Guidelines for Providing Good Reviews
General Guidelines
Peer review is at the heart of the scientific process, ensuring the quality, rigor, and impact of research disseminated to our community. As a reviewer, your role is not only to help identify strong papers but also to assist authors in improving their work through constructive and thoughtful feedback.
The goal of the review is to help authors improve their work, regardless of your final recommendation. Provide clear, specific, and actionable feedback—avoid vague statements like “the writing is unclear” or “many papers have done this before” without giving concrete examples or references. Identify both strengths and weaknesses, and articulate the significance of the paper’s contributions. Reviewing is not only about finding flaws but also about recognizing promising ideas and impactful research.
Remain objective and polite throughout your review. Avoid emotional or sarcastic remarks and never critique the authors personally. Treat the work as you would wish your own to be treated. It is acceptable to disagree with certain research directions or assumptions, but the review process is not the venue to dismiss entire subfields. Maintain a collegial and respectful tone—your feedback should help advance the quality of the research, not discourage its authors.
When judging a paper, balance its novelty, technical soundness, and potential impact. Common reasons for rejection include fundamental technical errors, misleading claims, or failure to acknowledge key prior work. Poor English or minor omissions in related work are generally not valid grounds for rejection unless they prevent you from evaluating the research. Conversely, strong empirical results, novel theoretical contributions, or insightful analyses in relevant areas are good reasons for acceptance.
Reviews must be submitted on time to ensure a fair process and sufficient discussion period. Manuscripts under review are confidential and must not be shared, discussed, or used for any purpose beyond evaluation. Reviewers must decline assignments where conflicts of interest exist (e.g., recent collaborations, institutional ties, personal relationships, or potential bias). Do not contact authors directly or disclose any part of the manuscript to others.
Use of Text Generation AI Tools
Reviewers must be aware of the IEEE policy on the use of AI-Generated text in manuscripts: “The use of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) in an article (including but not limited to text, figures, images, and code) shall be disclosed in the acknowledgments section of any article submitted to an IEEE publication. The AI system used shall be identified, and specific sections of the article that use AI-generated content shall be identified and accompanied by a brief explanation regarding the level at which the AI system was used to generate the content. The use of AI systems for editing and grammar enhancement is common practice and, as such, is generally outside the intent of the above policy. In this case, disclosure as noted above is recommended.”
Generative AI tools must not be used to read, summarize, or draft any part of your review, nor should manuscripts or review text be uploaded to AI or large language model platforms. Doing so constitutes a breach of confidentiality and professional ethics, and it may preclude you from reviewing in future editions of the conference.
Review Structure
The reviewer form has the following fields:
- Summary and Score: A short summary, no more than 250 characters, of what the paper is about. This field also includes the numerical score of your evaluation. CoG papers are scored between -3 (Strong Reject) to +3 (Strong Accept). Be sure to justify your overall score and recommendation in the rest of your review.
- Strengths and Contributions: List the main contributions of the paper, indicating their importance in terms of interest and novelty for the scientific community.
- Fixable Weaknesses: List the weaknesses of the paper that could be addressed in the camera ready version of the paper, as well as concrete, actionable suggestions for the authors to address them. These issues can include suggestions for improving clarity, presentation, references, or minor factual errors.
- Non-fixable Weaknesses: List weaknesses that are not fixable for the camera ready version of the paper, indicating how severe each weakness is for the acceptance of the paper. Major issues normally relate to core scientific or methodological flaws, missing critical references to prior work, or ethical concerns.
- Comments and Suggestions: Complete your review giving a general evaluation of other aspects of the paper, such as its formatting, writing quality, technical soundness and, if applicable, reproducibility. Include here other comments and suggestions that have not been mentioned before.
- Reviewer’s Confidence: You are also asked to indicate your confidence in the review you provided, which relates to not only your assessment of the quality of the paper but also your experience in the field. Reviewer’s confidence ranks from “none” to “expert”.
- Confidential Comments for the Program Committee: The review system allows confidential comments to the track chairs. Use this space to raise issues that should not be shared with authors—such as suspected plagiarism, duplicate submissions, ethical concerns, or conflicts of interest. Write these comments professionally, assuming they might eventually be shared if necessary.
- Best Paper Nomination: You can also indicate if you consider the paper should be nominated to receive a best paper award. This should be reserved for papers that are of an outstanding quality only.
Further Reading
Some resources to read more about writing good reviews: