
Fictional peer reviews rejecting famous papers (2005) - yarapavan
http://th.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/People/Lucks/reject.pdf
======
grep2
Just in case it is not obvious: These rejection letters are fictional[1],
created as collage of negative reviews Santini received. But it's hilarious to
read, I agree.

Since the original site where Santini commented on it is gone, probably it's
only a question of time until this document becomes internet "truth". Brave
new world.

[1][http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-
classic...](http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic/)

~~~
tokenadult
_Just in case it is not obvious: These rejection letters are fictional[1],
created as collage of negative reviews Santini received._

Thanks for pointing that out. I hope everyone gives your comment the upvote it
deserves. That this submission was just a made-up joke was not obvious from

1) the domain currently hosting the document, one of the first things I check
on each submission,

2) the submission title (which is NOT the original article title, contrary to
the Hacker News guidelines), which sounds much too serious for a title on a
joke article,

or

3) the first few comments, which treated the article as though it reported
historical facts. Good for you to let us know what the background is.

------
yread
To the ones not eager to open a PDF: go ahead and read it, it's hilarious.
Rejections of Dijkstra's, Codd's, Turing's, Shannon's, Hoare's, RSA's
groundbreaking papers in computer science due to nit picking and short
introductions.

For Shannon's paper:

 _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._

~~~
danieldk
Or even better:

 _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._

------
praptak
Hrm, I once took part in preparation of a grant application related to some
algorithms for dynamic frequency assignment in radio networks. The reviewer(s)
pointed out that there already exist official institutions that take care of
assigning radio frequencies. Sadly, this is not a joke.

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mysterywhiteboy
Add to this Berners-Lee's rejection[1] from HyperText 1991 for his paper
proposing the Web because it was a) too simple and [2], b) not really a very
good Hypertext system [3].

[1] It was actually relegated to a poster. [2] <http://www.w3.org/2007/04dc-
rdu/w3c-stripes.html#(7)> [3]
<http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/258701/1/youveGotHypertext11b.pdf>

------
Jabbles
Whilst amusing, I find it hard to believe that the repeated excuse of "not
practical" would ever have been given. Do academics really have such strong
objections to ideas which are purely academic?

 _"Structured programming is a nice academic exercise, which works well for
small examples, but I doubt that any real- world program will ever be written
in such a style."_

 _"The paper contains no real-world example to convince us that any model of
practical interest can be cast in it"_

~~~
fargolime
It's much worse than the article describes. I've solved five outstanding
problems in physics, or so I claim. Just little ones like dark energy. I
dedicated a decade to the effort (not that that proves anything, I'm just
saying I didn't slap anything together). Yet I can't get a single paper read.
Every editor rejects based on _subject matter_. A journal on gravity, for
example, is in reality a journal on general relativity, so they won't consider
a paper that purports a problem with that theory. In informally researching
the issue further, the vast majority of physicists I've encountered support
the blanket rejection of any paper that purports an issue with existing
physics. They'd rather keep their outstanding problems, even physical
paradoxes. (Arxiv isn't an option. Papers are regularly deleted there by mods
for the same reasons as above.)

So yes, I can easily believe the repeated excuse of "not practical". I've even
got angry responses for my subjects.

~~~
VMG
Either that - or you're a crank. We'd have to read the actual paper to decide.

~~~
fargolime
As I said, no one who could expertly read my papers will read them. So while
I'm a crank, a crackpot, nowadays that's based on subject matter alone.

~~~
msellout
Why don't you post the papers on your own website?

~~~
fargolime
I've done that, FWIW, which isn't much. The solutions will likely be lost to
science. Perhaps a future internet archaeologist will find and disseminate
them to a more scientific audience.

~~~
geoffschmidt
I understand that frustration can be hard to deal with but this attitude
really doesn't advance your cause. No one likes to talk to whiny emo people.
(Except at goth clubs where it can be kind of fun.)

~~~
fargolime
But I'm not frustrated, nor whining. I have no cause to advance; I no longer
seek publication of my ideas.

Your comment demonstrates the following thinking I've seen in today's
scientific community though: If you have anything to say against blanket
rejection of ideas based on subject matter, you're an even bigger crackpot (or
whiner) than we assumed you were.

~~~
VMG
Because in most cases, that conclusion is correct as well.

