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Getting a paper accepted

maxwellforbes.com

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Re: Getting a paper accepted

#71

Post by bonoboTP »

fl4tul4 wrote: post #51
techas wrote: post #49

I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…

That's not the way science is supposed to work...

It never really worked otherwise. Even before formal peer review and journals, social standing and political squabbling, finding patrons etc. definitely affected science. The grade school textbook ideal version is a literal lie-to-children. The problem is that threading the needle correctly, without falling over to the other side, of quackery and "the academic mafia is suppressing this perpetual motion machine" and "Big Science" doesn't want to admit that ESP exists etc. can be incredibly hard.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#72

Post by bonoboTP »

nicce wrote: post #67
techas wrote: post #49

I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…

I thought that blind peer-reviews solved this?

Yes, with some caveats. Sometimes people can guess where a paper comes from based on the used datasets, even graphic design style, a skew in cited papers. Also, often people upload the preprint to Arxiv and so the reviewer may have seen the non-anonymous version already. Also, the having someone within the community among the authors will help with formulating the paper in a way that this community expects it. With the right turns of phrase, citing and praising those related works that are seen highly in the community, using the tone that is usual in the community etc. People should ideally try to counteract such biases in themselves, but humans are tribal and social. Especially if you scale this to tens of thousands of people, the average won't be a saint. People have careers, graduations, promotions, visas, green cards, job prospects, friendships and generally social standing in their professional community on the line. Academics aren't any more holy than people in finance, or politics or entertainment or startups or other ruthless and social-game heavy environments.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#73

Post by Majromax »

mobeets wrote: post #70

I was surprised to see the author claim that citations in the Introduction are a bad thing. I do think ML papers are generally pretty bad at acknowledging other relevant literature, but this makes me think it’s an active decision somehow

Looking at the differences between the rejected and accepted papers, I don't think it's quite a matter of 'avoiding citations'. The changes seem to break along two lines.

1. Avoid overly general citations. The rejected paper leads with references to image captioning tasks in general and visual question-answering, neither of which is directly advanced by the described study. The accepted paper avoids these general citations in favour of more specific literature that works directly on the image-comparison task.

2. Don't lead with citations. The accepted paper has its citations at the end of the introduction, on page 2.

I think that each change is reasonably justified.

In avoiding overly-general citations, the common practice in machine learning literature is to publish short papers (10 pages or fewer for the main body), and column inches spent in an exhaustive literature review are inches not spent clearly describing the new study.

Placing citations towards the end of the introduction is consistent with the "inverted pyramid" school of writing, most commonly seen in journalism. Leaving the review process out of it for the moment, an ordinary researcher reading the article probably would rather know what the paper is claiming more than what the paper is citing. A page-one that can tell a reader whether they'll be interested in the rest of the article does readers a service.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#74

Post by Majromax »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #40
Fomite wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Another reason might be that clever titles stand out as bold claims, working counter to the common practice of academic humility. If a paper seems to be downplaying its own significance, then why should a casual reader (or reviewer, at first impression) give it the benefit of the doubt?

That's not to say that papers should over-claim, and I suspect that doing so might lead to a harsh counter-reaction from reviewers who feel like they've been set up to have their time wasted. Nonetheless, "project confidence" might be good practice in academia as well as one's social life.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#75

Post by dagw »

nicce wrote: post #67
techas wrote: post #49

I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…

I thought that blind peer-reviews solved this?

My wife works in a fairly niche field and can often guess at the very least which university or research group a blind paper is from, and quite often the author (or in the case of a PhD student, the authors supervisor).

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#76

Post by Majromax »

techas wrote: post #49

I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…

> Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors.

Although there's plenty of critique to go around about the review system, machine learning here typically uses double-blind peer review for the major conferences. That blinding is often imperfect (e.g. if a paper very obviously uses a dataset or cluster proprietary to a major company), but it's not precise enough to reject a paper based on the author being an unknown.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#77

Post by dagw »

mobeets wrote: post #70

I was surprised to see the author claim that citations in the Introduction are a bad thing. I do think ML papers are generally pretty bad at acknowledging other relevant literature, but this makes me think it’s an active decision somehow

You should definitely cite, but move the citations to where they are the most relevant and make them specific. The abstract and introduction should be more focused on what you've achieved, and overview of how you've achieved it, and why it is interesting. There generally shouldn't be too much to cite here. The exact details of methods used and everything you've built on comes later in the paper and that is where citations become important and relevant.

My least favourite type of citations in introductions, that I often see from more junior researches are ones that look like:

"In this paper we use a Machine Learning [1][2][3] technique known as Convolutional [4] Neural Networks [5][6][7][8] to..."

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#78

Post by chairhairair »

whatshisface wrote: post #12
abetusk wrote: post #7

I think the professional sciences has, for a long time, been a social game of building ones career but it does feel like it's metastasized into something that's swallowed academia. From the first article in the series [0]: > Insiders ... understand that a research paper serves ... in increasing importance ... Currency, An advertisement, Brand marketing ... in contrast to what outsiders .. believe, which is ... to sha…

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. Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?" The most disturbing thing about it is the way advice to forget about science and optimize for the process is mixed with standard tips for good c…

> Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?"

Chemists are extremely brand-aware regarding their figures.

In synthetic chemistry many chemists could guess the author based just on the color scheme of the paper's figures.

For instance, look at the consistency here: https://macmillan.princeton.edu/publications/

And it comes with rewards! The above lab is synonymous with several popular techniques (one, organocatalysis, which garnered a Nobel prize) - the association would be much less strong if the lab hadn't kept a consistent brand over so many years.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#79

Post by mbforbes »

chairhairair wrote: post #78
whatshisface wrote: post #12

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. Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?" The most disturbing thing about it is the way advice to forget about science and optimize for the process is mixed with standard tips for good c…

> Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?" Chemists are extremely brand-aware regarding their figures. In synthetic chemistry many chemists could guess the author based just on the color scheme of the paper's figures. For instance, look at the consistency here: https://macmillan.princeton.edu/publications/ And it comes with rewards! The abo…

Oh my, those figures are gorgeous! Thank you for sharing.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#80

Post by gbacon »

fl4tul4 wrote: post #51
techas wrote: post #49

I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suff…

That's not the way science is supposed to work...

The author elsewhere cautions “I write this because PhDs seem to attract a lot of smart, idealistic kids who are interested in doing Science 1 and don’t realize that they’ve signed up to do Science 2.”

https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-try-to-reform-science/

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