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by nicce 399 days ago
I thought that blind peer-reviews solved this?
3 comments

Yes, with some caveats. Sometimes people can guess where a paper comes from based on the used datasets, even graphic design style, a skew in cited papers. Also, often people upload the preprint to Arxiv and so the reviewer may have seen the non-anonymous version already. Also, the having someone within the community among the authors will help with formulating the paper in a way that this community expects it. With the right turns of phrase, citing and praising those related works that are seen highly in the community, using the tone that is usual in the community etc. People should ideally try to counteract such biases in themselves, but humans are tribal and social. Especially if you scale this to tens of thousands of people, the average won't be a saint. People have careers, graduations, promotions, visas, green cards, job prospects, friendships and generally social standing in their professional community on the line. Academics aren't any more holy than people in finance, or politics or entertainment or startups or other ruthless and social-game heavy environments.
My wife works in a fairly niche field and can often guess at the very least which university or research group a blind paper is from, and quite often the author (or in the case of a PhD student, the authors supervisor).
True. But that opens the game of writing a paper “with the style of” someone known and get accepted. Its a gamble game… for authors and reviewers.
But if they can't, surely they won't reject the paper because of that?
Still many many journals don’t apply double blind reviews. There is no advantage of don’t doing it. There is no extra work in doing it.

So I assume that it is not done to keep outsiders out of your garden…

Honestly, I don’t find any other reason to don’t apply it.

There’s tons of extra work in double blind (for the author mostly, but also for peer reviewers and editors/chairs). Speaking from direct experience as author, reviewer, and chair at conferences. And generally the benefit is totally lost as you can easily circumvent it especially if you have already published in the field by just citing your previous work.
I don't see the extra work for author - how exactly?