Information for Associate Editors

1. The Time Line for ICRA 2012
2. Editorial Board Structure
3. Getting Started
4. Standard Review Process
5. Summary Rejection
6. Plagiarism
7. Award Candidates 
8. Editor Endorsement of AE reports
9. Conflict of Interests
10. Invited Sessions
11. Going Deeper 

The Time Line for ICRA 2012

Editorial Board Structure

The Conference Editorial Board is organized into a two-layer hierarchy. There are nine Editors, each of whom handles a distinct set of submitted papers. The keywords for ICRA 2012 are partitioned into nine groups, each of which is the responsibility of one Editor. When a paper is submitted to ICRA 2012 (via PaperPlaza), the author's choice of keywords determine to which Editor the paper is assigned. The paper will be assigned to an AE based on specific keyword choices of the AEs.

Getting Started

The review process for ICRA is managed using the PaperPlaza system. PaperPlaza provides a wide variety of tools to help AEs manage the review process. Reviewer assignments, review entry, AE reporting, and final decisions are all managed using PaperPlaza.

To access the system, go to the PaperPlaza page, click Start and then Log in. If you have forgotten your login information, you can retrieve it using the PIN management page.

It may be useful to spend a few minutes looking over the help pages, and in particular the Associate Editor's FAQ at the PaperPlaza site: PaperPlaza Help Page.

Standard Review Process

CEB has a strict review quality policy: every submitted paper must receive at least two substantial reviews. The Associate Editor should reject any sub-standard review he receives - e.g. too short or shallow. It is also the AE's responsibility to see that reviews are constructive and not diminishing the authors' efforts, even when they have to be negative or very negative.

Only one of the reviewers for each paper can be at the same institution as the AE for the paper. While it is not explicitly forbidden to ask other AEs to perform reviews, it is likely that they will decline, since they will be quite busy managing their own paper load.

Selecting appropriate reviewers is critical in order to have a quality and timely review process. Candidate reviewers may include leading researchers in the topic area, colleagues who are familiar with the topic, authors of  papers on the reference list, authors of relevant papers that have been previously presented at ICRA or in other high-profile journals and conferences.

A good mix of senior and junior reviewers is desirable  as they provide reviews from different perspectives and at different levels  of detail. A mix of reviewers from different geographical regions is also  desirable. A key idea to secure reviewers is to align the interest of  reviewers with ours: the paper is on a topic that they would really like  to see or to say something about. Having reviewers who are interested in  going over the manuscript would alleviate the need of repeated sending of  reminding messages, and avoid the need for AEs to write detailed comments  themselves to supplement shallow and not-to-the-point reviews

Review requests are handled by the PaperPlaza system. You begin by compiling your own list of reviewers. Follow the link Reviewers on your workspace page to do this. You can find details about this process in the PaperPlaza help pages: Compiling my reviewer list.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Paperplaza has a very nice feature to help you choose your reviewers, which however has a potential for misuse. The feature is that you can get a list of registered users whose keywords match the paper at hand, so that a reviewer can be recruited with a single click. The abuse of this feature is that the AE selects a reviewer whom the AE does not know, and whose expertise is not proven. It may thus happen that junior members of the community, or simply people that are associated to a keyword by chance or mistake, are asked a review in a field where they are not competent. This is clearly unacceptable, and ultimately counterproductive in terms of time - as the reviewer will probably decline, or anyway the Editors will discard the review.

Also, please note that you shuld not add new users to the system unless you are certain that they are not already registered. Multiple PINs for a single user can cause significant difficulty and confusion.

After you have compiled your list of reviewers, a review can be requested by following the Reviews link for a submission, then clicking the Request a review link. You may edit the standard form letter as you please. You must click Send to actually generate the e-mail invitation to the reviewer.

Once you have collected all reviews, you should prepare and submit your AE report. In your report, you should briefly summarize the reviews (please avoid copying excerpts of the reviews in your report, as authors will see the reviews integrally), state your own opinion on the paper, and note any special circumstances that may apply. For example, if two reviews are in serious conflict, the AE Report should resolve the conflict if possible. If neither review is substantive, the AE Report should give a solid rationale for the decision to be taken. If the reviews disagree, please do not merely give the average as your rating. As AE, your role is to settle the conflict. Starting in 2010, you will have new powerful tools to go deeper in the more difficult cases, which we estimate should be no more than 20% of your papers: please see instructions below. You can also find details about the report process in the PaperPlaza help pages: AE Report.

