It is standard practice that identities of the reviewers are not made known to authors. The double-blind review process extends this principle so that reviewers do not know the identity of authors. This process requires authors to refrain from identifying themselves in their own paper. In some cases, no effort will stop a determined reviewer from finding out who has written a paper: what we are asking is that you take steps to hide this information from reviewers who are willing to work double blind.
In place of the usual author and address details, put “Author details suppressed” or leave the space blank. Do not simply cover the details with a black box, as the text can easily be extracted from under the box by dragging the cursor over it. Refrain from references to your university or campus by name. If you feel that a description of your university is in some way salient to the paper, use generalities. For example, write “A Large Metropolitan University (ALMU)” rather than “Auckland University of Technology (AUT)”.
Avoid citing a large number of your own papers. Cite the minimal number of those papers that will provide the reader with the necessary background, just as you would if those papers were written by someone else. Do not cite papers that have not yet been published.
Avoid expressions like “In earlier work we …” followed by a citation of a paper authored by yourself.
If your paper is one in a series, such as “Commonsense computing”, do not indicate this in the title or text of the paper submitted for review. You will have the opportunity to change the title if the paper is accepted.
If you have an acknowledgements section, please omit it for the blind submission.
In general, please apply good judgement when preparing your submission, to maintain the integrity of the double-blind process. If a submission is not anonymous, the authors might be invited to quickly revise and resubmit the paper, or the paper might simply be rejected.
Once you have a PDF copy of your paper, see how well it is blinded. Some PDF creation software includes in the document properties such details as author name, name of the document this one was created from, and so on. Many operating systems expose these meta-data properties during every-day interactions with the file system. A PDF document can hardly be called blind if its author’s name appears on the screen when the cursor hovers over it, or even if its author’s name is hidden in its properties. If your operating system does not show a document’s properties in a tool tip, please be especially careful to disguise these properties, as they will show in other systems. Please take document blinding seriously!