I disagree, the style to write as a "neutral" observer (often writing in passive voice) is frowned upon nowadays for good reason.

Part of that is also that the information if the authors wrote a citation or not can be important to a reviewer. For example it is unfortunately quite common that authors publish results in a salami tactic to maximize the number of publications. There can be a significant difference in impact between a citation saying "this is important to work on" which is written by the authors and one which is written by someone else.

Generally we should not write to hide information, and that would include if the authors wrote other work that relates to the work being reviewed. We should not adjust our writing to doubleblind review (and I would argue the advice the author was given is wrong). Doubleblind review is imperfect anyway, I can often tell who the authors are just by topic and e.g. writing and figure styles, so if a reviewer really wants to know the authors they can. We should still do double blind though.

Writing about your own work in third person has nothing to do with using the passive voice. You can use the active voice just fine: "Papers X,Y,Z show that ..." works regardless of the identity of the authors of X,Y,Z So the style argument is wrong.

The other argument you have is also questionable. It doesn't matter at all the identity of the citer when using citations to argue that a topic of research is important. If you cite 20 papers and they are mostly from the very same author, it doesn't matter if you're the author: any reviewer will realize the claim is shaky -- or not, if all those papers happens to be actually outstanding.

Double blind is imperfect but miles better than single blind. And we shouldn't list made-up defects that don't stand to scrutiny to it.

> Writing about your own work in third person has nothing to do with using the passive voice. You can use the active voice just fine: "Papers X,Y,Z show that ..." works regardless of the identity of the authors of X,Y,Z So the style argument is wrong.

I agree that writing in third person about your work is not the same as writing in passive voice. It is part of the same style trying to give an impression of objectivity despite the fact that you did the work.

Essentially you are trying to hide the information that you authored the papers, and did the work. Just compare "In paper X,Y,Z the authors show the importance of proper citing" or "In paper X,Y,Z we show the importance of proper citing". Don't tell me that you would not evaluate the 2 sentences differently.

> The other argument you have is also questionable. It doesn't matter at all the identity of the citer when using citations to argue that a topic of research is important. If you cite 20 papers and they are mostly from the very same author, it doesn't matter if you're the author: any reviewer will realize the claim is shaky -- or not, if all those papers happens to be actually outstanding.

Sure if there are 20 citations it's very obviously shaky, but often enough cases are not quite so clear cut. I still believe one should not deliberately hide information.

> Double blind is imperfect but miles better than single blind. And we shouldn't list made-up defects that don't stand to scrutiny to it.

Just so I don't get misunderstood, I'm not arguing against double blind, we should always do it and I have been advocating for it in several settings. I just say we should not suddenly change the way we write papers, so not to accidentally reveal our identity to the reviewers. That approach will make papers more difficult to read and write with questionable benefit.

> the style to write as a "neutral" observer (often writing in passive voice) is frowned upon nowadays for good reason.

Could you be more specific about who's frowning upon it? Because I've never heard this before in my field (Comp. Ling., where double blind is the rule) and would like to look more into it.

Many style guides now say to write in active voice (Nature is one of them, but many others as well). I don't have the books in front of me, so can't find the citation, but many publications on scientific writing essentially recommend direct language.

The reasoning is that the work was "subjective", i.e. carried out by you. By using "detached third person language" you are trying to give a false impression of objectivity. This is similar to management/PR double speak like "we are forced to raise our prices", "we are unable to compensate you"... (I don't assign malice in the case of scientists though).

Like sibling I'd also like more information on this and can't find anything immediately compelling with a light search. Like this post suggests, obviously there's a use to hiding information, sometimes a bad reputation is undeserved or irrelevant to the work, sometimes there are subtle biases in play.

The reputation of the author and their behaviour wrt the citations used should be considered, I agree with you that it's important information. Maybe the reviewer of an individual paper shouldn't be considering that though, maybe that should primarily be considered in a second review stage or in the context of meta-reviews? Idk, but the spirit of using passive voice in the context of research makes more sense to me.

> For example it is unfortunately quite common that authors publish results in a salami tactic to maximize the number of publications

Why is this unfortunate? I'd argue that splitting results in multiple publications is a) Riskier for authors (higher chance of rejection) and b) More convenient for readers (each paper requires less mental load, being focused on a single aspect). So, even if there's a payoff for authors, it doesn't come for free.

The tactic is more advantageous to authors, because they get more articles (which is used as a metric to evaluate scientific success) and I would argue it's less risky. Say you split up your results up into 3 papers, your chance of one paper being rejected might be higher, however your chance of all papers being rejected is lower.

In terms of more convenient for readers, you discount the mental load required in finding papers. That's in fact one of the biggest problems in many scientific fields at the moment. There are so many papers being published that it is very hard to keep up with the field. Reading the same amount of results also requires a much higher load, because if authors split up the results into 3 papers, the individual papers are not suddenly shorter, but in fact the overall page count is typically almost 3 times of a paper that would have put everything into a single paper.

In some cases the issue that you can't really "blind" it because it is a physical continuation of the earlier work - not just building upon the idea, which anyone could do, but using the exact same experimental device (a unique one, like the hadron collider) or continued analysis of the exact same set of patients or animals, or improving the previously made software tool.

This happens in larger fields too. For example in AI, which is a large research field, you can be blind-reviewing a paper, but it uses a proprietary google dataset, so you know where it comes from. Blind review is not the answer, I fear.

For me the most important advantage of blind review is not that 100% of papers are effectively blind, but that if you're a noname author you have the right to be blind and not having your paper looked down on just for that reason. That alone justifies double-blind review.

Regarding papers that cite proprietary datasets that no one can access, in fields like AI where it is perfectly possible to release datasets (if there's a specific reason it's a different issue), as far as I'm concerned they should be outright rejected due to lack of reproducibility and inability of the reviewers to check the correctness of the claims. Although I know this is a minority viewpoint and it won't happen.