Paper Reviewing Guidelines for T-ASE
(Ken Goldberg, June 2012)
We respect your expertise and realize that your time is valuable. Prompt and thorough peer review is essential to advancing research. As a researcher and author, we rely on you to volunteer your time periodically to carefully review submitted papers.
When you receive a request to review a paper, please download the paper as soon as possible to check that it is within your expertise and confirm that you can commit to completing the review within 30 days. If the request is to re-review a paper you reviewed previously, the authors will provide detailed responses to all your earlier suggestions, so it should not require much time to confirm that your suggestions were acted upon.
Please make sure that you don't have a conflict of interest (if you are on the same campus with a co-author or have written a paper with a co-author in the past 5 years). If so notify the assigning editor immediately, and suggest one or two other qualified reviewers.
When writing reviews, please put yourself into the position of the authors. Like them, you expect detailed and constructive feedback. If the paper is weak, not appropriate for our journal, or needs to be revised for publication, please explain the reasons why (see below) and convey specifically how it can be improved.
The key part of your review is the Advice to Authors, which should be at least 200 words. This is a body of text that should include these 5 parts:
1) A summary of the paper's main contributions in your own words.
2) Your evaluation of how well the paper reviews Related Work, based on your knowledge of the field and perhaps a keyword search. Suggestions of particular papers that should be referenced are welcome, especially those from the last 2-3 years. This information will be helpful not only to the author but also for the Editorial Board.
3) Your evaluation of strengths and weaknesses of the paper. Please provide constructive suggestions about how the authors might address each of the latter.
4) Suggestions of things to fix, for example figures that are unclear or typos.
5) A short summary of your overall evaluation and recommendation.
Thank you again for your time.