Double-blind conferences have engaged in debates over whether to allow authors to post their papers online on arXiv or elsewhere during the review process. Independently, some authors of research papers face the dilemma of whether to put their papers on arXiv due to its pros and cons. We conduct a study to substantiate this debate and dilemma via quantitative measurements. Specifically, we conducted surveys of reviewers in two top-tier double-blind computer science conferences -- ICML 2021 (5361 submissions and 4699 reviewers) and EC 2021 (498 submissions and 190 reviewers). Our three main findings are as follows. First, more than a third of the reviewers self-report searching online for a paper they are assigned to review. Second, conference policies restricting authors from publicising their work on social media or posting preprints before the review process may have only limited effectiveness in maintaining anonymity. Third, outside the review process, we find that preprints from better-ranked institutions experience a very small increase in visibility compared to preprints from other institutions.

翻译：双盲评审会议长期存在是否允许作者在评审期间将论文在线发布于arXiv等平台的争议。与此同时，部分研究者也因预印本发布的利弊而面临是否提交论文至arXiv的困境。本研究通过量化测量方法对此争议与困境进行实证分析。具体而言，我们针对两个顶级双盲计算机科学会议——ICML 2021（5361篇投稿，4699名评审人）与EC 2021（498篇投稿，190名评审人）的评审人开展了问卷调查。主要发现如下：第一，超过三分之一的评审人承认会在线检索被分配评审的论文；第二，会议禁止作者在社交媒体宣传研究成果或评审前发布预印本的政策，对维持匿名性的实际效果可能有限；第三，在评审流程之外，我们发现相较于其他机构，顶尖学术机构的预印本仅获得极微弱的可见度提升。