2017

Single versus Double Blind Reviewing at WSDM 2017

Tomkins, Andrew, Zhang, Min, Heavlin, William D.

Understand

In this paper we study the implications for conference program committees of using single-blind reviewing, in which committee members are aware of the names and affiliations of paper authors, versus double-blind reviewing, in which this information is not visible to committee members.

  • WSDM 2017, the 10th ACM International ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, performed a controlled experiment in which each paper was reviewed by four committee members.
  • Two of these four reviewers were chosen from a pool of committee members who had access to author information; the other two were chosen from a disjoint pool who did not have access to this information.
  • This information asymmetry persisted through the process of bidding for papers, reviewing papers, and entering scores.

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