Rapid reviewing August 12, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, papers, research, work.Tags: papers, peer review, reviewer comments, sleep
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I was on a trip this weekend and forgot that I had agreed to review a conference paper. Not a problem, though, because once I got the reminder, I figured I’d still have plenty of time. Except there was a problem: when I got home from my trip, I realized that the review was due at 1 a.m. that morning and not midnight of the next night: it was due 23 hours sooner than I had expected. I realized this about 2 hours before the review was due.
I am a slow reader, so this immediately put me into panic mode, but rather than wait until morning and send it in late, I decided to see if I could at least get something in before the deadline.
Despite it being a bit stressful, I actually managed to read through the whole thing and get a decent review written up. In fact, when I looked at it the next morning, I was rather shocked at how long the review was. I did realize later that there is one minor point I missed, but I think that, overall, I caught some important errors and that my assessment overall wouldn’t have changed.
I have to admit that this was also made easier by the fact that the paper was reasonably well-written. Reviewing papers and grading have one thing in common: the worse the submission, the longer it takes to review.
Not that I plan to leave all my reviews for the last minute, but it’s a good thing I realized I can do this in less time: two more review requests showed up this morning.
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