Double-Blind Peer Review Guidelines

Double-Blind Peer Review

Guidelines for ensuring author and reviewer anonymity during the review process.

JTUH journal uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.

To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. To help with this preparation, please ensure the following when submitting to JTUH:

✓ Submit the Title Page containing the Authors details and the Blinded Manuscript with no author details as 2 separate files.

Information to help prepare the Title Page

This should include the title, authors’ names and affiliations, and a complete address for the corresponding author, including telephone, ORCID, and e-mail address.

Information to help prepare the Blinded Manuscript

Besides the obvious need to remove names and affiliations under the title within the manuscript, there are other steps that need to be taken to ensure the manuscript is correctly prepared for double-blind peer review. To assist with this process, the key items that need to be observed are as follows:

  • Use the third person to refer to work the Authors have previously undertaken, e.g., replace any phrases like “as we have shown before” with “… has been shown before”.
  • Make sure figures do not contain any affiliation-related identifier.
  • Do not eliminate essential self-references or other references, but limit self-references only to papers that are relevant for those reviewing the submitted paper.
  • Remove references to funding sources.
  • Do not include acknowledgments.
  • Remove any identifying information, including author names, from file names and ensure document properties are also anonymized.

How to Ensure All Files are Anonymized

To ensure the integrity of anonymous peer review, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. 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.

The authors of the document must remove personal information from the file properties by taking the following steps:

Microsoft Word for Windows:

  1. Go to File
  2. Select Info
  3. Click on Check for Issues
  4. Click on Inspect Document
  5. In the Document Inspector dialog box, select the check boxes to choose the type of hidden content that you want inspecting.
  6. Click Remove All
  7. Click Close
  8. Save the document

Microsoft Word for MacOS:

  1. Go to Tools
  2. Click Protect Document
  3. Select Remove personal information for this file on save
  4. Click OK and save the file

PDF Documents:

  1. Go to File
  2. Select Properties
  3. Remove any name in the author field
  4. Click OK
  5. Save the document