{"id":69,"date":"2010-01-06T17:29:12","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T17:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=69"},"modified":"2010-01-06T17:33:50","modified_gmt":"2010-01-06T17:33:50","slug":"a-modest-suggestion-concerning-scientific-conferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=69","title":{"rendered":"A Modest Suggestion concerning Scientific Conferences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Typically, a scientific conference works like this (certainly in the areas in which I have worked): authors submit papers with a strict page limit <em>n<\/em>, struggle to fit their exciting work into <em>n<\/em> pages, get reviews, then if the paper is accepted they have to address a pile of reviewers comments about the paper, and squeeze all of this into the same number of pages. Of course, reviewers rarely ask for things to be taken out: most comments are &#8220;clarify this&#8221;, &#8220;explain this in more detail&#8221;, &#8220;give the parameters\/pseudocode for this&#8221;, &#8220;do some more experiments do whatever and include the results&#8221;. Of course, this is impossible, and so we end up taking out more of the stuff that made the paper comprehensible in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Suggestion: instead of having the same page limit for both phases, have a page limit of <em>n+1<\/em> or\u00a0<em>n+2<\/em> for the final version; then, the authors can have a hope of address the reviewer&#8217;s comments properly. I&#8217;ve come across this idea discussed a couple of times, but I can&#8217;t remember it being used for real.<\/p>\n<p>And whilst we&#8217;re on the subject, why do we care about strict page limits in an age where the ink is mostly bits anyway&#8230;but that is probably an argument for another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Typically, a scientific conference works like this (certainly in the areas in which I have worked): authors submit papers with a strict page limit n, struggle to fit their exciting work into n pages, get reviews, then if the paper is accepted they have to address a pile of reviewers comments about the paper, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/92"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}