Nominating referees

An author asked me if I coud suggest names of referees for him to nominate in the process of submitting a paper to Construction Management and Economics. I replied to him, no need. If I can nominate them I can select them when I am selecting reviewers! The reason for asking authors to nominate is two-fold. First, we may be lucky and get introduced to someone we had not previously come across. Second, it helps to understand better what kind of academic is best for the paper. It is more informative than mere keywords, which are bit uncertain. I don’t want authors to think that we actually use the referees they nominate when we choose reviewers for the paper. It just helps us to think about the kind of person they have directed their paper at. We would use the people they nominate for other papers in the same area. After all, this is a double-blind review process! It is interesting how these processes are interpreted in different ways.

Double-blind reviewing

As previously noted in this blog, the practice of double-blind refereeing is often compromised by authors who cite their own previous work in their draft papers submitted for review.

It is in the author's interest to maintain their anonymity, and the main reason for doing this is to protect unknown authors from being dismissed out of hand. It is easy enough for an author to cite his or her own work as "Anonymous, Year" and to enter "Reference omitted for purposes of refereeing, to be inserted in the event of acceptance", or similar, in the list of references. If authors choose deliberately to reveal their identity, there are many other ways that they can do this, so we do not expend a lot of editorial time on trying to overcome this. It is rarely such an obvious method of revealing an author's identity that surely it cannot be accidental?