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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
by 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 agodouble-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 agoJust in your corner. A number of the journals I submit to are double-blinded.
- hprotagonist 8y agomy 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 agoMy thoughts on C/N/S aside, all I was actually saying is that "double-blind hasn't reached biomedicine" is inaccurate. It's here, even if it's not widely used (I'd actually guess it's more widely used in biomedicine rather than some other fields). I'm not actually convinced unmasking is "trivially easy". Anecdotally, as a reviewer for the American Journal of Epidemiology, which is double-blind, I've had 4 cases where I've gone "I totally know who did this". In all four I've been wrong. In one case, I actually knew the authors personally. Now, it's possible I'm just uniquely bad at this, but I'm not sure it's as easy as everyone thinks it is.
- tagh 8y agoDitto for my corner of geology.
- DonaldPShimoda 8y ago> 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. My advisor is in PL too, and he's commented on the exact same thing. Every time he's on the PC for a conference, he's able to pick out a couple papers that he's confident are written by non-academics. He says it's a combination of the lack of thorough knowledge on the subject (attempting to present an idea as novel when it's been done before, but under a different name) and the writing style (not academic enough). It seems that these are things OP should definitely look out for if they want to successfully self-publish.
- pygy_ 8y ago> all the venues where I publish use double blind review. But you still need to have your paper sent for review... Couldn't the editor reject it outright?
- eslaught 8y agoPerhaps this is an issue in journal based publishing, I don't know. In CS, we publish in conferences. Conferences don't have editors in the sense that journals have. So there's no initial filtering step. Anyone can submit, and anything that gets submitted will be read by at least 3 or 4 reviewers (who don't get to see the author list). Anyone who does get to see the author list (e.g. the program committee chair) is not involved in any decision making about specific papers unless there is a very serious violation of some kind (which in practice happens very, very infrequently).
- PeterisP 8y agoPossibly, but it generally won't - assuming that the paper meets the criteria (which generally don't include any requirements for affiliation or degree) and isn't obviously garbage or absolutely weird (which may be an issue for first self publishing without any mentoring, you need to have an idea about "how papers are written" in this domain), it'll just go through the same process as every other paper. In some fields there is a noticeable proportion of "industry papers" with valuable contribution coming from people outside of academia without advanced degrees. Sometimes it's obvious in the reviewing process by having problems that are less frequent otherwise (i.e. they lack the experience of "how to write a decent paper according to the standards in this field" that's taught and practiced during the PhD process), but those generally are fixable and so they're just pointed out doing the reviewing/correction process.