How Not to Get Your Paper

Rejected

Mainak Chaudhuri
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
 Prolog: Why
• Publishing is important
– Must tell your ideas to others
– Improves the chance of converging to a better
idea (hundreds of brains working vs. tens)
– Helps the community to push the frontline in the
right direction
– Inspire others to think smart by showing them
how to think smart
– Let the coming generation(s) remember you for
what you accomplished
– Caveat: publishing is often overhyped (this is
where the counting game takes over)
 Searching for Ideas
• Selling a good idea is far easier than selling a
not so good idea
– Truth be told, there aren’t too many good ideas
out there
– Read a lot of papers to stay abreast with what
people around the globe are thinking
– Identify the top conferences and journals in your
area and browse the proceedings and periodicals
in regular intervals
• Reserve time for this from your weekly/monthly plan
• Summary: reading good papers holds the
key to writing good papers
 Idea-Execution Cycle
• The cycle of idea-(execute-improve)+ continues
until the results are satisfactory or further
gains are marginal
– Understand what is satisfactory by the publishing
standards
– Depending on the standard of results, decide where
to publish
– Top tier conferences and journals usually demand
high standard ideas and results
• These are usually medium to highly influential ideas
– Be realistic and decide how good your idea is
– Sending a not-so-good result to a top
conference/journal is a non-starter
 Draw up an Outline
• Think about a good story to tell
– Draw up the sections and subsections
– At every step put yourself in the position of a
reader and ask if the story plot is interesting
– Put enough time to write a good abstract and
introduction
• First impression is the final impression
• Motivate the problem and summarize your solutions in
introduction
• If your contribution is building on top of several other
prior work, include a related work subsection at the
end of introduction; otherwise move the related work
section to the end of the paper
 Give Credit to Others
• Not acknowledging closely related studies is
the biggest sin in research
– Know the related work well and review them
generously
– Importantly, point out how your idea improves
previous state-of-the-art
– In the evaluation section, compare your proposal
quantitatively with a few best known prior arts
• Implement them in your infra-structure and evaluate
impartially
 Mid-game (1/3)
• The middle of the paper goes in explaining
your contribution
– Crux of the matter
– Polish the writing well and make sure that you
highlight the major contributions
– Usually, this part is easy to write because this is
your work
– Make sure to show how you got to your end-
design step by step
• Motivate every addition to your design and tell a good
story
 Mid-game (2/3)
• Once you have talked about the central ideas,
it is time for quantitative evaluation
– Furnish enough information about your
simulation/evaluation infra-structure so that others
can reproduce the results
• Very important for the contribution to be useful
– Provide exact values of the important parameters
that you have used
– If you are using some non-conventional/new
methodology for evaluating your idea, justify why
it makes sense
– Use publicly available benchmark suites and
furnish enough details about them
 Mid-game (3/3)
• Once the infra-structure is conveyed, proceed
to present your results
– Explain the results carefully highlighting your
contributions
– Spend time to explain any outliers
• This opens up further trains of research
– Compare your proposal with a few closely related
studies
• Explain why you are better
• Explain any outliers with more care
– Overall, the evaluation should make a convincing
story and tell readers that you have spent time to
carefully design your experiments
 Read-Think-Update
• Read the complete manuscript several times
(not back-to-back)
– Reserve at least seven days for final polishing
– Challenge yourself with hard questions that a
reader may ask; see if you have answers to them
in the paper
– While reading imagine that you know nothing
about the work; see if you can follow the train of
thoughts described in the paper
– Come up with a list of negatives about your paper
which may lead to rejection
• Address them carefully
– Ask colleagues to read and give feedback
 Typical Outline
• Abstract
• Introduction, Motivation, Related Work
• Background
• Your Design Proposal
• Evaluation Methodology
• Results and Analysis
• Summary
• References
• Appendices (if any)
 Epilog: Rejection Can Help
• The world is highly competitive
– Too many smart people out there
– Probability of getting rejected is fairly high (top
tier CS conferences have one in ten to one in five
acceptance rates)
– If your paper is rejected, take the reviews
seriously and try to address the concerns
• Most reviews are usually good if you tried a top tier
conference/journal
• Some reviews may be unreasonably critical; don’t get
dejected
– Revise well and try again
How Not to Get Your Paper
Rejected

Thank you
Mainak Chaudhuri
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur