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I submitted a paper to an engineering / CS related conference. After several weeks of reviews, a list of accepted papers was published today. However, the notification will be sent out 10 days later, according to their website.

I saw that my paper was accepted since it is included in the aforementioned list. I was not explicitly notified, just the list was put online. I have not received any reviews, yet.

There are several conferences that publish their list of accepted papers before notifications are sent out.

What is the reason for this? The decision must already be fixed, otherwise there would not be a list of accepted papers. But why are the reviews not sent out, yet? Is the list commonly subjected to change? I would be happy if someone (program committee, chairs, etc.) could shed some light onto this, since I am quite interested in the background of this accepted-paper-list.

EDIT: More details regarding this conference.

ACM/IEEE DAC accepted papers: https://dac.com/2018/accepted-papers

They give a short explanation under "What is the DAC research manuscript timeline?": https://dac.com/submission-categories/research-manuscript#questions

The second week in February: A list of accepted manuscripts will be posted on the DAC website.

February 20: Accept/reject notices and confirmation forms will be emailed to authors.

Thus, this seems to be intentional and no notification email got lost. The same was done by the IEEE HOST this year, the accepted paper list was online many days before the notifications were sent out.

EDIT2: I just received the notification. The list of accepted papers was not updated as far as I see.

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  • 1
    Is the list necessarily complete?
    – Kimball
    Feb 10, 2018 at 18:25
  • That's odd. Perhaps they are waiting for reviews to be finalized, which may take a few days after the accept/reject decision is made.
    – Thomas
    Feb 10, 2018 at 19:14
  • I have never seen or heard anything like this happening in CS conferences. As you say, it makes no sense. There must be some kind of a mistake (e.g. notifications were already sent earlier but for some reason your notification email got lost). Feb 10, 2018 at 20:02
  • @JukkaSuomela: There is no mistake, I found a note on their website (see edited question). However, it still does not explain their approach.
    – J-Kun
    Feb 11, 2018 at 1:05
  • @Thomas: But how would they be able to decide about acceptance as long as the reviews are not finished?
    – J-Kun
    Feb 11, 2018 at 1:06

1 Answer 1

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Most likely, the program committee needs some additional time to edit reviews and provide a summary of the PC's discussion of the paper. Reviews may require editing to remove bugs (for example, if a reviewer misinterpreted a result, but the misunderstanding was cleared up in discussion), or to professionalize the language (a reviewer might have described an author as a jerk or worse), or to remove references to other submissions under review need to be purged.

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  • Do you think that this is more likely then "it was caused by an error" which seemed to be many people's first responses? Feb 11, 2018 at 17:39
  • I think you are right, see my edit to my first post. It looks like the time was spent for internal tasks since the paper list was not updated so far.
    – J-Kun
    Feb 21, 2018 at 12:06

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