Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335

...as well (skip to chapter 5 for the impatient).

-Do a literature survey and read LOTS of papers. If you are not coming from the standard academic route you are probably vastly underestimating how much existing work has been published. To publish your research you need to place it in the right context, with citations, and really understand what is novel about your ideas. Read lots of papers, take notes, keep track of the bibliographic details. Follow up on citations to find more papers.

-Write up your understanding of the relevant field as a survey of existing literature with citations. This will clarify your thinking and help you become familiar with standard terminology. This will also be part of your finished paper.

-Write up your idea using terminology and notation consistent with your existing survey. Discuss what is novel and different about your idea.

-Analyze your idea from the point of view of other paradigms. Answer possible critiques that would come from other ways of thinking about the same problem. If you've discovered "standard" ways of evaluating your type of idea, do the evaluation to see how you compare.

-Get feedback. Get opinions from as many other people as you can that are as good as you can find. In the draft paper, thank everyone that gives you any feedback. If people give you substantial ideas that improve the work, ask if they want to be co-authors and work with you a bit more.

-Once you feel there is a real research contribution in your paper draft, and people you have shown it to think it is good, start working on getting it published. Put it up on preprint sites and send it to conferences or journals that are relevant. By this point you should know the right venues based on your survey work.

Written communication of science is hard, especially when you are new to it. I think a good 50% of what I have learned as a PhD student was how to more effectively communicate through writing. And that builds on me (honestly) being in the top quartile of writers in my program when I walked in the door. I have worked with many co-authors who have had great work rejected by journals for writing reasons. It isn't about scholarly snobbery - a lot of it just isn't understandable to anyone but the author. Writing advertising copy / business plans / anything related to startups I worked with was orders of magnitude easier.

In a strict sense its gate keeping, in a more realistic sense its about norming. These standards/expectations often develop organically and are sometimes hard to write down in the sense you are asking for.

Publishing a paper no one reads is pointless. To make people want to read a paper, you need to make sure it is novel (so they don't waste their time reading about something you only rediscovered) and that it is integrated into the existing understanding of the field, with citations of related research, using common terminology, etc (so they can more easily understand your work and what it means).

This is what working with an existing researcher gets you. If you don't work within this framework, why would other researchers waste their time working out that when you say "frazzles" you mean "frizzles", and once you work that out the whole thing is equivalent to a conference paper from '06?