Ensuring a Blind Peer Review
To ensure a double blind peer review process, we must make every effort to prevent authors’ and reviewers’ identities being known to each other. This involves authors, editors, and reviewers removing all identifying information from their uploaded documents.
Before uploading a document to our system, please ensure that the following steps are carried out:
1. If your name has been included within the text of the document you are submitting (e.g. author name on title page), delete this from the text. If you have cited your own works within the document that make it easy to identify you, also replace this with "Author" and year, instead of the author’s name.
2. Author identification should be removed from the properties of the file uploaded, according to the instructions below:
For MacIntosh Word 2008 (and future versions):
Under the File menu select "Properties”.
Under the Summary tab remove all of the identifying information from all of the fields and click “Ok”.
Save your File.
For Microsoft 2007 (Windows):
Click on the office button in the upper-left hand corner of the office application
Select "Prepare" from the menu options.
Select "Properties" for the "Prepare" menu options.
Delete all the information in the document property fields that appears under the main menu options.
Save the document and close the document property field section.
For Microsoft 2010 (Windows):
Under the File menu select "Prepare for sharing”.
Click on the "Check for issues" icon.
Click on "inspect document" icon.
Uncheck all of the checkboxes except "Document Properties and Personal information".
Run the document inspector, which will then do a search of the document properties and indicated if any document property fields contain any information.
If the document inspector finds that some of the document properties contain information it will notify you and give you the option to "Remove all," which you will click to remove the document properties and personal information from the document.
For PDF files:
With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.