Double Blind Reviews in SE conferences: Practicability, Promises and Perils
Moritz Beller, Alberto Bacchelli · 2015
The peer review process is central to the scientific method, the advancement and spread of research as well as crucial for individual careers. As such, a single blind review process is susceptible towards apparent and hidden biases in the reviewers, as they know the identity of the authors. In this paper, we perform an extensive study on the benefits and costs that would be associated with introducing double-blind reviews at large SE conferences. We do this by surveying the SE community’s opinion, interviewing experts on double-blind reviewing and estimating the likelihood of reviewers being able to guess the author’s names. Our results indicate that double-blind reviewing could be introduced in large SE conferences at lower-than-generally believed costs and that the majority of the SE community would be in favour of introducing it.