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Ask HN: Is it possible to do research outside academy?

18 points by warkanlock ↗ HN
I've been diving into the lives of Von Neumann, Shannon, and Dirac, and they all have a lot in common when it comes to research and academia: they went to university, got great exposure to the cutting-edge stuff in their fields, and built a ton of connections. Even though I have a degree, I now think academia might be the only real way to do meaningful research.

I got into this because I wanted to "do research," but the strict formats, all the requirements before you can publish, the references you have to use, the nitty-gritty of writing essays, and the conditions that seem to be part of the status quo and hidden secrets between universities make it really tough for an outsider.

What do you think? I'm asking because I'm skimming through some ideas that I think could make a good paper or article, but the whole process seems so closed off that I can't see myself succeeding.

P.S.: I know R&D departments also *do research*, but they seem just as closed off, if not more, than universities.

24 comments

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dash2
I'd recommend doing a PhD. Not everything in any science can be learnt from books. There is a lot of learning by doing.

After that and a bit of experience, you don't necessarily need to be employed in academia. The obvious question is, how will you make money from doing research? If you are just doing it as a hobby, that's fine, but advancing the forefront of human knowledge is hard, intensive work and usually requires more than a part-time commitment.

Here's something I published while not employed in the university system, just to show it is possible: https://github.com/hughjonesd/hrs-selection, published version at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-024-10189-8.

atrettel
I hesitate to recommend getting a PhD as a general recommendation for all researchers, but I will say that I learned so much during my own PhD that I would never have learned otherwise. One problem with self-directed learning is that you tend to focus on areas that interest you directly or immediately. Doing a PhD exposed me to many topics that I was completely unaware of and basically forced me to learn much more broadly than I would have otherwise done in a self-directed manner.
kingkongjaffa
masters/phd gives you a big portion of time and access to journal papers to really do the research. It's like a muscle you have to train, I'm not sure it's easily done while working full time. How much of your day can be spent reading journal papers?

In my Masters degree I learned how to do proper academic research, literature reviews, paper writing, building up your body of knowledge from textbooks as the starting point to papers published in the past, to papers just being published now, and by that point you're at the cutting edge.

By the time you finish a masters or PhD you should more or less know which academics around the world are working on your niche area and what they are publishing, and read all of their stuff.

By the end of my masters I knew the ~10 people in the world who cared about my topic and had read all of their most recent papers.

mintaka5
yes. stop filtering anything and all things knowledge through institutions that use academia as a business model. Any and all things can be researched by anyone, and don't let ivory-tower heads convince you they have exclusive access to knowledge. They don't!
bell-cot
Do Research in what field(s), with what skill and budget?

Doing historical research is pretty easy, if you're fluent in the relevant language(s), and have good research skills and lots of time. And with the number of historians & history-adjacent professionals online these day - finding research-worthy questions would be fairly easy. Downside: "Research" probably means spending months meticulously picking through documents in an ill-organized national archive, or something similar. And at first, recognition (in anything like a serious professional journal) would be at the "mentioned & thanked" level.

Mathematical research is "easy" - if you're OMG-level talented. Famously, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan Otherwise, it's grueling hard work, with no guarantee that you'll ever discover anything worth publishing.

If you need access to "trophy" scientific equipment (NASA' James Webb telescope, CERN's LHC, etc.) - sorry, even big-name establishment insiders struggle to get that.

And if you're saying "do research" when you mean "receive research funding and get published"...sorry, but no. Up-through-the-ranks establishment insiders are struggling (and mostly failing) to get funded and published.

mikewarot
I tinker with ideas all the time... as far as disciplined research, that requires feedback from peers. I wouldn't be a stickler about "qualifications" in the paper sense, but care deeply about actual competence in them.

My hobby horse is the BitGrid, a "Turing Complete" systolic array that I hope to see actually reach Petaflop performance.

Of course, it could just be a pretty stone of no practical value.

beryilma
Sure, you can certainly do research outside of academia. But, for all practical purposes, you cannot publish at a reputable journal without an academic or R&D center affiliation.

However, what you call "nitty gritty of writing essays" is there for a reason: to streamline the communication and acknowledge the contributions of others. As long as you are not inventing something unseen before, you just cannot "do research" without also doing those things.

