4 ms·

Ask HN: Whitepaper v Academic Paper: What’s the best way to share breakthroughs?

• blt 8y ago
  I would suggest publishing it if you think it can get accepted at a refereed venue. It's never bad to add an extra paper on your CV as a grad student.
• totoglazer 8y ago
  By graduate student do you mean masters or PhD. If PhD clearly (try to) publish academically. If masters, and you have interest in a PhD, also academic. If you’re a masters student with no intention of serious further academic activity then it doesn’t matter much, arXiv + blog post seems reasonable.
• paraschopra 8y ago
  I recommend going through the academic paper route and aiming for the highest journal first. This process will give you free feedback from the experts in the field. You can always fall back and publish a blog post but you won’t get the high quality feedback that going through peer reviewed journal does
• rococode 8y ago
  Are you working with a professor on other things? They are probably interested in seeing what you have. As a grad student you're definitely in a position to reach out to someone relevant and ask them what they think about your work. If you're not planning to spend more time on it, and are just looking to share your interesting preliminary results, then a whitepaper might be the way to go. But if you have the time and believe your design has potential then it may likely be worth pursuing. Who knows, maybe some of us will be reading about it a year or two from now.
• mushufasa 8y ago
  Fortunately, this may be a false dichotomy. Many journals are fine if you post something on a blog or a 'working paper' on an open site like arxiv while you put it through the peer review process. if you are doing something that is timely, be aware that academic journals can take over a year to go through the peer review + revision process (months to hear back, month to revise, months to hear back, scheduled for several issues ahead -- not uncommon). you're definitely better off having gone through the other side, though -- even if the paper doesn't turn out to spread virally (most ideas, even good ones, don't) -- the validation of the academic review can stay with you + your CV.
• iflp 8y ago
  (trying to) publish in CS conferences isn't as painful as in other disciplines, but without help from someone with an academic background, it's likely your work will not receive much attention, as you might lack paper-writing skills / knowledge of prior work. If you can't find a local professor whom you can trust and who is willing to help (which you should try first), you might want to ask on r/MachineLearning. Many users there are grad students / researchers working in ML/AI, and I've seen someone in a similar situation (asking for endorsement to submit on arXiv) received help.
• kapauldo 8y ago
  White papers are not peer reviewed so are faster. If your goal is speed, white paper. If your goal is ip or prestige or sharing knowledge, academic.
• irvingprime 8y ago
  I've published a couple conference papers. I found the process to be slow and frustrating. The quality of feedback from reviewers was extremely low. The effort to write a paper in the ultra-dry, tedious style of academia was great with the payoff of making the papers almost unreadable while obscuring the ideas presented. Also, there's some expense involved. When I wrote papers I had an employer that paid my way to conferences. That is no longer the case. Journals don't require the same expenses, unless you want your work to be available through open access rather than locked into a single issue that will be read by maybe three people, ever. Open access usually costs the author money, meaning it's not really open. For my next publications, I'm not going to go the academic route. It looks good on the CV but otherwise doesn't serve my purposes. YMMV of course but think about what you want before committing to an approach that these days appears to be designed more to boost the publication credits of academics than to actually spread knowledge.