Guidelines for Blinding Manuscripts for Review

As you know, it is a LARR policy to perform "double-blind" reviews- i.e., neither the name of the author(s) or referees be known to one another. This is essential to ensuring full and penetrating reviews and testing of the reported research.

Therefore, in preparing your electronic submission for external review, we ask you to spend a few minutes going through your manuscript and, where appropriate, undertake the following:

• omit your name and affiliation from the title page, as well as headers/footers
• delete any inadvertent self-identification, e.g., "as this author has described elsewhere (cite).." or "see (cite) for further discussion.."
• avoid multiple self-citation, or citation of author's unpublished materials (Ph.D dissertations, etc.)
• delete acknowledgments to colleagues or to institutional affiliations that could also make identification of authorship likely.
• delete any reference to previous presentations of the paper in earlier draft form (at conferences or public seminars, etc.)

We understand that it is never possible to conclusively remove everything that might lead to author identification, but we do require authors to make a good-faith effort to remove any possible evident sources of identification, thereby avoiding complaints from referees about obvious indicators of authorship.

Please be assured that if your paper is ultimately accepted for publication then you will have full opportunity to reinstate this deleted material and any other phrasing relating to your own work. Failure to make these pre-review amendments to your paper may result in significant delays in processing your manuscript.