It’s important to get reviewing right, and remove as many biases as we can. We had a discussion about how to do this in COLING, presented in this blog post in interview format. The participants are the program co-chairs, Emily M. Bender and Leon Derczynski.
LD: How do you feel about blindness in the review process? It could be great for us to have blindness in a few regards. I’ll start with the most important to me. First, reviewers do not see author identities. Next, reviewers do not see each other’s identities. Most people would adjust their own review to align with e.g. Chris Manning’s (sounds terribly boring for him if this happens!). Third, area chairs do not see author identities. Finally, area chairs do not see reviewer identities in connection to their reviews, or a paper. But I don’t know how much of this is possible within the confines of conference management. The last seems the most risky; but reviewer identities being hidden from each other seems like a no-brainer. What do you think?
Reviewers blind from each other
EMB: It looks like we have a healthy difference of opinion here đ Absolutely, reviewers should not see author identities. With them not seeing each other’s identities, I disagree. I think the inter-reviewer discussion tends to go better if people know who they are talking to. Perhaps we can get the software to track the score changes and ask the ACs to be on guard for bigwigs dragging others to their opinions?
LD: Alright, we can try that; but after reading that report from URoch, how would you expect PhDÂ students/postdocs/asst profs to have reacted around a review of Florian Jaeger’s, if they’d had or intended to have any connection with his lab? On the other side, I hear a lot from people unwilling to go against big names, because they’ll look silly. So my perception of this is that discussion goes worse when people know who they’re contradictingâthough reviews might end up being more civil, too. I still think big names distort reviews here despite getting reviewing wrong just as often as the small names, so having reviewers know who each other are makes for less fair reviewing.
EMB: I wonder to what extent we’ll have ‘big names’ among our reviewers. I wonder if we can get the best of both worlds though by revealing all reviewers names to each other only after the decisions are out. So people will be on good behavior in the discussions (and reviews) knowing that they’ll be associated with their remarks eventually, but won’t be swayed by big names during the process?
LD: Yes, let’s do this. OK, what about hiding authors from area chairs?
Authors and ACs
EMB: I think hiding author identities from ACs is a good idea, but we still need to handle conflicts-of-interest somehow. And the cases where reviewers think that the authors should be citing X previous work when X is actually the author’s. Maybe we can have some of the small team of “roving” ACs doing that work? I’m not sure how they can handle all COI checking though.
LD: Ah, that’s tough. I don’t know too much about how the COI process typically works from the AC side, so I can’t comment here. If we agree on the intentionâthat author identities should ideally be hidden from ACsâwe can make the problem better-defined and share it with the community, so some development happens.
EMB: Right. Having ACs be blind to authors is also being discussed in other places in the field, so we might be able to follow in their footsteps.
Reviewers and ACs
LD: So how about reviewer identities being hidden from ACs?
EMB: I disagree again about area chairs not seeing reviewer identities next to their reviews. While a paper should be evaluated solely on its merits, I don’t think we can rely on the reviewers to get absolutely everything into their reviews. And so having the AC know who’s writing which review can provide helpful context.
LD: I suppose we are choosing ACs we hope will be strong and authoritative about their domain. Do you agree there’s a risk of a bias here? I’m not convinced that knowing a reviewer’s identity helps so muchâall humans make mistakes with great reliability (else annotation would be easier), and so what we really see is random effect magnification/minimization depending on the AC’s knowledge of a particular reviewer, where a given review’s quality varies on its own.
EMB: True, but/and it’s even more complex: The AC can only directly detect some aspects of review quality (is it thorough? helpful?) but doesn’t necessarily have the ability to tell whether it’s accurate. Alsoâhow are the ACs supposed to do the allocation of reviewers to papers, and do things like make sure those with more linguistic expertise are evenly distributed, if they don’t know who the reviewers are?
LD: My concern is that ACs will have bias about which reviewers are “reliable” (and anyway, no reviewer is 100% reliable). However, in the interest of simplicity: we’ve already taken steps to ensure that we have a varied, balanced AC pool this iteration, which I hope will reduce the effect of AC:reviewer bias when compared to conferences with mostly static AC pools. And the problem of allocating reviews to papers remains unsettled.
EMB: Right. Maybe we’re making enough changes this year?
LD: Right.
Resource papers
LD: An addendum: this kind of blindness may prove impossible for resource-type papers, where author anonymity may become an optionally relaxable constraint.
EMB: Well, I think people should at least go through the motions.
LD: Sureâthis makes life easier, too. As long as authors aren’t torn apart during review because someone can guess the authors behind a resource.
EMB: Good point. I’ll make a note in our draft AC duties document.
Reviewing style
LD: I want to bring up review style, as well. To nudge reviewers towards good reviewing style, I’d like reviewers to have the option of signing their reviews, with signatures available to authors at notification only. The reviewer identity would not be attached to a specific review, but rather general, in the form “Reviewers of this paper included: Natalie Schluter.” We known adversarial reviewing drops when reviewer identity is known, and I’d love to see CSâa discipline known for nasty reviewsâbegin to move in a positive direction. Indeed, as PC co-chairs of a CS-related conference, I feel we in particular have a duty to address this problem. My hope is that I can write a script to add this information, if we do it.
EMB: If the reviewers are opting in, perhaps it makes more sense for them to claim their own reviews. If I think one of my co-reviewers was a jerk, I would be less inclined to put my name to the group of reviews.
LD: That’s an interesting point. Nevertheless I’d like us to make progress on this front. In some time-rich utopia it might make sense to have the reviewers all agree whether or not to sign all three, and only have their identities revealed to each other after thatâbut we don’t have time. How about, reviews may be signed, but only at the point notifications are sent out? This prevents reviewers knowing who each other is, and lets those who want to hide, do soâas well as protecting us all from the collateral damage that results from jerk reviewers.
This could work with a checkboxâ”Sign my review with my name in the final author notification”âand the rest’s scripted in Softconf.
EMB: So how about option to sign for author’s view (the checkbox) + all reviewers revealed to each other once the decisions are done?
LD: Good, let’s do that. Reviewer identities are hidden from each other during the process, and revealed later; and reviewers have the option to sign their review via a checkbox in softconf.
EMB: Great.
Questions
What do you think? What would you change about the double-blind process?