Ensuring a blind review

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this press, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

The authors of the document should have replaced their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, article title, etc.

Checklist for ensuring a blind review

  1. Title (remove any identifying information)
  2. Cite papers published by the Author in the text as follows: (Author, 2019)
  3. Use the third person to refer to work the Authors have previously undertaken, e.g. replace any phrases like “as we have shown before” with “… has been shown before (Author, 2019)”.
  4. Do not eliminate essential self-references or other references but limit self-references only to papers that are relevant for those reviewing the submitted paper.
  5. For blinding in the reference list: (Author 2019) Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.
  6. Footnotes (remove any identifying information)
  7. Make sure figures and tables, including figure and table labels and captions, don't contain any affiliation related identifiers
  8. Remove references to funding sources
  9. Do not include acknowledgments
  10. Remove any identifying information from file names
  11. Ensure document properties are also anonymized.

Ensuring document properties are anonymized

With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application:

  1. File
  2. Save As
  3. Tools (or Options with a Mac)
  4. Security
  5. Remove personal information from file properties on save
  6. Save

Removing revealing information in PDFs

With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Adobe Acrobat's main menu: File > Document Properties