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by YeGoblynQueenne 2 days ago
Tier 1 journals have high standards (that's why they're tier 1) and they also have hundreds of submissions every cycle. It's common to have a paper rejected. On the upside you get your work seen by some of the most experienced researchers in AI, who are also specialists in your paper's subject. For example, here's the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research:

https://jmlr.org/editorial-board.html

Scroll down where it says "JMLR Editorial board of reviewers" and where you can find the names of reviewers and their areas of expetise.

The advice you get from such reviewers, even if your paper is rejected, is an invaluable tool to help you improve your work and its presentation. You eventually learn to not be sore about it and iterate until your work gets accepted.

Of course nobody's forcing you to publish, especially in a journal (in AI and CS conference proceedings tend to have much quicker turn around times and you naturally get more feedback if you get to present at a conference) but the alternative is to sit alone in your room hacking away at your code until you discover the perpetual motion machine.
1 comments
okaleniuk 2 days ago
The alternative is to use your network directly. The very notion of "I'll publish my work and someone will notice me" is wrong. Most people in academia are too concentrated on their own work to care about yours. The only minority that cares is already in your contact list.
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YeGoblynQueenne 12 hours ago
Not always. AFAICT my papers have often been reviewed by people I have never met and who have expertise that overlaps with, but does not fully match, mine, and I couldn't possibly contact those people out of the blue to ask for feedback, particularly because I'd never get the chance to meet them outside of peer review (they wouldn't be in the same conferences as me etc). And that's a good thing because that way I get a sort of "outsider looking in" view.

I've sure given and taken informal feedback in the past from people I know and that's great but peer review also makes the whole process more formal and less sloppy; at least sometimes and depending on the venue and to my experience.

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