Guide for anonymisation

Manuscripts submitted to Childhood in the Anthropocene must be anonymised. This means that the author’s name should be removed, and all metadata such as usernames and initials must be anonymised.

By adjusting the settings in Word (or another word processing programme), you can ensure that both your documents and any comments you make remain anonymous. You may either replace the author’s name with “X” or remove the author information entirely.

Anonymising an individual Word document involves both removing the document’s author information and ensuring that any comments in the text are anonymised.

Below are brief instructions on how to remove such information on PC and Mac.

PC

To display privacy options in Microsoft 365, Office 2016, or Office 2019 on Windows:

  1. Click File > Options.
  2. Click the Trust Centre tab > Trust Centre Settings > Privacy Options.

Document-specific settings in Word for Microsoft 365

  • Open the Word document and save a copy by clicking File > Save As, and enter a new name in the File name field.
  • In the copy of the original document, click File > Info.
  • Click Check for Issues, then select Inspect Document.
  • In the Document Inspector dialogue box, tick the boxes for the types of hidden content you want to inspect.
  • Click Inspect.
  • Review the inspection results in the Document Inspector dialogue box.
  • Next to each result type, click Remove All for the hidden content you wish to delete from the document.

Mac

To display privacy options in Microsoft 365 or Office 2016 for Mac:

  1. Open an Office application (e.g., Word or PowerPoint).
  2. Go to the application menu > Preferences, and select Privacy in the bottom row of options.
    This will open the Account Privacy Settings dialogue box, where you can adjust privacy options.

These settings apply to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on Mac.

Document-specific settings in Word for Mac

  1. Go to Review > Protect Document.
  2. Under Privacy, tick the box for Remove personal information from this file on save.