A Survey on Reviewer Assignment Problem 719 In general, RAP described in this paper, should be relevant whenever one has two large sets of objects that need to be matched such that each object in one set gets as- mall number of objects from the other, and have many practical appl tions, such as resource allocation(matching funding agencies to research projects[10] scheduling on parallel machines [13], assigning managers to construction projects [27], classroom assignment [8]), staff scheduling (assigning graduating students to interviewer, assigning press releases to newspaper reporters, matching staff to pro- jects in consulting companies [7], crew scheduling in airline companies [19], posting military servicemen [3, 25)), and construction decision making(corrective action rec ommendation for material management (38)) This wide range of real-world applications has constituted a major motivation for scholars in developing solutions for RAP. Reviewer assignment has been discussed as a process of peer-review in the voice of improving review mechanism. One of the earliest papers that addressed an assignment solution is by Dumais and Nielsen [14] who presented the matching degree computation by Latent Semantic Indexing(LSD), which was refined by Yarowsky and Florian [41] on using reviewers' online publica tion instead of their autobiography. Different from content-based Information Re trieval (IR), Watanabe et al. [39 raised the matching degree computation by constructing collaborative network, which leads to the hybrid approach of the two technologies. On the other hand, Operations Research(OR) has been used to build the assignment models and design algorithms of optimization RAP, which has been widely approached along different disciplines, can be applied into various application fields and represented by multifarious items, thus making it more difficult to search for previous work on the topic. This paper is intended to pro- vide a comprehensive survey according to the researches which have appeared in the literature sorting by the three phases of RaP. The value of such a study is in provid- ing an opportunity to reflect on what has been achieved, to identify gaps that need to be addressed. and to set direction for future research The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a review on the assignment procedure. Section 3 presents IR technology for computing matching degree between manuscripts and reviewers. Section 4 is a summary on the method- ologies for optimization modeling. Finally, conclusions are presented and suggestions are made for further research 2 Reviewer Assignment Procedure Researches defended on reviewer assignment procedure involve the specification of identification, and its influence in the peer-review mode( utions of qualified reviewer four issues: assignment criteria, assignment processes, so The assignment criteria play an important role in the methodology and procedure of reviewer assignment, and indirectly affect the peer-review quality. Fixed assign ment criteria are widely used in the science community, which require authors to select keywords from one list of disciplines or prorate the keywords. Fixed lists make up of two or three columns sometimes(e.g." Methodology","Application"and"Oth ers"[33D, which makes the chosen keywords more comprehensively. As it is argued that the update of fixed lists cannot catch up with the development of disciplines, theA Survey on Reviewer Assignment Problem 719 In general, RAP described in this paper, should be relevant whenever one has two large sets of objects that need to be matched such that each object in one set gets as￾signed a small number of objects from the other, and have many practical applica￾tions, such as resource allocation (matching funding agencies to research projects[10], scheduling on parallel machines [13], assigning managers to construction projects [27], classroom assignment [8]), staff scheduling (assigning graduating students to interviewer, assigning press releases to newspaper reporters, matching staff to pro￾jects in consulting companies [7], crew scheduling in airline companies [19], posting military servicemen [3,25]), and construction decision making (corrective action rec￾ommendation for material management [38]). This wide range of real-world applications has constituted a major motivation for scholars in developing solutions for RAP. Reviewer assignment has been discussed as a process of peer-review in the voice of improving review mechanism. One of the earliest papers that addressed an assignment solution is by Dumais and Nielsen [14], who presented the matching degree computation by Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which was refined by Yarowsky and Florian [41] on using reviewers’ online publica￾tion instead of their autobiography. Different from content-based Information Re￾trieval (IR), Watanabe et al. [39] raised the matching degree computation by constructing collaborative network, which leads to the hybrid approach of the two technologies. On the other hand, Operations Research (OR) has been used to build the assignment models and design algorithms of optimization. RAP, which has been widely approached along different disciplines, can be applied into various application fields and represented by multifarious items, thus making it more difficult to search for previous work on the topic. This paper is intended to pro￾vide a comprehensive survey according to the researches which have appeared in the literature sorting by the three phases of RAP. The value of such a study is in provid￾ing an opportunity to reflect on what has been achieved, to identify gaps that need to be addressed, and to set direction for future research. The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a review on the assignment procedure. Section 3 presents IR technology for computing matching degree between manuscripts and reviewers. Section 4 is a summary on the method￾ologies for optimization modeling. Finally, conclusions are presented and suggestions are made for further research. 2 Reviewer Assignment Procedure Researches defended on reviewer assignment procedure involve the specification of four issues: assignment criteria, assignment processes, solutions of qualified reviewer identification, and its influence in the peer-review model. The assignment criteria play an important role in the methodology and procedure of reviewer assignment, and indirectly affect the peer-review quality. Fixed assign￾ment criteria are widely used in the science community, which require authors to select keywords from one list of disciplines or prorate the keywords. Fixed lists make up of two or three columns sometimes (e.g. “Methodology”, “Application” and “Oth￾ers” [33]), which makes the chosen keywords more comprehensively. As it is argued that the update of fixed lists cannot catch up with the development of disciplines, the