The iSchool Community: A Case Study of iConference Reviews

A fair review process is essential to the success of any scientific conference. In this paper we present an analysis of the reviewing process of the 2014-2015 iConferences as well as a demographic analysis of the iConference community as a whole. The results show a clear need for making the reviewer pool more representative of the iSchool community as a whole by including more women and more researchers from Asian institutions. Other recommendations are to improve the continuity of the reviewer pool and to provide clearer instructions to reviewers to ensure that written reviews explicitly cover all the aspects represented by the review scores. The results of our study provide the iSchool community with a descriptive analysis of its community and a better understanding of its review process.