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：恰当的审稿人分配显著影响提案评审质量，因为准确公正的评审取决于能否将提案分配给相关审稿人。将审稿人分配给已提交提案这一关键任务是评审流程的起点，亦称为审稿人分配问题（RAP）。由于人工分配的明显局限性，期刊编辑、会议组织者及资助管理者亟需自动化的审稿人分配方法。自1992年以来，已有众多研究针对自动化流程的需求提出了分配解决方案。本综述论文的首要目标是为学者和实践者提供关于RAP现有研究的全面概述。为此，本文对过去三十年发表于Web of Science、Scopus、ScienceDirect、Google Scholar和Semantic Scholar数据库的103篇审稿人分配领域出版物进行了深入系统综述。本综述将RAP方法按其底层技术分为两大类及若干子类进行归类与讨论，并进一步提出了每类方法未来的潜在研究方向。该综述表明，RAP研究正变得日益重要，亟需更多努力来开发新方法与框架。