A Good Review

Any strong review should contain the following sections: 1. Summary: the thesis of the paper under review is the papers quintessence, which should be certainly captured by the reviewer. Otherwise the reviewer has not understood the paper. A sentence or two (not more than four) should adorn the thesis of the paper and all together they become the summary of a paper. 2. Weak points: in this part and if reviewers responsibility is to reveal that the paper under review must not be published, the reviewer should justify its decision based on sound reasoning when weak points will be pointed out. Of course, no paper is perfect, so if reviewer decides that the paper should be published, s/he can highlight weak points to be addressed in future work by the authors. 3. Strong points: again there are two scenarios, one is that if the reviewers decision is in favor of the paper, and hence the reviewer should back up his verdict by elaborating on and decorating strong points of the paper. However, if final words are not to publish the paper, the matter of respect suggests that the reviewer kindly points out the strength of the paper with words to guide the authors for further improving the paper. 4. Questions: if the authors have been given a chance of rebuttal, in this section, reviewer can ask questions about the parts where he did not fully grasp the concepts. Of course, if some parts of the paper are off the track of the target conference, the reviewer has a chance of pointing them out here. 5. Comments: Scholars have respect for each other. They are also willing to provide their colleagues with thoughts that can in general improve research. Here is the place and opportunity for such act. In my opinion, reviewers should freely offer their positive suggestions to the authors. Suggestions that encourage and to some extent guide the authors to follow up the work. In any of the above sections, the reviewer needs to be articulate and to the point. Unfortunately, sometimes politics (even in academia) make the main goal of research elude us, and there is not much we can do about it. It is when your work will not be accepted for publication although the reviewer has nothing concrete against it. He does not like you and hence your work. Double blind review conferences meant to solve such problems, albeit successful to some extent.

Direct your comments and suggestions to Mehran Rezaei: mehran@acm.org.