Quality and Innovation

The Problem: You are a Chair for a SPIE conference, your review team has provided numerical ratings for all your oral and poster submissions, and now you have to sort through all the numbers and prepare a draft program.

The Solution: Use R!

1. Go into MySPIE into the “Review Presentations” section

2. Click on the Excel icon for “Reviewer Results” (with comments)

3. Save that file as a CSV into some directory on your machine. I saved mine to C:/SPIE12/PresRevs.csv

4. Download the R Statistical Software from http://www.r-project.org if you don’t already have it.

5. Open R and cut and paste the following code onto your R command line. (Note: Use YOUR OWN directory name or it won’t work… mine is SPIE12 on my hard drive for this year’s conference.)

setwd("C:/SPIE12")
spie <- read.csv("PresRevs.csv",header=TRUE)
names(spie)[1] = "tracking"
names(spie)[2] = "conference"
names(spie)[3] = "papernum"
names(spie)[4] = "title"
names(spie)[5] = "reviewer"
names(spie)[6] = "rating"
names(spie)[7] = "recommendation"
names(spie)[8] = "comments"
names(spie)[9] = "more.comments"
papermeans <- aggregate(spie$rating,by=list(papernum),FUN=mean,na.rm=TRUE)
t <-unique(spie$title)
all <- cbind(papermeans,t)
names(all)[1] = "papernum"
names(all)[2] = "mean.rating"
names(all)[3] = "title"
sorted <- all[rev(order(papermeans$mean.rating)),]
write.csv(all,file="ProcessedReviews.csv")
write.csv(sorted,file="SortedProcessedReviews.csv")

6. This will export two CSV files, one with all your processed reviews in order of the paper number, and the other in order of the highest ranked paper first.

7. Have fun preparing your program.

Note: If ANYONE uses this, let me know – would love to know that my solution for making my SPIE Chair life easier actually helped someone else too. Or, if you can think of improvements to make, I might be interested in coding those for future use too 🙂 Leave a comment or send an email. Thanks.