[Sigmet-officers] Paper contest: review criteria

Tue Mar 22 11:01:45 EDT 2011

Dear all,

Thanks very much Judit for letting us know that is very easy to set up evaluation criteria in Easy Chair and for your summary of the ISSI criteria.   I have two comments regarding the ISSI criteria that seem relevant to our criteria:
(a)       The reviewers were asked to do work that was not sent to those who submitted or used directly in the evaluation. Specifically the reviewers needed to grade Originality, Quality of methodology/treatment, Validity of claims and interpretation, Integration into prior art and Quality of writing.  These grades were not sent to me on my submissions and seem only indirectly relevant to decision as to whether to accept the paper.
(b)      Having three different grading scales (-3 to 3), (0 to 4) and (1 to 5) seems to add to the workload of the reviewer and seems more prone to error than using one grading scale.

To recap, 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.”

I suggest that reviewers provide:
(1)      A narrative on the quality of the writing and the potential for publication of the research and/or presentation at ASIST
(2)      A score on the quality of the writing.
(3)      A score on the potential for publication of the research and/or presentation at ASIST.
(4)      Possibly a score on the reviewer’s confidence.

One possibility for (2) and (3) is for the reviewers to rank the papers they receive.  For example when assessing quality of the writing reviewers allocate 5 for the highest ranked paper, 4 for the second highest ranked paper, down to 2 for the fourth highest ranked paper.  This way the scores would already be normalised and we could evaluate who goes to the next round, by for each paper: (a) for each of criteria (2) and (3) adding the reviewer rankings, (b) forming an overall evaluation from the totals on criteria (2) and (3) (e.g., the weighted sum) and (c) selecting the four papers with the heist overall ranking for the second stage review.

What do you think?

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)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

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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