# Panel Proposal: IEEE VIS Reviewing -On a Path to Self-Destruction?

Petra Isenberg, Gunther Weber, Niklas Elmqvist, Narges Mahyar

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Petra Isenberg, Gunther Weber, Niklas Elmqvist, Narges Mahyar. Panel Proposal: IEEE VIS Reviewing -On a Path to Self-Destruction?. 2025. hal-05424383

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# Panel Proposal: IEEE VIS Reviewing — On a Path to Self-Destruction?

Petra Isenberg*

Gunther Weber†

Niklas Elmqvist‡

Inria, Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Aarhus University

Narges Mahyar§

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

## ABSTRACT

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.

**Index Terms:** visualization, peer review, reviewing.

## 1 PANEL TOPIC

Scientific peer review determines what research IEEE VIS publishes. As the flagship conference for the visualization community, what is accepted at the conference has a dramatic impact not only on the field but also on the careers of our community members, the grants they receive, the awards they win, and the promotions they are given. It is important, therefore, that we take a step back and consider the state of peer review in our community, changes that have occurred, patterns we observe, standards we want to uphold, and improvements that could be made. Now is a good time to do so because scientific communication in our field has been disrupted in multiple ways: both larger changes such as remote or hybrid conference or the new area model, as well as smaller ones such as going down to just a single external reviewer. Furthermore, for the first time in a long time, the IEEE VIS conference saw a reduction in submission compared to the previous year: 558 full submissions in 2024 and 538 in 2025, while other conferences such as CHI have seen up to a 20% increase in submissions to the Visualization subcommittee.

In this panel, we want to discuss how reviewers currently assess papers, positive and negative aspects of the content of reviews, implicitly held beliefs of reviewers, or the types of demands they make. As such, this panel is not about the format of peer review (number of reviewers, blind reviewing, etc.), but the content of peer reviews and how it seems to have changed over the last couple of years. The organizers of this panel have seen several negative trends that are worth discussing while keeping in mind the deep engagement we often see from peer reviewers in our community:

**Increased gatekeeping:** Reviewers seem to have become increasingly narrow-minded about what is or is not visualization research [2]. Reviewer comments of “out-of-scope” are, certainly not a new phenomenon (we recall rejections of papers as being “too much about interaction” or “too social science-oriented.” Yet, now new and emerging topic areas seem to be hit such as work on novel display types (smartwatches, phones, XR), AI, or databases. This trend is worrisome as visualization is by design a multi-disciplinary field. VIS should be the place where all areas with an interest in visual data representations comes together. Many researchers have put tremendous effort into promoting wider topics via workshops, tutorials, or recruiting domain experts. Yet, “out-of-scope” reviewing remarks will lead to (and have already led to) researchers leaving the VIS conference. There is a need to more broadly discuss what is really in and out of scope and whether we are seeing a trend at IEEE VIS for the accepted papers to become increasingly narrow rather than broad and inclusive.

**Going deep vs. going wide:** Reviewers seem to increasingly have a tendency to shoot down work for being incremental. Yet, don't we need incremental research to make progress? Are small improvements of rendering algorithms, study methodologies, visual representations, and so on, worth less than a novel but perhaps unrefined idea? By rejecting incremental work, are we excluding people who do not jump from one novel topic to another but who really dig deep into understanding a phenomenon?

**Give me guidelines:** It is tremendously common for reviewers to demand concrete takeaways or guidelines from a research paper, even if forming concrete guidelines is not appropriate given the stage of the work or because the results are complex and cannot be broken down into simple guidelines or take-away messages. In a recent Dagstuhl seminar on visualization design guidelines [1], community members spent considerable time discussing this issue; showing its relevance to the field more broadly. A perceived focus of or requirement for concrete guidelines can severely impact the types of work that is submitted and accepted.

**Nitpicking:** The IEEE VIS reviewing guidelines state: "We do not want the conference to consist of work with the fewest flaws; we need to weigh the possible significance of the work and the degree of ambition alongside the extent to which it is described, compared, and validated." Yet, it seems that reviewers have over the years become increasingly concerned with small and easily fixed details such as a forgotten citation, the use of terms such as representation vs. visualization, a specific color scale choice, etc. We need a broader and shared understanding of what "flaws" should lead to rejections.

