[HN Gopher] Reversing the fossilization of computer science conf...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Reversing the fossilization of computer science conferences
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 74 points
       Date   : 2025-04-28 07:17 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cacm.acm.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cacm.acm.org)
        
       | jltsiren wrote:
       | Note how the author talks about "main conferences", "major
       | conferences", and "top conferences". That's the root issue.
       | Whenever there is prestige available, people will compete for it.
       | And if you have a competition, you should formalize the rules to
       | make it fair.
       | 
       | When I was doing PhD ~15 years ago, I noticed that I rarely cited
       | work that appeared in the top conferences of the subfield. Those
       | conferences covered so wide range of topics that often only 1 or
       | 2 papers were in the same subsubfield as me. And even those were
       | often not directly relevant to my work.
       | 
       | But then there were small specialized conferences that had plenty
       | of interesting papers every year. I left CS for another field a
       | decade ago, but I still regularly attend some of those
       | conferences and review for them. The papers published in them are
       | still interesting and relevant to my work.
        
         | auggierose wrote:
         | What are you doing now?
        
           | jltsiren wrote:
           | I could say algorithmic bioinformatics, but that's not really
           | correct. The center of mass may be there, but the actual work
           | varies from theoretical computer science to genomics.
        
       | matthewdgreen wrote:
       | A big part of the problem here is that Universities have
       | increasingly begun attaching prestige to specific "top"
       | conference publications for both ranking and faculty promotions.
       | A good example of the phenomenon can be seen in [1] (sorry for
       | the noun-citation!) which only gives credit for approximately
       | three conferences in each field. Combine this with a flood of new
       | researchers entering CS, you have a recipe for "top" conferences
       | being essentially destroyed and filled with uninspired work.
       | 
       | (And contrary to the joke in the article, even your own work
       | becomes uninspired when you ship it to those conferences. You
       | can't afford to be quirky or interesting.)
       | 
       | Fortunately every field has a fourth or fifth-tier conference
       | that isn't on this list (or a specialized topic conference that
       | the rankings folks don't care about), and those still serve the
       | purposes that conferences were made for. You just might not be
       | able to convince a ranking-obsessed administrator that your work
       | has any value if you publish there.
       | 
       | [1] https://csrankings.org/
        
         | cscheid wrote:
         | (I imagine you agree, so this is just to expand) a secondary,
         | insidious issue is that administrators diffuse their rules
         | through the bureaucracy. In the case of CS, you start seeing
         | references to csrankings in recommendation letters for grad
         | applications, faculty applications, or even tenure letters. At
         | that point, it can be hard to fight against it.
        
       | dynm wrote:
       | I think the example of how to "correctly" cite a paper actually
       | makes this issue seem smaller than it is. In reality, these
       | conferences have very complicated (and unstated) "rules" for how
       | a paper is supposed to look. If an "outsider" wanders in and
       | submits a paper with new ideas, it will be very obvious that they
       | are not a "member of the community" and their paper will usually
       | be treated much more harshly as a result. This adds a _huge_
       | amount of friction to research.
       | 
       | And what's particularly frustrating is that many organizers will
       | try to combat this by writing papers saying they "particularly
       | encourage" papers that are interdisciplinary, or focused on less
       | fashionable topics, etc. It's good that they are trying to change
       | things, but I think the main effect in practice is to encourage
       | people to spend their time writing papers that have little chance
       | of being accepted.
       | 
       | This issue isn't at all unique to computer science, though. Try
       | publishing a paper in a top economics journal as an outsider!
        
         | lou1306 wrote:
         | Adding to the frustration, (the lack of) these shibboleths
         | partially undermine double-blind reviewing, which is on the
         | rise in prestigious conferences. A reviewer from the in-group
         | may immediately spot that a submission comes from the out-
         | group.
        
