5 ms·

> Not knowing LaTeX, the word processer of choice in mathematics, he typed up his calculations in Microsoft Word ... > He opted instead for quick publication

by bglazer 10y ago

> Not knowing LaTeX, the word processer of choice in mathematics, he typed up his calculations in Microsoft Word ... > He opted instead for quick publication in the Far East Journal of Theoretical Statistics, a periodical based in Allahabad, India, that was largely unknown to experts and which, on its website, rather suspiciously listed Royen as an editor. I couldn't help but laugh at this part. He proved a classic theorem in statistics and then precision engineered the actual submission to be roundly ignored. Makes me wonder if there's a proof of P=NP with ClipArt illustrations that's buried in the South Asian Journal of Mathematics.

shas3 10y ago
While it's hard to believe, there are entire fields where top journals can take 2 years to publish (no early publications, no culture of preprints, etc.) For example, in one subfield of EE where I once worked in mid oughts, the choice ws between an IEEE journal that took 2.5-4 yrs to publish or lesser known IET and online journals that published faster. Such fields are few in 2017. But it's not implausible that in 2014 the only two quick forums in statistics he was aware of were Arxiv and lesser known journals.
- sdenton4 10y ago
  The great thing about the arxiv, though, is that you can submit the preprint early while the paper goes through review at a 'real' journal. Review takes time... Unless you submit to your own journal... I'm surprised good friend didn't help with a better choice of journal, even a non top tier one.
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  There's entire trails of papers that cite each other on arXiv while they wait for a 1-2 year review for journal publication. It's crazy — the journal has in some regards become a formality necessary for career advancement, while the actual research in a field progresses in the form of postings on a preprint server.
  - a_bonobo 10y ago
    > the journal has in some regards become a formality necessary for career advancement, I think this is ever so slowly going away - the entire format of the journal is still a hangover from a print-only era and really needs to go away. There are some good news: the NIH (medicine's US funding body) now allows preprints to be cited in grant proposals, one nail in the coffin of journals. See http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/nih-enables-investigators-include-draft-preprints-grant-proposals http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/nih-enables-investiga...
    - ma2rten 10y ago
      Are you saying that journals are going away in favor of unpeer reviewed preprints? That seems like a big step backwards.
      - dagss 10y ago
        It is a step forwards. The important thing is to get rid of the journals, then new evaluation systems can rise from the ashes. The peer review is letting more and more crap through anyway.
      - adrianN 10y ago
        Peer review mostly guarantees that the paper is not ridiculously wrong. It's a pretty small hurdle to clear and whether or not a paper passes peer review depends mostly on the mood of the reviewers. I have received completely contradictory reviews for the same paper.
        ma2rten 10y ago
        Depends on the venue you publish in. One side effect of getting rid of peer reviews is that you need another indicator if a paper is worth reading, most of the time that's going to be author reputation. This means it's difficult for work from lesser known authors to get noticed (similarly to what happened here).
      - MaysonL 10y ago
jlg23 10y ago
> I couldn't help but laugh at this part. He proved a classic theorem in statistics and then precision engineered the actual submission to be roundly ignored. He simply did not care: “I am used to being frequently ignored by scientists from [top-tier] German universities,” he wrote in an email. “I am not so talented for ‘networking’ and many contacts. I do not need these things for the quality of my life.”
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- geezerjay 10y ago
  Sounds like a bullshit excuse. I don't understand why anyone would even argue that they intentionally do a poor job presenting their work because they somehow allege they are ignored. The only reason why anyone would go through such pains to get ignored is if they intentionally want to be ignored. And this does not make any sense, particularly in a "publish or perish" environment.
  - S4M 10y ago
    It is clearly stated in the article that Thomas Royen just wanted to get published quickly, as he isn't an academic.
  - yomritoyj 10y ago
    I on the contrary find it perfectly reasonable. Academic publishing has its own share of bullshit and I can well understand someone, specially a retired person, wanting to give up on that kind of prestige in order to save time and energy for actual science. For example, as far as I know, Grigori Perelman has not published the work that won him an offer of the Fields Medal in any journal.
  - mehaveaccount 10y ago
    I sympathize, after getting my PhD I went into the private sector. I often have side projects that could turn into publications, but massaging something through the publications process is a part-time job itself, and there's definitely quite a bit of who-you-know that can muddy things up.
JorgeGT 10y ago
> Makes me wonder if there's a proof of P=NP with ClipArt illustrations that's buried in the South Asian Journal of Mathematics. For some reason, the gem implausibly hidden in an obscure Indian publication reminded me of Borges' The Secret Miracle [1], where God is hidden in a single letter of a single book in the Clementinum library. It also makes me wonder, how many talents are forgotten, how many revolutions hidden away collecting dust? --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Miracle
- analog31 10y ago
  When I worked at the public library as a teenager, I proposed a "hundred dollar bill contest," where we would announce that there was a hundred dollar bill in one of the books. The head librarian got a horrified expression when she realized what I was proposing, and threatened to fire me on the spot. So I wouldn't mess around with God. ;-)
  - cevi 10y ago
    Maybe this explains the time I found a $20 bill in a rather obscure library book.
    - jackvalentine 10y ago
      The university library I worked in as an undergraduate had a $100 note inside a hard copy of someone's PhD thesis, put there by the author. It was still there when I left, four years later. The secret of its existence was amazingly well kept by the staff - and nobody read the thesis.
      - muro 10y ago
        Should have used a cheque
        jackvalentine 10y ago
tnecniv 10y ago
The thing that's interesting to me is that he knew that this was a famous unsolved problem, knew that he was correct, wanted to take SOME amount of time to publish it, and then didn't care to get it out there at all. I feel like my course of action would to be to send it to the guy at PSU he contacted and say "if you want to handle the publication bureaucracy, you can be second author."
jhbadger 10y ago
In biology, the reason why there was a thirty-five-year gap between the publication of Gregor Mendel's classic paper on peas and the birth of genetics was that his 1865 paper was published in an obscure journal.
- ocfnash 10y ago
  Great example. It also seems to have been the case that when he became Abbot of his monastery in 1867 he ceased research.

