The trouble with double blind is that in many disciplines the number of people publishing is quite small, and then when you get into sub disciplines you get a v

The trouble with double blind is that in many disciplines the number of people publishing is quite small, and then when you get into sub disciplines you get a very small number. If you've shopped a paper around at conferences and workshops before submitting it, it can be fairly unlikely that a person qualified to review the manuscript doesn't know who wrote a paper or couldn't find out with a phone call. So effectively you get single blind (if that, it is often pretty obvious who your referee was if you know the writing style or the referee keeps citing papers by the same author) . However, even though it often doesn't work very well in practice, not doing it doesn't work with perfect certainty.