Nevertheless, there were a few who questioned that definition of fairness and challenged the assumption that it was wrong for reviewers to take institutional affiliation and history into consider- ation. "We consider a result from a scientist who has never before been wrong much more seriously than a similar report from a scientist who has never before been right. . . . It is neither unnatural nor wrong that the work of scientists who have achieved eminence through a long record of important and suc- cessful research is accepted with fewer reservations than the work of less eminent scientists" (196). "A reviewer may be justified in assuming at the outset that [well-known] people know what they are do- ing" (211). "Those of us who publish establish some kind of track record. If our papers stand the test of time . . . it can be expected that we have acquired expertise in scientific methodology" (244). (This last respondent is a woman and a Nobel laureate.)

A similar point is made by some of the participants in a discussion of peer review published in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences: An International Journal of Current Research and Theory with Open Peer Commentary (5 [1982]: 187-255). The occasion was the report of research conducted by D. P. Peters and S. J. Ceci. Peters and Ceci had taken twelve articles published in twelve different journals, altered the titles, substituted for the names of the authors fictitious names identified as researchers at institu- tions no one had ever heard of (because they were, made up), and resubmitted the articles to the jour- nals that had originally accepted them. Three of the articles were recognized as resubmissions, and of the remaining nine eight were rejected. The response to these results ranged from horror ("It puts at risk the whole conceptual framework within which we are accustomed to make observations and con- struct theories" [245]) to "so what else is new."