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April 07, 2006, 09:04 AM ET
Peer Reviewers' Identities Exposed
A little-known setting in Microsoft Word has led to the unmasking of some peer reviewers who expected their reviews to remain anonymous, and at least a few journals have issued guidelines for preserving anonymity in electronic documents. (The Chronicle, free link)
Keyne A. Cheshire, an assistant professor of classics at Davidson College, in North Carolina, said he recently discovered the issue by accident. After submitting an article to a journal in his field, he received a reviewer report by e-mail, forwarded from the journal’s editor (he declined to name the journal or editor). The report, which Mr. Cheshire said included some “hefty criticism” of his article, arrived as a Microsoft Word file attached to the e-mail message. When Mr. Cheshire opened the document, he noticed that it seemed to be created using a British version of Word. Curious, he clicked on the document’s preferences and was surprised to see a screen labeled “Summary” that listed the name of the person who had created the document—someone in his discipline whom he knew. As it turns out, Microsoft Word automatically tags every document with an author and title when the file is first saved.
Do journals you work with have guidelines for ensuring that identifying information is removed from Word documents used in reviewing? We’d like to hear your experiences for a possible follow-up article.
Categories: Research
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