         | Joker_vD wrote:
         | I am fairly certain this rule was there against an obnoxious
         | citing style of "The lambda calculus [1] was intended as a
         | foundation for mathematics". It is especially obnoxious in the
         | case of CS because when you cite e.g. "as Johns comments in his
         | article about future developments of the programming languages
         | [1963a]" it is quite important to know that this paper is
         | actually from 1963 and can be mostly disregarded except as a
         | historic curiosity; yet I've seen people vehemently defending
         | this "[1]" style.
        
           | mnky9800n wrote:
           | The only time I like numbers is writing proposals and I only
           | like it because it saves space. Other than that I much prefer
           | (name, year) if I am to have a preference at all.
        
           | MaxBarraclough wrote:
           | Is citation style really an issue? Even if they don't state
           | which style they expect, surely you can tell their expected
           | style from their existing publications? With proper tooling
           | (e.g. LaTeX+BibTeX) it's pretty painless to switch styles.
        
             | Joker_vD wrote:
             | Here's that rant of a blog from D.J. Bernstein [0] about
             | how "[3, 7, 42]" citation style is superior and promotes
             | scientific progress that I was thinking about when I wrote
             | my comment. I personally find most of his reasoning pretty
             | unconvincing; and so while I understand Meyer's irritation,
             | I have to say I have to side with OOPSLA here. After all,
             | you'd also probably want the submitted papers to be written
             | in somewhat better than 5th-grade-high-school-student's
             | English, and don't have way too many typos (I talk like ~15
             | typos per page).
             | 
             | [0] https://blog.cr.yp.to/20240612-bibkeys.html, previously
             | discussed on HN here [1].
             | 
             | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40662056
        
               | MaxBarraclough wrote:
               | Opinions vary on citation styles, my point was that it
               | seems reasonable for a publication to standardise on one
               | citation style, i.e. to require its use. I'm not sure
               | it's what dynm meant by _very complicated (and unstated)
               | "rules" for how a paper is supposed to look_. That
               | article by DJB mentions that every author really ought to
               | be using a citation-management solution like BibTeX, so
               | that regardless of your preferences, it's easy to change
               | your whole paper to a different citation style.
               | 
               | There's a slight (but only slight) irony in your use of
               | the HackerNews convention for handling multiple links
               | without breaking up the body of the main text. In this
               | short-form medium it works great. I see someone made this
               | same point in the thread you linked, at
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673426
        
               | dynm wrote:
               | By complicated and unstated rules, I meant sort of norms
               | about how you talk about previous work, how you caption
               | figures, what order you have for the sections, how self-
               | congratulatory vs. humble you are, etc. Theoretically,
               | there are no rules for these things. But in practice,
               | insiders seem to adopt a (deliberately?) complex ruleset
               | and use it to signal to each other that they insiders.
        
       | s1mplicissimus wrote:
       | A great link nugget from the article:
       | https://wp.doc.ic.ac.uk/cairesfe/wp-content/uploads/sites/80... -
       | a parody on how some historically very significant papers might
       | be rejected in today's system. made me chuckle a lot
        
       | zoobab wrote:
       | The publication of scientific papers is broken too:
       | 
       | 1. authors that just reviewed the paper, did not do anything
       | substential 2. papers that do not ship with working code 3.
       | papers that are meaningless
        
         | mnky9800n wrote:
         | Yes papers not having working code is very annoying and anti
         | intellectual. I wrote a substack about this recently because I
         | review a lot of papers that essentially are trash because the
         | authors do not provide working codes:
         | 
         | https://open.substack.com/pub/mnky9800n/p/how-to-format-code...
        
       | red_admiral wrote:
       | Unfortunately it's becoming an increasing problem that travel is
       | not equally safe depending on your nationality, destination, and
       | other factors. CRYPTO, the annual "S-tier" conference in
       | California, has already let people attend virtually online, and
       | is considering its options for next year.
       | 
       | Any conference that announces itself as being proudly diverse and
       | inclusive will have to have some difficult board meetings this
       | year. It's not just the US, there's several countries in Europe
       | that need a closer look at too. I hear Canada and the Nordic
       | countries are fairly safe.
       | 
       | The whole show up to conferences internationally to network and
       | put attendace on your CV thing is also not great for people
       | looking after children, among others.
       | 
       | In practice if you want discussion and citation for your
       | cryptography paper, it has to go on IACR eprint at some point.
       | Being published in CRYPTO is still a major endorsement, but not
       | the way people actually get hold of a copy these days.
        
