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How do I handle negative or null results.is it worth publishing? (60)

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Distinguished 640 pts 0 followers
B.M.S. College of Engineering · Posted
Urban Planning Astronomy & Astrophysics Human Resource Management

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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17 Replies

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0
Rohan Desai Distinguished 950 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Gopal Naidu · 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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Rajesh Kumar · Accepted answer

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

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Varsha Pillai Growing 60 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 Varsha Pillai
Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 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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Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed to hear. One clarifying question: you mentioned FedProx handles non-IID data better.does that mean I should switch to FedProx by default, or only if I observe poor convergence with FedAvg first?

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Priya Nair · 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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Priya Nair · Accepted answer

FDR (Benjamini-Hochberg) is widely accepted and preferable to Bonferroni when you have many tests and limited power. The key is to be explicit about which correction you used and why.

On replication: No independent cohort is a genuine limitation but not a dealbreaker for rare disease research, where cohort availability is a known constraint. Many high-quality papers acknowledge this and still get published in good journals. Frame it as future work.

Power analysis: Yes, report it. Showing you are aware of the limitation is better than not mentioning it.

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Ravi Patel Starting 25 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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Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Bindiya Thomas Growing 65 pts · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

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Replying to Meghana Rao
Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 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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Zara Hussain Growing 55 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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Anita Rao · Accepted answer

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

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Lakshmi Devi Growing 75 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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Farhan Mirza · Accepted answer

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

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Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

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