[jamessb]

Sensible anonymisation policies prevent people from referring to "our previous work" in submissions - e.g., the policy for CHI [1] states:

> We do expect that authors leave citations to their previous work unanonymized so that reviewers can ensure that all previous research has been taken into account by the authors. However, authors are required to cite their own work in the third person, e.g., avoid “As described in our previous work [10], … ” and use instead “As described by [10], …”

However, it is true that things like choice of research questions, approach, and equipment used can be quite suggestive of the authors' identity.

[1]: https://chi2020.acm.org/authors/papers/chi-anonymisation-pol...