Reviewing papers is the best way to give back to the community. It is an integral part of your academic experience. To judge the quality of a scientific paper, research communities use the peer review model, where your colleagues (peers) are in charge of reading and evaluating your work in order to decide whether it should be published in a specific workshop, conference, or journal.

What goes into the review?

To understand the peer review process more, please refer to Elmqvist's blog below, especially on the roles in the review process. The aspects that you could assess in your review include:

• Related work: Does the paper discuss all the key work in the relevant area?
• Originality: Is it an entirely new approach to a problem, or is this incremental work?
• Significance: How important is the contribution to the existing work in the literature?
• Validity: Is the proposed idea thoroughly evaluated?
• Readability: Is the paper clear and logical?

Usually, the structure of a review contains:

• A 1-2 sentence summary of what the authors did, e.g., main contributions and approaches, in your own words.
• A 1-2 sentence summary of the key strengths and weaknesses of the paper, as well as your stand for this paper (positive, negative, neutral).
• Detailed feedback to 3-5 strengths and 3-5 weaknesses
• Minor comments, such as grammar, style, structure, flow, etc.

Additional information

The most important tips for being a good reviewer, extracted from Stasko's blog, are:

• Suggest removals to accompany additions
• Be specific
• Spend more review time on the middle