Ensuring a Blind Peer Review

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this 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 with regard to the text and the file properties:

1. The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.

2. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file.

   For Microsoft Word on Windows:

   1. Under the File menu select "Info."
   2. Click the "Check for issues" icon, then "Inspect Document."
   3. Uncheck all of the checkboxes except "Document Properties and Personal information".
   4. Run the document inspector, which will then do a search of the document properties and indicated if any document property fields contain any information.
   5. 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 Microsoft Word on Mac

   1. Under the Tools menu select "Protect Document."
   2. On the pop-up window that appears, check the box next to “Remove personal information from this file on save.”
   3. Save the File.

3. For PDF files:

   • With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.