5 ms·

(edit: my publication experiences are heavily biased towards biotech/biomedical/natural sciences fields. Your CS Experience May Vary, particularly w/r/t the pr

(edit: my publication experiences are heavily biased towards biotech/biomedical/natural sciences fields. Your CS Experience May Vary, particularly w/r/t the prestige of conference papers.) The obvious answer that you might not like very much is "write a paper and co-author it with an established group." If you share a lede with an established group, that's immediate credibility. Journals happily accept manuscripts from first/corresponding authors who don't have PhDs. Graduate students publish regularly; depending on your program this is effectively obligatory. Self-funding publication in a peer-reviewed journal will raise eyebrows -- so see my first suggestion, which offloads the often substantial publication costs onto a grant. (Our group's last publication cost was ~$4500, for a benchmark. That's higher than normal but it was open access with 6 color figures). Crediting a grant for the work also lends credibility; someone gave you cash to do this thing, so obviously they don't think you're totally nuts. Publishing preprint-only on the arxiv is well established. I think you need someone to vouch for you the first time, but that shouldn't be too hard depending on the field. Depending on the field, single-author maunscripts are either basically normal (parts of CS, much of mathematics, some theoretical physics), a giant red flag (experimental physics, biology-adjacent fields), or somewhere in between (economics?). Do not ever use a vanity publisher for scientific articles. If the journal ever appeared in Beall's list, run, because it's a mark of shame. Finally, don't necessarily attribute your marginalization to not having a PhD -- the politics of publication are ruthless no matter who you are.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago
I’d say, as an academic and reviewer, single author papers are extremely suspicious in both my current area of computer science research (computer vision and machine learning) as well as my previous area (compilers).
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  If the conference is double blind, how could you even tell? Also, there are plenty of single author papers in compilers and PL that are considered seminal, actually most seminal papers are single author. Multi-author papers are typically student ones.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    Another point here: in CS, there appears to be little to no difference between "conference paper" and "journal paper". That is _not_ always the case. In the biosciences, "conference paper" means "an undergrad could do this half-asleep, and probably did; nobody actually cares much."
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Even CS is diverse, but in my area journal papers are lower quality than conference ones.
throwawayaway12 8y ago
I think that this covers the general situation pretty well. I would also consider who you want your audience to be and the scope. If it is something that you want a non-expert to read, consider a blog post. On the other hand you may want to consider something like a patent if it is something you want to monetize. Lastly, consider peer reviewed journals if it is intended to be consumed by domain experts. All of this is from physics research perspective and may be different depending on your area.
MartianSquirrel 8y ago
Thanks a lot, this answers my questions very well. And as I only want to contribute and am not necessarily looking for fame, I really do not have any problem with having co-authors.
- tincholio 8y ago
  Adding to the GP, you just need to have a thick skin, and not take rejection personally. It's a fact of life in this environment. Regarding the venue and costs, in CS, some conferences are better venues than most journals (impact wise, at least), and attending one might be a good way to know the people in the field. In any case, you'll be expected to pay for the registration and present your paper, too.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Another question I would invite you to ask yourself is what do you wish to accomplish by publishing? A professional academic is required to publish a lot of papers in their career and this means that not all papers are necessarily going to be paid attention to, some have impact, many don't. A lot of papers, most papers I read in CS, involve incremental advances of a given technique. Usually the papers involve describing the problem, the describing how it's solved so far, describing how their solution is different and only then providing particular, computational details of the method. And my impression is this incremental style comes because most researchers do incremental research, extending the ideas and approaches of mentors or colleagues. Which is to say, if you, an outsider like myself, have a good idea for, say, a new algorithm, it might be useful to write a blog entry explaining it's value aside from any paper you write. And as said elsewhere, avoid "predatory" journals - they apparently don't give credibility or get attention.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    >And as said elsewhere, avoid "predatory" journals - they ... don't give credibility worse. They taint what credibility you have. It’s like buying a degree from a degree mill “school”.
eslaught 8y ago
I don't know about where you publish, but all the venues where I publish use double blind review. Therefore I'd say all this talk about how many authors and so on is a red herring. Assuming double blind review, the barriers are going to be with respect to the contribution itself, or the writing. For a paper to get accepted in my field (CS, HPC, PL, compilers), first of all it needs to present a novel and interesting contribution. I occasionally see papers that are pretty obviously coming from industry where it's pretty apparent that the authors just have no idea what a contribution entails. This is the sort of thing that you grow to just have a gut sense of by doing a PhD. Short of that, you could get some of this sense yourself by reading papers, though it would be far easier to collaborate with someone experienced in the field you can find a person who is willing.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  double-blind review has not come to the biosciences, I'm sad to say. Or at least not my corner. I don't know who my reviewers are (though often enough i can guess); they do know who I am.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    Just in your corner. A number of the journals I submit to are double-blinded.
    - hprotagonist 8y ago
      my corner includes Nature, Science, and Cell, so it’s a pretty big corner.. Nature has offered the option for two or three years; the problem is that ~nobody uses it because unmasking is trivially easy. As of last fall, 12% of submissions were double blind. The hyperspecialization of biomedical research means that you get obligate regulatory capture, or something quite close to it. Mostly people figure that trying to paper that over with things like blinded reviewers is a waste of time.
      - Fomite 8y ago
solipsism 8y ago
Share a lede? I think you might mean "share a byline".

