Reviewer Guidelines

• Each submission warrants equal, thorough, and objective consideration.
• Judge and communicate professionally and technically only.
• Refrain from promoting your work for citation unnecessarily and exclusively.
• Keep all information obtained in the review process confidential.
• Reveal any potential conflict of interest quickly and transparently. 

Reviews and awards scores shall be based on the following criteria.

1. Pre-requisite: Good scientific practice
   • Review for plagiarism, reuse and related work
     • No plagiarism (including diagrams, results, text).
       • If you notice plagiarism, provide citation to the source that was plagiarized if possible.
       • No re-publication of existing work, results, texts without substantial additions.
         • Roughly, no more than 25% of paper should be previous work.
       • The authors must recognize related work (including his own) appropriately.
       • Submission should not contain heavy marketing.
         • Normally, a specific product name should be mentioned no more than once.
         • Focus must not be on a product, but on the concepts behind a product.
       • Reasoning should be objective.
       • Any majorly (AI) generated content of the submission must be clearly declared as such by the author.
   • Award: only submissions formally compliant to the accepted scientific practice can be published and considered for awards.
2. Fit and importance: Does the paper address an important problem?
   • Review
     • Is the topic interesting for the DASC audience?
     • Is the problem addressed important for the DASC community?
     • Does it fit at least one of the DASC’s fields of interest?
   • Award: Does the paper advance knowledge or significantly improve the state of affairs for some group of people?
3. Claims and soundness: To what extent does the paper solve the problem it describes?
   • Review
     • Is the problem statement valid?
     • Are sound results presented?
       • If the paper contains false or contradictory claims, point them out and ask for correction.
       • If they have claims that are hard to believe, ask for evidence.
   • Award: A summary of an already well-documented problem is of little value. A single paper very rarely closes the book on a single problem, but it may take an important step towards solving the problem. If the problem area is completely new or newly scoped (truly new), then perhaps the paper doesn’t really solve the problem at all, but rather articulates a new problem area for follow-on work, which would be a great, significant contribution.
4. Innovation: To what extent does the author contribute their own “intellectual nugget”?
   • Review
     • Are original thoughts, methods, results or conclusions presented?
       • If you see the author is missing some innovation, he/she could easily contribute, please tell him what you would like to see.
     • Are claims of innovation sound?
       • If you feel the contribution is partially already existing, tell the author why and where.
     • Are appropriate methods or data used?
   • Award: There must be original thought. If an author simply regurgitates existing publications into a consolidated summary, then they have not contributed original thought. A summary of existing work should be part of the paper, but not the entire paper.
5. Impact: How important is the main contribution or conclusion?
   • Review
     • Are the findings worth being published?
     • Are all relevant aspects present concerning the claim?
     • Complete and comprehensive -- is sufficient information given to understand and judge the submission?
     • Is reasoning comprehensible and sound?
     • Can others use the contribution?
       • If not, give feedback on what is missing to be useful for others.
     • Tell the author, what you think this submission could enable in future.
   • Award: Were the conclusions significant enough to warrant publication? All work is incremental to some degree, as everything builds upon the past. The author’s job is to convince the reader that their increment was important.
6. Authorship: How well was the paper written?
   • Review
     • Is the overall appearance of the submission acceptable.
       • Structure -- are the sections and paragraphs arranged in a logical and clear manner?
       • Content and sequence -- is it easy to follow and understand?
       • Are figures and tables clear and relevant?
       • Are captions given and appropriate?
       • Is every figure and table referenced and described in the text?
     • Are there language, grammar and spelling issues?
       • Respect that as an international conference, we have many authors for whom English is not their primary language
       • Provide suggestions when grammar becomes significantly problematic.
   • Award: Did the author use good grammar? Did the author provide a good introduction of the problem, perhaps with a summary of existing works on the topic? Did the author present a smooth flow of ideas? Did the author provide conclusions that support the initial problem statement? Were figures and tables clearly understood? Was the paper too short or too long to effectively communicate to the reader?

• Help the authors write an award-winning paper.
• Provide comments that realistically help the authors improve their paper.
• Every review should be constructive feedback to the authors.
• Even the very best papers deserve to have some suggestions for improvement.
• Abstain from generic feedback such as “good work”, “needs improvement”, “check language”, without details. Give concrete details that pinpoint the issues authors should address.
• Give reasons, why you like or dislike something, e.g. “I do not think inter-aircraft Bluetooth is important, because aircraft already have transponders.”
• Your textual feedback must be organized in three major blocks, i.e.  “points in favor”, “points against” and “revision instructions”.

5.1 Points in favor

• Identify strengths that motivate the acceptance of the submission, e.g.
  • What do you think will most interest the DASC audience?
  • What are the key strengths?
  • What do you think is the most important content?
  • What is the new contribution, e.g. new methods, new data, new knowledge, new application of a method or new problem?
  • What do you like about the presentation and style?
  • Point out important statements or claims.
  • What have you learned from the submission?
  • Is there a specific statement you liked?
• This shall motivate the authors to further improve, even when already good work
• Even when listing many points against (in next section), always attempt to provide at least some small encouragement to start.

5.2 Points against

• Identify and explain the weaknesses of the submission, e.g.
  • Why does the content not fit the DASC audience?
  • Start with positive feedback.
  • What information is missing?
  • What are wrong assumptions?
  • What are wrong conclusions?
  • If you find misunderstandings, provide your view to the authors to help them resolve the problem.
  • What is lacking in clarity of presentation?

5.3 Revision instructions (only during peer review)

• If you suggest a revision, please list the items that, in your opinion, must be resolved in the final paper, e.g.
  • “Please improve the motivation of your research, because I do not believe that …”
  • “Please consider the following papers in your related work ….”
  • “The title should be rephrased, because it claims more that the content offers. I suggest using …”
  • “Please rewrite paragraph 4 to because I did not understand why …”
  • “The term for discretization is missing in eq. 3.2.”
  • “Figure 7 has a very low resolution. Please use a vector graphic instead.”
  • “The plot in fig 4 is not appropriate, you should use a boxplot to show standard deviation.”
  • “Please consider adding the following analysis of the results …”
  • “There is a typo on p3 l23.”
• Avoid very generalized feedback, because the author will not be able to address your remark, e.g.
  • Not useful: “Language needs to be improved.”
  • Useful: “Language needs to be improved: Page 2, sentence 4 needs a verb, …”