Blind review
The following explanation is prepared for ICCV. In ACPR2015, we would like to ask authors to read carefully the following and keep their papers anonymized.
Many authors misunderstand the concept of anonymizing for blind review. Blind review does not mean that one must remove citations to one’s own work—in fact it is often impossible to review a paper unless the previous citations are known and available.
Blind review means that you do not use the words “my” or “our” when citing previous work. That is all. (But see below for techreports)
Saying “this builds on the work of Lucy Smith [1]” does not say that you are Lucy Smith, it says that you are building on her work. If you are Smith and Jones, do not say “as we show in [7]”, say “as Smith and Jones show in [7]” and at the end of the paper, include reference 7 as you would any other cited work.
An example of a bad paper just asking to be rejected:
- An analysis of the frobnicatable foo filter.
- In this paper we present a performance analysis of our previous paper [1], and show it to be inferior to all previously known methods. Why the previous paper was accepted without this analysis is beyond me.
- [1] Removed for blind review
An example of an acceptable paper:
- An analysis of the frobnicatable foo filter.
- In this paper we present a performance analysis of the paper of Smith et al. [1], and show it to be inferior to all previously known methods. Why the previous paper was accepted without this analysis is beyond me. [1] Smith, L and Jones, C. “The frobnicatable foo filter, a fundamental contribution to human knowledge”. Nature 381(12), 1-213.
If you are making a submission to another conference at the same time, which covers similar or overlapping material, you may need to refer to that submission in order to explain the differences, just as you would if you had previously published related work. In such cases, include the anonymized parallel submission [?] as additional material and cite it as
- [1] Authors. “The frobnicatable foo filter”, F&G 2013 Submission ID 324, Supplied as additional material fg324.pdf.
Finally, you may feel you need to tell the reader that more details can be found elsewhere, and refer them to a technical report. For conference submissions, the paper must stand on its own, and not require the reviewer to go to a techreport
for further details. Thus, you may say in the body of the paper “further details may be found in [?]”. Then submit the techreport as additional material. Again, you may not assume the reviewers will read this material. Sometimes your paper is
about a problem which you tested using a tool which is widely known to be restricted to a single institution. For example, let’s say it’s 1969, you have solved a key problem on the Apollo lander, and you believe that the ICCV70 audience would
like to hear about your solution. The work is a development of your celebrated 1968 paper entitled “Zero-g frobnication: How being the only people in the world with access to the Apollo lander source code makes us a wow at parties”, by Zeus
et al.
You can handle this paper like any other. Don’t write “We show how to improve our previous work [Anonymous, 1968]. This time we tested the algorithm on a lunar lander [name of lander removed for blind review]”. That would be silly, and would
immediately identify the authors. Instead write the following:
- We describe a system for zero-g frobnication. This system is new because it handles the following cases: A, B. Previous systems [Zeus et al. 1968] didn’t handle case B properly. Ours handles it by including a foo term in the bar integral. …
- The proposed system was integrated with the Apollo lunar lander, and went all the way to the moon, don’t you know. It displayed the following behaviours which show how well we solved cases A and B: …
As you can see, the above text follows standard scientific convention, reads better than the first version, and does not explicitly name you as the authors. A reviewer might think it likely that the new paper was written by Zeus et al., but cannot make any decision based on that guess. He or she would have to be sure that no other authors could have been contracted to solve problem B.
FAQ: Are acknowledgements OK?
- No. Leave them for the final copy.
IAPR Ethical Requirements for Authors
The IAPR requires that all authors wishing to present a paper declare that the paper is substantially original; that is, the manuscript as a whole, or for the most part, is novel, has not been published in (or even submitted to) any journals and has not been presented at any other conferences. If previous versions of the manuscript were published or presented, appropriate references must be given and substantial justification for presentation of the current version must be presented.
The IAPR strictly prohibits any plagiarism; that is, the work of others must not be “borrowed” and presented as the authors’ own work, regardless of the size of the borrowed portion.
The IAPR frowns upon “no-show behavior” at IAPR-related conferences and workshops, meaning that an author registers to make a presentation but does not show up for it. If such behavior is unavoidable due to urgent and unexpected personal matters, the author is strongly urged to notify the event organizer of the situation as soon as possible. If prior notification is impossible, the organizer should be advised after the fact of the reason for the author’s absence.
The IAPR retains the rights to eliminate any papers in violation of these Requirements and to take appropriate action against individuals repeatedly violating these Requirements and assumes no responsibility for any resulting loss of reputation or opportunity of such individuals or for any inconvenience related to the future work of such individuals.