{"id":1448,"date":"2016-01-21T12:20:26","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T12:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/what-role-does-anonymity-play-in-scientific-publication\/"},"modified":"2025-02-19T06:20:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-19T06:20:11","slug":"what-role-does-anonymity-play-in-scientific-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/what-role-does-anonymity-play-in-scientific-publication","title":{"rendered":"What role does anonymity play in scientific publication?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discussions around anonymity in scientific publications have been gaining traction in the scholarly circles in recent days. While the advocates of open science stress on transparency and accessibility, there is a growing sentiment among some scientific folk about the need for nondisclosure of certain details in publishing to counter the \u201cstatus over merit\u201d culture of academia.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sparking fresh debates about the topic, Michael Eisen \u2013 a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley \u2013 announced<\/a> last month that he has stripped all of his publications of their journal names. He stated that, \u201cWe [also] do not believe that journal titles convey useful information about the quality or value of published works and therefore provide here only a list of authors and the title of each work along with links to the paper.\u201d The fact is that the impact factor of the journal that a researcher publishes in continues to be considered gold standard when assessing how successful a researcher is. Inevitably, this seamier side of academia has been one of the root causes of scientific misconduct.<\/span><\/p>\n

While most agree that researchers should be evaluated by merit rather than the publication venues, Eisen\u2019s move has received a mixed response. Claus Wilke, a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said, \u201cHiding journal names from the publication list is directly at odds with the principles of openness and egalitarianism that people like Michael Eisen so strongly promote.<\/a>\u201d He adds that till the time a researcher is a part of the conventional publishing system, he\/she should maintain openness about the publishing venue. A better way of demonstrating that journals are not as important as the research itself, according to Wilke, is to drop the race to publish in high-ranking journals or publish papers only on preprint servers.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Eisen has proposed hiding the journal names in an attempt to draw attention away from the prestige aspect and direct it towards the actual research instead, Paul Hanel, a psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, goes a step further by suggesting that papers should be stripped of all identifiers or metadata. In a paper titled \u201cWhy scientific publications should be anonymous<\/a>,\u201d Hanel suggests that to truly avoid all biases, \u201cEvery publication should be published without any reference to the author(s), their position, the institution(s), the address of the researcher(s), and the journal.\u201d Explaining this extreme stance, he lists various merits of removing all identifiers but the titles from papers. A few noteworthy arguments he makes are:<\/span><\/p>\n