Double blind review

Double-blind peer review.

Since Nature Nanotechnology launched in October 2006, our approach to peer review has been the same. We, like most science journals, use ‘single-blind’ peer review: that is, the referees of a paper know who the authors are but the authors don’t know who the referees are. We are now making a change to this process and will offer ‘doubleblind’ peer review — in which referees review a paper withou...

Moving to the Double-Blind Review System

Effectiveness of Anonymization in Double-Blind Review

Double-blind review relies on the authors’ ability and willingness to effectively anonymize their submissions. We explore anonymization effectiveness at ASE 2016, OOPSLA 2016, and PLDI 2016 by asking reviewers if they can guess author identities. We find that 74%–90% of reviews contain no correct guess and that reviewers who self-identify as experts on a paper’s topic are more likely to attempt...

Double-blind review in software engineering venues

The peer review process is central to the scientific method, the advancement and spread of research, as well as crucial for individual careers. However, the single-blind review mode currently used in most Software Engineering (SE) venues is susceptible to apparent and hidden biases, since reviewers know the identity of authors. We perform a study on the benefits and costs that are associated wi...

Double Blind Peer-Review in Games

Pre-publication peer-review forms the basis for how scholarly journals assess whether an article is suitable for publication. It is of paramount importance that the process is seen to be fair, robust and free of bias. One of the key methods for achieving these goals is blinding. Up until now, Games has used single blind peer-review, where the reviewer identities are not known to authors. This a...