11 ms·
What do you get if you publish a paper in a highly-ranked journal?
- s0rce 9y agoI published in Science and Nature during my PhD and other than some prestige and help getting a fellowship I never received any sort of direct payout. I don't think my supervisor got anything directly either, definitely helped future grant applications, however.
- cryoshon 9y ago>I published in Science and Nature during my PhD you have my admiration twice, then. it doesn't count for much from me to you, i know. but improving the human body of knowledge is, in a wide sense, its own reward.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- projectramo 9y agoWhen I was in grad school, you were sent to the front of the line when applying for tenure track positions. (If you got a paper or two into those two publications). However, people still had to like you in the interview and job talk.
- s0rce 9y agoI applied, gave up, just didn't feel like it was all worth it in the end and now work in industry.
- subroutine 9y agoI'm assuming these were not 1st author publications. If you have a 1st author Nature and a 1st author Science paper during grad school, Universities should be rolling out the red carpet.
- Ultimatt 9y agoSo? The actual career is still not worth it. That what you just said is true is almost the worst part about it!
- subroutine 9y agoNot worth it in what regard?
- s0rce 9y agoThey were both first author, details are on my very out of date website link in my profile if you are interested. Definitely no red carpet rolling out, not sure if you are in academia but those days have passed. Could I possibly have done another postdoc and managed a faculty position somewhere in the USA, probably, was it worth it to me, nope. Felt like I failed for a while, its hard to escape from the academia cult.
- subroutine 9y agoWhoa. Well first congrats, that is a triumphant feat for a grad student. I am truly surprised your faculty search wasnt more fruitful, given there is hardly much more you could have done other than maybe secure a K99 grant. Why do you suspect your cv was not top-tier competetive? I ask because yes, I am in Academia and from my experience (including being on faculty search committees) suggests you would have at least been invited to job talks.
- throwawaybbq1 9y agoHeh .. I don't want this to turn into an AMA. But yes .. I too have questions. How long have you been away from academia and how do you feel about it? I had success in grad school (papers in top CS conferences). I went the industrial research route which paid well initially. Now, I'm nearly 40 and have no tenure and a gap of a few years in my publication history. I am very tempted to get out of the game but am afraid about it being a 1 way street.
- joshvm 9y agoCertainly not directly, but in most universities publication output is the main driver for salary negotation (and advancement on tenure track). Most places will put you on a standard scale which increments each year, and having a top tier publication may be enough to negotiate a bump of a couple of rungs (worth a thousand or two pa in the UK). I would imagine the same applies to most jobs - rather than an on-the-spot bonus, if you published in a prestigious journal as part of your job, it would be strong grounds for some compensation at your next review.
- abfan1127 9y agohigh fives.
- moh_maya 9y ago1) For assistant professors, a better chance of tenure 2) Grants! 3) becomes easier to attract good postdocs, which helps you publish good papers faster, which helps... 4) Grad students
- efficax 9y agoIn addition to the prestige and career boost, you get a a really swell awesome feeling and get to be a permanent part of the encylopedia of knowledge. You're in libraries now!
- moh_maya 9y agoThat happens if you publish in any indexed journals. Perhaps more people will see your name if you publish in a higher profile journal, but that is also not a certainly (though highly probable)..
- upvotinglurker 9y agoMany libraries only have online subscriptions to these journals nowadays...
- azag0 9y agoIn chemical physics, many of the most influential papers (tens of thousands of citations) have been published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, an absolutely non-flashy publication with impact factor ~3 and a myriad of uninteresting papers.
- juskrey 9y ago.. which no one reads because one click costs $30
- bantersaurus 9y agoStreet cred
- kazinator 9y agoIf your roommate is Shelly Cooper, you get a sticker! Possibly one depicting a kitten which says, "me-wow!"
- vixen99 9y agoA lot of action on SciHub
- paulpauper 9y agoIt means a lot of status and prestige on Reddit and other 'smart' communities, especially if the paper is in a STEM subject. Outside of academia and offline, very little.
- knolan 9y agoYou'll get asked to review more papers.
- notyourday 9y agoPaper copy of the journal. Authors go absolutely apoplectic if they don't get the paper copy mailed to them. [Source: Pillow talk]
- s0rce 9y agoI ordered extra hard-copies for my mom and grandmother, I think they cared more about the papers in Nature/Science then anyone else.
- sndean 9y agoYeah, I was 2nd author on a Nature paper. The only person that cared was my mom.
