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One of my papers got declined today
- remoquete 2y agoI find it refreshing when researchers disclose their own failures. Science is made of negative results, errors, and rejections, though it's often characterized in a much different, unrealistic way. By the way, even though some of you may know about it, here's the link to the Journal of Negative Results: https://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr https://www.jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- TychoCelchuuu 2y ago[dead]
- amichail 2y agoSure, even top mathematicians have paper rejections. But I think the more important point is that very few people are capable of publishing papers in top math journals.
- jraph 2y agoI was confused by the title because paper rejection is incredibly common in research, but that's the point and one of the goals is to fight imposter syndrome. It's a good initiative. Next step: everybody realizes that researchers are just random people like everybody. Maybe that could kill any remaining imposter syndrome. A rejection, although common, is quite tough during your PhD though, even ignoring the imposter syndrome, because in a short time, you are expected to have a bunch of accepted papers, in prestigious publications if possible. It feels like a rejection slows you down, and the clock is still ticking. If we could kill some of this nefarious system, that'd be good as well.
- bisby 2y agoIt's especially important coming from someone like Terence Tao. If one of the best and brightest mathematicians out there can get a paper declined, then it can happen to literally anyone.
- arrowsmith 2y agoIt’s noteworthy because it’s from Terence Tao, regarded by many as the world’s greatest living mathematician. If you read the full post he’s making the exact same point as you: it’s common and normal to get a paper rejected even if you’re Terence Tao, so don’t treat a rejection like the end of the world.
- vitus 2y ago> regarded by many as the world’s greatest living mathematician. Oh? Perelman comes to mind (as the only person who has been eligible to claim one of the Millennium prizes), although he is no longer actively practicing math AFAIK. Of Abel prize winners, Wiles proved Fermat's last theorem, and Szemeredi has a number of number-theoretic and combinatorial contributions. Recently deceased (past ~10 years) include figures such as John Nash, Grothendieck, and Conway. Tao is definitely one of the most well-known mathematicians, and he's still got several more decades of accomplishments ahead of him, but I don't know that he rises to "greatest living mathematician" at this point. That said, I do appreciate that he indicates that even his papers get rejected from time to time.
- xanderlewis 2y agoHaving been a child prodigy somehow gives one infamy (in the wider public consciousness) beyond anything one can achieve as an adult.
- vanderZwan 2y agoHe's a child prodigy who didn't burn out, that does make him quite rare.
- tinktank 2y agoI wish I has an IQ that high...
- revskill 2y agoIQ means interesting questions.
- liteblues 2y ago[dead]
- aleph_minus_one 2y agoIf you want to become smarter in math, read and attempt to understand brutally hard math papers and textbooks. Torture yourself harder than any time before in your life. :-)
- abetusk 2y agoThe second post in that thread is gold: """ ... I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted. The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature! ... """
- YouWhy 2y agoWhile I'm not a mathematician, I think such an attitude on behalf of the journal does not encourage healthy community dynamics. Instead of allowing the community to join forces by breaking up a larger problem into pieces, it encourages siloing and camper mentality.
- abetusk 2y agoI agree. This is also a lack of effort on the journal's part to set expectations of what the reviewers should be looking for in an accepted paper. In the journal's defense though, what most likely happened is that the reviewers were different between submissions and they didn't know about the context. Ultimately, I think, this type of rejection comes down to the mostly the reviewers discretion and it can lead to this type of situation. I cut off the rest of the post but Tao finished it with this: """ ... Being an editor myself, and having had to decline some decent submissions for a variety of reasons, I find it best not to take these sorts of rejections personally, ... """
- asah 2y agoNon-zero failure rate is indeed often optimal because it provides valuable feedback toward finding the optimal horizon for various metrics, e.g. speed, quality, LPU[1], etc. That said, given the labor involved in academic publishing and review, the optimal rejection rate should be quite low, i.e. find a lower cost way to pre-filter papers. OTOH, the reviewers may get value from rejected papers... [1] least publishable unit
- dwaltrip 2y agoHilarious irony: > With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing. With a coauthor, I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted. > The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!
- bradleyjg 2y agoThis seems reasonable? Suppose the full result is worth 7 impact points, which is broken up into 5 points for the partial result and 2 points for the fix. The journal has a threshold of 6 points for publication. Had the authors held the paper until they had the full result, the journal would have published it, but neither part was significant enough. Scholarship is better off for them not having done so, because someone else might have gotten the fix, but the journal seems to have acted reasonably.
- remus 2y ago> This seems reasonable? In some sense, but it does feel like the journal is missing the bigger picture somewhat. Say the two papers are A and B, and we have A + B = C. The journal is saying they'll publish C, but not A and B!
- cubefox 2y ago... A and B separately.
