ABSTRACT
Double-blind peer review is one of the Academy's most cherished principles. In 2008, more than 1.3 million articles were published in peer-reviewed journals. Using one's peers to review manuscripts for possible publication goes back to the 1660s and has been adopted by most scholarly journals since the late 1940s. In the social sciences and humanities, double-blind peer review (DBR) is the norm. DBR requires that authors and reviewers be anonymous to each other throughout the reviewing process. Much of the debate on DBR over the past ten years has focused on the issue of gender and/or race. The references to this chapter include several of these studies. If reviewers know the identity of authors, the questions asked by reviewers can be more pointed. For example, if a team of authors already has two papers published on the same topic, reviewers would be more likely to know this and therefore better able to judge the novelty of the current journal submission.
