Receiving submissions and preparing for review

Receiving submissions and preparing for review

Your call for papers has been published and submissions are coming in. But where exactly? And how do you monitor progress? There's no time to sit back in this phase — there's work to be done: the review phase needs to be prepared.

Contents of this page:

Dashboard and overview
Back to the checklist
Define review criteria
Add reviewers
Assign submissions to reviewers
Invite reviewers

Dashboard and overview

All statistics related to your call for papers, submissions, and later the reviews can be found in the dashboard of the admin environment. The submissions themselves can be found in the Papers overview, which shows both a full list and tabs with selected papers. You can access both pages via the sidebar of the portal.

Back to the checklist

As you prepare for the review phase, the now-familiar checklist is again your guide. Simply follow the steps in the second tab to reach the next phase, where reviewers can begin their work. But first, you have a few tasks. In this tutorial, we’ll go through the checklist steps with you: defining review criteria, creating reviewers, and assigning submitted papers to them (manually or automatically).

Define review criteria

Your reviewers will evaluate the submissions based on these criteria. Each paper type has its own criteria. Think of Originality, Depth, Relevance, and Overall impression. For each criterion, you can define the possible values and their associated scores — for example, from Very poor or one star (*) with a score of 1 point, to Excellent or five stars (*****) with a score of 5 or 10 points. You’re completely free to define the number of criteria, their names, and the scoring scale.

Add reviewers

Where would you be without reviewers? In the next checklist step, you’ll add them. Each reviewer requires a name, email address, and organization. Optionally, you can link previously created categories to a reviewer so the system can automatically assign submissions using the auto-assign tool. And that brings us to the next step.

Assign submissions to reviewers

From the Papers overview, you can manually select reviewers per submission. Open a paper, go to the Reviewers tab, and select one or more names. As mentioned, you can also use the Auto-assign tool. We recommend doing this after the submission deadline has passed. In this tool, select the paper type to assign, choose between random assignment or assignment based on preferred categories (make sure these are filled in for each reviewer!), and the number of reviewers per submission. Have you completed todo assignments? (Tip: check the MISSING REVIEWERS tab in the Papers overview.) Then mark your call for papers in step 4 of the checklist’s second tab as Mark ready for reviews.

Invite reviewers

You’re now ready to officially invite the reviewers. As explained in the checklist, you can do this in different ways: individually or automatically. You can always resend emails from the reviewers overview on an individual basis.

The email each reviewer receives from the system includes a personal URL to their review portal. You can find the unique link on the detail page for each reviewer. If needed, you can copy and resend this link manually outside the system — for example, via WhatsApp. Use the eye icon in the upper right of the reviewer detail page to preview their review portal.