For the review process the submitted contributions have to be assigned to reviewers and PC members. After assignment they can access the contributions assigned to them, view their abstracts and download the manuscripts.

This page describes how chairs can assign submissions to reviewers in the ConfTool system. 

Assigning Reviewers to a Submission

Please log in as a user with the status Chair, Conference Chair or Administrator. After login please choose Manage Submissions and Reviews. If you cannot find this option after login, please contact the conference organizers.

Here you have the option to either list all contributions or list all reviewers by choosing the according links.

On the List of Contributions you will find a list of all submissions. Above the list is a search field and a link to "Show Filter Options". You can use both to narrow the number of papers concerning your desired topics or tracks if several chairs share the work of assigning submissions to the reviewers.

To the right of every list entry is a link "Assign" to access a new page to Assign Reviewers to this contribution. It shows all available reviewers for this type of contribution. This list is ordered by the preferences of the reviewers (from the "bidding" phase) and the number of matches between topics of the submission and areas of expertise of the reviewer. This data is also displayed in the second column.

Please select the required number of reviewers to examine the contribution by marking the checkbox "Assign" in the third column. (NB: If you assign a contribution to a person as meta-reviewer, this person will have access to all other reviews of the same submission. See: User Roles in ConfTool Pro.)

Select "Set Conflict" if you want to exclude a reviewer from participating in the online discussion forum about that specific contribution later on. When you have assigned all reviewers, please go to the bottom of the page and click the Save Data button to confirm your settings.

You can now verify and edit your assignments at the top of the new page. Select the link "Submissions" to go back to the list of contributions and to continue assigning other submissions.

Assigning Submissions to a Reviewer

Alternatively you can use the list "Program Committee and Reviewers". Here you get an overview of all available experts (PC members and reviewers). This page also lists the number of submissions already assigned to each person and the reviews already completed. By selecting "Assign Reviews" in the right column you get the option to assign or cancel ("unassign") contributions for this person. This works according to the function "Assign Reviewers to a Submission " as described above.

(NB: Experts are identified by the conference chairs in the back-end of ConfTool.)

Automatic Assignments of Reviews

ConfTool Pro also allows to assign submissions to reviewers automatically. Please note that this is only available to administrators and conference chairs, not to track chairs.

Please choose "Manage Submissions and Reviews" and then "Automatic Assignment of Reviews" to access this function. It considers the "bids" of the reviewers, the number of matching topics between submission and reviewer as well as the number of already assigned reviews per person during the assignment process.

In addition to that,  the system tries to identify and to consider “conflicts of interest”.  For this, ConfTool Pro compares e-mail addresses, names and organizations of the reviewers to those of the authors and co-authors. This is one of the many reasons why authors should be asked to list the e-mail addresses of their co-authors.

Although the automatic assignments of reviews normally yield good results, we advise to check, and – where required – to optimize, the final result via the manual assignment.

Activating the Review Phase

After assignment the Review Phase has to be enabled in "Settings" => "Phases and Deadlines" to make the submissions accessible to the reviewers.

Contact the Reviewers

To inform the reviewers about the start of the review process, their next steps and the review deadlines, please use the bulk mail functions of ConfTool. Please note that instructions for reviewers and PC members are available, too.

Hints

• Use the possibility that authors may name mail addresses of the co-authors when submitting.
• Use the option of the ConfTool system to define topics and enable authors and reviewers to choose the matching topics. This facilitates the assignment of submissions to reviewers considerably.
• Even though the time to prepare a conference  is always very short we recommend to offer the „Bidding Phase“  (ConfTool Pro) for at least a few days. This puts the reviewer in a position to name submissions of interest for him and to fix conflicts of interest in advance. The bottom line is that this also facilitates your work!
• Please assign the submissions, if possible, to at least 3 reviewers. It happens regularly that some reviewers do not meet their agreements and do not submit their reviews. If you then have only 2 assigned reviewers you may face the problem that some of the submissions end up with only one or no submitted review.