How Long Do You Need When Critiquing?
In order to provide authors with timely critiques, a reviewer has 12 hours to complete a review once it is assigned. If the reviewer does not complete the review within this 12 hour limit we assign the work to someone else for review. Is this time period too long, too short, or just right?
We are thinking about changing the default review timeout to 5 hours and providing an option to extend the review timeout to 36 hours. What do you as an author and reviewer think of this idea?
Jacob
Update (March 16, 2009) - You now have 16 hours to finish an assigened critique.
Stumble it!
Tags: peer reviews
January 19th, 2009 at 11:43 am
I’m a bit unsure of terms. Default review time out? If I open review, don’t start it and don’t return, it disappears in five hours?
Review timeout: happens when I start but don’t complete w/in 12 hrs? The change would give me 36?
As a writer, I enjoyed the rapid responses on my first submission, but if I think the reviewer is expending a lot of energy on my piece, I’d gladly wait.
As a reviewer, I know that some reviews can’t be completed in 12 hours, for whatever reason. I would appreciate the longer period.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I like the idea of being able to extend the time (as a reviewer). Some works take a long time to review, and if I start at lunch and take it back up at 8 in the evening, then I’d like my previous comments and the incomplete review to be available to finish, or I’m just throwing away half reviews.
January 19th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I find the twelve hour time for conducting a review sufficient. However, I don’t have a problem with longer. For very busy people, the longer time frame might be an improvement.
As to the five hours to conduct a review, I would prefer more time to address the incidents when a review is interrupted and lost. However, for the most part, the five hours has worked for me.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Definitely 36 hours! Some reviews take longer to review; I like to read them, sleep on it, then come back to the story/article/essay in the morning with a new outlook.
January 20th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Excellent idea! The extendible 36 hours review would be great, it happened more than once for me to not be able to complete my review in the 12 hours and have all my comments lost when I came back to it.
January 21st, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Same here. Losing an incomplete review is quite annoying.
January 22nd, 2009 at 4:16 pm
@sakuragirl and @Mac
Did the auto-save feature not work for you? We recently received an email saying the feature did not work for someone. Overall we thought it was working for everyone, how often have you lost your reviews? We have made significant changes to the auto-save feature so that it will prompt you to login if you have let your session timeout without typing anything. Have you lost any reviews lately? Does it seem to be working better?
January 22nd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
I could complete a review over several sessions just fine (log outs and log ins included). No progress lost there. But if I didn’t finish the review in the time limit ka-pow, bang, snap… all of it deleted.
The last review that this happened on was only a few days ago. I wasn’t able to finish it because school is a priority, and when I came back after the time limit (despite having marked a few edits), the story was replaced with a different one.
I hope that helps.
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Mac’s experience was mine, EXACTLY, guys.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:24 am
Same for me, just like Mac’s experience. For some reasons I find myself forced to “abandon” a review for some time and when I come back to it, it’s too late, the 12 hours period has expired and I get a new story. Other than that, the autosave and login prompt worked well for me.
January 29th, 2009 at 7:38 am
That happened to me too. I lost a review I was doing and I really loved the story I was reviewing. I find that I become attached to the stories I read and would love to see changes and revisions too. I work full time so it is hard for me to finish a review in 12 hours sometimes, I like to take my time and give the review my serious attention so longer would be better for me. And I like to think that those people reviewing my work aren’t rushing their review just to meet the schedule.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Because of your feedback we have change the review time limit from 12 to 16 hours.