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Reviewer Guidelines
Overview
Note: These guidelines may be subject to minor revisions before the submission deadline . Thank you for your work reviewing for the Fifth National Conference of Saudi Computers Colleges 2022 (NCCC 2022). We appreciate your service. Your time and effort directly contribute to maintaining the high quality of the conference and strengthening the research community in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia .
We expect that you are already experienced with writing excellent reviews. However, we find that guidelines can help streamline the process.
The Golden Rule: Write a review you would like to receive yourself .
A review should be helpful to the authors, even if the review recommends rejecting the paper . The reviews are anonymous, but please ensure that you deliver your best work and write reviews that you would be proud to associate with your name .
Best practices for reviewing
Check the paper topic :
• Confirm that the paper you are reviewing falls into the topical scope of NCCC, as defined by the Call for Regular and Short Papers. Re-read the Call for Regular and Short Papers to ensure that you have this year's themes in the forefront of your mind while reviewing .
• Although many submissions to NCCC make a technical contribution in the form of a new algorithm, not all do, nor is it a requirement of NCCC. Do not give less value to papers that study new application problems because they do not make a novel algorithmic contribution. Instead, judge these papers by the novelty of their insights and the value these insights could have for the community .
Support your statements:
• Reviews should not just state, "It is well known that…", but should include citations .
• Reviews should not just state, "Important references are missing…", but rather, they should include examples; Reviewers should list their own references only in very rare cases that these are indeed the most relevant references for the authors to refer to .
• Reviews should not just state, "Authors should compare to state of the art…", but they should cite specific work (i.e., peer-reviewed references) that they feel the authors should have considered and why .
• Authors appreciate it if reviewers are generous with their feedback .
Respect the authors :
• Reviews should critique "the paper" and not the authors .
• Reviews should try not to address the authors directly, esp. not as "you". (A direct address can be interpreted as an affront by the reader) .
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Please include in your review :
• Statement of novelty: What does the paper contribute? Is that contribution valuable for the computing research community? Does the paper cover all the relevant related work and explain how its contribution builds on the related work ?
• Statement of scientific rigour: Are the experiments well designed? Are the experiments sufficient to support the claims made by the paper? Are they reproducible (if applicable)? Have the authors released a resource, such as a data set or code ?
• Fixes that the authors should make for the camera ready. We can trust the authors to correct minor errors. Authors generally also will state their commitment to correcting minor errors found during the review process during the rebuttal. However, major flaws must lead to rejection since it is impossible to confirm that the authors have corrected major flaws successfully (i.e., the paper does not go back to the reviewers for checking) .
Ensuring review quality :
• When you finish a review, and before submitting it, please check it over to ensure that it follows these guidelines. Checking your review is good practice and will also save the Scientific Committee members the effort of chasing you .
• Note that high-quality, accurate reviews will also ensure that the authors do not request your review an appeal .
Policy on arXiv papers :
We consider a "publication" to be a manuscript that has undergone peer review and has been accepted for publication. This means that the following points apply to arXiv papers (and any other papers available online that have not been peer reviewed) :
• If the paper that you are reviewing is available on arXiv, and has not been published elsewhere, it is an acceptable submission to NCCC, since arXiv papers are not peer reviewed and are not publications ;
• Please do not insist that the authors cite a paper that is only on arXiv and has not otherwise been published. Since arXiv papers are not all peer-reviewed publications, missing an arXiv paper does not count as missing related work ;
• Likewise, if the authors do not compare their work with an approach described in an arXiv paper, it does not count as a weakness in their experimental evaluation of their own approach ;
• Suppose you know of an interesting arXiv paper relevant to the paper you are reviewing. In that case, you are more than welcome to tell the authors about it, but make sure you mark the reference as FYI "for your information" so that the authors know that you do not regard it as missing related work.
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If you have any questions about the guidelines, don't hesitate to get in touch with the Scientific Committee at [email protected].
