The health of research conferences and the dearth of big idea papers

Abstract

Research conferences are often the most desirable venues for presenting our research results. For academic computer scientists and engineers, preferring conferences over journals is so common that we even lobby administrators to ensure that conference papers can be viewed in the same light as journal papers in other fields [1]. Hence, the health of conferences is vital to our research mission. One conventional indication of health is the number of submissions and the acceptance rate at the conference. The accompanying figure shows both statistics for four ACM conferences. Clearly, these conferences appear healthy from this perspective. I am concerned, however, about the overall impact of increasing workloads on program committees and conferences and of decreasing acceptance rates on authors, especially authors of papers focusing on big ideas or new directions. Calls for papers often include encouraging words for big idea or new direction papers. The problem is that reviewers see so many regular papers it is just too difficult to switch gears and be more understanding when evaluating bolder papers with holes in arguments or missing measurements. Program committees typically start with a ranked list of papers based on the average of numerical ratings in order to cope with the large number of submissions. Big idea papers are sure to get some poor evaluations, which cause them to drop down the list.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.