The text part of your report will be received by authors: in this text, please do not indicate the decision you recommend, but only the motivations for your recommendation. You will give a recommended score, which is not visible to authors. In some cases the Senior Program Committee may change the recommended decision, and we want to avoid to confuse the authors.

In recommending your score, please consider that papers with an "A" or "B" are likely accepts, while those with a "D" are likely rejects. Papers with a "C" are debatable: it would be useful if you can provide your opinion (in the confidential comments) whether the paper should be accepted or not (some AEs use C+ or C- as an informal coding). Notice that "U" is not "E", i.e. it is not the fifth grade in the technical score scale. Rather, "U" stands for "Unsuitable", and should be used as a flag to signal "problem" papers - e.g. out of scope, or suspect of partial plagiarism, or incomplete, etc.

Note that once you have submitted your AE report, no further reviews can be obtained or entered into the system. When you submit your report, all pending reviews are canceled automatically. If you made a mistake or anyway need to change the report, you must ask the Profile Editor to reopen the paper. If you decide to serve as a reviewer for a paper, you should invite yourself as a reviewer through the usual procedure; you should not enter your review via the Report function of PaperPlaza.

Summary Rejection

In certain special cases, an AE may recommend that a paper be rejected without sending the paper for review. In such cases, the AE writes a brief summary review giving the rationale for this decision, and gives the paper an Unsatisfactory rating. This is done via the usual AE Report mechanism (described above). The Editor assigned to the paper will then make the final determination as to whether the paper should be rejected without further review, or should go through the formal review process.

A paper should be rejected without review in any of the following cases:

• It clearly makes no novel contribution to the state of the art.
• It contains significant technical errors.
• The paper has been published previously (i.e., the paper is identical to, or nearly identical to previously published work by the same authors).
• The paper plagiarizes previously published research by other authors (pls. see below)

A paper should not be rejected without review merely because it makes only an incremental contribution, because it fails to report real-world experiments or because of poor writing quality. Further, a paper should not be summarily rejected because the AE feels its subject lies outside the scope of ICRA (this judgment is left for the Program Committee). If there is any doubt as to the decision, the paper should be sent for review.

No more that 10-15% of submitted papers will be rejected without review

Plagiarism

IEEE defines plagiarism as the reuse of someone else's prior ideas, processes, results, or words without explicitly acknowledging the original author and source. It is important for all IEEE authors to recognize that plagiarism in any form, at any level, is unacceptable and is considered a serious breach of professional conduct, with potentially severe ethical and legal consequences (source: Section "8.2 Publication Guidelines" of the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual, "Guidelines for Adjudicating Different Levels of Plagiarism." )

Plagiarism cases involve serious accusations, which should be dealt with carefully. IEEE has clear policies to follow.

When a plagiarism case is detected by a CEB reviewer, he/she should inform the Associate Editor who assigned the review, the Profile Editor, and the CEB Editor in Chief.  While informing the editorial chain and ultimately the CEB Editor in Chief is mandatory, confidentiality in this process is strongly recommended by IEEE.

It is important that the Reviewer is factual in his remarks, and that as ample and detailed evidence is provided as far as possible. For instance, this could be a copy of the supposedly plagiarized paper with the copied parts highlighted.  It should also be noticed that there exist freely available software that can detect plagiarism automatically: if this was used, details on the query and its outcomes could also be useful.

When a plagiarism case is detected, and Editors concur on its relevance, CEB stops the review process, and mark the paper for summary rejection. The Conference will then send a summary rejection message with a stern comment, referring authors to IEEE policies, and warning of possibly impending further actions (in serious cases of plagiarism, IEEE Central will contact the authors directly). The EiC submits the case, with all evidence available, to an ad-hoc Committee for follow-up actions at IEEE level - as plagiarism usually involve more than one publication, and are of big concern to the Society.