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Comment by sanotehu | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind explaining the double-blind review in CS conferences? I'm a doctor by trade so am well acquainted with the way peer-review works but I've never heard of conferences being reviewed, either before-the-fact as an acceptance criterion or after-the-fact as a kind of rating.

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CS conference papers go through the same process as a journal would in your field, but typically with only 1-2 revision cycles. The acceptance rates are much lower than journal because there are fewer retries, so people generally submit ready-to-publish work to conferences. Many researchers don't publish in journals at all, or just do it as a token activity.

In the context of peer review (at least in CS), "single-blind" means that the authors don't know who the reviewers are, and "double-blind" means that additionally, the reviewers don't know who the authors are.

Conferences with double-blind review require papers to be anonymized, avoiding any mentions of author names or affiliations in the PDF submitted for review, as well as other obvious elements that would reveal the identity of the authors (e.g. "As we showed in a previous paper [4], ...")

"..."single-blind" means that the authors don't know who the reviewers are..."

Technically, it means that the authors would have to do some minor text analysis to find out who the reviewers are; the only difficulty is that the comments can be a bit thin, but you've got plenty of known samples to measure against.

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