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Experiences with PMRF.is the stipend keeping pace with inflation?

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Starting 30 pts 0 followers
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay · Posted
Accounting & Auditing

I have been on both sides.as a reviewer for IEEE and ACM journals, and as an author who has received peer review. The experience has made me wonder whether the current closed peer review model is serving science well.

As a reviewer: I put significant effort into reviews (usually 1500–2500 words). But I occasionally see reviews from other reviewers that are 3 sentences and completely uninformative.

As an author: I have received reviews that clearly misunderstood the paper's contribution. I have also received brilliant reviews that genuinely improved the paper.

Discussion question: What changes to peer review would actually improve quality? Open peer review? Paid reviewing? Double-blind everywhere?

Interested to hear from people across different fields and career stages.

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22 Replies

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Anita Rao · 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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Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

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Revathi Chandrasekaran Active 410 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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Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

Respectfully, I think this framing misses the systemic dimension. Individual researchers cannot solve a collective action problem. If you submit to open-access journals and your colleague submits to Nature, your colleague gets the promotion. Until evaluation criteria change at the institutional level.which requires policy intervention.individual choices have minimal impact.

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Hemant Patwa · 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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Anita Rao · 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 Anita Rao
Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Replying to Anita Rao
Neha Agarwal Growing 90 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

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Ishaan Verma Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

I'd push back slightly on the idea that industry collaboration is universally beneficial for academic research. The incentive misalignment is real.

Industry partners want deliverables on a schedule. Academic research is often exploratory and unpredictable. When the two clash, it is usually the researcher who has to compromise.either by rushing results, constraining publication, or steering away from results that are inconvenient for the sponsor.

This doesn't mean industry collaboration is bad. But the terms matter enormously. IP rights, publication rights, and the ability to pursue negative results should be negotiated upfront and protected in writing.

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Replying to Ishaan Verma
Royal Dsouza Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Replying to Ishaan Verma
Rajesh Kumar · 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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Neha Agarwal Growing 90 pts · Accepted answer

If you are not already using a reading group format with your students, I would strongly recommend it. Forces everyone to articulate what they read.

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Royal Dsouza Starting 30 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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Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Divya Krishnan Growing 85 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 Meghana Rao
Lalitha Mohan Active 230 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Suresh Iyer · Accepted answer

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

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Bhavana Reddy Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.

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Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

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Replying to Hemant Patwa
Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Varsha Pillai Growing 60 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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Divya Krishnan Growing 85 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.