IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2010 - 101

E D I T O R ' S

CORNER

Surviving the Review Process
Seth Hutchinson, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

he purpose of this article is to provide some insight
into the peer-review process used by many technical
journals and to give a bit of advice about revision and
resubmission of a paper that was not accepted after the first
round of reviews. For young authors, the review process can
be mysterious and frustrating. Criticisms conveyed in anonymous reviews may feel like personal attacks, while terse or
vague comments may seem to provide little guidance for revision. This article provides a set of practical guidelines that can
help you succeed in publishing good research. This includes a
brief overview of the review process, as well as some hints
about interpreting reviews, and suggestions for preparing a
response to the reviews. The opinions below have evolved over
several years, through numerous interactions with authors,
reviewers, and members of editorial boards. They are meant
only to convey practical hints for success and not as value
judgments about the process. Finally, they represent only
one viewpoint. Newcomers to the process would do well to
solicit the advice and opinions of a variety of senior researchers.

also lack perspective on the field and would likely not be
competent to give a good assessment of how important your
work might be. This reviewer can evaluate correctness but
likely not significance. In contrast, a more senior person might
not take the time to understand every technical detail but may
well be qualified to evaluate the significance of your work.
The expert might recommend to reject the paper because the
contribution is minor, without finding technical flaws in the
paper. At the same time, the graduate student might give high
praise for the technical details in the paper, without commenting on the relative significance of the contribution. In such a
case, the paper might well be rejected based on the expert's
recommendation, although the reviews do not contain many
technical criticisms.
Throughout the process, from the first draft to the final
revision, it is important to bear in mind that it is your job to
convince the reader of your contribution; it is not the responsibility of the reviewers to uncover the contribution of your
work. Maintaining this attitude will help you reach the goal of
publishing your work.

The Review Process
Many publications employ a three-tiered editorial board structure, consisting of an editor-in-chief (EiC), a few editors, and
many associate editors (AEs). When a paper is submitted, the
EiC assigns that paper to an editor, who then assigns it to an
appropriate AE. The AE collects reviews from experts in the
field, reads and synthesizes those reviews, and recommends a
decision to the editor. The editor then looks over the recommendation from the AE, as well as the reviews, before making
the final decision, which is communicated to the author along
with a rationale for the decision.
The AE and editor play an important role, but it is the
reviewers who do most of the work in the review process.
Thus, to understand the review process, one must understand
reviewers. Most reviewers fall somewhere along a spectrum
with two endpoints: 1) the very busy expert, who knows very
well the technical material but does not have much time to
read your paper in detail, and 2) the relative novice, who has
the time to check the technical details of your paper, but who
may not have a good sense of the relative importance of the
paper's contribution (it is axiomatic that the sum of free time
plus experience equals a constant).
Do not assume that it is essential that all reviewers understand all of the technical details of your paper. An advanced
graduate student might understand every detail of the mathematical content of your paper, but that graduate student might
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.939566

DECEMBER 2010

Understanding the Reviews
It can sometimes be difficult to discern the real intentions of
the reviewers. And yet, before one can revise a paper in
response to the reviews, it is important to understand what
exactly the reviewers had in mind. The following tips may
prove helpful.
Not All Criticisms Are Written in the Reviews
Reviewers typically do not like to give a paper more time than
it deserves. Therefore, if a reviewer is convinced after reading
a few pages that the paper should be rejected, the review will
likely contain detailed criticisms only for those first few pages
(and possibly the broader impact of the paper). It would be a
mistake to conclude that the remaining pages are acceptable
merely because the review contains relatively less criticism of
those pages. Therefore, addressing the criticisms contained in
the reviews should be viewed as a necessary condition for
publication but certainly not a sufficient condition. As a general rule, take the harshest criticisms as the baseline for your
revision efforts, and revise the entire paper as though it had
been uniformly criticized at this level.
Perhaps, the most common example of this is the review that
criticizes a paper for lacking a thorough evaluation of the related
literature. Authors often conclude that adding a few references
to the bibliography will solve this problem, leading to a publishable paper. This strategy rarely works, because this sort of criticism is often meant to convey the harsher (and unwritten)
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 101

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2010