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The Modes and Uses of Scientific Publication

By Bertrand Meyer
September 24, 2011
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Publication is about helping the advancement of humankind. Let us take this basis for granted and look at the other, possibly less glamorous aspects. Publication has four modes: Publicity; Exam; Business; and Ritual.

1. Publication as Publicity

The first goal of publication is to tell the world that you have discovered something: “See how smart I am!” (and how much smarter than all the others out there!). In a world devoid of material constraints for science, or where the material constraints are handled separately, as in 19^th-century German universities where professors were expected to fund their own labs, this would be the only mode and use of publication. Science today is a more complex edifice.

A good sign that Publication as Publicity is only one of the modes is that with today’s technology we could easily skip all the others. If all we cared about were to make our ideas and results known, we would simply put out our papers on ArXiv or just our own Web page. But almost no one stops there; researchers submit to conferences and journals, demonstrating how crucial the other three modes are to the modern culture of science.

2. Publication as Exam

Academic careers depend on a publication record. Actually this is not supposed to be the case; search and tenure committees are officially interested in “impact,” but any candidate is scared of showing a short publication list where competitors have tens or (commonly) hundreds of items.

We do not just publish; we want to be chosen for publication. Authors are proud of the low acceptance rates of conferences at which their papers have been accepted; in the past few years it has in fact become common practice, in publication lists attached to CVs, to list this percentage next to each accepted article. Acceptance rates are carefully tracked; see for example [2] for software engineering.

As Jeff Naughton has pointed out [1], this mode of working amounts to giving researchers the status of students forced to take exams again and again. Maybe that part is inevitable; the need to justify ourselves anew every morning may be an integral part of being a scientist, especially one funded by other people’s money. Two other consequences of this phenomenon are, I believe, more damaging.

The first risk directly affects the primary purpose of publication (remember the advancement of humankind?): a time-limited review process with low acceptance rates implies that some good papers get rejected and some flawed ones accepted. Everyone in software engineering knows (and recent PC chairs have admitted) that getting a paper accepted at the International Conference on Software Engineering is in part a lottery; with an acceptance rate hovering around 13%, this is inevitable. The mistakes occur both ways: papers accepted or even getting awards, then shown a few months later to be inaccurate; and innovative papers getting rejected because some sentence rubbed the referees the wrong way, or some paper was not cited. With a 4-month review cycle, and the next deadline coming several months later, the publication of a truly important result can be delayed significantly.

The second visible damage is publication inflation. Today’s research environment channels productive research teams towards an LPU (Least Publishable Unit) publication practice, causing an explosion of small contributions and the continuous decrease of the ratio of readers to writers. When submitting a paper I have always had, as my personal goal, to be read; but looking at the overall situation of computer science publication today suggests that this is not the dominant view: the overwhelming goal of publication is publication.

3. Publication as Business

Publishing requires an infrastructure, and money plays a role. Conferences in particular are a business. They have a budget to balance, not always an easy task, although a truly successful conference can be a big money-maker for its sponsor, commercial or non-profit. The financial side of conference publication has its consequences on authors: if you do not pay your fees, not only will you be unable to participate, but your paper will not be published.

One can deplore these practices, in particular their effect on authors from less well-endowed institutions, but they result from today’s computer science publication culture with its focus on the conference, what Lance Fortnow has called “A Journal in a Hotel”.

Sometimes the consequences border on the absurd. The ASE conference (Automated Software Engineering) accepts some contributions as “short papers”. Fair enough. At ASE 2009, “short paper” did not mean a shorter conference presentation but the permission to put up a poster and stand next to it for a while and answer passersby’s questions. For that privilege — and the real one: a publication in the conference volume — one had to register for the conference. ASE 2009 was in New Zealand, the other end of the world for a majority of authors. I ceded to the injunction: who was I to tell the PhD student whose work was the core of the submission, and who was so happy to have a paper accepted at a well-ranked conference, that he was not going to be published after all? But such practices are dubious. It would be more transparent to set up an explicit pay-for-play system, with page charges: at least the money would go to a scientific society or a university. Instead we ended up funding (in addition to the conference, which from what I heard was an excellent experience) airlines and hotels.

