Review Guidelines - IEEE Intelligent Vehicle 2022

Reviewers

Thank you for volunteering your time to review for IV 2022! Reviewers time and expertise are a key factor in order to assure a high-quality technical program. This web page has been created in order to detail and clarify what is expected of all members of the Reviewing Committee.

Reviewer Duties

Once you get the reviewing assignment, please go through papers assigned and check if there is no conflict of interest and if the paper falls within your field of expertise. If either of these issues arise, please contact the Program Chairs as soon as possible to solve them.

Any accepted contribution must be technically solid and make a contribution to the field of intelligent vehicles. A contribution to the field includes the novelty of an approach or breakthrough concept and convincing experimental results. However, a new vision or approach may constitute a contribution even if it does not exceed the state of the art (SOTA), and performance below SOTA should not be the sole reason for rejection. Similarly, slight errors that can be easily corrected are not grounds for rejection of an article.

Please familiarize yourself with the various plagiarism and submission guidelines, and if you find that the work does not meet these guidelines, contact the Program Chair and ask him to resolve the issue. In the meantime, go ahead and review the paper as if there is no violation. The Program Chairs will follow up, but it may take a bit of time.

Review Report

The reviewer must elaborate on the most important aspects of the article in a specific and detailed manner, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript. Although bullet points may be used, they must be adequately explained and help the reviewer make a final decision about the article. Remember that the assigned reviewer will make his or her decision based primarily on your comments, not on the assigned grade, so the decision must be well-reasoned. In addition, the review should provide sufficient feedback to the authors so that they may revise the paper for any future submissions.

With respect to the overview of the state of the art, specific publications should be given rather than vague references such as “this is known” or “this has been used before”.

Ethical Considerations

It is the responsibility of IV reviewers to respect and protect the confidentiality of assigned papers. Papers submitted to IV are not published and are the property of the authors. Since it is possible that the paper will not be accepted, it may be further edited or submitted to another conference or journal. Also, it may still be considered confidential/proprietary in some organizations and companies. Accordingly, the following guidelines apply:

You are not allowed to show the article (including the results, videos, images, codes, or any other supplementary materials) to anyone unless they have been included in the review process (Associate Editor (AE) or reviewer).
You should not use the ideas or code from the articles for your own benefit (articles, suggestions or code) before they are published.
After completion of the review, all copies and materials relating to the article must be deleted, including all additional materials.

Confidentiality

You are not allowed to show the article (including the results, videos, images, codes, or any other supplementary materials) to anyone unless they have been included in the review process (AE or reviewer).
You should not use the ideas or code from the articles for your own benefit (articles, suggestions or code) before they are published.
After completion of the review, all copies and materials relating to the article must be deleted, including all additional materials.

Conflict of Interest

It is vital for the conference that conflicts of interest are avoided, so it is important that there is no doubt about the impartiality of the reviewers. Although the organizers make an effort to avoid these cases, sometimes they can occur. If you have been assigned a paper with a potential conflict of interest, you should contact the assigning Associate Editor or Program Chair as soon as possible to resolve the issue. Conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to):

You work at the same institution as one of the authors.
If you’ve been involved in any way in the work presented, e.g. as thesis advisor, member of the committee, as an external advisor…
You have collaborated with one of the authors in the recent years (3 to 5 years). The definition of collaboration is broad; it is left to the reviewer’s judgment to determine this degree.
If you were thesis advisor or advisee of one of the authors. This type of relationship is generally associated with a lifelong conflict of interest. Again, it is left to the reviewer’s discretion to identify the degree of conflict.
If it may be perceived by others as conflict of interest.

Preprint Servers

Does IEEE consider authors posting their articles on preprint servers or on their companies’ web sites to be a form of prior publication, which may then disqualify the articles from further editorial consideration?

No. IEEE policy allows authors to submit previously posted articles to IEEE publications for consideration as long as authors are able to transfer copyright to IEEE, i.e., they had not transferred copyright to another party prior to submission.

Does the policy affect how authors post their articles on preprint servers such as TechRxiv or ArXiv?

