Thank you for agreeing to review a paper for ACM SAP. Reviews have a direct and important impact on the quality of the conference. Reviews also help the community as a whole to improve the quality of its research. Our instructions below borrow heavily from ACM SIGGRAPH’s technical paper reviewer instructions.

Minor flaws can be corrected and should not be a reason to reject a paper. Each accepted paper should, however, be technically sound and make a substantial contribution.

Ethics and Professionalism

Please read the Ethics of Review section below. It is extremely important that we uphold our reputation for treating ideas confidently and professionally.

Anonymity

We use single-blind reviewing. If you as a reviewer have a substantial concern regarding the originality or ethics of a submission, please contact the Technical Papers chairs prior to submitting your review. These concerns will be dealt with by the chair/advisory board, who will determine if the concern is valid and how to address it. They will inform you about the outcome. Due to the number of new works posted on arXiv and other non-peer-reviewed websites on a daily basis, it is increasingly likely that you might find online reports that are highly relevant to the submitted work and that the authors were unaware of. The existence of these non-peer-reviewed material should not negatively affect your review of the submission. In particular, note that authors are allowed, but not required, to cite them as concurrent work without the burden of having to detail how their work compares or differs from these prepublications. If such preprints are not cited, authors of conditionally accepted papers can be made aware of these publications and asked to cite them in their final revision.

Be Specific

Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying “this is well known” or “this has been common practice in the industry for years” is not sufficient nor acceptable. Please cite specific publications or public disclosures of techniques, and if these do not exist or you cannot find them, entertain the possibility that the contribution is indeed novel. The explanation section is one of the most important parts of your review. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the Technical Papers chairs decide which papers to accept, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include any specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers.

Timely Reviews

The deadline for completed reviews is 10 May 2023. Adhering to this deadline is extremely important. In particular, the discussion process starts immediately after the review deadline, where reviewers must be able to see the complete set of reviews.

When You Are Done

Please be careful to insulate the ideas you learned from the review from your own research and from your colleagues and students until after a paper is published. There is a chance that the submission you reviewed will be selected for publication in the ACM TAP journal. Such an extension requires an additional round of reviews and may need your notes, marked manuscripts, or implementations from the first round.

TECHNICAL PAPERS: ETHICS OF REVIEW

Protect Ideas

As a reviewer for ACM SAP, you have the responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the papers you review. ACM SAP submissions are by their nature not published documents. The work is considered new and proprietary by the authors; otherwise, they would not have submitted it. Of course, authors ultimately intend to publish their work; however, many of the submitted papers will end up being rejected from this year’s conference. Thus, it is likely that the paper you have in your hands will be refined further and submitted to another journal or conference or even to ACM SAP next year. Oftentimes, the work is considered confidential by the author’s employers. These organizations do not consider sending a paper to ACM SAP for review to constitute a public disclosure. Consequently, you must abide by a few simple rules to protect the ideas in the submissions you receive: Do not show the paper to anyone else, including colleagues or students, unless you have asked them to help with your review. See the Review Process section of the Technical Papers FAQ for more details on how to properly include a colleague or student in the review process. Do not show videos or other materials to non-reviewers. Do not use ideas from papers you review to develop new ones. Keep your notes, marked manuscripts, videos, or implementations of papers under review strictly confidential.

Avoid Conflict of Interest

As a reviewer of an ACM SAP paper, you have power over the reviewing process. It is important for you to stay clear of any conflict of interest. There should be absolutely no question about the impartiality of reviews. Thus, if you are assigned a paper for which your review would create a possible conflict of interest, you should return the paper immediately and not submit a review. If you discover a conflict of interest after starting the review, you must recuse yourself from the assignment as soon as you discover it. Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to) situations in which:

• You work at the same institution as one of the authors.
• You have been directly involved in the work and will be receiving credit in some way. For instance, if you are a member of the author’s thesis committee, and the paper is about their thesis work, then you were involved.
• You suspect that others might see a conflict of interest in your involvement. For example, even though Microsoft Research in Seattle and Beijing are in some ways more distant than Berkeley and MIT, there is likely to be a perception that they are “both Microsoft,” so folks from one should not review papers from the other.
• You have collaborated with one of the authors in the past three years. Collaboration is usually defined as having written a paper or grant proposal together, although you should use your judgment. For instance, being co-presenters in a course, co-authors of a survey paper, or co-chairs in a recent conference does not in itself lead to a conflict of interest.
• You were the M.S./Ph.D. advisor or advisee of one of the authors. This represents a lifetime conflict of interest.
• You have unpublished or unreleased work that would get scooped by the current submission because it tackles the same problem using a similar approach. If asked to review a paper that can create such a cross-reviewing conflict, please turn down the request and immediately inform the Technical Papers chairs.

Be Serious

The paper publishing business is serious — careers and reputations, as well as academic tenure decisions, often hinge on these publications, and thus on your review. You are responsible for upholding this reputation. This does not mean that we cannot have any fun in the paper sessions. But it does mean that we have a responsibility to be serious in the reviewing process. You should make an effort to do a solid and constructive review. Authors should never feel as if reviewers did not even seem to take the time to read the paper carefully. A casual or flippant review of a paper on which the author has spent considerable time is not appropriate and certainly not professional. In the long run, casual reviewing is very damaging to the conference and community. There is no dishonor in being too busy to do a good review, to realize that your competencies are not a good fit for a paper, or to realize that you have overcommitted yourself and cannot review all the papers you agreed to review. But it is a big mistake to take on too much and then not back out early enough to allow recovery. If you cannot write a high-quality review, give the paper back and say so. But please, do it early so that a suitable replacement can be found.

Be Professional

Belittling or sarcastic comments have no place in the reviewing process. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the authors understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. Be respectful and carefully explain why you like or dislike a submission so the authors can learn from your expertise.

Remain Anonymous

All reviewers are expected to maintain anonymity forever. In particular, it is never appropriate for reviewers to reveal themselves to the authors of an accepted paper, as this could be perceived as an attempt to curry favor. Requesting citations primarily to one’s own work may thwart anonymity, so it should be carefully considered.

In Summary

Adherence to ethics makes the whole reviewing process indubitably more complicated and sometimes less efficient. But convenience, efficiency, and expediency are not good reasons to contravene ethics. It is precisely at those times when it would be easier or more efficient to bend the rules that it is most important to do the right thing. Ultimately, spending that energy and time is an investment in the long-term health of the conference, the conference, and the entire community of researchers.