Reviewer Instructions

Freeway Operations Paper Review Subcommittee Additional and Special Guidelines

In addition to the above general TRB paper reviewer guidelines, the TRB Freeway Operations Committee has additional and special reviewer guidelines as follows:

1. All reviews are due as soon as possible but no later than the deadline specified on TRB website, normally the middle of September each year.  TRB always stresses the importance of this deadline each year. 

2. To be recommended for PRESENTATION the author(s) should have useful and topical information that is significant and that most people in the field do not already know. 

3. To be recommended for PUBLICATION the paper should have content that is useful in either a theoretical or practical sense, and not already in the literature. 

4. If you cannot review a paper or do not feel qualified to do so, please contact us immediately, so that alternate arrangements can be made now.

5. Our role is to select papers which in our opinion contribute to the body of knowledge on freeway operations and management as either:  promising new theory, models or techniques, or good innovative applications of existing techniques/models.  Based on these criteria, a paper should be able to satisfy the "so what?" test, and increase the body of knowledge.  A paper which merely confirms well established theory or documents state-of-the-practice where substantial prior information already exists generally will not pass this test.

6. We need frank comments and reasons why the paper should (or should not) be presented/published. You do not need to write a long narrative unless you feel that the paper warrants it, and wish to do so.  Note that it is as important to give supportive comments as criticism where appropriate, as this will help to select papers which make significant contributions to freeway operations.  Constructive criticism of good papers will also assist authors in preparing final drafts for publication.

7. Your primary role is to judge the technical merit of the paper, not to re-write it.  You should not spend effort editing a paper that either requires much editing or is not acceptable in terms of content.  You may comment that a paper needs much editing, or if you spot minor spelling or grammatical errors in an otherwise good and well-written paper, this would help the author(s).

8. If you notice that the paper assigned to you for review this year was submitted to TRB committee(s) in previous years (or submitted to other publication and/or presentation outlets) and you happened to be a reviewer of the older (or similar) versions of the paper, please mention this fact in your review.

9. If you author/co-author several papers that were submitted to this committee for review, and you are selected as a reviewer of other papers based on your areas of expertise, then your load of paper reviews will be proportional to the number of papers you submitted for review by this committee.

10. All papers are handled electronically by TRB on their web site.

11. Please answer the question in the electronic review form which asks if the paper should be considered for an award.

12. Please try to be consistent when answering the detailed questions in the online evaluation form; specifically your detailed answers should reflect your overall assessment of the presentation and/or publication questions.  This is important so that the TRB's web site overall score will be reasonably consistent with the overall presentation and/or publication ratings.

We are grateful for your assistance.

Sincerely,

Haitham Al-Deek

Chair of Paper Review Subcommittee (TRBAHB20)