Hidden fingerprints: preparing your manuscript for double-blind review

In a double-blind review, reviewers do not know who wrote the manuscript, and authors do not know who reviewed it. This only works if the manuscript itself doesn’t give you away. Removing names from the title page is the obvious step. Most identifying details are less obvious: some are stored inside the file, and some sit in the text where nobody thinks to look.

What we remove for you

When you upload the anonymized manuscript as a Word (.docx) file, our system cleans it before anyone else sees it. It does the same for every anonymized version you upload later, including revisions:

• Document properties: the author, “last saved by”, company, and manager fields are emptied, and custom properties are deleted.
• Comments and tracked changes: reviewers can still see comments and tracked changes, but every name on them is replaced with “Author”.
• Template path: some files record the folder path of the template they were made from, which can include a computer user name. This is cut down to the template’s file name.

None of this touches the text, layout, figures, or tables. The clean-up works on .docx files only. If you upload another format, check its file properties yourself.

What reviewers receive

Reviewers never see your file name. The file appears under a standard label such as “Main manuscript (anonymized)”. The main link opens a PDF we prepared from your Word file. The PDF has line numbers, a “For Peer Review” watermark, and a cover page. The cover page shows only the submission ID, the article type, and the keywords.

What only you can check

Software can clean a file. It cannot judge what your sentences reveal. Before you upload, read your manuscript once as a stranger would and look for:

• Self-citations. “As we showed in our earlier study (Sevim, 2023)” identifies you at once. Cite your own work in the third person, as you would cite anyone else’s (“Sevim (2023) showed…”). If even that would give you away, replace it with “(Author, year)” and omit it from the reference list until the final version.
• Acknowledgments and funding. Grant numbers, funders, supervisors, and colleagues you thank all point to you. Move them to the version with author details.
• Ethics approval. The committee’s name and the approval number usually name your institution. Write “approved by the relevant ethics committee (details withheld for review)”.
• The study setting. “Data were collected at our university hospital in Izmir” is as clear as a signature. Describe the setting in general terms for now.
• Figures, tables, and supplementary files. Check logos, screenshots, file paths in images, and names in data tables. Supplementary files need the same care as the main text.
• Links. Links to a lab website, a personal repository, a preregistration or a dataset under your name all reveal who you are. Replace them with “[link withheld for review]”.
• Headers, footers, and comments. We rename the person who wrote each comment, but the comment text itself stays. Delete notes to co-authors before you upload.

A second pair of eyes

After you upload, we scan the anonymized text for things that point to you:

• the full names of the authors you entered;
• citation patterns with your surname;
• your e-mail address;
• your institution’s name.

If we find any, you’ll see a short warning before you submit, so you can fix it then. The check is a safety net, not a guarantee. It cannot recognize a description of your city or your lab.

Where the details go

Nothing you remove is lost. The submission form has a separate place for the manuscript with author details: that is where your names, affiliations, acknowledgments, funding, and ethics approval belong. After acceptance, everything returns to the published version.

A clean manuscript protects you as much as it protects the process. Reviewers judge the work, not the name on it. That is the point of double-blind review.