Publishing – or How to get Publishing – or How to get Out of Grad SchoolOut of Grad School

Henning SchulzrinneDept. of Computer Science

Columbia University(updated Feb. 22, 2005)

Why publish?Why publish? To go to exotic hotels To impress your mother with your name

in print To graduate

external review To get a job

your advisor thinks all his students are above average

To satisfy research contract requirements

How many papers do I need How many papers do I need to graduate?to graduate?

1 Science paper or … 2 Sigcomm papers or … ~5 “real” publications

PublicationsPublications Different kinds of publications Think like a reviewer Finding the right conference Advertising your work Paper types What if my paper is rejected?

Publication typesPublication types Technical reports, including arXiv Workshops Conferences Magazines (“Archival”) Journals Internet Drafts and RFCs

Finding out about Finding out about conferencesconferences CFP = call for papers Finding out about conferences

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/conf/stats/

TCCC announcement list (subscribe!) Wenyu Jiang’s conference list

Technical ReportsTechnical Reports CS, IBM and BL TR arXiv.org avoids being “scooped” present additional details

(simulation results, proofs, implementation details)

Can be used to advertise on mailing lists – read more often than some conference papers

WorkshopsWorkshops Two kinds:

invited (Dagstuhl) topic-focused (“Internet Measurements”, NANOG)

Smaller, more focused than conferences May not have formal proceedings, just copies of

slides Often, only once or twice, but some for years

(ComSoc) Selectivity varies – from 100% to 10%

Some events are called workshop, but are really conferences (NOSSDAV, IWQoS)

ConferencesConferences Hundreds a year Traditional: ICC, Globecom Semi-traditional: Infocom,

SIGCOMM, ICNP, Sigmetrics, Usenix, SOSP, …

Newer: WWW, NOSSDAV, IWQoS, SAINT, Mobicom, Mobihoc, …

Submission size: 5-12 pages

ConferencesConferences Some have short submissions

(“extended abstract”) and longer accepted papers

Some are effectively the same length (Infocom)

Few have long submissions and shorter final papers

Conference reviewsConference reviews Either technical program committee

(TPC) or TPC + external reviewers Reviews

blind (most IEEE conferences): author doesn’t know reviewer, but reviewer knows author identity

double-blind (ACM): only the chair knows the author identities

Finding the right Finding the right conferenceconference Appropriate conference

layer/topic area style (analysis, system) selectivity location (Australia vs. NY)

Traveling to conferencesTraveling to conferences Many larger conferences have

student travel grants often for authors sometimes for non-authors

(SIGCOMM)

MagazinesMagazines Examples:

IEEE Network Magazine IEEE Communications Magazine IEEE Wireless Communications IEEE Multimedia Magazine

Large circulation topics of broad interest Written for non-specialist (30,000 readers!) Originality not always most important

JournalsJournals Every PhD thesis should result in at

least one journal publication Archival – most libraries have them and

keep them forever Long review cycle Selectivity varies greatly – can be less

selective than some conferences Often, given second chance – “resubmit

with major changes”

JournalsJournals Issued principally by

Societies ACM IEEE

Commercial publishers Springer Verlag Kluwer North Holland

JournalsJournals Examples

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking Journal on Selected Areas in Communications Computer Communications Review (CCR) ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing,Communications and Applications Computer Networks Journal of High Speed Networks Journal of Communications and Networks …

RFCs – Internet Standards RFCs – Internet Standards DocumentsDocuments RFCs are not papers (and vice

versa) Can take a while, particularly for

standards-track documents Start with submitting Internet Drafts

– but most Internet drafts never make it to RFC

Specification vs. description

RFCsRFCs Precision vs. novelty and

performance “How does it work” vs. “how is this

better than existing work” Good way to get impact Good for industrial job interviews

Ways to advertise your Ways to advertise your workwork Technical reports Put link and abstract on web page

(search engines!) Relevant mailing lists (e.g.,

end2end) Send pointer to authors of work that

is closely related arXiv for tech reports

Finding related workFinding related work netbib citeseer Google web pages of well-known network

research groups Digital Library, IEEEXplore

Types of papers - contentTypes of papers - content Measurement

measure performance of real systems test bed or real Internet careful statistics – how representative is

your data? Analysis of existing algorithm

TCP, FDDI, DQDB, RED, … - not some obscure protocol

simulation or analysis bad protocols are good news for authors…

Types of papers, cont’d.Types of papers, cont’d. System description

implement interesting system describe it in sufficient detail what’s new and interesting? prototype, not industrial product

New algorithm or protocol switching, routing, scheduling, … performance evaluation highest risk/reward don’t describe bit fields

Think like a reviewerThink like a reviewer Reviewers are volunteers Reviewers are not English editors

corollary: “if you can’t use a spell checker, why should I trust your graphs and equations?”

Abstract and title have to ensure proper routing of paper (theory vs. systems)

don’t overpromise: “solve QoS problem” vs. “add tweak to DiffServ to better serve soccer videos”

Reviewers get mad if their work is not cited Clearly state what your contribution is (and

state other things in future work)

Think like a reviewer, Think like a reviewer, cont’d.cont’d. Clear motivation – important for non-specialist

reviewers “is the problem important?”

Sufficient detail to evaluate, but not “used gcc 1.2.3 on a SPARC Ultra 10 called snoopy to simulate”

Avoid generic motivations “The rapid advances in foo” cliché!

Repeat main results in introduction and summary corollary: papers are not suspense novels – need to be able

to see scope, motivation and results on first page Very carefully distinguish from prior work

including your own prior work! Avoid overloading one paper (hard!)

paper should tell a story, not be a research catalogue or brain dump

Paper submissionPaper submission Technical report (and RFCs) do no harm Basic rule: cannot submit same material

to two venues simultaneously (including conference and journal)

Don’t explore LPU Conference paper = refined(workshop

paper + detail) Journal paper = refined( conference

papers)

What if a paper is What if a paper is rejected?rejected? Don’t jump off the GWB - it happens to

everyone If not, you’re not submitting to the right

conferences No point complaining if the reviews are

superficial – decisions are effectively final (except for discoveries of plagiarism, etc.)

Publish as tech report immediately (after taking reviews into consideration)