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Comment by pdexter | Hacker News Reader

They're anonymous but after the reviews the authors are then usually (always?) revealed to the reviewers. Let's not kid ourselves though, academia, and especially in smaller subfields, is made up of small communities where you can usually guess whose paper you're reviewing unless it's a brand new contribution in a field by someone who doesn't usually publish there. You can often guess who the review was performed by too, since the program committee is always public.

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You could implement something like Certificate Transparency's "precertificates" where you store a hash of the digital signature in a public Merkle tree, so during review the reviewer's identity isn't known. But once the paper is published, the actual signature can also be published and checked against the review hashes in the paper. If they're missing or inconsistent, treat the paper as unreviewed.

Sounds like a good approach

Eh ... in my experience as an editor, author, and reviewer, this varies quite a bit.

Sometimes you can take a pretty good guess who it is based on the topic and the references (e.g., citations to in-press papers on obscure topics is usually a give away). Other times, though, it's difficult to tell who the authors are.

People often also think they know who the author and/or reviewers are when they are really totally wrong. I've reviewed papers and seen other reviewers cite my papers in a way that I thought "damn, that looks like something I'd write" when it was not. Similarly, I've seen reviewers think they know who the author is when they're completely off.

I personally think anonymous reviews are critical, because it keeps some modicum of shielding of reviewers against retribution for negative comments. It's not 100% anonymous of course, but it's anonymous enough to create enough doubt about who the reviewers and authors actually are.

I agree, the doubt plays an important role.

> You can often guess who the review was performed by too, since the program committee is always public.

This must vary across disciplines. While in your field the pool of reviewers might be public, in my own field most journals keep confidential their set of preferred people to turn to for reviews.

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