Some Impactful Rejected Papers

Yes, my group had its share of rejected papers as well. Here are some that I specially remember:

  1. Massive MIMO: 10 myths and one critical question. The first version was rejected by the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. The main comment was that nobody would think that the points that we had phrased as myths were true. But in reality, each one of the myths was based on an actual misconception heard in public discussions! The paper was eventually published in the IEEE Communications Magazine instead in 2016, and has been cited more than 180 times.
  2. Massive MIMO with 1-bit ADCs. This paper was rejected by the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. By no means a perfect paper… but the review comments were mostly nonsensical. The editor stated: “The concept as such is straightforward and the conceptual novelty of the manuscript is in that sense limited.” The other authors left my group shortly after the paper was written. I did not predict the hype on 1-bit ADCs for MIMO that would ensue (and this happened despite the fact that yes, the concept as such is straightforward and its conceptual novelty is rather limited!). Hence I didn’t prioritize a rewrite and resubmission. The paper was never published, but we put the rejected manuscript on arXiv in 2014, and it has been cited 80 times.
  3. Finally, a paper that was almost rejected upon its initial submission: Energy and Spectral Efficiency of Very Large Multiuser MIMO Systems, eventually published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2013. The review comments included obvious nonsense, such as “Overall, there is not much difference in theory compared to what was studied in the area of MIMO for the last ten years.” The paper subsequently won the IEEE ComSoc Stephen O. Rice Prize, and has more than 1300 citations.

There are several lessons to learn here. First, that peer review may be the best system we know, but it isn’t perfect: disturbingly, it is often affected by incompetence and bias. Second, notwithstanding the first, that many paper rejections are probably also grounded in genuine misunderstandings: writing well takes a lot of experience, and a lot of hard, dedicated work. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, that persistence is really an essential component of success.

One thought on “Some Impactful Rejected Papers”

  1. I think we all have a list like this.

    The most notable one in my case is

    D. J. Love, R. W. Heath, Jr., and T. Strohmer, “Grassmannian Beamforming for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Wireless Systems,” IEEE Trans. on Info. Theory special issue on MIMO Communication, vol. 49, pp. 2735-2747, Oct. 2003.

    It was initially rejected in full-length form, and we had to argue with the associate editor. Eventually it was squeezed in as a correspondence.

    My observation has been that papers proposing new and different ideas were more likely to be rejected than the ones that were more incremental! Indeed the review process is funny.

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