Information for Reviewers
As a reviewer, you have a crucial role in supporting research integrity in the peer review and publishing process. Reviewers have an obligation to conduct reviews in an ethical and accountable manner. Here are some of the basic ethical principles that you should expect to follow:
- Agree to review an artifact only if you have both the appropriate subject expertise and enough time to complete the review.
- Provide an honest, objective, and unbiased review.
- Declare any potentially competing interests and/or recuse yourself from assignments if you have a conflict of interest.
- Make sure your perspective is not influenced by authors’ origins, nationality, beliefs, gender, or other characteristics.
- Do not impersonate another individual in your work as a reviewer.
- Do not share information about your review during or after peer review. Do not use any information from the review process for your own advantage.
- Make sure your review comments are professional. Keep your focus on the work and not on the individuals.
Reviewers will assess the details of the research artifact based on the following criteria:
- Documentation: Assess whether the description of the artifact is sufficiently documented to enable them to be exercised by readers of the paper. With particular emphasis on the accessibility of the code, the code dependencies and requirements, the description of the installation and deployment processes and the description of the experiments that the artifact implements.
- Completeness: Check that the artifact includes all the key components described in the article and to what extent the artifact contributes to the reproducibility of the experiments in the article.
- Exercisability: Examine whether the submitted artifact includes the scripts and data needed to execute the experiments described in the article, and whether the software can be successfully executed. Examine whether the submitted artifact includes the scripts and data needed to execute the experiments described in the article, and whether the software can be successfully executed.