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| reviewer_instructions [2011/03/15 22:26] – [Detailed Review Instructions] nickroy | reviewer_instructions [2011/03/15 22:38] (current) – [Detailed Review Instructions] nickroy |
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| * **Less helpful: "This work contains little or no experimental results."** While robotics is to a great extent the marriage of good experimentation and good theory, we welcome papers that provide insight into robotics through novel theoretical or algorithmic contributions. If you are unconvinced that the theory is correct, then a more helpful comment would be: "This is a theoretical paper, but unfortunately the authors make the following assumptions XX, YY and ZZ that undermine confidence that this theory can be applied usefully. We would need to see either experimental evidence, or a relaxation of those assumptions to be convinced of the authors' contribution." Or perhaps if the theoretical claim is uninteresting, a more helpful comment might be: "The authors provide a proof to support the claim of XX, but this claim is somewhat unsurprising given the work in YY and ZZ. A more interesting claim might be QQ, but the proofs do not support that result." | * **Less helpful: "This work contains little or no experimental results."** While robotics is to a great extent the marriage of good experimentation and good theory, we welcome papers that provide insight into robotics through novel theoretical or algorithmic contributions. If you are unconvinced that the theory is correct, then a more helpful comment would be: "This is a theoretical paper, but unfortunately the authors make the following assumptions XX, YY and ZZ that undermine confidence that this theory can be applied usefully. We would need to see either experimental evidence, or a relaxation of those assumptions to be convinced of the authors' contribution." Or perhaps if the theoretical claim is uninteresting, a more helpful comment might be: "The authors provide a proof to support the claim of XX, but this claim is somewhat unsurprising given the work in YY and ZZ. A more interesting claim might be QQ, but the proofs do not support that result." |
| * **Less helpful: "This is just a systems paper."** Again, while robotics is to a great extent the marriage of good theory and good experimentation, we welcome papers that provide insight into robotics through system development. This probably means that it is an experimental paper, but you are unconvinced by the experimentation, or even the claim of the paper. A more helpful comment would be: "This is an experimental paper, but unfortunately the experiments do not give sufficient confidence in the insight the authors describe. We would need to see the following experiments to be convinced of the authors' contribution." Or perhaps if the experimental claim is itself unclear or uninteresting, a more helpful comment might be: "The authors provide experiments but do not give a clear hypothesis being tested by XX. The results are somewhat unsurprising given the work in YY and ZZ. A more interesting claim might be QQ, but the experiments do not support that result." | * **Less helpful: "This is just a systems paper."** Again, while robotics is to a great extent the marriage of good theory and good experimentation, we welcome papers that provide insight into robotics through system development. This probably means that it is an experimental paper, but you are unconvinced by the experimentation, or even the claim of the paper. A more helpful comment would be: "This is an experimental paper, but unfortunately the experiments do not give sufficient confidence in the insight the authors describe. We would need to see the following experiments to be convinced of the authors' contribution." Or perhaps if the experimental claim is itself unclear or uninteresting, a more helpful comment might be: "The authors provide experiments but do not give a clear hypothesis being tested by XX. The results are somewhat unsurprising given the work in YY and ZZ. A more interesting claim might be QQ, but the experiments do not support that result." |
| * **Less helpful: "This paper is basically uninteresting."** This comment is not helpful to the author. Even if you, as a reviewer, are tired of reading papers in a particular area, this comment gives no guidance to the authors. Please avoid comments of this form. | * **Less helpful: "This paper is basically uninteresting."** This comment is not helpful to the author. Even if you, as a reviewer, are tired of reading papers in a particular area, this comment gives no guidance to the authors. Please avoid comments of this form. It's possible to say that a paper is narrow in the problem it addresses, without actually calling it boring. Describing a problem as narrow encourages the authors to broaden the scope of the paper. Describing a paper as boring encourages the authors to set the building on fire out of frustration. |
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| Guidance on the meaning of the criteria and their numerical scores (Thanks to Dieter Fox). | Guidance on the meaning of the criteria and their numerical scores (Thanks to Dieter Fox). |