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The culture of rejection in computer science publications

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Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#111

Post by bee_rider »

chasil wrote: post #98
ghaff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is an implied stamp of approval for publications. These days nothing is keeping people from publishing elsewhere if they want to.

If the organization is receiving public funds of any kind, then they should be required to (electronically) publish all submissions unless the authors withdraw. There has been quite enough censorship and paywalling of research that my taxes fund.

The point of a journal is not for people to express their feelings, but to provide researchers with a collection of papers that are, at least, mostly, not garbage. Journals publish the work of others and farm out the review process to others, their only real functionality is that of a gatekeeper.

Since a good chunk of researchers are funded in part by the government, I guess most journals would end up having to follow this "publish everything" requirement (money is fungible and some of every grant goes to administrative overhead, so you could argue anything any most universities touch is funded in part by the government).

Most publishers publish multiple journals, though, so I guess they could follow your rule as long as they were allowed to open up the, for example, "IEEE Journal of Perpetual Motion Machines And Straightforward Proofs That P=NP."

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#112

Post by paulpauper »

The emphasis on novelty has deep roots in academic publishing. It used to be that publishing was expensive, and any repetition came at the expense of other things that could have been published. Today, however, publishing is essentially free.

Yes, publishing is cheap or free, but attention is still scarce.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#113

Post by warkdarrior »

Hackbraten wrote: post #65
secondcoming wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but I don't know what it actually does stand for. It's definitely not Personal Computer

The acronym is not web-search friendly either. Been looking through this thread and search engines. Nothing helped. For example, not a single one of these [1] makes sense to me in that context. [1]: https://www.allacronyms.com/PC/university

Some times you will see the acronym TPC for Technical Program Committee. Searching for 'conference TPC' returns some relevant hits.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#114

Post by bee_rider »

raphlinus wrote: post #102

This topic is close to my heart. I do research on the fundamentals of 2D graphics, some of it cutting edge (especially GPU techniques), others just selecting the best known techniques (for example, right now I'm doing a bit of a deep dive into robust cubic and quartic polynomial root finders, not really academically publishable, but potentially hugely useful for others working on similar problems). I made a serious a…

I wonder if publishing papers onto something like github could become a tradition. Heck, you could even include an implementation. People could make pull requests for new ideas, or even fork your paper...

Academic journals grew out of the processes that academics used to communicate with each other and filter ideas through their community in the pre-internet days. It is weird that they've become the stamp of approval for all research.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#115

Post by mirker »

paulpauper wrote: post #112

The emphasis on novelty has deep roots in academic publishing. It used to be that publishing was expensive, and any repetition came at the expense of other things that could have been published. Today, however, publishing is essentially free. Yes, publishing is cheap or free, but attention is still scarce.

In hot fields, you have arXiv papers 2-3 generations ahead of peer review. Some have more citations than typical accepted papers. Peer review does not limit people’s attention.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#116

Post by impendia »

logisticseh wrote: post #25
impendia wrote: post #12

I am an academic mathematician -- who has had job applications rejected, papers rejected, grant proposals rejected. Not always, but it's not exactly a rare occurrence. I've also been on the other side, and it also sucks to reject people. It's an unfortunate reality of academia that there are fewer resources (jobs, grant funding, etc.) available, than there are researchers who are prepared to put them to good use. Fur…

I don't buy the attention filter argument. No one -- and I really do mean no one -- is going to read the entire contents of the proceedings of even just one of these conferences. NeurIPS -- a single CS conference -- is more than twice the size of the Joint Math Meetings. ICRA and ICML are just as large or larger, and AAAI isn't far behind. That's just one sub-field of CS. There are so many papers coming out every yea…

Interesting. Seems my experiences in math extrapolate less well than I'd imagined.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#117

Post by whatshisface »

BeetleB wrote: post #89
blagie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well-known in a research community. I'm positioned such that I don't need more academic points. I've mostly stopped publishing in branded prestige academic venues, in part due to rejection rates. My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my whole career where the reviewers did a pro…

> Comments often show the reviewers never read the paper. This. I was not in computer science, but in a different technical field, and this is sadly common. We would often have to appeal to the editor with "The topic the reviewer said we didn't address? It's in Section X. Get us another reviewer."

The biggest mystery in the whole thing is why someone who is volunteering to review papers anonymously would bother to do it badly when they could simply not do it at all.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#118

Post by BeetleB »

whatshisface wrote: post #117
BeetleB wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comments often show the reviewers never read the paper. This. I was not in computer science, but in a different technical field, and this is sadly common. We would often have to appeal to the editor with "The topic the reviewer said we didn't address? It's in Section X. Get us another reviewer."

The biggest mystery in the whole thing is why someone who is volunteering to review papers anonymously would bother to do it badly when they could simply not do it at all.

Because they want to appear as if they are an active participant in the community.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#119

Post by hedora »

I’d like to see a histogram of the number of resubmissions a paper goes through before acceptance.

There are definitely papers that get accepted on the first try, and others that get resubmitted 5+ times.

It doesn’t take many papers in the second group to drag acceptance rates down.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#120

Post by parasubvert »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #53
parasubvert wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is naive and a classic example of a poor argument, as your statements are unfalsifiable. They’re expressions of faith in the system and in individuals outside of time and circumstance. From my perspective, we have seen a lot of evidence that STEM is far from an objective field, and has culturally excluded a lot of talent. I see little evidence that this sort of talent magically, consistently, will fight…

I'm a black man who grew up in the projects in a single parent household. Through willpower and dedication, I made a way. I made a way because skin color doesn't matter when you have your CCNA at 14, or when you maintain a Gentoo install at 16, and have a OpenBSD router in your home built from old computer parts found in thrift stores. Mind you, these aren't even impressive achievements, but they were above average f…

By culture I meant largely what what was discussed in the OP, but also the gender gap and resulting slant towards males in the CS field. Though I suppose the racial gap would also apply.

I did not mean to get into an argument on particulars of whether it’s possible for talent to break through regardless of obstacles (a high rejection rate as discussed in OP, for example), as I figured you had personal reasons for your stance about the potential for talent to break through. I didn’t feel it was right or justified to say you were wrong. You may very well be right, and a part of me hopes you are. I just felt your argument as posted wasn’t strong.

Ultimately what I’m saying is that we don’t have a reliable model (as used in social science) to determine what makes high achievements possible.

I tend not to be fatalist about social systems always determining the outcomes of individuals, I think individuals can transcend them and break through the average result, and we have examples of this such as yourself.

I am a white cis male but the son of a single mother / school teacher and first generation immigrant, and through a mix of luck, privilege and skill had success beyond what was expected of me.

I think breaking through class barriers is doable but I’m not sure if there’s a way to model how to make it repeatable. Even “talent” is a nebulous term, something that arguably is rare but is also not measurable. Maybe it’s not rare?

Mainly I wonder if some folks with great talent get stopped along the way, and what can be done about it. I liken it to random extrinsic events - just as a a car accident cuts a life short, a person with the wrong PhD advisor or boss can be disillusioned or outcast, or worse. Just as car accident rates can be mitigated, what can we do to help nurture people of all walks of life in STEM?

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