[Sigmet-officers] Paper contest: number of reviewers, letter to reviewers

Thu Mar 17 08:20:43 EDT 2011

Jonathan, 

As I mentioned earlier, I am happy to review papers. I don't think it should be necessary to contact more than four external reviewers. Perhaps a couple of ASIST members from North America (maybe Drexel and Western Ontario) and a couple from Europe or Asia could be contacted. This will help to get them involved in the SIG. 

Dietmar  

----- Original Message -----

From: "Jonathan Levitt" <jonathan at levitt.net> 
To: sigmet-officers at asis.org 
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 6:59:11 AM 
Subject: [Sigmet-officers] Paper contest: number of reviewers,        letter to reviewers 

Dear all, 

Thanks for your latest suggestions.   We have at least four reviewers amongst the officers and we have agreed to a maximum of four papers for reviewer. To me the most urgent matters are for us to decide how many external reviewers to enlist and for Chaoqun to contact them. 

Unfortunately we need to have enlisted reviewers before the April 10 deadline, but we won’t know how many papers to review until after the April 10 deadline (I sought to address this problem in my March 11 email).   Nor do we know in advance what percentage of the people contacted will agree to review.   Has anyone any suggestions on how many external reviewers to enlist?   

Whilst we decide on how many external reviewers to enlist, I suggest that we prepare the letter to external reviewers.   Chaoqun, could you please draft the letter to external reviewers? 

Best regards, 

Jonathan. 

--- On Mon, 14/3/11, Judit Bar-Ilan <barilaj at mail.biu.ac.il> wrote: 

From: Judit Bar-Ilan <barilaj at mail.biu.ac.il> 
Subject: Re: [Sigmet-officers] Paper contest: appointment of reviewers 
To: sigmet-officers at asis.org 
Date: Monday, 14 March, 2011, 6:30 

Dear All, 

It is very easy to set up evaluation criteria in Easy Chair. Overall evaluation (on a scale of -3 to 3) and reviewer's confidence (on a scale of 0 to 4) are built in, and so are two textboxes, one for comments to the authors and one for comments to the other program committee members. Instead of a filling in the textbox it is possible to upload a file with the comments . Additional rating criteria can be added easily. For the ISSI conference these were: 
Significance of problem, Originality, Quality of methodology/treatment, Validity of claims and interpretation, Integration into prior art, Quality of writing and Overall assessment - all of these on a scale of 1 to 5. 

Obviously for the authors the free text narrative is much more important, but for deciding on the winner(s), scoring might be helpful, although I often find it difficult to assign scores to the evaluation criteria. 

For the paper contest we are supposed to give more detailed comments than for the papers submitted to ISSI conference (some of my co-reviewers for ISSI have not commented at all, or wrote 1-2 sentences), so I still think that seriously reviewing 6 papers per reviewer is too much. 

Regards, 
Judit 

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 11:52 PM, < sigmet-officers-request at asis.org > wrote: 

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Today's Topics: 

  1. Re: Paper contest: appointment of reviewers (Jonathan Levitt) 

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Message: 1 
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2011 13:52:48 -0800 (PST) 
From: Jonathan Levitt < jonathan at levitt.net > 
Subject: Re: [Sigmet-officers] Paper contest: appointment of reviewers 
To: sigmet-officers at mail.asis.org 
Message-ID: < 403991.8284.qm at web1206.biz.mail.gq1.yahoo.com > 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" 

Dear all, 
? 
Thanks Judit and Stasa for offering to review and for your interesting feedback.? 
? 
I suggested six reviews per reviewer, as: (a) ISSI asked me to review six submissions and (b) the fewer the number of papers per reviewer the less liable their normalised score.? I am happy for us to opt for a four peepers per reviewer if we have a two stage review process; in the second stage the most highly rated papers from the first stage are re-reviewed.? 
? 
Judit wrote ?What is the time frame for reviewing??? According to the call ?Authors are invited to submit manuscripts by midnight EST on Sunday, the 10th April 2011, to the following website ... We expect to have provided feedback on the submissions by the end of April 2011 and to have selected the winner and runner-up soon afterwards.? 
? 
Stasa wrote ?Is our reviewing process going to be open-ended (similar to Scientometrics) where one just provides a narrative, or are we going to add more structure (similar to JASIST) where one needs to ?grade? the paper on a number of criteria we collectively determined are the most important in addition to the narrative??? To me the review process and criteria need to be consistent with the call.? 
? 
Regarding the review process, according to the call ?The contest is designed, not only to recognize promising student research relating to the SIG, but also to provide feedback from specialists in the measurement of information production and use. Students will receive this feedback well before the deadline for submissions to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting? and ?There will be a winner, runner-up and, depending on the quantity of strong papers, a number of commended papers.? ?These extracts indicate that the SIG will (a) provide feedback on student research and (b) select a winner and runner-up. ?I suggest that in order to satisfy ?(a)? the reviewers will provide narrative feedback and in order to satisfy ?b? they provide an overall score for the paper that is then normalised.? Regarding the review criteria, according to the call ?The reviewers will particularly reward well-written, original research that has potential for publication in a 
 peer-reviewed journal or for presentation at a refereed conference?; this indicates that the review criteria should focus on (a) the quality of the writing and (b) the potential for publication of the research. 
? 
Stasa wrote ?I agree with Dietmar's suggestion that we have two reviewers per paper and add the third only if there are notable differences between the two reviewers.? ?I don?t understand how a third reviewer would help us satisfy the stated criteria of the call and it is likely to lengthen the process.? Perhaps someone will explain. 
? 
Stasa wrote ?Who/when is going to create a template for reviewing in case we want to go this route??? I think we need to agree on the criteria before we can create a template for reviewing.? I found my reviewer template for ISSI on the Easuchair system; I presume SIG/MET can arrange something similar.? Judit, do you know how the reviewer template was arranged for ISSI? 
? 
Bes regards, 
Jonathan. 

-- 
Judit Bar-Ilan 
Head of Department 
Department of Information Science 
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel 
Tel: 972-3-5318351 Fax: 972-3-7384027 
email: barilaj at mail.biu.ac.il 

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