Ask HN: Best way to publish papers as a non-scholar?

1) Own a domain. This is good to demonstrate your own views, values, work, etc.

2) Put PDF on your domain.

3) Put your domain behind something like cloudflare.

4) Publish links to PDF. Ensure you have a method of feedback: email is generally preferred and include your name and email in the PDF.

You could publish on third party services but consider them non-authoritive and ephemeral. If you use them as primary distribution you will get burned in the future.

A couple of suggestions.

- Many conferences use blind peer-review.

- After you've finished up with the work, you can ask a PhD to provide feedback/editing in exchange for co-authorship.

I would just put it on arXiv, or equivalents like biorXiv. You should read a lot of papers in the field and cite the relevant ones. Also, use conventions of the field--LaTeX two column format is frequently used in CS/ML papers.

In my PhD I put some work on biorXiv that I never bothered to put through peer review and was pleasantly surprised to see it cited by a peer-reviewed journal article.

I think the answer may change a lot depending on which field are you thinking about; because "the community" will be quite different as well.

Regarding "how to write better quality articles?" one key part is reading a lot of high quality articles from the field. Of course, there are other things yo may want to do, but again, it will depend on the area.

(edit: my publication experiences are heavily biased towards biotech/biomedical/natural sciences fields. Your CS Experience May Vary, particularly w/r/t the prestige of conference papers.)

The obvious answer that you might not like very much is "write a paper and co-author it with an established group." If you share a lede with an established group, that's immediate credibility.

Journals happily accept manuscripts from first/corresponding authors who don't have PhDs. Graduate students publish regularly; depending on your program this is effectively obligatory.

Self-funding publication in a peer-reviewed journal will raise eyebrows -- so see my first suggestion, which offloads the often substantial publication costs onto a grant. (Our group's last publication cost was ~$4500, for a benchmark. That's higher than normal but it was open access with 6 color figures). Crediting a grant for the work also lends credibility; someone gave you cash to do this thing, so obviously they don't think you're totally nuts.

Publishing preprint-only on the arxiv is well established. I think you need someone to vouch for you the first time, but that shouldn't be too hard depending on the field.

Depending on the field, single-author maunscripts are either basically normal (parts of CS, much of mathematics, some theoretical physics), a giant red flag (experimental physics, biology-adjacent fields), or somewhere in between (economics?).

Do not ever use a vanity publisher for scientific articles. If the journal ever appeared in Beall's list, run, because it's a mark of shame.

Finally, don't necessarily attribute your marginalization to not having a PhD -- the politics of publication are ruthless no matter who you are.

I think this really depends on your motivations. Are you trying to convey the information to the community? Trying to build a reputation as a researcher? Increment your citation count?

arXiv is a pretty good option for disseminating information, but most papers published there don't receive as much consideration as those that have gone through a peer review. Therefore, only the most obviously-groundbreaking papers end up accruing a lot of citations there.

If you want to build a reputation, you'll need to target peer-reviewed conferences, and probably those that have a double-blinded process. This will allow your work to stand on its own, although you'll need to ensure that it conforms to the structures/patterns/shibboleths of the academic community. They best way to learn these, if you don't already know them, is to read as many papers as you have time for in a domain as close to yours as possible, and then replicate those formats.

If you're looking to increase your citation count, this is difficult to do without really groundbreaking research. Some manage it by doing "citation sharing" with collaborators, but this is (A) frowned upon, and (B) difficult to get going if you're not in academia.

In any case, you'll probably want to learn LaTeX if you haven't already; this is a pretty necessary first step for publication, either at arXiv or an IEEE/ACM conference. Edit: This is because most conferences have a template that you must follow, and these templates are provided in LaTeX format.

Re: "any advice on how to write better quality articles"

My route to learning how to write quality papers: Find an expert in your field to tear your paper apart, and then get to work rebuilding it. Rinse and repeat 20 or so times. Additional experiments may be needed. You'll probably have a good paper at the end.

This of course is much easier to do in grad school. But can be achieved elsewhere.

I am a computer systems scientist and have participated in several peer-review processes.

