Publishing or withholding ideas one has as a reviewer?

In our March "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Maybe it's just me feeling good about myself, but I try to be a responsible reviewer. On top of always submitting reviews within a week, I do my best to help the authors improve their papers. (Though sometimes I do suggest acceptance without revision, but that's more the exception than the norm.)

This has led me to this weird experience: I gave out some ideas in my report, and the paper is now R&R. But now I really want to use those ideas to start an independent paper, so I'm not sure I should have given them out in the first place. So concrete questions: a) should I withhold ideas when reviewing? b) can I still use those ideas as my own if they get published?

Hmm, this seems tricky to me. It might depend on whether publishing the ideas in question might "scoop" the author one has reviewed. You definitely don't want to get in a situation where an author for a journal you've reviewed for might think you've ripped them off or preempted some argument in their own work--and if you've suggested that they include an idea or argument in their paper and you go and publish on just that, then it seems like you run that risk. Even if the idea came from you, it also came from you reviewing their work for a journal. On the other hand, I also don't know whether I think it is right to withhold a suggestion in peer-review just because you think you might want to publish on it. So, I don't know. Again, I think a lot might depend on what the idea is and the extent to which it is based on the work of the author one is reviewing or independent of it. But in general, I think it's best to err on the side of caution to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

What do readers think?

Comments

[Circe]

This is a really good question. FWIW, I disagree with what Marcus wrote, but agree with his claim that the details of particular cases matter. I'm sure it is an issue that newer reviewers grapple with.

First, it seems totally permissible to me to withhold a suggestion in peer-review because you think you might want to publish on it. I don't see it as a duty of peer-reviewers to provide suggestions on how to fix issues in a paper--I do this myself, but I think of it as supererogatory--so much as to point out where things are weak (among other things of course). Also, I think it is better to leave the author to fix things as they wish and not make them feel pressured to conform to my suggestions, qua reviewer.

Second, I'm not sure I understand the relevance of this: "Even if the idea came from you, it also came from you reviewing their work for a journal." All of my ideas have their causal origin in papers I've read. I read something > it makes me think about something else, something related, or something neglected in the text > I write on it.

[depends]

How much detail was given in the review? How far would the paper that you want to write go beyond what you said in the review? Without knowing answers to these questions, I find it difficult to judge the case.
I've reviewed a paper in which I said something along the lines of "The author neglects to mention X, and X is important for issue Y. In fact, most (all?) philosophers writing on Y have ignored or are unaware of X. I suggest the author discuss this."
But I certainly didn't expect the author to make their *entire paper* about X. And I was currently writing a paper entirely about X at the time I wrote that review...

[Bill Vanderburgh]

The solutions that occur to me seem mostly to involve violating the blind part of blind review (asking the author if/the extent to which they are taking up that line in their revised paper, whether they would mind you publishing the idea, whether they would like to coauthor on the topic, etc.). Some of those, I suppose, could be passed through the editor.

This also suggests a kind of acknowledgement I haven't seen before: "I'd like to thank an anonymous reviewee from another journal for sparking this idea."

[Daniel Weltman]

I agree with Circe on both points. I will also add that probably whatever the paper says will not be entirely or exactly what you suggested, so there's probably room for you to write your paper too, and if the author of the paper is any good, they will have an acknowledgement in their paper that the idea came from a reviewer for the journal. So hopefully there is no issue here if you give them an idea and then want to publish on it.

[R]

In terms of withholding an idea, the key question seems to be whether the idea affects your recommendation to the editor. If it's something you think the author needs to fix in order for you to recommend publication of the paper, then you should be as clear and precise as possible about what you want them to do. If it's not that, then there is absolutely no obligation to mention it at all.

FWIW, for an idea that you think is potentially worth publishing as a separate article, I would think it would typically fall in the latter category rather than the former. A response or follow-up to the argument that you're reviewing that could function as a full-blown published reply doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to ask someone to pre-empt or respond to in peer review. Better to hash these things out in print. Note that this is a win-win-win for you, the author, and the literature.