Before reviewers can score submissions, you set up four review pieces for the space: one settings record, rounds, buckets, and teams. This article explains how those pieces work together, the order that makes setup easier, and what “closed” means after a round deadline passes.
The Four Pieces
Review settings are the one settings record for the whole space, found at Spaces › Setup › Reviews › Settings. On this record, you choose the round where new submissions start and the bucket they use by default. You also choose the review form, the submission layout reviewers see, the scoring criteria, and whether reviewers must give an overall recommendation. The same settings record includes reviewer and team administrator instructions, what team administrators may do in the Portal, whether reviewers are emailed automatically, and the rules that place new submissions into buckets. Every space has exactly one review settings record.
Review rounds are the stages a submission moves through, such as “First Reading” followed by “Final Panel.” Each round has a status of not yet open, open, or closed, plus an optional deadline. For every bucket in the round, you choose which team reviews it and how reviewers are chosen. Manage rounds at Spaces › Setup › Reviews › Rounds, where you can create a round, open one to edit it, delete one, or drag rounds into a new order.
Review buckets are named groups of submissions inside the space, such as a track or category. Buckets send each group to the right review team because each round decides, bucket by bucket, which team reviews it. New submissions land in a bucket through the space’s placement rules or, when no rule matches, the space’s default bucket. Manage buckets at Spaces › Setup › Reviews › Buckets, where you can create, edit, delete, and reorder them just like rounds.
Review teams contain the people who do the reviewing. Each round’s bucket assignment points to one review team.
If reviewers should see a presenter’s organization or title alongside a submission, Rhythm does not fill in those details automatically. Create abstract custom fields for those attributes and add them to the abstract process, just as you would for any other custom field reviewers need to see.
Setup Order Matters
Review setup is one part of a working submission workflow. Before you set up buckets and rounds, a space generally needs these pieces in order: any custom fields the submission or abstract should collect, at least one submission form, the space itself, and then a submission process and submission type so the form is usable in the Portal. After those pieces are in place, you can set up reviews.
Set up buckets before rounds and settings because both need buckets to exist first. A round needs buckets so you can assign them to teams, and the settings record needs a default bucket. For the smoothest setup, create your buckets first, then review teams, then rounds, and finish with review settings.
Rhythm’s setup checklist follows the same order. At the bottom of a space’s setup overview, under “What about reviews?”, every space shows these six steps:
- Configure at least one review bucket.
- Set up the review teams.
- Configure at least one review round.
- Finalize the review settings.
- Populate the space.
- Install the Reviews feature in the Portal.
This checklist always shows the same six items for every space. It does not track what you have finished, so use it as a setup map rather than a progress tracker. A separate, one-time action enables and initializes reviews for a space. After reviews have already been enabled and initialized for that space, that action no longer appears, unlike the checklist above it.
Step 6, installing the Reviews feature, is separate from installing the Abstracts feature in your Portal or microsite, even for an event that already has Abstracts installed. Initializing a space’s review setup does not add the menu items members need to review. Install the Reviews feature too, or those menu items stay missing.
Some older training material refers to a “Review Process” instead of the “Submission Process” and “Approval Process” used here. If you see that older wording, treat it as referring to this same setup rather than a separate, missing step.
Tip
Two review spaces can show the same label, but each still opens the correct underlying space. A duplicate display name by itself does not mean your review setup is wrong. Open each button and check which space it loads.
Tip
Saving review settings does not change anything that already exists. A new scoring criterion does not update reviews that were already submitted, and a new placement rule does not move submissions that were already placed. If you change placement rules and want existing submissions sorted again, you need to reprocess them.
Buckets, Rounds, and Deleting Things
A bucket can be referenced in three places: the review settings’ default bucket, any placement rule that targets it, and each round’s bucket assignment. When you save a round from the Console, the round records an entry for every bucket in the space. Because of that, a bucket that has appeared in a saved round may be hard to delete until you edit each of those rounds so it no longer references the bucket.
Deleting a space also removes its review settings. However, a space with rounds or buckets still configured may not be deletable until you clear them out, because those round and bucket records can still hold onto the space.
Is a Round Still Open After Its Deadline?
You set a round’s status to not yet open, open, or closed. Rhythm does not update that status automatically. After the deadline passes, Rhythm treats the round as closed for reviewers and refuses new reviews for that round, but it does not change the saved status. That means a round can still show a status of open after its deadline has passed.
Warning
Do not rely on a round’s status column alone to know whether reviewers can still submit. Check the deadline too. If you want a round to clearly show as closed after its deadline passes, change its status yourself; Rhythm will not do it for you.
To check a round’s progress without opening the full review dashboard, open the round’s overview page at Spaces › the space › Reviews › the round’s name. This read-only view shows which team is reviewing each bucket, which submissions are in the round, and which reviews are in, outstanding, or declined.
Related
To learn how this setup sorts a submission into a bucket and gives it reviewers, see How a Submission Gets Its Bucket and Its Reviewers. To learn how expected reviewers and review status are tracked after rounds and buckets are in place, see How Expected Reviewers and Review Status Work.