I haven’t published any papers as an undergraduate, so the general theories about publishable papers all come from Philip Guo.

What are research papers?

In computer science, the most prestigious venues for publishing papers are conferences. Note that in many other academic disciplines, journals are the most prestigious venues, and the word “conference” means something quite different.

The general proceeds of the publication process

Take computer science conference as an example:

• A call for papers with a list of topics of interest and a specific submission deadline.
• Researchers submit their papers by that deadline
• The Conference program committee (PC), consisting of around 20 expert researchers, splits up the submitted papers and reviews them
• Decides which papers to accept and which to reject
• Emails all authors to notify them
• Authors of accepted papers attend the conference to give a 30-minute talk on their paper.

A paper can be submitted to only one conference at a time.

What do publishable papers expect?

The purpose of peer review is to ensure that all published papers are up to a certain level of acceptable quality, as determined by the scholarly community.

Reviewers are human beings with their subjective tastes and biases.

Convincingly selling my work was the key to publication

Try to sense reviewers tastes by asking for help.

Since being first is highly valued in academia, once another researcher publishes a similar idea and scoops you, then it becomes much harder to get your idea published.

A conference paper must have a convincing experimental evaluation that shows the effectiveness of the tool or technique is described in the paper.

Which conference or journals should I choose?

I aimed for a second-tier conference both because its deadline was conveniently timed and also because I didn’t think that SlopPy wasn’t a big enough idea to get accepted in a top-tier conference.

First author of papers is necessary for a PhD student. Title of second author is not bad at all. But it just a nice to have item.

Reference

[1] Philp Guo, The PhD. Grind