学习中，我们会受到peer pressure (同龄人压力)，发文章时，还会有peer review (同行评议)。
同行评议真的能如实反映文章的水准吗？真的是完全公平公正的吗？
研究人员通过试验发现，同行评议有非常大的主观性，而一个作者的知名度会对文章能够通过评议起到关键作用。
所以，当你的文章没有得到发表，那么有可能你的名头不那么响亮。
不要对自己的文章失去信心。
今天来读一下本期《经济学人》的这篇文章。
Academic publishing-Peer pressure
学术文章发表-同行评议
An influential academic safeguard is distorted by status bias
应该保障学术公平的手段，因身份偏见而走向扭曲
本文结构如下：
1. When, in 1905, the then unknown patent clerk Albert Einstein sent his revolutionary ideas on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and a few other topics to the German journal Annalen der Physik, its editors were happy to publish them. Submissions were rare and therefore rarely rejected—unless the text was clearly bonkers.
1905年，当时还籍籍无名的专利员阿尔伯特•爱因斯坦向德国期刊《物理年鉴》发送了自己写的具有革命性的文章，这些文章包括特殊相对论、光电效应，布朗运动和其他一些主题。
期刊的编辑们非常乐意出版这些文章。因为提交的文章数量稀少，所以文章被拒的几率就小——除非文章写得太差劲。
这里: sent his revolutionary ideas….是个很长的句子，可以分成两个句子来翻译。先说发送革命性的文章，然后再说这些文章都包括什么.
2. Things are different now. Most top academic journals use a system of peer review, which asks independent experts in the same field to assess papers before they are accepted. Reviewers are meant to check the methods, analysis and conclusions and, crucially, whether the work meets the required standards for publication.
然而，今非昔比。很多顶尖的学术期刊在使用一种同行评议的体系，即在接受文章之前，让同领域的独立专家来评估这些文章。
评议者的工作应该是检查文章使用的方法，分析的手段和内容，得出的结论以及更重要的文章是否达到出版的标准。
3. No scientist would claim that peer review is perfect. There are plenty of famous cases of groundbreaking papers being rejected after flawed advice from reviewers, while seldom a week goes by without one field or another rounding on a shoddy piece of work on social media and asking how on Earth it passed peer review. Many researchers describe the review process by borrowing Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy: it’s the worst system except for all the others.
每一个科学家敢说“同行评议”完美无瑕。突破性的文章因为评议者不准确的建议而被拒掉的著名例子有很多。
然而，当一个不咋地的文章发表后，各个领域的专家们在媒体上至少要骂上一周，气愤地问道“这种烂东西是怎么通过同行评议”的。
很多研究人员借用丘吉尔关于民主的讽刺来描述同行评议“这是所有体系中最差劲的体系。”
这里 while seldom a week goes by without one field…… 是个倒装句而且还是个双重否定句，有点难以理解。
可以把它调整成正常顺序-one field or another… media can go by less than one week.
这里的确有些难，也可能理解错，你是什么看法呢？
4. A new study of the peer review process reveals a novel and depressing, if not totally surprising, fault. It indicates that a modern-day Albert Einstein, or any researcher with a good idea but without an already stellar reputation, might struggle to get their foot in the door. Status bias means the name of the individual on the paper can matter as much as the findings when it comes to what gets published, suggests the study, which was released last week as a working paper on the SSRN repository.
一项有关同行评议流程的研究揭露了一个崭新的、令人沮丧，但完全意料之中的错误。研究暗示就算爱因斯坦再现，或者任何一个有着好想法的研究者，如果没有声誉在外，仍然会被拒之门外。研究表明，当要出版文章时，文章上的作者名字比研究发现更重要，这就是身份偏见。这项研究作为工作论文于上周发表在社会科学研究网络数据库上。
这里： status bias means…. suggests the study，在翻译的时候，可以调整一下顺序。
5. Researchers have suspected for a long time that work from established senior figures often gets an easier ride in peer review and is more likely to be accepted and published. It is an example of the so-called Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, that eminent people get disproportionate credit for work—named after the biblical parable of the talents in the Gospel of Matthew, which states that “to everyone who has will more be given”.
研究人员长期以来都在怀疑：那些比较著名的人物的著作更容易通过同行评议，并且被期刊接受和发表的可能性更大。
这就是所谓的聚集优势的“马太效应”，即著名的人物会得到不成比例的加分。“马太效应”来自《圣经•马太福音》中人物寓言，“凡有的，还要加倍给他”。
6. In the new study, researchers at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, collaborated with Vernon Smith, an experimental economist at Chapman University, in California, and a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Dr Smith had just completed a project with Sabiou Inoua, a colleague at Chapman University who at the time was a PHD student. The duo had written a paper on financial and market data that was ready to submit to an academic journal.
