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February 20, 2007

Comments

Fake

I never buy this "hard decisions" bit. The PC is usually sick & tired by the end of the discussion and would not have accepted more papers even if it was possible.

If your paper got rejected than your paper was not liked by the PC. The PC might be wrong, but it is probably a very good indication that you should go back and work on it. It is quite OK to be really upset about the PC decision and fume about it (especially when it is clearly wrong), but one should use this energy constructively by improving the paper, and not just sulking.

Piotr

Talking about reviews: any opinions about including the reviewer scores in the author feedback ? Personally, I think this would be a great way to communicate to the author(s) *quantitatively* what the reviewers thought about the paper, especially in case of rejection (e.g., does it make any sense to submit it to the same conference, or are the scores so low that it probably does not make sense; or, was the paper controversial, or were the scores more or less uniform, etc). This would also further increase the transparency of the system (which has already been greatly enhanced by comments such as the ones above).

Most conferences outside of theory (at least as far as I know), as well as the NSF panel system, do return the scores back to the authors.

Any opinions ?

Piotr

Talking about reviews: any opinions about including the reviewer scores in the author feedback ? Personally, I think this would be a great way to communicate to the author(s) *quantitatively* what the reviewers thought about the paper, especially in case of rejection (e.g., does it make any sense to submit it to the same conference, or are the scores so low that it probably does not make sense; or, was the paper controversial, or were the scores more or less uniform, etc). This would also further increase the transparency of the system (which has already been greatly enhanced by comments such as the ones above).

Most conferences outside of theory (at least as far as I know), as well as the NSF panel system, do return the scores back to the authors.

Any opinions ?

Herman

Quote from above:

> Q: Some of the reviews forwarded to me say
> wrong things about the paper.
> A: We know and ignored these reviews.

Why would I believe this if the PC doesn't actually say so?

You wouldn't. Because in many cases, the PC doesn't ignore the wrong things the reviewers say about your paper. I know of some...

Herman

To clarify the above a little: recently I have usually been ok with the reviews I got: even when some reviewers failed to recognize that my contribution was non-trivial and worthwile, there was usually also at least one review that I found fair. But I am rather unhappy with the standard disclaimers that program committees use when they forward reviews to authors. In my opinion, by forwarding a review a program committee gives at least the impression that it took the review seriously, and if it forwards a lousy review, this sheds doubt on the quality of the decisions. If it is actually true that program committees ignore some reviews, then how does the review end up being sent to the authors of the paper?

For those unhappy with reviews do please check out:

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion77.html

fogi

The basic idea is that even a FALSE review has useful information to the authros - it tells them where their presentation is bad enough that the reviewer got really confused.

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