The Task of the Referee

Computer researchers have a professional obligation to referee the work of others. This article tells you how to evaluate a paper and write a report using common standards and procedures. T here is an endless stream of research papers submitted to conferences, journals, newsletters, anthologies, annuals, trade journals, newspapers, and other periodicals. Many such publications use impartial, external experts to evaluate papers. This approach is often called peer review, and the reviewers are called referees. Refereeing is a public service, one of the professional obligations of a computer science and engineering professional. Unfortunately, referees typically learn to produce referee reports without any formal instruction; they learn by practice, by feedback from editors, by seeing referee reports for their own papers, and by reading referee reports written by others. This article tells you how to evaluate a paper, write a referee report, and apply common standards and procedures. It is intended to replace Forscher's rules(1), which are distributed by some editors but do not reflect the procedures used in computer science and engineering. This article focuses on research papers in applied areas of computer science and engineering, such as systems, architecture, hardware, communications, and performance evaluation, but most of the discussion is generally applicable; separate sections consider research proposals and survey and tutorial papers. Authors might find this material useful for preparing papers for publication. Another recent paper discusses refereeing in theoretical computer sciences; there are some differences between theory and the applied areas considered here. The referee's task Your role as referee is to decide whether a paper makes a sufficient contribution to the field. The contribution can be new and interestin