(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:
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submitted elsewhere for review (and hence is as yet unpublished), or that has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.