This might sound off-topic to this sub, but I feel like this is a problem that is way more common in the ML community. I’ve heard others peers who do research in ML complaining about the same thing.

Now to the problem: I’m from a little-known department, doing a PhD with a little-known advisor, and most of my research gets published in the main ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or CVPR). However, it seems that the community simply ignores that my research exists. There are two specific papers from big labs whose idea and experiments are extremely close to papers of mine from at least 1 year before — these papers have now over 500 citations and don’t mention my papers at all (which have less than 20 citations each, currently).

For example, last year I’ve published a computer vision paper that got strong results in segmentation and detection tasks. This year I’ve seen at least 4 papers being published that have weaker results on the same task, using the same base architecture, and do not compare nor reference my work from last year. All of these 4 papers claim to have the state-of-the-art, and compare against each other (the most recent ones compare their results against all the previous ones, that is). One of these papers has over 200 citations while my paper currently has 4.

Is there anything I can do to make my research more visible? I’m on the verge on quitting my PhD because not having my work acknowledged is simply terrible for me, especially since this happens with my research in general, and not only a few papers that I’ve published. I’ve tried contacting authors from these papers and typically get a reply saying that they were not aware of my work and agreed that it was extremely relevant, but they don’t go through the trouble of updating their submissions to reference me.