In a three-year ‘experiment,’ reviewers won’t see a list of authors—or institutional affiliations—on papers
The Wildlife Society Bulletin, one of The Wildlife Society’s three peer-reviewed journals, is now implementing a double-blind review process. This three-year “experiment” will help the editors of the journal ensure that it is being fair in the reviewing process.
“I see this as a service to our authorship community to ensure that the reviewing process is as bias-free as possible,” said Bret Collier, the editor-in-chief of the journal. “And that goal serves the entire TWS community more broadly.”
The Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM)will continue to use single-blind reviews, a process where referees can see the authors’ names and affiliations but the authors don’t know the identity of their reviewers. Collier and the rest of the editorial team will compare publishing statistics from WSB, which tends to garner submissions from a wide variety of topic areas, with how JWM performs during the same time period.
This change comes after the Wildlife Society Bulletin (WSB) migrated their submissions to Research Exchange, a new platform that no longer gives authors the opportunity to identify potential reviewers. “If there is an inherent bias within our reviewing process, I see that as something that we can work on addressing,” Collier said. “But we don’t know if the bias exists, which is why we’re doing the evaluation.”
Jacqueline Frair, the editor-in-chief of JWM, introduced the idea at TWS’ 2024 Annual Conference in Baltimore. Recent research has shown that while JWMhas been performing better on gender equity in recent years, there’s still progress to be made.
Frair recently published an editorial in JWM about reducing bias in the peer-review process. Specifically, she highlighted the potential effects against female, foreign or first-time authors within the peer review process.
Frair cited research that showed papers published by authors from countries “with a lower human development index or lower English proficiency fared worse under a single-blind review” compared to a double-blind review.
Many other journals are already implementing the double-blind review process, including Behavioral Ecology, Conservation Biology, Diversity and Distributions, Ecology and Society, Functional Ecology, Journal of Applied Ecology and Oikos.
Collier said that the research is fairly mixed on the efficacy of double-blind reviews overall. There are a few limitations with the method. If authors painstakingly anonymize their papers, it’s still likely that reviewers will know their identities or affiliations. “We are a very small field,” he said. “If someone is tagging ducks in Tennessee, it can only be a handful of people,” he said.
Also, when researchers anonymize their work, potential referees don’t have the opportunity to recuse themselves from reviewing previous students or collaborators, which could have “latent ethical effects” on the reviewing process, Collier said.
Despite the drawbacks, Collier is convinced it’s a worthwhile exercise for WSB and is looking forward to identifying potential areas for fine-tuning the reviewing process to make it more equitable.
While WSB has largely been a North American journal, with submissions mostly coming from the United States and Canada, Collier said he’s seen an increase in international submissions in recent years as TWS’ international presence expands.
WSB is also implementing a new, open-access pricing parity structure for authors from institutions in certain Latin American countries. With TWS’ newly created Mexico Chapter and Latin American and Caribbean Working Group, this pricing structure will hopefully encourage more researchers in this region to submit papers to WSB.
“I’m in my sixth year as editor-in-chief, and every year we’ve made tweaks to WSB so it better serves our community, from changing the layout to going to open access,” Collier said. “This is the next step in transparency and accountability for the Bulletin in that we want to ensure that the reviews all our papers are getting are constructive for the authors.”
The first articles published with double-blind reviews will come out in August, and the test cycle will run until 2028.
