Sunday, April 10, 2011

Note to anonymous reviewers

The practice of citenapping is incompatible with anonymity. So, for example, if you state that a paper’s introduction needs to discuss the basic state of the literature, and you then ignore all the contributions from five of the half-dozen labs working on the topic in favor of a pile of papers all from, say, the University of Chicago meteoritics group, then the probability distribution of your identity over all people in the field is no longer flat.

So if you are using said anonymity to be condescending, dismissive, sloppy, or some combination of the above, it is less likely to hide you.

That being said, the stack of papers suggested are all quite good, if a bit repetitive. So the author appreciates the tip, even if they aren’t terribly pertinent to the topic at hand.

Just saying.

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