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Best Way To Publish an "Indie" Research Paper?
alexmipego writes "I'm a developer, and a few months ago while working on a common geodesic problem (distance between two GPS points) I started to research a new algorithm that greatly improves the performance over existing algorithms. After relearning a lot of math I'm now fairly close to the final algorithm, after which I'll run extensive benchmarks comparing my algorithm with the most commonly used ones. After spending so much time on this, and if the final results are positive, I feel that simply posting this type of work on a blog might not be the best option, so I'm looking into something more formal, like a research paper. I've no experience on those, have not even read a complete one, so my first question is what resources do you recommend to learn how to write one? And even after I write it, I can't expect to be published by Science or other high-profile publications. So where should I send it to make it known by people in the respective fields and be taken seriously?"
Try archive.org
You can either submit it to a conference (look on google for them) or to a journal (also google them). They usually have an electronic form to upload your paper and after that it's simply wether the reviewers think it's worthwhile to publish. There really isn't anything complicated in publishing a paper other than having a good paper.
I'm a developer ... I'm looking into something more formal like a research paper.
LaTeX. Here's a template (you wanted article.ltx). Some distributions of LaTeX come with templates as well. Here's a quick guide (PDF).
I've no experience on those, not even read a complete one, so my first question is what resources do you recommend to learn how to write one?
The template will make you get the basics right. The most basic I've seen are Title, Abstract, Sections, Conclusion, References. It's easy (I taught myself in college) and the production value of LaTeX gives you an instant artificially inflated level of credibility.
And even after I write it I can't expect to be published by Science or other high-profile publications.
Why the hell not? Just do it up and see what happens!
So where should I send it to make it known by people on the respective fields and be taken seriously?
Sounds like you should do some research on arxiv, a prepublication center where you can find some of the best stuff as well as absolute drivel. I would need to hear more about your method to ensure it's indeed an algorithm worthy of publication but I guess you would put that in Data Structures and Algorithms? But why stop there? Why don't you put it on arxiv and blog about it? Why don't you send out e-mails with the arxiv link to open source projects and commercial entities suggesting the use of your algorithm? I'd imagine the USGS would be interested in hearing from you. Sure that's all very wishful thinking but if you've got what you say you've got, why not? At the very least you'll learn why your idea isn't good enough to catch eyeballs.
I will caveat all this with the brutish reality of capital and give you a very unpopular option. Software algorithms are currently considered intellectual property by the United States government and several other countries. You could apply for a patent and then attempt to license your algorithm to companies like ESRI and Google or the USGS. You're on your own if this is what you're aiming for.
My work here is dung.
arXiv
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Maybe the standards organization that has authority over the system you are working on? Like IEEE for electronics... not sure who does GPS but you may also consider putting a patent on that there algorithm. There's gold in them numbers! (Like CDMA, etc.)
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
You've taken out the patent already right?
Even a question about 'Best Way To Publish an "Indie" Research Paper?' draws much attention.
What would happen is the research paper is really published?
I know I'm going to catch some hell for this, but if you have the money to do it why not look into patenting it if it's really something that's groundbreaking?
Submit it to a relevant conference for publication; the peer review process for conferences is less intimidating than journals. You'll likely have to pay to attend & give a brief talk, but it helps get your foot in the door.
Then if/when you want to do a follow-up, you can reference the conference proceedings, which gives you more credentials to submit the follow-up article to a journal.
http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/ is the page with the IEEE style guides.
http://standards.ieee.org/guides/style/2009_Style_Manual.pdf is the guide itself.
If your paper agrees with this it shouldn't be too hard to change it later to fit into the particular style requirement of the final journal.
You can also go to http://arxiv.org/ and read some of the papers in the Math or Computing Science sections closest to your topic to see the styles in the field.
Software patents are cool as long as they're made by one of us.
Any peer reviewed journal normally involves about 40 back and forth reviews.
As to open source ... the only ones I know about are for my line of work, things like open source BioMed, or Cell Communication and Signaling.
My guess is your particular field has similar open source, but peer-reviewed, journals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't post it to IEEE. That will guarantee that 90% of people interested in your paper won't ever be able to read it. Just put in on your blog with a note here in SlashDot.
Are you trying to monetize it? If so, you need to file for a patent instead. Naturally everyone here would prefer you publish it for free on the internet instead.
I would say your best bet would be to contact your favorite comp. sci. college professor and ask him to sponsor your paper, before submission. First, it is good to publish with other people and second it more likely to be reviewed and get published. I am a biologist, but my understanding is that computer science publications are mainly submissions to large conferences. So, you may want to submit your paper to a conference.
No offense, but your paper won't get into science unless to at least 10-fold improvement or something really earth shattering. My guess is that most algorithms would go to a specific journal like the Journal of GPS Algorithms.
"So where should I send it to make it known by people on the respective fields and be taken seriously?"
Why don't you use your fancy schmancy algorithm and locate that yourself!
1 - Patent. I don't know if US grants 'first publishing' rights or not, still. You don't need to wait for the application to go through though. Send it and the check to USPTO and it should be ok.
2.1 - Know how to make your case in the article. Research similar stuff, references, etc, etc
2.2 - Check for respectable publishers in the area concerned. I'm not sure Arxiv is a good idea, I'd try for IEEE, ACM or something more specific (and not as 'famous'). Easier to publish as well than Science, Nature, etc. Just avoid some journals that publish anything you throw at them.
2.3 - Yay! You have a paper with your name on it. yay... sorry, no profit.
how long until
I'm not sure about this -- it's been a long time since I was in academia, but don't the most prestigious journals (and most journals, really) have as one of their criteria that the paper not have been published elsewhere, and wouldn't a conference presentation count as such?
Someone who knows this stuff for sure, please answer on this -- what constitutes a previous exposure/publishing such that a prestigious journal won't publish the paper?
Or are those old rules which people no longer follow?
I don't know what an appropriate journal/conference for this would be, but your best bet is to hunt down some well-regarded papers in a similar area and see where they're published. Google Scholar's a good place to look for research articles. Once you've found somewhere to submit to, I wouldn't worry about being taken seriously - mostly these things are blind reviewed, so they don't know if you're working from your garage or an MIT lab.
What kind of distance are you talking about? Straight line distance (straight through the earth)? Distance on a great circle? In that case, just assuming some idealised shape of the earth or actual shape?
I'm not submitting my secret perpetual motion machine to any bunch of "boffins" with pre-conceived notions. my invention uses magnets... and ..and ... mirrors.. both are firmly scientific.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
you might want to start with a guide like "How to Write & Publish A Scientific Paper" by Robert Day (ISBN-13: 978-1573561655).
Then search for the appropriate journal. One suggestion is: GPS Solutions (published by Springer),
http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/geophysics/journal/10291
Manuscript submission instructions and forms at: http://www.springer.com/journal/10291/submission
Hope it works out for you!
"Indie" status doesn't actually matter that much in the publishing pipeline; you can submit your paper to a journal in the same way that anybody else does, and it will get the same consideration. (The place where organization status matters a bit more is at the reverse end -- if one of the authors is particularly well-known, that tends to make the review process easier)
If your project has practical applications and you wish to patent, make sure to file that first. In that case, consult with a patent attorney on the right things to do next.
Otherwise, pick the appropriate journal and submit following the guidelines on their web page. You'll definitely want to format your paper in LaTeX, since pretty much everyone requires that; some journals have standard LaTeX style packages they want you to use, but these are easy to plug in. (e.g., the Physical Review uses revtex.sty, and many other journals now use it too)
As far as which journal you want, it depends on the particular field, but I'm guessing that Science isn't it -- that's a very high-profile journal which is intended to be things of interest to the scientific community at large, but in practice it has a fairly strong bio/chemistry/some physics focus. Someone else on this thread may have particular journal suggestions, or you may want to search on-line for similar (recent) papers and see where they were published. ACM transactions are often good "default" places in CS. Also, CS tends to prefer conference talks to straight-up journal publications; you may consider submitting your algorithm as a talk to some appropriate CS conference, in which case the article is published as part of the proceedings. Again, the conference depends on your particular subject.
Don't worry about your lack of organizational affiliation. That's rarely a big issue.
I am sure that at least in the US, reviews like Point Of Beginning , Inside GNSS, Professional Surveyor Magazine or GPS World will be interested if the work is valid.
