The principle of signing your peer review

Give it a go?

During peer-review, most journals in my field reveal the identity of the authors to the reviewers but keep the reviewers’ identities hidden from the authors. You can see why. The reviewer is doing a favour, and it’s not their work being put out there, so why should they have to reveal themselves. Some journals mask the authors’ names too and call it something like double-blind peer-review.

At some point I discovered that someone I respect signs their reviews and decided it is a (small but) good principle. So despite nerves, I now (usually) sign my name. Most people in my field don’t. I want to make the case for it.

Hopefully it’s obvious, but a qualification to the below is it’s about my experience and personality, and won’t all apply to everyone. Still, think about it.

Negatives

I’m not one for thinking about negative consequences. It drives my wife mad that I will think ‘Cool tree – kids let’s climb it’ but not ‘What if one of us falls’ (see pic). An obvious recipe for… fun.

That said, I was initially cautious about the negatives of signing reviews. Here are some concerns and negative experiences.

• If you say something dumb, the authors can attribute it to you. When you’re not in the shadows, they could laugh at you and moan about you. Gasp! The serious point is that negative comments can have negative consequences. The paper might take more work before being acceptable. It might be rejected. These take time. Lots of people’s understanding of who they are is way too wrapped up with their work, and those people take negative comments harder.

• Imposter syndrome. ‘If they don’t know who I am, I could be anyone, like a really important, smart person… not just little old me, so they might listen.’ To paraphrase

  Rachael Meager
  , imposter syndrome doesn’t ease through you realising you’re not stupid, it eases when you realising everyone else is just as stupid.

• I find it tricky when I sign and the other reviewer does not, for various reasons.

  • Partly due to the above points.

  • A few times another reviewer has made almost identical comments to mine. This is great for helping with imposter syndrome (above). Then I’m desperate to know who they are, and wondering why they haven’t contacted me, since we’re basically the same person (once I discovered it was someone in my office after I signed mine).

  • Sometimes I’m left wanting to ask a reviewer more about an interesting comment they made, and not knowing their identity is annoying.

• A handful of times I’ve reviewed manuscripts from very prominent people. I once read a story about Donald Knuth submitting a paper under a pseudonym because he was concerned his reviewers were intimidated and giving it a soft touch¹. So I try to treat these reviews like any other. One time I pointed out some fundamental issues – that review was art – and their paper was rejected. Rather than take on the comments, the person reacted and has since started publicly decrying things I said they’d missed, misunderstood or misrespresented (but note: no backlack against me personally).

Positives

There are lots of positives too, both for the system and for you professionally, and IMO these outweigh the negatives.

• You have to be careful about how you write. You feel more pressure to justify what you say and admit what you’re uncertain about. While you’ll want to deliver negative comments clearly rather than shy away, knowing the authors know your name might help with the delivery – reviewers can be pretty offensively rude. I find it hard to be openly critical and worry that people will get offended. Conversely I love people who are openly critical – when they are blunt with me I can believe that any praise must be genuine.

• It’s easier to quickly deal with small points and clarifications. Once or twice people have emailed me to say ‘I’m not supposed to do this [err, why not] but I wasn’t sure if this comment meant a or b; can you clarify before I resubmit this whole response? I don’t want to answer the wrong question.’ Being able to contact you directly this makes the difference between going through another round of reviews, everyone’s a winner.

• Major: It opens up possibilities of future interactions with the authors and other reviewers. The following are not the aim, but I’ve found them to be a nice consequence. As a result of signing reviews:

  • People know your name. At conferences people sometimes say ‘Hello, you reviewed my paper on…’ and you get talking. Which is nice if you find starting a conversation from nothing hard work.

  • You form new collaborations with people whose work you like, who like your reviews, or who want you as a co-author so you can’t be a reviewer.

  • You might get invited to places. To give seminars, speak at symposia, visit someone. Again, these have happened to me as a result of a signed review.

  • I’ve often get offered monetary bribes… I’M JOKING CALM DOWN!

• This is minor but I sometimes need the authors to know I’m not the person whose papers I’m mentioning in a review. If an anonymous person says ‘please reference these four papers by Ian White’, you might make an assumption about your reviewer, which is not very fair on Ian: surprise, it was me! I also don’t want to be on the other side of this and know two people who say they often refer people to Kahan & Morris 2012².

The ass in associate editor

Quite often the associate editor changes the review by removing my name. How kind, they’re keeping me anonymous. Like, without any note to say they’re doing this, as if I’m so dumb that I didn’t realise my name was right there at the top! When this happens, I just contact the authors myself and say ‘so you know, I’m reviewer 1’. Hey, I did this to Beatriz Goulao a few years ago, we got talking, we collaborated and now we co-supervise a PhD student!

Recently, an AE did not edit my review, so it got through to the authors ok. The editor-in-chief then chastised him and suggested they should revoke my review and start again with a new reviewer. What.

On the author side, I’ve several times had such great (often tough) anonymous reviewers that I wanted to acknowledge them. So a couple of times when a paper was accepted, I asked the editor if they could ask the reviewer if they want to be acknowledged. Both times the editors were all ‘what an inappropriate request’. To me, being acknowledged in the paper is a lot more meaningful than being able to say you reviewed for this journal flipping publons or your orcid record. After all, the line between a reviewer’s input and a co-author’s can be pretty blurred.

Hey, if you have ever anonymously reviewed one of my papers and fancy outing yourself, feel free. I’d love to know!

In summary

I like that some journals (e.g. BMJ family) have open peer review but understand some reviewers dislike it. For them the negative possibilities outweigh the positives. I think BMC journals used to have fully open peer review but seem to have reverted to making it optional. I like the idea that the default is named but you can opt to be anonymous. Those forms have so many pointless tick boxes already, what’s one more!

1. I’m not a great googler but can’t find this anecdote online. I’m pretty sure he said it in an interview. Let me know if you can find it!

2. BC Kahan, TP Morris. Improper analysis of trials randomised using stratified blocks or minimisation. Statistics in Medicine. 2012; 31:328–340. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.4431