Review Ethics

The paper publishing activity is very serious indeed: careers and reputations, as well as academic tenure decisions, often hinges on these publications. It means that we must be serious in the review processes.  The paper reviewer is playing a critical role in the review process and fulfilling an important obligation of a committee member, the care and thoroughness are the foundations for the quality of a good review provided with fairness in judgment, expertise in the field, and carefully crafted comments that help authors improve their papers and work. We totally can’t accept the sketchy comments which apparently seems that the paper didn't be read carefully.  Of course, the reviewers are allowed to refuse the review requests because of busyness or beyond research scopes. 


Be Pertinent and Helpful 

The paper review process has two separate and equally important goals. The first is to provide guidance to the authors, and the second is to provide editors and program committee with decisions of presentation type and publication.  After carefully reading, the reviewers are expected to provide the authors with clear, detailed, diplomatic, unbiased evaluation and even appropriate citations ( if authors are unaware of relevant work) but to avoid vague complaints.

Reviewers often begin with an overall assessment of the paper and further specify the strengths and weaknesses. In addition, the reviewers are expected to be acquainted with the conference topics and scopes, from this, reviewers take consider the originality, technical quality, research significance and pertinence. So the sufficient, substantial and well-founded comments are must for the decision of the 'Acceptance' or 'Rejection' not only scores.

 

Be Confidential

The contents, ideas of the papers cannot be used, referenced, or included in the works of yours, your colleagues and your students prior to publication. Until then, the information in the papers should be treated as confidential and must not be used for any potential purposes uncorrelated to the review process. Reviewers should never share the reviewed version of the paper, review findings, reviewer comments on papers, and deliberations on the review decisions with anyone other than the review committee and the editor tea.


Conflicts

A conflict of interest is defined as a situation in which the reviewer can be viewed as being able to benefit personally from the outcome of a review, or in which the reviewer is not able to remain objective for personal reasons. If the conflict of interest exists, then the reviewer should decline to review the paper. The specific conflicts may be related to following situations:

  • You are the author or co-author paper.

  • You worked in the same institute/affiliation.

  • You are the supervisor, adviser of one of the authors.

  • Your unpublished work is studying the same issue and used the same research approaches, or it probably cause cross-reviewing conflicts.

  • You recognize the authors or paper.

The assignments are trying to avoid most conflicts, but If you recognize that your reviewing will be related to the conflicts of rights, please turn down the paper and write back the refusing mail for the request.