Before you publish, absolutely file a provisional patent. It's cheap to do, and if you have created something valuable, as soon as you publish it, it will become public domain in Europe and the UK.
Just do
Watch those corners
Note, I am a career academic scientist.
Obviously, it should not matter if you are an individual or an institutional scientist and the science should stand on its own merits. Unfortunately, the signal to noise ratio of quality papers coming from non affiliated individual submitters is probably bad enough that most journal editors would rather not take the time or risk to send your work out for peer review. (Think of all the perpetual motion machine crackpots out there still). In most fields, peer review is a voluntary system of review for which reviewers are not compensated and requires substantial effort, so editors are loathe to ask volunteers to review a suspect manuscript fearing it will poison reviewers to subsequent inquires.
Practically though, one way to look more credible is to incorporate (this is inexpensive in most states) and submit it corresponding from the corporation. Another strategy is to find a co-author at a research institution. This may be difficult because academics in my department get a surprising number of calls like this from people who are usually either disturbed or obviously idiotic. But most academics I know will take these calls, especially the younger ones. They might be able to check your work from a different perspective and can certainly help with the arcane apects of manuscript preparation, tone and format.
If you're uncertain, consider talking to a university. Specifically, talk to someone in the Comp. Sci. (or equivalent) department. They might not know where to go, but they can probably start pointing you in the right direction. Most people in academics have to publish, so talking to them might give you an idea of where to look.
Cynical Idealist
Go figure out which journals are most relevant to the work you are doing, and start reading some papers from those journals. After all, if you haven't read current research in your field how can you know that nobody else has already done what you are doing? You can start by searching for your topic through something like Google Scholar or Pubmed. You may need to pay a visit to a university to access some of the articles...
But either way, it is important to be knowledgeable in the research before attempting to publish a paper. You'll need to be able to cite previous works from other relevant authors to show why your own work is worthwhile; that is hard to do without reading those works.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Pay a visit to the library of a nearby university with a CS department (sometimes the departments have their own libraries) and look at the computer science related journals they have (a list of ACM associated journals can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/panel/journals). Most of what I know about writing papers comes from reading them. The first thing you'll want to do is a literature search on related algorithms, and dig up some of those papers. Read through a bunch of them to see how they're organized, the types of subject material covered (to help you decide which journal to submit to) and the Information for Authors section. The Info for Authors section will tell you everything you need to know about formatting and submitting to that particular journal.
One of the staff librarians can probably help you find material to help you learn about the mechanics of paper writing.
The process from submission to publication (assuming your paper is accepted) will likely take several months to a year and involve one or more revisions.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Its gently peer reviewed (technical correctness only) and anyone can download the paper. http://www.plosone.org/home.action
1. Identify the IEEE "Transactions" journals and/or ACM journals that your work is most closely related to. If you don't have access to IEEE or ACM libraries online, you can either buy membership to those organizations (expect to pay $100-$300 per year, I believe) to get access; or you may have luck at a university library.
2. Study the structure of the papers in those journals. Take note of what sections their papers have, and what fraction of column space is dedicated to each. You may want to be guided by this.
3. In those same journals, look up their rules for submission. Also, look for advertisements by the editors regarding topics they'd especially like submissions for. If you find a call that's right up your topic's alley, you may want that to be the journal to which you submit the paper.
4. Submit your idea to exactly one journal. I believe submitting the same paper to multiple journals get can get your paper thrown out.
5. Some (most?) journals conduct "blind" reviews of submissions, in which the reviewers don't know your name or affiliation. So for those journals you probably don't need to worry about a lack of credibility coming from your lack of affiliation.
6. Accept that your paper is unlikely to get accepted in its original submission. However, you should get comments back from the people who review it. Those comments are likely to be extremely valuable in making you aware of other related work, and/or in showing you what needs to change to get published.
7. Oh, and use LaTeX.
You said you have never read a research paper, so how do you know you've not discovered an algorithm that has already been discovered?
Even if your algorithm is original, then you would be expected to cite relevant work in the field and know where your algorithm fits in.
In either case you probably need to start reading before you start writing.
If you haven't read research papers, you can't possibly know that someone hasn't already discovered the algorithm you are working on, or perhaps has made one that is even better. You need to read the papers on the subject before you can know that, so that is step one. Also, to get published you need to cite other people's work when you use their results, even if you don't know you are using their results because you came up with that part on your own. Doesn't matter - if they did something you are using before, then it's their work and you need to cite them. To do that you need to know enough about the literature of the field to be able to know what to cite. An upside to that is that once you've done all this reading, you will know what journal you can submit your own article to.
My advice is to publish in PLOS ONE: http://www.plosone.org/.
It's an open access peer-reviewed journal, and their policy is to not
reject any articles unless they are factually incorrect. The journal
has a very good reputation, and is a great place to publish
interdisciplinary work that doesn't fit into more traditional channels.
The decision process is very quick compared to most journals.
There are formatting guidelines on the site. The author keeps
the copyrights.
By the way, if your article is accepted for publication you will have to
pay a publication fee, which is fairly steep if you're paying out of pocket,
but is a fair price to pay for open access and peer review imho.
First of all, I'd probably suggest looking for where the current best-known algorithms for this problem have been published, and look into similar channels. You say you know what's currently done; where did those appear?
If you're interested in an academic publication I have a few broad suggestions for you, although you may face an uphill battle if you're starting from "never having read a research paper." I say this not because academics control the publication process with an iron fist and won't let anything else in, but simply because you have less knowledge of how to write an academic paper.
I'd start by looking at related academic publications. I can't point you to anything specific, but try searching Google Scholar with related terms and seeing what comes up. Note where the paper was published (which journal or conference -- note that unlike many sciences, computer science publishes primarily in conferences, although for theoretical computer science journals are fairly well regarded also). You might also want to look through the ACM's portal or Digital Library to see if you can quickly find any conferences or journals that might publish such research.
Also note the style of the related articles - there is an overall form that is common to most research papers in the area (Abstract, Intro, Related Work, The Techical Parts, Results, Conclusion).
Make sure you do your background research and see what other work has been done in this area; if you've really got a new algorithm, then definitely publish it! But do be prepared for disappointment -- there are lots of smart people out there and frequently one of them has already had your idea :-). But don't think I'm trying to discourage you! Definitely check things out and try to get your work published
First of all, read other papers in the area, especially those with similar research topics. That's the way you learn how to write good research papers.
A few tips:
- Do not try writing EVERYTHING. You have to make the experimental environment clear, describe your algorithm to the point of reproducibility (beyond that point is unnecessary and could make the paper harder to read), present your results as clear and understandable as possible and "sell" your conclusions.
- Take special care with your abstract, it's sad, but your paper can get a bad review just because your abstract is not appealing enough.
- Writing tips on future research might help (if you have any ideas, other researchers will appreciate it).
- It is of extreme importance that people who is not working in exactly the same topic can understand the paper. Reviewers most probably will work with GPS stuff but not in the same stuff you do, they have to be able to perfectly understand what you did and ***how important it is***.
Once you have your paper, find the best magazine you can find in which your topic fits. Probably Science is not that magazine, as it is specialized in basic research, but there will be others. Find one in which you think you can publish and send it there. You cannot send it to another magazine at the same time, you have to wait to be rejected before you can resend the paper to another magazine, congress or workshop, take it into account. Also, publishing in a magazine is expensive, they will charge you for that. BTW: You might have to change your paper to make it fit in a certain number of pages (usually 15 in a magazine, some others have an extension limit of 10 and others up to 30).
I'm pretty sure you mean arxiv.org (the 'x' is the greek letter "chi", hence why it's procounced like "archive")
To be published, your paper need references. Since you mention you've never read a research paper, you'll need to do an extensive publication search and review, introduce yours and other analysis methods, discuss why yours is an improvement, all complete with proper citations.
If it sounds like a lot of work, IT IS, especially for your first one. It has to pass peer review, meaning, specialists in the field will read it and comment on whether it is suitable for publication. How you present your results is very important so the reader understands the idea.
It may also be EXPENSIVE: Many journals charge you for publishing your article, and this can be hundreds of dollars. It also takes a lot of TIME, and be a few months before the first comments from reviews get back to you. You'll make revisions, then send it back, and wait awhile longer.
