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IEEE VIS Reviewing
On a Path to Self-Destruction?
at IEEE VIS 2025, Vienna, Austria
Organizers: Petra Isenberg, Gunther Weber, Niklas Elmqvist, Narges Mahyar
This panel will examine concerning trends in IEEE VIS peer review content. We want to celebrate what works but also discuss how the current state of reviewing may be narrowing the field’s scope and even hampering scientific progress. We will discuss five key issues: increased gatekeeping that excludes emerging research areas, bias against incremental work, excessive demands for concrete guidelines, nitpicking over minor flaws, and subjective opinion-based rejections. These reviewing patterns threaten the multidisciplinary nature of visualization research and may contribute to declining submission rates. The panel will explore how the community can maintain its rigorous standards while fostering inclusive, constructive peer review that supports diverse research contributions.
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Panelists
Panelists
Helwig Hauser (University of Bergen, Norway)
Helwig was OPC for IEEE VIS and Editor-in-Chief at Computer Graphics Forum. Helwig has experience with diverse topics in visualization spanning across scientific and more abstract data visualization but is also closely involved with many application fields. As such, he brings valuable perspectives on the reviewing process at different visualization-related venues and viewpoints from the domain sciences.
Tamara Munzner (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Tamara served as an overall paper chair for VIS (2023 & 2024), papers chair for EuroVis (2009 & 2010), and IEEE InfoVis (2003 & 2004). She has been a member of the InfoVis Steering Committee, the Visualization Executive Committee, the reVISe committee, and many award committees for VIS.
Han-Wei Shen (Ohio State University, USA)
Han-Wei just ended his service as Editor-in-Chief at IEEE TVCG. During his time as EiC, Han-Wei saw a very large number of Visualization research papers and their reviews—including for IEEE VIS. He is currently a rotating program manager at the U.S. National Science Foundation and has significant insight on the impact reviewing decisions have on the field in the context of research funding.
Michael Sedlmair (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Michael has been IEEE VIS area paper chair twice and is currently in his second year as ACM CHI subcommittee chair (like an IEEE VIS area paper chair) for the Vis subcommittee. He is also an elected member of the IEEE VIS steering committee. Michael works at the intersection of AR/VR/XR and visualization and, thus, can give an interdisciplinary perspective on the reviews he receives for his own work.
Melanie Tory (Northeastern University, USA)
Melanie has been IEEE InfoVis paper chair, member of the IEEE VIS steering committee, and is currently Overall Papers Chair for the conference. Melanie’s work also takes on an interdisciplinary perspective giving her a unique view on the acceptance of this type of work and comparison to reviewing at other conferences related to the field.
Bei Wang (University of Utah, USA)
Bei served as a paper chair for EuroVis 2025 and is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). She has organized multiple Dagstuhl seminars on computational topology and topological data analysis, and served as the steering committee chair for Workshop on Topological Data Analysis and Visualization (TopoInVis). With a strong background in mathematics, she brings valuable insights to the review process, particularly from research communities with a mathematical focus.
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