Prepare your manuscript for 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 your manuscript. This includes:
- authors' names
- affiliations
- email addresses
This information must not be in:
- the manuscript, including all figures, tables, supplementary material and related files
- the file metadata (personal information from the document properties)
- any files that will be shared with reviewers
Your manuscript should not include:
- author acknowledgements or contribution statements
- a competing interest statement
We'll ask for this information in our submission system (Snapp). Any information you provide in the submission system will be added to the version we'll publish.
You should also 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)."
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.
