Reviewer assignment problem: A scoping review
Jelena Jovanovic Ebrahim Bagheri
Peer review is an integral component of scientific research. The quality of
peer review, and consequently the published research, depends to a large extent
on the ability to recruit adequate reviewers for submitted papers. However,
finding such reviewers is an increasingly difficult task due to several
factors, such as the continuous increase both in the production of scientific
papers and the workload of scholars. To mitigate these challenges, solutions
for automated association of papers with "well matching" reviewers - the task
often referred to as reviewer assignment problem (RAP) - have been the subject
of research for thirty years now. Even though numerous solutions have been
suggested, to our knowledge, a recent systematic synthesis of the RAP-related
literature is missing. To fill this gap and support further RAP-related
research, in this paper, we present a scoping review of computational
approaches for addressing RAP. Following the latest methodological guidance for
scoping reviews, we have collected recent literature on RAP from three
databases (Scopus, Google Scholar, DBLP) and, after applying the eligibility
criteria, retained 26 studies for extracting and synthesising data on several
aspects of RAP research including: i) the overall framing of and approach to
RAP; ii) the criteria for reviewer selection; iii) the modelling of candidate
reviewers and submissions; iv) the computational methods for matching reviewers
and submissions; and v) the methods for evaluating the performance of the
proposed solutions. The paper summarises and discusses the findings for each of
the aforementioned aspects of RAP research and suggests future research
directions.