The Toxic Culture of Rejection in Computer Science
a day ago
- #Computer Science
- #Peer Review
- #Academic Publishing
- Computer Science values low acceptance rates in conferences, fostering a toxic culture of rejection over community growth.
- Rejection often targets serious efforts by promising young researchers, dismissed for minor flaws or 'lack of novelty.'
- The novelty criterion is misapplied, ignoring that most good ideas are reinforced through repetition, not initial introduction.
- Systems papers are frequently rejected because they integrate prior art, missing the opportunity to teach engineering excellence.
- Double-blind reviews and high rejection rates institutionalize unethical practices, where reviewers use ideas from rejected papers without attribution.
- Program committee members face conflicts of interest, incentivized to reject papers to improve their own submissions' chances.
- The culture of rejection discourages young researchers, leading some to leave academia or the field entirely.
- Solutions include focusing on interesting, instructive papers, disclosing reviewer identities, and archiving reviews and rebuttals.
- Reviewers should treat anonymized authors as colleagues, not strangers, and use 'lack of novelty' as a rejection criterion cautiously.