Wednesday, March 11, 2009

ignoble prize alert - the impact on reviewers judgement of being cited in the work under review

so how much is our judgment affected (unfairly) by seeing a citation to our own work in a paper (or book or whatever) we are reviewing?

devising an experiemnt to test this is tricky - there are effects like
a) very bad people who accept a paper because they want to boost their citation count to prepare a bigger H factor
b) there's the simple (correct) effect of being more familiar with the previous and related work (which is why presumably one was picked as a reviewer

to conduct an experiment to test this effect we need to submit some papers with
i) blinded citations for PC members
ii) citations replaced with irrelevant citations
iii) citations with authors names changed
iv) citations replaced by equivalent works (e.g. level of indirection - cite instead a work (survey, similar paper) that cites the original citation)

it should be done:)

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