Many of you have asked for more transparency and better feedback when it comes to contest entries. In our most recent contests (Calling from a Central Location, Selecting Transmission Route, and Concurrent Licensing System) we have experimented with some new scoring metrics. We are also intent on providing you with as much useful feedback as possible so if you had participated you should have received an email including:

weighted relevancy score for each reference submitted (0-100)
average weighted relevancy score for all references submitted (0-100)
personalized feedback as to why the score wasn’t higher and what could be done to improve for next time

Some common issues amongst participants include:

not supporting a “Yes” answer with a sufficient explanation (answers without an explanation will not count towards your score)
submitting a known reference
submitting a reference that has already been received (in the event of a duplicate Patexia favors the earlier submission)

What Does Weighted Mean?

While all questions are important, some may contribute more or less to your score based on a weighting system. Critical questions, such as the publication date, are binary and an incorrect or unsupported answer will result in a zero relevancy score for the entire reference. If you decide to submit more than one reference we will use the average of each reference's weighted relevancy score as your final relevancy score. If you are unsure about the quality of a reference, take that into consideration before submitting it to a contest. Finally, you can expect to see your overall rank as a new feature in contests moving forward.