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carlosjobim
Who gives a damn about publishing in journals? With the internet anybody can publish anywhere. And if it's the truth then it's the truth. Anybody can seek and find the truth.
jrvieira
seek, yes. find, is a hard problem
carlosjobim
Most of the time you will end up in a dead end, no matter what idea you're trying to find evidence for. And this is true within academic research as well.

Academic knowledge is but a tiny fraction of the knowledge that is discovered every day. Most of it is far from the public eye, being discovered and applied in all different kind of workplaces all over the world. Maybe that knowledge is not "fancy" enough for the academically minded, but it is the knowledge that propels the world forward.

musicale
This is exactly right. I have found all kinds of interesting work via HN, arxiv, github, youtube, random blog posts, etc.
tugberkk
We should give a damn. As you said, anyone can publish anything on the internet, how would we know whether it is valid or not?

Peer-review is important. I know it is not working great, but it is working to some degree.

carlosjobim
I don't agree with even the concept of peer review. Reality is the only deciding factor in what is true or not, which is discovered in real world testing and not by asking somebody with a title.
tugberkk
It is very hard to do testing on theoretical side of things. It is also possible to cheat on experimental results. On top of that, it eliminates the possibility of redoing (or publishing previously done results) if there is no significant contribution.

I think academic publishing is not in a good place right now and should be improved, but I don't personally see any problem with the concept. Thank you for your insights on the matter.

musicale
Government and industry research labs are still around and do lots of research. Companies with R&D departments also do "R" as well as "D" though it is typically more applied and product-focused.

However, I've also seen independent researchers (Smith Research, Doe Consulting) and undergraduates publish and present work at technical conferences and workshops. There is usually no requirement for an academic or large company affiliation, or a graduate degree.

What is required, as you indicate, is a carefully written academic paper that presents a clearly identified (and "novel") contribution to the field, clear explanation with convincing evaluation, and adequate review of, comparison with, and citation of prior work, in the preferred writing and publication style.

If you're not used to this kind of writing, you might want to see if you can get help from someone who is.

coolradmab
yes its hard, as somone who built a wetlab in a maker space for bio materials research and did the hours each day it took to push the bleeding edge on synthetic sea shell analogues to producing a working protocol. i haven't managed to publish the work in a journal due too the fees involved. you can find more on my site https://alexmakes.net/projects/sea_chells.html
musicale
I don't like it when (predatory?) journals and conferences charge fees for submission or publication; is that common in your field?

A very bad trend with (IEEE, ACM, etc.) in some conferences and journals has been to charge "open access fees." I prefer publication venues that are open access without fees. However, if you get stuck with one of these bad venues you can usually still publish preprints via your own web site.

gus_massa
In which field?

Some ideas:

Try to collaborate with a research group, so they handle all the nasty details like writing the introduction of the paper and fighting with the referees.

Just publish in a blog. Is this research https://paulgraham.com/spam.html ?

Contribute to an open source project that use the topic you are interested.

> I'm skimming through some ideas that I think could make a good paper or article

There are two problems:

1) Ensure that it has not been discovered before.

2) Ensure that it's ""interesting"" for researchers.

Where I use quadruple quotes because some topics that are interesting are ignored by the research community, and some boring topics get hot.

As an additional recommendation, try to avoid predatory journals that just publish whatever you want to publish if you pay them the fee. Nobody read them. Nobody cares about them.

impendia
I am a research mathematician, a professor at a US university.

Anyone can do research. It is much harder to do research that other researchers will read and take an interest in.

"The strict formats, all the requirements before you can publish, the references you have to use, the nitty-gritty of writing essays, and the conditions that seem to be part of the status quo and hidden secrets between universities": If you want to write a paper which others will read, then you have to learn what topics others are interested in reading about, what other work has been done in the field, and how to write up your results so others will find them interesting. You would learn all of this (and much more!) in a good PhD program.

But if you don't care about recognition? Then all doors are open to you. Just do it! I'm quite serious. Never mind what others have done; maybe you're duplicating something that someone else did seventy years ago, but if you're not gunning for an academic job do you really care? You'll need to accept that no one might ever take a serious interest in what you've done, but the joy of discovery and problem-solving is available to you, as it is to everyone.

musicale
I've found lots of interesting technical work via HN, github, youtube, and random blogs, often made by people who were simply interested in things, investigated them, and then decided to share them with other people.

I think open source type conferences may epitomize what conferences should be - like-minded people getting together to discuss and share work on problems that they are interested in.