Double-Blind Peer Review Guidelines

Also Please Read the Conflicts of interest

TJES  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 Tikrit Journal of Engineering Sciences (TJES): 

  • Submit the Title Page containing the Authors details and 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. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

    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 have removed personal information from the file properties by taking the following steps:
    Microsoft Word for Windows:
    Go to File
    Select Info
    Click on Check for Issues
    Click on Inspect Document
    In the Document Inspector dialog box, select the check boxes to choose the type of hidden content that you want inspecting.
    Click Remove All
    Click Close
    Save the document
    Microsoft Word for MacOS:
    Go to Tools
    Click Protect Document
    Select Remove personal information for this file on save
    Click OK and save the file
    PDF:
    Go to File
    Select Properties
    Remove any name in the author field
    Click OK
    Save the document