Double-Blind Review Guidelines

In order to guarantee the double-blind peer-review process for submissions to the Journal of Integrated Education, Society, and Technology (JIEST), it is the responsibility of authors and reviewers to make every effort to prevent their own identities from being known.

For authors, this must be done for all documents, images, and other files that are submitted as part of their submission. For reviewers, documents that are uploaded for review must also be properly blinded.

Therefore, all individuals involved in this process should perform the following steps for all files that are exchanged.

Most importantly, all authors of the document should replace their names in the text with “Author”, and the year should be used in citations, references, article titles, and other relevant parts of the manuscript.

Ensuring a Double-Blind Review

Authors should ensure the following:

• Remove any identifying information from the title page or manuscript title.

• Cite papers published by the author in the text as follows: (Author, 2026)

• Use the third person to refer to work the authors have previously undertaken. For example, replace phrases such as “as we have shown before” with “... has been shown before (Author, 2019).”

• Do not eliminate essential self-references or other references, but limit self-references only to papers that are relevant for those reviewing the submitted manuscript.

• For blinding in the reference list, use the following format: Author. (2026). Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.

• Remove any identifying information from footnotes.

• Make sure that figures and tables, including figure and table labels and captions, do not contain any affiliation-related identifiers.

• Remove references to funding sources.

• Do not include acknowledgments in the submitted manuscript.

• Remove any identifying information from file names.

• Ensure that document properties are also anonymized.

Blinding Document Properties

It is the responsibility of authors to ensure that document properties are anonymized. Ordinarily, documents can be inspected to see who created or modified the document. This information can and must be removed.

If the following steps do not work, authors must still find a way to blind their manuscript. Authors may contact the Journal of Integrated Education, Society, and Technology (JIEST) editorial team if they continue to experience difficulty with this process.

Newer Versions of Microsoft Word

Author identification should also be removed from the properties of the file. This can usually be done through the File menu in Microsoft Word by following these steps:

File

Info

Inspect Document / Check for Issues

Inspect

Remove All for Document Properties and Personal Information

Save

Older Versions of Microsoft Word

For some older versions of Microsoft Word, the above method may not work. If this is the case, authors may try the following steps:

File

Save As

Tools or Options on Mac

Security

Remove personal information from file properties on save

Save

Blinding PDF Document Properties

For PDF files, the authors’ names and identifying information should also be removed from the document properties. In Adobe Acrobat, this can usually be done through the main menu:

File > Document Properties

Authors should carefully check PDF files before submission to ensure that all identifying information has been removed.