by bglazer 10y ago

shas3 10y ago

While it's hard to believe, there are entire fields where top journals can take 2 years to publish (no early publications, no culture of preprints, etc.) For example, in one subfield of EE where I once worked in mid oughts, the choice ws between an IEEE journal that took 2.5-4 yrs to publish or lesser known IET and online journals that published faster. Such fields are few in 2017. But it's not implausible that in 2014 the only two quick forums in statistics he was aware of were Arxiv and lesser known journals.

sdenton4 10y ago
The great thing about the arxiv, though, is that you can submit the preprint early while the paper goes through review at a 'real' journal. Review takes time... Unless you submit to your own journal... I'm surprised good friend didn't help with a better choice of journal, even a non top tier one.
Xcelerate 10y ago
There's entire trails of papers that cite each other on arXiv while they wait for a 1-2 year review for journal publication. It's crazy — the journal has in some regards become a formality necessary for career advancement, while the actual research in a field progresses in the form of postings on a preprint server.
- a_bonobo 10y ago
  > the journal has in some regards become a formality necessary for career advancement, I think this is ever so slowly going away - the entire format of the journal is still a hangover from a print-only era and really needs to go away. There are some good news: the NIH (medicine's US funding body) now allows preprints to be cited in grant proposals, one nail in the coffin of journals. See http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/nih-enables-investigators-include-draft-preprints-grant-proposals http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/nih-enables-investiga...
  - ma2rten 10y ago
    Are you saying that journals are going away in favor of unpeer reviewed preprints? That seems like a big step backwards.
    - dagss 10y ago
      It is a step forwards. The important thing is to get rid of the journals, then new evaluation systems can rise from the ashes. The peer review is letting more and more crap through anyway.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      Peer review mostly guarantees that the paper is not ridiculously wrong. It's a pretty small hurdle to clear and whether or not a paper passes peer review depends mostly on the mood of the reviewers. I have received completely contradictory reviews for the same paper.
      - ma2rten 10y ago
        Depends on the venue you publish in. One side effect of getting rid of peer reviews is that you need another indicator if a paper is worth reading, most of the time that's going to be author reputation. This means it's difficult for work from lesser known authors to get noticed (similarly to what happened here).
    - MaysonL 10y ago

jlg23 10y ago

> I couldn't help but laugh at this part. He proved a classic theorem in statistics and then precision engineered the actual submission to be roundly ignored. He simply did not care: “I am used to being frequently ignored by scientists from [top-tier] German universities,” he wrote in an email. “I am not so talented for ‘networking’ and many contacts. I do not need these things for the quality of my life.”

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
geezerjay 10y ago
Sounds like a bullshit excuse. I don't understand why anyone would even argue that they intentionally do a poor job presenting their work because they somehow allege they are ignored. The only reason why anyone would go through such pains to get ignored is if they intentionally want to be ignored. And this does not make any sense, particularly in a "publish or perish" environment.
- S4M 10y ago
  It is clearly stated in the article that Thomas Royen just wanted to get published quickly, as he isn't an academic.
- yomritoyj 10y ago
  I on the contrary find it perfectly reasonable. Academic publishing has its own share of bullshit and I can well understand someone, specially a retired person, wanting to give up on that kind of prestige in order to save time and energy for actual science. For example, as far as I know, Grigori Perelman has not published the work that won him an offer of the Fields Medal in any journal.
- mehaveaccount 10y ago
  I sympathize, after getting my PhD I went into the private sector. I often have side projects that could turn into publications, but massaging something through the publications process is a part-time job itself, and there's definitely quite a bit of who-you-know that can muddy things up.

JorgeGT 10y ago

> Makes me wonder if there's a proof of P=NP with ClipArt illustrations that's buried in the South Asian Journal of Mathematics. For some reason, the gem implausibly hidden in an obscure Indian publication reminded me of Borges' The Secret Miracle [1], where God is hidden in a single letter of a single book in the Clementinum library. It also makes me wonder, how many talents are forgotten, how many revolutions hidden away collecting dust? --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Miracle

analog31 10y ago
When I worked at the public library as a teenager, I proposed a "hundred dollar bill contest," where we would announce that there was a hundred dollar bill in one of the books. The head librarian got a horrified expression when she realized what I was proposing, and threatened to fire me on the spot. So I wouldn't mess around with God. ;-)
- cevi 10y ago
  Maybe this explains the time I found a $20 bill in a rather obscure library book.
  - jackvalentine 10y ago
    The university library I worked in as an undergraduate had a $100 note inside a hard copy of someone's PhD thesis, put there by the author. It was still there when I left, four years later. The secret of its existence was amazingly well kept by the staff - and nobody read the thesis.
    - muro 10y ago
      Should have used a cheque
      - jackvalentine 10y ago

tnecniv 10y ago

The thing that's interesting to me is that he knew that this was a famous unsolved problem, knew that he was correct, wanted to take SOME amount of time to publish it, and then didn't care to get it out there at all. I feel like my course of action would to be to send it to the guy at PSU he contacted and say "if you want to handle the publication bureaucracy, you can be second author."

jhbadger 10y ago

In biology, the reason why there was a thirty-five-year gap between the publication of Gregor Mendel's classic paper on peas and the birth of genetics was that his 1865 paper was published in an obscure journal.

ocfnash 10y ago
Great example. It also seems to have been the case that when he became Abbot of his monastery in 1867 he ceased research.