Refereeing of Reference Articles

Background and Rationale

ETAI reference articles were introduced by a call for contributions in the area on Reasoning about Actions and Change on June 30, 1998. The call for contributions stated the following:

It has been observed several times that articles in our area are bound to repeat standard definitions, and that this has several disadvantages: (1) it takes unnecessary effort for author and reader alike, (2) it makes it more difficult to write short articles and research notes, since then the proportion between standard stuff and new contribution would go out of proportion. Possibly also, (3), maybe it encourages trivial differences between articles in the same tradition, which again makes reading more difficult. One reason for this state of affairs is, supposedly, that traditional journals prefer articles to be self-contained, since looking up another article can be fairly cumbersome. In the electronic world, this has changed: that other article may be available at the click of the mouse. This new situation is particularly clear in electronic journals such as the ETAI and the JAIR, but it will apply more and more universally as the electronic editions of other journals become more widespread. The Editorial Committee for the ETAI area of Reasoning about Actions and Change therefore invites researchers in our area to contribute reference articles that describe the basic definitions and rationale for our main approaches in concise form. The role of these reference articles ought only be to serve as references that replace the customary introductory definitions; they are not supposed to present new results or to be exhaustive presentations of an approach. Besides for replacing introductory sections of forthcoming articles (published in the ETAI or elsewhere), these reference articles will also have other uses. In particular, they will serve as a natural basis for next-level articles that compare alternative approaches wrt expressiveness, range of applicability, etc.

Refereeing criteria

Since the reference articles have another purpose than traditional ones, they will also be reviewed and refereed according to non-standard criteria, namely the following ones:

1. Does the article represent a tradition or "approach" where there is already a sufficient volume of work in the field?

2. Does the article concisely specify the assumptions, motivations, and notations used in that approach? Does it correctly capture the assumptions, etc. that have been used and are being used?

3. Would reading the present article enable one to skip the introductory definitions section of many previously published articles that used the approach?

4. Is the article also concise in the sense that it does not contain a lot of material that is unnecessary for the above criteria?

5. Is the article pedagogical and sufficiently easy to read, but at the same time precise and correct?

In addition, reference articles may contain citations or links to other articles or reports with e.g. the following contents:

• An account of the history of the approach and its relation to alternative approaches.

• Additional about the motivations for the approach.

• Extensions of the approach and variants of the formalism