Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 36 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#11

Post by FullMetalJason »

mlevental wrote: post #5
FullMetalJason wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the pointers. How do PhD admissions look at self-publications? What are your thoughts on below two situations evaluated by the admissions committee at a good university(say MIT/Caltech)? 1. A strong LOR from a PI managing a known lab(but with few moderate pubs on my name) vs. 2. No great LORs but self-publishing one or two good papers(quantified with good number of citations and overall quality)

papers in top journals/conferences supervene everything but let's be realistic: if you're asking here you're probably not publishing in nature/annals/nips etc so unless there's something else exceptional about you (that you're publishing in mediocre journals as a high school student) LORs would carry more weight.

You are right :) If I had something that's good enough that it gets through nature then it's a different game altogether. But let's say even if you had something that was good enough to be published in Nature, what are the chances that it will get through if I directly send it in myself as a single author?(do they even accept such submissions?)

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#12

Post by JamesBarney »

FullMetalJason wrote: post #11
mlevental wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

papers in top journals/conferences supervene everything but let's be realistic: if you're asking here you're probably not publishing in nature/annals/nips etc so unless there's something else exceptional about you (that you're publishing in mediocre journals as a high school student) LORs would carry more weight.

You are right :) If I had something that's good enough that it gets through nature then it's a different game altogether. But let's say even if you had something that was good enough to be published in Nature, what are the chances that it will get through if I directly send it in myself as a single author?(do they even accept such submissions?)

If you had something that good I'd find someone on twitter or locally who would read it and if it was good send it to someone they knew who could help get it published. And if they thought it was good they could forward it on to people. Basically building up a chain of trust via vouching.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#13

Post by biofox »

I'd recommend starting by looking at the literature of the area you want to publish in. Familiarise yourself with the main journals, and try to get a feel for the customs of the field.

Almost all publications provide guidelines for authors, and most editors will be happy to answer questions on the submission criteria.

Speaking as a reviewer: the most important things, above everything else, are always (1) the quality of the science, and (2) the clarity of the presentation. If you get those right, you will have little problem publishing.

If you'd like any feedback, feel free to send me an email. My address is in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#14

Post by OxO4 »

FullMetalJason wrote: post #9
gus_massa wrote: post #6

A clerk sitting in a patent office with a PhD or without a PhD? To be more specific: Do you have a degree in the university? In which field? Is it related to what you want to publish? In which field yo want to publish? In physics they like papers in journals. In computer science, they like conference presentations. Beware that there are many predatory journals that publish any article if you pay the fee. Nobody cares…

Thanks! I have Masters in CS from a state uni(Have a thesis in Machine learning). Been in industry(FAANG) for 2 years as an ML engineer(I know that's not a great track to be in for research). But I am very much interested in getting into core research teams like FAIR / Google Research as a Research Scientist(trust me when I say that the teams set the bar very clearly with an entry minimum of phd though you are except…

Grades don't actually matter that much for admissions. The letters of recommendation are much more important, e.g. from the advisor that you did your thesis with.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#15

Post by Theodores »

FullMetalJason wrote: post #9
gus_massa wrote: post #6

A clerk sitting in a patent office with a PhD or without a PhD? To be more specific: Do you have a degree in the university? In which field? Is it related to what you want to publish? In which field yo want to publish? In physics they like papers in journals. In computer science, they like conference presentations. Beware that there are many predatory journals that publish any article if you pay the fee. Nobody cares…

Thanks! I have Masters in CS from a state uni(Have a thesis in Machine learning). Been in industry(FAANG) for 2 years as an ML engineer(I know that's not a great track to be in for research). But I am very much interested in getting into core research teams like FAIR / Google Research as a Research Scientist(trust me when I say that the teams set the bar very clearly with an entry minimum of phd though you are except…

A friend in scientific publishing tells me that China is in on the game.

Not wishing to say anything trade confidential, however, a major Western publishing house is having difficulty competing, the reason being turnaround speed. Try and get something published here and it takes a long time. Having a baby can be quicker.

Meanwhile in China you submit to your journal and you get it peer reviewed the following week and published shortly thereafter.

Try it, at least under the pretext of learning about how the world of scientific publishing works in the West as well as in China. Even if you do not get published there will be benefits in knowing what the score is.

Sorry I have no more details to share with you on the internal difficulties of the publishing business, there has been a lot of merger and acquisition activity going on as the business model is currently going through some pains.

