How to Maintain Peer Review Confidentiality

Maintaining absolute opacity in peer-reviewing is difficult, because active researchers in any given subspecialty are sufficiently well-acquainted with each others' work to make fairly accurate guesses about authorship of an anonymous paper. Nonetheless, several different types of editorial policy can increase the anonymity of the peer review process.

Instructions

    • 1

      Require that the author's name and other identifying information only appear on a separate, unnumbered title page for hard copy submissions. Do not include this page with materials sent to reviewers.

    • 2

      Preserve anonymity of electronic submissions when circulating to reviewers by removing metadata. Open an electronic file containing a submission, make a copy of the contents and paste the contents into a new file to remove the author's metadata.

    • 3

      Insist that all self-citations be phrased in the third person. In other words, change "As I have argued previously .... (Author 2000a, 3)" to "Author (2000a, 3) argues ...". Alternatively, move all self-references to footnotes and replace self-referential footnotes with the statement "Note deleted during peer review process to maintain anonymity."

    • 4

      Choose reviewers carefully. Balance the experts in a narrow subfield who will be able to identify anonymous papers simply by the research topic or writing style with scholars in closely related fields who are less likely to have personal knowledge of the identity of the researcher and can provide a broader disciplinary perspective on the work.

    • 5

      Ensure double-blind reviewing by removing possible self-identifying metadata, references and similar information from readers' reports, unless the readers volunteer to self-identify.

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