Double-anonymous Peer Review
Preparing Your Manuscript for Double-anonymous Peer Review
In a double-anonymous peer review, both the reviewers and authors remain unaware of each other's identities during the review process. To maintain this anonymity, authors must take care to avoid accidentally disclosing their identities to the reviewers throughout the peer-review process.
Instructions for Anonymous Submission
Before submitting, please ensure that all identifying information is removed from the manuscript, figures, tables, and any related or supplementary files. Identifying information includes:
Author names — Ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript, title page, headers, footers, and any footnotes or endnotes.
Institutional affiliations — Remove any references to your institution(s) or department(s) that could reveal your identity.
Email addresses
Self-citations — Refer to your own work in the third person (e.g., "Author(s), Year") rather than using the first person (e.g., "We...").
Metadata — Check the file properties (e.g., author name, document title) and remove any identifying information in the document metadata.
Figures and Tables — Ensure that any logos, institutional names, or personally identifying features within figures or tables are either removed or anonymised.
Exclude any sections that could reveal identifying information, such as funding, data availability, acknowledgments, and any other statements that might disclose your identity within the manuscript.
If you are using a preprint service, please be aware that the authors' identities may be easier to discover online during a double-anonymous peer review process. While we ask our reviewers to evaluate articles impartially and trust them not to seek out the authors' identities, we cannot guarantee that this will not occur.
