Double-blind peer review guideline

Himalayan Journal of Health Sciences (HJHS) Journal using double-blind peer review, where the identities of both reviewers and authors are concealed from each other throughout the review (the reviewer and the author are anonymous). To facilitate this, HJHS must ensure that identifying information such as authors' names or affiliations, Acknowledgement, Conflict of interest are removed from manuscripts before submission for review so that they do not reveal their identities to reviewers, either directly or indirectly.

Merits:

• Author anonymity prevents any reviewer bias, for example based on an author's country of origin or previous controversial work.
• Articles written by prestigious or renowned authors are considered on the basis of the content of their papers, rather than their reputation.
• Reviewers can often identify the author through their writing style, subject matter or self-citation.

Anonymised manuscript

HJHS removes any identifying information, such as authors' names or affiliations, from the manuscript before submission.

As well as removing names and affiliations under the title within the manuscript, other steps need to be taken to ensure the manuscript is correctly prepared for double-blind peer review. The key points to consider are:

• Use the third person to refer to work the authors has previously published.
• Make sure that figures and tables do not contain any reference to author affiliations
• Exclude acknowledgements and any references to funding sources.
• Use the title page, which is not sent to reviewers, to detail these and to declare any potential conflicts of interest to the Editor.
• Choose file names with care, and ensure that the file’s ‘Properties’ are also anonymised.
• We take care to ensure that we do not inadvertently upload identifying information within any of the files that will be shared with reviewers. All file types except Title Page, Cover Letter and Source Files are typically included in the version of our manuscript shared with reviewers.

Find the Peer review process chart below: