[e2e] double bland reviewing

[Craig Partridge]

In message <Pine.GSO.4.53.0405102321090.12758 at compserv3>, Kostas Pentikousis wr
ites:

>|so certain conferences have a tradition of double blind
>|submission/review process to minimse the effect of
>
>... which means absolutely nothing about the quality of accepted
>papers: peer review is an unreliable quality control mechanism.
>
>Hurt? Read Juan Miguel Campanario's papers on "Peer review for
>journals as it stands today" (well, actually 1998):
>http://www2.uah.es/jmc/papers2.html

That's not how I read the article.  It says that double blind appears
to do better than other mechanisms but that the research on the issue
isn't sufficient to be sure.

>Heck, even Floyd has rejected papers
>(http://www.icir.org/floyd/rejected_question.html)

Everyone has rejected papers.  Even folks as careful with their presentation
as Sally.  One nice thing is that Sally's site shows you the draft that
got rejected.  I've seen original drafts of some rejected papers that later
went on to get awards in which it is clear the original paper had a lot
of problems -- to the authors' credit, they went off and fixed the problems.

That said, I do think that networking, as a field, has a tendency to
be overly harsh on really ground breaking work -- because the work is
really novel, we have trouble putting it in context and making a favorable
decision.  That's not helped by the huge amount of flotsam and jetsam
being submitted (the fact that the minimum standard for a useful proceedings
in our field is that it rejects 50% or better 75% of submissions is, to
my mind, a condemnation of our inability to teach people to self-assess
their own research work -- and having served on several program committees,
I can heartlessly say that the low 50% of papers are usually truly awful).

Craig