Refereeing Papers About Your Own Work


A graduate student in philosophy writes in with the following query:

 Under what conditions is it appropriate to referee a paper that responds directly to your own work? 

Ravi Zupa, Sculpture (“Mightier Than” series)

The student elaborates:

On the one hand, it seems unethical to review such a paper, given the personal investment in the subject. On the other, it seems plausible to me that the conflict of interest doesn’t necessarily make a potential referee a less qualified reviewer than whoever would replace them, especially if the topic is a niche one or is highly technical.

I can see an argument for the idea that it might be unfair to the author (or bad for the subject) to “selfishly” refuse to contribute in cases where one’s expertise might make a relevant difference. (Though I suspect that there are very few cases in which the topic is genuinely as niche or technical as that.) It also seems worthwhile to balance concerns of the time required to find additional reviewers and the associated costs to both author and editor.

Finally, I’m unsure how I would draw a cutoff for papers that one shouldn’t review—speaking only for myself, I suspect that I would be more likely to be uncharitable to a paper that failed to engage with my work on a subject than with one that responded to it, for instance. 

I reached out to Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown), editor-in-chief the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and former editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Quarterly for a response. She writes:

Referees are not chosen anonymously, and the editor can see that the paper responds to your work, so presumably in inviting you they decided this would not be a problematic conflict of interest. I think that unless you have a distinctive reason to not trust your own judgment, you should feel free to let the editor make this call.

As an editor, I never ask someone to referee a paper in which they are treated very harshly, nor one in which they are held up as an important hero, because it seems to me these situations create obvious conflicts of interest. More broadly, I avoid asking someone whose work is the main topic of a paper to referee it, because I figure they will be too close to the material. But quite often, I ask someone who is discussed less centrally in a paper to referee it. Sometimes this is because I am genuinely unsure if that person is being characterized accurately and they seem like the best person to ask. Sometimes it is because I am not sure who the experts are in the field and the actual content of the paper is a good source of experts. In such cases, I don’t think there is any prima facie reason for there to be a problematic conflict of interest, and indeed these referees are especially valuable to me. Importantly, I trust people I ask to referee papers to just let me know if they have a conflict of interest that isn’t apparent from the outside.

Responses from others are welcome.

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Trajan
Trajan
4 years ago

Thanks for the post. One thing to consider. You anticipate that the relevant conflict of interest by the author would look something like this: “I recommend reject (privately thinks: it’s good, but it’s critical of me and so I’m gonna tank it to save my reputation.” I actually think a more likely (or at least, similarly likely) kind of conflict of interest militates in the other direction–so as to take this kind of shape. “I recommend minor revisions (privately thinks: it’s so-so, but since it cites me, it would up my citation count on Google Scholar!”)

Daniel
Daniel
Reply to  Trajan
4 years ago

Just wanted to chime in to agree with Trajan. I’ve frequently found myself refereeing papers that discuss my work (usually critically), and I strongly suspect I’m more likely than the average referee to accept such work. Part of it is what Trajan says. But another issue is that, if you’ve published on a topic, you probably think it’s interesting and worth discussing in print. So when somebody else replies to you on that topic, you probably still think their reply concerns matters that are interesting and worth discussing in print.

Or to put it another way, convincing the referee that the topic is of sufficient interest is a hurdle that you’ve already surmounted when your referee is your target.

A Philosopher
A Philosopher
Reply to  Trajan
4 years ago

Yeah I think both of those are serious conflicts of interest, the latter especially. Who doesn’t want their work cited, or better yet discussed at length in the literature? People have a very strong vested interest in their work making an impact. And human beings are terrible at introspecting their own motives. So people shouldn’t be reviewing papers that focus on their own work. The conflicts of interest here are both obvious and serious.

Jon Light
4 years ago

I’d almost rather this person referee the paper than some other person who wasn’t cited and then tanks the paper for not citing the reviewer’s work. In other words, I almost think the conflict is lower when this is all above board, than when you have some desperate reviewer fishing for citations. I bet a lot of us routinely get papers rejected–maybe even half of my rejections?–for not citing the “relevant” work (i.e., that of the reviewer, which might not be relevant (or good) at all.

Dale Miller
4 years ago

Another possible reason that the reviewer might be more inclined to accept the paper in these sorts of cases is that she sees the possibility of publishing a reply. Nevertheless, as an editor I nearly always ask the author of the original paper to review a reply. They’re uniquely well positioned to, for instance, head off misunderstandings. However, the author would never be the sole reviewer.

FluxSurface
FluxSurface
4 years ago

I would say it depends on the quality of the paper on the table. If you think the paper is good, then you might be the right person to review it. If you think it’s not up to par, then it’s better to recuse yourself from reviewing it. The question, I think, is not of whether the situation colors your experience as a reviewer, but rather whether a bad coloration can affect someone else.

Thomas
Thomas
4 years ago

We shouldn’t forget that a secondary aim of the peer-review review process is to improve the papers. I suspect the author whom the piece is about would be well placed to improve the article

Gino
Gino
4 years ago

Here’s one problem if you ask someone to referee a paper that criticises/attacks their own work: being the author, the reviewer may feel tempted to argue that their own view can be amended to deal with the objections. But (more often than not) a reply only need to show that a view X has a problem, not that X couldn’t possibly be modified to solve that problem (unless of course we talk about minimal modifications; but my point is exactly that the original author may easily misjudge how substantial their proposed amendments are, and therefore be unfair or at least biased in their judgment).