         | graemep wrote:
         | > Unfortunately it's becoming an increasing problem that travel
         | is not equally safe depending on your nationality, destination,
         | and other factors.
         | 
         | It seems to get a lot more attention now that people from a
         | different type of country are getting affected.
         | 
         | > Any conference that announces itself as being proudly diverse
         | and inclusive will have to have some difficult board meetings
         | this year. It's not just the US, there's several countries in
         | Europe that need a closer look at too. I hear Canada and the
         | Nordic countries are fairly safe.
         | 
         | Do you mean safe for individuals or a choice of venue?
         | 
         | In the UK (which is the country I know best) individuals are
         | fine once they get a visa, but its not a safe choice in terms
         | of planning because the granting of visas for people from
         | certain countries is unpredictable (so people you expect to be
         | able to attend might not be allowed to).
        
           | red_admiral wrote:
           | Safe for individuals, mainly.
           | 
           | The UK right now is also trying to figure out who can use
           | what bathrooms. I don't understand the details myself.
        
             | graemep wrote:
             | The legal question (that was settled by a recent case) was
             | whether the word woman in existing legislation includes
             | transwomen. The particular case was primarily whether
             | transwomen could qualify for preference given to women for
             | certain posts "on the boards of certain public authorities
             | in Scotland".
             | 
             | https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/judgments/uksc-2024-0042
             | 
             | The toilets things getting the publicity is more a matter
             | of the media being obsessed with that aspect of it.
             | Obviously there are implications for that, but also for
             | many other things.
        
               | red_admiral wrote:
               | The EHRC [1] (Equality and Human Rights Commission) has
               | issued guidance [2] that suggests public toilets could be
               | affected. In practice I think life will go on as usual in
               | any organisation that's not explicitly anti-trans, but
               | there's a risk that someone will make a statement by
               | suing a venue for sex discrimination.
               | 
               | As far as I know, the judgement affects much wider issues
               | than just the women's "quota" on boardrooms in Scotland.
               | It seems like a lot of major employers and their lawyers
               | are trying to understand the implications and promising
               | they'll have a update for everyone "soon".
               | 
               | [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/equality-
               | and-hum... [2] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/media-
               | centre/interim-upd...
        
             | bobalob wrote:
             | Bathrooms are only a small part of this.
             | 
             | The Supreme Court ruling will also ensure that males are
             | not present in women's prisons, women's hospital wards,
             | women's sports, domestic violence refuges for women, and
             | many other spaces designated as being single-sex.
             | 
             | It also confirms that, in law, sexual orientation is
             | defined in terms of sex. One of the intervenors in the case
             | included lesbian groups who were concerned that legal
             | recognition of the rights of lesbian women would be
             | rendered meaningless if heterosexual males could simply
             | identify as such.
             | 
             | As for bathrooms, they are one of the few facilities for
             | which access is based on trust. The activists who insist
             | that they're going to use opposite-sex bathrooms regardless
             | of what the law says are confirming that they can't be
             | trusted to respect boundaries and stay out. Which says a
             | lot really.
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | I'm not sure that it says what you think it says. It
               | seems to equally apply to the trustworthiness of people
               | like Rosa Parks.
        
               | bobalob wrote:
               | How so? Are you suggesting that the civil rights of males
               | are being violated when they're told that female-only
               | spaces are off-limits?
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | I'm merely following the logic of your argument, that
               | people who violate rules demonstrate untrustworthiness
               | and a lack of respect for boundaries; you did not specify
               | an exception for those people whose civil rights are
               | being infringed by those rules.
               | 
               | Are you saying that it's fair to extend such an
               | exception?
        
