How Not to Get Your Paper Rejected Mainak

Transcript:How Not to Get Your Paper Rejected Mainak:
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