Reviewer Instructions
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Thank you for agreeing to review a paper for SIGGRAPH Asia. Reviews have a direct and important impact on the quality of the most important conference in computer graphics. Reviews also help the computer graphics community as a whole to improve the quality of its research. To access review materials and the web review forms, please log in to the online submission system using your standard submission account.
Journal Papers and Conference Papers
The Technical Papers program has two integrated paper tracks: Journal (ACM Transactions on Graphics) and Conference. However, the submissions themselves are either Dual-Track (can be considered for publication either as a Journal or a Conference paper) or Journal only (considered for Journal publication only).
All submissions (dual-track and journal) are reviewed using a single scale (see Review Scores section). The recommendation on whether a submission is suitable for the Journal or Conference track is made after the review is complete, based on the following general criteria.
Journal Papers are expected to satisfy the ACM TOG criteria of excellence established over the years, and present original, well validated, and comprehensively described research advancing computer graphics and interactive techniques. Papers accepted to the Journal track will be published in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).
Conference Papers are expected to present original research advancing computer graphics and interactive techniques. However, the evidence supporting these advances (examples, experimental studies, comparisons, proofs, etc.) might not be as comprehensive as expected for Journal Papers. The length of papers accepted to this track is capped as outlined below. Papers accepted to this track will be published in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Proceedings.
In particular, when assessing a submission’s suitability for the Conference track, reviewers should be open to works that introduce new interesting problems, novel solutions to existing problems that are likely to improve on the state of the art, or any other types of contributions summarized below, especially if it has potential for opening new directions of research, even if the proposed work is not fully validated, lacks comprehensive ablations or analysis, and is only partially compared against alternative options.
Journal-only submissions can only be accepted to the Journal track and need to satisfy this track’s criteria to be accepted. Dual-track submissions can be accepted either as Conference or Journal Papers. We recommend that reviewers first decide if the paper’s overall contribution (in terms of advancement of the state of the art) merits acceptance to the SIGGRAPH Asia Technical Papers program and then, if the answer is positive (be it weakly or strongly), evaluate the paper’s completeness and degree of comprehensiveness to determine the track the paper should be accepted to.
What to Look For
Be fair, promote a broad range of substantial contributions to the area and look for what is good or stimulating about the paper. In the words of former chair Tony DeRose:
“An important factor in evaluating a paper is the degree to which it will inspire follow-on research. After all, we are looking for papers that will propel the field forward as rapidly and vibrantly as possible, while at the same time keeping us well-grounded academically. Finding the right balance obviously isn’t easy, but doing so will ensure that SIGGRAPH Asia remains a breeding ground for significant new areas of research.”
It is critical to keep an open mind for the types of contributions that do not fit the most common patterns of SIGGRAPH Asia apers; this includes, but is not restricted to:
- systems papers, which may not have a novel algorithm but describe a novel way to integrate multiple techniques into a system;
- experimental studies, which present the results of experiments relevant to the field, from perceptual studies to material measurements;
- novel datasets and benchmarks for evaluation and comparisons of algorithms, and machine learning applications;
Analysis of existing techniques and problems, if it is likely to inspire follow-on research and move the field forward.
Minor flaws can be corrected and should not be a reason to reject a paper. Each accepted paper should, however, be technically sound and make a substantial contribution. And remember that one of the reasons we introduced the Conference track is to allow for less polished but novel ideas to be published and published fast.
Ethics and Professionalism
Please read the Ethics of Review section below. It is extremely important that we uphold our reputation for treating ideas confidently and professionally. By accepting a paper for review, you are committing to review all materials submitted in the approved formats: PDF for documents; for videos, we strongly encourage MP4 and PNG or JPG for images. If you are not willing to make this guarantee, please recuse yourself from reviewing. You also are expected to make a reasonable effort to review materials in non-approved formats, but you are not under the same absolute obligation to do so.
Anonymity
We use double-blind reviewing. Authors are expected to strictly adhere to the anonymity policy. Authors were asked to make all reasonable efforts to hide their identities in the submitted materials, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgments. This information will, of course, be included in the published version should the paper be accepted.
One area where anonymity can affect your evaluation of the submitted paper is if the paper builds on ideas that were previously available in some prepublication form, for instance as a SIGGRAPH Talk, or as a technical report, a thesis, or an arXiv publication. The authors were instructed to avoid plagiarism and to cite their sources if they used ideas from someone else’s work. Authors do not cite their own prepublications of largely overlapping works to avoid revealing their identity (see Submission and Anonymity Policies). Reviewers should not deliberately try to discover the identity of the authors. Immediately following the submission deadline, plagiarism detection software will be run on all submissions, and the sorting team will further ascertain the originality of submissions during the sort when needed. If you as a reviewer have a substantial concern regarding the originality of the submission, please contact the Technical Papers admin before submitting your review. These concerns will be dealt with by the chair/advisory board, who will determine if the concern is valid and how to address it. They will inform you about the outcome.
