Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors

Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer are identified, is rarely practised in ecology or evolution journals. Most journals in the field of ecology practice single-blind reviews in which the reviewer but not the author identity is concealed. In 2001, however, double-blind review was introduced by the journal Behavioral Ecology. A database of all papers published in BE between 1997 and 2005 (n=867) was generated (the year 2001 was omitted to accomodate the change in editorial policy). For each paper, gender was assignmed to the first author using first names. Gender was classified as "unknown" if the author provided only initials, if the name was gender neutral or if the name could not be assigned to either gender. The same data was gathered from an out-group set of primary research journals listed by ISI as being in the category of "Ecology" or "Evolutionary Biology" with a 2004 impact factor of 2.0-2.5 (similar to that of BE). This provided an additional five journals: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (BES; n=1040), Animal Behavior (AB; n=2178), Journal of Biogeography (JB; n=1040), Biological Conservation (BC; n=1719), and Landscape Ecology (LE; n=419). Missing data from complete issues omitted from the table of contents were inserted using ISI (JB and LE; four issues). This study showed that following the policy change to double-blind peer reviews, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers.

双盲同行评审（double-blind peer review）指作者与审稿人双方均无法获知彼此身份，该评审模式在生态学与进化生物学领域的期刊中极少被采用。当前该领域绝大多数期刊采用单盲评审（single-blind review），即仅对审稿人隐匿作者身份。2001年，《行为生态学》（Behavioral Ecology）期刊率先推行双盲评审制度。本研究构建了1997年至2005年间该刊发表的全部论文数据库（共计n=867篇，为适配期刊编辑政策的变更，剔除了2001年的相关数据）。针对每篇论文，研究人员通过第一作者的姓名推定其性别：若作者仅提供姓名首字母、姓名属于性别中立型或无法判定所属性别，则将该作者性别归类为"未知"。研究人员同时从ISI归类为"生态学"或"进化生物学"领域、2004年影响因子为2.0-2.5（与《行为生态学》期刊影响因子相近）的外组原创研究期刊中采集了相同数据集，共涵盖5本期刊：《行为生态学与社会生物学》（Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, BES；n=1040）、《动物行为》（Animal Behavior, AB；n=2178）、《生物地理学杂志》（Journal of Biogeography, JB；n=1040）、《生物保护》（Biological Conservation, BC；n=1719）以及《景观生态学》（Landscape Ecology, LE；n=419）。针对目录中未收录的完整期数的缺失数据，研究人员通过ISI数据库进行了补充（涉及JB和LE的4期内容）。本研究结果表明，在期刊将评审制度变更为双盲同行评审后，第一作者为女性的论文占比出现了显著提升。