The quality of reviews of conference papers is mostly terrible, though. I've been on both sides of it, here are some major complaints: * There is only one roun

The quality of reviews of conference papers is mostly terrible, though. I've been on both sides of it, here are some major complaints: * There is only one round of reviews, with a binary accept/reject outcome. In case of rejection, feedback cannot be incorporated. In case of acceptance, there is basically no incentive for incorporating feedback, as the paper is already "through" and putting in any more time is considered a waste. * Assigning papers to reviewers is very arbitrary and often the reviewers are not at all familiar with the field. Getting a paper reassigned to another reviewer is often so complicated and time-consuming that reviewers just do the bare minimum (if asked to rate novelty/originality etc., on a scale 1-5 they give it a "3", which given the usual acceptance rate of <50% means the paper will get rejected). * Reviewers usually get a lot of papers to review. They don't have time (who does?) but have to finish by a two-week deadline. If one of the papers is relevant to the research of the reviewer or has been written by colleagues they know (double-blind does not help, you recognize who wrote it..), that paper will receive attention; the other papers are seen as distraction and are dealt with as outlined above. Peer-review is important, though. Some fields of research, particularly those where a lot of research is done by actual practitioners and not just pure research scientists, are mostly driven by conferences with short (one page or less) abstracts without full papers. There are often very few citeable sources that have been peer reviewed; conference websites and abstract books vanish over the years. An arxiv-like repository can help with that, but it does not solve the problem of peer review. Community-run open-access journals seem to provide a solution, but rarely take off.