Review Process

The review process is managed by the Earth System Governance International Project Office. This office invites the International Review Panel in collaboration with the conference chair.

The International Review Panel consists of senior scholars in the international and interdisciplinary Earth System Governance network, including members of the Scientific Steering Committee, members of the Earth System Governance Lead Faculty, Senior Research Fellows and experienced Research Fellows. In addition, for each conference the International Review Panel is complemented with a number of senior researchers from the country or region where the conference is held, as well as senior researchers from around the world who hold particular expertise in the specific topic(s) of the conference. The names of the International Review Panel will be published here after completion of the review process.

The review is double-anonymous. This means that the authors of the abstracts of papers submitted in response to the call for papers do not know which reviewer will review their abstract; and that reviewers do not know the author(s) of an abstract.

All formally correct abstracts are anonymized and randomly allocated to at least four different reviewers for the double-anonymous peer review. Reviewers grade the abstracts assigned to them on a scale from 5 (excellent/highly appropriate for the conference) to 1 (not appropriate at all), with the option (but not requirement) of adding qualitative comments. Reviewers are requested to aim at an average grade of about 3 for all abstracts assigned to them in order to further remove grader bias from the system.

For full panel proposals, all paper abstracts of the panel will be evaluated individually in the general double-anonymous peer-review of the conference, with the possible outcome that only some papers submitted for a panel might eventually be accepted. Only panels with three or more accepted papers will be included in the programme. If fewer than three papers for the panel are accepted, these accepted papers will be integrated into other panels.

Members of the International Review Panel can submit their own abstract to the conference. Due to the random allocation of abstracts to reviewers, it can happen that they will be assigned their own abstract or abstracts of close colleagues. In those cases and all other cases of conflicting interests, reviewers are requested to refrain from grading and mark the abstract instead as “conflict of interest”.

If an abstract receives grades from different reviewers that differ more than 2 points, an additional review is sought (by randomly allocating the abstract to yet another member of the International Review Panel).

Based on the grades received for each abstract from the International Review Panel, an average grade for every abstract is calculated, and the abstracts are then ranked accordingly. The best abstracts are accepted for presentation, whereby the total number of abstracts to be accepted is determined by the capacity of the respective conference.