As your submission and review deadlines approach, it's important to be able to get an overview of how well the conference is progressing. TrackChair presents this information in colour-coded tables for quick reference. These tables show you the paper submission and review assignment status, both for the entire conference and broken down by track.
You can see an example of the paper submission table in the screenshot below. This table is displayed on the conference dashboard, the starting point for all conference administration. A similar table is shown to chairs of each track.
These status tables are integrated with TrackChair's paper search feature. You can click on any number in the table to find those papers. This makes it easy to quickly restrict a paper search to only accepted papers, or only papers from a given track. It also helps you to use TrackChair's paper set feature to work with many papers at once.
Review Status
Keeping track of submissions is useful, but being able to follow review assignment is vital. We understand the importance of this, and so TrackChair supplies a review summary page for both the conference and every track.
Reviews in TrackChair have a status property, which reflects what the reviewer has done. Reviews begin as assigned; if the reviewer or assigner cancels the request, they are labelled refused. Otherwise, the reviews are marked incomplete, and once all questions are answered they are complete.
These review status values map well to the stage of the conference. At the start of review assignment, most papers should have many assigned reviews; later, most papers should have incomplete reviews. At the review deadline, all papers should have two or more completed reviews.
The review status table reflects this by offering three views into review assignment. Using this page, you can find papers with too few reviews for the current stage of the conference. The table displays the number of papers with a certain number of reviews, and is colour-coded for ease of understanding. Red columns need attention, yellow columns are barely acceptable, and green indicates that all is well. This is shown in the screenshot below: click for a video demonstration.
You can get to the review status page from the link on the conference dashboard page. As you can see from the video, at this stage in the conference almost all papers seem fine: 5 have two reviews, and 271 have more than two reviews.
Using the drop-down status menu, we can quickly change the contents of the table to only count reviews with certain status values. Choosing "incomplete or completed" counts reviews where the reviewer has responded, and may have finished the review. This shows that 67 papers have two such reviews, and 196 have more than two.
However, as we approach the review deadline, it is best to count "completed" reviews only. This shows a different picture: 11 papers have no completed reviews, and 39 papers only have one. These need attention, so we could simply click on one of those numbers to take action.
For example, we could use use TrackChair's paper set feature to assign a TPC member or reviewer. Alternatively, we could inspect each paper in turn from the paper search page, assigning an appropriate reviewer after looking at more detail.
Keeping Track of TPC Members
At a lower level, TrackChair allows track chairs to follow the work being done by their TPC members. Delegation is encouraged to distribute the load, but following TPC member activity is still necessary. To do this, the track reviews page displays a list of TPC assignments and the number of reviews assigned to each paper.
This allows the conference organizer or track chair to notice overloaded TPC members, or those who are delayed in assigning papers. Click on the screenshot below to view a video demonstration of using this page.
The TPC reviews page is linked from the track dashboard. Again, the reviews are counted for each paper, and you can choose which review statuses are displayed. The page here starts with all active reviews, and shows that one TPC member has assigned 2 reviews per paper, while another has assigned 3. Both of these are fine for this early stage of the conference.
Choosing "incomplete or completed" reviews from the menu shows a different picture. All four papers here have too few reviews: two have 2 reviews, and the other two only have one. Changing again to "completed" reviews shows that the second TPC member's papers have no completed reviews.
If some TPC members are overloaded, you can remove the paper from their charge. Then, TrackChair's keyword system allows you to quickly assign a suitable TPC member to the paper.
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