Ensuring an Anonymous Review

To ensure the integrity of the anonymous peer-review for submission to your journal, 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.

Anonymising Manuscript File Properties/Metadata

With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should be removed from the properties for the file as standard practice.

For Macintosh versions of Microsoft Word

Under the Tools menu select: Protect Document > Remove personal information from file on save > Save.

For Windows versions of Microsoft Word

Under the 'File' menu select: Check for Issues > Inspect Document.

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 indicate 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 author's names should also be removed from Document Properties found under 'File' on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.

Anonymising Specific References to the Author(s) and their Previous Research within a Manuscript

All identifying metadata and author names should first be removed from the key article information, such as in 'Document Properties' (see above). Additionally, any identifying information as part of the title block of the submitted manuscript, such as the author’s name or email address, and in any acknowledgements or competing interests statements, should all be removed prior to anonymous review.

Where it is reasonable to do so, the author(s) of the document should provide citations and references to their own research in the third person. This means that sentences using 'I' or 'We' that can clearly be traced to the author(s) should be amended. For example:

We outline this argument for anonymising identifying information in a previous paper (Jones et al, 2024).

Should be amended to:

Jones et al outline this argument in their paper, 'Anonymising Identifying Information' (2024).

In some cases where this kind of alteration of the sentence is not sufficient and there is still a clear and identifiable link to the author(s), the information should be removed as appropriately as possible for the purpose of anonymous review only. Any removed identifying information, along with any amended citations and references, should be inserted back into the manuscript post-review, once a final editorial decision on the manuscript has been reached.

When an entire article has been written in the first person (for example, an autobiographical or personal account) that must undergo anonymous peer review, we recognise that the removal of identifying information of the author(s) is not completely viable. However, it should be redacted as much as possible so that immediate author identification by peer reviewers is prevented to the best of the editors' abilities. The above 'Anonymising Manuscript File Properties/Metadata' advice should be followed in the first instance. Any self-citations and references by the author(s) should be redacted as far as possible within the constraints of a personal account, for example:

I found that, 20 years ago, anonymising data was as much a concern as it is today (Author, 2004).

Anonymising Additional/Figure Files by the Author(s)

The guidance above should be followed, similarly, for any other supporting documents or figure files taken from previously published research by the author(s) that will be sent to reviewers where the author(s) can be clearly identified.

Where possible, within a manuscript, such figures cited and reproduced from previously published work by the author(s) should be referred to in the third person. A caption for the figure, placed in the body text of the manuscript, should refer to the figure's author(s) in the third person, for example:

Figure 1: A Diagram of Anonymisation. Taken from Jones et al, 2024. Reproduced by permission of the author(s).

If a figure has been created by the author(s) of the manuscript as part of the submitted research, this should simply give the figure caption's description with no additional information needed:

Figure 1: A Diagram of Anonymisation.

However, figures that have been created by the author(s) that are used within the manuscript should not contain any author names embedded within the figure itself (for example, text within or on an image). Such information should be removed from the figure file prior to review.