[GuiA]

I'm not very surprised. If you've ever reviewed papers for an academic conference, you'll find that the vast majority of them are just very bad. The average ACM conference has a ~20% or so acceptance rate - and the remaining 80% isn't just a hair away from being accepted. For a big chunk of it, it's just garbage.

Ill defined research problems, vague statements, poor methodology, many grammatical mistakes... given the nature of peer review, it's only natural that people who author nonsensical papers would nod at nonsensical reviews.

For people saying that this is because academia is an old boys network: not quite so. While it can definitely be like that when you get to the top, the vast majority of peer reviewers for most conferences are just grad students, post docs, or junior researchers who don't really discriminate by trying to guess who wrote the paper.

[mturmon]

I think the disagreements in the thread around this comment stem from the notion of an "average ACM conference" -- there is no such thing. ACM has everything from very high-quality conferences like STOC to "C-track" conferences that have a few good papers, but are mostly routine or crap.

I've done a lot of review work (but I don't like to do hard work for free any more), and nothing is more depressing than reviewing for C-track conferences. The mis-spent effort, the mis-used terminology, the buzzwords and the pretense.

[santaclaus]

Weird, I've had a very different experience reviewing for two big ACM conferences. The rejected papers are usually a bit too narrow of a contribution, but you'll usually see them appear in respected smaller venues soon after. Most of the horrible unacceptable work gets culled out in earlier passes before reviewers even see it.

[more_original]

ACM has a wide range of conferences. There are conferences with an A* ranking, but also ones with a C ranking. Submissions to A*-conferences are not 80% garbage.

http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/?search=acm&by=all

[GuiA]

Your link shows that over 75% of the conferences are B or lower. So sure, the submissions to A* conferences are not 80% garbage, but these conferences are 4% of the total. Not really representative of academic work as a whole.

[eli_gottlieb]

Oh hey, cool! My paper writing up my MSc thesis was at a B-grade conference with a 26% acceptance rate. That's actually more selective than I expected, given my opinion of my own work.

[more_original]

Sure, I was just giving a possible reason for the different experiences of reviewing for ACM conferences.