Guidelines for Anonymity of Authorship for SenSys submissions

(We acknowledge the Sigmod community for the following guidelines on preparing a double-blind submission.)

To ensure anonymity of authorship, authors must prepare their manuscript as follows:

• Authors' names and affiliations must not appear on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
• Funding sources(s) must not be acknowledged on the title page or elsewhere in the paper.
• Omit all personal acknowledgements. Research group members or other colleagues or collaborators must not be acknowledged anywhere in the paper. There should also be no acknowledgement section in the paper.
• It is strongly suggested that the submitted file is named with the assigned submission number. For example, if assigned paper number is 352, then name your submitted file 352.pdf.
• Source file naming must also be done with care. For example, if your name is Jane Smith and you submit a PDF file generated from a .dvi file called Jane-Smith.dvi, one can infer your authorship by looking into the PDF file.

Despite the anonymity requirements, you should still include relevant prior published work of your own in the references - omitting them could potentially reveal your identity by negation. We define "prior published" work as any research paper that has been published and made available in the online or printed proceedings of a referred conference, refereed workshop or a journal prior to March 6, 2007. Such "prior published" work includes longer poster papers (4 pages or more). However, you should not cite a published demonstration paper of your own or any one page poster papers of your own even if it is in "prior published" work as defined above. You must use care in referring to your prior published work. For example, if you are Jane Smith, the following text gives away the authorship of the submitted paper:

    In our previous work [1], we presented two algorithms for .... In this paper, we build on that work by ...

    [1] Jane Smith, "A Simple Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACM SenSys 2003, pp. 1 - 10.
    [2] Jane Smith, "A More Complicated Algorithm for..," Proceedings of ACM SenSys 2005, pp. 34 - 44

The solution is to reference your prior published work in the third person (just as you would any other piece of work that is related to the submitted paper). This allows you to set the context for the submitted paper, while at the same time preserving anonymity:

    In previous work [1,2], algorithms were presented for ... In this paper, we build on that work by ...

   References
    [1] Jane Smith, "A Simple Algorithm for ...," Proceedings of ACM SenSys 2003, pp. 1 - 10.
    [2] Jane Smith, "A More Complicated Algorithm for..," Proceedings of ACM SenSys 2005, pp. 34 - 44

Referring to any work (including but not limited to your own work) that has been submitted elsewhere for review (and hence is as yet unpublished), or that has been accepted for publication at a referred conference, referred workshop, or a journal for which proceedings (printed or online) have been made available on or after March 6, 2007 requires a different protocol to ensure consistency with double-blind reviewing. In the body of your SenSys'07 submission, you may refer to such work in the third person as "The authors have also developed closely related techniques for localization [15], but...". In the above example, reference 15 would then read: [15] Details omitted due to double-blind reviewing. Note that you should mention neither the authors, nor the title or venue of publication, while describing "anonymous citations" like [15]. Be sure to place all anonymous citations after the list of your regular citations. Of course, this does not mean you are not responsible to provide the details of such anonymous citations. During the paper upload phase, the submission tool will ask you to disclose (for Program Committee Chair only) full details of each such anonymous citation. Furthermore, if requested by the Program Committee Chair, you may be required to submit the anonymous versions of these papers corresponding to such citations at short notice (7-10 days). The program committee chair will contact you during the review period if this becomes necessary.

Technical reports (or URLs for downloadable versions) of your own work should not be referenced. Self-references should also be limited to only papers that are very relevant and essential for the reviewing of the submitted paper. You should not publish the papers submitted to SenSys07 online (in your home page or elsewhere) before the acceptance notification date.

Common sense and careful writing can go a long way toward preserving anonymity without diminishing the quality or impact of a paper. The goal is to preserve anonymity while still allowing the reader to fully grasp the context (related past work, including your own) of the submitted paper. In past years this goal has been achieved successfully by hundreds of papers. If you need specific guidance, please contact one of the Program Co-Chairs.

It is the responsibility of authors to do their very best to preserve anonymity. Papers that do not follow the guidelines here, or otherwise potentially reveal the identity of the authors, are subject to immediate rejection.