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Recently, one of my works have received the status of Accept with Shepherd. We have received many suggestions from the reviewers.

I'd like to know in more detail in which real status is my paper and if it has been accepted or it is in a sort of minor/major review.

The paper is for a workshop of a CS conference.

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    Possibly this? academia.stackexchange.com/questions/109827/… . I have to say I find this terminology a tad paternalistic... Oct 6, 2019 at 4:54
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    It means you need to include your priest as a coauthor. :-P
    – Vikki
    Oct 7, 2019 at 2:07
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    They believe it would be of benefit for other people to know about your work, but they are not happy with the quality of the presentation of your work.
    – Ian
    Oct 7, 2019 at 12:55
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    @Sean hopefully it was anonymous! Oct 7, 2019 at 15:51
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    @LightnessRacesinOrbit: "paternalistic" has to do with paternalism, not with patriarchy, though the two are hardly completely unrelated. And why, I think it is a great time to remind people that paternalism is generally not welcomed ;) Oct 7, 2019 at 22:43

2 Answers 2

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Your paper will be shepherded. The conference organizers will assign a contact person called shepherd to your paper, who guides you through a sequence of revisions (for further information, see the question mentioned by @darijgrinberg, and this question).

The "accept with..." decision signals you that they really want your paper at the workshop, stronger than in the case of a major revision. But similar to a minor revision, there's still a possibility that your paper will be rejected, if you don't work cooperatively with the shepherd.

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    Let me reinforce the “they want your paper” part. In my experience (HCI conferences), shepherding happens when the manuscript is viewed as having a strong contribution, but solvable peripheral issues (usually presentation-related) mean it’s not publishable as-is. In my field, being a shepherded paper is good because you’ll get relatively senior guidance developing your ideas better.
    – Reid
    Oct 6, 2019 at 19:40
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In my experience as a conference program chair, shepherding is usually applied to borderline papers, where the chairs think the paper has valuable material but flaws too serious for publication in its current form.

Assigning a shepherd for the paper means that your acceptance is conditional on revising to address those flaws. It's still good news, however, in that the conference wouldn't be assigning you a shepherd unless they think that you can overcome the current flaws and produce an acceptable paper. Moreover, it is normally the case that you are invited to communicate back and forth with a shepherd to make sure that your revisions are on target---the conference wants you to succeed in your revision.

What you need to do now is to communicate with the shepherd about your revision plan and make sure that what you want to do matches what they will consider acceptable. If you can find agreement on a set of acceptable revisions and successfully execute them, then your paper should become finally accepted.

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