Blind Review of Manuscripts Received As Word Documents

East Carolina University Department of Psychology

User Identity in Word Documents

You think your manuscript is going to be blindly reviewed. You are asked to submit it as a Word document. That Word document is then emailed to the reviewers. Unless you have taken steps to conceal your identity, it will be revealed to the reviewers in the properties of the Word document file. All the reviewer has to do is to click File, Properties, and the following window is displayed:

Of course, you will have the same problem when you are reviewing a manuscript and the review is supposed to be blind. You send off your highly critical review of a manuscript in a Word document and it is forwarded to the authors, who discover your identity and then conspire to get even. So, you decide to change the author’s name in the properties box. You simply overwrite it with some other name. Now when others click File, Properties they see something like this: You think your identity is now concealed. Not so fast. The recipient of this document just clicks the “Statistics” tab and sees this:

Oh my. The editor can open the document, make any minor change, and resave it to conceal your identity, but that action may well not be taken.

What can you do? Well, although cumbersome, there is one thing you can do – change your identity within Word. Click Tools, Options, User Identity and change your identity: Of course, you will then need to remember to change your identity back to your correct identity after you finish working with the file for which you wish your true identity to be concealed. Return to Wuensch's Word Help Page