The skilled adversarial reviewer can find reasons to reject any paper without even reading it. This is considered truly blind reviewing. [
Cormode, G.]
Many conferences request that submitted papers be anonymized by removing the authors’ names, tweaking the references, removing mentions of the authors’ organization in the paper, etc. The goal of the double-blind review process is to reduce the bias (positive or negative) that reviewers might have based on their knowledge of who wrote the paper. SIGIR, for example, included the following on their submission page for the 2013 conference:
Anonymity. SIGIR reviewing is double-blind. Therefore, please anonymize your submission. This means that all submissions must contain no information identifying the author(s) or their organization(s): Do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, anonymize citations to and mentions of your own prior work that are directly related to your present work, and do not include funding or other acknowledgments. For example, if you are using your product that is well known in the domain and you think it will be easy for an expert to identify you or your company, we recommend that you use another name for your product (e.g., MyProduct_ABC, MyCompany_ABC). If your paper is accepted, then you will replace the original name in the final version for the proceedings.
Papers that do not follow the above Style, Language, Anonymity instructions will be rejected without review. [emphasis mine]
And, apparently, in some cases, they followed through on this policy. In my opinion, this is too harsh.
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