my corner includes Nature, Science, and Cell, so it’s a pretty big corner..
Nature has offered the option for two or three years; the problem is that ~nobody uses it because unmasking is trivially easy. As of last fall, 12% of submissions were double blind.
The hyperspecialization of biomedical research means that you get obligate regulatory capture, or something quite close to it. Mostly people figure that trying to paper that over with things like blinded reviewers is a waste of time.
My thoughts on C/N/S aside, all I was actually saying is that "double-blind hasn't reached biomedicine" is inaccurate. It's here, even if it's not widely used (I'd actually guess it's more widely used in biomedicine rather than some other fields).
I'm not actually convinced unmasking is "trivially easy". Anecdotally, as a reviewer for the American Journal of Epidemiology, which is double-blind, I've had 4 cases where I've gone "I totally know who did this".
In all four I've been wrong. In one case, I actually knew the authors personally.
Now, it's possible I'm just uniquely bad at this, but I'm not sure it's as easy as everyone thinks it is.
Nature has offered the option for two or three years; the problem is that ~nobody uses it because unmasking is trivially easy. As of last fall, 12% of submissions were double blind.
The hyperspecialization of biomedical research means that you get obligate regulatory capture, or something quite close to it. Mostly people figure that trying to paper that over with things like blinded reviewers is a waste of time.