               | bobalob wrote:
               | You're taking part of my comment and ignoring the context
               | in which it was written.
        
               | thomasfedb wrote:
               | I think you should expect to have your arguments
               | deconstructed on HN.
        
       | grunder_advice wrote:
       | In AI/ML job ads it is quite typical for the requirements to
       | include, "must have published at top AI conferences include but
       | not limited to NeuroIPS, ICML, ICLR, ...etc", which I find
       | completely crazy, because it just incentivizes grad students to
       | publish rubbish papers to have on their CV, and indeed most
       | conference papers in AI/ML are complete rubbish, because it is
       | trivial to take any architecture and any corresponding benchmark,
       | tweak the architecture slightly and publish a paper. Even dud
       | results are published as "promising". It's just a complete
       | shitshow, and as somebody who is in the field it feels as though
       | you cannot even complain because people get offended. You're just
       | supposed to keep spinning the hamster wheel without posing any
       | hard questions. Moreover, having published at top conferences
       | does not prove that somebody is going to be a good ML Engineer.
       | It just proves that somebody knows how to write a compelling
       | conference paper, which is a completely different skill set
       | altogether.
        
         | ash-ali wrote:
         | imo its a little more difficult to publish at these conferences
         | using: "take any architecture and any corresponding benchmark,
         | tweak the architecture slightly and publish a paper". at t2-t3
         | conferences ... sure.
        
       | zero_k wrote:
       | The main issue I see is that papers are actually becoming so
       | focussed on form that they are now unreadable. People prefer
       | reading my blog for my papers than reading the papers themselves.
       | In fact I hear people telling me they understood the blog
       | _better_. The whole academic writing shtick has become so obtuse
       | that not only writing is cumbersome, but so is reading.
       | 
       | The other side of all this academic brownie points via papers
       | (and doing reviews, which has become "brownie points for
       | gatekeeping") is that most academic software is not only
       | unmaintained, but actually unusable. They rarely even compile,
       | and if they do, there is no --help, no good defaults, no README,
       | and no way to maintain them. They are single-use software and
       | their singular use is to write the paper. Any other use-case is
       | almost frowned upon.
       | 
       | One of the worst parts of Academic software is that if you re-
       | write it in a ways that's actually usable and extensible, you
       | can't publish that -- it's not new ("research") work. And you
       | will not only have to cite the person who wrote the first useless
       | version forever, but they will claim they have done it if your
       | tool actually takes off.
       | 
       | BTW, there are academics who don't follow this trend. I am glad
       | that in my field (SAT), some of the best, e.g. Armin Biere and
       | Randal Bryant are not like this at all. Their software is
       | insanely nice and they fix bugs many-many years after release.
       | Notice that they are also incredibly good engineers.
        
         | amarcheschi wrote:
         | there is only 1 implementation available for an algorithm on
         | which i did part of my bs internship, and it uses a lot of
         | harcoding. It of course makes benchmarking and extending it
         | much, much harder if you want to change some things
         | 
         | examples here
         | https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AIBM%2FFedMA%20hard&type=c...
         | 
         | these hard coded parts are not easily adjustable
        
         | bluGill wrote:
         | Unfortunately academic resource doesn't seem to be focused on
         | the hard problems of today. A fast algorithm is nice, but we
         | need to be able to maintain code long term, understand code,
         | and fix bugs. I have 15 million lines of code I'm supposed to
         | maintain and I know many others reading this work on larger
         | projects. There is no way one human can write that much
         | software. There is no way we can afford to throw it away even
         | if there is a better way (well we could, but based on the last
         | time we did that the cost would be over 1 billion dollars and 8
         | years - not a useful investment since there is no reason to
         | think anything will make those prices go down). We need to keep
         | it working.
         | 
         | This is a shock to many of our leaders - who were writing 8 bit
         | assembly to do similar things. They commonly did throw away all
         | the work of the last version since it only took them a few
         | months to rewrite it for the exact features they needed.
         | (having experience because they wrote it just a year ago means
         | the rewrite as much faster, and the limitations of 8 bit means
         | it was worth rewriting since they had to remove one feature to
         | add a new one).
        
