Top Ten Ways to Kill a Paper – Part II
In a previous blog, I talked about five common mistakes authors make when trying to get an article accepted for publication in peer-reviewed software engineering journals, magazines, or proceedings. The full list includes ten common mistakes, as follows:
Number 10. Ignore reviewer feedback.
Number 9. Stick to clichés.
Number 8. Borrow without giving due credit.
Number 7. Don’t worry about the language.
Number 6. Ignore your work’s limitations.
Number 5. Ignore the context and prior art.
Number 4. Rely on argumentation to push an idea.
Number 3. Ignore your audience.
Number 2. Be undeservedly authoritative.
Number 1. Write in a purely descriptive style.
In this post, I’ll address the top five sins from Number 5 Number 1.
Sin #5 is the sin of laziness, or the appearance of it. Readers want to know what encompasses an idea, a piece of research, or a narrative about an interesting experience. They want to be able to position it relative to other works that are similar. They want to know about the connections between concepts, the progression of ideas. They want to understand the context. Prior art and context provide the beginning of a story. Without the beginning, the story struggles to survive. Without prior art and context, a paper has little value.
Sin #4 is the sin of defensiveness. Relying on winding questionable arguments to push an idea makes it seem like the author’s premise doesn’t hold water, as if the weakness of the idea needs to be hidden behind a veil of twisted logic. A better alternative to using argumentation is presenting facts and existing evidence. If evidence is not strong, just admit it. No apologies are necessary.
Sin #3 is making no attempt to differentiate among the various types of audiences. If you write up your excellent research in an overly scholarly style for a professional magazine, it will bounce back. If you write up your exceptionally insightful project experience report in an overly colloquial style for a research journal, it will bounce back. Style matters to your target audience. In addition, certain elements need to be in place in different types of publications at varying degrees. A comprehensive, academic-quality literature survey may not be necessary, or even overkill, for a magazine, but is essential for an archival periodical. Know your audience, and know what each type of publication requires to meet its audience’s expectations.
Sin #2 often accompanies Sin #4. It comes from the absolute tone that authors often use when expressing what is simply a point a view. Or, it comes from the tendency to pepper an article with unsupportable statements or embellish ideas with virtuous qualifiers and superlatives. This almost always makes reviewers recoil with disgust and fury. Avoid being unnecessarily absolute and self-assured. Humility, without being deliberately fuzzy, will work better than you think. However, it doesn’t imply that you shouldn’t take risks. Your message can still be provocative.
Perhaps the best strategy to use to get a paper rejected is to take a good idea and just write it up. And stop there. This brings us to Sin #1. A purely descriptive style is one in which you just describe something — whether it’s a concept, a process, an idea, a new technology, an experience, a study — in gory detail, definition by definition, step by step. You start from the beginning, explain all the elements in a clear, natural sequence, perhaps give a few small examples, and then you’ve done your job. You can stop. What could be wrong with this straightforward approach? Nothing. It may be perfectly OK for a white paper, a chapter of a text book, an appendix, a manual, a handbook, or a technical report. But it won’t make very interesting reading and it certainly will not buy you any brownie points with the reviewers. Try it!
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