Reviewer bias in single- versus double-blind peer review

Peer review may be "single-blind," in which reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of paper authors, or "double-blind," in which this information is hidden. Noting that computer science research often appears first or exclusively in peer-reviewed conferences rather than journals, we study these two reviewing models in the context of the 10th Association for Computing Machinery International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, a highly selective venue (15.6% acceptance rate) in which expert committee members review full-length submissions for acceptance. We present a controlled experiment in which four committee members review each paper. Two of these four reviewers are drawn from a pool of…

• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Awards: 61532011, 61672311