Guidelines for External Reviewers (non-TPC members)

IEEE INFOCOM 2008

April 13 - 19, 2008, Phoenix, AZ, USA

Questions? Please email TPC Co-Chairs at @cse.unl.edu.

Disclaimer: This document and the process described are subject to change without notice!
Please read the following if you have been assigned a paper to review by a TPC member for the INFOCOM 2008 conference. If you are a TPC member yourself, please read the Guidelines for TPC Members instead.

Summary of Action Items for Reviewers

  1. If you are a Designated Reviewer on EDAS, select topics of interest and update Conflicts of Interest by July 1, 2007 (Required)
  2. Accept or Decline the Paper Review Invitation (within 2 days of receipt).
  3. Review assigned paper(s) by September 8, 2007 (Required)
  4. Actively participate in Online TPC Discussion for the assigned paper(s) from September 9 - 22, 2007 (Required)

Updating your topics of interest and conflicts of interest information

You are requested to update your topics of interest for INFOCOM 2008 and your conflicts of interest information on EDAS after accepting the invitation to serve as a Designated Reviewer by following the instructions below. You can directly access the webpage to update your topics of interest for the INFOCOM 2008 conference by clicking on this link: http://www.edas.info/editInterest.php?c=5065. Alternately, you can update your topics of interest by logging into http://www.edas.info using your login email address and your EDAS password. Then click on "My TPCs" tab. You will see a list of conferences in which you serve as a TPC member. In the row for "INFOCOM 2008", please click on the cell in the "Interests (edit)" column. The link is usually set as "undefined", by default. In the subsequent screen, you will see that you are listed as "neutral" to all the topics for the conference. Please select at least eight (8) topics and click on the corresponding menu buttons in the "of interest" column. Similarly, please select as many topics which are not "of interest" to you. Please be sure to click on "Change topics of interest" button at the bottom of the page to update your topics of interest. In the list of topics for INFOCOM 2008, please note that the suffix SIM refers to both Simulation and Experimental work; MOD refers to Analytical modeling, Performance evaluation and Theory. It is critical that you update your topics of interest before the review assignment, in order to make sure that you have the best chance to receive papers which fall in your topics of interest.

You can update your conflicts of interest (COI) information by logging into http://www.edas.info using your login email address and your EDAS password. Then click on "My Profile" tab. On the first line, please click on the link listed as "conflicts of interest". In the subsequent screen, you will see a list of individuals with whom you have identified Conflicts-of-Interest. Please note that in EDAS, "Your initial list of conflicts-of-interest consists of individuals having the same email domain, the same name or those that have co-authored EDAS-registered papers with you. You can provide either the name of the organization, the name of an individual, or an email domain, or several of these." Please be sure to identify all individuals with whom you have conflicts of interest, paying particular attention to potential INFOCOM 2008 authors and TPC members. We greatly appreciate your efforts in updating this information in EDAS so that we may avoid unnecessary changes to review assignments later, a time-consuming process.

Please review the INFOCOM 2008 Definition of Conflict of Interest for determining the set of individuals you need to list on EDAS. People/institutions that you are in "conflict of interest" consist of the following:


High Review Quality

As an IEEE INFOCOM 2008 reviewer, your reviews and discussion participation are crucial in determining the ultimate quality of the conference.

A simple way to think about the reviewer duties is to think reciprocally about what you expect as an author of a paper from a peer in the community: a good, substantive review, a decision that is well-founded on the consensus of the reviews and good feedback. This is what we expect from reviewers. The element of randomness in the process cannot be eliminated, but we want to control it while biasing it towards merit and providing good feedback to authors. Providing high quality reviews is by far the most important contribution of a reviewer.

Accepting and Delegating Reviews - HOWTO

If you are not a TPC member, you may be assigned a regular review by the TPC lead reviewer or the TPC Co-chairs. Please note that you are not allowed to further delegate the reviews to anyone else. Also, please accept the review assignment within a week after receiving the notification email. Your review when completed will be sent to you with a copy to the TPC lead reviewer who assigned it to you.
  1. How do I accept all of my review assignments?

    When you log in to your EDAS page (http://edas.info) for INFOCOM 2008 (and click on My Reviews tab), you will be shown a list of all the papers you are handling for this conference. Please click on the link at the top of the table which states "You can also accept and decline reviews in a batch." You will be presented with a list of all your review assignments with the status Accepted column marked for each paper. If you have ensured that you do not have a conflict of interest with any of the authors for the papers in this list, please go ahead and click on the "Change" button at the bottom of the page.

  2. How do I accept my review assignments one by one?

    When you log in to your EDAS page (http://edas.info) for INFOCOM 2008 (and click on My Reviews tab), you will be shown a list of all the papers you are handling for this conference.

    To accept your regular review assignments: In the second column (marked Type of review), please click on the link marked "review" and then click on the "Accept review" button. Please do this for each of the papers for which you are the regular reviewer.

  3. How do I decline my review assignments?

    Please follow the instructions above to view the review assignments and instead of clicking on "Accept review" button, please click on the "Decline review" button. Please decline reviews only when there is a conflict of interest with the authors of the paper.

    We request that you ACCEPT all of your review assignments within a week after receiving the notification emails.

Participating in Online Discussions

To post an online discussion message for a paper that you are reviewing, please do the following (after the Regular Review deadline).
  1. Click on the Paper number (after clicking on My reviews tab upon EDAS login).
  2. You should be able to view the reviews and at the bottom of the page, there will be a Discussion section.
  3. Click on the Discuss bubble icon . You will see a text box in the subsequent screen. Please type in your comments about the paper. The discussion messages will be emailed to all the reviewers and Lead TPC member for that paper. You will also be able to view the discussion messages online.
As reviewer for a paper, you need to provide comments during the discussion phase that help the Lead TPC member responsible for the paper in preparing his/her TPC Review/Summary for the paper and classify the paper into one of 4 categories: Accept, Discuss, Needs Additional Review, Reject.