Appropriate reviewer assignment significantly impacts the quality of proposal evaluation, as accurate and fair reviews are contingent on their assignment to relevant reviewers. The crucial task of assigning reviewers to submitted proposals is the starting point of the review process and is also known as the reviewer assignment problem (RAP). Due to the obvious restrictions of manual assignment, journal editors, conference organizers, and grant managers demand automatic reviewer assignment approaches. Many studies have proposed assignment solutions in response to the demand for automated procedures since 1992. The primary objective of this survey paper is to provide scholars and practitioners with a comprehensive overview of available research on the RAP. To achieve this goal, this article presents an in-depth systematic review of 103 publications in the field of reviewer assignment published in the past three decades and available in the Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and Semantic Scholar databases. This review paper classified and discussed the RAP approaches into two broad categories and numerous subcategories based on their underlying techniques. Furthermore, potential future research directions for each category are presented. This survey shows that the research on the RAP is becoming more significant and that more effort is required to develop new approaches and a framework.

翻译：恰当的评审人分配显著影响提案评估的质量，因为准确和公正的评论取决于它们分配给相关的评论者。将评论者分配给提交的提案是评审进程的起点，也被称为评论者分配问题（RAP）。由于手动分配的明显限制，期刊编辑、会议组织者和基金管理人员要求自动化评论者分配方法。自1992年以来，许多研究提出了分配解决方案来响应自动化程序的需求。本综述论文的主要目标是为学者和实践者提供RAP研究的全面概述。为达到这个目的，本文在Web of Science、 Scopus、ScienceDirect、Google Scholar和Semantic Scholar数据库中深入系统地审查了过去三十年中发表的103篇评论者分配领域的出版物。本综述将RAP方法分为两大类和众多子类，并根据它们的基础技术进行了讨论和分类。此外，还介绍了每类别的潜在未来研究方向。本综述显示，RAP的研究变得越来越重要，需要更多的努力来开发新的方法和框架。