Peer review models: single-blind, double-blind, and open

Before you can survive peer review, it helps to know which kind you are in, because the model shapes how you write and who you can suggest. There are three common ones.

In single-blind review, the reviewers know who you are but you do not know them. This is still the most common model in many fields, and its quiet risk is bias: a reviewer can be swayed, for or against, by your name, your institution, or your country. In double-blind review, neither side knows the other, which is meant to reduce that bias. It puts a real obligation on you, though. You have to anonymize the manuscript properly, stripping author names, obvious self-citations phrased as "our previous work", and identifying details, because a reviewer who can guess who you are has defeated the point and may hold the sloppiness against you.

Open review, increasingly common at some journals, means identities are known to all and sometimes the reviews are published alongside the paper. It tends to make reviews more constructive and less anonymously harsh, but it changes nothing about how you should write: clear, defensible, and honest about limitations. Check which model your target uses before you submit, and if it is double-blind, treat the anonymization as a real task, not an afterthought.