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them together. Something that can be confronting about these issues is that, often,
the authors appear to have worked hard over a long period of time to produce a
substantial document; and yet it immediately obvious that there is no chance of
the work being accepted. An experienced researcher may feel baffled that this has
occurred—as the work progressed, did no one see that it was going badly?
Be alert to the potential faults in your own work, and have the courage to abandon
or refocus activity that has little chance of leading to a valuable outcome. And,
while the examples below are in some respects extreme—which makes them easy to
understand—they do highlight the kinds of issues that readers become alert to, and
which authors should therefore avoid.
Irrelevance
When I first see a paper, impressions form in a minute or two, influenced by lay-
out, readability, and so on. With some papers, though, a positive initial response is
gradually followed by a sinking feeling: I cannot figure out what this paper is about .
Something elementary is utterly missing.
What that “something” is can vary. Sometimes there is a lack of connection to
the literature on any particular topic, and thus no sense of what the author is trying
to achieve. In some cases the author has proposed an elegant solution, but it is not
obvious what the problem is, or the problem is so unrealistic that it is impossible to
grasp. 4 It may be that the author has given a clear motivation for the work, but the bulk
of the paper concerns something else entirely; an example was a paper whose starting
point was the challenge faced by teachers who wish to ensure that Web searches
only return pages that are appropriate for children, but the contribution concerned
mechanisms for selectively highlighting passages that were relevant to the query.
Another form of this are those papers that are submitted to an inappropriate
venue: 5 work on file compression submitted to a conference on database modelling,
or work on face recognition submitted to a journal on data visualization. 6 Even more
4 I once struggled with a paper that concerned relational databases, but in which each record—and
I do mean record, not table—had an arbitrary number of fields. So, not relational then, but in some
places relational properties were assumed. (Like many of the examples in this text, this instance is
“real” but altered to disguise its origins, and also to make it easy to explain in a sentence or two.)
And another in which the authors assumed that Web queries are the result of a random walk through
a weighted graph representing mental representations of related concepts, and wished to use a log
of queries to infer the graph. Some rather arbitrary use of terminology (“actuation maps can be
made explicit through provocation by deliberative stimuli”) was at first intimidating, until I realised
the authors were using it to disguise the fact that they hadn't figured out how to achieve anything.
5 Which is not the same thing as venues that are inappropriate. A consequence of publication
pressures has been the rise of journals and conferences that seem little more than opportunistic, with
glossy web presences, plausible editorial boards or program committees, and even affiliations with
major professional societies—but with low standards of refereeing, high publication or registration
costs, and, ultimately, no citations.
6 At a journal where most of the submissions were on Web search, I received respectable papers
on automated migration of software between operating systems and on a method for evaluating a
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