next »

[hahn2010]

One friend of mine told me a conference in the computational biology field was very corrupted, just call it *COM*. He said  it almost only accepted the papers from the founder's colleagues and students. I did not believe it at that time. Recently I found a lot of papers from the founder's group were published in this conference! If the case is this, why bother to send CFP to other people. It sounds like totally waste other people's time and play a game  

[corvus_caurinus]

Is it rigged, or is it just so low-prestige / stuck in an disciplinary backwater that no one else cares, and most submissions are sent out of loyalty to the founder rather than out of potential any benefit to the author?

[hahn2010]

It is a high-tier conference! One main reason for this is because it is one of the earliest conferences in the computational biology field.  The founder is a big guy and you can find almost all his previous students, post-docs, and current group people in the program committee. It is a very corrupted conference and should not be honored by leading journals  

[mouseman]

Which conference?  There are actually a number of them, even ISMB has half a dozen.

[hahn2010]

RECOMB, a very corrupted conference. I don't believe it can compare with ISMB, which is more international and open.

[larryc]

You should apply for the Oxford Round Table. Much classier, and I have a friend who can get you in.

[mouseman]

Just asked the Mousewoman - a computational biologist.  She calls BS on your friend's claim.  The conference is in a very limited field - Theoretical Molecular Computation Biology.  Like in any field that small, everybody is connected to everybody, especially when you're talking about the top people.  Then, of course, there is the fact that the steering committee are from three different countries and 8 different top-rated universities/institutes.  Finally, as you said, these are the people who established the field, so it is likely that they are connected in some way to almost everybody who is in the field at this point.
Here is the steering committee:  http://recomb.org/index.php/Steering_Committee.html

Are you sure that your friend wasn't just mad that his paper was rejected?

[hahn2010]

The reason I partially believe his claim is that I found this

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Bandeira:Nuno.html

[mouseman]

The reason I partially believe his claim is that I found this

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Bandeira:Nuno.html

If you look closely you'll also see that there are a total of 15 different authors on the 4 RECOMB papers.  Looks to me like a case of a field where everybody knows everybody and everybody collaborates with everybody.  For example, I am part of the American Society of Mammalogists.  If you look at the talks at the annual meeting, you will see some names pop up repeatedly.  In fact, I am sure that people from my adviser's lab or his collaborators have presented in almost every single meeting from 1990.  There are 4500 members in the ASM, and I have yet to hear about a talk that was rejected (Hell, we had the Bigfoot guy give a talk).

Additionally, if you start looking at the people who presented at RECOMB, you will find that many have also presented extensively at STOC, SODA, SIAM, etc., so we're not talking about lightweights here.  As I wrote - your friend's talk may simply not been good enough, or relevant enough.

[corvus_caurinus]

I looked around a bit; no sign at all that the field is corrupt. It is a small field (read:backwater) so of course the founders are still heavily involved and many participants are connected to those founders. Sounds like a case of very sour grapes.