Review group chair: Managing and understanding your review

As a review group chair, your primary job during the review process is to encourage your reviewers to complete their reviews. This article will tell you what you need to know and show you the relevant tools you will need to complete your task.

(1) Viewing reviews 

Selecting 'Browse Submissions' from your card will take you to the List of Submissions in your review group where you can see the ongoing reviews as below:

1. The ID and the Title and of a submission.
2. The status of the review and review group report
3. Marking scheme configured for the reviewers
4. Statistics - the status of each individual review and percentage completion for each reviewer.
5. Shows the reviewers assigned to this submission.
6. (Optional) The name of the review group and the status of the report for you, as a review group chair, to complete

(2) Understand each review

When looking at your list of submissions for review, you'll see a submission with reviews that look something like this:

In this case, there are 2 reviewers assigned to this particular submission. One of the reviews seem to be colour coded. This guide will help you to understand what each colour represents and how you should do next next:

Green Reviews

A green review indicates that a reviewer has completed his/her review and no further action is required. You should consider reading the reviewer's comments, particularly the public comments (if applicable) as these comments will be shared with the submitting authors later on. Comments should generally be constructive and positive.

Orange Reviews

An orange review indicates that the reviewer has confirmed their intention to review the submission and their  review is in progress. You can send a reminder to these reviewers to complete the review using the Communication hub

Occasionally, you may see an orange review that contains submitted review scores. This indicates that the reviewer is either still working on the review or has completed their review. You may consider completing the review on their behalf.

Grey Reviews

A grey review indicates that the reviewer has not yet started or declined the review. These types of reviews are most concerning, as it means that reviewer has not responded to any of your emails. Initially you should consider    sending a reminder to these reviewers, but ultimately you may end up reassigning these reviews to another reviewer

(3) Managing review completion

As a review group chair, you need to ensure that reviews are completed. You can do this three ways

(A) Email reviewers to encourage them to complete, see more here.

(B) Replace reviewers who are not completing, see more here.

(C) Disable the review completely, see more here.