For each bucket in a round, you choose the review team and the strategy Rhythm uses to assign reviewers from that team. Use these settings for round-robin distribution, manual assignment, and custom assignment functions.
Prerequisites
- A review team must already exist in the space for each bucket you want to assign.
- For a custom-logic strategy, the integration function you want to use must already exist in your Rhythm account.
Where to Find It
Open a round at Spaces › Setup › Reviews › Rounds, then find the bucket you want to configure under Bucket Assignments. You can also choose the team that reviews a bucket from the bucket’s edit screen at Spaces › Setup › Reviews › Buckets. The bucket screen only sets the team; you choose the strategy, such as round robin, manual, or custom, on the round.
Automatic reviewer assignment for a new submission uses the round set as the space's starting round. See Review Settings for a Space for that setting. If you clone a space or reuse last year's setup, confirm that the starting round points to the current round before you rely on automatic assignment. If it still points to a prior round, Rhythm pulls reviewers from that round's bucket assignments instead of the one you meant to use.
Reviewers Cannot Be Assigned Individually — Only Through a Team and a Bucket
Rhythm assigns reviewers through teams and buckets, not directly to individual people. A reviewer must belong to a review team, and that team must be assigned to a bucket before the reviewer can review submissions in that bucket. You cannot assign a person to review submissions outside of a team, and each bucket has exactly one review team per round. If different groups should review different sets of submissions, create multiple buckets and give each bucket its own team instead of splitting one bucket across teams.
If you use one bucket for every submission, every member of that bucket's team can see every submission because there is no narrower grouping to keep them apart. That can be the right choice when segmentation does not matter, but it removes the separation between groups of submissions that reviewers would not otherwise see.
You cannot hide one specific abstract from one specific reviewer within a shared team. To keep a reviewer from evaluating their own submission, use a bucket assignment rule in Review Settings to route that submission to a bucket the reviewer is not assigned to. You need a separate rule for each reviewer this applies to.
If a submission needs review by more than one group in sequence, move it from one bucket to the next after the first group's review is complete. This is a manual step using the space's review settings, not something Rhythm does automatically between buckets.
The Strategies
| Strategy | What it does | Extra settings |
|---|---|---|
| Assign a Team | Every member of the team reviews every submission in the bucket | — |
| Round Robin Assign Reviewers | Rhythm shares submissions across the team’s reviewers, with a set number of reviewers for each submission | Reviewers per Submission: (required, at least 1); Distribute reviewers to avoid assigning the same group to multiple submissions whenever possible (optional) |
| Manual Assignment | Rhythm does not assign anyone automatically; you add reviewers to each submission by hand | — |
| Custom Logic/Lambda Function | An integration function built by Rhythm's services team chooses the reviewers | Lambda Function: (required) |
Assign a Team is the default strategy for every new bucket assignment.
Round Robin: Reviewers per Submission and Spreading
For round robin, Reviewers per Submission sets how many reviewers from the team each submission needs. Use it when you want, for example, exactly two reviewers per abstract. Round robin spreads assignments as evenly as possible across the whole team, rather than limiting how many submissions one reviewer can receive. Round robin never assigns a reviewer to their own submission.
Turn on Distribute reviewers to avoid assigning the same group to multiple submissions whenever possible when you want Rhythm to avoid putting the same small group of reviewers together on many submissions. Rhythm uses this option only for round robin; it has no effect with the other three strategies. If your team is dynamic, such as a team built from an organization or committee instead of hand-picked members, this spreading is less reliable than it is for a hand-picked team.
Warning
Round-robin assignment has not always assigned reviewers reliably. Some submissions have been left without any assigned reviewer, even after bucket assignment was reprocessed. Treat round robin as a newer strategy, and test it carefully with a handful of submissions before you rely on it for a whole space.
Warning
A round-robin bucket can show the same reviewer more than once on a submission's Reviews tab after an administrator submits a review on that reviewer's behalf. This has not been reproduced with Assign a Team or Manual Assignment. If you see a duplicate reviewer entry, it is a display issue on that submission's Reviews tab, not a sign that the reviewer was assigned twice.
Manual Assignment
When you choose manual assignment for a bucket, Rhythm does not add reviewers to submissions automatically. Someone still needs to add reviewers by hand for every submission in that bucket. Rhythm does not remind anyone when a submission is waiting for reviewers, so make sure your team checks for unassigned submissions regularly.
If you switch a bucket from round robin to manual assignment, you may need to reopen the round and save it again using its override option before you can add reviewers by hand. Simply changing the strategy field is not always enough on its own.
If your goal is to stop reviewer notification emails, turn off the reviewer notification email in Review Settings instead of changing the bucket assignment. Changing the default bucket or a team's assignment only changes who is placed in line for review; it does not, by itself, turn off notification emails.
Custom Logic
If your Rhythm account has an integration function that chooses reviewers, you can select it as the bucket’s strategy. If the function fails when it runs, Rhythm only logs the failure. Staff do not see a Console message that reviewers were not assigned, so check that submissions in a custom-logic bucket are getting reviewers after you turn this on.
Minimum Reviewers for a Team Assignment
Some accounts have a feature-flagged setting for a bucket assigned to a whole team. Instead of requiring every team member to review, you can say how many team members must review each submission. This question appears only after the feature is turned on for your Rhythm account, and only for a bucket using the Assign a Team strategy. Its exact effect on a reviewer's queue and dashboard counts has not been confirmed for every account, so confirm with Support before you rely on it in a live space.
What's Not Supported
Rhythm does not provide a separate setting to randomly distribute abstracts or other submissions across reviewers or across every bucket in a space. It also does not cap the number of submissions assigned to one team before assignment moves to the next team. Bucket assignment rules and the strategies above are the only ways Rhythm matches submissions and reviewers. There is also no built-in way to match reviewers to submissions by topic or area of interest.
Review rounds are sequential for a given submission. Everyone on the assigned team must complete their review in one round before the submission moves to the next, and a submission cannot be reviewed in two rounds at the same time. Rhythm also has no easy way to advance many abstracts to the next round at once; moving submissions between rounds is effectively a one-at-a-time action.
If you need the same bucket reviewed by different teams over time rather than at the same time, use multiple review rounds as the closest supported approach. Assign the bucket to one team in one round, and to a different team in another round. This gives you staged, team-based routing, but not randomized reviewer allocation.
Dependencies and Precedence
Warning
Saving a bucket from Manage Review Buckets resets that bucket’s strategy in every round back to Assign a Team. This discards any round-robin count, spreading choice, or custom function you had set. It happens every time you save the bucket, even if you only rename it. If you have configured round robin or custom logic for a bucket, re-check and re-set that round’s strategy after anyone edits the bucket.
- The team assigned to a bucket in a round must belong to the same space. Rhythm refuses a team from another space when you save the round.
Permissions
Setting a bucket’s strategy on the round requires submissions:user:review-rounds:*. Choosing a bucket’s team from the bucket’s own screen requires submissions:user:review-buckets:*. Because saving a bucket rewrites round data as described above, a staff member who can edit buckets but not rounds can still affect round-level assignment this way.
Validation and Errors
Round robin requires Reviewers per Submission. If you leave it blank, Rhythm refuses to save the round. Custom logic requires a selected function, and Rhythm also refuses to save when that field is blank. If no team member is eligible when round-robin assignment runs for a submission, assignment fails with an error instead of silently skipping that submission.
Tip
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