Decision-Making Support in Optimal Multicriteria Peer Reviewer Selection in Scientific Conference Organization

It is very important to attract reports, which are qualitative, relevant and corresponding to the conference scope, in organizing a scientific conference. The reports are included in the program of the conference, and they define a degree of success of the entire event. That is why the stage of peer reviewer selection for incoming reports can be a defining moment in conference organization. Due to the fact that conference reports come in large numbers within a short time, a single-step selection of the most suitable peer reviewers at once for all reports is required. Consequently, a peer reviewer selection problem can be considered as an optimization problem. In existing research this optimization problem is formulated, but little attention is paid to multicriteriality question in them, when selecting peer reviewers. An approach to decision-making support in optimal multicriteria peer reviewer selection, taking into consideration peer reviewers’ characteristics, such as: expertise and authority on the subject of the submitted reports, general expertise and authority, and also expertise in reviewing, is proposed in the paper. The approach was tested on data of the IEEE conference "USBEREIT", using scientometric base "elibrary.ru".