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 the connections between things. 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 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 strategy than 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 between various types of audiences. If you write your excellent research in an overly-scholarly style for a professional magazine, it will bounce back. If you write your project exprience report in an overly-casual style for a research journal, it will bounce back. Certain elements need to be in place in different types of publications. A comprehensive, academic-quality literature survey may not be necessary for a magazine, but is essential for an archival periodical. Know your audience, and know what each type of publication requires for its audience.
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 anger. Avoid being unnecessarily absolute and self-assured and your style will pay off. This doesn’t mean 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, or a technical report. But it won’t make very interesting reading and it certainly will not buy you brownie points with the reviewers. Try it!
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