The Second Lives of Rejected Papers

This is a set of questions to poke some gentle fun at SIGCOMM and other network research conferences, and to make some serious observations in the process:

Acknowledging the imperfections of the paper review process;
Commiserating with the frustration of receiving reviews that don't fully recognize the merits of one's own work; and
Most importantly, underscoring that papers rejected by conferences (SIGCOMM in particular, since that is the conference that I am most familiar with) can go on to have perfectly valuable and productive lives.

In that spirit, I are asking the question below.
[Note that I am asking this question as someone who has played all sides of the SIGCOMM process. Not only have I had papers rejected by SIGCOMM, but I have had papers accepted as well. I have been on the SIGCOMM Program Committee many times, and have been a SIGCOMM Program Co-Chair, and a SIGCOMM Vice-Chair, and am current chair of the SIGCOMM Technical Advisory Committee responsible for giving advice on matters such as SIGCOMM procedures. I have spent a fair amount of time trying to maintain and improve the quality of the SIGCOMM reviewing process.]

Question:
(1) If you have ever had a paper of yours rejected by a networking conference, what was your favorite paper of yours that was rejected, so far?

Answers:

Sally Floyd: The 1997 draft of the following paper, submitted to SIGCOMM 97.:
Floyd, S., and Fall, K., Promoting the Use of End-to-End Congestion Control in the Internet, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, August 1999. Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize Paper Award for 1999.
I know there are plenty of other people who have had favorite papers of theirs rejected...

Follow-up questions:
(2) Did the reviews, in your view, lead you to improve the paper?
(3) What was your least favourite paper of yours that was accepted by the same conference, so far?

Thought question for reviewers and program committee members:
(4) What is the conference submission that, in retrospect, you most regret having given a negative review? a positive review?

Papers on the fallibility of human judgement and built-in biases in the peer review process:

Juan Miguel Campanario, Have Referees Rejected Some of the Most-Cited Papers of All Times?, Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences, 47 (4), 1996, pp. 302-310.
"The peer review system has been frequently criticized. According to its critics, peer review system tends to `favour unadventurous nibblings at the margin of truth rather than quantum leaps', it may delay publication, it cannot always avoid duplicate or fraudulent publication, it is sometimes biased to positive results, it is set up in such a way that particular criteria can interfere with selection, and it often allows excellent manuscripts to be criticized by referees with vested interests or contrary views."
Juan Miguel Campanario, Consolation for the Scientist: Sometimes It is Hard to Publish Papers that are Later Highly Cited, Social Studies of Science, 23 (2), 1993, pp. 342-362.

Note: the two PDF articles above are rotated 90 degrees, so to read them without printing them out, you might have to convert them to postscript and rotate...

Return to [ Sally Floyd].

Last modified: April 2002