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Getting a paper accepted

maxwellforbes.com

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Re: Getting a paper accepted

#91

Post by eeeeeeehio »

setopt wrote: post #32
eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

> But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. By “idea” researchers usually imply “idea for a high-impact project that I’m capable of executing”. It’s not just about having ideas, but about having ideas that will actually make an impact on your field. Those again come in two flavors: “obvious ideas” that are the logical next step in a chain…

It's not too difficult to state any idea, even a surprising one. But often, papers with surprising ideas (or maybe the right thing to say is surprising results?) turn out to be wrong!

I think it's still the case that there's lots of ideas that (if they worked!) would be surprising. Anyone can state outlandish ideas in a paper -- imo the contribution is proving (e.g. with sound "experiments", interpreted broadly) that they actually work. Unfortunately, I think clarity of writing matters more to reviewers than the soundness of your experiments. I think in CS this could very well change if the reviewers willed it (i.e. require artifact submission with the paper, and allow papers to be rejected for faults in the artifact)

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#92

Post by eeeeeeehio »

rocqua wrote: post #54
eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

The point of a paper isn't "I had this idea" nor is it "I have this evidence". It is "I had this idea, and it turned out to work! (btw here's the evidence I found that convinced me it works). The value lies in getting true ideas in front of your eyeballs. So communicating the idea clearly is crucial to making the value available.

I agree with you. But what part of the blog post, or the peer review process in general, do you think ensures that only true ideas get in front of eyeballs?

I can write anything I want in the paper, but at the end of the day my experiments could do something slightly (or completely) different. Where are reviewers going to catch this?

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#93

Post by GJim »

ke88y wrote: post #83
keiferski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A secondary and less visible consequence of this is that many people don’t go into academia in the first place because they are put off by the publishing system. And so many people that would otherwise be contributing to human knowledge are working in an office somewhere helping a random company sell more widgets.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia. In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product. In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academi…

> In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron

Are you are aware there is a world outside the USA?

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#94

Post by eeeeeeehio »

smolder wrote: post #38
eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

This whole take is embarrassingly ignorant and no one with the credentials has the time to check you. We need people to do real thinking and they need to ignore you.

I don't understand why took the time to leave (three?) personal attacks, rather than just provide your perspective? I'm willing to acknowledge that my opinion has limitations (I think it mainly applies to CS-adjacent fields with empirical performance evaluations, and where experiments can easily be independently verified).

I would be interested to hear other perspectives.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#95

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

eeeeeeehio wrote: post #27

Academics seem to have this fixation on "ideas": > And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea. But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form…

generating the ideas “planets move at constant per planet velocity” “planets move at a specific speed as a power law function of distance from the sun and we fit the paramets great” “each planet sweeps equal areas in equal time” is cheap, but evaluating which idea is good is expensive, and the whole value of that evaluation is captured in the final idea

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#96

Post by ModernMech »

ke88y wrote: post #83
keiferski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A secondary and less visible consequence of this is that many people don’t go into academia in the first place because they are put off by the publishing system. And so many people that would otherwise be contributing to human knowledge are working in an office somewhere helping a random company sell more widgets.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia. In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product. In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academi…

And yet, show me any private sector funded research and most of the citations will be academic research funded by public dollars.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#97

Post by ke88y »

ModernMech wrote: post #96
ke88y wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia. In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product. In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academi…

And yet, show me any private sector funded research and most of the citations will be academic research funded by public dollars.

Only when they are disseminating in an academic venue. Most non-university research dissemination happens outside of academic venues.

And even then usually only because it’s expected, not because it was actually useful. (And no, it’s not because academics are more ethical about acknowledging the shoulders they stand on. Academics rarely cite the chip designs, software libraries, lab instruments, instruction documents, training materials, etc. What “counts” as something that deserves a citation mostly boils down to “did you publish it in a venue controlled by other academics”, not “how important was this to enabling your contributions?”)

The fortunate thing about the private sector is that you don’t have to spend years of your life shaping opinion on citation ethics, because people are using your stuff instead of half-interestedly saying that they may’ve skimmed the intro to a pdf describing your stuff. And if people use your stuff and get value from it you can usually extract some of the value that creates. Which means you don’t need vanity metrics to convince some government agency to throw you some coin.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#98

Post by ke88y »

GJim wrote: post #93
ke88y wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributing to humanity’s knowledge is MUCH easier in the private sector than in academia. In the private sector you can choose your patrons and your dissemination mechanism. Many, many scientists publish papers, publish code, give talks, write blogs, and otherwise distribute technical details about their work product. In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron and you must disseminate in academi…

> In academia the Federal Government is your only serious patron Are you are aware there is a world outside the USA?

Sorry, you’re totally correct!

It’s important to point out that US professors are sometimes able to go without public patronage, but that this is very much an anomaly.

The US private sector funds A LOT of R&D relative to other countries, and the US attracts an outsized amount of FDI targeted at R&D.

As a result, in the USA there are occasionally rare instances where professors can mostly fund labs without government patronage.

Scientists in other counties are even more desperate for public patronage (and its associated political games) than US scientists

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#99

Post by jszymborski »

abetusk wrote: post #11
jszymborski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, at some point science is communication. Great for Einstein if he gets general relativity, but if he wants anyone else to care, he needs to communicate not only the complex idea in a clear manner, but also _why_ I should spend my cherished minutes here on earth trying to wrap my small brain around it. It's the difference between being a Cassandra or the Oracle at Delphi. Maybe the only difference between the t…

The argument is about pursuing research for discovery or pursuing research for career advancement. Both scenarios require communication but for different reasons. You're not really addressing main critique.

> I did my PhD in the US, and it is very unfortunate that "gaming" publications and focusing on "grants" is the meat of research.

I interpreted GPs above statement as reacting to the strategies in the article for "gaming" publications and grants, but perhaps I misunderstood GPs comment.

Re: Getting a paper accepted

#100

Post by ke88y »

rcxdude wrote: post #88
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every private-sector company I've worked for has had me sign an NDA saying that I can only disseminate knowledge within that company.

Without permission, yeah. But many companies do publish scientific papers. In both worlds, there's usually a game of publishing enough to give people confidence that the results are good, without actually giving away enough details to actually lose any competitive advantage (this is perhaps even more so in academia). In basically every field there will be things that everyone talks about and things that no-one talks…

Also, to state the ultra-obvious given our venue: you can find patrons outside of mega companies that require NDAs.
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