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How do I choose between a conference paper and a journal paper for my results? (78)

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Starting 5 pts 0 followers
Christ (Deemed to be University) · Posted
Genomics & Bioinformatics Public Health & Epidemiology

Context

I am preparing to submit my first research paper to a Q1 journal (IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks). This will be my first submission and I am unsure about a few things.

Questions:

  1. Is it mandatory to submit the code and dataset along with the paper, or is that only required upon acceptance?
  2. My results show a 2.3% improvement over the SOTA baseline. Is that considered significant enough?
  3. How long does the review process typically take for IEEE Transactions journals?

I have read the author guidelines but they are somewhat ambiguous on point 1. Would appreciate guidance from anyone who has published in similar venues.

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16 Replies

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Varsha Pillai Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

The short answer: it depends heavily on the journal and field, but here is a general framework.

If your null result is well-powered and the hypothesis was reasonable: Absolutely publish it. Null results in well-designed studies are as valuable as positive results. Journals like PLOS ONE explicitly welcome them.

If your study is underpowered: Be transparent about it. Report effect sizes and confidence intervals, not just p-values. A small, underpowered study with honest reporting is still a contribution.

What kills papers is when limitations are obvious but the authors have not addressed them.

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Kavitha Subramanian Active 365 pts · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

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Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 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 Arjun Venkatesan
Yogesh Pandey Growing 70 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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Kiran Yadav Growing 130 pts · Accepted answer

Check whether your institution has a Springer/Elsevier waiver agreement.many NITs and IITs do.

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Quamar Ahmed Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

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Replying to Quamar Ahmed
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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Replying to Quamar Ahmed
Hemant Patwa · 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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Replying to Quamar Ahmed
Jagdish Rawat · 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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Om Prakash Growing 55 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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Xena D'Souza Starting 25 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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Meena Sharma · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 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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Replying to Lakshmi Devi
Jaya Lakshmanan Growing 50 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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Replying to Lakshmi Devi
Pooja Nambiar Growing 115 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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Replying to Lakshmi Devi
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 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.