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[–]gwern[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

One interesting or terrifying thing about the various kinds of result-blind peer review/pre-accepted articles is just how often people keep reinventing them, exemplifying Cowen's law. In the terminology of multiple discovery, by my count this tweak to peer review represents a multiple of >9 (not that I got them all):

  1. 1966: Rosenthal (unfortunately, in a book, rather than a paper, which I couldn't get fulltext of; I've ordered a used copy to scan)
  2. 1977: Mahoney
  3. 1987: Newcombe
  4. 1988: Kupfersmid
  5. 2005: Glymour
  6. 2007: Lawlor
  7. 2011: Karger
  8. 2012/2015: Nyhan
  9. 2012: Said
  10. 2013: Chambers

EDIT: Johnson 1975 is claimed as another multiple.

This idea has been reinvented more often than Thompson sampling... (I consider them a multiple if they do not cite any other papers on it as prior art, or in the case of Lawlor, explicitly say they invented it but then a colleague told them the idea had been proposed earlier.)

It's sometimes said that Columbus is famous for being the last person to discover America, in the spirit of Lawrence Shepp ("Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered."); given that "registered reports" has been taking off and gotten many times the number of publications that all the other approaches since 1966 have gotten cumulatively (which is maybe like 20), it seems that Chambers 2013 is winning the memetic war to be the inventor of result-blind peer review.