Discussants

Guidelines for the participation as a Discussant

The role of the “discussant” at the ACEDE Conference is to provide constructive comments on the papers presented.

The scientific quality of the Conference depends on a great extent, on how timely and constructive the comments are carried out by the discussants. Therefore, in order to ensure a most homogeneous and efficient task, we encourage them to follow these guidelines.

Basic data

The oral paper discussants will have a maximum time of 5 minutes per paper.

The Doctoral workshop discussants will have a maximum time of 10 minutes per thesis project.

We kindly ask to strictly abide by the rules to ensure the smooth course of the session. The presidents of each session will be strict with the control of time.

The discussant may use Microsoft PowerPoint in support of his/her comments or suggestions. It is important to arrive at the session room 10 minutes before it commences to be able to coordinate the interventions with the president, the authors and the rest of the discussants attending the session, and also in order to check for technical details.

Setting the tone of the comments

We kindly ask discussants to make constructive comments. One of the most important roles carried out by the discussants is to help improve the research done by the researchers who have put their trust in our Conference. Remember that discussants represent ACEDE.

Recommendations in contributing to the debate and scientific construction

The main task of discussants is to provide authors with some critical comments that contribute towards the improvement of the work presented or to facilitate its future publication, ensuring rigor and research interest. As a result, we aim to make a revision that offers authors some hints that will help improve their work. In addition, the discussant´s comments can be an excellent starting point to encourage subsequent debate in the session.

As a suggestion, the Scientific Committee considers appropriate that discussants focus their comments on the following aspects:

1. Positive aspects of the work that are not given high enough priority, proposing the best way to exploit them.
2. Major concerns of the work and suggestions on how to save them or how to reduce its detrimental effects on the interest of the results.
3. Opening debate in the session on topics of interest derived from the presentations (new models, related or contradictory results...).
4. In the case of the Doctoral thesis projects, the discussant must offer comments and suggestions on possible theoretical approaches, methodologies or bibliography of interest.