Getting a paper accepted

In 2019, I submitted a paper that was rejected with review scores 2.5, 3, 3. One week later, I resubmitted it with minor changes, and it was accepted with scores 4, 4.5, 4.5. For context, that’s an almost unspeakably dramatic jump in scores, from “middling reject” to “strong accept.” This post shows exactly those changes. We’ll frame them in two parts: Polish page 1 for acceptance Use the remaining pages to avoid rejection Page 1 has four parts: title, abstract, Figure 1, and introduction. We’ll make them specific, memorable, clear, communicate value, and hook the reader. Reviewers mostly decide accept vs reject by page 1. So we optimize the judgment-before-scroll. Then, to make sure our paper isn’t rejected, we’ll do due diligence in the rest of it by including stuff like baselines, ablations, statistical significance, and human evaluation. The tweaks that get the paper accepted—unexpectedly, happily—also improve the actual science contribution. But if you’re tempted to be evil, ... Read full article.