Fictional peer reviews rejecting famous papers (2005)

http://th.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/People/Lucks/reject.pdf

by yarapavan • 14 years ago

86 51 14 years ago

th.informatik.uni-mannheim.de

yread• 14 years ago

To the ones not eager to open a PDF: go ahead and read it, it's hilarious. Rejections of Dijkstra's, Codd's, Turing's, Shannon's, Hoare's, RSA's groundbreaking papers in computer science due to nit picking and short introductions.

For Shannon's paper:

The author claims that “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problems,” which seems to indicate that his theory is suitable mostly for transmitting gibberish. Alas, people will not pay to have gibberish transmitted anywhere.

microtonal• 14 years ago

Or even better:

At any point, there are sexy topics and unsexy ones: these days, television is sexy and color television is even sexier. Discrete channels with a finite number of symbols are good for telegraphy, but telegraphy is 100 years old, hardly a good research topic.

ernesth• 14 years ago

To the ones eager to open a PDF, http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/reject.html (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3493803)

mysterywhiteboy• 14 years ago

Add to this Berners-Lee's rejection[1] from HyperText 1991 for his paper proposing the Web because it was a) too simple and [2], b) not really a very good Hypertext system [3].

[1] It was actually relegated to a poster. [2] http://www.w3.org/2007/04dc-rdu/w3c-stripes.html#(7) [3] http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/258701/1/youveGotHypertext11b.pdf

grep2• 14 years ago

Just in case it is not obvious: These rejection letters are fictional[1], created as collage of negative reviews Santini received. But it's hilarious to read, I agree.

Since the original site where Santini commented on it is gone, probably it's only a question of time until this document becomes internet "truth". Brave new world.

[1]http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic...

larsberg• 14 years ago

Yes, and it also lacks something more important - the original versions of the papers that were rejected!

While I certainly have my quibbles with my peer reviewers from time to time, in every case that I've had a paper reviewed, whether reject or accept the final paper that ended up making publication was a far, far better version than the original. For all we know, the original versions of those papers were poorly-motivated, typo-filled messes, potentially even with grievous errors that were later corrected.

That's certainly been true of some papers that I've provided negative reviews for and have later seen in another form as wonderfully polished gem.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

Just in case it is not obvious: These rejection letters are fictional[1], created as collage of negative reviews Santini received.

Thanks for pointing that out. I hope everyone gives your comment the upvote it deserves. That this submission was just a made-up joke was not obvious from

1) the domain currently hosting the document, one of the first things I check on each submission,

2) the submission title (which is NOT the original article title, contrary to the Hacker News guidelines), which sounds much too serious for a title on a joke article,

3) the first few comments, which treated the article as though it reported historical facts. Good for you to let us know what the background is.

ISL• 14 years ago

Thank you.

heeton• 14 years ago

I particularly like this, regarding RSA :

Finally, there is the question of the application. Electronic mail on the Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused outside academic circles and public laboratories—environments in which the need to maintain confidentiality is scarcely pressing.

qwertzlcoatl• 14 years ago

My favorites:

“An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming.” I am not sure I under- stand this article. It claims to be about programming, but it doesn’t contain a single line of code.

"On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entsheidungs-problem." [...] Either these numbers are too big to be represented in the machine[...] or they are not, in which case a machine that can't compute them is simply broken!

praptak• 14 years ago

Hrm, I once took part in preparation of a grant application related to some algorithms for dynamic frequency assignment in radio networks. The reviewer(s) pointed out that there already exist official institutions that take care of assigning radio frequencies. Sadly, this is not a joke.

hollerith• 14 years ago

OP describes Dijkstra's “Goto Statement Considered Harmful” as a paper whereas in reality it was a letter to the editor.

cema• 14 years ago

Well, I have not heard of such letters being rejected. Not read, maybe...

msellout2• 14 years ago

That's the joke.

mythealias• 14 years ago

Not sure if reviewer was having a bad day or just lacks the understanding to comprehend ideas beyond what is the norm. Also quite often professors delegate the review work to their students who may lack the understanding in broader perspective.

Jabbles2• 14 years ago

Whilst amusing, I find it hard to believe that the repeated excuse of "not practical" would ever have been given. Do academics really have such strong objections to ideas which are purely academic?

"Structured programming is a nice academic exercise, which works well for small examples, but I doubt that any real- world program will ever be written in such a style."