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 8y ago

I’d say, as an academic and reviewer, single author papers are extremely suspicious in both my current area of computer science research (computer vision and machine learning) as well as my previous area (compilers).

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
If the conference is double blind, how could you even tell? Also, there are plenty of single author papers in compilers and PL that are considered seminal, actually most seminal papers are single author. Multi-author papers are typically student ones.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  Another point here: in CS, there appears to be little to no difference between "conference paper" and "journal paper". That is _not_ always the case. In the biosciences, "conference paper" means "an undergrad could do this half-asleep, and probably did; nobody actually cares much."
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Even CS is diverse, but in my area journal papers are lower quality than conference ones.

throwawayaway12 8y ago

I think that this covers the general situation pretty well. I would also consider who you want your audience to be and the scope. If it is something that you want a non-expert to read, consider a blog post. On the other hand you may want to consider something like a patent if it is something you want to monetize. Lastly, consider peer reviewed journals if it is intended to be consumed by domain experts. All of this is from physics research perspective and may be different depending on your area.

MartianSquirrel 8y ago

Thanks a lot, this answers my questions very well. And as I only want to contribute and am not necessarily looking for fame, I really do not have any problem with having co-authors.

tincholio 8y ago
Adding to the GP, you just need to have a thick skin, and not take rejection personally. It's a fact of life in this environment. Regarding the venue and costs, in CS, some conferences are better venues than most journals (impact wise, at least), and attending one might be a good way to know the people in the field. In any case, you'll be expected to pay for the registration and present your paper, too.
joe_the_user 8y ago
Another question I would invite you to ask yourself is what do you wish to accomplish by publishing? A professional academic is required to publish a lot of papers in their career and this means that not all papers are necessarily going to be paid attention to, some have impact, many don't. A lot of papers, most papers I read in CS, involve incremental advances of a given technique. Usually the papers involve describing the problem, the describing how it's solved so far, describing how their solution is different and only then providing particular, computational details of the method. And my impression is this incremental style comes because most researchers do incremental research, extending the ideas and approaches of mentors or colleagues. Which is to say, if you, an outsider like myself, have a good idea for, say, a new algorithm, it might be useful to write a blog entry explaining it's value aside from any paper you write. And as said elsewhere, avoid "predatory" journals - they apparently don't give credibility or get attention.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  >And as said elsewhere, avoid "predatory" journals - they ... don't give credibility worse. They taint what credibility you have. It’s like buying a degree from a degree mill “school”.

eslaught 8y ago

I don't know about where you publish, but all the venues where I publish use double blind review. Therefore I'd say all this talk about how many authors and so on is a red herring. Assuming double blind review, the barriers are going to be with respect to the contribution itself, or the writing. For a paper to get accepted in my field (CS, HPC, PL, compilers), first of all it needs to present a novel and interesting contribution. I occasionally see papers that are pretty obviously coming from industry where it's pretty apparent that the authors just have no idea what a contribution entails. This is the sort of thing that you grow to just have a gut sense of by doing a PhD. Short of that, you could get some of this sense yourself by reading papers, though it would be far easier to collaborate with someone experienced in the field you can find a person who is willing.

hprotagonist 8y ago
double-blind review has not come to the biosciences, I'm sad to say. Or at least not my corner. I don't know who my reviewers are (though often enough i can guess); they do know who I am.
- Fomite 8y ago
  Just in your corner. A number of the journals I submit to are double-blinded.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    my corner includes Nature, Science, and Cell, so it’s a pretty big corner.. Nature has offered the option for two or three years; the problem is that ~nobody uses it because unmasking is trivially easy. As of last fall, 12% of submissions were double blind. The hyperspecialization of biomedical research means that you get obligate regulatory capture, or something quite close to it. Mostly people figure that trying to paper that over with things like blinded reviewers is a waste of time.
    - Fomite 8y ago

solipsism 8y ago

Share a lede? I think you might mean "share a byline".