Double-anonymous peer review

In journals with a double-anonymous peer review model, the reviewers and authors don't know each other's identities during the review process. To ensure this, authors must avoid accidentally revealing who they are to the reviewers.

Instructions for anonymising your submission

Before submitting, remove any identifying information from the manuscript, figures, tables, and related and complementary files. Identifying information includes:

• Authors' names
• Affiliations
• Email addresses

Additionally, ensure that you prepare your manuscript correctly for double anonymous peer review by considering the following:

• Use the third person when referring to your previously published work. For example, write "Brown and Smith (2015) have demonstrated" instead of "we/the authors have previously demonstrated (Brown & Smith, 2015)."
• Exclude acknowledgements and references to funding sources within the manuscript. 
• Make sure you remove any identifiable information from the body of your work as well as the file metadata (personal information from the document properties) to ensure that part of your files is anonymised.
• Double-check that you have not accidentally included identifying information in any files that will be shared with reviewers.

Ensure that figures and tables do not reference author affiliations.

If you are using a preprint service, be aware that it will be easier to find out who the authors are online during a double-anonymous peer review. We ask our reviewers to review articles objectively and trust them not to investigate the authors’ identities, but we cannot guarantee this.