Instructions for reviewers

Thank you for agreeing to review for Digital Humanities, please bear in mind the points below when you are writing your review.

Criteria for assessment

• substantial original results: proposals must report substantial results, rather than the promise of future work
• analytic perspective on research issue: a simple description or demonstration of a project is insufficient; research issues should be identified, contextualised and theorised
• knowledge of related work: proposals should also show knowledge of other work in their field, either by citing appropriate literature or discussing the work of other projects, and drawing comparisons with them
  

If you think that a proposal is too promissory or descriptive, you may wish to suggest that it would be better as a poster or software demo rather than a full paper.

Comments for applicants

Please be aware that the comments that you make will be sent to proposers unedited. You can, if you wish, make confidential comments for the PC, but we encourage reviewers to address comments to the applicants if at all possible. Please therefore try to keep your comments constructive, helpful and objective, and avoid any personal remarks. This is especially important if you feel that the paper should be rejected or is of poor quality. Applicants are likely to be disappointed by a rejection, so comments which appear aggressive or personal will add insult to injury.

Scale of marks

In most years, the borderline for acceptance is a score of about 70. It is relatively unusual for papers to receive marks at either the highest or lowest extremes of the scale. Multiple 0s are unusual, unless aspects of the paper are exceptionally poor or worrying (for example suspected plagiarism) Multiple 10s should also be used sparingly unless this is one of the most excellent papers you have ever read.

Review length

Please try to provide a reasonable amount of detail in your comments, especially if you believe that the proposal ought to be rejected. In other words we would hope for at least a paragraph or two of feedback rather than a couple of sentences. Detailed feedback will help the programme committee to understand the rationale for your grades and thus help us to make decisions about acceptance or rejection, especially if the proposal is of borderline quality. It also helps applicants to understand reasons for rejection, to improve future submissions, or if accepted, should help them when preparing their paper for presentation.

Returned reviews

We do our best to match abstracts with the areas of interest indicated by reviewers. However, you may feel unable to complete a review, because you have insufficient time to do so or the proposal is not a good match with your expertise. In rare cases you may feel that you cannot be objective: you may have a conflict of interest (the proposal is by a very close friend, a former student, or a current collaborator) or the intellectual approach of the paper may be extremely antipathetic to your own. If you cannot complete the review for any reason please contact the programme chair as soon as possible, so that your abstracts can be assigned to another reviewer.

-- Main.DotPorter - 12 Sep 2008