Review Time-Frame

Do you always submit the reviews assigned to you on time? Putting it in a different way, do you even begin reading them a few days before the due deadline?

Lets restrict the discussion to journals like IEEE Trans. Signal Proc., which have a short but elastic time-frame for submission of reviews. Conferences and special-issue journals (e.g., JSAC) of course, have inelastic time-frames, so one has no choice but to stick to the deadline. While this always leads to timely reviews, the review quality may suffer. I've had my share of one-line reviews; ``The paper is good and a nice decodability criterion is established.''

From my brief stint at reviewing and submitting my own papers, I guess most graduate students would answer the above questions in negative. Some students, who tend to get several review requests, first look at the paper on the due date after emailing the associate editor for an extension. They usually get a two-week extension, which sometimes expands into two months - not funny when one is on the receiving end.

The truth is, graduate students do not always have spread-out research interests and often get assigned papers that are not exactly in their area. Mix in some procrastination and you have a delayed and lousy review. On the other extreme, students sometime get papers in their exact area as well. Reading the paper is then a delight, and the reviews mostly get done on time.

So how does one optimize one's timeliness ? Perhaps one could use waterfilling. That is, if the paper is outside one's area, realize that the review is going to be bad and get done with it, as soon as possible. The AE may not be impressed by the review but will at least get it on time, and may even decide to spend some time on the paper himself. On the other hand, if the paper is aligned with one's research interests, spend some time writing the review, even if it requires asking for an extension. The review should be extra long if it is a rejection; the authors should gain something out the process.