🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan5.170446.15655@Princeton.EDU> awolfe@moo.Princeton.EDU (Andrew Wolfe) writes:

   (Philosophical note.  This experiment also raised the issue of whether or
   not the architecture community will accept the publication of negative
   results.  We could not locate any recent papers in major conferences that
   did not have positive results)

I was the program committee chairman for the 1992 ISCA and would agree
that a paper like the one you describe would have a tough time.  ISCA
cannot publish all the good papers it receives.  HOWEVER, my current
hat is hardware and software systems editor for the Journal of
Parallel and Distributed Computing and for JPDC, unlike ISCA, there is
no page limit to the journal so the situation is different.

Sometimes the negative results paper is the consequent of a trying out
a bad idea; this is a bad paper.  Also any paper of the kind, I did
this and that happened is not so inspiring (but admittedly it can help
others who want to do exactly the same "this").

The paper you describe, which falls into neither of the above two
categories, does seem to be of merit.  Your brief description sounds
like the paper presents an hypothesis, performes a carefully
controlled experiment, obtains a negative result, and offers a
possible explanation.  If in addition the explanation is tested and
found valid, the paper should be considered.  If you do wish to send
the paper to me for JPDC, you might wish to include this posting with
your cover letter and I will pass it on to the subject area editor
assigned to review the paper.

Allan Gottlieb