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- Nevermark 2y agoHow many step papers before a keystone paper seems reasonable to you? I suspect readers don’t find it as exciting to read partial result papers. Unless there is an open invitation to compete on its completion, which would have a purpose and be fun. If papers are not page turners, then the journal is going to have a hard time keeping subscribers. On the other hand, publishing a proof of a Millennium Problem as several installments, is probably a fantastic idea. Time to absorb each contributing result. And the suspense! Then republish the collected papers as a signed special leather limited series edition. Easton, get on this!
- _yb2s 2y agoI am actually quite surprised Terence Tao still gets papers rejected from math journals... but appreciate him sharing this, as hearing this from him will help newer scientists not get discouraged by a rejection. I had the lucky opportunity to do a postdoc with one of the most famous people in my field, and I was shocked how much difference the name did make- I never had a paper rejection from top tier journals submitting with him as the corresponding author. I am fairly certain the editors would have rejected my work for not being fundamentally on an interesting enough topic to them, if not for the name. The fact that a big name is interested in something, alone can make it a "high impact subject."
- vouaobrasil 2y ago> I am actually quite surprised Terence Tao still gets papers rejected from math journals At least it indicates that the system is working somewhat properly some of the time...
- scubbo 2y agoCould you elaborate on this statement? It sounds like you're implying something, but it's not clear what.
- monktastic1 2y agoI interpret it as saying that at least the system hasn't just degraded into a rubber stamp (where someone like Tao can publish anything on name alone).
- TN1ck 2y agoI think it’s that a paper submitted by one of the most famous authors in the math field is not auto approved by the journals. That even he has to go through the normal process and gets rejected at times.
- 9dev 2y agoI find it bewildering that it wouldn’t, actually. I would have expected one of the earliest things in the review process happening would be to black out the submitters name and university, only to be revealed after the review is closed.
- aborsy 2y agoResearch is getting more and more specialized. Increasingly there may not be many potential journals for a paper, and, even if there are, the paper might be sent to the same reviewers (small sub communities). You may have to leave a year of work on arxiv, with the expectation that the work will be rehashed and used in other published papers.
- atrettel 2y agoI agree with the discussion that rejection is normal and researchers should discuss it more often. That said, I do think that "publish or perish" plays an unspoken role here. I see a lot of colleagues trying to push out "least publishable units" that might barely pass review (by definition). If you need to juice your metrics, it's a common strategy that people employ. Still, I think a lot of papers would pass peer review more easily if researchers just combined multiple results into a single longer paper. I find those papers to be easier to read since they require less boilerplate, and I imagine they would be easier to pass peer review by the virtue that they simply contain more significant results.
- nextn 2y agoLonger papers with more claims have more to prove, not less. I imagine they would be harder to pass peer review.
- tredre3 2y ago> Longer papers with more claims have more to prove, not less. I imagine they would be harder to pass peer review. Yes, a longer paper puts more work on the peer reviewers (handful of people). But splitting one project in multiple papers puts more work on the reader (thousands of people). There is a balance to strike.
- atrettel 2y agoI agree with your first part but not your second. Most authors do not make outrageous claims, and I surely would reject their manuscript if they did. I've done it before and will do it again without any issue. To me, the point of peer review is to both evaluate the science/correctness of the work, but also to ensure that this is something novel that is worth telling others about. Does the manuscript introduce something novel into the literature? That is my standard (and the standard that I was taught). I typically look for at least one of three things: new theory, new data/experiments, or an extensive review and summation of existing work. The more results the manuscript has, the more likely it is to meet this novelty requirement.
- ak_111 2y ago- hey honey how was work today? - it was fine, I desk rejected terence tao, his result was a bit meh and the write up wasn't up to my standard. Then I had a bit of a quite office hour, anyway, ...
- Der_Einzige 2y agoI've had the surreal moment of attending a workshop where the main presenter (famous) is talking about their soon to-be-published work where I realize that I'm one of their reviewers (months after I wrote the review, so no impact on my score). In this case, I loved their paper and gave it high marks, and so did the other reviewers. Not surprising when I found out who the author was!!! I have to not say a word to them as I talk to them or else I could ruin the whole peer review thing! "Hey honey, I reviewed X work from Y famous person today"
- krisoft 2y ago> I have to not say a word to them as I talk to them or else I could ruin the whole peer review thing! In what sense would it ruin peer review to reveal your role after you already wrote and submitted the review?
- haunter 2y agofwiw, editorial review =/= peer review
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- ak_111 2y agoI always thought that part of the upside of being tenured and extremely recognised as a leader of your field is the freedom to submit to incredibly obscure (non-predatory) journals just for fun.
- d0mine 2y agoWhy journals exist at all? Could papers be published on something like arxiv.org (like software is on github.com)? It could support links/backref, citations(forks), questions(discussions), tags, followers, etc easily.
