Referee Guide
Refereeing is very important. Discussions of who should be on
editorial boards and program committees often centers on the quality of
the refereeing of those being considered. Recommendations for
industrial and academic positions include comments about the quality of
reviews done by the applicant often as a comment on their scientific
and technical insights.
In addition, a referee is privileged to see
the quality of papers submitted to a venue and what is expected of a
high quality submission.
Listed here are resources on refereeing manuscripts.
How to review papers
How to review
Reviewing
a technical paper
General
academic/graduate student guide to everything - See Ian
Parberry's paper on reviewing in theoretical computer science; the
concepts are still the same.
Here is a brief summary of the
above. For more details please refer to documents on the links
above.
All reviews should apply the Golden Rule: "Do unto others that you
would have done unto you."
A basic review includes the following, starting in order of
presentation. This is based on what any author would like to see
in their review. This is placed under "Comments to the authors."
- A brief review of
what the paper is about
what it intends to show,
and whether or not it meets those goals
data used and experimental
results (very important!)
methods used and theoretical results
- Comments on the results presented from positive to negative. Both are
important. Give substantive comments on what has been the contribution
and what is lacking. What is new and what is not. More is better.
- Missing work should be pointed out in detail with specific references
when possible. Referees may want to phrase comments to not necessarily
suggest their own work.
- A brief summary of the recommendation with a justification of the
decision.
In general, authors like feedback. They want someone to read their
work. In giving feedback, more is better.
Often one sees, especially for conference submissions:
"Comments to committee"
This is usually not filled in unless there is something that the
referee does not wish to share with the authors such as conflicts of
interest, duplicate submissions, work already published, better off as
a poster, etc.
Reviews for journal papers have
an additional feature since those manuscripts can be revised.
Basically all journal reviews should include the above and call for one
of the following decisions or
variations thereof:
Accept
Revise and accept
Revise and resubmit
Reject
For more about reviewing, please see the guides listed above.