Yes. The IEEE recognizes that many authors share their unpublished articles on public sites. Once articles have been accepted for publication by IEEE, authors are required to post an IEEE copyright notice on their preprints. Upon publication, authors must replace the preprints with either 1) the full citation to the IEEE works with Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or 2) the accepted versions only (not the IEEE-published versions) with the DOI. IEEE journals will make available to each author the accepted version of the article that the author can post that includes the DOI, IEEE copyright notice, and a notice indicating the article has been accepted for publication by IEEE. IEEE conference authors are free to post their own version of their articles, as accepted by an IEEE conference.

https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/pubs/author_version_faq.pdf

Your Report

Disparaging comments are not welcome in peer reviews. It is important that comments help in decision making and allow authors to understand the shortcomings of their work in order to improve it in the future. A good reviewer should write gentle, concise, and helpful comments that allow the reviewer to immediately see the merits (pros and cons) of an article, rather than relying solely on the overall grade assigned. Remember that reviews are read by colleagues (other reviewers and AEs), so being a helpful reviewer will be an advantage in the research community.

Some helpful tips:

A good report should not be written in a hurry. It is recommended to take several days between reading the article and completing the report.
Short reviews are of no benefit to either the authors or the AE, because accepting a review of an article requires taking the trouble to write a substantive review.
If you point out that certain parts of an article need revision or are not clear enough, notes and suggestions for clarification should be provided.
It is recommended not to include references to your identity and to indicate that articles of your own authorship should be cited.
When referring to the novelty of an article, claims such as “this has been done before” or “this is known” should be accompanied by references that justify the statement. Positive claims must also be accompanied by details.
Articles should not be rejected for the simple reason that they do not contain citations or comparisons to non-reviewed published articles, such as those on arXiv.
If you feel that the topic has nothing to do with the congress, please explain this briefly in the review and suggest alternative conferences or journals. Anyway, keeping an open mind in this regard is advisable, as articles that expand the scope of the congress are welcome.
Always be constructive in your reviews and use confident and respectful language. Your colleagues will value it and take criticism more positively.

Papercept Instructions

Download your papers.
Check for possible conflict or submission rule violations.
Review papers and assign rating.

1. To download individual papers, you can click the links Download for the corresponding paper in the Reviewer’s Workspace. It will give you access to the download menu, where you can select to download the paper (“First submission”) or any other supplementary file to the paper that will be available in this menu.

2. Contact the program chairs immediately if you believe you have a conflict with the paper or if the paper violates the submission rules. In the meantime, go ahead and review the paper as if there is no violation. The Program Chairs will follow up, but it may take a bit of time.

3. Click “Review” in the Reviewers Workspace to get to the review form. Proceed with the review and save it to continue in the future, or click submit once the form is ready.

About arXiv
Authors should cite all the sources that have inspired their work, although it is not reasonable to ask for a review, inclusion or comparison of the work presented with an article published in preprint format, that has not been subjected to peer review (such as arXiv) or that one that has only recently appeared/published before the submission deadline. Similarly, it is not advisable to discourage ideas that have been developed in parallel and independently to these publications. Reviewers are therefore recommended to follow the following guidelines.

The reviewer should not require a paper to be compared to, or discuss another paper recently published in ArXiv or similar. However, it is acceptable to indicate to the author the existence of something published in these repositories, either because of its similar or for its interest in the subject.
Authors should cite the work they have been inspired by, even if it appears in an arXiv-style repository.
Not citing an article in arXiv or similar IS NOT a reason for rejection. Please indicate the reference to the authors.
It is not a reason for rejection that there is an article with similar ideas in an arXiv-style repository. If there are doubts about plagiarism, the reviewer should contact the Program Chair to resolve this issue.

Associate Editors

We want to thank you for accepting being part of the International Committee (named Associate Editor in the online Platform-Papercept) for The Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, sponsored by The IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS). As Associate Editor you are asked to manage the review of 3-5 papers, and to collect at least 3 independent reviews for each paper.

The papers assigned to you are already available it the system, please proceed to check for potential conflicts of interest or papers that you do not feel comfortable handling at: https://its.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl and click enter in “Associate Editor for Contributed Papers”.

In order to ensure a fair review process in accordance with IEEE-ITSS standards, Associate Editors must verify that the following premises are met:

Acting as an Associate Editor (AE) is a very important role for the IEEE-ITSS congresses, the scientific quality of congress depends on their engaged performance. That is why it is expected that they will be dedicated and professional in the performance of their duties.
The reviews received must be properly documented and justified (with special relevance to those that are negative). If a review is received and is not properly justified, it is the task of the associated editor to ask the reviewer for clarification or to seek a new review.
AEs should be familiar with the paper, and should not make a final decision without a documented judgment of the paper.
AEs should remember the IEEE’s policy with respect to no unilateral decisions. This means that decisions made must be supported by at least two reviewers, including the AE.
AEs, either when assigning reviewers, or with respect to their assigned papers, must ensure that there is no conflict of interest that would compromise the impartiality of the review.