Page 154 - English for Writing Research Papers

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7.10 Ensure that readers understand what you mean when

you write the authors
Another problem arises when in consecutive sentences you describe your results in
relation to the results of two or more authors. In S1, it is not clear who these authors
refers to.

S1. *Our results agree with those on bilingual teenagers in Scandinavian countries by
Magnusson et al. (2011), and those from the Middle East by Hussein et al. (2009), who
used middle school and high school pupils; these authors ruled out the existence of…
These authors could refer to both Magnusson’s group and Hussein’s group, or just
one or the other. If there is a possibility of ambiguity it is always best to specify the
author again. In any case, S1 is very long and would be better written as S2.
S2. Our results agree with those obtained on bilingual children in Scandinavian countries by
Magnusson et al. (2011). They also agree with studies in the Middle East by Hussein
et al. (2009), who used middle school and high school pupils. Hussein et al. ruled out the
existence of…

7.11 What to do if your paper is subject to a 'blind' review

Before you submit your paper, find out if the paper will be subjected to a blind

review or not. A blind review is when the referees do not know the author of the
paper that they are reading. This means that the editor will delete your names and
institutes from the top of the manuscript. The idea is to enable referees to be totally
subjective in their recommendations.

Consequently, you should avoid giving any clues as to who you are.

So if your name is John Doe, in your draft version you should not write a sentence
such as:

S1. In a previous paper (Doe et al, 2017) we demonstrated that …

S1 would make it clear to the referees that you are John Doe and thus defeat the
objective of a blind review. Instead you could write:

S2. Doe et al (2017) demonstrated that …

However, when the paper has been accepted for publication, you should change all
such sentences to the personal form (S1) so that you enable the reader to understand
that when you write Doe et al you are in fact referring to your own work.