The most popular topic of conversation among information theory afficionados is probably the long review times for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Everyone has a story of a very delayed review — either for their own paper or for a friend of theirs. The Information Theory Society Board of Governors and Editor-in-Chief have presented charts of “sub-to-pub” times and other statistics and are working hard on ways to improve the speed of reviews without impairing their quality. These are all laudable. But it occurs to me that there is room for social engineering on the input side of things as well. That is, if we treat the process as a black box, with inputs (papers) and outputs (decisions), what would a machine-learning approach to predicting decision time do?

Perhaps the most important (and overlooked in some cases) aspects of learning a predictor from real data is figuring out what features to measure about each of the inputs. Off the top of my head, things which may be predictive include:

• length
• number of citations
• number of equations
• number of theorems/lemmas/etc.
• number of previous IT papers by the authors
• h-index of authors
• membership status of the authors (student members to Fellows)
• associate editor handling the paper — although for obvious reasons we may not want to include this

I am sure I am missing a bunch of relevant measurable quantities here, but you get the picture.

I would bet that paper length is a strong predictor of review time, not because it takes a longer time to read a longer paper, but because the activation energy of actually picking up the paper to review it is a nonlinear function of the length.

Doing a regression analysis might yield some interesting suggestions on how to pick coauthors and paper length to minimize the review time. This could also help make the system go faster, no? Should we request these sort of statistics from the EiC?