Publishing

1
Publishing or How to get Out of Grad School

• Henning Schulzrinne
• Dept. of Computer Science
• Columbia University
• (updated Feb. 22, 2005)

2
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

3
How many papers do I need to graduate?

• 1 Science paper or
• 2 Sigcomm papers or
• 5 real publications

4
Publications

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

5
Publication types

• Technical reports, including arXiv
• Workshops
• Conferences
• Magazines
• (Archival) Journals
• Internet Drafts and RFCs

6
Finding out about conferences

• CFP call for papers
• Finding out about conferences
• http//www.cs.ucsb.edu/almeroth/conf/stats/
• TCCC announcement list (subscribe!)
• Wenyu Jiangs conference list

7
Technical 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

8
Workshops

• 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)

9
Conferences

• 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

10
Conferences

• 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

11
Conference reviews

• Either technical program committee (TPC) or TPC
  external reviewers
• Reviews
• blind (most IEEE conferences) author doesnt
  know reviewer, but reviewer knows author identity
• double-blind (ACM) only the chair knows the
  author identities

12
Finding the right conference

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

13
Traveling to conferences

• Many larger conferences have student travel
  grants
• often for authors
• sometimes for non-authors (SIGCOMM)

14
Magazines

• 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

15
Journals

• 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

16
Journals

• Issued principally by
• Societies
• ACM
• IEEE
• Commercial publishers
• Springer Verlag
• Kluwer
• North Holland

17
Journals

• 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

18
RFCs Internet Standards Documents

• 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

19
RFCs

• 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

20
Ways to advertise your work

• 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

21
Finding related work

• netbib
• citeseer
• Google
• web pages of well-known network research groups
• Digital Library, IEEEXplore

22
Types 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

23
Types of papers, contd.

• System description
• implement interesting system
• describe it in sufficient detail
• whats new and interesting?
• prototype, not industrial product
• New algorithm or protocol
• switching, routing, scheduling,
• performance evaluation
• highest risk/reward
• dont describe bit fields

24
Think like a reviewer

• Reviewers are volunteers
• Reviewers are not English editors
• corollary if you cant 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)
• dont 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)

25
Think like a reviewer, contd.

• 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

26
Paper submission

• Technical report (and RFCs) do no harm
• Basic rule cannot submit same material to two
  venues simultaneously (including conference and
  journal)
• Dont explore LPU
• Conference paper refined(workshop paper
  detail)
• Journal paper refined(? conference papers)

27
What if a paper is rejected?

• Dont jump off the GWB - it happens to everyone
• If not, youre 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)