- xioxox 9y agoI didn't get one for a first-author Science paper, but got them for co-authored Nature papers.
- notyourday 9y agoI am pretty sure that means production editor messed up or someone else in your department got your copy.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- neurothrow 9y agoA scientist once apologized for being a jerk to me at a meeting the previous year, after research that I presented there was published in a highly-ranked journal. Oddly, I didn't even remember the incident in question, but the change in opinion, apparently just because of the publication venue has stuck with me for a long time.
- Vinnl 9y agoIn addition to providing more incentive for manipulation of result and flashy research, it also rewards researchers not for the contents of their research, but for where they manage to get it published. Especially the "top tier" journals place emphasis on noteworthiness, disincentivising e.g. replication studies, and often with a higher number of retractions [1]. It also means that the position of the traditional, subscription-based journals are cemented more, even though many funders are also aiming to transition to open access publishing. So overall, I guess I'm not that enthusiastic about this. [1] https://www.nature.com/news/why-high-profile-journals-have-more-retractions-1.15951 https://www.nature.com/news/why-high-profile-journals-have-m...
- quickben 9y agoIf you are not planning a career in academia, wouldnt it be better to patent it? Just wondering...
- KGIII 9y agoNot everything can be patented and some folks have ethical concerns about keeping research open. Not to mention, you pretty much have to publish once you get into grad school. If you're going for your Ph.D. then your goal is to further the art.
- santaclaus 9y agoThey aren't mutually exclusive. As a researcher/engineer, whenever we publish in a top tier journal the company usually files for patents on the main contribution too.
- PeterisP 9y agoMost research is not patentable. Technical development and design that results in some "method and apparatus" to do a particular thing is patentable, but the research required before that R&D that leads to understand how stuff works and what might work is not patentable. And that's not speaking about less technical fields of science where nothing is patentable, or computer science which is not patentable in much of the world (software patents aren't valid in EU and other places). Also, patenting is expensive. Especially because you need to file a patent in multiple major markets, you need multiple different patent lawyers, if you're outside of USA then filing a patent in USA is a bit of a hassle, and just for USA+main EU countries gets quite costly quick - so that's a reason not to patent things unless you have a clear picture that some product is going to violate that patent and thus it'll become valuable.
- santaclaus 9y ago> Most research is not patentable. In my experience, the lawyers just chuck 'A System for' in front of the paper's title and open the firehose at the patent office. Lots of ridiculous stuff gets through...
- robotresearcher 9y agoSuggest a title change, since almost none of the comments address the contents of the article. E.g. "Large cash bounties paid for highly-ranked journal articles in China and other Asian and middle eastern countries". Most comments are answering the question by stating the traditional reward. The article is about how very different rewards are appearing.
- joe_the_user 9y agoWell then let me bite on the question of the problem with such high payouts. "The next question is whether there’s anything wrong with this idea, and if so, what. It makes me uncomfortable, but that’s not the appropriate measure. As long as the journals themselves keep up their editorial standards, the main effect would seem to be that their editorial staffs must get an awful lot of China-derived manuscripts whose authors are hoping to get lucky." Well, I'd offer that this analysis ignores how science has historically worked. Essentially, science has involved something like a "club" of individuals who can be trusted to make a sincere effort to find the true. Certainly, the use of exact instruments and the theoretical reproducibility of experiments were important but also dealing with individuals are reliable, systematic and trustworthy was an important thing. Which is to say that science journals aren't designed to filter out articles which are wholly fraudulent, a tissue of lies cleverly created to mimic an actual scientific breakthrough. With a clever enough person, naturally, there is no way to see fraud from the article, one would have to lab at the laboratory, attempt to reproduce the experiment and so-forth (and reproducibility was the key historically, most experiments weren't actually reproduced and no journal is going to maintain a lab to reproduce submitted articles - except perhaps in CS where a program might submittable). And there you have it. The lab coated scientist is a movie character but be scientist, as least once, was more than to engage in some activities. It was to be part of the "broad march of progress" where the lesser-scientist still helped move things forward by small, honest iterations of basic research (and this "club" arguably was disproportionately and unfairly white, male and first-world but every process has its weaknesses). A move which makes the pursuit of science a purely adversarial affair, by consigning poor performs to absolute poverty and giving fairly vast rewards to good performs is going to break the club everywhere. And the implications of the end of science as an idealist pursuit vary from field to field. Fraud in CS or math might be impossible or might be rendered impossible with suitable measures. But in social sciences or other fields, things could get nasty indeed.
