Why do most published papers hit the maximum page limit exactly?

Question

Most published papers have a number of pages equals to the maximum page limit of their corresponding conference! Is there an unwritten rule that makes authors enforce this? Should aspiring researchers do this to get their work published?

I can understand cutting down an original long draft to hit the limit, but what if the work is actually short? Should authors still seek to hit the maximum page limit?

Edit: Some answers below suggest that this is just a side effect and not intentional. Here, I provide quotes that suggest otherwise, that it's a goal that researchers might work for.

The following list of quotes are from this question: Is it a good idea to submit paper which is shorter than conference's page limit

"I have seen papers rejected because it was shorter than the maximum allowed pages. But this was not the only reason...", accepted answer

"But if the page limit is 12 pages, I see no problem for accepting a high-quality 11-page paper.", accepted answer

"One page short out of two pages or one page short out of 25? If the standard paper is pretty short, then it might matter more than if the standard paper is very long.", a comment rated 6

here is a quote of a comment on another similar question:

"just to add that submitting a full-length paper that's significantly under a page limit is, in my experience, extremely rare and will not look good to reviewers (unless your paper is somehow exceptional!)"

Answer 1

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." attributed to Mark Twain, Blaise Pascal, and others.

To be honest, I haven't noticed this, nor ever used the maximum page length as a goal. But it is harder, as the quote suggests, to say what you need to say properly in few words. So, assuming you are correct, I'd guess it is that people write a draft, notice that it is too long and then work to shorten it with not too much effort. I'd think that would be more common than finding you have a shorter draft and padding it in some way. The latter would probably be noticed by reviewers.

Another factor might be that revisions suggested by reviewers are more likely to increase than decrease the length of a paper.

And, some newer, inexperienced scholars, might think it an advantage to fill up the available space, though, again, I don't have evidence of this explicitly.

Some professional associations have different venues for short and for long papers, actually.

Answer 2

Authors want to make the maximal impression in terms of the perceived importance of the paper, and that means cramming as much content into the paper as possible. The general philosophy is that “more is better”.

As an example, if a paper contains N results and takes up 9 pages, and there is a possibility to make it a paper with N+1 results that takes up 10 pages, then most authors will be of the opinion that the version of the paper with N+1 results will be a more competitive paper for a conference that allows papers with 10 pages. After all, even reviewers who don’t care about the additional N+1-th result will still base their review on the first N results. They almost certainly won’t take off any points for the paper having one more page and one more not-so-interesting result if the page limit hasn’t been exceeded.

Should aspiring researchers do this to get their work published?

It depends what you’re aiming for. If you are trying to maximize the chance of the paper getting accepted, and can’t be sure whether a shorter paper that doesn’t hit the page limit is good enough, then yes, probably making it longer is a good idea. At least, if this is achieved by actually adding content of some useful substance rather than through artificially inflating the length in silly ways without adding anything useful.

If you are confident that the quality of your shorter paper is already good enough to get accepted, then you should simply try to write the best paper that you can that makes the best long-term impact. Sometimes this can mean leaving the paper shorter (and therefore more focused and attractive to a wider range of readers).

If you are not confident the shorter paper is good enough to get accepted, but don’t have anything useful to add to make it long, then leave it short. It may not be ideal but it’s better than padding it with useless content just to make it appear longer.

Answer 3

It must be simply because the page limit is small in these conferences that you are talking about. If the page limit was 25 or 30, papers would not hit it so often.

If the work can be explained in an even smaller number of pages, obviously authors should not pad out the paper to make it up to the maximum number of pages.

Answer 4

(Sorry, I missed that you had already pointed out this situation in the question. Unless there's an objection, I'll leave my answer here for anyone who (like me apparently) reads too quickly.)

I can offer three data points, for the three published papers I worked on in computer science.

In each case, once we had an idea of what we intended to write about, we started by just writing the paper without any regard for page limits. In fact, in all three cases we didn't know for sure which conference we were going to submit to when we started writing. We got our theorems down, all the necessary intermediate results, all their proofs, and all the motivation and interconnective sections—all in full detail. Without fail, we wound up with a paper that was much too long to submit to any conference.

Once we had that paper, we made a copy and began the work of stripping away everything that could be lost. Arguments were simplified, prose shortened, notation tightened up. Sometimes entire proofs were moved to appendices (published separately) and replaced with proofs sketches.

So it was no coincidence that our papers hit the exact page limit for whatever venue we eventually submitted to—the slog of trimming content stopped the moment the last line of our works cited section fit on the last allowed page in whatever template the conference supplied. If further revisions made the paper any shorter than that, it was pure coincidence.

We published the full versions of the papers as PDFs on our department website, and for at least one we made another copy to whittle down for a journal submission.

Answer 5

You aim for the highest you can succeed in and more pages allowed means more complex topics can be covered in detail. Thus, if your paper is shorter you typically either won't have a complex topic or provide less details than another paper that hits the page limit. At least in high quality journals that means that papers with a lower page count are less likely to make it into the category that would allow them a higher page count - cause that category is probably having a high competition and other papers that use the full page count either have topics with more impact or provide more detail for a topic with similar impact. On most projects there is way more to tell than fits into a paper, so you need to chip off the least important bits until you have an essence that fits into a paper category. If a paper is submitted below the page limit, that can give the impression that the topic isn't all that interesting if it can be completely covered in less than the allowed pages (or it might need more work and rather fit a short paper, demonstration, poster session or the like).

That being said there are exceptions of impactful work that can be described perfectly well in lower than usual pages, but this seems rare. Conversely I've never seen someone struggle to fill the pages of a paper submission when they had a topic that did fit the category (people might struggle and then realize that they rather should do a lightning talk or the like first on the other hand).