To ensure the integrity of the double-blind peer review process for submissions to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers becoming known to each other.  This contribution to the fairness of peer review involves authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review process), making sure they have taken the following steps to anonymize texts, files, and hidden file properties. 

Steps to Anonymize Manuscripts and Files

STEP 1: Remove author names and affiliations from your manuscript, supplementary files, and datasets:

• Title page should have no names or affiliations.
• For in-text citations for your work, use (Author, Year) instead of (Jones, 2017). Remove revealing words such as “my study”.
• In the Bibliography, use (Author, Year), and leave out title, publisher, and any other information about your work.
• In the Funding section, remove names and affiliations.
• In the Acknowledgements section, remove anything that could identify authors or institutions, including words such as “colleagues.”
• Headers and footers are best removed.
• Footnotes should be checked for author names, affiliations, citations, etc., and telling phrases such as “my work on . . .” or revealing history.

STEP 2: Remove identifying information from the background properties of your documents.

Below are some guides to find the steps to anonymize your documents. If your hardware and software versions are not represented below, or if the directions addressing your hardware/software configuration do not seem to work, you could use the menu items on your Word or Acrobat menus that do match up with directions below and follow those steps. You may need to experiment. 

For the latest versions of Microsoft Word (Office 365, Word 2019):

Microsoft Word documents
PC	2019 on MAC	365 on MAC
File	File	Open document
Save As	Save As	Review
Tools	Security	Protect Document
Remove Personal Information from File Properties on Save	Remove Personal Information from File Properties on Save	Under Privacy, check the box for “Remove personal information from this file on Save”
Save	Save	Save

For Adobe Acrobat PDF files:

Adobe Acrobat PDF documents
PC Acrobat 2020, 2017, DC	MAC Acrobat 2020, 2017, DC	PC Acrobat 2011 & earlier
Open File	File	File
Tools	Properties	Properties
Redact	Description	Description
Remove Hidden Information	Go to the Author box and manually delete any text.	Go to the Author box and manually delete any text.
Look for anything appearing in the Results box and choose it.	Check the other fields under Description for revealing information.	Check the other fields under Description for revealing information.
Remove	If anything is found, delete it manually.	If anything is found, delete it manually.
Save	OK	OK

For earlier versions of Microsoft Word:

Microsoft Word 2016, 2013, 2010 on Windows:

• File
• Prepare for Sharing
• Check for Issues
• Inspect Document
• Uncheck all the boxes except “Document Properties and Personal Information.”
• Document Inspector
• If any information is found by the document inspector, hit Remove All.

Microsoft Word 2008 on Mac:

• File
• Properties
• Summary
• Remove all identifying information from all fields.
• Save

Microsoft Word 2007 on Windows:

• Office
• Prepare
• Properties
• Delete information in the document property fields in the main menu options.
• Save

Microsoft 2003 and earlier (Windows and Mac):

• File
• Save As
• Tools (Windows); Options (Mac)
• Security
• Remove Personal Information from File Properties on Save
• Save

When submitting a revised manuscript, or followup reviews, follow the same guidelines as in Steps 1 and 2.

Authors are responsible for providing the anonymized version of their manuscript.