           | rtkwe wrote:
           | That's not a part of computer science that's organizational
           | and process management at that point not computer science so
           | I'm not shocked CS academics aren't interested in it. You're
           | looking at the wrong group to answer your question, we have a
           | great amount of discussion about how to organize large
           | software to make it manageable already too but most of it
           | comes down to breaking it into more manageable chunks with
           | defined interfaces and testing that interface thoroughly.
        
             | bluGill wrote:
             | Fir enough if the other group was looking at it but they
             | are not from what I can tell.
             | 
             | ane frankly CS without those skills is useless for the
             | reason I was replying to. If they cannot make
             | readable/maintainable code they need to get a different
             | job.
        
               | rtkwe wrote:
               | There's loads of space in a CS career where you'll never
               | get anywhere near responsibility for a hundred thousand
               | much less multiple millions of lines of code at once.
               | 
               | And there are already loads of advice out there about how
               | to organize and manage huge code bases. It's usually
               | consultancy based for anything but the broadest ideas
               | though because it's so specific to the particular
               | situation. An architecture is as much defined by the
               | application it's built for as it is by what people would
               | like to impose on it for convenience.
        
           | bigbuppo wrote:
           | Not to mention, academia likes to think it is isolated from
           | the real world, which is advertising and marketing all the
           | way down. We should probably mint more dual CS and marketing
           | majors.
        
         | jrmg wrote:
         | What's stopping you from writing papers in the style of your
         | blog posts (this is an actual question, not a 'why don't you
         | just...')
        
           | detaro wrote:
           | That reviewers tend to not like papers that aren't written
           | like papers.
        
           | Eridrus wrote:
           | Reviewers.
           | 
           | Even small deviations from academic style get negative
           | responses from reviewers.
        
         | bjourne wrote:
         | > In fact I hear people telling me they understood the blog
         | _better_. The whole academic writing shtick has become so
         | obtuse that not only writing is cumbersome, but so is reading.
         | 
         | Legible writing has little incentive. You can write in a simple
         | down-to-earth manner and risk having someone objecting "Your
         | work is isomorphic to X, done years ago." Your counter-
         | objection, "Well, X is so incomprehensible that no one had any
         | chance of understanding it", will fall flat. Better not risk
         | it, write in an obtuse form and withhold the source code.
        
           | HdS84 wrote:
           | I've studied political science in Germany. Unfortunately,
           | most German political science people confused opaque writing
           | with wisdom - basically hiding invalid theory behind an
           | obtuse language. Nobody wanted to say out loud that they
           | don't understand the language, so it helped to fortify their
           | shit theories.
        
             | aleph_minus_one wrote:
             | While there is a lot of bullshit hidden behind obtuse
             | language, I would claim that in Germany there is a very
             | different culture around what is a "good, clear academic
             | text".
             | 
             | When I see HN discussions, in the USA, it seems to be that
             | simple, clear explanations are something to be cherished.
             | On the other hand, in Germany, the academic ideal is to use
             | terms _that describe things as precisely and exactly as
             | possible_.
             | 
             | In other words:
             | 
             | - in the USA "clarity" means "describing things as simple
             | and "understandable" (for less educated people) as
             | possible".
             | 
             | - In Germany (in particular humanities academia) "clarity"
             | means "describing things in the most precise ('clear' in
             | the sense of 'minimal risk of misunderstanding') terms as
             | possible. You may assume that the reader is either
             | sufficiently educated to know these specialist terms or
             | take a serious effort to learn them".
             | 
             | Thus, the expectations what "clarity" means in academic
             | texts are very different between these countries.
        
