Conflict Checker is a Python script that checks for conflicts in paper assignments done via CMT. It checks for:
- authors, reviewers, or metareviewes from the same institution
- authors, reviewers, or metareviewes with the same email address domain
- assignments with more than max_reviewers_from_same_country reviewer/metareviewer from the same country
As inputs, the script reads 3 spreadsheets:
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Papers.xlsx, which can be obtained directly from CMT after the reviewer assignment is done. For that, go to the Submissions page, filter for the correct submission track, then filter for papers with status "Awaiting Decision". Go to the Actions button on the top right, select "Export to Excel/Submissions". You may need to convert this file from .xls to .xslx. Make sure the first line of the file contains the headers of each column (starting with Paper ID). If the first line is not the column headers, remove them and save the file.
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Reviewers.xlsx and Metareviewers.xlsx, which contain the list of reviewers and metareviewers, respectively. These are NOT exported from CMT, as they contain info that is not there. Also, some reviewers/metareviewers use generic email accounts on CMT instead of their institutional email addresses, and this hinders checking for domain conflicts. These two files should contain five columns: "First Name", "Last Name", "Email Address", "Organization", "Country". Samples of these files are available in the docs folder.
Create a venv
$ python –m venv conflict
Activate the venv
$ source conflict/bin/activate
Install pandas
$ (conflict) pip install pandas
Install openpyxl
$ (conflict) pip install openpyxl
Place the three input files in the same folder as the script. If you want to allow a paper to have more than 1 reviewer from the same country, edit the script and change the value of the max_reviewers_from_same_country variable.
Run:
$ python conflict-checker.py
When the script prints a message that it could not find a reviewer or metareviewer, check for extra spaces in their names. Do all the fixings on the Reviewers.xlsx or Metareviewers.xlsx. The names on those files must match the names on CMT that were exported to the Papers.xlsx file. Since you, as a PC-chair, do not have permission to change the names of reviewers and metareviewers on CMT, change it on the other two files, so they are an exact match.