Is the paper within scope? are you fishing in the right pond?

Tirthankar Ghosal, Ravi Sonam, Asif Ekbal, Sriparna Saha, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Outright rejection from the editors' desk, better known as pre-screening or desk-rejection is an unfortunate yet common occurrence in academic peer review. In spite of having merit, many papers are rejected from the desk merely because they are a misfit to the scope of the journal. However, this phenomena costs a considerable time of both the editors and the authors. In this work, we present an investigation towards automation of desk rejection for out-of-scope submissions. We model the problem as a binary classification decision of an article being within scope or outside. We carry our experiments on six different Elsevier Computer Science journals. Our approach based on supervised machine learning outperforms a state-of-the-art by a wide margin in terms of accuracy (at least ~8%). We believe that our proposed method is generic, and with requisite set-up could be applied to articles of other journals. An appropriate system developed with our features could also help prospective authors to check beforehand whether they are submitting to the right venue.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2019
EditorsMaria Bonn, Dan Wu, Stephen J. Downie, Alain Martaus
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages237-240
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781728115474
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2019
Event19th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2019 - Urbana-Champaign, United States
Duration: Jun 2 2019Jun 6 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
Volume2019-June
ISSN (Print)1552-5996

Conference

Conference19th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityUrbana-Champaign
Period06/2/1906/6/19

Funding

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The first and third author gratefully acknowledge Visvesvaraya PhD Scheme and YFRF under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India for supporting this research. We also extend our gratitude to Elsevier for data support.

FundersFunder number
YFRF
Ministry of Electronics and Information technology

    Keywords

    • Bibliography analysis
    • Desk rejection
    • Scholarly full text analysis
    • Scope detection

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Is the paper within scope? are you fishing in the right pond?'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this