Thread by @dsquintana

Double-blind peer review is rare in my field but even if it wasn’t I don’t think it would be effective as it’s pretty easy in small fields to figure out the authors based on the research questions and methods alone

I recently got a peer review request with just an abstract and I was able to guess the authors, which was confirmed when I agreed and got full access to the paper

Preprints are getting pretty popular too, which make double-blinding pretty useless if you’re keeping an eye on preprints. The huge upside with preprints outweighs the loss of double-blind reviewing IMO

Making a paper double-blind friendly is just more work for authors, who are already spending hours of their time formatting their papers to adhere to journal style despite a good chance of rejection

I understand how double-blind review can help early career researchers, as they may help mitigate bias, but I think preprints can help more.

Best case benefit: Good feedback

‘Worst’ case: get your work out immediately so your CV isn’t filled with ‘Smith et al (submitted)’