Allocating submissions to reviewers

After the submission deadline has passed, now is the time to start reviewing the submissions. 

Step 1) Finalise the settings

First, you'll need to set up your review process, add a marking scheme and invite/add your reviewers.

Step 2) Allocate submissions

Once this is all done, find your Review Not Yet Started card on your dashboard and select Allocate Now to assign each submission to the most appropriate set of reviewer(s).

You will be brought to the List of Submissions. To allocate the submissions to reviewers, click Allocate Submissions.

As you can only allocate once in the system, we strongly recommend doing this once you have received all your papers and your reviewers have selected their topics. If that is all done, you'll need to click Yes, Allocate.

It can take a while to allocate all the papers, so please be patient as the progress counts up!

Step 3) Checking the allocation

Once the allocation is finished, you'll see the name of the reviewers assigned to the individual papers. You can now check and ensure you are happy with all the assignments. 

Star Rating

Each reviewer is given a "star rating" based in his/her suitability for the given submission. This rating is based on the number of topics shared between the reviewer and the submission. A reviewer with 3 stars has the maximum number of common topics shared with the submission. A reviewer with no stars has no topics shared with this submission. The star rating does not take a reviewer's intellectual ability, reputation or academic qualifications into account.

Workload

Each reviewer also has a workload rating, which represents the number of submissions assigned to each reviewer. In the example below, Flo has 1 submission assigned to them. You can tweak the allocation and manually reassign the reviewers by clicking on the reviewer name and selecting an alternative reviewer, inviting a new reviewer, or by deciding that a review is not required. 

Not allocated or Partially allocated submissions

It sometimes happens that not all your submissions get allocated. This is either due to:

• your allocations settings where the limit of submissions per reviewer is too low (you don't have enough reviewers per number of submissions)
• nepotism is enabled and the system couldn't allocate all submissions 
• the topic cover is not good among reviewers so the system couldn't match all submissions.

If this happens you can check the  All Statuses filter and find submissions that have been Partially allocated or Not allocated at all:

As explained above you can always manually reassign the reviewers.

Step 4) Begin the review and notify reviewers

Once happy, your next step is to notify the reviewers to start their tasks. We have more information in our guide here.