"The paper contains no real-world example to convince us that any model of practical interest can be cast in it"

fargolime9• 14 years ago

It's much worse than the article describes. I've solved five outstanding problems in physics, or so I claim. Just little ones like dark energy. I dedicated a decade to the effort (not that that proves anything, I'm just saying I didn't slap anything together). Yet I can't get a single paper read. Every editor rejects based on subject matter. A journal on gravity, for example, is in reality a journal on general relativity, so they won't consider a paper that purports a problem with that theory. In informally researching the issue further, the vast majority of physicists I've encountered support the blanket rejection of any paper that purports an issue with existing physics. They'd rather keep their outstanding problems, even physical paradoxes. (Arxiv isn't an option. Papers are regularly deleted there by mods for the same reasons as above.)

So yes, I can easily believe the repeated excuse of "not practical". I've even got angry responses for my subjects.

VMG2• 14 years ago

Either that - or you're a crank. We'd have to read the actual paper to decide.

Jabbles2• 14 years ago

Do you accept that you might be wrong?

vonmoltke• 14 years ago

I used to work in a quasi-academic development and production environment (DOD S&T[1]), and I heard that excuse quite a bit. Usually it was because someone had a pet idea that would be threatened or was too afraid of the risk of moving from the established development line.

[1] http://www.acq.osd.mil/chieftechnologist/index.html

adunk• 14 years ago

Its not uncommon in computer systems conferences to see rejects based on comments about the system not having practical application or being too non-practical. Oddly enough, it is not too uncommon to see papers getting one review rejecting the paper because it is not practical enough and another review (for the same paper) rejecting the paper because it is too practical :P

marme• 14 years ago

while it is a funny joke it does not really make any sense because no serious academic journal reviews papers with less than 3 reviewers. Most use more then 5 or 6 so one reviewer on a bad day really cant have much impact

arbuge• 14 years ago

Can't comment on other areas but in EECS my experience was 2 - 3 was the norm. (Never ever heard of 5 - 6 although I presume you'd get that many if you submitted a paper with "cold fusion" in the title.)

Stuff is becoming so technical these days that from those 2-3 reviewers you are sometimes lucky to get a single person with a real understanding of the subject matter and competent to vote on it. The whole peer review system is almost as broken as the patent system imho.

leothekim• 14 years ago

The peer review system is riven with ego politics. I've submitted a paper before that got rejected by a committee member because I didn't work closely enough with member's research team. He was the one hold out among four other positive peer reviews. The paper ended up getting published in a subsequent conference where the committee members didn't have a stake in my area.

The usefulness of any given idea isn't usually reflected in peer reviewers' opinions, but whether it actually is a good idea, and sometimes that happens outside the peer review system. For example, I don't think even Larry and Sergei's PageRank algorithm was published in a peer-reviewed conference, and we all know what happened there.

Novelty, on the other hand, is probably a lot harder but even those ideas fall through the ego-drilled cracks of peer review.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

PageRank was an old algorithm, applied to a new corpus (the web, instead of research papers). Their contribution was in executing on the web.

nullc• 14 years ago

It would have been funnier if the flaws in the reviewers arguments were a little more subtle, but this would have required the author to actually _read_ the papers he was criticizing. Even a bad reviewer that only skimmed half of the papers would have not made the errors in these reviews (e.g. saying things were unaddressed which were section headings in the original)...

Evbn3• 14 years ago

I think you overstimate reviewers.

mhewett• 14 years ago

I've had two very frustrating reviews. On one paper, the first reviewer said it had too much theory and the second reviewer said it had too little theory. Both rejected it. On another grant proposal, a reviewer said in paragraph one, "This is impossible, it can't be done". In paragraph two, he said "...and I know of three companies already doing this."

rauljara• 14 years ago

> On one paper, the first reviewer said it had too much theory and the second reviewer said it had too little theory. Both rejected it.

I haven't read the paper, so it's possible that one or both of the reviewers were way off base. But it's also possible that both reviewers were "correct". Often, when you get conflicting advice like that it's a sign that you're stuck in a compromised middle position that isn't quite working for anybody. For the paper in question, the comments could probably could have been better stated as "You have some theory in the paper which is a little incomplete as it stands. To improve the paper, you could either expand upon it, or cut it, but probably not keep it as it is."

tjgq2• 14 years ago

On the topic of self-contradicting reviews, I once got one where the reviewer began by noting that "the paper is very difficult to read and almost impossible to understand" and proceeded to remark that "it contains very interesting ideas"...

shawabawa32• 14 years ago

I fail to see the contradiction. Begin difficult to read and impossible to understand does mean it can't contain interesting ideas.

shawabawa32• 14 years ago

I fail to see the contradiction. Being difficult to read and impossible to understand does mean it can't contain interesting ideas.

Evbn3• 14 years ago

Scribd is still in business?

I wonder how many people are still a running Firefox 3 on win2000 or whatever to have a use for the scribd links instead of the original PDFs.

Fictional peer reviews rejecting famous papers (2005)

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