Self-restraint in refereeing

Dear author,

I regret to inform you that Awesome Bigname Philosophy Journal cannot accept your paper for publication. After having googled the title of your paper, and failing that, lines from your abstract and paper, our referee discovered your identity. He found that you are a nobody from an lackluster university, without a tenured or tenure track position but only a lowly [adjunct teacher, grad student, postdoc etc], and [a woman, black, non-English speaker etc] to boot. Therefore, after a perfunctory glance at your paper, the referee has decided that your paper is not of high enough quality to be published in ABPJ.

We pass on referees' comments in the hope that they may prove useful. We receive over n submissions each year, and must reject many very competent papers, especially those written by people on the bottom of the academic ladder. We hope that your work will find a home in another journal, though obviously one not as highly regarded as ABPJ.

Best wishes,

The Editor.

I cannot imagine a real situation where an author would receive such a letter, but apparently it is not uncommon for referees to try to find out the name of an author of a paper they referee. They are not shy about it either. Brit mentioned many freely admitting this, and thinking they are free of bias. Interestingly, the belief that one is free of bias, unlike other people, who are of course biased, is another form of bias, called the bias blind spot. The bias blind spot does not get attenuated with intelligence or education. So it is very problematic that referees lack the self-restraint and google titles of papers in an attempt to find out the authors' names.

It is doubly problematic because some people (grad student, members of ethnic or other minorities, people from less prestigious universities) now think it is a bad idea to present your paper at a conference -after all, the title shows up on google searches, and even if you change it, the abstract might also reveal who you are. This places people who already face significant difficulties in academia with a further handicap - it is essential to present your work to informal peer review to increase its quality. 

What can we do about it? It seems a no-brainer to me, but maybe editors should caution their referees explicitly not to try to find out the identity of an author until the review process is complete, i.e., until a final editorial decision is reached. It is really not so hard! As academics we practice self-restraint all the time. We do not send out papers to multiple journals at the same time. We do not write to an editor to ask for our paper's status, even if we are burning with curiosity. So it is not hard, I believe, to refrain from finding out an author's identity!