Reviewing Paper at Gunpoint

[quasihumanist]

In my field, reviews are always only single blind, so the potential reviewer always knows who the authors are before agreeing to review.  So this kind of deception can't happen.

Frankly, this is a situation where the paper is getting accepted anyway no matter what you say.  If you'd submitted a negative review, the editor would've just accepted the paper anyway.  If your review was so negative that they couldn't do that, they would've just circular binned your review and asked for another one from someone else.  I know multiple stories of editors soliciting reviews until they get one they agree with.

My field has such tiny subfields that avoiding conflicts of interest seem impossible.  One of my papers was submitted to a journal where a co-author's advisor is an associate editor.  We suggested a different associate editor to handle the paper, but the person we suggested just transferred it to the advisor presumably because they didn't feel they understood the subsubfield well enough to handle the paper.  (My co-author graduated about 10 years ago, so it's not a clearly problematic situation.)  I also recently reviewed a paper by someone with whom I'm currently writing a paper (but we don't have a publicly available joint paper).  I told the editor, and they told me to go ahead unless I thought I couldn't be fair.

[nescafe]

I've been in a similar situation, involving an article that (I gather) had already been through one round of divided peer review before it got to me. I reviewed it three times, coming to Reject, R+R (under duress), and Reject over the course of those three reviews. The piece was published anyway, and maybe the journal won't ask me to review for them again. Whatever.