Reply #186: Here, here (or is it hear, hear?). I teach and write on scholarly communication.

[nealmhughes]

There are actually standards used in the process! Shock! Name does not trump content by any means, but it can get you throught the first step getting peer reviewed. But since the peers do not know whom they are reviewing, nor do the authors know who the peers are, there is a good -- actually an overwhelming chance -- that the parties can't even read between the lines and figure out who is who.

The flow is as follows: seminar paper/working paper, conference paper, first edited draft for peer review, approval or disapproval by the peers, then publication after changes if needed and a new review, then replies/collaries to the original, ad infin.

Of course, sometimes there will be no conference paper, and no one will go beyond the initial paper's publication (purely out of boredom/BS factor but not so deep a BS factor to warrant their time for reply, etc.

There is a reason that scholarly communication is called that. Ackoff calls it an "open, complex system" with positive and negative feedback.