The format of the paper is not too important, it will be formatted once accepted. The key is to efficiently and accurately disseminate your paper, which may include equations, graphs and tables. Many journals have templates in both LateX and Word -- Microsoft Word is perfectly fine for this.
To determine which journal you should submit to, look up keywords common to your topic on Google Scholar. Perhaps some IEEE journal would be a good choice (just a guess, I have no idea what you're doing).
If your idea is truly novel, patent it (writing a patent can be easy, might be expensive if you get a patent expert/lawyer involved, and you might also cite/review other similar patents). If you still want to write a research paper, try going to a local university and find a sympathetic professor who will aid you in your mission. Some profs won't bother helping, but some will be very pleased you've taken the initiative to do this and help you.
You state that haven't even read a complete research paper. The best way to learn to write one is to read a bunch and emulate the ones that you like. This is also the best way to find a journal to which you should try to publish your paper.
Note that in reading research papers you just might find that someone else has already done what you yourself discovered. There are a lot of smart people out there.
I've no experience on [research papers], not even read a complete one
Then you will likely have a hard time writing a legitimate paper. A key aspect of most papers is a comparison of your work to work previously published. You need to establish how yours is novel. Without ever reading any other articles, I doubt you'll be able to do that successfully. Of course you'd need to do this to get a patent as well if you go the route others seem to be suggesting.
That's exactly the reason why some conferences have a track for "Practitioner Reports", e.g. OOPSLA Practitioner Reports are exactly what you call an "Indie Paper", it has to be less formal than an academic paper yet reveal an interesting practical problem. I've seen some of these at OOPSLA and they are good. Plus, you'll get a very good crowd of listeners at such a forum: a mix of practitioners and academics. Talking to a college professor is also a good idea (though might be confusing). Best of Luck!
Is computing geodesic distances any sort of bottleneck for anyone? I find it hard to believe that it would be. If that's the case, then you may have a hard time getting it published. Amdahl's law and all, a 10x speedup in something that represents only 1% of the total time of an algorithm gives you less than a 1% speedup of the overall system. The other point I haven't seen anyone make, is that if it's a common problem, then chances are the math for the proper solution is already known (especially if you really are just talking about finding the shortest distance between two points on a sphere). It's very unlikely that you've invented a new way of doing something as common as computing distance between two points on a sphere. You should talk with some people who do geology or geostatistics or oceanography or the like to check if what you've done is really novel.
if this is really just a math algorithm, you can't really patent it. If it is a software 'process', then you are good. Hire an attorney and get some pro advice before you go any further.
Also, you might do some research before submission to see if you haven't just discovered something that people have know about for the last 200 years, but you haven't talked to the right math professor to know about.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
0) By "greatly improves the performance" do you mean by some order of magnitude, or merely by a constant factor? For example, are you going from O(n^2) to O(n log n), or is it only O(10n) to O(5n). Don't get me wrong, the latter can be useful, but the former would draw more attention from the research community. I assume you know Big-O notation and formal analysis of algorithms, otherwise you will need to learn about it before submitting a research paper in algorithms.
1) If you have never even read a full research paper, then how do you know your approach is new or better than existing approaches? First, I would recommend getting a data structures and algorithms book and a computational geometry book. Read through those looking not only for things similar to your technique, but also just to make sure you have the vocabulary correct. Then move on to Google Scholar and start looking into the more recent scholarly journals and conference proceedings on the topic. You will need subscriptions (probably via a university) to see a lot of that content, but you can try the "All X versions" link beneath most articles to see if the author published a PDF on a public web site. Books are usually years behind the state of the art, and a lot of newer research and algorithms only fully appears in papers. Also, a lot of research (most?) is not published on blogs, so your algorithm may not be as new or groundbreaking as you think. Or if it is, you still may find more inspiration to improve it from related techniques.
2) Ditto what others have said about learning LaTeX for page layout. However, if you might want to publish in a specific journal or conference, then you might have to use their specific format, so you might just want to type your first draft as plain text and a collection of images, for import into a specific LaTeX template later.
3) Writing style: You must be *very* *formal* in your writing style to be considered credible in academic circles. Have an English teacher (or similarly-minded person) go over the paper with a fine-toothed comb looking for any spelling, grammar, or word-use errors. Absolutely no slang or colloquialisms whatsoever are acceptable in a research paper. Do not use contractions. Try not to use any analogies unless they are truly apt and likely to be universally understood. Try not to use first or second person in the paper. Remember, people from all over the world from different cultures, many of whom do not speak English as their primary language, will hopefully be reading your paper, and you don't want them to get confused by any culture-specific concepts or words.
4) If your algorithm really is new or groundbreaking, then I would strongly recommend trying to publish in a proper academic workshop or conference first (try ACM or IEEE conferences on computational geometry, location-driven computing, etc.), rather than a free online archive. You will get far more credibility and exposure in academia, and you just might get your employer to pay for a junket to a conference! Workshops are more for newer, less developed research, so you may have an easier time publishing there. Conferences are for more established research, so it's harder to get in them, but they carry much more respect. Also, most workshops and conferences have industrial tracks, if your paper focuses less on formal algorithmic analysis and more on real-world uses.
5) Be warned though, that although conferences are supposed to be submitter-blind, often it's much easier to get a publication when you have a known academic co-author on the paper. You might want to look up authors of papers related to yours, find the Ph.D.s on the paper, and approach them about a collaboration. This might take a bit more time, and you would have to share credit (just make sure you are first-author), but it may be worthwhile to get more exposure and credibility. They might also be able to help point you toward making further improvements to your algorithm.
6) Please, please, do not patent your algorithm! There is more than enough patented math already; the world does not need yet another algorithm that can't be used by anyone for 20 years.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
from a quick search of activity on the internet, it appears you've just found a way to approximate atan2(). There is nothing novel here - it can be done with a few arithmetic math operations.
Trade mags are always looking for new and interesting things to publish. Simple format, short, light on references and they'll typically pay you (EDN gives you $150 for a design idea). Forget the academic paper route, it will only benefit you in your doctoral research. As a PhD and a PE I submit that this route is taken seriously by people who make things.
Overall, it's not too hard. Affiliations aren't all that important to the process and professorship/etc doesn't matter. Most of the time, the reviews and such are done blind.
1. The first thing you need to do is research the current state of the field and have a good idea how yours relates.
2. Next, pick a journal that is in your field and is appropriate. IEEE may be a good place to start, but with your research you'll find what similar papers are published in. You won't be published in Science.
3. Write it up and submit it. Follow the style given by the journal, they're sticklers for it. It'll either be in Word or LaTeX format. You should have someone (somewhat) knowledgeable read through it first to make the process easier. It doesn't need to be an expert, but has to be someone who understands what you're talking about.
4. Get reviews back from the journal. Every paper that is submitted gets reviewed by 2 people in the field. Some conferences use only 1. You'll get comments back that will need to be addressed.
Expect the submission process to take 6-12 months or so before it will be published, depending on the journal and comments received.
Unless you want to be posting your scientific discoveries on your blog for the foreseeable future....
Having had to write just such code for a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, I'd question whether a new algorithm developed without looking at the literature is likely to be new. There were high-precision GPS systems with 15cm accuracy seven years ago, and the new ones are even better. Novatel is now offering 1cm repeatability.
Besides, distance between two GPS points is straightforward. The high-precision receivers give you ECEF (earth-centered, earth fixed,; 3 axes centered at the center of the earth) coordinates, which are Cartesian. There, it's trivial. If all you have is latitude and longitude, the GPS device has already converted from ECEF to latitude and longitude using some standard geoid (a standard formula for the pair-shaped earth correction, like WGS-84). You use the appropriate geoid for the GPS device to convert back to ECEF, then compute the distance.
As said before, latex. And check your references for their journals. A journal which has published articles on the same problem before is more likely to do it again.
If you want to publish in a high profile journal do not shoot yourself in the foot by posting it to any abstract service before submitting and being published in said journal. Generally speaking the high impact journals want their journal to be the breaking news source not arxiv nor do they want old news.
I would suggest you go to someone who you know in an academic or technical field that has published papers of this sort, and ask that person to help you publish it. If there's no university nearby, ask local friends if they know anybody --- if you're not in a similar situation, someone will remember a computer science or applied math professor from college.
