The journal reviewing process isn’t anonymous. Did you really think it was? Think again!

You have worked on your paper on this extraordinarily complicated and remarkably interesting solution to the knowability paradox for four years. You finally got it right. After polishing the piece, vetting the ideas at department colloquium talks and workshops and incorporating feedback from cohorts, you submit to a top-ten mainstream journal. Then you patiently, very patiently, wait a year and a half and get a rejection. Hostile referee reports! They HATE the paper.

The turn-around time for journals is horrific. But you knew that before submitting the piece. Referees can be terrible: Some don't bother to read the paper carefully. Others provide idiotic or arrogant comments and evidently know nothing about the subject matter. But you knew that, too, before hitting the “send” button. You couldn't have been more prepared. In fact, one of your advisers taught you that if referees are ignorant or foolish, don't blame them. Anticipate stupidity. It's YOUR job to make your work resistant to idiocy.

What you didn't know (and probably still don’t) is that your rejection may have been partially based on the fact that you are a newcomer at a crappy university that no one has ever heard of. Or maybe you are one of those other underprivileged in the field implicitly considered less intelligent than the inner circle.

“But wait a minute,” you think. “Unlike in some other fields the refereeing process in philosophy is double blind, sometimes even triple blind. You don't know who the referees are, and they don't know who you are. Philosophy is good that way. It's anonymous. Any complaints about being rejected because you are junior or a woman or black or what have you are unjustified, because the refereeing process is truly blind. Philosophy rocks. It avoids implicit biases. There can't be those biases when all identifying information is blinded.”

A brilliant thought occurs to you: “Even when we go to the trouble of blind peer reviewing, senior white males come out ahead, not newcomers, not women, not black. Senior white males just are that much better than the rest. Blind refereeing proves it. Finally we have reason to make the annoying New APPS bloggers who keep talking about biases in philosophy shut up”.

Blind-Refereeing Argument

There are only 2 percent women and other minorities at this conference or in this volume or in this year's journal issues, because all the papers were blindly refereed. So there could not possibly have been any implicit biases in place. So while we do happen to have an all-white-male or mostly-white-male lineup, this was grounded in objective measures.

Bad argument. Refereeing is far from always blind. It cannot be completely objective because of how the profession operates and because of technological developments. In most cases it's too easy to find out who the author of a certain paper is. And people have an urge to find out before they referee your paper. And while your peers will claim to be neutral and unbiased, we know all too well that once people know that the author is an unknown junior at a crappy university, a woman or another minority, implicit biases may influence the verdict.

Don’t worry! I do not reveal your identity when I send your paper out for refereeing. Journal editors don't normally do that. But reviewers often feel the need to search for the identity of the author. It's so tempting to plug the title into the Google search engine. The unconscious inside the referee goes: "Ah! A Mr. Nobody or a minority person! They are not all that smart. Let's get that paper rejected." I know it. You know it, too. If you don't, go take the Harvard Implicit Association Test. It will show you that you do have those biases.

“But,” you may ask, “is it really true that referees google papers before making decisions?”

Yep. It's true. I know. I know because people tell me. They are not shy about it either. They say that that's what they do. They don’t think it will cause them to make biased decisions. They just want to know whose paper they are wasting their time on.

You have a quick comeback: “There is a way to avoid the Google phenomenon. Don't upload your paper to your website until it's forthcoming in a journal. That takes care of the problem, right?”

Not really. If you are prudent, you don’t submit your papers until your ideas have been vetted at conferences. So when people google your paper’s title, they will find it, because it was listed at those conferences.

“But,” you think, “I am cleverer than the googling referee. I will just change the title of my paper before submitting. So when the referees google it, the paper won't come up.”

Not so fast. Referees have told me time and time again that if they don’t find the title on Google, they may google phrases (slightly unusual ones) or first lines or arbitrary lines. So even if you change the paper’s title, the referees may still figure out who you are.

So, all you juniors at crappy universities, unheard-of philosophers, women and other minorities: if you actually did manage to get your paper into a top journal, that’s a major accomplishment. Congratulations!