Your refusal to link to the actual PDFs doesn't inspire confidence either. You
claim breakthroughs and leave us hanging, which isn't very nice.

~~~
fargolime
Linking would be going too far off topic, which I won't do. It would indicate
an ulterior motive I don't have.

You'd need at least a good laymen's background in relativity theory to
understand my work. If you have that, you can give me a way to contact you and
I'll do that after this discussion has scrolled off others' lists.

~~~
gknoy
You could also link to your website in your user summary, and have it easily
accessible for tangential conversations.

------
mhewett
I've had two very frustrating reviews. On one paper, the first reviewer said
it had too much theory and the second reviewer said it had too little theory.
Both rejected it. On another grant proposal, a reviewer said in paragraph one,
"This is impossible, it can't be done". In paragraph two, he said "...and I
know of three companies already doing this."

~~~
tjgq
On the topic of self-contradicting reviews, I once got one where the reviewer
began by noting that "the paper is very difficult to read and almost
impossible to understand" and proceeded to remark that "it contains very
interesting ideas"...

~~~
shawabawa3
I fail to see the contradiction. Being difficult to read and impossible to
understand does mean it can't contain interesting ideas.

~~~
tjgq
At the very least, (s)he would have had to understand the main ideas to deem
them interesting (though perhaps the details were difficult to follow). So
yes, you're right that it isn't technically a contradiction. The way it was
written did come across to me as intelectually dishonest at the time, though.

------
heeton
I particularly like this, regarding RSA :

 _Finally, there is the question of the application. Electronic mail on the
Arpanet is indeed a nice gizmo, but it is unlikely it will ever be diffused
outside academic circles and public laboratories—environments in which the
need to maintain confidentiality is scarcely pressing._

------
qwertzlcoatl
My favorites:

“An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming.” I am not sure I under- stand
this article. It claims to be about programming, but it doesn’t contain a
single line of code.

"On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entsheidungs-problem." [...]
Either these numbers are too big to be represented in the machine[...] or they
are not, in which case a machine that can't compute them is simply broken!

------
hollerith
OP describes Dijkstra's “Goto Statement Considered Harmful” as a paper whereas
in reality it was a letter to the editor.

~~~
cema
Well, I have not heard of such letters being rejected. Not read, maybe...

------
leothekim
The peer review system is riven with ego politics. I've submitted a paper
before that got rejected by a committee member because I didn't work closely
enough with member's research team. He was the one hold out among four other
positive peer reviews. The paper ended up getting published in a subsequent
conference where the committee members didn't have a stake in my area.

The usefulness of any given idea isn't usually reflected in peer reviewers'
opinions, but whether it actually is a good idea, and sometimes that happens
outside the peer review system. For example, I don't think even Larry and
Sergei's PageRank algorithm was published in a peer-reviewed conference, and
we all know what happened there.

Novelty, on the other hand, is probably a lot harder but even those ideas fall
through the ego-drilled cracks of peer review.

~~~
Evbn
PageRank was an old algorithm, applied to a new corpus (the web, instead of
research papers). Their contribution was in executing on the web.

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nullc
It would have been funnier if the flaws in the reviewers arguments were a
little more subtle, but this would have required the author to actually _read_
the papers he was criticizing. Even a bad reviewer that only skimmed half of
the papers would have not made the errors in these reviews (e.g. saying things
were unaddressed which were section headings in the original)...

~~~
Evbn
I think you overstimate reviewers.

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mythealias
Not sure if reviewer was having a bad day or just lacks the understanding to
comprehend ideas beyond what is the norm. Also quite often professors delegate
the review work to their students who may lack the understanding in broader
perspective.

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marme
while it is a funny joke it does not really make any sense because no serious
academic journal reviews papers with less than 3 reviewers. Most use more then
5 or 6 so one reviewer on a bad day really cant have much impact

~~~
arbuge
Can't comment on other areas but in EECS my experience was 2 - 3 was the norm.
(Never ever heard of 5 - 6 although I presume you'd get that many if you
submitted a paper with "cold fusion" in the title.)

Stuff is becoming so technical these days that from those 2-3 reviewers you
are sometimes lucky to get a single person with a real understanding of the
subject matter and competent to vote on it. The whole peer review system is
almost as broken as the patent system imho.

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Evbn
Scribd is still in business?

I wonder how many people are still a running Firefox 3 on win2000 or whatever
to have a use for the scribd links instead of the original PDFs.