You will probably need to improve your material with their help, too and that may mean sharing credit. As long as you establish up front that you mean to be the lead author, things should go well.
Another important difference between journals and conferences is that conferences usually require that you physically travel there and present your paper. This means you have to pay out of pocket for the trip and conference registration, which can be a hefty $500-$1k for a non-student. So pay attention where it's held :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Publish it on Slashdot. Our world-renowned peer-review process will include:
1) Claims that it's vaporware
2) Claims that it's obviously patentable
3) Claims that it's patently obvious
4) Claims that it's identical to a completely different algorithm
5) Claims that it won't work from people who either didn't read or didn't understand your paper
6) Claims that it's an amazing breakthrough from people who either didn't read or didn't understand your paper
7) Two separate Microsoft/Apple fanboi wars.
8) One guy saying how awesome it would be if somebody made an implementation of your algorithm in their favorite programming language.
9) One useful response that you'll never read because the poster accidentally replied to the wrong thread and got modded -1, Flamebait
Most IEEE type journals require a submission in PDF format. They don't care how you get it to that form so as long as you use the right fonts and can express the math clearly. Use whatever PDF authoring tool you're comfortable with. As others have stated Latex is a great choice but it has a definite learning curve.
Here is a not so short intro(but shorter than most) to Latex. Intro
Furthermore, you'll want to have a number of references. It depends on the conference/journal in question but around 15 to 20 is pretty standard. Make sure to reference any and all algorithms you'll compare it to and any foundational work you used. Text books are fine if they're standard books to the field.
That's another decision you have to make as well. Do you want to publish to a Journal or to a Conference. A conference will have a higher acceptance rate usually and you can go network with other people in the field. A journal will be more prestigious, but will take much longer to get published(a year or more as you go through the review cycle). To decide I would start looking at IEEE(or ACM or whatever else you think might be of interest) to find a conference/journal you think might be appropriate and then read several papers in that area. Also go to your local university and browse through books on your subject as there may have been work done several years ago that just isn't used due to processing power issues. This can effect the tone of your paper.
On the topic of tone, you need to decide how you wish to frame the contribution of your paper. Is it a systems type paper that focuses mainly on implementation and comparison? Is it a proper new algorithm? Is it a mix of the two? Why do I as another researcher in the field care? This choice of tone will greatly affect both the place you submit the paper and the likelihood of where it will be accepted. You can try submitting to major journals like Science if you'd like, but it's very likely you will not get accepted as those types of journals focus very heavily on major cutting edge work.
Someone else mentioned looking through ArVix, but that is usually more of a pre-publication forum for math and physics type papers more than what I think you're working on. I'm not sure that will be particularly helpful to your situation.
I don't work in your field particularly, but I do have a fair bit of background in geodesic calculations and math so if you'd like to discuss things feel free to message me.
Good luck!
I don't care what you say, all I need is my Wumpabet soup.
As I have written several distance calculators I am curious about your "new algorithm that greatly improves the performance over existing algorithms" I have frequently traded-off accuracy for speed, and have even re-invented a few that turned out to be hybrids of existing algorithms. I would be curious as to what kind of performance gains you are getting, and whether or not accuracy suffers. Also for sufficiently distant points, do you use the great-circle or rhumb-line calculations i.e. do you allow for bearing to change over the course between the two points?
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html
I have found however that for most purposes that require a moderately high degree of accuracy the vincenty algorithm is fast enough:
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-vincenty.html
Where accuracy is not important at all using an average 1 minute = 1 nm or an approximation based on distance from the equator
good luck
Came here to say precisely this. No one here wants to say anything discouraging, even though it's the elephant in the room. My advice would be to survey the literature before you go to the trouble of writing an academic paper, which is 100% certain to be rejected by everybody if you don't show a good grasp of existing work in the field. Also, remember that peer review is an essential step in getting a paper accepted, so do a little of that yourself before submitting it (if you trust anyone not to steal your idea, that is).
Realistically, it's about 99.9% certain that your algorithm isn't the big advance that you think it is. But one in a thousand is worth the effort, for sure.
As a graduate student, who has just started learning how to write and submit papers, I have the following advice.
First, the submission process is a lot more open then I thought it would be; you create an author account, and then just submit the paper. Your paper then will largely be judged on its merit --- whether it is well written, well-explained, interesting, and brings a worthwhile new idea to the table. So in short, don't be scared off from publishing. :-)
Second, do a lot of background reading before hand so that you can figure out where your idea ties in to what has been done before. This is *very* important, because for your paper to be taken seriously you need to show that you have done your homework to learn what has been done before.
Third, keep in mind that most people who read your paper won't care about the details and will just want to figure out what the big takeaway idea is that they should learn --- the same that you yourself will often find yourself doing when perusing academic papers. So although you should endeavor to explain your ideas clearly and precisely enough that someone can implement your algorithm, you should also have a high-level description that explains the big-picture insight behind your idea.
Finally, part of what makes good papers is that they have a good "story" behind them. They start by talking about what has come before, leading up to the new idea that is being presented in the paper and how it follows from or intentionally diverges from previous work. They then talk about the intuition behind the idea itself to give the reader a high-level understanding of the insight behind it. (Note that this is where most people will stop reading, so you want to make the parts up to this good for their benefit. :-) ) Next they go into the technical details of their idea, in a way that is as pedagogical as possible; at every step they explain not only how something was done, but why it was done in that particular way. Finally, they describe how the idea works out well in practice, and then conclude by reminding the reader about what the significance of the idea is (because by this point if they actually read over the details they probably have forgotten :-) ), and end with an optional (brief) discussion about what future research questions are inspired by your idea.
Good luck, and most importantly --- have fun! :-)
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Considering how he's said exactly what the problem he's working on is I'm shocked that several geeks haven't already perused the known algorithms for it and come up with the exact same method he has.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
From your description it sounds as if it's an algorithm that's more general than just GPS. Maybe it works for all hyperbolic positioning systems, or maybe even for all positioning systems. I'd look at the journals and conferences of the Institute of Navigation and Royal Institute of Navigation.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If you haven't even read a complete paper first then it is unlikely you will get your own paper published simply because journals have some expectations of how the material is to be presented (including how much history to include, relating to the wok of others etc.), proper methods of citation, and so on. This has nothing to do with the merit of your idea or the results it is simply that if you want to present in a particular forum then you need to know the rules and expectations of the forum.
Unless you are going to publish as a conference paper (the easiest way and usually the lowest bar for refereed papers) you can expect that it may takes years before it is reviewed, returned to you with the comments of the referees, resubmitted, and then finally published. So you might want to get it out on a website somewhere just to stake claim to having thought of the idea first.
Another alternative is to do a poster at a conference - it is much easier to get accepted for that, the amount of work putting your stuff into the expected form is much less etc. etc. It doesn't count as a refereed paper but if you aren't interested in academic points then so what? Also (you may find this surprising) many academic journals expect you to pay them to publish your paper.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
I misread the headline as 'Best Way To PUNISH an "Indie" Research Paper?'
I was thinking, 'Oh, is it full of errors or plagiarised?'
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Do keep in mind that, assuming your paper gets accepted, you'll still need to pay a nontrivial (a few hundred or thousand dollars, depending on the journal) publication fee.
As noted above, you won't be getting it published in anything like Science but you can tack a professor onto the paper and offer them last authorship, which they will gladly take (i.e. publish or parish). It's always who you know. While peer-reviewed journal are supposed to be anonymous the circle jerks of scholars usually know who is working on what.
Also, you'll want to look at specific journals that might deal with algorithms or the specific type you researched. You'd be surprised to know how particular journals can become. I also imagine that computer/math related journals have whats called an impact factor, which is basically how many people cite the authors from that journal. It also indicates how difficult the journal is to be accepted to. Furthermore, once you've narrowed down the search you'll want to know who the editors and reviewers are on the journal so you have an idea of who might be reviewing your paper.
And finally, if you email one of those potential reviewers asking them to provide feedback they cannot be the final reviewer on the paper because it's a conflict of interests. So blindly email the paper to whomever you'd like on the board and thank them on the paper for looking over it (regardless of whether they did or not) and the editor will have to select other people.
