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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> The challenge with double blind is anonymizing content that often relies on cited prior work.

You're the second person to bring this up, but I'm not sure why it's a problem. Just don't say "based on my own previous work" and instead say "based on previous work". I.e. cite yourself the same way that you'd cite anyone else's work.

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But as a (final) reader I would weigh supporting evidence by the same author/author group/lab far weaker than supporting evidence by unrelated sources! That being said: One could get around that by replacing the citation style for the review version only. There are typically changes anyways and the given amount of fights that I had with editors for pure typesetting or "improvements of english" that one would actually be helpful to do.

As the final reader you're expected to do some due diligence and at the bare minimum read the reference list. Once you do, you can easily see which papers are self citations and which ones are not. If you're not doing this due diligence you probably don't care too much about this paper anyway and there is no harm done if you think a reference is not a self citation when it actually is.

That doesn't help if references are given as First Author et al. or even as [number] and while I agree in principle it simply doesn't happen in practice.

But then it just weakens your statement to make it worse. And I'm not even sure if it makes a difference for what the article talks about. Because the reviewer needs to actively go looking. And at least to my understanding these effects are not due to people going out of their way to misjudge people, but rather that it's an effect of subconscious prejudices. And for the latter breaking the obvious connection is probably enough.

If the previous work is a single paper, you are right. However it consists usually in multiple papers, it becomes then more complicated to hide that all these papers share one (or more) author(s).

Speaking from personal experience, it can be really difficult hard to write a paper that anonymizes yourself...especially if you are known for a particular approach to a specialized problem. You actually have to begin excluding cites, turning them into placeholders (withheld due to anonymous review requirements), rather than just speaking about the work as if someone else did it.

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