- bumby 2y agoPart of the idea is that journals help curate better publications via the peer review process. Whether or not that occurs in practice is up for some debate. Having a curated list can be important to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially in an era with ever increasing rates of research papers.
- d0mine 2y agoEliminating journals as a corporate monopoly doesn't eliminate peer review. For example, it should be easy to show the number of citations and even their specific context in other articles on the arxiv-like site. For example, if I like some app/library implementation on github, I look at their dependencies (a citation in a sense) to discover things to try. Curated lists can also exist on the site. Look at awesome* repos on github eg https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python Obviously, some lists can be better than the others. Usual social mechanics is adequate here.
- bumby 2y agoI think citation is a noisy/poor signal for peer-review. I've refereed a number of papers where I dig into the citations and find the article doesn't actually support the author's claim. Still, the vast majority of citations go unchecked. I don't think peer-review has to be done by journals, I'm just not sure what the better solution is.
- d0mine 2y agoI’ve definitely encountered such cases myself (when actual cited paper didn’t support author’s claims). Nothing prevents the site introducing more direct peer review (published X papers on a topic -> review a paper). Though If we compare two cases: reading a paper to leave an anonymous review vs reading a paper to cite it. The latter seems like more authentic and useful (less perversed incentives).
- bumby 2y agoAdam Grant once related an amusing rejection from a double-blind review. One of the reviewers justified the rejection with something along the lines of “The author would do well to familiarize themselves with the work of Adam Grant”
- Upvoter33 2y agoThis also happens pretty commonly. However, it's not even unreasonable! Sometimes you write a paper and you don't do a good enough of a job putting in the context of your own related work.
- CrazyStat 2y agoAnd sometimes the reviewer didn't read carefully and doesn't understand what you're doing. I once wrote a paper along the lines of "look we can do X blazingly fast, which (among other things) lets us put it inside a loop and do it millions of times to do Y." A reviewer responded with "I don't understand what the point of doing X fast is if you're just going to put it in a loop and make it slow again." He also asked us to run simulations to compare our method to another paper which was doing an unrelated thing Z. The editor agreed that we could ignore his comments.
- Nevermark 2y agoYes, funny the first time. Not so much the fifth!
- orthoxerox 2y agoLife imitates art. In a 1986 comedy "Back to School" Rodney Dangerfield's character delegates his college assignments to various subject matter experts. His English Lit teacher berates him for it, saying that not only did he obviously cheat, but he also copied his essay from someone who's unfamiliar with the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Of course, the essay was written by Vonnegut himself, appearing in a cameo role.
- Metacelsus 2y agoI, as a reviewer, made a similar mistake once! The author's initial version seemed to contradict one of their earlier papers but I was missing some context.
- TZubiri 2y ago"Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average." This feels like a superhuman trying to empathize with a regular person.
- ziofill 2y agoThis is his main point, and I wholeheartedly agree: …a perception can be created that all of one's peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one's own personal career ending up becoming the only known source of examples of "mundane" failure. I speculate that this may be a contributor to the "impostor syndrome"…
- ndesaulniers 2y agoThe master has failed more than the beginner has tried.
- 23B1 2y agoA similar story. I actively blogged about my thesis and it somehow came up in one of those older-model plagarism detectors (this was years and years ago, it might have been just some hamfisted google search). The (boomer) profs convened a 'panel' without my knowledge and decided I had in fact plagiarized, and informed me I was in deep doo doo. I was pretty much ready to lose my mind, my career was over, years wasted, etc. Luckily I was buddy with a Princeton prof. who had dealt with this sort of thing and he guided me through the minefield. I came out fine, but my school never apologized. Failure is often just temporary and might not even be real failure.
- tetha 2y ago> Because of this, a perception can be created that all of one's peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one's own personal career ending up becoming the only known source of examples of "mundane" failure. I've found similar insights when I joined a community of musicians and also discovered twitch / youtube presences of musicians I listen to. Some of Dragonforces corona streams are absolutely worth a watch. It's easy to listen to mixed and finished albums and... despair to a degree. How could anyone learn to become that good? It must be impossible, giving up seems the only rational choice. But in reality, people struggle and fumble along at their level. Sure enough, the level of someone playing guitar professionally for 20 years is a tad higher than mine, but that really, really perfect album take? That's the one take out of a couple dozen. This really helped me "ground" or "calibrate" my sense of how good or how bad I am and gave me a better appreciation of how much of a marathon an instrument can be.
- cess11 2y agoJournals are typically for-profit, and science is not, so they don't always align and we should not expect journals to serve science except incidentally.
- NicholasGurr 2y ago[flagged]
- justinl33 2y agoIt’s okay Terence, it happens to the best of us.
