First, said average joe must know the field, since it's otherwise difficult to know that something is a breakthrough - it could have been considered and rejected some decades previous. Second, use a site like Google Scholar to find similar work in the area, or go to the library and do the same. This gives average joe an idea of which journals are relevant to the field. Third, pick an appropriate journal, go to its we…
How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
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Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#12First, said average joe must know the field, since it's otherwise difficult to know that something is a breakthrough - it could have been considered and rejected some decades previous. Second, use a site like Google Scholar to find similar work in the area, or go to the library and do the same. This gives average joe an idea of which journals are relevant to the field. Third, pick an appropriate journal, go to its we…
Pretty much that translates to 'don't be an average joe; study to be an actual scientist'? The emphasis on putting discoveries in the correct orthodox format is unsettling; would a real discovery be ignored if the report was mis-formatted? Something is wrong then.
There is certainly a required style - a paper needs an abstract, it needs a body, and it needs a references section. This is because it fits into a larger system of use. People read the abstract to get a sense of if the paper is relevant to their interests. If so, then they might spend the money to get the rest of the paper, or spend the time needed to fully understand it. People use the references to get a better sense of the background required to understand the paper. Only people who fiercely believe they are exceptional (ie, not an average joe) might think they don't need to include this information.
Another part of the orthodoxy is that it needs to be written in the language of the journal. Angewandte Chemie only accepts papers in German, so if you submit a paper in Malay then it's not going to be accepted no matter how good it is. It also needs to be relevant to the interests of the journal - even if it's in German, Angewandte Chemie won't publish a paper about low-energy neutrino detection.
The "instructions to the author" describe these sorts of points. If that is too much orthodoxy for your hypothetical average joe, then joe will have a hard time doing anything, which makes joe decidedly not average.
On the other hand, editors will usually bend over backwards to get a seriously ground-breaking piece published. They just have to be able to understand that it's 1) ground-breaking, 2) relevant, and 3) likely to be true. Joe's first step is to convince the editor of that. If no editor can be convinced, then it's unlikely that other, non-editors will be convinced.
You mentioned "mis-formatting" as a possible hang-up. To start, this means you haven't read many papers, because I find mis-formattings all the time.
Remember, editors in nearly all cases are working joes who volunteer their time. As the UNSW link points out "Even sending the [manuscript] back to you, unread, with a covering note saying "Read the Instructions to authors" takes time." - time that the editor would rather spend doing research. The problem is that editors get a lot of crank submissions and a lot of poorly done research. These are disproportionately poorly formatted. Editors are human, and if they see something that looks nothing like a scientific paper, it's much more likely to trigger the "crank" flag than to be seen as a breakthrough paper.
There's a balance at work here. A novelist who just wrote the next Great American Novel, but wrote it using a leaky ball-point pen on tissue paper, making the result difficult to decipher, will find it harder to publish. Xkcd #483 points out that the probability of new words created by the author is inversely proportionally to the probability of the book being good. And so on, and so on, and so on.
I think one of the points of confusion here is that "ground-breaking" is a very broad term, almost to the point of uselessness. Every single published scientific paper is supposed to break new ground. Some find a new sandbox, others a back yard, others an island, and a very few find a new continent. Without more information about your hypothetical case, it's impossible if this is something like "discovered antigravity" or "found a new intermediate of acetylene catalysis on the Platinum(100) surface", but odds are that it's not something like the first, so the requirement for convincing people that it's actually ground-breaking is higher.
For the record, scientists are average joes in just about every measure, except that they can put some extra letters before or after their name. Don't get hung up by thinking they are special in any way. Also, editors have no clue on the background of a new author, and I've seen many papers where the author has no institutional affiliation, so it's not like they can tell if someone is/isn't a scientist. "By your words are ye known", to misquote Matthew. To directly quote George Lundberg, editor of JAMA, after publishing a paper which included Emily Rosa, a 9 year old, as co-author: "Age doesn't matter. It's good science that matters, and this is good science".
Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#13A couple of points: 1. Even experienced academics / researchers have difficulty in getting published. Especially if their discovery contradicts any widely accepted theories. 2. How do you know that yours is a breakthrough discovery? Have you read up on all the publications in the relevant field(s)? 3. As a general rule, anything you write for publication needs to cite the relevant existing knowledge and then show how…
Other than that quibble, I agree with your points.
Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#14Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much that translates to 'don't be an average joe; study to be an actual scientist'? The emphasis on putting discoveries in the correct orthodox format is unsettling; would a real discovery be ignored if the report was mis-formatted? Something is wrong then.
I don't understand your comment. Nothing I said requires someone to "study to be an actual scientist" nor did I emphasize an orthodox style. How did you infer that? For that matter, how do you define "actual scientist" any different from "average joe who makes a breakthrough discovery"? There is certainly a required style - a paper needs an abstract, it needs a body, and it needs a references section. This is because…
Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#16A couple of points: 1. Even experienced academics / researchers have difficulty in getting published. Especially if their discovery contradicts any widely accepted theories. 2. How do you know that yours is a breakthrough discovery? Have you read up on all the publications in the relevant field(s)? 3. As a general rule, anything you write for publication needs to cite the relevant existing knowledge and then show how…
Hmm. I've seen that it's pretty easy to get published. What's difficult for experienced academics / researchers is that they want to get published in journals with a high prestige rate. This is used as a proxy for one's "impact" on the field, with effects on one's standing in a department, pay grade, career advancement, etc. Other than that quibble, I agree with your points.
Even for the average joe, publishing their findings in such a journal will very likely trigger the "crank" flag and thus erode any credibility.
Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#17A trick Tim Ferriss (4HWW) employed was to befriend very specific bloggers and targeted authors who frequently wrote about aligned subject matter. He would very causally offer to share tidbits of what he was working on, sensing it would pique their interests. Steadily he was able to build buzz and street-cred via a non-traditional route. Quite brilliant strategy actually.
Academic institutions are, generally, keen to be seen to be collaborating with industry. So if said joe can work that angle there might even be collaborative research grants available to the cooperating institution.
As mentioned in my reply, it might be prudent to establish priority by self-publishing on average-joe.com and a reputable internet scientific archive like ArXiv. Doing so mitigates the risk of somebody else claiming the discovery as their own.
Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#18The same way all scientists do. Except when you submit to the journal just put "No affiliation" in the institution field.
Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. I've seen that it's pretty easy to get published. What's difficult for experienced academics / researchers is that they want to get published in journals with a high prestige rate. This is used as a proxy for one's "impact" on the field, with effects on one's standing in a department, pay grade, career advancement, etc. Other than that quibble, I agree with your points.
As you say in your reply to the question, there are many journals who will publish almost anything just to get paid. We have all heard about the gibberish papers that get publish in Nature, etc. Even for the average joe, publishing their findings in such a journal will very likely trigger the "crank" flag and thus erode any credibility.