Paper got rejected without feedback

Question

I had submitted a research paper to an IEEE conference recently. It's a new conference; the first occurrence of this conference. I submitted it, and did not receive a response from them even until a day after the day they said we'll receive our acceptance notification. So I called up the college that was organising the conference, and they said that my paper was not accepted, but I never received any results of the peer review process for the paper.

Before this paper, I had submitted one paper to an IEEE conference which was the 4th occurrence of that conference. My paper had two accepts, one reject, and finally the paper was rejected. But before that, I had received the comments of the peer reviewers. I know why that was rejected, made changes accordingly before submitting it along with some more results of my research to the 'first conference' I was talking about.

So my question is: Is it common to not receive the results of peer review (two of them according to their website), if the paper is rejected? Does it mean that my paper was desk-rejected due to something like incorrect formatting, or could it be because it's the first time they are organizing the conference so things are hectic for them?

One possible reason could be that I had first written the paper using LaTeX. Then I saw their website and realised that they required both a PDF and a Word file, so I copy-pasted everything from the Latex file to the Word file. As a result, a diagram went to the next page in Word and the text written after that diagram in the LaTeX file went to the previous page in the Word file. So there were slight differences in the formatting of the Word and PDF files, but does that reason make a paper incapable of even going to peer review?

For more context, I am a student pursuing B.E. in Computer Science and this paper was regarding my final year project.

PS: I am asking this just to get an idea whether it's a shortcoming on my part, so that I can correct it before submitting it the next time. My question here is about why I didn't receive the comments of the reviewers and not why the paper was rejected.

Apologies if these are too many questions, I would always be ready to split it or provide more information if required.

Answer 1

Frankly, acceptance notifications being late and past the announced response date is nowadays common, no reason to lose sleep on that.

As for the referee response (or the lack of it), write to the chairs and ask if there is any feedback as to the reasons of the rejection.

If it were desk-rejected (i.e. rejected right away because of formatting or other reasons that are visible before detailed review), I would have expected a rejection right away, not after the notification deadline. Anyway, if they cannot give you reasons, you know one conference you won't submit your papers to in the future.

However, since you are a Final Year student, you will have a project supervisor. That's the first port of call for questions like these. I hope you had asked them to give feedback on your paper before you submitted. As an inexperienced student, you are likely to capture 95% of problems at that stage (rather than after submission, at refereeing stage).

There are students with excellent ideas, but who haven't learnt to write up yet. Improving the writeup can turn a desk-rejected paper into a best paper award candidate (I speak from experience).

Use that resource.

Answer 2

In addition to the quality and acceptability of a conference paper is that a conference has a maximum number of slots in which to allot papers. This is due to cost and venue restrictions as well as time.

It may be that your paper passed muster, but in the final analysis, was judged somewhat below or less relevant than other papers that filled the slots. This would be a last minute decision on the part of the conference organization, so that even they didn't know you would be rejected until the end of the process.

Combine that with the overhead of contacting people and it could just be a delay in your receiving feedback. I agree with Captain Emacs that this is unlikely to be a summary or desk reject or you would have heard much earlier.

Answer 3

Just another possible explanation: If this is the first instance of a conference, chances are that the people organizing it might not be very experienced in conference organizing. While generally desk rejections should be communicated straight away, maybe the inexperience led to ALL acceptance/rejection communications being sent out at the same time. And being one day late with sending out notifications is actually not that uncommon, as depending on the number of abstracts received, deadlines often get extended last minute or reviewing of abstracts and subsequent decisions take longer than expected. People are not perfect.