IEEE Security & Privacy Reviewer Guidelines
Reviewing for this magazine is different from reviewing for a conference or journal. Articles are approximately six pages and should be accessible to the broad spectrum of readers of S&P. Please review the author guidelines thoroughly to understand the scope, structure, topic, and other requirements for S&P manuscripts.
Computer Society reviewer guidelines can be found here. ScholarOne reviewer guidelines can be found here.
For your reference, we’ve provided a .docx version of the review form that the ScholarOne system will provide for you to fill in online. The main criteria are:
- Is the article of general interest for a wide spectrum of readers, particularly with regard to relevancy to S&P?
- Is the article presenting a topic in a very understandable way, but yet remaining at scientific level?
- What are the key points? Is the submission technically sound? What are its strongest and weakest points?
- Are the title and abstract appropriate? Does it contain the right references? Is it well-organized? How readable is it?
- Is the article presenting the state-of-the-art accurately? An article does not necessarily need to present completely new material. Many times material presented has been published and peer-reviewed somewhere else. For instance, an article about botnets could cover the state of the art and include an evaluation of the existing work and how the authors think better solutions should be or what could be the directions.
- Is the article a good short systematization of knowledge, if it represents a survey?
Review Process in ScholarOne
ScholarOne generates an email invitation to review in response to an editor’s selection of you, the reviewer. The email source is onbehalfof@manuscriptcentral.com, and the subject line starts with Invitation to Review for the IEEE Security & Privacy. So if you have agreed out-of-band with an editor to review, please look for this email and/or fiddle with your spam filter to let email from manuscriptcentral.com through. The email invitation will ask you to indicate whether you accept the invitation, decline the invitation, or are unavailable. Accepting the invitation will generate another email and put you on a schedule for reminders generated by ScholarOne.
The follow-up email will provide a direct link to the site where you can access the paper and fill in a review, and a link to the general ScholarOne site for S&P where, upon logging in, you select the reviewer role and are presented with a list of papers you’ve agreed to review but have not yet completed. Selecting the one that was just assigned takes you to the same page as the direct link.
The review allows inclusion of private comments to be seen only by the editor, and public comments that are communicated also to the author. The review allows you to include files you would like to present as part of the review, and asks for a recommendation from among Accept with No Changes, Accept if Certain Minor Revisions Are Made, Author Should Prepare a Major Revision for a Second Review, and Reject. Recommendation of a major revision implies your willingness to re-review a revision in the event it is presented.
