The naked article

Or author. Do you know how to strip a Word Document of personal data? I don't. Henry says this at Crooked Timber, where I seem to be the only person listed under Library Science, and I'm not even employed.

"Fun story in the Chronicle this week, about the perennial academic pastime of trying to figure out the identity of the anonymous referee who dinged your article. Word documents preserve a lot of metadata, including, very often, the author’s name – so that if you submit your review via a Word email attachment (as many journals ask you to these days), and the journal forwards the review unchanged to the article’s author, he or she can figure out who you are without having to play the usual guessing game. I’ve been aware of this for a couple of years (I carefully strip all data before sending reviews out, just in case) – but I suspect that many academics aren’t (some of them may not even realize that Word collates this data automatically)."

See the comments at the permalink for more. They end up debating different text editors and word processing. I didn't know anyone still used WordPerfect. Guess there's been a switch back.