Yay for science.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you are a member of a professional society (I'm a member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications), then see if it is something they will publish. The benefit of this is that professional societies have their own criteria when it comes to deciding who is a reputable source - and that criteria is usually built into the membership in the first place. They are the scientific/academic equivalent of guilds and membership of one is often highly desirable. If you're good enough to write publishable papers of interest, you really should belong to one.
If you belong to any professional organizations with standing in the academic community, then getting the stamp of approval from that organization can make a huge difference in how a paper is received.
If you know someone with standing in the academic community, then have them edit the paper and submit it as a joint paper. Their credibility will help carry the day, but you get the credit.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hi, that sounds like an interesting and useful algorithm. You may have better luck trying to publish in a smaller, specialty geomatics journal. Also, you probably would do well to find a credentialed co-author. If you're in Canada or interested in publishing in canada the best journal for this sort of paper would be the Canadian Institute of Geomatics's quarterly Geomatica (http://www.cig-acsg.ca/english/geomatica/authors.php). Good Luck, I look forward to seeing the published paper.
Thanks all for all the nice comments so far ;) The list is growing faster than I can keep up with but here are some remarks I would like to add:
I do not wish to patent it and I plan on making sure there will be material enough to be considered prior art in case of patent trolling. I'm also a open source contributor and I'm sure if I needed I could forward them the work so they could protect it (e.g. add it to their defensive patent poll). All in all, I'm not looking for profit, yet a job would be welcome lol
As for the new algorithm I think was I was maybe a bit too vague on the story. So, to put it simple and short, afaik there are 3 major formulas used nowadays: great circle distance, haversine and vincenty's. In order, they each offer more accuracy than the previous at the expense of more computation power needed for the calculations. While I didn't even try to replace Vincenty's formula yet (but it might be possible) my solution improves on the others because they all require a lot of trigonometry functions (cos, sin, etc..). On the simplest of those, you have to call 6 trig functions, while with my method I only need 1 (so far) to achieve the same end result as the haversine's formula.
I'm not sure if such formula and the methods needed to make this work are even patentable anyway.
Hope you do find something useful though and get it published.
It all starts at 0
As a researcher in Physics, here are what I would suggest.
First, getting your paper out there for other people to see is the easy part: just post it on arxiv.org. Free, open for everybody, and easy to submit to. It also has the bonus of offering the LaTeX source of most papers submitted to it, meaning that you can just download a closely-related paper, and copy their formatting! Often specific journals also have their own LaTeX formatting rules and support files, so if you are able to pick out a specific, look at what they have.
Now, for the paper itself, you primarily need two big things:
1. Clarity.
2. Context.
Clarity is absolutely essential. You need to explain your idea in full, with enough detail that another person can fully replicate your results. Explaining your reasoning for doing it a certain way, and also presenting evidence for why it should be this way instead of some other is also paramount. For this algorithm, for instance, both numerical stability under a wide range of coordinate choices and performance are going to be important metrics with which to judge the work.
Context is also essential. This means that you have to show the reader of your paper where the paper fits within the total body of literature. You need, in short, to start looking through the literature surrounding this sort of algorithm, and discover what has already been written. If you don't do this, the first thing you risk doing is simply replicating what somebody else has already done (in which case nobody will care about your paper). Or perhaps even worse, you risk making obvious mistakes that others have already shown are bad things to do (for one reason or another). There's also the positive that they can give you ideas for things you didn't think about in your own work, ways to make your own algorithm even better.
So, if you really want to write a proper research paper, if I were you I'd first sit down and try to find out what other people have written on this topic. If you can get a hold of a comp sci professional who works in even a related area, they could be a tremendous help for finding you relevant papers and information to get you started. Then, once you've read and understood at least a few related papers, you should have the added bonus of getting a grasp of the overall structure and format to use for your own paper. You can get an idea of the overall context by at least skimming some of the papers they reference, and that should help you build a nice introduction. You might also get an idea of what journals you can submit to, and start trying there.
Anyway, that's what I have to say on the subject. Best of luck to you!
Geological Survey Bulletin 1532 by J.P. Snyder "Map projections Used by the U.S. Geological Survey"
or, how about
Thomas, P.D. "Spheroidal geodesics, reference systems, and local geometry", published by USNO in 1970
There's a lot of theory out there.
The best way to learn how to write research papers is by reading a lot of them. In this case read papers on similar algorithms or the specific field of your work. Pay attention to the structure, the language, the kind of claims they do and how they validate their work. You will need to compare your own work to the state of the art, in part to show that you know what you are doing, in part to introduce the topic to readers that are not that knowledgeable with the specific topic, and in part to honestly tell in which ways your work is better and in which it isn't. All this reading will also give you an idea of the publications that deal with your topic. Journals in general tend to publish the summary of several years of work, while conferences are more one-off and first-results kind of work. Workshops have the lower entry barrier in most fields of computers science, sort of look-what-I-just-did publications, but still are reputable and valid ways of putting your work out there.
When you read them, try to criticize them. Not only in terms of whether the algorithm is good, but how clear it is, how well they showed what they said they would show, how useful it is according to them and how well justified it is, and so on.
Finally, get someone unfamiliar with your work but used to reading research/system papers to review your paper. Everything you write seems obvious to you but it might not be to anyone else.
Reminds me of a paper published by the Journal of Irreproducible Results on how different a second paper had to be from the first in order to be considered publishable.
Stop bastardizing the process. Just stop. The Gnomes had no steps after "Profit".
It was a 3 step process, never 4 never 5.
The gnomes were wise to give us 3 steps and 3 steps only, heretic.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Why not post it into a blog? Put it there, post a link on Slashdot; if it's any good, the word will get around.
Maybe we should create an Independent Research wiki or something for this kind of things?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Are you sure you haven't reinvented the wheel?
Mapmakers and Mathematicians have been working in this area for like, centuries.
If you're talking straight-line, great-circle routes, that was reduced to simple formulas a very long time ago.
If you're talking about contour-following, or minimum-energy paths, or road-following, that was worked out before we were born.
If you're talking about efficient algorithms for searching geo databases, that's been well plumbed too.
If you're talking about an efficient algorithm or implementation on a particular platform, that's not so much science, as a blurb in Dr Dobbs.
LATEX with the "apa.cls" class installed would be an excellent start: http://www.ilsp.gr/homepages/protopapas/pdf/Protopapas_2007_Eutypon.pdf To frame your argument, you would want use: http://scholar.google.com/ to look for (free) electronically accessible research (there is plenty) that supports, frames, or possibly even discredits your argument or conclusion. Mostly avoid first-person, and minimize (if not outright eliminate) all passive-voice. If you want a computer's opinion on the quality of your writing try the COHmetrix system I use for linguistic research: http://cohmetrix.memphis.edu/cohmetrixpr/index.html Pay attention to the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid reading level. High numbers are good on these scores, but numbers that are too high can mean the document is difficult to read. Find a decent publication and prepare to be rejected 8 or so times, each time though you will make changes that make it increasingly more likely to be published. This isn't the entire process, but it's some of the highlights. I currently do this exact process for a living (I mostly edit other peoples work to make their papers APA 5 or 6 compliant), it's brutal, but it's entirely worth the trouble.
Disclaimer: I'm an IEEE member and an electrical engineering grad student.
IEEE has dozens of individual journals. There are no requirements for your experience, merely that your material is technically sound enough to stand up to the scrutiny of three experts (peer review). You can't publish it anywhere else if you go IEEE, but you can still patent your idea if you're interested in that.
Post it on Slashdot.
We need some new material for 'Bad Car Analogies' and 'In Soviet Russia' replies.
Have gnu, will travel.
I didn't see it mentioned, so I'd like to make you aware of Vincenty's algorithm to calculate the geodesic distance of two geo-referenced points. It also takes the ellipsoid shape of the earth into account. It's from 1975, very compact and converges blazingly fast. I can't say if it is used in current geo-information systems, but you'd need to be better than Vincenty to improve upon the state of the art.
As to suitable conferences: Have a look at the publication list of an existing geo-information research institute and try the conferences where they publish.
something clever to make me stand out!
