SmartChair Manual

Service · Paper submission

Review forms & blind review

A review report is not free text — it is the conference's own review form, filled in once per paper per reviewer. Organizers decide its questions, and which answers authors ever see.

The review form

Organizers build the review form in the form system: scores, choice lists, and text fields in any structure the conference needs. Until the form has at least one question, the review configuration page warns that reviewing cannot meaningfully start. A sample of the form can be downloaded as an Excel file, and the same Excel version can be generated per paper and attached to reviewer invitations — useful for reviewers who prefer working offline.

Author-visible or reviewer-only

Every question carries a visibility flag. Author-visible answers appear in what authors and co-reviewers see of a report; reviewer-only answers (for example a confidential recommendation to the committee) are stripped from every author-facing page automatically. The flag is per question, so one form serves both audiences.

Blind review

With blind review switched on, author names and affiliations are hidden from reviewers everywhere: in the bidding list, the assigned-papers list, and the reports themselves. The organizers always see full information.

Report lifecycle

A report is Under review while the reviewer works on it, Completed once submitted, and can be reopened for editing until the organizers close the review period. Completed reports feed the decision step and, if discussion is enabled, are readable by co-reviewers of the same paper (author-visible items only).

Review results

The conference's result vocabulary is a short list the organizers edit — one option per line, with Accepted and Not accepted required. Marking an option as revision-allowed turns it into a “revise and resubmit” path: authors of papers with that result may submit a revised version before the revision deadline.

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