Double Blind FAQ

This year, ICPE uses a double blind review (DBR) process for the Research Track, the Emerging Research Track, and the Data Challenge Track. Submissions for other tracks, including the Artifact Track, are not impacted by this information.

DBR is intended to increase fairness and reduce implicit bias during reviewing by hiding the author identity from the reviewers, in addition to the usual hiding of the reviewer identity from the authors. DBR is intended to be a pragmatic measure that requires little additional effort from the authors and does not substantially restrict submissions. For DBR, authors are required to reasonably anonymise their PDF submissions and declare known conflicts of interest with PC members during submission. The most important requirements are:

  • The submitted PDF files do not contain the list of authors, or links to the home institutions, personal websites, or personal profiles on sites such as GitHub or GitLab that would identify the authors or their institutions.

  • The authors do not refer to their own previous work in a way that would disclose their identity (“In previous work [1], we have shown that …”).

  • The submitted PDF files do not contain links to external artifacts that would identify the authors or their institutions. Example instructions on how to anonymize external artifacts can be found here.

  • There are no acknowledgements of people or projects in the submitted PDF.

The general goal of the anonymization measures is not to make it impossible to guess author identities. The guiding principle is simply avoiding that reviewers become automatically aware of author identities merely by carefully reading the paper and reflecting on its content.

Double-blind reviewing does not preclude submitting work intended for ICPE to preprint services such as arXiv. However, we ask authors to use a sufficiently different title for their preprint submission than for the PDF submitted to ICPE.

After paper acceptance, authors will be given ample time and space to update their manuscript and revert the anonymization to their liking for the published (camera-ready) version (such as by adding acknowledgements, explicit mentions of company names, explicit mentions of previous work). Anonymization is needed only for the version that will be reviewed by the conference PC.

Fine print: Information on this page has evolved from similar instructions provided by ICSE. More discussion can be found for example here and here.