It sounds like you have two vertical markets to look at for publishing:
Both of these organizations publish several different journals and you'd need to submit to the right one. You'll want to email or telephone someone on the inside to get a better idea of where your topic might fit, usually an editor, or the like. Keep in mind it would actually be two different papers as one would focus on the computer science aspects of what you did and the other would be more geoscience focused on the utility of the algorithm within the field, etc.
Patents might count more than publications for non-academics, hell even for academics. If your employer would own the patent, fine well make them pay the lawyers, and get the resume line for yourself. Yes, software patents are wrong, and we'll all win if they're eliminated one day, but the resume line still counts.
In fact, academia is wide open if your invention is really that brilliant, but most likely you're simply not nearly as clever as you imagine. So fine you'll never see science, nature, etc. but you should not let that discourage you however. I'll explain :
Academia has a handful of brilliant tenured professors with good academic jobs doing serious research. We're talking maybe half-ish the faculty at the top three-ish institutions in each state, way more in MA, way less in MO, etc. After these, we've got the smart young postdocs who produce good research simply by being smart and young, but those smart young people must eventually either leave academia for industry, or take glorified high school teacher posts at so-called liberal arts collages.
You know how people say "the people who can do and the people who can't teach"? Well, they're not talking about professors at research universities, who most definitely can do, but maybe can't teach. They're talking about professors at liberal arts collages, who learned to teach, but never quite got the doing, and never escaped into industry.
Anyways, all these baby sitter professors need weak journals where they can publish whatever kinda interesting stuff they've been toying around with in between all their massive teaching and administrative duties, ideally stuff so easy they've involved their undergraduates. You'll therefore find plenty of journals or conferences for which your paper is suitable, I promise. Do you think your find is better than a clever rich kid's heavily guided summer project? Great, we've got journals for that intermediate level too.
Do you think you're discovery is really really great? Alright, maybe you should chat about it with local universities. You might actually find some trick for getting a masters or even doctorate out of it. You'd need some classes of course, but hey masters with thesis usually doesn't require many hours. If they take you, they'll help you get the paper into the right journal. Don't you think a master's degree plus a publication sounds way better than just a publication?
Is a patent worth more than a master's degree? I donno, maybe depending upon the employer, but you can try both.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Much of this meta-knowledge is not written down. Instead its learned by apprenticeships to experts, research groups and professors. And watching examples of what they do and imitate them. Generally, successfully publishing three times constitutes a PhD. Behind such there could be several failed projects, because they were wrong, or too small, or too big.
If his goal is defensive publication, entities like IP.com provide a Prior Art Database that assures an invention's novelty is established around the world. It's dated and distributed to libraries and patent offices worldwide. However, I think the poster is interested in academic publication, which is something else entirely. (My advice there is to find journals and conferences that have published similar types of algorithms, then write his paper in the same style as papers from those sources. All journals and conferences have templates for authors to follow and combining those with published examples is about the best the inexperienced author can do.)
Maybe this is buried somewhere, but I didn't find it.
Try plos.org (Public Library of Science)
Some of these tips are very good. I've published a few dozen papers in the GPS field, and I work with engineers and scientists who have done so also. I am sure they would agree with a lot of the (more positive) tips you have received.
This is what I can add: who do you want to know about this? Think of your original problem, and the process by which you came to a solution. No doubt you were trying to solve a real problem for real people. Those people are a great first audience for your work. What do they read when it comes to technical works? When they look for technical solutions, where do they look? If you want a broader audience, and you don't know what they read, ask them. Myself, I read GPS World a lot, and I consult the proceedings of the Institute of Navigation meetings.
This might sound like a small step but remember you *can* repeat it. First an company newsletter, then a conference, then a journal. Good luck!
In line with the parent, I'd suggest -- if you're willing to share the credit -- to find an academic in the field, and letting her/him do the work of making it into a paper and publishing it. You see, while it isn't hard to write a paper, it isn't exactly a trivial exercise either.
The way I see it, you can let someone else get all the academic considerations right, or you can try to learn them sufficiently well yourself.
Again, the latter option isn't that hard. It is time-consuming, and not exactly trivial.
A good publication will not only detail new findings, but compare them to existing ones in the field. An academic can do this. Furthermore, an academic should have a good idea on how to convert a good idea into a paper, what is going on in the field that is relevant, which conferences/journals would be best suited (and most interesting) for your idea, and will likely suggest improvements (to the paper, not necessarily the algorithm) that otherwise would be done by reviewers. Plus: for many conferences in CS, someone needs to attend the conference and present the paper in order for the paper to be accepted. Conferences are not always cheap, and not always next door. Academics have budgets for this sort of thing, so you could always let a co-author go. Or you could try to get your co-author to fund your trip somehow -- might work too (to academics, attending conferences is akin to a "business expense").
If you'd like to keep the credit all to yourself: by all means, do! An academic publication could be the right way to do so.
Perhaps there is another, even better way. A software patent maybe? (yes I'll get downmodded for that, but perhaps there is a way you can give it away while having it patented? Not familiar enough with the US patent system).
At any rate, getting some personal (face-to-face) advice from your friendly, neighborhood academic would definitely benefit you.
Seriously, do a through literature review before you even think about writing a paper. I'm a pro researcher in the field of computational science, and I can't count the number of times I've had an interesting idea only to find that somebody published a paper about it >10 years ago. Lately it's been more like 5 years ago though, so perhaps I'm catching up :). Fortunately, I've had enough novel ideas to keep my career moving.
Or if it's just a formula, put it on a blog with your name on it, and then slip it into an appropriate Wikipedia article, with references pointing to the blog.
Yeah, I know, Wikipedia is not for original research. However, I did NOT realize that, when I did something very similar to this quite a few years back. I posted a few paragraphs into a Wikipedia page, naming my formula with my name. And now I am quoted all over the web for some stupid formula I created. It's even taught in seminars in the Americas and in Asia.
If everyone considered donating things to the community to be "silly" then there would be no such thing as charity or volunteerism, and the world would be a much sadder place.
I'm not sure about the field of algorithms, but most quality systems conferences review submissions double-blind: the people on the program committee have no idea who wrote the paper, and the authors don't now exactly which reviewer said what about their paper. If the paper is a continuation of previous research, usually you can guess who wrote it. But if the paper they're reading is something new, there's no way for them to tell if it's a new direction from a prestigious research group at MIT, or written by a truck driver thinking about problems on the road and setting up experiments in the back of his truck. Each paper stands on its own merit, not the reputation of the author.
That said, there's definitely a cultural idea of what a "good paper" looks like, so reading Google Scholar is helpful.
Actually, if your work really is innovative, and you're keen to get it published, it might not hurt to find an algorithms professor in a local university, chat with him about your work, and see if he's willing to help you get the paper into publishable form.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Even incremental advances change the art .......
The Association for Computational Machinery is Computer Sciences oldest association. Go to http://www.acm.org - they have a monthly magazine and a peer reviewed journal, either of which might be interested in your math/project/algorithm ....
As long as your paper passes peer review and you pay the publishing fee the paper will be published. The journal does not try to judge the relative merits of your work with regards to similar work. The results will be an open access paper which anyone and everyone can read. http://www.plosone.org/
die2 [dahy] Show IPA noun, plural dies for 1, 2, 4, dice for 3; verb, died, dieing.
–noun
1.
Machinery .
a.
any of various devices for cutting or forming material in a press or a stamping or forging machine.
b.
a hollow device of steel, often composed of several pieces to be fitted into a stock, for cutting the threads of bolts or the like.
c.
one of the separate pieces of such a device.
d.
a steel block or plate with small conical holes through which wire, plastic rods, etc., are drawn.
2.
an engraved stamp for impressing a design upon some softer material, as in coining money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://libra.msra.cn/conf_category_1.htm
http://www.cs-conference-ranking.org/conferencerankings/topicsiv.html
The common procedure is to first submit to the most prestigious conference in the appropriate specialization that you think might accept your paper. A good way to guesstimate this is by looking at past papers from the conference. Even if you aren't an ACM or IEEE member (and you should probably join if you can afford it), you can browse the abstracts at the ACM and IEEE portals, which should be good enough for your purposes. You'll also want to look at the related papers in preparing your own paper's list of references (nearly all papers compare explicitly to previous research and state what the innovation over the current research status is in the paper).
