156
votes
Which review recommendation should I give to maximize the likelihood that a manuscript is rejected?
Is this sound and appropriate?
No. Your job as a reviewer is not to choose which manuscripts are accepted or rejected. Your job is to advise the editor as to the merits and the flaws of the ...
- 109k
111
votes
Accepted
How can I improve my paper with mostly original contents and only two references?
Citations aren't just about avoiding plagiarism. They are more about embedding your work into a scientific context. Every paper should explain in an introduction section
why this work is relevant, ...
- 1,161
94
votes
Which review recommendation should I give to maximize the likelihood that a manuscript is rejected?
If your intention is to "kill" the manuscript, you should give a reject recommendation. Rejecting does not mean there are no merits to the manuscript. In fact, I would guess that most manuscripts are ...
- 7,983
92
votes
Accepted
How to proceed when a mathematical result contradicts existing literature?
Certainly the fact that there is a contradiction with previous literature must be prominently advertised; to do otherwise would be scientific misconduct. I would not be confident in publishing such a ...
- 8,894
90
votes
Can I still try to publish my work if my algorithm's results are not as good as other algorithms'?
If you want to get technical, in general no learning algorithm performs any better than any other.
The question then, is what can be learned from your algorithm. In your question, you speak of it as ...
- 187k
75
votes
Accepted
Publishing a result that is aesthetically pleasing, but has no practical value
Yes, this is fine. Math papers very often contain results just because they are interesting or instructive, even if they do not seem to be "useful".
You could mention this when introducing the ...
- 132k
73
votes
Why is novelty mandatory for a Ph.D. degree?
Novelty is a basic requirement in research because without novel results, the work is of at best limited usefulness. It's not useless - review papers are useful - but it's less interesting to the ...
- 122k
73
votes
Accepted
Are results that are derived simply by using more computational power publishable?
(I switched the order of a couple of your questions to give the answer a more logical flow.)
On the other hand, the results are definitely new, and interesting (for whatever reason N = 20 is the ...
- 185k
72
votes
Accepted
IEEE conference chair asked to take down the arXiv version of the paper within 24 hours
I think that what you're seeing here is a conference chair who doesn't understand what arXiv is and is blindly applying the self-plagiarism policy.
The IEEE's current official FAQ on author rights has ...
- 187k
69
votes
Can I publish a paper which 1) proposes an idea and 2) proves that the idea doesn't work?
What is wrong with proving some never existing idea is not a good idea?
Ideas are easy to produce, but unfortunately only a tiny fraction of them are really useful. If you pick an idea at random, it'...
- 53.7k
67
votes
Accepted
Is improving a simple algorithm without beating the state of the art still publishable?
Sure this is publishable, but the real question is where?
The applied mathematical community, especially the one in which the state of the art methods are developed will probably not see the ...
- 38k
62
votes
How can I improve my paper with mostly original contents and only two references?
It depends what you're actually saying in the paper. If all you're saying is "We invented cryptographic algorithm X.", then you may not need any citations at all, but that would be a ...
- 8,281
50
votes
Accepted
Will mathematics journals accept a non-novel theorem, but with different approach
There is more to mathematics than theorems. Sometimes the best part is the methodology of the proof, especially if it can be used to also solve important problems in the field. If everybody has been ...
- 346k
49
votes
How to publish a paper that does not seem to be within the scope of any journal?
Interdisciplinary papers have this problem a lot. A - now - very influential paper in my field, I was told by the first author, was in limbo for 4 years before it was published, despite the senior ...
- 46.6k
47
votes
Advice on publishing original theorems with easy proofs
There's a good chance the rejection is because your results are not interesting enough for the journal. In other words, the journal is looking for not only new and interesting results, but also ...
- 122k
45
votes
Will the PhD degree be retracted if the thesis is found to be not novel?
It would be very rare for such a thing to happen. However, it might depend on the circumstances behind it. If it was nothing more than a misjudgment by the candidate and the committee or some missed (...
- 346k
45
votes
Accepted
Is combinatorial novelty without insight useful? Who cares if we're the first to use tool T on problem P?
Is this valuable to science? If so, why?
Because it leads us to understand if tool T works on problem B. How big the "insight" that we gain from this is depends a lot on how different T is to other ...
- 135k
43
votes
Which review recommendation should I give to maximize the likelihood that a manuscript is rejected?
There is no "kill the manuscript" in a reviewer's job description.
If the reviewer thinks the manuscript is unoriginal or flawed (e.g. technically), that's what they should say in their review. They ...
- 46.6k
43
votes
Accepted
How can I efficiently check the originality of my work?
Ask people
Doing literature research on your own is necessary, and you should spend some time on this to make sure that the result is not already available. But there is only so much you can find, ...
- 8,411
42
votes
How to proceed when a mathematical result contradicts existing literature?
Forgetting the issue of publication, when two mathematicians find contradictory results, I think they have the collective intellectual duty to try to figure out what is going on. Generally this ...
- 816
40
votes
What is an "un-reproducible result"?
It's important to define what reproducibility actually means and in what context it is used. Science deals with things that can be reproduced in principle: If you managed to re-create the exact same ...
- 91.3k
40
votes
Can scientific research be accepted with grammatical errors?
Errors in writing come in many forms. Those that merely irritate pedants are less of a problem than those that impair understanding.
Since the purpose of publishing research is to inform others, it's ...
- 105k
38
votes
Can I publish a paper with new proof but the same result?
You can publish anything interesting.
There are instance where a new proof of a new theorem is not interesting. There are also cases where a better exposition of the existing proof is interesting.
- 7,389
37
votes
Why is novelty mandatory for a Ph.D. degree?
This answer will be a bit different and not limited to the sciences as the other current answers seem to be. It will also apply to many similar degrees not designated PhD. I'll use the term "doctorate"...
- 346k
35
votes
What if someone else published an article on the same topic as my accepted unpublished article
After a journal has accepted an article, they're ethically bound to publish it unless there's an egregious error or abuse on the author's part. Some examples could be:
They discover that you actually ...
- 122k
33
votes
Accepted
Where can/should I, as a high schooler, publish a paper regarding the derivation of a formula?
The big question here is whether what you've done is new to the world - whether it's a genuine new advance that nobody in the world has done before, or whether it's something known to the world that ...
- 9,437
32
votes
Accepted
How harmful is it to submit side-results that are not new?
Your impulse to try to find out whether your "mathematical side results" are new and/or publishable is a great one, but I think you need to go about it in a different way. If you are not a ...
- 130k
31
votes
Why is explainability not one of the criteria for publication?
Coming especially from a biomedical sciences perspective,
I mean proving something works without explaining how it works.
(from a comment describing what is meant by 'explainability')
this would ...
- 105k
30
votes
How to publish a paper that does not seem to be within the scope of any journal?
Here are some suggestions to get your work published, that may or may not apply to your case – you have to judge for yourself.
Ask the journals
When submitting a rejected paper to another journal, ...
- 59.7k
30
votes
How can I improve my paper with mostly original contents and only two references?
Most of the contents are completely original.
How do you know with only two references?
Show your readers and reviewers that your work differs from what has been done before. Show them that you know ...
- 35k
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