I recently submitted a paper to the Australian Universities Quality Forum (see http://www.auqa.edu.au/auqf/) for a conference to be held here in Adelaide from the 7th -9th July. My paper was accepted, and I was informed (via the covering letter) that it had been subjected to a 'double-blind refereeing process'. Can anyone explain exactly what this process entails? Cheers, George
That should mean that they don't know who you are and you don't know who they are until your paper is evaluated.
In medicine, it typically means that neither the physician/experimenter nor the patient knows whether he/she is getting the "real" stuff or the placebo. Perhaps each reader will be given five papers to evaluate, not knowing that one is yours and four are purchased from Sheila Danzig's paper-writing service.
"Each referee conducts a careful review of the paper. Referees are not provided with the identity of any author. Referees provide the editors with detailed comments for consideration. These comments are forwarded to the authors after editorial review of the comments has been made. The authors are not provided with the identity of any referee." From: http://www.uccs.edu/~gklein/referee_process.html Hope this info helps, its the first link I came across while working on another topic. Regards,
As Kevin explained, it's a system where you & the reviewers don't know each other's identity. One of my professors at UMass is a reviewer for CJ journal, and reviewed a paper that was written by one of his classmates in grad school. He had no idea who wrote it until it was published.
