Concept Mapping - What Do Reviewers seek in Good Research Paper?

Written on April 20, 2022

What do reviewers seek in good research papers? Rigorous evaluation? Creative Solutions? Something else entirely?

I recently came across a short paper by Jennifer Rexford and Scott Shenkerand titled “Answering three questions about networking research” that addresses those questions.

I noticed that the concepts discussed in that paper are similar to what I’ve learned as (sub) reviewer. I’ve been sub-reviewing research papers of several Security and Software Engineering venues, such as NDSS, ICSE, USENIX Security, TOSEM, ASE, and FSE, guided by my advisors Dr. Adwait Nadkarni and Dr. Denys Poshyvanyk for the past few years and picked up what to look for, and what not to focus on during reviews.

Next, I raised the following questions:

  1. can I extract and map the properties of good research papers according to this article and my current understanding?
  2. How do I map the inter-woven relations of these properties in a easily understandable way without repeating texts?

I came across the concept of concept mapping recently (see what I did there? Yes? Anyway … ). I am a fan of the mind map technique, and have used it a lot. The concept map technique is similar while labeling relations and following a hierarchical structure.

Based on my understanding, I created the concept map that describes the properties of a good research paper, from the perspective of reviewers.

Does this concept map address the questions I’ve raised, i.e., extracting properties and mapping relations in an easy to understandeable manner?

Why don’t you tell me? :)


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