Our paper "Designing Incentives for Attracting Peer Reviewers to Information System Conferences," with Arthur Carvalho and Chad Anderson has been just recently accepted at the Communications of the Association for Information Systems journal. It reflects on the current situation of reviewing in IS conferences and formulates suggestions how the problems can be addressed through incentivising high-quality reviews.
Abstract:
⚪️ Information systems (IS) conferences, as venues for the introduction of new knowledge to the IS community, require effective peer review systems to evaluate submitted research for quality, validity, and originality.
🔴 We argue in this paper that questionable practices and degrading review quality may arise without direct incentives beyond reviewer altruism to engage in the peer review process. In particular, we highlight potential issues with arguably common practices in some IS conferences, such as peer review invitations sent to researchers who have also submitted papers for publication consideration and the increasing number of reviews performed by graduate students.
🟢 To address these issues, we suggest three solutions: 1) quid pro quo rules; 2) the use of incentive-compatible methods whose scores are linked to relevant rewards; and 3) the use of blockchain-based tokens in tandem with smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs. We conclude by offering directions the IS community can take to further study the highlighted issues and implement the proposed solutions.
🔗 Here is the link to the full paper.