I have never seen a case where an author who does not have researcher credentials is marginalized.

However, papers with bad science are rejected and in the worst-case, the authors are blacklisted. It does not matter if the authors have stellar credentials or none to start with. So aim to write papers with good science and forever stop worrying about getting marginalized.

There are several books that explain bad science. I recommend "Craft of Research", "They Say I Say", and "Demon Haunted World" to start with.

The most effective method to get your paper accepted is to make the experimental methods explicit and the data public. This will make your paper much more scientific than those published in conferences with poor-reproducibility checks.

Professors are hungry to write good papers. Conaact a professor who works in the same community to review your paper in return for co-authorship. They will gladly agree if your paper is aligned with their interests.

All the best!

From the popular answers to this thread, I think the next relevant question that arises is: How non-scholars can find opportunities to collaborate with scholars? We need some kind of "Who is open to collaborating?" threads similar to that of "Who is hiring?" threads.

Many communities are double blind. Your lack of affiliation won’t hurt you in that case, because the reviewers won’t know. You will, however, probably get dinged for not knowing the standards, practices, and nuances of the community.

I've published some papers in artificial intelligence as co-author. No one asked for educational backgrounds. And I've published papers in applied math as sole author: Again, no one asked about educational background. I do have a relevant Ph.D., but no one asked.

I suggest, write a good paper, look for appropriate journals, and submit to one of them. Maybe speed up the process a little: Send a copy of the paper (or PDF file, as they wish) to the editor in chief with a cover letter not making a formal submittal but just asking if, first glance, might this paper be of interest for their journal?

I never paid anything, no page fees, etc. to publish.

None of the papers, co-author or my sole author papers, got rejected.

Here are some hints that might help:

(1) Write the paper, especially in the abstract and the first paragraphs, like you really know technically just what the heck you are doing. E.g., I started one sole authored paper where I mentioned that a derivative I was taking was a "dual vector" -- not everyone who writes such applied math pays attention to duality.

(2) In each of my sole authored papers, some of the key topics, prerequisites, etc. were advanced and narrow enough that I'd guess that less than 10% of the editors had all the prerequisites.

(3) I suggest that write applied math, mathematical statistics, and computer science making important and appropriate use of some relatively advanced pure math.

(4) Generally I suggest that just write applied math, with nearly all the content in theorems and proofs, for mathematical statistics, computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. The usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant", and new and correct theorems and proofs are big steps forward for these criteria. If the theorems are also, in the paper, relevant to some applications or an applied field, then that can help with "significant".

(5) Know quite well just how the heck to write math. A good way to learn this is to have the equivalent of a good undergraduate major in pure math.

A good, first start on such writing is a theorem proving course in abstract algebra, one that starts with sets and foundations and, then, all based on just sets, develops groups, rings, fields, the rational, real, and complex numbers, vector spaces, linear independence, linear transformations, subspaces, null spaces, quotent spaces, duality, the adjoint transformation, eigen values and eigen vectors, the Hamilton-Cayley theorem, inner products, Hermitian and Unitary operators, maybe group representations. Then have a good course in linear algebra, e.g., from the classic P. Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces (one of the best writers of math). Then a good course in analysis, e.g., from W. Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, with highly precise writing. With a few more such good, pure math texts, courses, etc. where the homework is essentially all theorems and proofs and graded by a good mathematician who cares, one will no doubt learn how to write math, and the learning will show.

In my case, I got a good start in a course in abstract algebra, with a good prof who did well grading my papers, and then learned the rest just by studying really good writers, learning how they wrote, without more good grading.

How to write math is no big secret: There're a LOT of beautifully written math texts on the shelves of the research libraries.

It probably depends on the community and the journal but I was a reviewer for a journal (not blinded, not CS) and in my experience a good paper is everything, credentials are nothing. I read quite a few papers from university bprofessors who had hardly a clue of statistics and research design and didn't care to ask an statistician and submitted shitty papers and were rejected. As a reviewer, I was really happy when I got to read a well written paper with no really obvious flaws.

