Anonymised peer-reviewing – help or hindrance?

Credit: imtmphoto via Adobe Stock.

11 February 2025

By David Scott

This short piece is a plea for full disclosure in processes of peer review and evaluation in academia. It stems from a philosophy of research explained in the trilogy of books that I have just published with UCL Press: On Learning: A General Theory of Objects and Object-Relations (2021); the edited collection On Learning: volume 2, Philosophy, Concepts and Practices (2024); and On Learning: volume 3, Curriculum, Knowledge and Ethics (2025). It is also reflected in my latest publication, On Learning and Ethics: Philosophy, Knowledge and Normativity (2025, Ethics International Press). That philosophy of research is underpinned by a semantic and valorised epistemology – meanings and values are prioritised – and by a careful and ethical approach to the world.

Peer review is common within higher education, encompassing assessment of articles, chapters in books, book proposals, books, conference presentations, teaching sessions, curricula, indeed most of the activities that make up the work of an academic. This is treated now as the holy grail of quality in universities and by university teachers and researchers, in that it allows publications and performances to be graded in various ways. Academics and practitioners in the UK (and round the world in other education systems that have similar purposes) are persuaded that the only legitimate path for them to follow if they want their work to be recognised is to take part in these various types of reviewing exercises.

One type of peer review is the single anonymised review of a proposal, text or performance, where the author or performer is not told the identity of the reviewer, with this reviewer chosen by the editor of a journal or a publishing house or a person of some seniority within their organisation or with an appointed evaluator from a governmental or quasi-governmental organisation. A second type is where more than one reviewer is asked to look at the piece of work, with, in the case of a written piece of work, these reviewers being anonymised. A third type is an open review process where the identities of the author or performer and the reviewer are known by all the participants during or after the review process. A fourth type is a transparent peer review process, where the report is made publicly available, with the reviewer choosing to reveal who they are, if they so choose. A fifth type includes a collaborative, open and formative dimension to the work, so that reviewers and authors/performers work together on improving their work, and there are no hidden or concealed elements in the process. The final type of reviewing comprises referencing work that has already been published, usually without the consent of the author/performer.

The parts of these processes that come under the most scrutiny are the anonymity of the reviewer, the choice of reviewer, the collaborative and formative nature of the exercise, the power-plays that are ever-present in these exercises, and issues that relate to truth, depictions of reality and consequences.

There are two anonymising moments in these processes: the reviewer, assessor or critic concealing their name from the person who is being reviewed, assessed or critically evaluated, and the person who is being reviewed, assessed or critically evaluated concealing their name and identity from the reviewer, assessor or critic. In the first of these processes, if it can be sustained, anonymity is used to facilitate, as far as this is possible, a route into a truthful account of the object being reviewed. The fear is that the reviewer if they are known to the person whose work is being evaluated will not give a truthful account and valuation of what they are looking at, because they do not want to be seen by other people as being overly critical or excessively censorious. They also do not want in a bureaucratic sense to have to enter into a correspondence with the person whose work is being evaluated.

In this sense, anonymising acts to prevent collaborative and formative processes working effectively. This contributes in however small a way to a hierarchical arrangement and rearrangement of objects, object-relations, object-configurations and people in the world. There is an alternative to anonymisation and this is full disclosure.

Choice of reviewer is also an important part of the proceedings, by journal editors, publishers, inspectors, evaluating bodies and the like. The assumption that is made is that there is a universal and non-ideological notion of quality, which they can then use in their evaluation, assessment or judgement. For example, a reviewer who works to a set of beliefs that we might want to describe as positivist/empiricist, and this is the dominant perspective at the present time, is asked to review a piece of work that is fundamentally semantic and semiotic in intention and design. Furthermore, most journal editors, publishers, inspectors and the like are not sympathetic to alternative perspectives. The process is inherently conservative (as the piece of work being assessed is being judged against prevailing and perhaps even regressive understandings of the subject matter) – new work is disadvantaged in the game that is being played. Those who support this system of anonymising do so with a passion and fervour that is difficult to counteract.