I hesitate to write this post because we far too often have the opposite problem, authors who take their hastily written deadline-driven conference submissions and just put them out on the web in its messy state. But aiming for that impossible perfection in the exposition spends considerable time making tiny changes to an abstract that, in most cases, no one would have noticed. One can better spend their time in other ways, like doing research for the next paper.
So take a little time to clean up the conference submission but then don't worry about every little detail. As soon as possible make it available for all to see. If there are problems in the exposition, people will let you know (especially if you fail to cite their research) and you can fix the paper accordingly. Psychologically you will feel better getting that conference submission you had spent that hard concentrated effort on out of your mind, until it (hopefully) gets accepted and you have to work on the proceedings version.
Or, as we like to say in statistics, anything worth doing is worth doing shittily.
ReplyDeleteThat's the whole point of ArXiv. You can do as many revisions as you want, and nobody expects the first version to be stellar.
ReplyDeleteDoes every really rush to post submissions on the web?
ReplyDeleteWhat about the chances of someone "stealing your thunder"?
well at least the arxiv provides a timestamp. the only risk is that someone improves your results, making your paper outdated.
ReplyDeleteThere is also the issue of conferences with anonymous submission. In these cases, posting your submission will likely "out" you to potential reviewers. In crypto, the IACR has explicitly said this should not count against you when reviewing CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT/etc. papers, but it is a concern.
ReplyDelete