Ensuring Anonymous Peer Review

To ensure the integrity of the anonymous 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. Therefore, authors, editors, and reviewers must follow steps to check the text and file properties for identifying information:

  1. Author identification should also be removed from the file's properties with Microsoft Office documents.

For Microsoft 2003 and previous versions and Macintosh versions of Word:

  • Under the File menu select: Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.

For MacIntosh Word 2008 (and future versions)

  1. Under the File menu, select "Properties."
  2. Under the "Summary" tab, remove all the identifying information from all fields.
  3. Save the File.

For Microsoft 2007 (Windows):

  1. Click on the office button in the upper-left-hand corner of the office application
  2. Select "Prepare" from the menu options.
  3. Select "Properties" for the "Prepare" menu options.
  4. Delete all the information in the document property fields under the main menu options.
  5. Save the document and close the document property field section.

For Microsoft 2010 (Windows):

  1. Under the File menu, select "Prepare for sharing."
  2. Click on the "Check for issues" icon.
  3. Click on the "inspect document" icon.
  4. Uncheck all of the checkboxes except "Document Properties and Personal information."
  5. Run the document inspector, which will then search for the document properties and indicate if any document property fields contain any information.
  6. Suppose the document inspector finds that some of the document properties contain information. In that case, 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 2016 (Windows):

  1. Manually remove the author's name from headers if they haven't done so.
  2. Click "File" and then "Info" on the left side.
  3. Click "Check for Issues" and "Inspect Document" on the drop-down menu.
  4. Ensure "Document Properties and Personal Information" is checked before clicking "Inspect."
  5. When "Document Properties and Personal Information" comes back with an exclamation mark, click "Remove All." You can click "Reinspect" to double-check that it worked.
  6. Save the document.