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I have been visiting some journal websites and I found that some of them state that they use a double blind review process.

What does it mean?

Anyon
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RTK
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1 Answers1

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It means that, not only are the reviewers' identities unknown to the authors (as usual), but the authors' identities are unknown to the reviewers. Only the editor(s) know the identity of everyone involved. This supposedly makes for a less biased review. This also means that the authors need to exercise special care in preparing the submission, because they should avoid all instances of "we" when referring to past, cited papers, for example.

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    I'll note that double blind reviewing is fairly rare for most things. Usually, the reviewer sees the paper as submitted, including all authors. But there are exceptions and these are usually noted by the conference or journal. – Buffy Aug 22 '18 at 16:39
  • @Buffy I'm surprised to hear this. In political science, double-blind is the norm; in fact, I couldn't name one instance of a single-blind journal from the top of my head. Another example of academia's diversity? – henning Aug 22 '18 at 18:37
  • @henning, yes, it varies by field, certainly. And even in a given field, conferences may be different from journals (I suspect). – Buffy Aug 22 '18 at 18:42
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    @henning You might be interested in this. For example in pure math, double blind would be completely impossible to implement. –  Aug 22 '18 at 19:28