         | anon291 wrote:
         | Exactly. The format is wrong. The expectation of publication in
         | a journal in the way that they are formatted today is not good.
         | At one point, an aspiring PhD student used a novel technique
         | from a library I wrote and published on GitHub. The student
         | cited my library as an example of the technique out in the
         | wild, but claimed that he invented it. This is easily
         | falsifiable by the GitHub history, but because there's no
         | scientific paper, apparently this is fine by the journal. Not
         | that I really care because for me, it's NBD, but I think it
         | shows how myopic, isolated, and simply silly the whole
         | scientific publishing industry is, especially in CS.
        
       | relaxing wrote:
       | The reason behind the citation style is to serve the automated
       | parsing of citations by research information systems, which can
       | then roll up all of your contributions to the field into a single
       | score which determines one's entire worth in academia.
       | 
       | The author really should have recognized this, as it serves his
       | point about careerism and brownie points.
       | 
       | The idea that being forced into a citation style stifles
       | innovation is hilarious, especially coming from a computer
       | scientist - formal systems are all we do. It's not so hard, is
       | it? Use a citation manager and have them generated for you!
        
       | mehulashah wrote:
       | There's a larger problem here beyond careerization that is going
       | unsaid. People are using these metrics as an assessment of their
       | self worth. I've had top researchers point out that such and such
       | publication was accepted in the industrial track vs research
       | track, and how important it was to keep that flag in the
       | bibliographical data, even well after publication in a top
       | conference. Most papers research or industrial stay in obscurity.
       | The truly novel ones will catch like wildfire. The metricization
       | of research and academic standing is the underlying culprit.
        
         | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
         | > The truly novel ones will catch like wildfire.
         | 
         | This doesn't always happen; there are many historical examples
         | where the first publication of an idea or technology goes
         | unnoticed, often for many years, until someone better-
         | positioned re-invents the same thing.
        
       | jp57 wrote:
       | When I started my PhD in CS/AI in the late 90s, my department's
       | AI faculty was already telling us, "at the major conferences, all
       | the action is in the workshops." And this was my experience, the
       | workshops were indeed where you found the most engaging
       | experiences and interesting new things.
       | 
       | Meanwhile the work at the main at the main conference of AAAI or
       | ICML was much farther along, and the value of having it presented
       | at a conference, rather than a journal, was minimal. The
       | conventional wisdom was, "the talk is just an advertisement for
       | the paper."
        
       | ModernMech wrote:
       | Pretty funny OOPSLA/SPLASH is the first example given because
       | that's _exactly_ the conference that came to mind when I clicked
       | to read the article.
       | 
       | Honestly though, I find much better luck in the workshops. They
       | don't really have the same reach as the main conference, and the
       | specificity of the topics means that the reviewers are usually
       | much more focused on _content_ rather than checking boxes. They
       | want to make a good workshop for the attendees, so it 's far more
       | important for workshops to focus on actual content rather than
       | the resume building activities. The LIVE workshop for instance
       | doesn't even really require a paper:
       | https://2024.splashcon.org/home/live-2024#Call-for-Submissio...
       | 
       | Other workshops require just an extended abstract. Or maybe a
       | short paper that doesn't have to be archived. I find these venues
       | easier to get into, easier to present at, and easier to have a
       | good discussion with the attendees.
        
       | fitzn wrote:
       | This article resonated with me and puts into words some of the
       | feelings I had towards the end of my PhD. This part:
       | 
       | > An interesting case in software engineering is dismissal for
       | lack of "evaluation." It would be, of course, ridiculous to deny
       | the benefits that the emphasis on systematic empirical
       | measurement has brought to software engineering in the last three
       | decades. But it has become difficult today to publish conceptual
       | work not yet backed by systematic quantitative studies.
       | 
       | struck a chord with me. The top-tier CS systems conferences for
       | me (OSDI and SOSP) have gotten to the point where you basically
       | have to be writing the paper about the system you built at a
       | FAANG that serves 1B users daily to get accepted.
       | 
       | It's hard for a novel idea and first-cut implementation to
       | compete with systems built over many years with a team of a dozen
       | software engineers. Obviously, those big systems deserve tons of
       | credit and it's amazing that Big Tech publishes those papers!
       | Credit to them. But it's also the case that novel ideas with an
       | implementation that hasn't seen 1B users yet still have value.
       | 
       | I suppose the argument is that workshops serve that purpose of
       | novel ideas with unproven implementation. There's some truth to
       | that, but as the article highlights, the full conference papers
       | are the real currency.
        
