Aloha! We’ve made it to the last few weeks of 2016, and all of the traditional indicators of the winter season are upon us. Here in Honolulu, the humpback whales have returned after their long summer absence, and daytime highs have plummeted from 85°F (29°C) to a chilly 81°F (27°C). It is indeed a wintery wonderland.
For RF and microwave engineers the world over, one of the true indicators of the season is the upcoming paper submission deadline for the 2017 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS2017)! Don’t forget to submit your paper(s) by 5 December 2016 so that you can join us here in beautiful Hawaiʻi for IMS2017.
As you prepare your paper, it is important to keep in mind that IMS enforces a double-blind review policy for all submissions. This policy preserves the anonymity of both judges and authors during the reviewing process, which helps to eliminate any perceptions of bias or favoritism. Ensuring that all papers are treated equally and are judged solely on the merit of the presented work is a cornerstone of the IMS reviewing process, and as such the double-blind policy is strictly enforced.
Several guidelines have been provided by the IMS organizing committee to assist authors editing their manuscripts in preparation for a double-blind review. These guidelines can be read in full here (http://ims2017.org/images/files/instructions/IMS_2017/IMS2017-Double-Blind-Reviewing-Policy.pdf), but to summarize:
1. Eliminate all author names, contact information, and affiliations from the paper, including any logos or identifying marks from the figure.
2. Do not include acknowledgments or funding references
3. Use third-person pronouns to refer to your own work, and depersonalize the paper by using anonymous text as necessary
4. Remove citations to your patents and any unpublished works. Citations to your published works should remain if those works are relevant to the paper, but these should be cited using anonymous, third-person language.
This list is not exhaustive, but should get you on the right track as you prepare your paper for submission. Included in the guidelines linked above is also an example of what NOT to do, in the form of a tongue-in-cheek sample paper that is filled with double-blind rule violations. Hopefully this humorous paper, in conjunction with the full guidelines in the above link, will help all authors comply with the IMS double-blind review policy.
Good luck to all the authors out there hurriedly finishing up their papers, and don’t forget to Catch the Wave to IMS2017!
-Ryan C. Gough, IMS2017 Student Paper Competition Chair
