The culture of rejection in computer science publications
1–10 of 172 posts
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#2I wonder if this culture arises out of necessity. Many conferences claim to not have a set quota of papers they accept, but in practice there is a limitation to how many presentations can be accommodated given the physical and temporal limitations of the venue. The quota may grow slightly over time, either by shrinking the time allotted to every presentation (ICFP is really squeezing it these years, for example) or adding parallel tracks, but there are ultimately fairly hard physical restrictions. This inevitably limits how many submissions can be accepted, which also creates an otherwise unnecessary air of competition, even between otherwise unrelated papers.
Journals don't have this restriction; you can always put out more volumes. I suppose I enjoy conferences as much as any CS practitioner, but it does not strike me as a sustainable or scalable publication method.
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#3I am a simple man. When ever I see the words "Toxic Culture" spoken by people somehere, I flee the country..
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#4I think we are not far off from virtual conferences where most sessions are presented by DallE generated presenters, speaking with wavenet generated audios in turn are presenting GPT generated papers.
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#5I think we are not far off from virtual conferences where most sessions are presented by DallE generated presenters, speaking with wavenet generated audios in turn are presenting GPT generated papers.
Now that’s a fun hackathon project if I ever saw one!
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#6> The double-blind review process has eliminated natural biases that may have influenced our reviews in the past, including tendencies to reject based on gender or to accept from the “better” institutions.
I don’t know how much double-blind really helps. Especially in a specific field, you can usually tell what person/lab/company wrote the paper without seeing the authors’ names.
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#7In general I agree that low acceptance rate with negative selection based on arguments like "it's not novel", "it's obvious" is toxic.
I get it that capacity for conference might be limited, so gatekeeping might be necessity, but personally I like to learn useful knowledge, so something novel, but theoretical might be more boring for me than something well known, but improved in some interesting ways.
Also composing solutions is interesting, you should not have to reinvent the wheel, just to get approved, if you want to focus on broader perspective. The whole is greater than sum of the parts.
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#8I think we are not far off from virtual conferences where most sessions are presented by DallE generated presenters, speaking with wavenet generated audios in turn are presenting GPT generated papers.
Basically already happening in many Chinese departments and conferences, just without the AI yet, but of equivalent quality.
(I'm ethnic Chinese and this is not meant to be a racially charged comment)
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#9This is a reason I gave up doing systems research. It’s full of cliques and negativity. It became a process whereby we were even trained to accept this rejection frequency as normal and to expect retrying for years. You keep submitting a paper and revising it for months even while working on the next idea (can’t just sit around fixing a paper, PhD work must always continue).
Rejections also directly impact a student’s graduation. No accepted papers at decent conferences? Delay graduation. It’s grating and unnecessarily stressful.
After graduation I was unmotivated to continue to bother publishing because I don’t care for this culture. I’m saddened by it.
There are positions in industry like at Sandia National Labs which require regular publication to remain employed. Again, given good work is done, rejections affect your livelihood. Too much stress.
I lost my “spark” thinking the field of CS systems research was one of exploration and community. It exists, but not as a whole.
/rant
Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications
#10I am a simple man. When ever I see the words "Toxic Culture" spoken by people somehere, I flee the country..
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re trying to say that the phrase “toxic culture” signals something exasperating or frustrating to you about the person using it.
Is it because you don’t think that a culture can be toxic? Or perhaps that the phrase is overused or misapplied?
Or is it something else that you dislike?