The Not-So-Blind Review

This is a post for all of my academic friends, since ya'll are pretty much the only people I know of who, on a frequent basis, are preparing proposals or articles for blind review:

So I recently discovered that just taking my name off of my articles I'm submitting to journals does not make the submission "blind." If you are sending a word document to a journal for review, the reviewer only has to click "properties" to see that you were the last person who saved it. I found this out when a certain jerkface wrote a really nasty (rather than, say, constructively critical) review of one of my articles and sent it to me -- complete with her name in the "properties" box in Word. I was able to look her up to see the kind of unoriginal, underwhelming work she does at Nowheresville University, thereby reassuring myself that my work may not be as bad as her inferiority complex. Anyway, I learned how to "wipe" Word of its properties and thought I should pass the instructions along to everyone I care about.

For Word 2008 for Mac, go to "Word," "Preferences," and select "Security." Select "remove personal information from this file on save." Hit ok. Now your personal properties are wiped from the document, thereby officially making it a blind submission. This website will show you instructions for other versions of Word to achieve the same goal.