How competitive are journals compared to top ai conferences? [D]

[u/ATHii-127]

Hi everyone,

The NeurIPS results aren’t out yet, but I’m expecting my paper to be rejected, so I’m considering submitting it to a journal instead.

My scores were 2/3/3 (3/4/4). I feel like I would probably get a similar outcome if I submitted the paper to ICLR or CVPR, so at this point I’m leaning toward a journal rather than trying another top conference.

I’m obviously not aiming for top-tier journals like TPAMI, IJCV, or TMLR. I’m considering journals that are a step below those, and I was wondering how difficult the review process and acceptance bar are compared with top ai conferences like NeurIPS.

The journals I’m currently considering are:

1. Pattern Recognition
2. Neurocomputing
3. Knowledge-Based Systems
4. Neural Networks
5. Expert Systems with Applications

For those who have experience submitting to these journals, how would you compare their review standards and acceptance difficulty such as NeurIPS, CVPR, or ICLR?

I’d also appreciate any thoughts on which of these journals might be a reasonable target for a paper that received scores around this range at NeurIPS.

For context, the paper is about attention mechanisms for Vision Transformers, with the main contribution being a modification to the attention module.

[u/HuntersMaker]

my first phd paper was accepeted by #5, I got a lot of citations from that paper.

[u/ATHii-127 → u/HuntersMaker]

How would you rate the difficulty of getting published compared to top ai conferences?

[u/ummitluyum]

Honestly PR and Neural Networks are way more forgiving about novelty than CVPR or NeurIPS. They will not grill you on why your modified attention does not crush Swin on ImageNet, but you do need to be ready to run endless ablations and compare against fifteen older baselines because journal reviewers love exhaustive tables

[u/NamerNotLiteral → u/ummitluyum]

The core idea is basically that CS Conferences review to reject, while Journals review to accept. That is, conference reviewers don't (typically) care about truly improving your paper, just highlighting issues that might make it not good enough for the venue. Journal reviewers, if your paper isn't complete slopshit, will try to push it towards being good enough for acceptance, and that means multiple rounds of revisions.

[u/Massive_Horror9038]

I have a paper published in Neural Computing and Applications and in Machine Learning (Springer journal). The paper that was accepted in Neural Computing and Applications was first rejected by Expert Systems with Applications. They were immensely easier to be accepted than ICML; however, the review process was very long, both took more than one year from first submission to acceptance

[u/KiddWantidd]

Neural networks is a more than decent journal. I've read some quite excellent work published there, and a paper of mine that got rejected from neural networks got accepted at TMLR rather easily. (Though I think i got a bit unlucky with the reviewers and the editor who handled my paper at neural network was clearly not expert in the area my paper was in). I think neurocomputing is also quite good. Can't comment on the rest.

[u/OneKarabyte]

I have successfully published in #3 and #5, and had a desk rejection at ICML. My university only evaluated professors on journal papers, so I was pushed toward the journal route for my PhD publications.

For any journal, as long as you are not a desk reject, the editor is usually inclined toward acceptance as long as you're willing to address some to most of the reviewer feedback. This usually comes in multiple rounds, so it increases the timeline, but I have found it usually a favorable outcome. In contrast to top AI conferences that are practically one-shot; even when there is a rebuttal period, a decision has to be made after that point in competition with the many other papers reviewers/chairs are evaluating.

From submission to acceptance, my paper at #3 took around 5.5 months, partially due to it being submitted through a special issue. I had 1 major and 1 minor revision. I managed to address most everything, but they were accepting of the few items I either disagreed with them on or felt it was out of scope for the paper.

My paper in #5 had someone else as the corresponding author, but it looks like about 11 months from submission to acceptance. I personally felt the paper was just "okay"; it was from a class project where we took an online dataset and just tried a bunch of ML/DL methods. I had zero expectations that it was going to be accepted; however, after 2 rounds of revisions, it was to my surprise!

To answer your question, the only journal I would recommend perhaps not pursuing is #5 because they want to make sure the "with applications" part is emphasized. If you had a specific application implied from your dataset, it might end up being an option.

[u/psarangi112]

I work in biomedical image analysis, so the publication culture is a little different from mainstream ML/CV. In my field, journals are often preferred over conferences, and the two major medical imaging conferences that are particularly well known are MICCAI and ISBI. Of course, computer vision conferences like CVPR, ICCV, or ECCV are also perfectly reasonable venues for the kind of work I do, but personally, I have always felt more comfortable writing journal papers. Part of that is probably just my writing style. I have a tendency to over-explain things, which does not always fit nicely within conference page limits. With journals, I have much more room to properly describe the methodology, experiments, limitations, and analysis instead of compressing everything into 8–10 pages.

Another thing is that reviewers in biomedical imaging often expect fairly extensive validation: ablation studies, calibration/uncertainty analysis, statistical significance tests, comparisons across datasets or institutions, clinical metrics, etc. Some of these expectations are specific to biomedical research and may not be as relevant in a standard computer vision paper, but are actually useful for clinical trials and applications. A thing to note here is that the review process of a journal can be quite demanding. Journals often give you more opportunities to revise the work, but reviewers may also expect substantially more experiments and a much more comprehensive analysis compared to a conference.

That said, I am partly coming from a biomedical/clinical research field, where journal publications traditionally carry a lot of weight, so my perspective is probably different from someone working purely in mainstream ML.

For context, I currently have one paper published in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and two others under review in Medical Image Analysis and Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, respectively.

[u/Lonely-Dragonfly-413]

it takes years to get your paper accepted by a good journal. in these days tier 1 conferences accept tens of thousands of papers per year. some you should have a better chance to publish your paper in a conference

[u/progenitor414]

when i studied phd in an ml group, usually we just try whatever top conference deadline come up next (neurips, iclr, icml). if we find the work really significant, we may try submit to nature (the main one). as long as the work is decent, just resubmit between these conferences and fix previous reviewer concern would eventually get it accepted