Papers Submitted to Academic Conferences — Being there is all that matters!

Papers submitted to academic conferences typically need to pass an peer review process, where a single paper is assigned to several reviewers who judge the novelty value of the proposed study/solution, its quality, understandability and so on. The peer review process is a good thing, as authors can benefit from the comments of the reviewers and typically the best submitted papers are accepted for publication (A peer review process has drawbacks, but this is a different thing).

I’m currently reviewing papers for a IEEE conference and I’m shocked about the poor quality of some submitted papers. Some conferences are pleasent to the reviewer, when the papers which need to be reviewed typically have a high quality. Some others aren’t. In the remainder of this post, I present some things which bothered me the most about the current submissions.

Some things that bother me as a reviewer:

• The quality of the presentation is poor: When a paper is sloppy typesetted, it can be hard to read and leaves the bad taste in my mouth, that the author also did sloppy work during the evaluation of the presented study. Some papers teem with typing errors — would it be too much to ask the authors to run the spellcheck before submission? Moreover, some authors seem to be inexperienced with the style of technical research papers, which results in strange typesettings and unclear formulas.
• The discussion of related work is sometimes omitted. This always gives one the feeling that the authors are not familiar with the literature and the state of the art in their field, as they are unable to distinguish their study from existing work.
• Please, do not label your study as “extensive”, if it was not extensive or if no study was carried out at all!
• Check the scope of the conference before submission (read the call for papers!) and do not submit papers that are not at all related to the conference (this is just spam).
• Provide reasonable justifications for your assumptions and don’t take them for granted.
• Your assumptions should be reflected in the experiment design!!
• When proposing a new approach, compare its performance to traditional methods to highlight its benefits!
• The methodology / experiment design should be well explained and justified, as this influences the results obtained and their verification. A brief overview of the experiment without mentioning important paramter is simply not enough.

Some notes on the presentation quality:

• Use a spell checker
• Typeset formulas correctly (variables are written in italic, use subscripts, use the usual notation, e.g. a Sigma when denoting sums, …)
• Learn how to use your word processor
• Do not vary with the font size (e.g. in the same paragraph….) or font styles (e.g. changing to sans-serif fonts (this looks like a plagiarism of an inexperienced undergraduate student…)
• Creating understandable plots is more work than just somehow plotting your data! Spend some time on formatting your plot, highlight relevant parts, choose an appropriate design, …
• Prefer vector graphics whenever possible and do not include screenshots of your Matlab desktop!