Make sure you understand how a journal article is expected to be structured. This varies from field to field. In my field (not CS), it looks like this:

1. Introduction. This not only lays out the problem you're addressing, but also locates it in the context of previous work. This is important for a few reasons, not least that the people reviewing your paper will probably expect you to have cited them there. But also, it shows that you understand your work in the context of a broader scholarly effort to advance your field. If you think your work is truly novel, you probably haven't done enough reading to find parallels in the literature. The introduction should also briefly state your results -- this isn't a mystery novel, you're not saving up for a big reveal.

2. Methods. This section describes the new thing you did or made. What it is, how it works and why. You're still going to be putting a fair number of citations in here, but they'll be a good deal more focused than in the intro. Often I see people citing their own research group's previous work here, because you're building on something the group already did.

3. Experiment. This section describes what you did to evaluate your work. This description should be detailed enough that somebody else should be able to repeat your measurements.

4. Results. This section should have the most figures and the fewest citations in it. It describes what happened when you did your experiment.

5. Conclusion. Here you explain what it all means and how it ties back to the broader scholarly effort to advance your field. Where the intro states your results, the conclusion restates them and puts them into context. The conclusion also usually talks about future research directions suggested by the work you've presented.

A lot of grad school is about learning how to write papers like this.

There is nothing magical about having a PhD of course. I've reviewed a few papers (for journals) from non-traditional sources, and also had some more direct submissions. The common issues you run into are

  1) The work is sloppy and/or has obvious errors.
  2) The work lacks clear context (i.e. citations and framing - "why should we care").
  3) The structure is not idiomatic.
  4) The writing is not idiomatic.

The 1st one is an easy rejection, but the next 3 are harder. If you are submitting through conventional editorial boards, you have to understand how much unpaid work it is to do a good review. If your paper is difficult to place in context, it's harder. If it is done in a non-idiomatic way it is both harder to understand, and - fair or not - reduces confidence (which means more detailed verification needed).

I agree having a "traditional" collaborator can help, not because of the credentials so much as avoiding issues 2-3. It also will help to read a large number of well written articles. At minimum, if you are thinking of publishing your own ideas you should have read every core/significant related paper done in the last decade or so, and as many of the other related ones you find interesting as you can. That will help you with both issue #2 and with improving quality.

If it's in an area with an active preprint server like arxiv, by all means submit there. If your idea is interesting and you've called it out well, you should get some feedback.

Created an account just to respond to this. This might not be the answer you want to hear but my 2c would be blog. The internet is great publish your own stuff. Why should you care about being marginalized by a community who mostly plagiarize off each other and only think within the limits of what others allow them to think. The same people are the one's who never allow breakthroughs and call anything but incremental improvements pop science. Do things for yourself, for the human spirit. Stop worrying what others think about you. They don't think about you. There's nothing sad in that, it's actually liberating you are free to share and write and create how you want. If you want recognition you've failed before you start.

On writing better articles my advice is to simply start with the end in mind. Explain the idea how you would to a child without using childish language. Leave the thesaurus aside, don't use industry language just cause you have to. Don't not use it just cause you think you'll sound pretentious.

Hope that helps, hopefully I don't come off sounding like a knob. Good luck.

Here are some maybe sort of out there ideas I came up with:

1. Be in the process of getting a masters degree. No one really cares at the end of the day as long as you are a graduate student affiliated with a decent school (this may be field-dependent). In CS you can easily publish for example as a masters student at brown -- I have a friend who had no problem doing this with no co-authors and never went on to get a PhD, but he was at an Ivy League school.

2. Find an academic friend or a former professor/adviser in your field and be his/her co-author. This has the added benefit of potentially increasing the quality of the research if they agree to edit/help you with it. Could be combined with option 4.

2. Be a former academic and publish to ArXiv using your old academic email address (not really publishing, but at least people can cite it at that point).

3. Publish to ArXiv without an academic email address. People will be able to cite it, but you won't be "published" per say (in the deep learning community many, many citations are to preprint servers). People not familiar with academia won't know the difference and will still be impressed if you say list it on your resume under publications.

