同行评议是好是坏？

Hello，小树枝们，又见面啦！今天我们一起来看一篇经济⛄的文章《Peer pressure》。

同行评议（peer review)，从广义上说，是指某一或若干领域的一些专家共同对涉及上述领域的一项知识产品进行评价的活动。国内讨论较多的是狭义的同行评议，即作者投稿以后，由刊物主编或纳稿编辑邀请具有专业知识或造诣的学者，评议论文的学术和文字质量，提出意见和判定，主编按评议的结果决定是否适合在本刊发表。

1.文章脉络

【para1-2】 ➡️研究发现，20世纪初，文章录用发表的难度低；如今投稿文章需要通过同行评议

【para3】➡️同行评议制度并不完美，纰漏屡见不鲜

【para4】 ➡️研究揭露同行评议制度存在身份偏见

【para5】 ➡️研究人员发现名人会被加分

【para6-7】➡️ 利用知名学者和名不见经传的学者共同作品投稿，对比研究

【para8】➡️更多人愿意评议知名学者的文章

【para9】➡️ 知名学者署名的文章通过率更高

【para10】➡️与匿名文章相比，人们更不认同名不见经传者的文章

【para11】➡️身份地位对各学术领域的评议都会造成影响

【para12】➡️将文章匿名用以减少身份偏见越来越难

【para13】➡️同行评议之后的流程也需要文章作者付出更多努力

2.外刊原文

An influential academic safeguard is distortedby status bias

【Para.1】When, in 1905, the then-unknownpatent clerk Albert Einstein sent his revolutionary ideas on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and a few other topics to the German journal Annalen der Physik, its editors were happy to publish them. Submissions were rare and therefore rarely rejected—unless the text was clearly bonkers.

【Para.2】Things are different now. Most top academic journals use a system of peer review, which asks independent experts in the same field to assess papers before they are accepted. Reviewers are meant to check the methods, analysis and conclusions and, crucially, whether the work meets the required standards for publication.

【Para.3】No scientist would claim that peer review is perfect. There are plenty of famous cases of ground-breaking papers being rejected after flawed advice from reviewers, while seldom a week goes by without one field or another rounding on a shoddy piece of work on social media and asking how on Earth it passed peer review. Many researchers describe the review process by borrowing Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy: it’s the worst system except for all the others.

【Para.4】A new study of the peer review process reveals a novel and depressing, if not totally surprising, fault. It indicates that a modern-day Albert Einstein, or any researcher with a good idea but without an already-stellar reputation, might struggle to get their foot in the door. Status bias means the name of the inpidual on the paper can matter as much as the findings when it comes to what gets published, suggests the study, which was released last week as a working paper on the SSRN repository.

【Para.5】Researchers have suspected for a long time that work from established senior figures often gets an easier ride in peer review and is more likely to be accepted and published. It is an example of the so-called Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, that eminent people get disproportionate credit for work—named after the biblical parable of the talents in the Gospel of Matthew, which states that “to everyone who has will more be given”.

【Para.6】In the new study, researchers at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, collaborated with Vernon Smith, an experimental economist at Chapman University, in California, and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Dr Smith had just completed a project with Sabiou Inoua, a colleague at Chapman University who at the time was a PhD student. The duo had written a paper on financial and market data that was ready to submit to an academic journal.

【Para.7】The team from Innsbruck had a devious plan—use the name of either Dr Smith or Mr Inoua as the paper’s author and send it to peer reviewers to see how they judged the quality of the work. Editors at the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Finance, the journal to which the pair submitted their manu, were admirably ready to play along.

【Para.8】They first asked more than 3,300 potential reviewers if they would be willing to take the time to assess the manu, based on a short abstract emailed to them that listed one of the two authors’ names, or omitted the names entirely. In this scenario, including Dr Smith’s name saw the acceptance rate jump—almost 40% agreed to review when he was the author compared with closer to 30% when the author was Mr Inoua or not listed.

【Para.9】Those who agreed were sent a full manu to review, with the same pattern of names, and more than 500 reviewers submitted reports. When they thought it was Mr Inoua’s work alone, 65% of reviewers voted to reject it. That is almost three times as many as the 23% of reviewers who rejected the same paper when it carried only Dr Smith’s name.

【Para.10】But it was also a significantly higher rejection rate than the 48% who spurned the paper when it was completely anonymous. Not only did Dr Smith’s eminence boost his numbers, but the newbie status of Mr Inoua counted against him.

【Para.11】Does the pernicious impact of status bias seep beyond the pages of this particular journal and this particular field? Juergen Huber, one of the Innsbruck team, is certain that it does. Every discipline from chemistry and physics to medicine and genetics has its own superstars, he says, while some results indicate that top institutions like Harvard University also get a status boost in peer review.

【Para.12】One option to deal with the bias is to remove all names from all manus under review. But Dr Huber points out this is increasingly difficult with the rise of preprints and working papers published online before they are formally submitted to a journal. Any reviewer of an anonymous manu could simply search for its tell-tale online trail.

【Para.13】The story has an interesting coda. Mr Inoua and Dr Smith’s bold willingness to test the limits of peer review has not come without cost. The Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Finance is yet to publish their paper. It is waiting for the duo to respond to the reviewers’ comments—all 500 of them.

3.单词解析

• peer pressure 一般指同伴压力。同伴压力是指因为渴望被同伴接纳认可，避免被排挤，而选择按照同伴规定的规则去思考或行动所产生的一种心理压力。还可以作同侪压力; 同辈压力理解
• then-unknown adj. /ðen ˌʌnˈnəʊn / not famous back then, unknown at that time 那时还不出名，当时还不为人所知的 Widely considered one of the most influential actors of the Twentieth Century, Marlon Brando had acting in his blood-his mother was a performer who mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda. 马龙·白龙度被誉为20世纪最有影响力的演员，白兰度出生在一个演艺世家：母亲是一名演员，当时还指导过不甚知名的亨利·方达
• safeguard n. /ˈseɪfɡɑːd/ a law, rule, or measure intended to prevent someone or something from being harmed 预防性条款（或法规）；保障措施 Many people took second jobs as a safeguard against unemployment. 许多人为防失业都干两份工作
• distort v. /dɪˈstɔːt/ to twist or change facts, ideas, etc. so that they are no longer correct or true 歪曲；曲解 The article gave a distorted picture of his childhood. 这篇文章歪曲了他的童年 词根：tort, tors= to twist 扭曲 retort v. /rɪˈtɔːt/ 反驳 （re 回 + tort 扭曲 → 反着扭 → 反驳 ） torsion n. /ˈtɔːʃn/ 扭转力 （tors 扭曲 + ion 动作或状态 → 扭转力 ） tortuous adj. /ˈtɔːtʃuəs/ 曲折的 （tort 扭曲 + uous …的 → 曲折的 ）
• photoelectric adj. /ˌfəʊtəʊɪˈlektrɪk/ using an electric current that is controlled by light 光电的 high speed photoelectric sensor 高速光电传感器

【来源声明】：本文原文摘选自SEPTEMBER 17TH–23RD 2022｜Science & technology，原文版权归杂志所有，仅供个人学习交流使用。

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