Blind Reject

Blind reject is a useful skill when you write reviews for ANY conferences or journals. It requires ZERO prior knowledge. It saves you plenty of time, possibly wasted on reading those convoluted papers (I know your time is very valuable). At the end of the day, who cares about a rejected paper anyway? So don't worry about any consequences. It is duty free, responsibility free, copyright free, and even tax free. Can't wait? Let's start.

To begin your review, you can start by the following sentence:

  • This paper aims to tackle a ... problem ...
  • This paper proposes a method to solve the problem of ...
    • You can fill in the blanks by copying some key words in the title or abstract.

    Then to prove that you have read the paper, you should summarize the key points of the paper. But no worries. You only need to paraphrase the abstract of the paper. Please note that you cannot directly copy all the sentences. But it won't be hard. You can change the expressions, combine two sentences into one, split one sentence into two, rephrase the sentence and so on.

    Now it's your showtime. You have the following weapons to choose. The usefulness of the following skills are ranked from ★ (a little useful) to ★★★★★ (extremely useful).

  • If you don't know what the paper is about, you can say "The paper is very shallow in motivating the problem" or "The problem is never stated clearly and crisply".★★★★★
  • If you are not capable of understanding the paper, you can say "The paper is really a pain to read". or "This paper does not have a flow that can make the ideas or novelty more clear."★★★★★
  • If you find a section is started by a technical discussion, you can say "It jumps directly into ...(content) without even showing what is this section about" or "why is this section even important" or "how does this section fit into the proposed solution". If you find a section started by a conjunction/summary, you can also say "It wasted too much space on showing the common knowledge" and "It is not clear what contribution this paper makes".★★★★
  • If a definition is given before any discussion, you can say "the author shows directly the definition of ... What is it? Why do we even need to consider it?". If a definition is given after the discussion, you can say "the author should formally define it before discussing it. This may confuse the readers. ".★★★★★
  • If you find a grammar error or typo in the paper, you can write "I think this paper can be tremendously improved by checking the English writing style" ★★★.
  • If you find the related works are too short, you can say "This paper should compare more related works and distinguish its contribution from others". If the related works are too long, you can say "This paper spent too much space on introducing other's work. How is this method/paper different from others".★★
    • The experiment part is always a hot spot to deploy your attack. So hurry up. Don't fall behind.
  • If you cannot understand the meaning of the figures, you can say "The figures should be regenerated".★
  • If you find the experimental results are so good (efficient, effective, less error, or short time etc), you can say "I don't believe the result can be so amazing" or "It is too good to be true".★
  • If you happen to know another method that is not shown in the experiment, congratulations! You can show off both your knowledge and concern on the paper by saying "Another method ... show also be included/compared in the experiments".★★★★

    • Now it should be more or less sufficient for you to reject a paper. But if you still want to prove the authority that you should be the only expert in this field, you can choose the following skills.

  • "The paper is meant to ..., which is not the normal case."★★★★
  • "The proposed solution does not appear to solve the problem of interest." (Who cares? Reviewers are ALWAYS right.)★★★
  • "There seems to be a mismatch between the problem being studied and the approach being considered". Then you can start talking about another totally different problem to show that this paper is wrong.★★★★★

    • Happy Reviewing!

    * Most of above quotes are the original review results of the author's paper submitted to SIGMOD 2016. The author would like to thank the talented reviewers for teaching such a wondawful lesson!