INFORMATION FOR REVIEWERS

Reviewer Guide

Before you start, we urge you to watch the video "Reviewing an Article", found at the bottom of this page.

When you receive a review request, please first check to make sure you have no conflict of interest. If you do have conflict of interest, please inform the requesting Associate Editor and decline the review. For example, decline the review if the paper is from your own institute, or from an author with whom you work or have worked before (former or current student, supervisor, collaborator, etc.) or an author with whom you have co-published before.

When you review a paper, you can submit two sets of comments:

1. Remarks for the Associate Editor/Editor (optional, invisible to authors). This section is optional. Please use this to report exceptional situations, such as plagiarism, double submission, conflict of interest, private comments to the editor, etc. Remember that authors will not be able to see these comments.
2. Remarks for the Author (mandatory, visible to authors). This section is mandatory. Here, please write your review and evaluation about the paper. Please also remember two very important notes:
   1. Never disclose your identity to the authors! Remember that authors can read this section, so don't leave any clues about who you are. Reviews must be blind.
   2. Do not ask authors to cite/compare with your own paper! Not only this might reveal your identity (see above), but it might also give the perception that you want to increase your citation count. It is also implicitly not allowed by IEEE, as per IEEE PSPB Manual section 8.2.2.A.4.

Review Requirements

IEEE PSPB Operations Manual, 8.2.1.B (Responsibilities of Authors) and 8.2.2.A.4 (Review of Articles by Referees), address several critical issues related to the publications and review process.

Specifically, “IEEE requires that referees treat the contents of articles under review as confidential information not to be disclosed to others before publication. It is expected that no one with access to an article under review will make any inappropriate use of the special knowledge that access provides.”

In addition and critically important is the following statement regarding AI-generated review: “Information or content contained in or about a manuscript under review shall not be processed through a public platform (directly or indirectly) for AI generation of text for a review. Doing so is considered a breach of confidentiality because AI systems generally learn from any input.”

• Reviews must be submitted in English.
• Please comment on both the presentation and the technical aspects of the work, including novelty, technical soundness, practicality (if applicable), experiments, comparison to related works, etc.
• Please pay extra attention to the novelty of the paper. Is the contribution novel? This is key for a journal paper. Also, note that the contribution does not necessarily need to be a novel method. TIM accepts novelty of method, instrument, system, or application. As such, it is perfectly fine to combine existing methods and create a novel system; it's still novel. Please make sure to carefully read our I&M scope requirements.
• A review should critique the work, not the authors! Reviews should NOT address the authors as "you", but simply as "the authors". In addition, reviews must be objective and mindful, and must avoid emotional, condescending, joking, accusing, attacking, or aggressive language. As per IEEE PSPB Manual section 2.6, "... reviewers should avoid the use of ad hominem and deprecating comments in their review and judgment statements for communications with authors."
• Reviews should give detailed constructive comments that authors can use to improve their work. Please avoid generalizations and subjective comments. Please be very specific, providing objective and detailed comments.. See the following examples: 

• From a scientific perspective, both authors and reviewers must support their statements. As such, a review should not make statements like “it is a fact that…” or “everyone knows that …” without proof. Instead, it should include citations for those claims.
• IEEE TIM policy on papers appearing in preprint repositories, such as TechRXiv or arXiv:
  • If a paper under review is already in a preprint repository, but has not been published anywhere else, it is an acceptable submission to IEEE TIM, since such preprint papers are neither peer reviewed nor published in any publication.
  • Please do not ask authors to cite or compare against a paper that appears only in a preprint repository, because such papers are not peer-reviewed publications. If you know of an interesting preprint paper that authors need to look at, you are welcome to tell the authors about it, for their perusal, but make sure you don’t ask for its inclusion in the paper.

Reviewers List in TIM

Up until 2020, TIM published in its December Issue a list with the names of all reviewers for the past review period. This list is archived in IEEE Xplore, similar to a regular paper, and can be used by reviewers as official proof of their review activities for IEEE TIM. As an example, see the December 2019 list on IEEE Xplore.

From 2021, this list is published in the following year. For example, reviewers who did one or more reviews in 2021 will be listed in the reviewer list published in 2022.

This list is archived in IEEE Xplore, similar to a regular paper, and can be used by reviewers as official proof of their review activities for IEEE TIM.

Please note that TIM does not issue individual certificates to reviewers.