Reviewer Guidelines

Overview

Note: These guidelines may be subject to minor revisions before the submission deadline.

Thank you for your work reviewing for ACM Multimedia Asia 2021. We appreciate your service. Your time and effort directly contributes to maintaining the high quality of the conference and strengthening the multimedia research community.

As a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member, we expect that you are already experienced with writing excellent reviews. However, in practice we find that guidelines can help streamline the process. ACM Multimedia Asia will be announcing awards for the best reviewers of the conference. The guidelines also serves as a basis for the best reviewer decisions.

As an Area Chair (AC), we expect that you have experience summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of papers pointed out by reviewers, and making recommendations. You will want to be thoroughly familiar with the review guidelines. For completeness, at the bottom of the guidelines the responsibilities of an AC are summarised.

The Golden Rule of reviewing: Write a review that you would like to receive yourself.

A review should be helpful to the authors, even if the review recommends rejection of the paper.

The reviews are anonymous, but please make sure that you deliver your best work, and that you write reviews that you would be proud to associate with your name.

Best practices for reviewing

Check the paper topic:

  • Confirm that the paper that you are reviewing falls into the topical scope of ACM Multimedia Asia, as defined by the Call for Regular Papers. Re-read the Call for Regular Papers to make sure that you have this year’s themes in the forefront of your mind while you are reviewing.
  • Remember that the problem addressed by an ACM Multimedia Asia paper is expected to involve more than a single modality, or is expected to be related to the challenge of how people interpret and use multimedia. Papers that address a single modality only and also fail to contribute new knowledge on human use of multimedia must be rejected as out of scope for the conference.
  • Although many submissions to ACM Multimedia Asia make a technical contribution in the form of a new algorithm, not all do, nor is it a requirement of ACM Multimedia Asia. Do not give less value to papers that carry out studies of new multimedia 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 rather, they 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 the state of the art…”, but rather, they should cite specific work (i.e., peer-reviewed references) that they feel the authors should have considered and why.
  • Authors appreciate if reviewers are generous with their feedback.

Respect the authors:

  • Reviews should critique “the paper”, and not the authors.
  • Reviews should try not address the authors directly, esp. not as “you”. (A direct address can be interpreted as an affront by the reader).
  • During the review process, no attempt should be made to guess the identity of the authors. (If you discover it by accident, please complete your review, but notify your AC.)

Please include in your review:

  • Statement of novelty: What does the paper contribute? Is that contribution valuable for the multimedia research community? Does the paper cover all the relevant related work, and explain how its contribution builds on the related work?
  • Statement of scientific rigor: Are the experiments well designed? Are the experiments sufficient to support the claims made by the paper? Are they reproducible? 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 not possible to confirm that the authors have actually 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 you submit it, please check it over to make sure that it follows these guidelines. Checking your review is good practice and will also save the ACs the effort of chasing you.
  • Note that high-quality, accurate reviews will also ensure that the authors do not request your review to be referred to the Authors’ Advocate.

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 ACM Multimedia Asia, 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;
  • If you know of an interesting arXiv paper relevant to the paper you are reviewing, 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.

Responsibilities of Area Chairs

  • An Area Chair solicits reviews for up to 10 papers.
  • An Area Chair reads the ten papers and the reviews.
  • An Area Chair ensures that the reviews have followed the reviewer guidelines.
  • An Area Chair summarises the strengths and weaknesses of each paper, makes a recommendation, and presents the recommendation at the TPC meeting.
  • An Area Chair adheres to the schedule for the review and selection process.

If you have any questions about the guidelines, please contact the Program Chairs.

Last updated on 15 July, 2021.