Journal of Signal Processing Systems - Insights from Negative Results Track

Editors of the track:

Karol Desnos, IETR, France; karol.Desnos@insa-rennes.fr

Alexandre Mercat, Tampere University, Finland; alexandre.mercat@tuni.fi

Articles accepted to the track will be published on a rolling basis and included in a designated collection (this opens in a new tab) online.

Motivation:

The peer-review process at the core of the scientific publication system is biased towards positive results, which is similar to the well-known survivorship bias. Indeed, to increase the chances of a paper being accepted, researchers must seek the most convincing achievements and emphasize the qualitative and quantitative advantage of their contributions over previous related works. While being useful to promote the excellence of research and favor the emergence of ever more advanced techniques and technologies, this bias shadows the importance of learning from failure in the trial-and-error process inherent to scientific research.

Frequently, researchers choose to develop an idea because theoretical assumptions or early results seem promising. When scaling up, or when implementing this idea in a realistic scenario, the results are sometimes not as good as expected, or simply not competitive with related works.

Because of the bias towards positive results, such unsatisfactory results are almost impossible to publish. Hence, when such a scenario occurs, scientists sometimes try to publish the idea anyway, by "disguising" the results in a positive way: by choosing unrealistic but favorable usage scenarios, by choosing an unusual evaluation metric, or by deliberately overlooking negative aspects of their results. Although such papers are toxic to the research literature, they are unfortunately very common because of the systemic incentive for researchers to publish always more.

Track objective:

This special track is dedicated to the presentation of scientific contributions that lead to negative results. Contributions are expected to present an original idea, to explain why this idea was expected to provide good results, to present how and why it failed unexpectedly, and to discuss the presence (or absence) of solutions to solve encountered issues.

The objectives of this track are fourfold:

- To give credit to the research process that lead to the negative result.

- To promote good ideas behind the negative results. Some ideas producing negative results may need some adapting or fine tuning before they can achieve their potential. A negative results track provides a way to disseminate these kinds of ideas so they don't just get buried. Well-developed insights from negative results may even be significantly more useful to researchers compared to marginal positive-result contributions.

- To help prevent other researchers from trying to develop this idea. If the idea seemed good at first, other researchers may come up with the same idea (or very similar ideas) as well. By publishing the idea and its unexpected negative results, you may save some time for other researchers.

- To avoid disguising a negative result into a good one, which may trick other researchers into implementing an idea only to realize its actual negative side-effects later.

Paper submission guideline and review process:

This special track is an open call for papers opened permanently. The editors of the track strive to complete a first round of reviews within three months of their original submission.

Authors need to directly log into the JSPS submission system and find the article type: “Insights from Negative Results”: https://www.editorialmanager.com/vlsi/default.aspx (this opens in a new tab)

JSPS Submission guidelines and templates apply to this special track, and are listed on the following page: https://www.springer.com/journal/11265/submission-guidelines (this opens in a new tab)

In addition to these guidelines, we impose a **double-column format and a submission length between 10 and 18 pages, including references** for initial manuscript in the track. The upper page limit is set to 20 pages for the final manuscript to integrate changes following remarks from the reviewers.

When using the LaTeX template, which is strongly advised, please use the `\documentclass[iicol,sn-standardnature]{sn-jnl}` document class. When using a word document, please make sure to follow the formatting guidelines of JSPS, listed [here](https://www.springer.com/journal/11265/submission-guidelines#Instructions%20for%20Authors_Text (this opens in a new tab)).

Technical scope of the track:

The technical scope of the special track mirrors the scope of the JSPS Journal: https://www.springer.com/journal/11265/aims-and-scope

Negative Result paper examples

Examples of papers presenting negative results can be found in the proceedings of the SAMOS conference where a special session on this topic was organized in 2018, 2019 and 2021: https://samos-conference.com/wp/proceedings-repository/ (this opens in a new tab)

Submission guidelines

Papers must be prepared in accordance with the Journal guidelines: https://www.springer.com/journal/11265/submission-guidelines (this opens in a new tab)

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the Negative Results Track. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation, by at least three independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process. Manuscripts will be subject to a peer reviewing process and must conform to the author guide lines available on the JSPS website at: https://www.springer.com/11265

Author Resources

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by other journals.

Springer provides a host of information about publishing in a Springer Journal on our Journal Author Resources (this opens in a new tab) page, including FAQs (this opens in a new tab), Tutorials (this opens in a new tab) along with Help and Support. (this opens in a new tab)

Journal of Signal Processing Systems - Insights from Negative Results Track

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