It may seem disloyal going to get published by the underdog, however it isn't a biggie. Where do you think growth for journal subscriptions is coming from these days? China. The publishing community is gladly selling them 'our IP'.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#16

Post by sytelus »

World has changed quite a lot since 1905, my friend. Today, research is not done in silo and publishing new works typically requires significant understanding and knowledge about previous works and collaborators (unless you are doing pure math but even then...). If you are writing research paper in CS, you should have extensive citations in your paper. Top tier CS/ML conferences have typical acceptance rate of 25% or less. The 75% of the papers they reject often have nothing technically wrong with it except minor negligence like missing citations, not enough experiments, missing some baseline, not having confidence intervals in metrics and so on. It is being said that experienced reviewers often can tell you with high accuracy whether paper would be accepted or rejected in about 60 seconds because rejected papers usually has some signs of inexperience of author reflected in structure and presentation. Choosing right conferences is also extremely important because today’s conferences are very focused on specific topic and style. If you go bit off and you face rejection regardless of content of your paper merry because area chair and reviewers would say they are not confident. Typically you should know who has done related work in the field and which are the related papers in past 5 years at least. You should have at least one of those people as your co-author. This is needed because today’s research publications need very specific format, structure, target venue and you need someone to guide and review your work. It’s not just about correctness or achieving some great thing, you also need to compare your work with previous work using experiments and precisely layout pro and cons. Typically this is done by you being PhD student and your advisor helping you to navigate the space. Even with 2 or 3 experienced co-authors, typically writing good paper might take couple of weeks of brainstorming about presentation, content, back and forth, rewriting, rephrasing and re-reviewing. I don’t want to discourage you but if you have to ask these questions, most likely you are no where close to publishing your work. Publishing on arxive is pointless because it is considered non-peer reviewed and it would rarely get you any audience. I would suggest to look up ACM conferences in your field (IEEE is another option but I don’t like them).

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#17

Post by Jhsto »

1. I find conferences on https://edas.info/rssConferences.php and then use my country's national ranking lists to figure out whether it's a good one https://www.tsv.fi/julkaisufoorumi/haku.php?lang=en, here, a score of 1 or better is worth submitting to.

2. I don't think "top publications" like found in http://csrankings.org/ turn down submissions because it's from an independent author. Instead, it would be harder because you are working alone. Now, you need more time, nobody is steering or affecting your opinions what is currently relevant, and nobody is giving you a fresh pair of eyes to identify your own biases. That's hard.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#18

Post by roel_v »

FullMetalJason wrote: post #3
tlb wrote: post #2

No university affiliation is required by arXiv or any other journal I know of. You should put some affiliation, but it can be your own thing like _Full Metal Jason Labs_. However, it's hard to write well for an audience in a given field without having gone to grad school in that field. Readers will sense that your paper is from an outsider. So stick to topics that people will believe an outsider about. Proofs and wor…

Thank you for the pointers. How do PhD admissions look at self-publications? What are your thoughts on below two situations evaluated by the admissions committee at a good university(say MIT/Caltech)? 1. A strong LOR from a PI managing a known lab(but with few moderate pubs on my name) vs. 2. No great LORs but self-publishing one or two good papers(quantified with good number of citations and overall quality)

Your self-published paper on arXiv is not going to get great (lots of) citations. Being a sole basement genius yet doing work that will be noticed by mainstream academia doesn't exist (any more). Even for grad students it's hard finding subjects and angles om them that are publishable.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#19

Post by danbrooks »

FullMetalJason wrote: post #3
tlb wrote: post #2

No university affiliation is required by arXiv or any other journal I know of. You should put some affiliation, but it can be your own thing like _Full Metal Jason Labs_. However, it's hard to write well for an audience in a given field without having gone to grad school in that field. Readers will sense that your paper is from an outsider. So stick to topics that people will believe an outsider about. Proofs and wor…

Thank you for the pointers. How do PhD admissions look at self-publications? What are your thoughts on below two situations evaluated by the admissions committee at a good university(say MIT/Caltech)? 1. A strong LOR from a PI managing a known lab(but with few moderate pubs on my name) vs. 2. No great LORs but self-publishing one or two good papers(quantified with good number of citations and overall quality)

A strong letter of recommendation with a few publications is definitely strongest.

Re: Ask HN: How to Publish on Your Own?

#20

Post by privong »

tlb wrote: post #2

No university affiliation is required by arXiv or any other journal I know of. You should put some affiliation, but it can be your own thing like _Full Metal Jason Labs_. However, it's hard to write well for an audience in a given field without having gone to grad school in that field. Readers will sense that your paper is from an outsider. So stick to topics that people will believe an outsider about. Proofs and wor…

> Zero people wake up in the morning thinking "I'll just browse for new papers from people I've never heard of."

Minor comment, but that's fairly dependent on the field. Every morning I am at work I take ~5–10 minutes to skim the titles of the day's new arXiv/astro-ph postings[0] to see if there's anything interesting. If there is, I'll mark it for later, save it, or spend some time reading/skimming it. That's fairly common among my peers in the field. There are even websites that piggyback on arXiv to facilitate voting on papers to create agendas for discussion groups or journal clubs[e.g., 1].

[0] https://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph/new

[1] https://voxcharta.org/about/about-this-website/

Post reply on HN