Does this actually constitute a bibliographic reference?

[redbird]

This is in a paper I am proofreading, freelance. I am querying it:

"10. $name1, $name2, $name3, Vegas, $name4. Submitted to a conference for blind review. Details omitted to preserve anonymity."

The referencing sentence says "The implementation of the algorithm and the experimental platform are described in more detail in a previous work.¹⁰"

As I understand it, the purpose of a reference to the authors' previous work is to enable the reader to find the information. This completely fails at that. (I think it also fails to establish priority, but I may be mistaken there.)

Comments

[ellarien]

They may have been hoping that the earlier paper would be accepted by the time this one got to proof and they could fix it then, in which case querying would definitely be the right thing to do.

I've never come across the blind reviewing wrinkle, but the literature of my field is littered with references to "in preparation" or "submitted" papers, many of which eventually came out a year later than the cited date, or with different authors, or sometimes not at all. I am in favor of reducing the incidence of this kind of thing as much as possible.