How is a Paper Evaluated

In recent years, PWRD has seen increased authors and reviewers from various countries and diverse research cultures. Many of them have different opinions on what constitute a high quality paper. In order to enhance the consistency, effectiveness and transparency of paper review process, PWRD has adopted a rubrics-based paper review scheme. The rubrics clarify the characteristics of an acceptable paper and the focus of paper review. According to this scheme, a paper will be evaluated from the following four aspects:

  • Quality of Subject: The specific problems/issues investigated by the paper must be meaningful and are not artificial. They are expected to have some technical significance to deserve investigation. In addition, the subject shall be relevant to the interest of PWRD reader community;
  • Quality of Contribution: The paper must contain original contributions that are innovative and have a potential impact to academic research, industry application or both;
  • Quality of Research: The research work conducted to support, validate, or demonstrate the paper’s contribution shall have certain degree of technical depth and scientific rigorousness;
  • Quality of Presentation: The paper’s texts and illustrations shall be able to communicate the contents effectively;

Since PWRD welcomes three types of papers (Research, Application and Review types), there are three sets of rubrics/criteria each corresponding to one type of papers. More details of the above criteria can be found by clicking this link: PaperReview-Guide

Authors are recommended to conduct self-evaluation using the above guide before submitting their papers. A paper is very likely not ready for submission if a honest self-evaluation gives it scores less than 4 (“acceptable”) in any one of the four aspects. (Experiences show that an author often rates his/her own paper higher while a reviewer often rates other’s paper lower). Improving the paper based on the guide first is likely to shorten the overall time for paper publication since the revised paper has a reduced chance to get rejected.

Information on how to improve paper writing is shown in the page “How to write a good paper”.

About Peer Review

PWRD use peers to evaluate submitted papers. There is no “higher authority” obligated to review papers. In the majority of cases, the reviewers are authors who have published or are publishing papers in the subject area;

In 2015, PWRD editorial board processes about 1500 papers/year or 120 paper/month. The volunteer workload is high. For example, each paper requires at least 3 reviewers. So the editorial board needs to find 2500 reviewers per year, assuming each reviewer is willing to review about 2 papers per year;

Unfortunately, there were only about 35% submitting authors (about 600) contributed to paper review in 2015. This is why the review system is overloaded;

To be fair to the PWRD community, it is reasonable to expect an experienced author to review 1~3 papers per every one of his/her papers submitted. This is because three or more reviewers have made it possible for this author’s work to get evaluated;

If authors do not contribute to peer review, none of their papers can be reviewed properly. The review system cannot function and this is a lose-lose situation. On the other hand, if most authors volunteer for paper review and perform good reviews, all authors will benefit from a more dependable review process. Helping others is to help you – the authors.