Thank you for serving as a discussant for PAS 2024. Your primary role during the session is to provide the audience with perspective and insight about the substance and significance of papers. Given that the presented papers may be diverse for certain sessions, Discussants are welcome to either link the papers to the topic area addressed by the session or focus on discussing the individual papers.

You may briefly summarize the individual contributions in the papers and then move on to integrate them and relate them to the state of the science in the topic area addressed by the session. You can do this by highlighting key ideas, identifying key themes across the papers, posing challenging questions, and/or suggesting important directions for future work.

In your analysis of individual papers, please note the paper's key contributions and strengths as well as its weaknesses. Critically analyze what the author has done and raise questions about assumptions, methods, and interpretation of findings. It is appropriate to acknowledge that the papers are at different stages of progression. If you note this in a developmental way, it is encouraging to authors. Make sure to emphasize the constructive in your comments: effective discussants often advance the ideas in the paper by providing new ideas or perspectives to improve the paper.

Your oral discussion of each paper should highlight major issues only. Please focus your critique on issues that members of the audience will need to understand in order to integrate, interpret, and reconcile the research that has been presented. In addition, please also highlight those issues most central to the further development of the science, rather than idiosyncratic problems.

Remember that the audience has seen only the short presentations, not the full papers. If you are addressing a point that was not clearly presented by the author during the session, please explain the context for your remarks to the audience.

You may consider providing each author with written feedback. Authors appreciate receiving comments and critiques that are presented in an organized and thoughtful manner or a marked-up copy of their manuscript. Your thoughtful feedback will assist the authors in improving their work.

In presenting your discussion, please stay within the allotted time; most Discussants will be allocated 12 minutes, but that allocation is up to the Chair. It is important for the audience to have the opportunity to ask questions at the Q & A session. Please be attentive to the Chair, who sets the time allocations and will be the time-keeper for the session.

The deadline for submitting full papers online is April 22. Individual links to access the papers in your session will be emailed to each discussant by April 25. However, some papers may be late, or not submitted at all, and discussants may have different responses to this.

Discussants may decide that if full papers are not received by April 25, they will not give any feedback. You may also get in touch with the presenting authors directly to ask for their papers, or presentation slides in advance and prepare feedback based on those. Some Discussants may decide to give authors additional time to send in their papers if their schedules and other commitments allow it. Or, if neither full papers nor slides are received, some Discussants may choose to give feedback based on what is presented at the conference itself, or only have an informal conversation with such presenters after the session, and so on. Within each session, there may be some combination of these, over and above the expected variation in how developed different papers and presentations are. We are not recommending one response or strategy over another, but the type and extent of feedback that you will be able provide will naturally vary across papers as well.

PAS aims to provide authors the opportunity to receive feedback on their papers from a dedicated group of individuals, but it is ultimately your service to the community and we are happy to leave it to you to decide what works best for you.

If you have specific questions about the paper or a paper is not closely related to your research expertise, it is entirely appropriate to discuss a paper with the authors before the session. If something is not clear to you, please don’t hesitate to get clarification from the author(s) so that you can better fulfil your role as a discussant who provides value-added comments for the audience and authors.

PLEASE DO NOT circulate the papers and presentations provided to you. Thank you.