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We are Under Attack

Academia is overwhelmed by a flood of poor-quality papers on niche topics. A proposal suggests adjusting demand and supply to improve conference quality and reduce submission volume, benefitting both researchers and reviewers. Let's rethink academic conference standards!

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We are Under Attack

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  1. We are Under Attack

  2. We are Under Attack By the Least Publishable Unit

  3. Evidence • Zillions of mediocre papers • On increasingly narrow topics • Of interest to almost nobody • With high serial overlap • Number of submissions to conferences (including this one) is out of hand • Requiring a PC of multitudes • Generating pretty random reviewing • With a goal of rejecting a paper if it is the least bit controversial

  4. Evidence • General wisdom Until acceptance { float a bad paper to a conference; improve it based on reviews; } • Leading to yet more submissions

  5. Further Evidence • I got hired at Berkeley in 1971 • With 0 publications • I got tenure at Berkeley in 1976 • With 7 publications • You can’t get an asst professor job unless you have at least this • Tenure cases typically have 4X this number • Asst. professors are neither 4X smarter nor work 4X harder 35 years later

  6. Two Modest Proposal • Increase demand • Decrease supply

  7. Increase Supply • Co-opt a few more conferences • Anything with the words “big data” in the title is a candidate, e.g. • ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing • New IEEE Conference on Big Data • Move major conferences to a poster format • At least for thenarrowly focused papers • So the 3 people who are interested can yack with the author

  8. Decrease Supply • Create a “Standing Committee” of “gray beards” • Say 20 people • Organized by subareas • Which would review up to 2 extended abstracts per year • say 6 pages • from legitimate researchers (who would have to be screened) • I.e. take your best pair of shots per year • Basically a universal program committee

  9. Decrease Supply • Every paper would get a score • Say an integer between 0 and 20 • Any conference (PODS, CIDR, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE) could then pick the top ranked and previously unpublished abstracts (presumably with a sub-area bias) • Which could then be expanded into a full paper • Has the nice feature that rejected papers automatically roll over to the next available conference • Could augment this with a mentoring system…

  10. Over Time • Gray beard average score (GBAS) would be the significant metric in tenure decisions…. • Importance not volume!

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