Day 35 — Peer reviewing responsibility
The first conference paper that I prepared is targeting ICIS conference (http://icis2019.aisconferences.org/). My co-author and, at the same time, doctoral thesis advisor recommended that I volunteer to do some reviewing work for that conference. He indicated that doing 3 reviews should be fine and that it is a good practice to take on such responsibility. First of all, it gives me exposure to other papers (opportunities to learn). Second, by being active and supporting the conference I increase my chances of actually getting in.
I did receive three papers for review. They were all full papers, unlike mine, which was a short paper (8 pages limit) presenting work-in-progress research.
After logging in into the conference submission and review system I was able to find a PDF document with guidelines for reviewers. The set-up part was straightforward. The instructions regarding the actual review were rather concise.
Something along those lines: Brief summary. Highlight strengths and weaknesses. Merit of the research question, research design, methodology, collection of data, analysis and findings.
Furthermore, in some other materials I found information that a good review is at least one page long. Also, I had to indicate my own level of expertise in the area relevant to the paper, provide recommendation regarding accepting/rejecting the paper to the conference and provide some additional comments (if needed) for the committee evaluating the submission (not shared with authors).
Armed with these instructions I patiently procrastinated the review process.
There are always some excuses and I have one as well. I was feverishly working on another conference paper, which had more data analysis challenges than I expected.
Fortunately, the deadline for peer review came. Interestingly, it nearly overlapped with the deadline for submission of my second paper.
I decided to take a break from the second paper and do the reviews first, as these were due first.
Pressed with time, I did not ask for any additional help regarding reviews. I have had some experience doing peer reviews and article critique from courses I took earlier, thus I felt comfortable enough to venture into unknown papers, research streams and peer review feedback process.
To my surprise, the quality of the submitted papers was not extremely high. Two out of three articles didn’t seem particularly strong to me. ICIS conference was advertised to me as a rather demanding one to get in to, so I expected very high quality papers. Maybe, I just didn’t know enough to evaluate them.
However, the sample sizes and methodologies used in the two weaker papers seemed insufficient, in my opinion, to draw deeper conclusions regarding new phenomenons they were attempting to explore/explain.
The paper that definitely stood out to me was based on an interesting case and substantial data. I cannot speak of deeper implications or insights from that paper, but it seemed like a solid work to me.
One of the questions that left in my head after completing the review process was how I should use references in peer review feedback. Most of my comments were based on observations of things I noticed in the papers being reviewed and I referenced only one or two papers giving suggestions for improvement. I was wondering if my comments appear too much as just a personal opinion. Should I use references to back up my claims?
I’ll need to investigate that more.
Today I received a request to review some papers for my second conference. I must say that these papers appear much closer to my own interest areas than those from the first one. Therefore, I’m really looking forward to checking these.
