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Do long papers (all other factors being equal) have a lower chance of being published because they take up too much "space" in a journal?

I am specifically asking about the field of Computer Science and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Journals.

Do journals, editors, or reviewers think along the lines of: If we reject a 30-page paper (Paper A), we can instead publish two 15-page papers (Papers B1 and B2), so we should apply more stringent quality standards when reviewing Paper A because it "takes away space" that could otherwise be used for other papers? I think "total available space" of a given journal issue should not play a big role nowadays, when publishing is mostly online (or does it?).

Are there other potential issues related to paper length, such as reviewers refusing to review a paper perceived as "too long" or becoming unconsciously biased against it? As mentioned, we are assuming that all other factors (including the level of conciseness in presentation) are equal. Thus, the length of the paper is assumed to be objectively justified and appropriate given the breadth of the topic.

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    Hmmm, How do 2 fifteen page papers take less space than one 30 page paper?
    – Buffy
    Commented Nov 24 at 13:28
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    At least in math, the general rule for acceptance/rejection is "the longer the paper, the higher the quality of results it should have." This is not always true, of course, but true "generically."
    – Moishe Kohan
    Commented Nov 24 at 14:12
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    What is "ACM"? .
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Nov 25 at 13:55
  • @AzorAhai-him- ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. It's like IEEE or ASME but for computer science
    – apnorton
    Commented Nov 25 at 22:54
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    @apnorton I gather. The point was to prod OP into not using acronyms.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Nov 26 at 13:29

3 Answers 3

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ACM is about to phase out printing all journals they publish, and in any case, printed pages is not something reviewers or editors have been concerned about for a long time. The printing part is not what made journals expensive.

As an editor, my concerns about long papers are two-fold:

  • It better be a really good story you are telling if you can't tell it within, say, 20 pages. Does your paper really warrant a longer length?
  • It is, objectively, harder to find reviewers for long papers and ensure they do turn around the paper in the allotted time.

As such, when I see a paper of 30 pages, I'm already negatively inclined and I have sent back many papers to the authors right away with the comment "Please shorten it to ~XX pages and then we can send it out to reviewers".

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    Thank you very much, this is exactly what I wanted to know.
    – zx-81
    Commented Nov 25 at 8:24
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    "It better be a really good story you are telling if you can't tell it within, say, 20 pages". Yes, but lets assume that the reason for the paper being longer than normal is, that it "tells several smaller stories", i.e contains multiple major contributions but cannot be split in several papers because the conttributions are interdependent. Would editors/reviewers acknowledge this and be more generous with respect to paper length ?
    – zx-81
    Commented Nov 25 at 8:39
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    If the paper tells several small stories, you may be asked to split it into several independently publishable parts. That happened to us once (although with a conference submission, not journal)
    – Vladimir Lysikov
    Commented Nov 25 at 8:58
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    @zx-81 If a paper is telling too many stories, each story is typically poorly told. In 15 years of being an editor, I cannot recall a paper that was better off doing more than one thing well. You may think that it's important to tell multiple things at once, but my experience is that that is not true.
    – Wolfgang Bangerth
    Commented Nov 26 at 0:14
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    I truly hope you haven't told authors to shorten papers based solely on the length of the submission.
    – Greg Martin
    Commented Nov 26 at 6:32
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As an editor and conference organizer (in mathematics and CS) I can say that the answer is yes, all other things being equal, extra length will put you at a disadvantage for multiple reasons:

(1) Even for volumes that will never be printed, pages still matter because they impact the cost of copy-editing and the production process.

(2) It is harder to get longer papers refereed. Conferences that have a fixed refereeing window often impose a page limit for this reason. Indeed, I know of one conference that decided not to impose a page limit one year (thinking it did not matter), and reversed the decision for the next edition of the conference because of this.

(3) As suggested in one of the comments above, longer papers will typically have a higher quality bar. If the referees/editors feel that there is content you could have removed or shortened, they will be more annoyed by this in a 30 page paper than in a 15 page paper, so it is in your interest to shorten it before submitting.

Having said that, most journals would prefer not to publish Parts I and II of what is really one paper as two separate papers. So if your paper needs to be X pages and not X/2 pages, I would submit it as a single paper to a venue that regularly publishes X page submissions.

I should add that the venue matters a lot. Submitting a 15 page paper to a journal that mostly publishes 30 page papers is unlikely to increase your chances, but submitting a 30 page paper to a journal that mostly published 15 page papers may decrease them (all other things being equal).

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    It's not just the editors and reviewers; the readers have limited time, too. I'll read a 30 page paper if it looks like it's potentially relevant to what I'm working on right now. I'll read a 15 page paper if it looks like it might be interesting.
    – Ray
    Commented Nov 26 at 18:21
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If the condition all other factors being equal is taken literally, then that means that the longer paper tells the same story at the same level of comprehensibility in more pages. That should clearly not be a positive, so I should hope that this means a higher chance of rejection.

Naturally, things are rarely really equal and shortening things will often mean making some sacrifices. But likewise, making some effort to present an argument in a clear, concise, non-verbose form will often also have the side-effect of improving the results at least in some minor way; so as a general rule, I would recommend making such effort.

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