Research for Mystery Novel

[Parasaurolophus]

Wow, well done!

[Wahoo Redux]

Best of luck with that. 

Someday Tom Hanks might star in the movie version and then you can quit academia altogether and go live in Maui. 

[Larimar]

Quick question: When it comes to peer reviews for journal articles in the social sciences and humanities (for my story, specifically anthropology and philosophy), is it usually done blind, or do people know whose articles they are reviewing, and who is reviewing theirs?

Thanks,
Larimar

[fleabite]

In the humanities, the standard is that the reviewers should not know the identity of those whose work they are reviewing, and those submitting articles are expected to remove any identifying information. I'm sure in some cases (small subfields; very specialized topics), the reviewers can guess.

[jerseyjay]

I have published in history and literary criticism, and my understanding is that it is the same throughout the social sciences and humanities. Reviews of articles are double-blind--nobody is supposed to know who the author or reviewers are. (Books are different--there the authors are known, and the reviewer may or may not wish to be anonymous.)

That said, it is often not that difficult for a reviewer to figure out who wrote the paper or the author to figure out who one of the reviewers is. Some people are known to be working on a specialized topic, sometimes you talk to somebody at a conference who talks about their research and soon you get a request to review it, some people have clear writing styles, some people have clear points of views, etc.  For reviewers, you may also tell who is reviewing the piece based on their advice, including what article to cite (e.g., some reviewers insist you cite their entire corpus). Of course, sometimes it is possible to guess wrong. To a large part it depends on how narrow or wide the (sub)topic is.

[spork]

For fields like anthropology, political science, and history, the review process is supposed to be double blind, as others have described.

I once was able to identify a reviewer because he only referred to his own publications in his criticism of my research. I informed the journal's editors of this. They published my article.

Given widespread fraud and malfeasance in social science research, it deserves to be the setting for a murder mystery. The Chronicle recently published a relevant op-ed: https://www.chronicle.com/article/social-science-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it.

[spork]

[deleted - hit the wrong button when editing]

[Larimar]

Thanks, fleabite, jerseyjay, and spork. This is very helpful. It's actually good news, because it means one of my characters can play innocent and pretend not to know who reviewed an article. This will help my plot and pacing!

[Parasaurolophus]

Quick question: When it comes to peer reviews for journal articles in the social sciences and humanities (for my story, specifically anthropology and philosophy), is it usually done blind, or do people know whose articles they are reviewing, and who is reviewing theirs?

Thanks,
Larimar

Philosophy: almost always double-blind, with a push for triple-blind (editors don't know either) in recent years.

There are, however, a couple of prestigious holdouts of single-blind review (blind to the author). They also have a history of shady practices (e.g. publishing two 90-page articles by an editor, etc.).

[Larimar]

Thanks, Parasaurolophus!