General Review Process

The general review process covers the following submission types (grouped by submission date):

If you are reviewing for Papers (your invitation email from EasyChair will have your track assignment), please refer to the Paper Review Process and Paper Review Guidelines.

Reviewers provide high-quality reviews for submissions to provide authors with feedback so they may improve their work for presentation or future submission. Reviewers are expected to provide constructive, specific comments in reviews that support numeric indicators.

Each submission will receive at most 3 reviews.

All reviews are submitted through EasyChair. Reviewers are considered “Ordinary PC members” in EasyChair.

The Track Chairs for a given track will lead any discussion and will make recommendations of acceptance to the Program Chairs for each track.

As a reviewer, you will need to update your reviewer profile, (optionally) bid on papers you’re interested in reviewing, review, and discuss the submission with the track chairs.

Reviewer Timeline

The following dates describe the timeline for Reviewer work on SIGCSE 2020. Please consider your workload around these dates before accepting a Reviewer invitation.

Group 1 Timeline

Group 1 submissions are Panels, Special Sessions, and Workshops.

Group 1 Timeline Period	Start Date	End Date
Bidding	Saturday, August 31, 2019	Thursday, September 5, 2019
Review	Friday, September 6, 2019	Saturday, September 21, 2019
Discussion & Recommendations	Sunday, September 22, 2019	Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Group 2 Timeline

Group 2 submissions are ACM Student Research Competition, BoFs, Demos, Lightning talks, Nifty Assignments, and Posters.

Group 2 Timeline Period	Start Date	End Date
Bidding (Optional - see track specific information for details)	Saturday, October 19, 2019	Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Review	Saturday, October 19, 2019 OR Wednesday, October 23, 2019	Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Discussion & Recommendations	Thursday, November 7, 2019	Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Workload

Each reviewer will review between 3 and 5 submissions per Round. Reviewers have the option of reviewing in both Round 1 & Round 2. Most submissions are around 2 pages in length.

Reviewer Profile

When you receive your invitation to review for SIGCSE 2020, please take a few moments to update your profile and select 3-5 topics that you are most qualified for reviewing. To do so, select SIGCSE 2020 > My topics from the menu.

Please check at most 5 topics! More topics will make it harder for the EasyChair system to make a good set of matches.

Bid

If your track has a bidding period, please bid within the specified window. If you do not bid, we will use topics to assign submissions for review.

Reviewers will bid on submissions they are interested in reviewing after the submission deadline. Please bid for submissions where the title and abstract are in your area of expertise. Bidding will help with assigning submissions for review that you’re qualified and interested in reviewing!

Review

Before starting your review, you may be asked by the Track Chairs to declare conflicts with any submitting authors. Please do so in a timely manner so we can avoid conflicts during assignment.

As a reviewer, we ask that you carefully read each submission assigned to you and write a constructive review that concisely summarizes what you believe the submission to be about. When reviewing a submission, consider:

The strengths and weaknesses,
The contribution to an outstanding SIGCSE 2020 program and experience for attendees, and
How it brings new ideas or extends current ideas through replication to the field and practitioners and researchers of computer science education.

Track specific reviewer guidelines are available:

While your review text should clearly support your scores and recommendation, please do not include your preference for acceptance or rejection of a submission in the feedback to the authors. Instead, use the provided radio buttons to make a recommendation (the authors will not see this) based on your summary review and provide any details that refer to your recommendation directly in the confidential comments to the track chairs. As a reviewer, you will only see a small portion of the submissions and a submission that you recommend for acceptance may be rejected when considering the full set of submissions.

Discussion

The discussion and recommendation period provides the opportunity for track chairs to discuss reviews and feedback so they can provide the best recommendation for acceptance or rejection to the Program Chairs. We ask that reviewers engage in discussion when prompted by other reviewers or the track chairs by using the Comments feature of EasyChair. During this period you will be able to revise your review based on the discussion, but you are not required to do so.

Track chairs will make a final recommendation to the Program Chairs from your feedback.

Recalcitrant Reviewers

Reviewers who don’t submit reviews, have reviews with limited constructive feedback, or who submit inappropriate reviews will be removed from the reviewer list (as per SIGCSE policy). Recalcitrant reviewers will be informed of their removal from the reviewer list. Reviewers with repeated offenses (two within a three year period) will be removed from SIGCSE reviewing for three years.