奥地利因斯布鲁克大学的研究人员与加州查普曼大学的实验经济学家同时也是诺贝尔经济学奖获得者Vernon Smith合作完成了一项新的研究。
Smith博士刚刚与当时还是查普曼大学博士生的Sabiou Inoua合作完成了一个项目。二人写了一篇关于金融和市场数据的文章，打算提交给学术期刊。
7. The team from Innsbruck had a devious plan—use the name of either Dr Smith or Mr Inoua as the paper’s author and send it to peer reviewers to see how they judged the quality of the work. Editors at the Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Finance, the journal to which the pair submitted their manuscript, were admirably ready to play along.
因斯布鲁克的团队有一个不太光明的计划——利用Smith博士或者Inoua 先生作为文章的作者，然后发送给同行进行评议，他们想看看这些人是如何评价这篇文章的质量的。
文章打算投稿的《行为和实验金融》期刊的编辑也非常愿意进行合作。
8. They first asked more than 3,300 potential reviewers if they would be willing to take the time to assess the manuscript, based on a short abstract emailed to them that listed one of the two authors’ names, or omitted the names entirely. In this scenario, including Dr Smith’s name saw the acceptance rate jump—almost 40% agreed to review when he was the author compared with closer to 30% when the author was Mr Inoua or not listed.
编辑们找到了3300位潜在的评议者，询问他们在看了收到的简短摘要后，是否愿意对该文章初稿进行评议。
摘要中列出了其中一位作者的名字，或者全部隐去名字。在这种情况下，当作者名字是Smith 博士时，同意评议的接受率达到了40%，而当作者写的是Inoua先生或者没有作者名字时，同意评议的接受率将近30%。
9. Those who agreed were sent a full manuscript to review, with the same pattern of names, and more than 500 reviewers submitted reports. When they thought it was Mr Inoua’s work alone, 65% of reviewers voted to reject it. That is almost three times as many as the 23% of reviewers who rejected the same paper when it carried only Dr Smith’s name.
那些同意评议的人会收到初稿全文，名字也保持一致，500多评议者提交了报告。当评议者认为Inoua先生是该文章独立作者时，65%的评议者给予不通过。
而这一比例几乎是当作者仅有Smith博士时，评议者给予不通过比例为23%的3倍。
10. But it was also a significantly higher rejection rate than the 48% who spurned the paper when it was completely anonymous. Not only did Dr Smith’s eminence boost his numbers, but the newbie status of Mr Inoua counted against him.
但这一比例仍然比完全匿名时文章被拒比例48%要高。Smith博士的名字提高了通过率，而名不见经传的Inoua先生这个身份则起到了反作用。
11. Does the pernicious impact of status bias seep beyond the pages of this particular journal and this particular field? Juergen Huber, one of the Innsbruck team, is certain that it does. Every discipline from chemistry and physics to medicine and genetics has its own superstars, he says, while some results indicate that top institutions like Harvard University also get a status boost in peer review.
这种身份偏见的不良影响不局限于这个期刊和这个领域。因斯布鲁克团队的Juergen Huber告诉你：的确如此。
从化学、物理学到医学和遗传学的每个学科，都有本领域的学术巨星，而且一些研究表明还表明像哈佛大学这样的顶尖院校同样能在同行评议中凭借身份提升通过率。
12. One option to deal with the bias is to remove all names from all manuscripts under review. But Dr Huber points out this is increasingly difficult with the rise of preprints and working papers published online before they are formally submitted to a journal. Any reviewer of an anonymous manuscript could simply search for its tell-tale online trail.
解决这种偏见的一个办法就是去掉要评议文章中的所有名字。但是，Huber博士指出这对正式提交给期刊前的预印本和网络发表的工作文章来说越来越难。
任何一篇匿名文章的评议者通过简单的网络搜索就能找到蛛丝马迹。
13. The story has an interesting coda. Mr Inoua and Dr Smith’s bold willingness to test the limits of peer review has not come without cost. The Journal of Behavioural and Experimental Finance is yet to publish their paper. It is waiting for the duo to respond to the reviewers’ comments—all 500 of them.
这个故事的结局很有趣。Inoua先生和Smith博士甘愿拿自己的文章检测同行评议局限性的做法也是有代价的。《行为和实验金融》期刊尚未发表该文章，因为二人还没有回复完那500个评议者的评价。
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