       | sitkack wrote:
       | 1) Increase page length maximums, 10 pages is too low to explain
       | something. I am looking directly at you IEEE.
       | 
       | 2) Record and post all of the conferences, ACM is doing great
       | strides here, but many many conferences aren't even recorded.
       | 
       | 3) Reduce the paywalls and the access to all information, again I
       | want to really support the ACM here, but the conferences that
       | aren't broadcast for free (and also aren't recorded) are also the
       | ones that are hella expensive and you have to attend in person
       | (making them 5x as expensive with travel and lodging). Provide a
       | happy medium, $300 for remote attendance? Delay publishing of the
       | recordings (just post them raw) by 12 weeks?
       | 
       | The collaboration mediums should scale with the number of folks
       | in the population. The venue stays the same but you 10x the
       | input, lots of great people and great research is going to get
       | broken.
        
       | kenjackson wrote:
       | The article says that Attention is All You Need wasn't published
       | in a "standard" conference, but wasn't it published in NIPS? Did
       | I misread the article?
        
       | samth wrote:
       | This article is mostly whining that evidence-free speculation
       | about how to write good software is no longer publishable in top
       | conferences. And the major evidence cited is that there's a
       | specific citation style required, a standard feature of every
       | kind of publishing since forever. I promise (having reviewed many
       | times for the specific conference under discussion) that no one's
       | paper is rejected (or even denigrated) for failing to use
       | appropriate citation style, people comment on it the same way
       | they would comment on any other style issue.
        
         | denotational wrote:
         | I think that's a pretty uncharitable take; I thought there were
         | several interesting questions raised by the author:
         | 
         | 1. Should conference "service" be something we expect of
         | postdocs (and even PhD candidates) rather than established
         | experts?
         | 
         | > Often, as a result, the PC is staffed by junior, ambitious
         | academics intent on filling their resumes. Note that it does
         | not matter for these resumes whether the person did a good or
         | bad job as a referee! [...] I very much doubt that the
         | submissions of Einstein, Curie, Planck, and such to the Solvay
         | conferences were assessed by postdocs. Top conferences should
         | be the responsibility of the established leaders in the field.
         | 
         | 2. Should programme chairs strive to maintain exclusivity of
         | their conference track, or look for important ideas that
         | deserve to be communicated?
         | 
         | > As a simple example, consider a paper that introduces a new
         | concept, but does not completely work out its implications and
         | has a number of imperfections. In the careerist view, it is
         | normal to reject it as not ready for full endorsement. In the
         | scientific view, the question for the program committee (PC)
         | becomes: is the idea important enough to warrant publication
         | even if it still has rough edges? The answer may well be yes.
         | [...] Since top conferences boast of their high rejection
         | rates, typically 80% to 90%, referees must look for reasons to
         | reject the papers in their pile rather than arguments for
         | accepting them.
         | 
         | 3. Is computer science suffering from a focus on orthopraxy
         | rather than scientific method?
         | 
         | > What threatens to make conferences irrelevant is a specific
         | case of the general phenomenon of bureaucratization of science.
         | Some of the bureaucratization process is inevitable: research
         | no longer involves a few thousand elite members in a dozen
         | countries (as it did before the mid-1900s), but is a global
         | academic and industry business drawing in enormous amounts of
         | money and millions of players for whom a publication is not
         | just an opportunity to share their latest results, but a career
         | step.
         | 
         | What do you think about these?
        
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