review_criteria.md

Suggested Review Criteria for SciPy Proceedings

A small subcommittee of the SciPy 2017 organizing committee has created this set of suggested review criteria to help guide authors and reviewers alike. Suggestions and amendments to these review criteria are enthusiastically welcomed via discussion or pull request.

Written Quality

• Prose should be written in English.
• Prose should clearly and consistently communicate the narrative (e.g. consistent tense and person; use of active voice; etc)
• The written style should convey information that furthers the knowledge or research of the reader.
• Due to the interdisciplinary nature of SciPy, highly domain-specific jargon should be avoided or explained where possible.
• Papers that do not meet quality standards may not be approved for publication.

Technical Content

• The technical content should be scientifically sound.
• Computational content should, likewise, be verified.
• The work should describe the development or use of python software for approaching a problem in a domain within the scope of the conference.

Novelty and Impact

• The work should employ new or innovative methods or approaches to a problem.
• The work should advance the state of a scientific domain, the practice of scientific computing itself, or another subject area within the scope of the conference.

Verifiability

• Software descriptions should be accompanied by references to or examples of representative source code.
• Source code essential to the conclusions of the paper should be made available to the reader.
• Data sources should be identified (e.g., with citation to a persistent DOI).
• Analysis should be accompanied by a workflow description sufficient to reproduce the results.

Other Requirements

• All mentioned software should be formally and consistently cited wherever possible.
• Acronyms should be spelled out upon first mention.
• License conditions on images and figures must be respected (Creative Commons, etc.).
• Mathematical and other symbols should be defined.
• Definitions should include consistent units where appropriate.
• Avoid long paragraphs of your rich text file to enable reviewers to target specific sections with their comments. GitHub comments are per line of text.
• Avoid custom LaTeX markup where possible.

Length

• The compiled version should be no longer than 8 pages, including figures, source code, appendices, etc.

Figures

• All figures and tables should have captions.
• Figure text should be of a readable size.

Code Snippets

• Code snippets should be formatted to fit inside a single column without overflow. Please make sure to check the build server's copy of your paper; it's the authoritative view of how your paper will appear.
• If not in Python, the language in the code snippet should be mentioned.
• Code snippets should follow a common style guide. PEP8 is preferred.