Double-blind review with four references in a row?

Question

I've read a lot of answers here about double-blind reviews and thesis or single articles.

My problem comes from having four self-references in my article. I feel that if I include them all, could be very easy to infer that this is the fifth one (It's a 4-year granted project and I have been collaborating in a number of software components inside a bigger architecture, now it's the time to use them all to interact with other applications) . But if I ommit some of them, I could end being accused of self-plagiarism. The other articles have been published in the proceedings of conferences that didn't require double-blind reviews, this is the first submission I make to a conference that asks for it (Maybe because of being CORE A) Also not worthless to mention that I'm going to send it as a short paper, so actually it'd be very helpful to cite rather than to repeat past texts.

What should I do?

Answer 1

Describe those works in the third person but do not anonymise the references. For example, "Doe et al in their work show that..." Even if you are Doe. Very often I review papers (in CS/HCI) whose authors have blanked their past work that they reference. This makes it very hard to judge the quality of the new contribution if compared to the previous work, and it is bad practice in my opinion.

The side effect is that it is conceivable that they could guess who you are, but it is less of a problem than not being able to judge the quality of the contribution, IMHO. If the venue allows it, after acceptance you can change your "Doe et al" with "In our previous work.."