Originally Posted by
John Forester
I am fully familiar with the standard procedure for refereeing papers, for I participated in that for several years, and in many discussions about how it should be done. I have known, and obeyed, Bernard K. Forscher's paper Rules for Referees, published in Science, for some twenty years.
If you noted my account, the paper submission process used by the journal Environmental Health and its associated journals had six entries for suggested referees and three entries for referees to be excluded. So they considered the submitter's choice of referees, although, I presume, they were not obligated to follow the request. Normally, referees are anonymous, although I know of cases, at the top of the ladder, in which the names of the referees were admitted.
If you have been reading this material, you will have read that the situation of bicycle transportation engineering is not the standard for professional science. It is done by amateurs, simply because those with money for studies and projects fund according to the cyclist-inferiority bikeway cycling program.
Normally, referees are chosen from persons with a substantial publication record. However, there have been no professional publications in that field. Only Paul Schimek's Dilemmas of Bicycle Facilities and my Bicycle Transportation Controversy papers have been published by professional journals. Now consider those with substantial publishing history. Take John Pucher, so admired here. He has never published anything in the field of bicycle transportation engineering; all he has done is to collect population statistics. Take Hunter, with several papers to his name. They all have to do only with motorists overtaking cyclists, and fail to consider at all the major engineering problems of bicycle transportation. The list goes on and on. Consider the absurdity of the bike box program in Portland (and other places); any simple engineering analysis of the actual operation demonstrates its defects, although there has been much propaganda issued about them. Much publishing that has no engineering at all, and some that is intended to demonstrate the superiority of bikeways but fails to do so through bad management and other problems.
There are very few writers who have concerned themselves with the cyclists' safe operating method, its usefulness, and the design of the facilities that best provide for it. Therefore, the pool of reasonable referees is small.
You consider the problem of group think. Well, that's not a problem All chemists believe the periodic table; that's not a group think problem. The fact that those who have specialized in cyclists' safe operating methods have come to agree that vehicular cycling is appropriate is no more a problem than the chemists' belief in the periodic table. It is the most reasonable conclusion from the evidence.
Regarding referees, almost every journal I can think of is at least blind and sometimes double blind. But as a practical measure, it is fairly straightforward to figure out who is writing either the paper or the review. Besides circulating working papers one will see the same people at conferences presenting papers or giving talks on certain subjects.
Like a lot of activists -- i.e., the crazies here and at Chainguard -- I simply read what is freely available. Things like reputation and the rigor of the review process are very hard to assess from the outside since the set of acceptable assumptions appears to vary across disciplines.
It is clear that bicycle transportation research is a drop in the bucket and suffers from a general lack of resources and interest. To be honest, you stating that biases observed in small groups is not a problem in your small group fails to inspire me with confidence. My history of science is far from complete, but I seem to recall that the periodic table was painfully vetted out and went through several iterations. Chemists have moved on to other questions which are argued and examined in excruciating detail. Mind you, I happen to think that vehicular cycling is the optimal strategy for safe cycling in a wide variety of environments. But my casual reading of transportation science suggests that like many other discplines that deal with strategic agents, the interaction between engineering and people is not fully understood.
Anyway, you may not have many options regarding people who take cycling transportation science seriously. But that would be a reason to temper one's results, IMO.