REVIEW PROCESS
The MICCAI review process is based on the guidelines prepared by the MICCAI Board of Directors in order to ensure consistency over the MICCAI conference series. If you have questions please contact
The review is performed by two committees:
- External Reviewers provide an evaluation for a limited number of papers (around 6 papers per reviewer on average), each paper assigned to at least 3 external reviewers. The reviewers are recruited by the program chairs, and their competence is carefully verified in consultation with PC members and senior MICCAI scientists.
- Program Committee (PC) Members assign external reviewers and make final recommendations for a subset of submitted papers. The list of PC members can be found on the conference web site .
Each PC member acts both as a Primary and a Secondary PC member:
- Primary PC Member assigns the external reviewers. He/She knows the identity of the authors and manages the assignment of reviewers for about 10 papers. He/She leads the discussion process with the external reviewers. Primary PC member needs to ensure at least three solid reviews for each of his/her Primary papers, but does not make any recommendation or decision about these papers.
- Secondary PC Member makes recommendation. He/She does not know the identity of the authors and makes a recommendation for around 20 papers, which are a different set from his/her Primary papers. Each paper discussed at the PC meeting will have 2 independent recommendations from secondary PC members.
Note that terms “Primary” and “Secondary” do not represent their intuitive meanings. They just mean two different roles. Separating the above two roles may look complicated, but ensures to eliminate the bias in the recommendation of PC members by knowing the identity of the authors as much as possible.
The outline of the process and expected timeline is as follows:
- Assignment of PC Members (March 2nd - March 10th). Paper submission has closed. Each paper is assigned to one Primary PC Member and two Secondary PC members. The Primary and Secondary PC members are assigned based on the preferences of the author and the subject matter of the paper, both entered by the author in the paper submission form.
- Assignment of External Reviewers by Primary PC members (March 11th- March 19th). The Primary PC member assigns at least three external reviewers to evaluate the paper. These reviewers need to be selected by taking the conflicts of interest into account, by making sure that they are from different organizations and different regions/countries and finally that they include at least one senior researcher or highly expert in the subject. Primary PC members are asked not to only rely on keywords for selecting the reviewers and make additional efforts to ensure that they are the right peer reviewers for given papers.
- Review by External Reviewers (March 15th - April 5th). External reviewers work on their review without knowing the identity of authors. The Primary PC member monitors the build-up of reviews and contact reviewers if their reviews lack in content or tone.
- Early rejection (April 12th). The papers for which all reviewers recommend rejection are rejected with no further consideration. External reviews of those papers are sent to the authors.
- Rebuttal Submission (April 12th - April 16th). For the remaining papers, the authors receive the external reviews and are invited to submit a short rebuttal.
- Discussion among External Reviewers (moderated by Primary PC members) (April 12th - April 21st). The Primary PC member engages reviewers in a discussion, urges them to update their reviews, and produces a brief report about their discussion. The discussion consists of two stages, review sharing and rebuttal evaluation. During the first stage, the reviews for each paper are shared among the external reviewers, based on which they have discussion. The reviews must not be updated at this stage. At the second stage (after April 17th), rebuttals are sent to the Primary PC member and the external reviewers who carefully study the rebuttal and have further discussion. Based on the discussion, the external reviewers have to update their reviews (if needed). The purpose of discussion is not to reach a consensus among the reviewers but to eliminate misunderstanding and strengthen the reviews. Throughout the entire process, the Primary PC member refrains from influencing the external reviewers in expressing their unbiased and anonymous professional opinion.
- Recommendation from Secondary PC members (April 22nd - May 3rd). For each paper, the two Secondary PC members consider the external reviews, rebuttal, and discussion report and make a recommendation about acceptance or rejection of the paper and may also recommend the paper for oral presentation and awards. In making the recommendation, Secondary PC members do not know the identity of the authors and the external reviewers.
- Final Decisions (May 4th - May 19th). The program chairs compile all recommendations and the Program Committee finalizes decisions about acceptance or rejection, oral talks and award nominations during the PC meeting that will take place in Tokyo on May 11-12, 2013. The award winners are decided later by the MICCAI award committee chaired by a designated board member.
- Notification of acceptance (May 20th). The authors are notified about the decision. They will receive the anonymous reviews, without identifying the Secondary PC member and external reviewers. In case of a procedural error, the authors may submit a formal complaint to the Program Chairs who will promptly investigate the case.
- Preparation of camera-ready (May 21st - June 6th). The accepted papers must be finalized for publication in the proceedings. Final papers are due before June 6th 2013. Papers not received by this deadline will not be included in the program.
PC member tasks
- PC member tasks are summarized in the following document.
Miccai2013-PrimaryPCTasks.pdf