ICME 2025 Reviewer Guidelines

The goal of the review process is to identify papers that are technically sound and make an original and substantial contribution to the field. Your review plays a pivotal role in helping the Program Committee accept such papers. Therefore, please budget sufficient time to read the papers you are assigned and complete your review by the deadline. If you are not able to allocate enough time to review the papers, please inform the Program Committee as soon as possible so that they can make appropriate adjustments.

You will be asked to provide an evaluation of the paper assigned to you according to the following criteria:

  • How confident are you in your evaluation of this paper
  • Importance/relevance to ICME
  • Novelty/originality
  • Technical correctness
  • Experimental validation and reproducibility
  • Clarity of presentation
  • Reference to prior work
  • Overall evaluation of this paper
  • Award quality

Each of these criteria has multiple options, one of which must be chosen. You will also be asked to provide a summary of strengths and weaknesses of the paper and justify your recommendation.

Your score and your comments will be shared with the authors. The only exception is “Confidential Comments to technical program committee.” Please use this field to convey any confidential information that you believe should not be disclosed to the authors.

General Comments

When deciding your recommendation for a paper, do not be shy. Use the whole spectrum of evaluation scores: if you think a paper is outstanding in any of the criteria, give it the highest score for that criterion. Similarly, if you think a paper is really bad (and you are able to convincingly justify such opinion), then give it the lowest score. Please give intermediate scores only when you think the paper lies in the middle, and make sure to explain why.

Reviews that are too sketchy, short, or superficial do not help the authors, the Program Committee, nor the ICME community. Therefore, please devote enough time to write a thoughtful and detailed review. Please be as specific and detailed as you can. Please also be fair; do not let personal feelings affect your review.

Please ensure that your scores are consistent with your comments. If you have a negative assessment of an aspect of a paper that has led you to give a low score, please articulate it in your review. A negative review comment such as “has been done before” or “this is well known” must include appropriate justifications and relevant references. The authors, even if disappointed, would greatly appreciate such comments.

When you suggest improvements in the writing, please be specific. If a particular passage in the text is unclear, please point it out and suggest improvements. However, if the whole paper or a major portion of it is poorly written, then say so; you are not expected to rewrite it for the authors. If you think that the paper has merits but does not match the scope of ICME, please articulate why in your review.

Please avoid referring to the authors by using the phrases “you” or “the authors;” instead use the phrase “the paper.” Please do not belittle the paper or the authors and avoid sarcastic comments. Even if you think that a paper is very weak, please still provide constructive feedback to the authors. The paper may have been written by a student or researcher who is submitting a paper for the first time. You do not want to crush their spirits.

If you notice unethical or suspect behavior, please notify the Program Committee as soon as possible.

Conflict of Interest

Please make sure that there is no obvious conflict of interest. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are the following:

  • You work in the same institution as one of the authors.
  • You have been involved in the work and will be credited in some way (e.g., you have hosted one of the authors in your lab, to carry out work related to the paper).
  • You have formally collaborated (e.g., written a paper together, or been awarded a joint grant) with one of the authors in the past three years.
  • You were the M.Sc./Ph.D. advisor (or advisee) of one of the authors, regardless of how many years ago this happened.
  • You have reasons to believe that others might see a conflict of interest, even though you don’t see one (e.g., you and one of the authors work for the same multinational corporation, although you work in different departments on different continents and have never met before).

In case you have any doubt about a potential conflict of interest, then please contact the Program Committee to determine how to proceed.

Confidentiality and Anonymity

As a reviewer, it is your responsibility to zealously protect the confidentiality of the ideas represented in the paper you review.

  • Please keep all copies of the paper strictly confidential. Please do not show your assigned papers to anyone else, including colleagues or students, unless you have asked them to help with your review, in which case also make them clearly aware of the confidentiality requirements.
  • Please do not use ideas from the paper to develop new ones until the paper has been made public.
  • Please do not disclose your identity to the authors.
  • Please do not ask the authors to cite your work unless your work is obviously relevant. Otherwise, this request is unethical. Area Chairs will be on the lookout for this type of behavior.

The Program Committee thanks you for your time and effort in upholding the highest ethical review standards and scientific quality of the papers presented at ICME.

Sources

In developing these guidelines, we borrowed many ideas and wordings from the following sources: