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What is your experience with peer review as a reviewer? Good, bad, ugly. (46)

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Growing 55 pts 0 followers
Bearys Institute of Technology · Posted
Cybersecurity Biomedical Engineering

I recently had a difficult conversation with my PhD guide that I think many students can relate to.

The short version: my guide and I fundamentally disagreed about the direction of my thesis after 2.5 years of work. He wanted to pivot to a new application area that I thought was tangential to the core problem I was solving. I felt like I was being steered by his grant interests rather than the scientific question.

How I handled it:

  • Requested a formal committee meeting (not just a one-on-one with the guide)
  • Prepared a written document outlining both directions with pros and cons
  • Asked the committee to weigh in, which gave me cover to advocate for my position
  • Eventually reached a compromise where I did a smaller study in the new direction while keeping my core thesis intact

The relationship with my guide improved after this, partly because I approached it formally and professionally rather than emotionally.

Has anyone else navigated significant disagreements with their guide? What worked?

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17 Replies

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Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.

On the research proposal:

  • 60–70% technical approach, 30% context and impact
  • Preliminary results absolutely help. Coursework projects are fine if genuinely relevant
  • The societal impact section should be substantive.PMRF is a national initiative; reviewers want to see why this matters

On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.

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Replying to Harini Balakrishnan
Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.

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Replying to Harini Balakrishnan
Divya Krishnan Growing 85 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for the honest take. This is the kind of answer I was looking for.not the sanitized version.

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Replying to Harini Balakrishnan
Ashwin Murthy Distinguished 560 pts · Accepted answer

This is very reassuring. I was worried the null result would kill the paper but your framing around transparency and effect sizes makes a lot of sense.

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Disha Malhotra Starting 8 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.

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Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 pts · Accepted answer

Could you clarify what you mean by results-blind review? I have heard of it but never understood how it works in practice. Wouldn't reviewers need to see results to evaluate whether the methodology is sound?

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Replying to Revathi Chandrasekaran
Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 pts · Accepted answer

Thank you for this detailed answer! A quick follow-up: when you mention cosine learning rate with warm-up, are you warming up the LoRA parameters specifically or the entire model including the frozen backbone?

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Neha Agarwal Growing 90 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

As a senior faculty member (25 years in the system), I want to offer a different perspective. Yes, the pressures are real. But I have also seen the other side: students who produce excellent work, publish honestly, and build reputations over time. The system is imperfect but not entirely broken.

What has actually helped my students: choosing venues carefully (a few strong papers rather than many weak ones), developing genuine collaborations rather than transactional coauthorships.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Lalitha Mohan Active 230 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Uday Bose Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Replying to Uday Bose
Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

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Replying to Uday Bose
Ekta Choudhary Starting 45 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

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Replying to Uday Bose
Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 pts · Accepted answer

This is very reassuring. I was worried the null result would kill the paper but your framing around transparency and effect sizes makes a lot of sense.

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Ishaan Verma Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.