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Getting a paper accepted

maxwellforbes.com

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Re: Getting a paper accepted

#31

Post by jhrmnn »

eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

I have a theory that this focus on ideas vs solutions also divides individual researchers, in what drives them. Agreed that academia celebrates and rewards ideas, not solutions. And maybe that’s ok and how it should be, solutions can be done in industry? But the SNR of ideas feels too high at this point.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#32

Post by setopt »

eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

> But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them.

By “idea” researchers usually imply “idea for a high-impact project that I’m capable of executing”. It’s not just about having ideas, but about having ideas that will actually make an impact on your field. Those again come in two flavors: “obvious ideas” that are the logical next step in a chain of incremental improvements, but that no one yet had time or capability to implement; and “surprising ideas” that can really turn a research field upside down if it works, but is inherently a high-risk/high-reward scenario.

Speaking as a physicist, I find the truly “surprising ideas” to be quite rare but important. I get them from time to time but it can take years between. But the “obvious” ideas, sure, the more students I have the more of them I’d work on.

> Any of these ideas can be a paper, but what makes it science can't just be the fact that it was communicated clearly. It wouldn't be science unless you perform experiments (that accurately implement the "idea") and faithfully report the results. (Reviewers may add an additional constraint: that the results must look "good".)

I kinda agree with this. With the caveat that I’d consider e.g. solving theoretical problems to also count under “experiment” in this specific sentence, since science is arguably not just about gathering data but also developing a coherent understanding of it. Which is why theoretical and numerical physics count as “science”.

On the other hand, I think textbooks and review papers are crucial for science as a social process. We often have to try to consolidate the knowledge gathered from different research directions before we can move forward. That part is about clear communication more than new research.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#33

Post by speedgoose »

Another strategy is to write a descent paper and submit it somewhere good. If it’s accepted, great. If it’s rejected and the comments make sense, improve the paper based on the comments before resubmitting somewhere else. Otherwise simply resubmit somewhere else.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#34

Post by smolder »

eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

Your comment is cheap in a way that's embarrassing. You wrote an anti-science rant while failing to meet the standards you complain about.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#35

Post by smolder »

eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

This person is a clown, probably with a paid agenda, and they should be disallowed from saying such dumb things where smart people with useful skills might read it.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#36

Post by Fomite »

whatshisface wrote: post #25
Fomite wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have definitely said that people can't resist a network diagram, and "people love a good map", and I'm not in ML research. There are things that appeal to people. This tends to not manifest as "We need one of these" but "If we have one of these, lets be sure to use it."

People like witty epigraphs underneath chapter titles too, and that's great. Now imagine saying, "the difference between this paper getting accepted or rejected is the presence or absence of a network diagram..."

I mean, at one point I was presenting some research next to someone with a network diagram, a map, and a phylogenetic tree and my comment was "That's going to win best poster" and I was right.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#37

Post by jampa »

Thanks for this post. As someone writing an open-source book (without an editor to help), I find some takeaways very helpful.

But I think your most significant change was changing the "what" to "why".

Reading the original, we can see that most sentences start with "we did..." "we did..." and my impression as a reader was, "Okay, but how is this important?" In the second one, the "what" is only in the first part of the sentence, to name things (which gives a sense of novelty), and then only "whys" come after it.

"Whys" > "Whats" also applies to good code comments (and why LLM's code sometimes sucks). I can easily know "what" the code does, but often, I want to know "why" it is there.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#38

Post by smolder »

eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

This whole take is embarrassingly ignorant and no one with the credentials has the time to check you. We need people to do real thinking and they need to ignore you.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#39

Post by ubj »

Interesting tips, but it also depends on the field.

If you're submitting to a control theory journal, you better have some novel theorems with rigorous mathematical proofs in that "rest of the paper" part. That's a little nontrivial.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#40

Post by karmakurtisaani »

Fomite wrote: post #23
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an article about ML research, and the emphasis on branding and marketing your paper wouldn't fly in any of the fields people think of as scientific The number of accepted papers is absolutely currency and measure of worth in academia.

Interestingly, one of the pieces of advice, about having a punchy title, is a double edged sword. There's some data suggesting papers with "clever" titles have an easier time getting published, but accumulate fewer lifetime citations. Both of which are currency.

The reason could be that clever titles add "novelty", but not much substance. Publishable, but not citable.
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