Comment by bjackman
2 days ago
> Submitting a paper to a conference because it’s got a decent shot at acceptance and you don’t want the time you spent on it go to waste, even though you’ve since realized that the core ideas aren’t quite correct.
I don't see a problem with this? If papers are the vehicle for conference entries why shouldn't authors submit it just because it's wrong? Conferences are for discussion. So go there and discuss it... "My paper says XYZ, but since I wrote it I realised ABC" - sounds like a good talk to me?
(Naivety check: I am not an academic)
Yes. As the saying goes, If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research. Finished papers often have flaws, if you try to write something perfect you may never finish it. They're called limitations and you list them in conclusions and suggest addressing in future work.
(Experience check: I is one)
In other fields than computer science, that would be more the case I think because conferences are not given as much importance. Journals are what matter and since these publications take more time and are usually more selective (for the well-known journals at least), you tend to have better science in them. Computer science have few journals and the standard of publication is the conference.
That's not what papers are for. But I can see how not being an academic would make you think that.
What you're describing are workshops with what we would call non-archival proceedings. Places where you write whatever you want and then talk about it.
Publications, conference or journal, are supposed to be what are called archival. They are a record of what we've discovered and want to share with the world. They are supposed to be sent into the world after we carefully complete a line of work.
Publications are not supposed to spam the system with half-baked junk. Sadly, that's what a lot of people are doing these days.
Some fields do have the opposite problem, though, where standards for publication are so high that they prevent publication of useful ideas or results that could be built on by other researchers. I don’t think a published paper should have to meet some kind of gold standard of completeness and correctness. It just has to report something new or interesting with any appropriate caveats attached.
I don't know I'm sure Monsanto put out[0] a lot of papers about how effective glyphosate is but another team decided to test glyphosate against the "inert" ingredients in roundup and found glyphosate was actually the weakest pesticide of the group.
Now, my pet theory is that they knew glyphosate wasn't that great, but talked it up in papers as a sacrificial anode sort of thing "gee shucks it looks like glyphosate based pesticides are harmful to humans (or bees, or fish, or) so we'll stop manufacturing that formulation."
But, Possibly due to academia, they have fanboys and cheerleaders and I think that's why it's still around and in heavy use even though we're not sure it's a good idea.
[0] Bayer Monsanto funds studies at agricultural universities.
P. S. Just watch.