On 2/5/2011 8:50 AM, Alexander Garcia Castro wrote:
> The Best Paper award is sponsored by Elsevier as an incentive
> for researchers working on defining the next generation of
> scientific publishing concepts (01)
As a general principle, best paper awards should only be
given at least 5 or 10 years *after* a conference. It is
extremely difficult to judge what current research will be
significant for the future, and most committees inevitably
err on the side of current fads, rather than future potential. (02)
In practice, the papers that receive a "best paper" award
are usually the most bland and unexciting papers imaginable.
That is the result of the reviewing procedures: (03)
1. Reviewers evaluate all the papers they receive on
a scale of 1 to 10. (04)
2. All the scores are averaged, and the papers with the
highest average scores are accepted. (05)
3. But these methods almost *always* weed out innovative
papers, because some reviewer is guaranteed to object
to something that is radically different from anything
that he or she has ever seen before. (06)
4. Even when an innovative paper slips through the cracks,
it will almost never become a "best paper" because few,
if any, reviewers will know enough about the subject
to give it a 9 or 10 score. (07)
5. As a result, the papers that win best-paper awards are
well-written, have clearly defined objectives, achieve
clearly stated results that confirm the stated goals,
-- and will put anybody in the audience to sleep. (08)
These are the reasons why the workshops at large conferences
are far more interesting and exciting than the formal paper
sessions. (09)
As an example, the Google founders were unable to get their
page-rank algorithm accepted at a major conference. But as
we have seen, it had a lot of potential for the future. (010)
John (011)
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