For some reason, the topic of reviewing and getting papers rejected came up several times in conversations at VIS recently. Getting your work rejected and learning to deal with rejection is part of life as an academic, and it’s worthwhile to think about the process a bit.
What does it mean to publish a paper? Is it just to add a bullet point to your CV, or do you want the world to know about your research? What does it mean to publish today? Here are some thoughts and pointers on how to get the word out about the amazing work you do.
Much of academic work is focused on writing papers. This doesn't just include the work that goes into the research and the writing, but also strategy – beyond the single paper. Here is one that worked. Even if it's a bit coincidental, I think it's a good model for other papers.
There has been a change in the way papers presented at IEEE VIS are published in the TVCG journal. It used to be the last issue of the year, but starting in 2015, it's now the January issue of the next year. So all VIS 2015 papers have a publication date of 2016.
The purpose of peer review is to separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the brilliant from the clinically insane – you get the picture. But why? Why filter and not just let anybody publish whatever they want?
As a reviewer, you might sometimes ask yourself why people write so many bad papers. And why they bother submitting them. I certainly do. But where do they come from? Who submits bad papers? And why? It may come as a surprise, but there are good reasons to submit bad papers for review.
Reviewing is great when you get a good paper where you can make some suggestions to make it even better, and everybody’s happy. Bad papers are much less fun, but they are also much more common. Here are some examples I’ve seen and that I keep seeing.
Peer review is one of the central pillars of academic publishing. But how does it actually work? What is blind review, and what is it good for? This part will answer those questions, and then tell you how to be a good reviewer yourself.
What is peer review? How does it work? And is it really as flawed as people claim it is? In this little series, I will talk about all that, and then end up arguing that peer review does, in fact, work - at least in visualization. But first an example where it didn’t.
I recently got an email from a colleague with the subject, “Academic research, is it all bad?” He had looked at a paper presented at a VIS workshop that people were pointing to on Twitter, and had found it lacking (“it’s just a blog posting”). While there are high-quality venues for visualization research, it’s not easy to be sure which ones are good, and which ones are lower quality.
