CSCW Reviewer Mentor Program

The CSCW Reviewer Mentor Program is intended to create an opportunity for students to participate in the CSCW review process while getting guidance from senior reviewers. The idea is that a small pool of students within the CSCW field are matched with CSCW review mentors, who agree to support the student in writing good reviews. This has three purposes. First, PC members who choose a student reviewer within the mentor program will know that the student will do a good review, since the mentor will see to that. Second, students will have the opportunity to get feedback and discuss the reviewing process with the mentor and therefore become a better reviewer. Third, the students will become expert reviewers for future CSCW conferences!

Update! (June 5, 2014)

CSCW 2015 Reviewing Mentor Program Participants

The final selection of student reviewers and mentor volunteers are done, and inclosed is the complete list of all student reviewers and their mentors. Please use this list when assigning reviewers. Basically the intended way of using the list is as follows. As PC member you are looking for reviewers to a particular paper, you open the list of available reviewers in the PCS system and see how some of possible reviewers fitting the criteria of the paper are not someone you know. Therefore you look at the student reviewer list and properly you will find the name here, and thus you know that the student will be committed to do a great work, as well as getting excellent supervision in doing so. Thus, you can choose to assign the reviewer to your paper.

Instructions, Tricks and Trade in making CSCW reviews

This document contains tricks of the trade in making CSCW reviews, including overall structure, possible relevant links, and so on. The document is created with the aim of assisting and supporting new CSCW reviewers to the field but can also be used by others.

Other helpful resources are Dan Cosley's blog post "How I review papers" and Dave Randall's reflections on reviewing for CSCW.

If you have any additional interesting tricks of the trade you would like to share, please email the student reviewing chair, and if applicable it will be included in the instructions.

How do I sign up as a Student Reviewer?
(Deadline June 1, 2014)

Have a mentor? Make an agreement with a senior reviewer (could be your supervisor or other local people in your department), and then send an email to studentreviewmentor2015@cscw.acm.org with the following information:

  • Basic information: Student review mentee name, affiliation, email, 5 topic keywords
  • Your review mentor name, affiliation, and email
  • Sign-up as a reviewer in the PCS-system

Do not have a mentor? If you do not have a formal agreement with a senior reviewer, you can sign-up for one by emailing the following information to studentreviewmentor2015@cscw.acm.org:

  • Basic information: Student review mentee name, affiliation, email, 5 topic keywords – a short bio (5 sentences), including why you are signing up, and what your expectations are

How do I sign up to be a review mentor?
(Deadline June 1, 2014)

For this to be a success we really need mentors! To sign-up as volunteer to be a review mentor, please email studentreviewmentor2015@cscw.acm.org the following:

  • Name, affiliation, email, how many students you volunteer to mentor and up to 5 areas of expertise to help match you with a student.

We will match mentors and mentees based upon student requests (maturity, engagement, and motivation) and mentor areas of expertise.


How will program committee members assign student reviewers?

We will complete a table of student reviewers and mentees, which will be circulated to the CSCW PC, who can use the list to find and assign reviewers for their papers.

All mentors and students will be acknowledged at the CSCW2015 conference.


Why a mentoring review program?

The increasing numbers of submission for CSCW as well as the revise & resubmit process entails that we are dependent on a large number of good reviewers who are willing to provide expert feedback and engage with authors on their work.

In former CSCW surveys students have stated that despite volunteering to review for CSCW they are not often chosen by PC members for reviewing tasks.

Questions can be directed to Pernille Bjorn, Chair for the Student Review Mentoring pilot at studentreviewmentor2015@cscw.acm.org


Student Review Mentoring Chair

Pernille Bjorn, IT University of Copenhagen
studentreviewmentor2015@cscw.acm.org