Your Unofficial Guide to Reviewing Papers

This guide is an unofficial guide for academic paper reviewing, professional conduct, and academic writing quality at TU Delft.

📋 Table of Contents

1. Professional Conduct

   • Document Quality Standards
   • Collaboration and Feedback

2. Paper Structure

   • Standard Academic Paper Structure
   • Detailed Paper Structure Guidelines
     • Title
     • Abstract
     • Introduction
     • Related Work
     • Approach & Solution
     • Your Novel Theory / Experimental Setup / Architecture
     • Experimental Results
     • Conclusions

3. Document Reviewing

   • Three-Level Review Process
   • Review Checklist
   • Review Writing Guidelines

4. Understanding Professor Feedback

   • Common Symbols and Abbreviations

Professional Conduct

Document Quality Standards

Spelling and Grammar:

• Always spell-check your documents before distribution
• Use tools like ispell, detex, spell, latex2html, WinEdit, or Word
• Asking readers to fix trivial errors is discourteous

Document Structure:

• Page Numbers: Always include page numbers in documents and presentations
• Table of Contents: Essential for documents longer than a few pages
• Additional Lists: For large documents (theses), include:
  • List of figures
  • Terminology
  • Abbreviations
  • Symbols
  • Definitions
  • Theorems
  • Index (very helpful for long documents)

Collaboration and Feedback

Paper Submission Process:

1. Give co-authors sufficient time to review papers
2. Update git repository with submitted PDF in snapshot directory
3. Repeat process for final accepted version

Plagiarism Prevention:

• Clearly indicate when reusing text, figures, or data from other documents
• Avoid reusing text from your own papers in new papers (except extended journal versions)
• Self-plagiarism is not acceptable and leads to paper rejection

Paper Structure

Standard Academic Paper Structure

1. Title
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. Related Work
5. Problem Definition
6. Solution/Approach
7. Experiments/Evaluation
8. Results
9. Discussion
10. Conclusions
11. References

Key Requirements:

• Follow this structure for acceptance
• Reviewers expect this organization
• Deviations may lead to rejection

Detailed Paper Structure Guidelines

Title

• Nano version of the paper: What is it about?

Abstract

• Micro version of the paper, focusing on:
  • Problem
  • Novelty
  • Claims
  • Possibly some high-level results
• Content:
  • Trends (leading to the problem)
  • Problem statement
  • Novelty & claims (in terms of approach, solution, results)
  • [Optional] High-level results

Introduction

• Mini version of the paper, focusing on:
  • Problem
  • Novelty
  • Claims
  • High-level approach & solution
• Content:
  • Trends (leading to the problem)
  • Problem statement
  • Novelty & claims
  • Approach & solution
  • Structure of paper
• Note:
  • Repetition and recursion are useful
  • Explain the structure of your paper to the reader
    (e.g., at the end of the introduction, and by linking sections)

Related Work (or before Conclusions)

• Explain how your work:
  • Differs from,
  • Improves on,
  • Extends,
    other work
• Not just a list of other works!

(High-level Overview of) Approach & Solution

• This section can be skipped, especially in shorter papers.

Your Novel Theory / Experimental Setup / Architecture / …

• Short introduction, linking to the previous section
• Subsections
• Short conclusion, linking to the next section

Experimental Results

• Explain the reason for the experiments
  (Hint: to prove your claims)
• Then describe them
• Explain (not just describe) your experimental results
• Show that they prove your claims

Conclusions

• State that you solved the problem with your solution
• State that you proved your claims
• Include:
  • (Reminder of) Problem statement
  • (Reminder of) Solution (approach)
  • Results proving the claims

Document Reviewing

Three-Level Review Process

Level 1: 3-5 Minutes (Fail-Fast)

• Read only: title, abstract, conclusions, references
• Check: good English, clear problem, relevance, solution, citations
• Reject if any criteria not met
• Most people read papers this way

Level 2: 10-15 Minutes (High-Level)

• Also examine: figures, high-level approach, results section
• Check: solution understanding, experiment validity, claims proven
• Reject if criteria not met

Level 3: 1+ Hour (Detailed)

• Read everything, understand everything
• Almost no-one does this
• Reject only for real faults

Review Checklist

Content Verification:

• Do title, abstract, introduction, and conclusions match?
• Are claims in abstract & introduction justified?
• Is problem defined well?
• Is solution and concepts defined well?
• Are limitations and constraints defined clearly?

Structure and Presentation:

• Is paper well-structured with proper sections, layout, figures?
• Is English understandable?
• Is there a related work section?
• Is related work correct and fair to other papers?

Experiments and Results:

• Are experiments defined in sufficient detail?
• Are experiments presented well (understandable graphs)?
• Are conclusions from experiments justified?
• What is the novelty of the paper?

Review Writing Guidelines

Professional Conduct:

• Be polite and don't offend authors
• Write impersonal reviews: "the text is difficult to understand" not "I don't understand"
• Give suggestions for improvement
• Review to same standard regardless of venue

Revision Responses:

• Include cover letter thanking reviewers and editor
• Respond to each comment in detail
• Ensure each response results in visible changes

Understanding Professor Feedback

Common Symbols and Abbreviations

Approval Indicators:

• C: OK
• ~: OK-ish
• ✓: Good

Problem Indicators:

• ?: Unclear (larger = bigger problem)
• ×, n: Not OK (larger = bigger problem)
• ≠: Inconsistent, incorrect

Structural Changes:

• large ~ between words: Swap these parts
• \: Break into two paragraphs or lines
• ×: Join two parts (paragraphs, sentences)

Logical Connectives:

• ⇒: Implies
• /⇒: Non sequitur (does not follow)
• ∴: Therefore
• ∵: Because

References:

• ②, ①, ②: Text referred to later/elsewhere

Common Abbreviations:

• o/w: Otherwise
• w/o: Without
• w/: With
• p/pp: Page/pages
• def/(un)def'd: Definition/(un)defined
• emph/it: Emphasize/italicize
• ip/op: Input/output
• (dis)cts: (Dis)continuous
• reqˢ/respˢ: Request(s)/response(s)
• trans: Transaction
• beh: Behaviour
• eqn: Equation