Where to publish a paper if not associated a college and have no degree? | Hacker News Reader

Where to publish a paper if not associated a college and have no degree?

Title. I have a paper that I'd like to publish, but I know no one, have no degree, and am not associated with any university.

Can I submit one for review anywhere?

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You need to write the paper on a topic. Physics/chemistry/frog jigging? Papers submitted to a journal are written in a general paper format, with minor variances that the journal requires. Google 'how to write a scientific paper' and riffle through what the search returns, reading those and seeing how that looks in a published paper from the journal your paper that fits what you wrote will guide you. Proof read your paper to get rid of all typos and grammos. You are now ready to submit it, but first, if you know a PhD level expert on your paper's topic, approach him to act as a screen, to validate your work and conclusions as worth of being reviewed by that journal via their pool of referees. If the validator gives you thumbs down - ask why in detail? correct if possible or admit the paper is intrinsically unworthy of publication. Normally, people get educated and in their final year write their degree paper, B,Sc, B.A, B.A.Sc, etc and in their 3rd and 4th years will have read a great deal in their degree topic, studied the math/chem/stats/physics to their year 3 or 4 and write their finals. Now, have you done this? or is this a de novo paper? I do not want to discourage you, there are Newton's yet unfound....

If it's a research paper then the point is to push the frontier of science and knowledge forward, or at least to the side. This means that you will have to know where the frontier is. That frontier can be marked by some previous papers which you will cite in your paper. If your paper really pushes the frontier, then you can target the journal where the paper in the old frontier that your paper pushes past was published. If your work is original and credible and acceptably written and really pushes the frontier then they will likely be more than happy to publish it no matter where it comes from.

I would tell a story about a paper being published but I don't want to end up archived in the creepy backrooms of algolia https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights

You do not need a degree to submit a paper. The greatest problem is finding the right journal to submit it to. There are many journals with different areas of interest. And for journals with overlapping fields, it is often the case that one journal will reject an paper because they feel that the result is not significant enough while another journal (of lesser 'quality') will happily accept it.

My advise would be to find someone that is an expert in the field of the paper and ask advice with respect to what would be a good journal. You could also try to contact any of the authors whoes papers you reference. If you paper has not any references, you would have to find relevant references. If a paper does not have any references, it is not very likely to be accepted by any journal.

There's also the problem that there are a lot of low-quality journals out there which exist to get paid to publish just about anything.

To the OP, I agree with fjfaase - if you don't have references, your work won't meet the baseline scholarship 'real' journal expect.

"Real" means read by others in the field you want to publish. If there's literally no previous work to build on, then that means you aren't in that field, or it's not a problem which interests the field. At the very least you can start "every previous publication has focused on X [cite several review articles]. In this work I consider Y."

If you do have references, those give you an idea of where others in your field publish.

Today, you can do what the early scientists did back in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. They weren't associated with a college, and had no degree.

Self-publish. And today you can self-publish on a website and Google, etc, will broadcast that you have done so far and wide. Then your thesis will have to stand or fall on its own merits.

I suppose you could look on this as "Build It and They Will Come".

You could even request for peer-review and supply an email address for discussion. Be aware that breakthroughs are always fought savagely. Be ready for lots of negative reviews. They will need to be strongly debated. We hope you are ready for that.

> today you can self-publish ... your thesis will have to stand or fall on its own merits.

It really depends on the OP's goal.

I've too often seen snooty academics who ignore the non-academic literature - even when they know about it. In one case, something like "we are the first to compare X to Y", and when I pointed to two different blog posts, by two different projects, comparing X to Y, and finding the same conclusion as the paper, the corresponding author said something like "that work was insufficiently scholarly".

In practice, what happens is that people search for previous work using Google Scholar, or subscription-based equivalents. If they can't find it that way, it doesn't really exist to most of the people who need it.

Which means that self-publishing doesn't fall simply on its own merits - it can also fall because it isn't where people are looking.

You definitely can. I think a lot of journals have policies that amount to "we don't want to waste time in projects without institutional faith behind them", and if you're doing research with human subjects you'll need institutional approval, but there's nothing stopping you from finding a journal that'll have you and submitting!

If you post the paper on site such as arXiv or SSRN and mention it on Twitter, appropriate subreddits and other social media sites, the work may get some attention and informal review without being published. Most papers I see in finance journals were previously posted on SSRN. I don't know how important journal publication itself is to you.

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