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Best Way To Publish an "Indie" Research Paper?

Posted by timothy on from the don-your-suit-of-thick-skin dept.

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?"

1 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. More details from Author by alexmipego · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.