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Case in Hand:

I submitted a paper to a Q1 Conference (I'm in CS, so conferences have a strict baseline for us) and recently got it back for a rebuttal that I need to submit in 6 days.

The issue is R2 cited my own poster published last December in the review saying "The evaluation section is very similar to this". This should exactly be the case, because this is the Full Paper for that poster, which I submitted to this conference.

Before submitting I had inquired with the conference chair if a prior poster abstract submission (2 pages including references) would be a problem when submitting the full paper, and got no objection from them (in writing in email).

So I am moderately confident I can at least alleviate R2's concern about the reason for the "similarity", but I am at a loss for how to do that **without breaking the double-blind **.

Does anyone have any idea about what should be done in a similar situation?

PS: The submission system had no way for me to disclose a prior poster in it. And of course I did not cite my own poster for the exact same full paper.

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It is the conference committee that has the responsibility for maintaining "double blind" rules, not yours. Your rebuttal is to the editor, not directly to the reviewers.

Say what you must, cordially of course.

But, you could have cited your own work in a double blind review situation. That isn't an issue. If the rules are really enforced such a citation is just to a named author for a specific work, not "this author". In such cases, for review, cite your work by name of author(s) just as you would the work of another.

The editor of a journal and the conference committee aren't "blind" to submitters. Only the reviewers are and the committee can limit what the reviewer sees from your rebuttal.

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    I do not think this fully answers the question. The previous cannot just be cited. The paper is the expansion of the poster, not just citing it. I guess the author needs to break the double blind and/or ask the chairs what to do. Typically, in double-blind, reviewers are discouraged from googling the author's work (to not find arXiv papers breaking the d-b), so the reviewers may be partly to blame here. If the chairs are not helpful, maybe an apologetic "I am afraid the reviewer found the poster of which the present paper is an expansion, as permitted by submission guidelines.", sth like th
    – Captain Emacs
    Commented Aug 19, 2023 at 21:33
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    @CaptainEmacs A paper is not a poster. This may be borderline salami-slicing, but the poster is a distinct "publication", which is expanded into a the paper being submitted now. It should be possible to cite the poster. In mathematics, there is a tradition of authors announcing results (one or two paragraphs), and publishing the full paper later. Both the original announcement and the final paper can be cited separately. Unless CS is very different from the rest of academia, I don't see why something similar doesn't apply here, too.
    – Xander Henderson
    Commented Aug 19, 2023 at 23:19
  • @XanderHenderson It's not exactly salami slicing. It is quite accepted to have preliminary work published as poster, and then expanded to journal level. This is, at the end not really 2 publications, but at the end of the process, just one; people would refer only to the second, more mature one. I guess this practice is more common in CS with faster development and turnaround times.
    – Captain Emacs
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 19:17
  • @CaptainEmacs Yeah, it sounds like CS is very different from the rest of academia. In math, the poster would be one "publication" (i.e. it would get its own citation), and the paper which is a result of the poster, or a more finalized version of the poster, would be a second publication.
    – Xander Henderson
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 19:26

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