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Blinded review revisited.

In 1999 Judith Baggs, the editor of Research in Nursing & Health (RINAH), wrote an editorial on blinding in peer review (Baggs, 1999). After more than a decade of surveys on blinding, studies of the procedure, and other observations related to this issue, revisiting the topic appears in order. Definitions of terms and a bit of background on the blinding process is a useful place to start. Blinding refers to obscuring the identity of either (or both) the authors or the reviewers of a manuscript during the review process. I chose the term obscuring intentionally, rather than concealing identity or ensuring anonymity during the review process, as identities are sometimes revealed, either intentionally or by deduction. More is provided on this later. Blinding is the term universally used to avoid disclosing authors’ identities; both blinding and masking are terms used to refer to hiding reviewers’ identities. Here I use blinding to refer to attempts to hide either authors’ or reviewers’ identity. In single blinding, the identity of either the authors or reviewers is obscured; in double blinding both authors’ and reviewers’ identities are hidden. In open reviews one or both identities are revealed. Federal government reviews typically use reviewer blinding—revealing the identity of the panel members involved in group reviews but not individual reviewer responsibilities—but not author blinding. The double blind arrangement is most common in nursing journal reviews (Baggs, Broom, Dougherty, Freda, & Kearney, 2008). By contrast, many biomedical and other scientific journals use single blind procedures,masking only reviewers’ names (Baggs et al., 2008; Yankauer, 1991).