Mensch und Computer (MuC) is adhering to a double-blind reviewing process. Therefore, materials provided by the authors must be anonymized according to the guidelines below to guarantee a fair review process. Submissions that do not comply with the guidelines will be desk rejected.
Anonymize the Identity of All Authors and Institutions
The MuC double-blind paper review process is based on reviewing where the identities of both the authors and reviewers are kept hidden. Therefore, authors are expected to remove author and institutional identities from the title and header areas of the paper, as noted in the submission instructions (Note: changing the text color, e.g., to white, of the author information is not sufficient). In addition, ensure that no description can reveal authors’ names or affiliations included in the submission (e.g., too detailed descriptions of where user studies were conducted). Authors should also remove any information in the acknowledgments section that reveals the authors or the institutions (e.g., specific supporting grant information). Also, please ensure that identifying information does not appear in the document’s meta-data (e.g., the ‘Authors’ field in your word processor’s ‘Save As’ dialog box). In addition, we require that the acknowledgments section be left blank as it could also quickly identify the authors or their institution.
Do Not Anonymize References
Further suppression of identity in the body of the paper is left to the authors’ discretion. We do expect that authors leave citations to their previous work unanonymized so that reviewers can ensure that all previous research has been taken into account by the authors. However, authors are required to cite their work in the third person, e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], … ” and use instead “As described by [10], …”
Videos
We encourage participants to upload videos of their submissions. However, names, affiliations, logos, or acknowledgments that disclose the authors’ identity must be removed from any video spot.
Supplementary Materials
Authors can upload supplementary materials, such as compilable source code, questionnaires, and executable applications, to their submissions. However, supplementary materials are not allowed to contain names, affiliations, logos, or acknowledgments that can be used to trace the authors’ identity.
If In Doubt: Contact the Respective Track Chairs
If you, for some particular reasons, have challenges with anonymously writing the paper, get in touch with the chairs of the track you are planning to submit to and ask for advice. To ensure the fairness of the reviewing process, MuC uses a review process where reviewers do not know the author’s identity, and authors do not know the identity of reviewers. Some authors have decided to publish their MuC submissions in public archives before or during the review process in the past few years. These public archives have surpassed in reach and publicity what used to happen with tech reports published in institutional repositories. The consequence is that well-informed external reviewers may know, without searching for it, the entire identity and institutional affiliation of the authors of a submission they are reviewing. While reviewers should not actively seek information about author identity, complete anonymization is complex. It can be made more so by publication and promoting work during the MuC review process. While publication in public archives (e.g., arXiv) is becoming standard across many fields, authors should be aware that unconscious biases can affect the nature of reviews when identities are known. The MuC organization committee does not discourage non-archival publication of work before or during the review process but recognizes that complete anonymization becomes more difficult.