What makes such an example remarkable is that a reasonable justification exists for every one of its components: a highly selective refereeing process to maintain the value of the publication venue; limiting the number of papers selected for full presentation, to avoid a conference with multiple parallel tracks (and the all too frequent phenomenon of conference sessions whose audience consists of the three presenters plus the session chair); making sure that authors of published papers actually attend the event, so that it is a real conference with personal encounters, not just an opportunity to increment one’s publication count. The concrete result, however, is that authors of short papers have the impression of being ransomed without getting the opportunity to present their work in a serious way. Literally seconds as I was going to hit the “publish” button for the present article, an author of an accepted short paper for ASE 2012 (where the process appears similar) sent an email to complain, triggering a new discussion. We clearly need to find better solutions to resolve the conflicting criteria.

4. Publication as Ritual

Many of the seminal papers in science, including some of the most influential in computer science, defy classification and used a distinctive, one-of-a-kind style. Would they stand a chance in one of today’s highly ranked conferences, such as ICSE in software or VLDB in databases? It’s hard to guess. Each community has developed its own standard look-and-feel, so that after a while all papers start looking the same. They are like a classical mass with its Te Deum, Agnus Dei and Kyrie Eleison. (The “Te Deum” part is, in a conference submission, spread throughout the paper, in the form of adoring citations of the program committee members' own divinely inspired articles, good for their H-indexes if they bless your own offering.)

All empirical software engineering papers, for example, have the obligatory “Threats to Validity” section, which is has developed into a true art form. The trick is the same as in the standard interview question “What can you say about your own deficiencies?”, to which every applicant know the key: describe a personality trait so that you superficially appear self-critical but in reality continue boasting, as in “sometimes I take my work too much to heart” [3]. The “Threats to Validity” section follows the same pattern: you try to think of all possible referee objections, the better to refute them.

Another part of the ritual is the “related work” section, treacherous because you have to make sure not to omit anything that a PC member finds important; also, you must walk a fine line between criticizing existing research too much, which could offend someone, or not enough, which enables the referee to say that you are not bringing anything significantly new. I often wonder who, besides the referees, reads those sections. But here too it is easier to lament than to fault the basic idea or propose better solutions. We do want to avoid wasting our time on papers whose authors are not aware of previous work. The related work section allows referees to perform this check. Its importance in the selection process has, however, grown out of proportion. It is one thing to make sure that a paper is state-of-the-art, but another to reject it (as often happens) because it fails to cite a particular contribution whose results would not directly affect its own. Here we move from the world of the rational to the world of the ritual. An extreme and funny recent example — funny to me, not necessarily to the coauthors — is a rejection from  APSEC 2011, the Australia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, based on one review (the others were positive) that stated: “How novel is this? Are [there] not any cloud-based IDEs out there that have [a] similar awareness model integrated into their CM? This is something the related work [section] fails to describe precisely. [4]” The ritual here becomes bizarre: as far as we know, no existing system discusses a similar model; the reviewer too does not know of any; but he blasts the paper all the same for not citing work that he thinks must have been done by someone, somehow, somewhere. APSEC is a fine conference — it has to be, from the totally unbiased criterion that it accepted another one of our submissions this year! — and this particular paper may or may not have been ready for publication; judge it for yourself [5]. Such examples suggest, however, that the ritual of computer science publication has its limits.

Publicity, Exam, Business, Ritual: to which one of the four modes of publication are you most attuned? Oh, sorry, I forgot: in your case, it is solely for the advancement of humankind.

References and notes

[1] Jeffrey F. Naughton, DBMS Research: First 50 Years, Next 50 Years, slides of keynote at 26^th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, 2010, available at lazowska.cs.washington.edu/naughtonicde.pdf.

[2] Tao Xie, Software Engineering Conferences, at people.engr.ncsu.edu/txie/seconferences.htm.

[3] I once saw on French TV a hilarious interview of an entrepreneur who had started a software company in Vietnam, where job candidates just did not know “the code”, and moved on, in response to such a question, to tell the interviewer about being rude to their mother and all the other horrible things they had done in their lives.

[4] The words in brackets were not in the review but I added them for clarity.

[5] Martin Nordio, H.-Christian Estler, Carlo A. Furia and Bertrand Meyer: Collaborative Software Development on the Web, available at arxiv.org/abs/1105.0768.

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