Peer reviewing is a fundamental part of the scientific publishing process. However, being a reviewer is not easy and being the author of a paper under review is not easy either. The talk discusses a few good (dos) and bad (don’ts) practices for both reviewers and authors of a submitted paper. To illustrate the ugly part, a fictional paper is described, along with a number of possible reviewers’ comments on it–based on the comments that I have actually received for some of my submissions. The aim of the talk is to encourage participants, as both reviewers and authors, to improve the overall reviewing process of scientific Empirical Software Engineering papers.

Sandro Morasca is a Professor of Computer Science at the Dipartimento di Scienze Teoriche e Applicate of the Università degli Studi dell’Insubria in Como and Varese, Italy. He was an Associate and Assistant Professor at the Politecnico di Milano in Milano and Como, Italy, and a Faculty Research Assistant and later a Visiting Scientist at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Maryland at College Park. Sandro Morasca has been actively carrying out research in Empirical Software Engineering, Software Quality, Machine Learning, Software Verification, Open Source Software, Web Services, and Specification of Concurrent and Real-time Software Systems, and has published over 30 journal papers and over 90 conference papers. Sandro Morasca has been involved in several national and international projects and has served on the PC of a number of international Software Engineering conferences and on the editorial board of “Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal,” published by Springer-Verlag.