Technical Papers Reviewer Instructions

Thank you for agreeing to review a paper for SIGGRAPH. Your reviews have a direct and important impact on the quality of the most important conference in computer graphics. Your 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 login to the online subnission system using your standard submission account.

What to Look For
Look for what's good or stimulating in the paper. Minor flaws can be corrected and shouldn't be a reason to reject a paper. Each paper that is accepted should, however, be technically sound and make a substantial contribution to the field. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the Call for Submissions.

Ethics & Professionalism
Please read the ethics guidelines. It is extremely important that we uphold our reputation for treating ideas confidentially and professionally. By accepting a paper for review, you are guaranteeing to review all materials submitted in the approved formats: PDF for documents, QuickTime MPEG-4 and DivX Version 6 for videos (and don't forget to check for an audio track!), and TIFF, PNG, or JPG, for images. If you are not willing to make this guarantee, please recuse yourself from reviewing the paper.

You are also 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.

Blind Reviews
We are using blind reviewing again this year. Authors were asked to take reasonable efforts to hide their identities, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgments. This information will of course be included in the published version.

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: cite specific publications or public disclosures of techniques! The Explanation section is easily the most important of the review. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the 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. For more suggestions on writing your reviews, please read Greg Turk's web page on Writing Technical Reviews.

Online Review
To access electronically submitted papers and supplemental material, log in to the online submission system the same way you would to make a submission to SIGGRAPH 2009, using your existing electronic submission account. Once you have logged in, follow the "Access the Jury/Review System" link to view the papers assigned to you for review. If you have any questions or problems with the online review system, please contact:

Francesca Regan
SIGGRAPH 2009 Papers Program Administrator
papersadmin2009 (at) siggraph.org

If Francesca is not available, there are a few other people on the papersadmin2009 (at) siggraph.org alias who can also assist you.

ACM & Eurographics Digital Libraries
ACM and Eurographics have generously provided full access to their respective Digital Libraries for SIGGRAPH 2009 paper reviewer usage, effective 31 January through 5 April 2009. You are encouraged to make full use of these resources:

ACM Digital Library

Eurographics Digital Library

You must login to access the full text of an article. A username and password will be made available via our electronic review system to each person who has agreed to review a SIGGRAPH paper.

Timely Reviews
The deadline for completed reviews is 13 March 2009, unless your senior reviewer set an earlier deadline for your review. The Papers Committee has a lot of work to do after the reviews are in. Adhering to this deadline is extremely important. We will once again be offering an author rebuttal process this year preceding the Papers committee meeting.

When You're Done
When you have finished with your review, you should destroy any paper manuscript and/or supporting material (such as videotapes) you received, as described in the ethics guidelines. If you have written notes directly on a manuscript that you want to return to the author, send the marked-up paper back to the senior reviewer. Be sure that the marked-up paper is received by the senior reviewer prior to the review deadline.