Blinding a latex paper

Question

Many journals require submission of a blinded version of your paper. The blinded version usually removes:

• the list of authors
• any citations to the authors' work

How can I create a blinded version of my manuscript without doing this manually?

Answer 1

You could use the extract package to generate a separate LaTeX source file for the paper with the author list and acknowledgements automatically removed. I believe the versions package could be used to do this as well.

As for blinding the citations, I think the point is to refer to your own work in a neutral and unrevealing way. Here are some examples of correct and incorrect ways to cite your own work in a blinded manuscript:

Incorrect: "As I have argued elsewhere..."
Corrected: "As Jones (2001) has argued..."

Incorrect: "As I argue in (Jones 2001)."
Corrected: "As Jones (2001) argues."

Incorrect: "This argument is fleshed out in my (2001)." 
Corrected: "Jones (2001) makes this argument in more detail."

Answer 2

To remove the list of authors, you could use \renewcommand to "edit" your \maketitle in order to avoid listing article's authors. For author's citations, you could do the same.

For example.

\renewcommand{\maketitle}{\title}

Answer 3

One thing that is often overlooked in these cases, is that you do not really need to remove citations of your own work, as long as you refer to them in the third person. Instead of writing "As shown in our previous paper (Removed for review) ...", you should write "As shown by Smith et al. (Smith, Jones, and Adams, 2008)...".

This reads much better and saves you some of the trouble, while typically satisfying the submission rules for journals and conference. This way all you have to do is remove the list of authors, which is not hard to do by hand.

Answer 4

Hadley, you say it's necessary to remove all references to your own work. Is that really the case? At a certain career stage, the absence of a set of citations could very well give away the identity of the author!

I will betray my old-fart status by advising you to ignore those who advise using the active voice. Changing "Hadley (2009) showed that the sky is blue" to "The sky is blue (Hadley 2009)" is a simple solution to the problem of "I" (and "we" and "some of us" and "some of us, plus others") in technical writing. And it has an additional bonus: it focusses attention on the matter at hand, not on the people involved. You want the reader's internal eye to see that broad sweep of azure, not your avatar ;-)