Ensuring Blind Review
To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review process, Dianoia makes every effort to anonymize the identities of our prospective authors from being known to our editorial board. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:
- The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text
- With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.
- With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.
Upon anonymizing the identities of our prospective authors, each Dianoia essay is reviewed by 3-4 Dianoia editors and given a rating on a scale from 1-10 in terms of its: originality, grammar, philosophical precision and enjoyability. Essays that receive a rank above 8 go on to the second round of review until twenty essays remain. At this point, the essays are then subjected to a third round of close reading--from both our own editors and external review board members--after which the Editor-in-Chief picks the final 5-7 essays for publication.
All reviewers for Dianoia are students at four year accredited institutions and are either enrolled in undergraduate or graduate studies.
