-
Take the time to write good reviews. Ideally, you should read a paper and then think about it over the course of several days before you write your review.
-
Short reviews are unhelpful to authors, other reviewers, and Area Chairs. If you have agreed to review a paper, you should take enough time to write a thoughtful and detailed review.
-
Be specific when you suggest that the writing needs to be improved. If there is a particular section that is unclear, point it out and give suggestions for how it can be clarified.
-
Be specific about novelty. Claims in a review that the submitted work "has been done before" MUST be backed up with specific references and an explanation of how closely they are related. At the same time, for a positive review, be sure to summarize what novel aspects are most interesting in the Strengths section.
-
Do not reject papers solely because they are missing citations or comparisons to prior work that has only been published without review (e.g., arXiv or technical reports). Refer to the FAQ below for more details on handling arXiv prior art.
-
Don't give away your identity by asking the authors to cite several of your own papers.
-
If you think the paper is out of scope for ICCV's subject areas, clearly explain why in the review. Then suggest other publication possibilities (journals, conferences, workshops) that would be a better match for the paper. However, unless area mismatch is extreme, you should keep an open mind, because we want a diverse set of good papers at the conference.
-
The tone of your review is important. A harshly written review will be resented by the authors, regardless of whether your criticisms are true. If you take care, it is always possible to word your review constructively while staying true to your thoughts about the paper.
-
Avoid referring to the authors in the second person ("you"). Instead, use the third person ("the authors" or "the paper"). Referring to the authors as "you" can be perceived as being confrontational, even though you may not mean it this way.
-
Be generous about giving the authors new ideas for how they can improve their work. You might suggest a new technical tool that could help, a dataset that could be tried, an application area that might benefit from their work, or a way to generalize their idea to increase its impact.
-
The Author-Guidelines writes that “A paper must be fully anonymized”, “A paper must use a given template”, “A paper must be at most 8 pages excluding references”, “A code must be anonymized”, etc. A reviewer may want to instantly reject upon identifying such a violation. However, we still want reviewers to review all the given papers at default. PCs have already filtered out obvious violation cases. If you think that a paper violates our guideline and should be rejected without a review, please email Program Chairs (programchairs-iccv23@googlegroups.com) for instructions instead of writing a single-line review such as “The paper violates a guideline and should be rejected”.
-
Reviewers SHOULD NOT reject a paper solely because another paper with a similar idea has already appeared on arXiv. If the reviewer suspects plagiarism or academic dishonesty, they are encouraged to bring these concerns to the attention of Area and Program Chairs.
Finally, keep in mind that a thoughtful review not only benefits the authors, but also yourself. Your reviews are read by other reviewers and especially the Area Chairs, in addition to the authors. Being a helpful reviewer will generate good will towards you in the research community and may even help you to win an Outstanding Reviewer award.