Guide

Double-blind peer review, explained

In double-blind peer review, the reviewers do not know who wrote the paper and the authors do not know who reviewed it. In single-blind review, reviewers see the authors' names but stay anonymous themselves. Hiding the authors is meant to make reviewers judge the paper rather than its authors' reputation, and controlled experiments show that reputation does sway reviewers who can see it.

Updated 26 October 2026

Single, double and triple blind

Review models differ in who knows whose identity. The names vary (Elsevier says “anonymized” where others say “blind”), but the models are the same.

Who knows whose identity during review
Criterion	Reviewer knows the author	Author knows the reviewer	Deciding editor knows the author
Single-blind	Yes	No	Yes
Double-blind	No	No	Yes
Triple-blind	No	No	No
Open identities	Yes	Yes	Yes

What the evidence on bias shows

Two controlled experiments compared reviewers who could see the authors with reviewers who could not.

WSDM 2017. At the ACM WSDM computer science conference, each paper had two reviewers who saw the authors and two who did not. Reviewers who saw the authors bid on 22% fewer papers, favoured papers from top institutions, and were more likely to recommend accepting papers from famous authors (odds multiplier 1.63), top universities (1.58) and top companies (2.10). The multiplier for female authors, 0.78, was not statistically significant.
A Nobel laureate's name. In 2022, a finance paper co-written by Nobel laureate Vernon Smith and a little-known early-career researcher was sent to 3,300 reviewers, of whom 534 accepted. Shown only the laureate's name, around 23% recommended rejection; with no author name, almost 50%; shown only the junior author's name, more than 65%. Same paper, three verdicts.

Each is a single experiment in one field, so together they show that the bias exists rather than how large it is everywhere.

Its limits: reviewers sometimes guess

Hiding names does not hide everything. A reviewer can recognise a lab's methods, a dataset, or a citation to the authors' own earlier work. When reviewers at three 2016 computer science conferences (ASE, OOPSLA and PLDI) were asked to guess, 74% to 90% of reviews contained no correct guess. Anonymization is imperfect, but most of the time it holds.

It also depends on the authors: a manuscript that names them in its acknowledgements, file metadata or self-citations (“as we showed in…”) undoes it.

Double-blind and published reviews are compatible

Anonymity is about identities, not about whether reviews are public. A review can be written double-blind and published with the paper afterwards, with the reviewer's name still withheld. That is the model Unjournal uses: readers see what was checked, without learning who checked it. Open peer review covers the models that publish names as well.

How it works on Unjournal

Reviewers never see who wrote the paper, and you never see who they are.
You approve an anonymized shortlist of the researchers best placed to judge your paper; nothing reaches a reviewer without your approval.
Each reviewer gets a focused request anchored on the passages that matter and comments directly on the paper.
When you publish, the reviews appear alongside the paper on the Unjournal preprint journal, and the reviewers stay anonymous.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between single-blind and double-blind peer review?

In single-blind review the reviewers know who the authors are but the authors do not know the reviewers. In double-blind review neither side knows the other's identity.

Does double-blind peer review reduce bias?

Controlled experiments show that reviewers who can see author names favour famous authors and prestigious institutions, so hiding names removes that lever. It does not remove every bias: reviewers sometimes guess who the authors are, though in one study of three conferences 74% to 90% of reviews contained no correct guess.

What is triple-blind peer review?

Triple-blind review hides the authors' and reviewers' identities from each other and also from the editor who makes the decision.

How do I prepare a manuscript for double-blind review?

Remove author names and affiliations from the title page, acknowledgements and funding statements, check the file's metadata, and cite your own earlier work in the third person rather than as “our previous study”.

Is Unjournal review double-blind?

Yes, anonymous both ways: reviewers never see who wrote the paper and the author never sees who they are. The reviews are published with the paper, and the reviewers stay anonymous.