If they accept your paper, great. If not, they'll usually send you the reviewer's comments. Next, use these comments to make your paper better and submit it to the next best conference that you think might accept your paper. Repeat until accepted.
This procedure will definitely work because eventually you'll get to low prestige journals that should accept pretty much anything that's not simply incorrect. Don't feel bad if this happens. Many papers subsequently recognized as important had to be shopped into obscure journals, so even this worst-case scenario is not that bad.
Good luck!
Just a suggestion and I haven't had time to check if someone else has also suggested this, but you might find that contacting an academic who works in a similar area and asking them to add their name to the author list as a corresponding author might give you a better chance of publishing the material in a decent journal. It's pretty normal to have at least two authors these days, even if the second author did next-to-nothing for the article. It helps in the case where a student does the work then moves elsewhere and is not contactable - the supervisor's contact details are not as likely to change (plus they usually contributed to the research by funding or providing equipment etc), so they get put on at the end of the author list as a point of contact.
In your case, there are a shitload of companies likely to profit if your algorithm is as good as you reckon it is, so I would support previous suggestions that you protect it in some way before releasing it to the public.
Having published and reviewed papers in several disciplines (Computer Science, Mathematics and Social Sciences) I offer the following:
All the disciplines want to see how your work fits in with the current and past body of knowledge - this will be best done by citing the original sources for the work you are comparing and using to position your work. Secondary sources (text books etc) are less well regarded but can be used if the original sources are unavailable or if they are sufficiently well respected (eg citing Knuth is usually acceptable if describing a common algorithm's performance). A good deal of your paper will be devoted to explaining the state of the art and how your approach builds on or improves on it.
If you cite it, make sure you have read it; as a reviewer one of the easiest ways to disqualify a paper is to look for errors in the citations (a classic fault is when someone cites a paper and the contention of the paper is exactly the opposite of what the author claims) - if the author can't be bothered to read and position their work so that I can evaluate it in context, it is really hard to believe any claims of originality.
The disciplines vary markedly in terms of formats, venues (conferences versus journals), and acceptable practices (using derivative works in the social sciences requires far more care than in computer science).
Publishing can be quite time consuming - it took several years to get a journal article in the mathematical / security area.
Finally, publishing is a human activity - reviewers and editors have expectations and reputations to maintain - figuring out the right way to present your work in a particular discipline can be quite tricky; the easiest way to do this is to find someone publishing in the area and work with them.
that will stick it to those eggheads in the ivory tower.
plz realize the tower is a scam, fostered by securitized student loan debt (much like the housing bubble was fostered by securitized mortgage debt)
What you do need to do is find an appropriate journal venue for your work. It helps to read some of the papers published there to get a feel what they publish.
The other thing you must do as part of serious scholarship is to put your work in the context of prior papers if not prior art. You know, the Isaac Newton "I see far as I stand on the shoulders of giants" kind of thing, when the work in question (Principia) made him one of the giants.
Is there any way that you can get library privileges at your local university? You could walk in the door and tell one of the librarians what you are doing and why you want access to their collection. These days, this does not mean simply browsing their stacks, it means having access to their electronic journals behind (expensive) subscription walls.
Once you have library access, you can use Google Scholar along with the other search engines for scientific literature and "go to town" figuring out what others have done on similar lines. Even if you come across something very similar to your work, do not be discouraged and think you "have been scooped." A reference to that similar work is a powerful way of establishing that "brilliant minds think alike" and that you are not working in a complete vacuum. Often times, your result will have important differences or enhancements or possible simplifications on an earlier derivation or result, and as the saying goes, "On the shoulders of giants."
Why?
You don't know enough to describe the problem properly. It's also a 1-2 day task. I gather you spent considerably longer.
Points far apart: ICBM problem. Solved 50 years ago by the best minds available.
Points close together: Surveying problem. Solved by the best minds available even longer ago.
This is what libraries are for.
rhb
Steam! Steam, I tell you!
And I'd have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling grad students!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Literature searching can be really hard, because algorithms don't necessarily fit well into Google queries, even if you do have an online system that has the relevant kinds of papers in it. It's tough enough if you've got a problem you're trying to solve, but tougher if you're trying to demonstrate non-existence of a specific solution.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Although it was in the legal field. The best advice I can give is to find a list of journals that publish content like yours. Then, read over some of the research papers. It will give you an idea of the kind of style they look for. (For example, what kind of citation methods do they use. Do they allow diagrams and charts and, if so, how must they be submitted. For that matter, what kind of submissions are allowed?)
A good resource for legal writing is Academic Legal Writing by Eugene Volokh. Some of the principles can apply to any area of academic writing. As for math/science research papers, there may be similar types of "guides."
You may want to check out Open Journal System's list of OJS journals. You can learn more here: http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs
This system allows for journals to accept submissions online. One of these journals might publish you.
Good luck with it. Sounds like an interesting subject. Also, see if you can contact academics at a local research University. They may have some suggestions as well.
submit to a conference or workshop. If it is accepted you'll give a presentation at the conference and your paper will be published in the proceedings.
Start a new website, indiepaper.org or something, for people like you. This will take less effort than writing a paper, submitting it, rewriting it, resubmitting it, etc. Also, even if your paper is not a huge it, the website will be. Mention it on Slashdot when it is complete. It will get a huge number of submissions, 90% junk, 9.9% mediocre and 0.1% genius. It will be like the Wikipedia of academic journals.
Bloom filter.
Start with Strang's book: Linear Algebra, Geodesy, and Gps [Hardcover]
K. Borre Gilbert Strang (Author) It has the references and background for the algorithm development as well as connection to linear algebra.
If you really have something that is fundamentally different than what is known, you will find out find out by reading the relevant chapters. Then if true publishing in either Journal of Guidance, Control, and Navigation or IEEE Trans. on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.
[I] have not even read a complete [research paper]
Then that is where you should start. Seriously, writing papers is all about communicating your ideas to others. Doing so in a simplistic, naive sort of way will get your submission rejected. You've clearly taken impressive steps toward educating yourself in the field, so now take the next step and educate yourself as to how people in the field professionally communicate with each other.
Writing the central part of a paper -- describing the main idea -- is the easiest, and fastest part. Writing the introduction, background, and discussion sections where your work is compared with the literature, problems are discussed, and potential future solutions laid out, is by far the hardest part, take by far the longest time, and is what distinguishes a high-school book report from a scholarly paper.
How do you go about this? Use Google Scholar to search for papers related to your field. Read them. You might need to pay for some (the horror!); some might be available through your public library or state university. Find the papers that those papers reference, get them, read them. Repeat until you've found no more new ones. Intellectually digest the contents. Find one that reads particularly well and use it as a template, and then write a basic manuscript. Use whatever tools you like at this point.
You will then need to select a journal. Each journal has its own Guide for Authors (or similar document) that details the specific format that they require for submissions. Do not treat this document cavalierly. Much of the time, the journal will provide a template of some sort. Cram your original document into this format and obey every rule.
Then, make your submission. And wait. And expect to be rejected without review.
Then, select the next journal down your list of preferred publications, and try again. Re-writing for their particular guidelines. Submit, and expect a rejection.
Repeat until you get the golden accept. Note that most journals will not allow you to submit to more than one at the same time, and if you do, and are found out, at best you will be given a black mark, at worst, you will not be able to publish ever again. Since there are only so many reviewers, and they generally know each other professionally, the chances of being caught are quite high.
If your algorithm is a big step forward and could have a big impact, I would not discount Science as a potential journal. But, bear in mind that the best journals (Science, Nature, Cell, etc.) publish only a tiny fraction of submissions. You could, as an alternate, consider PLoS (Public Library of Science).
Having an official academic affiliation usually helps -- or, better put, having no academic affiliation hurts. If you can make friends with a professor at your local state university and get a visiting scientist appointment (free to both parties) that could go a long way to helping you publish.
Good luck.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I could not agree more with the AC. I am doing a Postdoc in a very specific subfield of computer scientist and one thing I have learned is that you have to get very very specific in your work in order for it to be "novel".
In addition, as sibling post mentions, a good literature review can be hard. Specially because more than 70% of the papers *related* to GP work will be behind a paywall (eg. Elsevier).
To make things worst, if the original poster submits his paper to a conference, he most likely would have to register to the conference AND go wherever the conference is to present his work. This may be a problem due to funds.
