Towards a More Structured Peer Review Process with Empirical Standards

Context. Empirical research consistently demonstrates that that scholarly peer review is ineffective, unreliable, and prejudiced. In principle, the solution is to move from contemporary, unstructured, essay-like reviewing to more structured, checklist-like reviewing. The Task Force created models—called “empirical standards”—of the software engineering community’s expectations for different popular methodologies. Objective. This paper presents a tool for facilitating more structured reviewing by generating review checklists from the empirical standards. Design. A tool that generates pre-submission and review forms using the empirical standards for software engineering research was designed and implemented. The pre-submission and review forms can be used by authors and reviewers, respectively, to determine whether a manuscript meets the software engineering community’s expectations for the particular kind of research conducted. Evaluation. The proposed tool can be empirically evaluated using lab or field randomized experiments as well as qualitative research. Huge, impractical studies involving splitting a conference program committee are not necessary to establish the effectiveness of the standards, checklists and structured review. Conclusions. The checklist generator enables more structured peer reviews, which in turn should improve review quality, reliability, thoroughness, and readability. Empirical research is needed to assess the effectiveness of the tool and the standards.