Reviews are usually assigned automatically, but sometimes you need to step in. A reviewer may have a conflict of interest, someone may have been left off a bucket that uses manual selection, or a review may have happened outside Rhythm and needs to be recorded. This article explains how to view a submission’s reviewers and add, change, or remove one by hand.
When to Use This
Use this when you need to fix the reviewers for one specific submission. If you need to re-sort every submission in a space after changing bucket or team rules, see Reprocess Placement and Reviewer Assignment for a Space.
Prerequisites
- You need permission to view the submission before you can see the Reviews tab.
- Your Rhythm account’s Submissions setup must allow individual reviewer assignments before Manually Add Reviewer appears. You can still remove a reviewer when that control is not turned on.
See a Submission's Reviewers
- Open the space, go to Submissions, and open the submission.
- Select the Reviews tab.
Result
You’ll see a summary of the submission’s review bucket, current round, and status. After reviews exist, the summary also shows the average score, total score, and overall recommendation. Below the summary, each round has a table with each reviewer’s name, team, score, recommendation, and status.
Only people with a reviewer or administrator/reviewer role appear here. Someone assigned only as an administrator does not appear in this list, so you cannot remove them from it. The list includes everyone expected to review the submission in each round, including members of a whole team assigned to review that bucket. Because of that, some rows come from an actual assignment record and some do not. Only rows with an assignment record show a remove icon.
Reviewers and administrators have different responsibilities. Reviewers are assigned submissions to review, and they submit scores. Administrators do not submit reviews themselves. Instead, they can advance a submission to a later round, change its bucket assignment, and update its review status. You can limit which of those actions an administrator may take from review settings. Someone with both roles can do either.
A page layout you configured for the abstract does not change what appears here. For example, adding an abstract number to an abstract’s page layout does not make that field appear on this reviewer-facing panel. Page layouts and the Reviews tab are separate.
Add a Reviewer by Hand
- On the Reviews tab, select Manually Add Reviewer.
- Choose the Round, Bucket, and Team. If the space has only one team, it is already selected.
- Choose the Reviewer. If you chose a team, you can only select from that team’s stored members.
- Choose the Role: reviewer or administrator/reviewer. Only reviewing roles appear here, even if the person also administers the team.
- Choose a Status, add a Decline Reason if the status is declined, and add any Notes.
- Save.
Result
Rhythm creates a new reviewer assignment for that person, submission, and round.
Warning
Each person can have only one assignment per submission per round, across any team. If you set the status to reviewed here, Rhythm records the assignment as complete even though no review exists in Rhythm. Use this only when the work genuinely happened outside Rhythm, such as an email or paper review that you are recording now. Afterward, nothing else marks that assignment as unusual beyond the ordinary record of who last changed it.
Change or Remove a Reviewer
You can change an assignment’s team, role, status, decline reason, or notes. You cannot move an existing assignment to a different round or assign it to a different person. The round and reviewer identify the assignment, so Rhythm refuses changes to either one. Remove the assignment and add a new one instead.
- On the Reviews tab, find the reviewer’s row.
- To remove them, select the remove icon and confirm. To change the assignment, open it for editing.
Result
Removing a reviewer deletes the assignment record outright. There is no reason field, and the reviewer is not notified. If that reviewer already submitted a review, the review stays; only the assignment is removed.
If the same person appears twice for the same submission and round, you can remove one of the duplicate rows from this panel while the underlying cause is looked into.
In a round set up for manual reviewer assignment, the Reviews tab action to administratively submit a review on a reviewer’s behalf needs an existing reviewer assignment. If no one has been assigned yet, add a reviewer by hand first. That action will not move forward without an assignment in place.