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[ Pervasive
2006, Call For Papers ]
Pervasive 2006 Anonymous Submission Policy
Papers submitted to Pervasive 2006 must be anonymized. By "anonymized", we mean that it shouldn't be readily apparent to a reviewer looking at your paper, and with access to an internet search engine, who you are and where you are from. This is to avoid bias (positive or negative) in the reviews of your submission.
We understand that "perfect anonymization" is often not possible - a sufficiently dedicated or lucky reviewer could often deduce who you are, either from your knowledge of the field, or your writing style, or a sufficiently advanced used of Google. You are not required to make your paper absolutely impossible for any arbitrarily motivated reviewer to "crack". However, you are required to make it difficult.
The anonymization process consists of several mandatory easy parts, and several non-mandatory slightly less easy parts. Any paper which does not comply with the mandatory parts will be returned to the authors, and not reviewed until revised.
Mandatory anonymization steps
- Author names, affiliations, or contact information must not be mentioned in the title area of the paper - this includes footnotes on the first page (e.g. "author's current contact information:...").
- The acknowledgements must be anonymized or removed. For example, "we thank our supervisor, Dr. Foo Bar, for all his help" lt s any reader know almost immediately where you are and what small set of people you belong to. Similarly, you must remove lines of the form "we thank whose funded this work.
Non-mandatory anonymization steps
There are many other, sometimes slightly less easy, steps which are recommended:
Experiment anonymization. If your paper contains subjects in an experiment, don't use phrases like "we recruited 14 Foo University computer science undergraduates". Instead, say things like "we recruited 14 computer science undergraduates from our local university". Similarly, instead of "we interviewed 17 tourists as they exited the Eiffel Tower", say "...as they exited a local tourist landmark".
Photo anonymization. Try not to include photographs which make it too obvious where the photo was taken. This is particularly true of campus landmarks, and floor plans of "aware homes".
Prior work anonymization. Do not include text like "in our previous work [Foo03] we showed that...." - this makes it rather obvious who you are. The rule of thumb is: cite your own prior work as if it had been done by somebody else. For example, "Foo [Foo03] showed that ....".
Prior work NON-anonymization
Don't cite yourself to support your own arguments. For example, if you are Dr. Foo, don't say "While our thesis that the world is flat is controversial, it is a thesis shared by the brilliant earlier work of Foo [Foo03]".
Reference anonymization. If you believe that a reference makes it too obvious who you are, anonymize it. For example, in a toolkit paper, if the URL to download the toolkit is hosted by the university of Foo, this makes it rather clear that you are from the university of Foo. Instead put the semantics of the reference, but not the syntax, for example in this case: "[13] anonymized download URL". Other examples are "[13] anonymized conference publication", "[13] anonymized tech report", etc.
Tech report anonymization Tech reports are an important special case of this, as they are non-archival. Consider the following text in a paper: "in this paper, fwe report the summarized conclusions of our study - the full details of the study are available at [13] ... [13] removed for anonymization". You run the risk that a reviewer will assume that reference [13] is a previous publication, and that therefore your summarized conclusions are not novel to the community. If reference [13] is a tech report, or something else non-archival, you run the risk of having your paper rejected inaccurately (yes, this has happened). Instead, do this "... [13] anonymized tech report".
More tech report anonymization
Reviewers will often type the name of your paper into Google, to make sure that your paper hasn't been already published. This means that if you have published the paper as a tech report with the same title, Google will detect it, and the reviewer will immediately know who you are. Therefore, if possible, we suggest that you move any such tech reports off-line until after the reviewing process is complete.
Currency anonymization
Remove references to a local currency. Text like "upon completion of the survey, volunteers were paid $20 (Canadian)" makes it obvious what country you are in. Instead, convert all monetary references to euro (€).
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