rejection rate

[Henry Spencer]

After my recent postings about the choosing of the San Diego program,
several people sent mail asking what the rejection rate was like.  It
occurs to me that this might be of general interest.

If memory serves, we in fact rejected about half of the submissions.
I recall one of the Program Committee members, possibly one of the
Chairs, calculating early on that we had enough for a double-tracked
conference if we rejected almost nothing.  However, the bulk of the
rejections were "obvious rejections", papers that were generally agreed
to be badly substandard.  (Note, "the bulk of", not "all of" -- there
were several borderline cases that almost made it into the conference.)

Of the papers that I was involved with (each paper was read by several
Program Committee members, but not by everyone), most of the rejects
were papers that had very little content or were very badly written,
or both.  We rejected several abstracts because we simply could not tell
what the final paper would look like -- note that the Call For Papers
explicitly requested complete or near-complete papers.  We rejected
one good paper that simply had absolutely nothing to do with Unix
(we might have taken it if we'd been seriously short of papers).  We
didn't reject anything simply because it didn't fit the session topics --
the session topics were picked to fit the papers, not vice-versa.  We
did accept one or two borderline papers after grouping the accepted papers
into sessions, as I recall, because they filled short sessions out to
normal length.  We also left the program chairs with a short list of
borderline papers for use in case somebody withdrew a paper, although
I don't think that actually happened.

The thing to remember about submitting papers is how it all looks
from the other side.  A conference program committee has these three
blank days, and a journal editor has N blank pages every M days, and
those blanks have to be filled with *something* or there will be trouble.
There is seldom a surplus of truly great, or even good, material.  If
you did something mildly interesting, and write it up halfway competently,
there is a good chance that it will be accepted...  *if* you actually
write it up and submit it.
-- 
The Earth is our mother;       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
our nine months are up.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu