--- name: recsys-review-process description: Use when explaining or planning around ACM RecSys peer review — the mutually-anonymous model with at least three PC members and a Senior PC overseer, the rebuttal phase, how the reproducibility-crisis culture shapes reviewer priorities, the offline-versus-online evaluation lens, and how acceptance leads to ACM Digital Library publication. --- # RecSys Review Process Use this to reason about review-stage strategy. Reopen the current Call for Contributions, the committees page, and any reviewer guidelines before making process claims — mechanics are cycle-specific. ## Process model - RecSys review is **mutually anonymous** (double-blind). Each submission is read by **at least three PC members** and overseen by a **Senior PC member** who synthesizes the recommendation. - There is an author **rebuttal** phase (2026: June 4-9) for a short clarifying narrative. - Reviewers weigh recommendation novelty, evaluation validity, reproducibility, clarity, and relevance to the recommender community — not raw metric wins alone. - The most useful reply is a decision-focused clarification that gives the Senior PC a clean rationale for acceptance or rejection. - Accepted papers are published in the **ACM Digital Library**, so camera-ready compliance and metadata matter as much as the initial decision. ## Who reviews here, and what they distrust - The pool is a **single-domain recommender community**: expect at least one reviewer who has internalized the field's reproducibility debate and will probe baseline tuning line by line. - Because RecSys is topically tight, matches are close and an under-tuned comparison or a leaky split gets caught rather than skimmed past. - Borderline offline-evaluation papers usually fall on one of three edges: baselines tuned less hard than the proposed method, a random split where a temporal one was needed, or an offline metric asserted to imply a deployment win with no bridge. ## Scoring leverage table | Review dimension | What raises it | What sinks it | |---|---|---| | Recommendation novelty | A named user/item modeling or evaluation idea | An architecture swap with no recommendation-specific insight | | Evaluation validity | Equal-budget baselines, temporal split, full-ranking metrics, variance | Untuned baselines, random split, sampled metrics reported as full | | Deployment relevance | Off-policy estimate, simulator, or A/B result | "Offline nDCG rose, therefore users benefit" | | Reproducibility | A runnable anonymous repository regenerating the tables | A promise to release code "upon acceptance" only | | Clarity | One notation source, honest limitations | Buried assumptions; a random-split protocol left implicit | ## Stage-by-stage realism - Initial reviews: triage by what the Senior PC would weigh, not by reviewer tone. - Rebuttal: the window is short; an early, precise narrative on the central evaluation objection beats a late line-by-line reply (see `recsys-author-response`). - Decision: the Senior PC synthesizes; one unresolved evaluation-validity objection outweighs several resolved clarity complaints. - Post-decision: ACM Digital Library publication means the rights form and metadata become the final gate. ## Vignette: reading a split decision Two reviewers like the method; one flags that baselines were tuned only on defaults. At RecSys that single objection is decisive because it maps onto the community's reproducibility anxiety — so the rebuttal must resolve *that* thread, with the equal-budget grid, before polishing anything the other reviewers raised. ## Output format ```text [Current stage] submitted / reviews / rebuttal / decision / camera-ready [Decision actors] [Likely leverage] [Forbidden moves] [Next response move] ```