Page 54 - Becoming Metric Wise

44 Becoming Metric-Wise

In case of fraud, plagiarism or other serious misconduct a retraction
note must be published stating the reason(s) for the retraction. These
issues are further discussed in Section 3.3 of this chapter.
• Ethical problems must be clarified and may lead to rejection.
• Communication between reviewers and the editor is not disclosed to
authors, and certainly not to the (scientific) public at large.

3.1.5 Review Systems
There exist several review systems with respect to the relation between
authors and referees. We start with the two most common ones.
Single blind review, which is sometimes referred to as blind review or
anonymous review. In this system, referees know the names of the
authors, but not vice versa. This system protects the referee in case of a
negative review and helps to maintain a pleasant atmosphere within the
field. There are, of course, also disadvantages: for instance, the potential
chance of intellectual theft increases. It, moreover, opens the door for
conduct violating other deontological rules, such as personal attacks on
authors. Yet, as referee reports are first read by the editor, such reports
should not be forwarded and the reviewer should be made aware by the
editor that such behavior is not tolerated. In library and information sci-
ence this system is the one practiced the most. Weller (2001) writes that,
over all fields, this system is applied in 60% of the cases.
Double blind review. In this system, authors do not know the reviewers
and reviewers do not know the authors. In theory this procedure leads to
an objective evaluation. In particular, one may expect that accepting
based on the writer being a well-known figure will not occur. Yet, also
here there are some problems. If one removes the authors’ name, it is still
easy to find out the writer(s) of the submission. For this reason, one usu-
ally requires that the authors remove all aspects that would make it possi-
ble to identify them. This means that all self-references must be deleted,
and this is also the case for all acknowledgments of funding and sentences
like, “In a previous article we .. .” This places an extra burden on
authors. Reading such a skeletal submission is not a pleasant task. Even
then, if one of the authors is a well-known scientist in the field, an estab-
lished reviewer can easily guess this colleague’s identity by the type of
research and language used. Another problem is that by blinding the
authors and their laboratories, a reviewer cannot take the track record
into account. Research groups with a reputation of mediocre research