- mrtree 9y agoNothing but pride.
- Animats 9y ago25 free reprint copies?
- jstandard 9y agoHow does intellectual property work for published research based on approaches developed while consulting for a company? For example, let's say you develop a novel modeling methodology for a company who hired you. You'd like to publish the methodology and give conference talks on it. Since you're hired, your work and the methodology would belong to the company as their asset. Are there certain types of licenses applicable here? How about in the case of the article where researchers are compensated for presenting a talk on that methodology?
- icelancer 9y ago>>How does intellectual property work for published research based on approaches developed while consulting for a company? This is negotiable upfront for industrial research positions. You should always review your IP contract inside your job offer packet and battle HR/management hard on the rights to the IP and compensation surrounding it. Most boilerplate language assigns all IP rights to the company you work for with a maximum of $1 consideration paid for your work (to satisfy contract law if it is ever argued in a court), with acknowledgements or minor credit to you in the official documentation. Needless to say, you shouldn't blindly agree to that unless your base salary is commensurate with such a loss of control and future rights of your work.
- jstandard 9y agoThanks, that's helpful as an upfront approach. How about if a contract is already in place and the company is okay with the methodology being published, as long as they retain rights to it. Is there a licensing vehicle that allows for publishing while remaining an asset of the company? For example, Square built their Dagger library and uses the Apache license. http://square.github.io/dagger/ http://square.github.io/dagger/ My impression is that Dagger is still an asset of Square, but you can use it as long as you meet the licensing requirements. Is there an equivalent to this for a modeling approach or work done by a consultant?
- throwawaybbq1 9y agoIANAL. However, as an industrial researcher in CS, the standard is this. Once you patent your work, the company is okay with you publishing. There are exceptions. There is a story (no idea if true of not) that the folks who published the dynamo paper almost got fired. Some ideas are so important to the business that they may not be patented and just reserved a trade secret. All of this is negotiable and often done on a case by case basis. Most employers I've had have a standard reviewing process where the researchers submit the paper (to be submitted) and we get an approval that it is okay to publish. There is typically a checkbox that asks if you sought protection for any IP in the paper, etc.
- asdffdsa321 9y agoAn interview at google?
- icelancer 9y agoI live in this field now. I refuse to publish in so-called "highly-ranked journals" that take 3-6 months to find peers to review and referee your work, drag their feet, and basically amount to a ridiculous group of cronies that guard the gates of "science." I've talked about it before on HN but I will only publish to open access and open data (most important) journals that require all data be scrubbed of PII and published alongside the paper for replication purposes. I highly favor journals that not only allow, but encourage replication (yes, many elite journals cite "novelty" as a top factor regarding publication decisions... embarrassing). Science should be freely available, open access, open data, and replicable. Otherwise it isn't science. It's primarily garbage that exists to advance the careers and egos of a select few.
- osrec 9y agoCompletely agree with you. I find it especially annoying when research funded by tax payers' money is not made freely available.
- avip 9y agoDon't forget code! "we then used our in-house untested code, developed by an undergrad we scrapped from Biology, to normalize the results. The code is comfortably not attached"
- kazinator 9y agoAnd that's just the CS papers.
- ziotom78 9y agoNot entirely true: I am an astrophysicist, and I can say that this practice would be extremely useful for my discipline as well. In cosmology (my field) we use codes that are often extremely complex, yet they are not usually released together with the papers based on their outputs. This puzzles me, as last year I attended a conference on informatics and astrophysics (ADASS), and one of the talks showed that releasing your codes as open source increases a lot the chance of your papers being cited (expecially if you advertise your code using services like ASCL [1]). The only reason I can think of this unwillingness to publish codes is the fact that these codes written by physicists are often extremely unreadable: very long Fortran routines with awkward variable names, no comments, no test cases, no documentation… Once you get a result from your own software, you get more satisfaction if you publish a paper with the results than if you polish and publish the code. IMHO this is bad science, but it is difficult to change this way of working: cosmology is today done by large collaborations, not by individuals, and if you propose to make the codebase developed by your team public, this idea is usually not welcomed by your co-authors. [1] http://ascl.net/ http://ascl.net/
- amelius 9y agoSo I suppose it's often better to turn your idea into a company instead.
- juskrey 9y agoIt is always better. The thing is most of the journal papers are useless in the real world.