Comparisons, Prior and Concurrent Work
Comparisons are important, but should not require unnecessary or excessive work.
The papers are expected to compare to relevant published peer-reviewed work, but this requirement should not impose undue burden on the authors, and preclude publication of highly promising contributions. Remember that different types of contributions require different types of validation and that not everything needs to be demonstrated on an end-to-end application or with a user study. Reviewers should weigh requiring comparisons, especially complex and time-consuming (e.g., perceptual experiments, algorithms/methods requiring substantial adaptation to the problem etc), against the likelihood that these comparisons will yield a result affecting the evaluation of the paper.
Experimental comparisons can be required only to publicly available code/data.
When requesting comparisons to prior work, please provide public links to the code/data for the work to compare to. If no such code or data is publicly available, do not expect authors to implement it, unless this is a minor change to an already implemented method for which the code is available, and limit the request to a discussion.
As a rule, do not request comparisons to non-trivial to implement, hypothetically possible approaches, or comparisons to adaptations of algorithms solving related, but distinct problems. If you have an alternative approach in mind that you consider preferable, this might be a reason to write a follow-up paper on this new approach, not reject the one under review.
Requiring comparisons that need non-standard resources harms inclusivity.
Required resources for comparison should not exceed those of a typical lab or already demonstrated in the submission. For example, requiring a comparison to prior work requiring access to an industrial-scale GPU cluster, a unique measurement device, or a high-end multimaterial 3d printer, would not be appropriate, unless the contribution of the paper already uses such resources.
Not everything available online is prior work.
Due to the number of new works posted on arXiv and other non-peer-reviewed websites on a daily basis, it is increasingly likely that you might find online reports that are highly relevant to the submitted work and that the authors were unaware of. Similar considerations apply to recent publications, e.g., work published several weeks before the deadline. The existence of non-peer-reviewed or recently published materials should not negatively affect your review of the submission. In particular, note that authors are allowed, but not required, to cite them as concurrent work without the burden of having to detail how their work compares or differs from these prepublications. If such preprints are not cited, authors of conditionally accepted papers can be made aware of these publications and asked to cite them in their final revision.
Be Specific
Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying “this is well known” or “this has been common practice in the industry for years” is not sufficient nor acceptable. Please cite specific publications or public disclosures of techniques, and if these do not exist or you cannot find them, entertain the possibility that the contribution is indeed novel. The explanation section is one of the most important parts of your review. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the Technical Papers Committee decide which papers to accept, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include any specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers.
Review scores
Each paper is evaluated as Strong Reject, Reject, Borderline Reject, Borderline Accept, Accept, and Strong Accept. The same scale is used for Journal and Dual-track papers, i.e., papers should be evaluated irrespective of submission type. The contribution of the paper is evaluated as a whole, including all aspects of the paper. For Dual-track submissions, the reviewer may recommend whether to accept the paper for the Journal or Conference track. The final recommendation to accept a dual-track submission as a Journal or Conference paper is made by the committee.
As the requirements for Journal papers are a superset of the requirements for conference papers, uniformly strong scores for a dual-track submission is an indication that the submission should be accepted as a Journal paper, with Conference track more suitable for papers that may have a greater variation of scores.
Online Review
To access electronically submitted papers and supplemental material, log into the submission portal the same way you would to make a submission to SIGGRAPH, using your existing online submission account. Once you have logged in, access the “Submissions & Reviews” portion of the site at the top of the screen, and use the links in your “To-Do List.” If you have any questions or problems with the online review system, use the “Contact Support” link at the bottom of the page.
ACM and Eurographics Digital Libraries
The Eurographics library is now open access, so you can access it freely during the review process.
ACM has provided full access to their digital libraries (ACM Digital Library) for SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 paper reviewer usage, effective 2 February–5 April 2024. You are encouraged to make full use of these resources:
You must log in to access the full text of an article. A username and password will be made available via our electronic review system to each reviewer.
Timely Reviews
The deadline for completed reviews is 28 June 2024. Adhering to this deadline is extremely important. In particular, the author rebuttal process starts immediately after the review deadline, where authors must be able to see the complete set of reviews.
When You Are Done
In previous years, these guidelines said, “After the review process, destroy all copies of papers and videos that are not returned to the senior reviewer and erase any implementations you have written to evaluate the ideas in the papers, as well as any results of those implementations.”
However, in 2012, SIGGRAPH introduced a new process for revised papers that were rejected from a previous SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH Asia conference, where the authors can choose to release the previous reviewers’ names so that the same reviewers can be reassigned. Therefore, there is a chance that you will be asked in the future to review such a resubmission and may need your notes, marked manuscripts, or implementations. You may keep them if necessary, but please be careful to insulate the ideas you learned from the review from your own research and from your colleagues and students. Also, please be aware that your reviews may be perused by future SIGGRAPH Asia reviewers.
