Paper rejection
The feeling when I receive comments about a submitted paper is the same that I feel when a nurse takes a blood sample with a syringe, exactly that moment: the needle is less than one centimeter, the speed decreases, my heart is almost close to explode and I just want to go running out from the health center. Exactly the same. I need time for reading reviewer comments, I need to go slowly, like take a shower in cold water: hand - arm - right foot - leg - another arm... I say this because there are cases when reviewers are like parents-in-law seeing all your deficiencies, even when the relevance of obvious mistakes are minimal.
The best examples to never give up (be stubborn) are two review comments of two papers by well-known authors, that made astonish contributions to Artificial Intelligence and Telecommunications: Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, check it out: (from: http://www.fang.ece.ufl.edu/reject.html)
A. TURING
Paper: "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungs Problem."
Reviewer Comments: This is a bizarre paper. It begins by defining a computing device absolutely unlike anything I have seen, then proceeds to show—I haven't quite followed the needlessly complicated formalism—that there are numbers that it can't compute. As I see it, there are two alternatives that apply to any machine that will ever be built: Either these numbers are too big to be represented in the machine, in which case the conclusion is obvious, or they are not; in that case, a machine that can't compute them is simply broken! Any tabulating machine worth its rent can compute all the values in the range it represents, and any number computable by a function—that is, by applying the four operations a number of times—can be computed by any modern tabulating machine since these machines—unlike the one proposed here with its bizarre mechanism——have the four operations hardwired. It seems that the "improvement" proposed by Turing is not an improvement over current technology at all, and I strongly suspect the machine is too simple to be of any use. If the article is accepted, Turing should remember that the language of this journal is English and change the title accordingly.
C.E. SHANNON
Paper: "A Mathematical Theory of Communication."
Reviewer Comments: This paper is poorly motivated and excessively abstract. It is unclear for what practical problem it might be relevant. The author claims that "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problems," which seems to indicate that his theory is suitable mostly for transmitting gibberish. Alas, people will not pay to have gibberish transmitted anywhere. I don't understand the relevance of discrete sources: No matter what one does, in the end, the signal will have to be modulated using good old-fashioned vacuum tubes, so the signal on the "'channel"' will always be analogical. A running example would have helped make the presentation clearer and less theoretical, but none is provided. Also, the author presents no implementation details or experiments taken from a practical application. Confidential comments to the editor: The only thing absolutely wrong with this paper is that it doesn't quite "resonate" with what the research community finds exciting. At any point, there are sexy topics and unsexy ones: these days, television is sexy and color television is even sexier. Discrete channels with a finite number of symbols are good for telegraphy, but telegraphy is 100 years old, hardly a good research topic. The author mentions computing machines, such as the recent ENIAC. Well, I guess one could connect such machines, but a recent IBM memo stated that a dozen or so such machines will be sufficient for all the computing that we'll ever need in the foreseeable future, so there won't be a whole lot of connecting going on with only a dozen ENIACs! IBM has decided to stay out of the electronic computing business, and this journal should probably do the same!
The last sentence is hilarious! Esteban
