Technical review template
The following is the review template used by the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal. Please use this template as you prepare your review of Fred Brooks' silver bullet article. You are to pretend that you are a reviewer for this article and it has just been submitted for review to this prestigious software engineering journal.
INSTRUCTIONS TO REVIEWERS
A. DEFINITIONS:For a contribution to be acceptable for publication in the Transactions either as a Regular paper or a Concise paper, Correspondence, or as a special issue , it must comprise novel material not previously published in a technical journal. The novelty will usually lie in original results, methods, observations, concepts, or applications, but may also reside in syntheses of or new insights into previously reported research. In a Regular paper, the title, abstract, introduction, and summary should be sufficiently informative to make the contribution of the paper clear to the broadest possible audience, and to place them in context with related work. A Concise paper is distinguished from a Regular paper in that it is shorter (usually no more than 12 double-spaced pages of text and figures). A Correspondence item is typically a short comment or response to a previous work published in the Transactions or may be a supported position statement on an area of software engineering in general (usually it contains no more than six pages of text and figures). A paper accepted for special issue (Regular, Concise, or Correspondence) should meet all the requirements of a Regular or Concise paper and should also be directly relevant to the theme of the special issue.
B. RESPONSIBILITIES: Reviewers must ensure that only high quality papers get into print and that the authors are protected from placing poor work into print. From that perspective, the reviewer should not only thoroughly read the papers to find flaws, but also make recommendations to the author as to how the paper might be improved. Reviews are in four parts:
1. A summary of evaluation
2. Recommendation
3. Comments to be withheld from the author(s). This section is optional. If you have comments for the editors to be withheld from the authors, please write them on the back of this sheet, or attach a separate sheet of paper.
4. Comments for authors. In this section reviewers should point out technical errors and make recommendations for improvements in the paper, give opinion about the relevance, importance and originality of the work, and review and provide opinions of the presentation style and English.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
REVIEWER FORM
Name of Reviewer:
Author(s):
Paper Title:
1. SUMMARY OF EVALUATION
2. RECOMMENDATION
applicable if the paper in question is itself a major revision of a previously reviewed paper).
3. COMMENTS TO BE WITHHELD FROM THE AUTHOR(S) (optional)
4. COMMENTS FOR AUTHORS (please attach additional pages as necessary)