However, if he affiliates with a University, they can solve both of those problems because usually universities have access to a lot of for-pay academic services and sometimes they sponsor research.
My advice? look on the internet for some researcher who works in a similar thing; write him a serious letter/mail mentioning your work (if you send a plain snail letter, I am sure they will take you more seriously, as you even *cared* enough to write them).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What concerns me most is that you said that you haven't ever read a complete research paper. How can you be sure that your idea is new and worth publishing if you haven't done the requisite literature reviews? You really need to do your homework before you submit anything to a journal. Most journals will select referees for papers based on that paper's references. If you reference some papers by Dr. Smith and he is still alive, there's a good chance that Dr. Smith will be asked to referee. If you don't have reasonable references, your submission may be rejected out of hand.
Academic publication can be a very slow process. Don't be surprised if it takes a year for your paper to be officially accepted, and another six months before it shows up in print. DO NOT submit your paper to more than one journal. If you don't hear back, don't assume that you've been rejected. Contact the journal and find out what's going on before you send your submission elsewhere. The last thing you want is for more than one journal to accept your paper.
Hi,
I'm a research associate (post-doc, I finished my PhD last year) in Computer Science. I work in an area that involves comparisons between the performance of algorithms, although I have no specific knowledge about the area you've been working in.
A few people have given good advice already, but I'll add my thoughts:
- Submit to a conference, not a journal. In Computer Science, conferences are usually regarded as more important than journals (this is very unusual for a scientific field). There are so many conferences, you should be able to publish somewhere provided the work is decent. You can then get very useful feedback by attending the conference, and potentially move on to a journal paper.
- Write your paper in LaTeX. It's really not difficult to learn and is usually pretty much text with the occasional formatting instruction. The exception is mathematical formulae, for which LaTeX is great but it takes a while to get used to.
- Couch your work in the field. You need to reference previous papers, ensure you are not duplicating someone else's work, and show how your ideas link to those of others.
- If you attend independently you will have to pay for the conference. So that's flights, hotel, living costs and conference registration (quick example of the latter is 400UKP).
- Don't worry about publications like Science!
- If you're comparing your algorithm to another implementation, you must be rigorous. You're writing a "horse race" paper where you're showing one is faster/better than another. To do so in a fair, principled and generalisable way is difficult. An absolute basic must is that you use statistics properly: your results must be statistically significant, but also have an effect size that must be interesting. You'll have to run the algorithms on some example problems - are these problems representative? Will the results generalise to other problems? Your algorithm may also require parameters to be chosen. How do you decide these parameters? What about the algorithm you're comparing to? Are you putting the same effort into tuning the performance of both?
As others have said, by far the best way to achieve all of these things is to get in touch with an academic. They'll help with the writing, experimental method, and ensure that your work fits into the field.
I'd be happy to take a look at anything you write and give you advice on writing style and what you need to do to make it publishable.
Hope that helps,
RS.
Call me a nerd if you like, but I need to ask this:
Do you know how to write? Writing a journal article isn't just "Check out this cool thing I worked on." You need to do a review of lit., provide a rationale for your work (i.e. show the gap in the research or failings of other algorithms which make your work necessary/useful), explain your work, show your results, and conclude with some manner of discussion of further work to be completed, holes in your design, implications, etc. Like 40 pages, double-spaced.
It's not something you just whip out when you're done. It sounds to me like you've looked at some other people's work and jumped straight to fiddling. This is fine, and honestly, most research at least starts that way. The paper is where you are going to legitimatize it by showing that you did your homework and you're not just some guy who did some fiddling--even if that's what you are!
So, on the one hand, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from getting into Science, except for maybe a lack of understanding of the genre and the expectations of the reviewers. All peer-reviewed journals do blind reviews, so the fact that you're just some dude will just knock their socks on their asses if they accept your paper.
In short, if you've never done this kind of writing before, you'll need someone to help you get the hang of it and proof it for you.
Just a word of warning, though: Since you didn't already start with a review of lit, and went straight for the fun stuff, you might end up finding that your idea isn't good or necessary when you're doing the research you were supposed to do at the beginning (probably before the project got so big and complex that you thought, "I wonder if there's a paper in this?"). That's a bummer. It's happened to me. Just don't be too crestfallen if you find something like that.
Good luck and I hope you pull it off!
The first question that comes to mind is whether his algorithm actually is novel since how can he know, if he hasn't read current research. I recommend changing from Google to Google Scholar and searching *a lot*
The second thing is that at least in my experience, for the first paper you write, by far more time goes to reading current research than the rest of the work combined. Later, you know the field better and whose papers to read and so on and then that might get faster. So even if he indeed has come up with something new, he cannot state that until he has spent as much time reading other peoples' papers as he has developing the algorithm.
Reading all that is much less fun than conducting your own research and writing your own paper so frankly, if he asks slashdot without reading a single paper beforehand, I doubt that he'll endure reading 30-50 papers and skimming through many more.
GPL it?
have not even read a complete one
As a researcher who also publishes from time to time, I have to say, it comes hard to believe the originality of your idea (not impossible, but still), if you even confess not to have read relevant research results. For one, it would give you perspective on what's the trend of research and results in the particular area, second, it would give you good reference background (which is good, since without proper bibliography it's nearly impossible to push through a paper, even at conferences is they are good ones), third, it would expose you to solutions in the respective field to which you could compare your idea with, since in many fields there are a lot of proposed solutions to problems and it's generally required to show your originality and/or improvement over existing ones if you wish your results to be accepted.
I'd suggest like some others also have above, to get in touch with someone who has relevant background, and co-author a publication. It would drastically improve your chances.
Patenting could also be a walkable path, but it takes a lot of time, and a more limited exposure. If you want people to get to know your idea, a relevant conference with a knowledgeable audience would be a good way to go. And certainly better than publishing in a blog.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
What you're solving is the inverse geodetic problem, a topic of study in the field of geodesy for centuries, literally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesy#Second_.28inverse.29_geodetic_problem As several people have commented earlier, you need to be sure whether this is a new algorithm, a modification of earlier algorithms, or just an optimization. You can research this yourself, and I assume you already have. Possible sources include the National Geodetic Survey, http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency https://www1.nga.mil/ProductsServices/GeodesyGeophysics/Pages/default.aspx You would want to submit a paper to conferences in geodesy or surveying. Possibilities include the American congress on Surveying and Mapping http://www.acsm.net/ Intl Assoc of Geodesy http://www.iag-aig.org/index.php . This would be an easy way to determine how revolutionary your algorithm is. These organizations also publish journals, so a conference paper could be a first step.
Just e-mail me your research and I'll write it up in a nice scientific paper.
edited by
Mark Zuckerberg
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i have been engaged in the practice of land surveying and conducted extensive research into direct and inverse problem on a geodesic stop my research demonstrates engineering and construction software does not result in a solution which meets minimum standards for precision described by the united states stop usgs state geodetic advisor indicates no expertise in direct and inverse problem available from united states and national labs told congress no need for high order solution stop regret your remarks referenced slashdot do not identify the problem by name or precision of the proposed solution regardless quite interested in subject please provide a point of contact for telephone dialogue suggest meeting immediately sincerely andrew ps i am engaged at present in discussion for imbedded direct and inverse solution with various software publishers and custom computer programming services
Vincenty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty's_formulae is the current benchmark for distance between two points. If you think you've done better, you've got two real options:
(1) A GPS/Navigation Journal, or
(2) Surveying journal
Forget computer science - not really interested in this problem.
As far as conferences are concerned, it's worth trying to get into one of the following:
* IEEE PLANS http://www.plansconference.org/
* ION PLANS http://www.ion.org/meetings/
If you think it's still good for a journal, look for who has cited Vincenty's paper in Google Scholar - it will give you a good indication as to what journals to chase.
. . . with reference to your remarks ibid:
". . . generally speaking, there are short, medium and long line solutions depending on how far apart your points are . . ."
distance depends on position and direction for precise geodetic and cartographic applications on the WGS84 reference ellipsoidal surface;
implementation of the geoid is recommended for navigation applications . . .
You should contact researchers at Ohio University's Avionics Engineering Center. They do tons of work with GPS and would be able (and probably willing) to guide you in what you need to do.