Special Interest Group on CRAP

Having been on many program committees in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need a worst paper award in addition to a best paper award. Let’s think about this - if a conference has a 10% acceptance rate, it doesn’t mean that these 10% papers are necessarily important papers. It simply means that 90% of the papers that were submitted were judged to be worse than the 10% that were accepted. In that 90% there is some real crap, and we could improve the overal process of publishing scientific literature if we shamed some of these authors to be more discriminating in what they write and what they submit to conferences and journals.

I’m not sure how such awards would work, but I think there is a growing need for something to shame people into working longer on their ideas before submitting them for review.