2016-07-23|IEEE A&A Senior Member Review Panel Meeting
To whom it may concern
Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity for the second time (the first one was in 2003) to participate in the very important function of IEEE A&A Senior Member Review Panel Meeting in Ottawa, ON, Canada, on 2016-07-23.
One of the Significant Performance Indicators for Industry (Practitioners, Consultants and Entrepreneurs) is "Patents issued". I noticed that most Curriculum Vitae mix granted patents and patent applications. If the distinction between these is important for the IEEE, then the method to identify issued patents via the patent kind code (A, A1, B1, B2, C, etc.) should be explained to the reviewers.
One candidate listed many publications with journal names that I did not recognize. Wi-Fi was available at the meeting room, so I decided to google "International Journal of Computer Applications" and "Journal of Computer Science and Engineering". I was disturbed to find these journals in the "List of Fake and Low-Quality Computer Science Journals". With this finding, I changed my evaluation to "Unqualified" due to Inadequate proof of significant performance. When I notified the Chair, he emphasized the importance of ethics, of course. It was only my curiosity and luck that led me to uncover this particular case. There should be a mechanism to expose them because other reviewers may have missed other cases. I believe that a text string search should be able to automatically flag such behaviour before the meeting so that questionable journals in the candidates's list of publications are colour-coded in red.
Also, it was not immediately clear which portions of the document were written by the referees, so they could be colour-coded in blue, for example.
I sincerely hope that my suggestions and proposals will lead to improvements in future IEEE A&A Senior Member Review Panel Meetings.
Thank you very much for your attention.
To whom it may concern
During the panel meeting, I raised a situation in which a candidate may not have enough status but he/she received a Nobel Prize. "Come and see me!" was the chair's response. Well, here is a case in which a Nobel Prize winner could be invited to become a senior member of the IEEE.