Reasons to Reject a Paper

Strong reasons:

  1. Promise more than delivered (this is the first work….).
  2. Miss important references (closely related).
  3. Results are too incremental or too unconvincing, or lower than state-of-the-art.
  4. Poorly written or oraganized.
  5. Incorrect statements or statements without support.
  6. Lack of component analysis for important components.

Weak reasons:

  1. Novelty is minor or incremental. Just an extension of A, or similar to A, or combination of A and B.
  2. Motivation is unclear or arguable.
  3. No theoretical guarantee of the effectiveness.
  4. No technical contribution: too few math formulations or the proposed method is too straightforward.
  5. Formulations are too dense and hard to follow.
  6. Paper writing has some flaws (e.g., ambiguity, redundancy, a few typos or grammar mistakes).
  7. Improvement is not very significant.
  8. Lack of component analysis for less important components.
  9. Lack of qualitative analysis.
  10. Unfair or insufficient comparison with state-of-the-art. Miss some baselines. Sometimes we need to create baselines if necessary.
  11. Hyper-parameter analysis: too many hyper-parameters, unclear how to set hyper-parameter, sensitivity to hyper-parameters.
  12. No significant test.
  13. Miss some details (e.g., technical details or experimental details), not self-contained.
  14. Miss less important references.
  15. Miss analyses on time/memory/model complexity