Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting a paper accepted

maxwellforbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 135 posts

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#81

Post by mbforbes »

karel-3d wrote: post #55
stefanpie wrote: post #4

I am not the original author, but I posted this since it mirrors some experiences I have had in my PhD so far submitting papers. This kind of tweaking in paper and writing even happens when writing the first draft or sometimes even in the conception of the research idea or how to go about the implementation and experimentation. There is a half-joke in our lab that the more times a paper is rejected, the bigger or mor…

There are other posts in the series of the author. He was the co-author of BERT! Yet his paper was scoffed at as "just engineering". He knows what he is talking about.

Omg, I was not a BERT coauthor! But thank you so much for writing this, I had no idea that other post could have accidentally implied this. I will revise that section.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#82

Post by ancillary »

auggierose wrote: post #66
intended wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not clarity in a paper. 1) The whole opening segment is the literature review. 2) If you are coming up with a novel concept, then you would be explaining how it shows up in relation to known fact. Then you would be providing evidence and experiment. The entire structure is designed to ensure as many affordances for the author to make their case. Being accepted as a social game is the cynical view that ignores…

As you have seen in the post (did you read it, dear reviewer?), references on the first page where unhelpful, so 1) comes already with a caveat. And so on. I think the social game view is at this point entirely justified, and there is nothing cynical about it. And no, academia does not still work. A given "structure" is also ridiculous, and part of the problem. Once you care more about the form than the content, form…

> The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.

Reviewing dynamics make this hard. There is little to no reward for reviewers, and it is much easier to write a long and bad paper than it is to review it carefully (and LLMs have upset this balance even further). To suggest that every submitted paper should occupy several weeks of expert attention is to fundamentally misunderstand how many crappy papers are getting submitted.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#83

Post by ke88y »

keiferski wrote: post #15
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…

A secondary and less visible consequence of this is that many people don’t go into academia in the first place because they are put off by the publishing system. And so many people that would otherwise be contributing to human knowledge are working in an office somewhere helping a random company sell more widgets.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia.

In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product.

In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academic journals/conferences, which generally do a piss poor job of providing incentives for either doing good work or communicating well about that work.

Any time I hire a junior PhD I have to UNDO a ton of academic writing/provlem-solving propaganda and reteach both common sense and normal writing style.

The harsh truth is that private sector scientists tend to do better science and disseminate it in more useful and lasting ways. They are paid better for it.

The academic scientists who are up to private sector standards tend to have diverse funding mechanisms and therefore rely far less heavily on prestige publication for their labs revenue stream. But most professors must publish papers because they are unable to do good work and/or communicate the value of that work to anyone other than their inner circle of friends (who sit on the grant review panels or take stints at federal agencies).

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#84

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

ke88y wrote: post #83
keiferski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A secondary and less visible consequence of this is that many people don’t go into academia in the first place because they are put off by the publishing system. And so many people that would otherwise be contributing to human knowledge are working in an office somewhere helping a random company sell more widgets.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia. In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product. In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academi…

Every private-sector company I've worked for has had me sign an NDA saying that I can only disseminate knowledge within that company.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#85

Post by karel-3d »

mbforbes wrote: post #81
karel-3d wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other posts in the series of the author. He was the co-author of BERT! Yet his paper was scoffed at as "just engineering". He knows what he is talking about.

Omg, I was not a BERT coauthor! But thank you so much for writing this, I had no idea that other post could have accidentally implied this. I will revise that section.

Ahhh I am stupid. I thought this line means you co-authored BERT, sorry.

>I saw this firsthand with BERT in my field (NLP).

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#86

Post by auggierose »

ancillary wrote: post #82
auggierose wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you have seen in the post (did you read it, dear reviewer?), references on the first page where unhelpful, so 1) comes already with a caveat. And so on. I think the social game view is at this point entirely justified, and there is nothing cynical about it. And no, academia does not still work. A given "structure" is also ridiculous, and part of the problem. Once you care more about the form than the content, form…

> The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it. Reviewing dynamics make this hard. There is little to no reward fo…

Not several. One full week would be enough.

To suggest that peer review means anything when this is not the case is the true fundamental misunderstanding here.

In other words: Fuck peer review. You are no peer of mine.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#87

Post by mbforbes »

karel-3d wrote: post #85
mbforbes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omg, I was not a BERT coauthor! But thank you so much for writing this, I had no idea that other post could have accidentally implied this. I will revise that section.

Ahhh I am stupid. I thought this line means you co-authored BERT, sorry. >I saw this firsthand with BERT in my field (NLP).

You are not stupid! No need to be sorry. It's my job to write more clearly. Thank you again for writing the comment.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#88

Post by rcxdude »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #84
ke88y wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia. In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product. In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academi…

Every private-sector company I've worked for has had me sign an NDA saying that I can only disseminate knowledge within that company.

Without permission, yeah. But many companies do publish scientific papers. In both worlds, there's usually a game of publishing enough to give people confidence that the results are good, without actually giving away enough details to actually lose any competitive advantage (this is perhaps even more so in academia). In basically every field there will be things that everyone talks about and things that no-one talks about, and the latter is often even more important (but usually more boring know-how type things).

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#90

Post by canjobear »

spidersouris wrote: post #53
canjobear wrote: post #9

I think it’s equally likely that the second version just got a different set of reviewers who randomly liked it more, and the revisions didn’t make a big difference. Having submitted lots of papers to conferences like this I basically think of the reviewer ratings as noise.

For *ACL you'd have to justify your wish to change reviewers, though; and you need a good reason for that. I don't know how much reviewers changes for a resubmission are solely due to reviewers' unavailability but it seems unlikely all three of them got removed from the reviewer pool.

Before ARR existed you could just send the paper in again and get new reviews.
Post reply on HN