- ggernov 2y ago[flagged]
- slackr 2y agoReminds me—I wish someone would make an anti-LinkedIn, where the norm is to announce only setbacks and mistakes, disappointments etc.
- remoquete 2y agoFolks already do. They often turn them into inspirational tales.
- omoikane 2y agoThere was a site where people posted company failures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
- 77pt77 2y agoJust like in academia, no one cares about negative results in professional settings.
- cperciva 2y agoIn 2005, my paper on breaking RSA by observing a single private-key operation from a different hyperthread sharing the same L1 cache -- literally the first publication of a cryptographic attack exploiting shared caches -- was rejected from the cryptology preprint archive on the grounds that "it was about CPU architecture, not cryptography". Rejection from journals is like rejection from VCs -- it happens all the time and often not for any good reason. (That paper has now been cited 971 times according to Google Scholar, despite never appearing in a journal.)
- davrosthedalek 2y agoIs it on the arxiv? If not, please put it there.
- ilya_m 2y agoThe paper is here: http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful/ http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful... As its author noted, the paper has done fine ciation- and impact-wise.
- cperciva 2y agoPaper is here: https://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf https://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf Your link is the website I put up for non-experts when I announced the issue.
- davrosthedalek 2y agoIn this case, it's less about discoverability, but more about long term archival. Will daemonology.net continue to exist forever? Arxiv.org might perish, but I am sure the community will make sure the data will be preserved.
- cperciva 2y agoI'm not too worried about that -- this paper is "mirrored" on hundreds of university websites since it's a common reference for graduate courses in computer security.
- kzz102 2y agoIn academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there is no universal standard on either the prestige of the journal or the importance of the paper, mismatches happen regularly, and rejection is the natural result. In fact, the only way to avoid rejections is to submit a paper to a journal of lower prestige than your estimate, which is clearly not what authors want to do.
- directevolve 2y agoIt’s not an accident - if academics underestimated the quality of their own work or overestimated that of the journal, this would increase acceptance rates. Authors start at an attainable stretch goal, hope for a quick rejection if that’s the outcome, and work their way down the list. That’s why rejection is inevitable.
- kittikitti 2y agoAcademia is a paper tiger. The Internet means you don't need a publisher for your work. Ironically, this self published blog might be one of his most read works yet.
- snowwrestler 2y agoYou never needed a publisher; before the Internet you could write up your findings and mail them to relevant people in your field. Quite a lot of scientists did this, actually. What publication in a journal gives you is context, social proof, and structured placement in public archives like libraries. This remains true in the age of the Internet.
- lupire 2y agoIt's important to remember there a journal's reputation is built by the authors who publish there, and not vice versa.
- kizer 2y agoWhether it’s a journal, a university, a tech company… never take it personally because there’s bureaucracy, policies, etc and information lost in the operation of the whole process. Cast a wide net and believe in the value you’ve created or bring.
- jongjong 2y agoThe high standards of those academic journals sound incredible in this day and age when media is full of misinformation and irrelevant information. The anecdote about the highly reputable journal rejecting the second of a 2-part paper which (presumably) would have been accepted as a 1-part paper is telling.
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- iamnotsure 2y agoPlease note that despite much work being done in the equality department being famous is nowadays still a requirement for acquiring the status of impostor syndrome achiever. Persons who are not really famous do not have impostor syndrome but are just a simple copycats in this respect.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoSo the non-famous people who claim to have impostor syndrome are actual impostors because they claim to have impostor syndrome. Honestly, that seems like a bit of a weird take but to each their own.
- j7ake 2y agoWe can laugh at academia but we know of these similar rejection stories nearly in all domains. AirBnB being rejected for funding, musicians like Schubert struggling their entire life, writers like Rowling in poverty. Rejection will always be the norm in competitive winner take all dynamics.
- SergeAx 2y agoWe often talk about how important it is to be a platform for oneself, self-host blog under own domain etc. Why it is not the case for science papers, articles, issues? Like, isn't the whole World Wide Web was invented specifically for that?
- soheil 2y agoShould we therefore also publicize everything else that lies between success and failure?
- drumhead 2y agoSaw the title and thought, nothing unusual in that really, then saw the domain was maths based, it's not Terrence Tao is it?! It was Terrence Tao. If one of the greats can get rejected then there's no shame in you getting rejected.
- PaulHoule 2y agoIf you stick around in physics long enough you will submit a paper to Physical Review Letters (which is limited to about four pages) that gets rejected because it isn't of general enough interest, then you resubmit to some other section of The Physical Review and get in. These days I read a lot of CS papers with an eye on solving the problems and personally I tend to find the short ones useless. (e.g. pay $30 for a 4-page paper because it supposedly has a good ranking function for named entity recognition except... it isn't a good ranking function)
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- shadowvoxing 2y agoRejection Therapy ftw. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy