How Not to Get Your Paper Rejected Mainak
- Slides: 13
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 you got to your enddesign 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
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