hack to break reviewer anonymity

a rather straightforward hack to break the anonymity of reviewers for peer-reviewed publications (most places at least ensure single-blind submission -- author names are public but reviewing is anonymous)


wonder if this has been tried before to figure out who is reviewing your paper?
1. put some results/theorems in a separate file (preferably these are genuine)

2. give a url submissionid_conference.googlepages.com/filename for the file (probably works much better if the submission is double blind -- if author names are also suppressed and all hints to author identity are explicitly removed, then you can just create something and justify why you created a webpage for the additional stuff from 1 -- linking to your homepage would sacrifice author anonymity :-) )

3. add some webtracking thing to the url and see where you are getting hits from

assuming you can filter out spurious hits/click spam and check for actual views (e.g., .edu or city names), you should have a fairly reasonable idea of who is reviewing

(inspired in part by a recent paper that cited itself for motivation :-) )

qotd

We zone out, we chicken out, we deceive. To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control. Why? Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through

-- Kluge, Gary Marcus

the only thing worse than having a bad idea is having no ideas

anonymous