4. Form an LLC, make a good website about how your company does research in X field, and self-publish as a "white paper" (I took this approach a few years ago, but I no longer maintain the website). In some industries, much of the significant research is contained in white papers or company funded papers. It might also be possible to submit to a conference/journal under the auspice of a company -- I don't know how that works though.

5. Get in touch with the journal/conference you want to submit to and explain your situation and ask for advice. Depending on the venue they might be very accommodating.

A note on "funding". At least in the CS community, funding is often not needed to conduct groundbreaking research as it's 99% of the time just you sitting at a computer. There are exceptions, but I think in CS being self-funded isn't going to raise as many eyebrows as in other fields.

How would you compare a blog to a paper? I personally read just about as much papers as blog posts, with both containing valuable information and important ideas. I have my own blog, but I'm currently sitting on some ideas that could maybe... maybe be a paper. Sure, peer-review is nice, but how many people are going to read about my idea as a blog post, vs in a (pay-walled?) journal. I'm inclined to think that outside academia, a blog post may actually have a bigger reach. The paper has more bragging rights maybe though.

Just write one (or many) blog entries somewhere. People in the academy publish papers just because they are evaluated by the number of publications. Your blog will have much more reach than any specialized journal. If you still want to have a PDF mixed with the ones made by the academia, upload something to arxiv.

I review a bit (less than I did), and I occasionally publish (each time with the expectation that everyone will pick it up and start saying how important and significant this paper is, but each time to watch it being cited twice if I am lucky) so... fwiw

There must be a result or at least a clear contribution. Sans the result it's really a poster or a think piece, but really you don't have a publication. A publication is to demonstrate a new piece of confirmed knowledge; an observation, measurement, analysis or proof.

The quality bit is "how good is the way that you are conveying this new knowledge" is it sewn up, is every doubt closed, is the detail all there?

As a potential college dropout looking to publish my CS research, this is an extremely helpful thread. Thanks everyone for your contributions!

Share your paper with a colleague for comments. If they're a fan, they can serve as an advocate with a journal if necessary.

Science is a social endeavor. If you don't have colleagues, go meet people!

As a referee, it doesn't matter at all to me whether you have a PhD. Your institution may matter a little bit as context, but not a lot. It is the science that matters.

As with any paper, I'll read the abstract, read the introduction, look at the figures and the captions, glance at any short equation, and read the conclusion. By the end of that process, I will know whether or not the paper is worth further attention. The refereeing process is generally an investment of several days of my time, so I do it with care.

Do the work, talk with people, get feedback, and repeat.

Publish it to the public - fuck academia. Bought and sold by special interests.

I have reviewed and published several papers for conferences in Computer Science. You got good suggestions so far, I'd like to add one important thing:

* Choose and Know your community!

When you choose a venue like a conference, you are writing an article with the intent of being read by a very specific subset of the research community. You can imagine each subgroup having a set of "interesting conversations" around a narrow set of topics or methodology that are deemed important by the community.

So ... you have to convince your audience that you are contributing something to their conversation. Go look up papers in the previous edition of the conference, dig into their references, and frame your contribution in the term of the conversation they are having. In this way it'll be easier for everybody reading the paper to understand what you are doing.

In some cases, it might be that you are telling the community that they should care about this new problem of yours, but if it is completely unrelated to their discussion, it'll be an harder sell.

Also, be aware of the style of the community: are they interested in experiments backed by strong theoretical work? Or are they more interested in practical experiences, without caring much about theory? A decent paper accepted in a theoretical conference might actually be rejected by a more practical conference (and the other way around).

Just curious: why try to publish in an academic journal if you're not an academic?

In many fields, if you have the resources to do the research you wouldn't be asking this question. And fields where single author, more creative (let's call it) work is acceptable also seem to be areas with a broader audience beyond readers of narrow, often paywalled journals and could be more appropriate as a book, talk, blog, or arxiv post. And if you're not trying to be an academic, you don't need publications for treading water in your career.

(I'm not being critical of the ambition. Even if the reason is just ego or getting accepted into a group of people you respect, that's good enough reason for me!)