**Opinions over objectivity:** Are reviewers becoming more opinionated? In a recent set of reviews received by the organizers, a number of reviewers stated that they did not “believe” the work was going to get used, be worthwhile, or be relevant to the visualization field, etc. Expressions of beliefs in

<footnote>*e-mail: petra.isenberg@inria.fr</footnote>

<footnote>†e-mail: ghweber@lbl.gov</footnote>

<footnote>‡e-mail:elm@cs.au.dk</footnote>

<footnote>§e-mail:nmahyar@cs.umass.edu</footnote>
scientific reviews are worrisome as they seem to indicate rejection based on subjective feelings and opinions rather than objective criteria or well-justified concerns.

## 2 PANEL FORMAT

Assuming a 90-minute slot, we propose the following schedule:

* 0-10 mins: Introduction by the organizers;

* 10-50 mins: Short panelist presentations (8-10 mins each);

* 50-85 mins: Q&A from audience and moderators; and

* 85-90 mins: Wrap-up by the organizers.

We will use Slido to enable the audience (potentially hybrid) to post questions and up-vote favorites. Given the relevance of the topic to a large number of community members, and the potentially emotionally charged theme, we will already circulate the slide before the conference via email lists. This will allow our panelists to prepare answers and potential data to refute or prove hypotheses posed by the audience. The panel organizers will serve as moderators and also prepare questions to get the discussion going, if needed. A live microphone will be provided for anyone who wants to ask a specific question live to the panel. The organizers will create a website for the panel with information on the panel itself, its schedule, and how to ask questions.

## 3 PROSPECTIVE PANELISTS

The panel will include panel presentations from community members who are in close contact with the peer review system. Specifically, we will invite journal EiCs and representative paper chairs from IEEE VIS, EuroVis, CHI, or PacificVis. The following panelists have agreed to join, should the panel be accepted.

**Han-Wei Shen** is the current 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** has been IEEE VIS area paper chair twice (in the Data Transformations area) and is currently in his second year as ACM CHI subcommittee chair (like an IEEE VIS area paper chair) for the Visualization 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** 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.

**Helwig Hauser** 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.

**Bei Wang** 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.

**Tamara Munzner** 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.

## 4 ORGANIZERS

**Petra Isenberg** has been involved in many types of service for the Visualization community. She is currently Associate Editor-in-Chief at IEEE CG&A and ACM CHI Subcommittee (paper) chair. In the past, she was co- and vice-chair of the IEEE VIS steering committee, member of the reVISe committee, and paper chair for InfoVis.

**Gunther Weber** is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE TVCG and workshop co-chair for IEEE LDAV. In the past, he was papers co-chair for IEEE SciVIS (2018, 2019) and IEEE LDAV papers co-chair (2023, 2024) and participated in the “Restructuring IEEE VIS for the Future” workshop. His service includes PC roles at VIS, EuroVis, and Supercomputing (SC).

**Niklas Elmqvist** has been a papers chair for IEEE VIS a total of five times (2016, 2017, 2020, 2024, and 2025) and chair for the Viz subcommittee at ACM CHI in 2020 and 2021. He is currently an elected member of the IEEE VIS Steering Committee and an Overall Papers Chair for IEEE VIS 2025.

**Narges Mayhar** has been a member of IEEE VIS Executive Committee (VEC) since 2022 and has served at different capacity at VIS, CHI, and other conferences due to her interdisciplinary background. Her service includes roles such as Paper Co-Chair (Creativity and Cognition 2021) and Organizing Committee member for BELIV, DEXIS, and Vis4Good, as well as AC/PC roles at VIS, CHI, C&C, and ISS.

## REFERENCES

[1] E. Dimara, M. Meyer, G. J. Quadri, and P. Rosen. Dagstuhl Seminar 25232: Navigating the maze of guidelines to unify visualization design recommendations, June 2025. 1

[2] N. Elmqvist. "This Is Not Vis": On the perils of gatekeeping in peer review. Medium, June 2025. 1