Editorial: Accepting shortened papers hurts science

This issue contains two papers. Automatic Property based Testing and Path Validation of XQuery Programs, by Jesús M Almendros‐Jiménez and Antonio Becerra‐Terón, presents a tool that automatically generates tests as XML strings for XQuery programs. (Recommended by Guilio Antoniol.) The second paper, Test Suite Completeness and Black Box Testing, Adilson Luiz Bonifácio and Arnaldo Vieira Moura, is a theoretical study of the issue of completeness in test suites. (Recommended by Hassan Ural.) We did not ask the authors of either paper to cut their papers short. A common conundrum when reviewing conference papers is what to do with papers when the reviewers split, or with papers that were not reviewed quite favorably enough to be accepted, but not quite negatively enough to be rejected. We are a field that strives for consensus, but what to do when we there is no consensus? When this happens, someone always proposes to accept the paper as a short paper. It is not quite “good enough” as is, so maybe it would be fine if the authors just cut the bad parts. Or maybe by taking a shorter version than submitted, it makes it clear to all that this is a marginal paper. “Okay, we can publish it, but only if we hold our noses so the smell won't be too bad.” Really, what is the point? After 30 years of writing papers, reviewing papers, editing papers, and helping organize conferences in all capacities, I strongly believe accepting “short versions” of papers is always a bad idea. Why? First, the authors wrote a full‐length paper (let us say 10 pages), not a short paper (let us say 6 pages). A 6‐page paper would be a different paper, and is it really possible to adequately describe the research in 6 pages? As my colleague Lionel Briand said, that takes a borderline paper and makes it worse. The paper is either a valuable contribution to the conference or it is not—cutting the number of pages does not change that. Second, it is grossly unfair to authors. The authors wrote a 10‐page paper and are asked to rewrite their research as a much shorter paper. That is very difficult, and because the revision period is always limited, it imposes an unreasonable time burden. Third, it is deceptive. Unless the call for papers says “some papers may be accepted with the condition that they are cut by 40%,” this change introduces new rules in the middle of a process. Short papers are sometimes requested when there is not even a short paper