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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

If people thought this way - internalizing this publishing point idea - it would incentivize sitting on your incremental results, fiercely keeping them secret if and until you can prove the whole bigger result by yourself. However long that might take.

If a series of incremental results were as prestigious as holding off to bundle them people would have reason to collaborate and complete each other's work more eagerly. Delaying an almost complete result for a year so that a journal will think it has enough impact point seems straightforwardly net bad, it slows down both progress & collaboration.

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> If people thought this way - internalizing this publishing point idea - it would incentivize sitting on your incremental results, fiercely keeping them secret if and until you can prove the whole bigger result by yourself. However long that might take.

This is exactly what people think, and exactly what happens, especially in winner-takes-all situations. You end up with an interesting tension between how long you can wait to build your story, and how long until someone else publishes the same findings and takes all the credit.

A classic example in physics involves the discovery of the J/ψ particle [0]. Samuel Ting's group at MIT discovered it first (chronologically) but Ting decided he needed time to flesh out the findings, and so sat on the discovery and kept it quiet. Meanwhile, Burton Richter's group at Stanford also happened upon the discovery, but they were less inclined to be quiet. Ting found out, and (in a spirit of collaboration) both groups submitted their papers for publication at the same time, and were published in the same issue of Physical Review Letters.

They both won the Nobel 2 years later.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/psi_meson

Wait, how did they both know that they both discovered it, but only after they had both discovered it?

People talk. The field isn't that big.

They got an optimal result in that case, isn't that nice.

The reasonable thing to do here is to discourage all of your collaborators from ever submitting anything to that journal again. Work with your team, submit incremental results to journals who will accept them, and let the picky journal suffer a loss of reputation from not featuring some of the top researchers in the field.

To supply a counter viewpoint here... The opposite is the "least publishable unit" which leads to loads and loads of almost-nothing results flooding the journals and other publication outlets. It would be hard to keep up with all that if there wasn't a reasonable threshold. If anything then I find that threshold too low currently, rather than too high. The "publish or perish" principle also pushes people that way.

That's much less of a problem than the fact that papers are such poor media for sharing knowledge. They are published too slowly to be immediately useful versus just a quick chat, and simultaneously written in too rushed a way to comprehensively educate people on progress in the field.

> versus just a quick chat,

Everybody is free to keep a blog for this kind of informal chat/brainstorming kind of communication. Paper publications should be well-written, structured, thought-through results that make it worthwhile for the reader to spend their time. Anything else belongs to a blog post.

The educational and editorial quality of papers from before 1980 or so beats just about anything published today. That is what publish or perish - impact factor - smallest publishable unit culture did.

Don‘t know much about publishing in maths but in some disciplines it is clearly incentivised to create the biggest possible number of papers out of a single research project, leading automatically to incremental publishing of results. I call it atomic publishing (from Greek atomos - indivisible) since such a paper contains only one result that cannot be split up anymore.

Andrew Wiles spent 6 years working on 1 paper, and then another year working on a minor follow-up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27...

Or cheese slicer publishing, as you are selling your cheese one slice at a time. The practice is usually frowned upon.

I thought this was called salami slicing in publication.

Science is almost all incremental results. There's far more incentive to get published now than there is to "sit on" an incremental result hoping to add to it to make a bigger splash.

Academic science discovers continuous integration.

In the software world, it's often desired to have a steady stream of small, individually reviewable commits, that each deliver a incremental set of value.

Dropping a 20000 files changed bomb "Complete rewrite of linux kernel audio subsystem" is not seen as prestigious. Repeated, gradual contributions and involvement in the community is.

The big question here is if journal space is a limited resource. Obviously it was at one point.

Supposing it is, you have to trade off publishing these incremental results against publishing someone else’s complete result.

What if it had taken ten papers to get there instead of two? For a sufficiently important problem, sure, but the interesting question is at a problem that’s interesting enough to publish complete but barely.

The limiting factor isn’t journal space, but attention among the audience. (In theory) the journals publishing restrictions help to filter and condense information so the audience is maximally informed given that they will only read a fixed amount

Journal space is not a limited resource. Premium journal space is.

That's because every researcher has a hierarchy of journals that they monitor. Prestigious journals are read by many researchers. So you're essentially competing for access to the limited attention of many researchers.

Conversely, publishing in a premium journal has more value than a regular journal. And the big scientific publishers are therefore in competition to make sure that they own the premium journals. Which they have multiple tricks to ensure.

Interestingly, their tricks only really work in science. That's because in the humanities, it is harder to establish objective opinions about quality. By contrast everyone can agree in science that Nature generally has the best papers. So attempting to raise the price on a prestigious science journal, works. Attempting to raise the price on a prestigious humanities journal, results in its circulation going down. Which makes it less prestigious.

Space isn't a limited resource, but prestige points are deliberatly limited, as a proxy for the publications' competition for attention. We can appreciate the irony, while considering the outcome reasonable - after all, the results weren't kept out of the literature. They just got published with a label that more or less puts them lower in the search ranking for the next mathematician who looks up the topic.

Hyper focusing on a single journal publication is going to lead to absurdities like this. A researcher is judged by the total delta of his improvements, at least by his peers and future humanity. (the sum of all points, not the max).

It is easy to defend any side of the argument by inflating the "pitfalls of other approach" ad absurdum. This is silly. Obviously, balance is the key, as always.

Instead, we should look at which side the, uh, industry currently tends to err. And this is definitely not the "sitting on your incremental results" side. The current motto of academia is to publish more. It doesn't matter if your papers are crap, it doesn't matter if you already have significant results and are working on something big, you have to publish to keep your position. How many crappy papers you release is a KPI of academia.

I mean, I can imagine a world were it would have been a good idea. I think it's a better world, where science journals don't exist. Instead, anybody can put any crap on ~arxiv.org~ Sci-Hub and anybody can leave comments, upvote/downvote stuff, papers have actual links and all other modern social network mechanics up to the point you can have a feed of most interesting new papers tailored specially for you. This is open-source, non-profit, 1/1000 of what universities used to pay for journal subscriptions is used to maintain the servers. Most importantly, because of some nice search screens or whatever the paper's metadata becomes more important than the paper itself, and in the end we are able to assign 10-word simple summary on what the current community consensus on the paper is: if it proves anything, "almost proves" anything, has been 10 times disproved, 20 research teams failed to reproduce to results or 100 people (see names in the popup) tried to read and failed to understand this gibberish. Nothing gets retracted, ever.

Then it would be great. But as things are and all these "highly reputable journals" keep being a plague of society, it is actually kinda nice that somebody encourages you to finish your stuff before publishing.

Now, should have been this paper of Tao been rejected? I don't know, I think not. Especially the second one. But it's somewhat refreshing.

Two submission in medium reputation journal does not have significantly lower prestige than one in high reputation journal.

Gauss did something along these lines and held back mathematical progress by decades.

Gauss had plenty of room for slack, giving people time to catch up on his work..

Every night Gauss went to sleep, mathematics was held back a week.

During his college/grad school days, he was going half nuts, ideas would come to him faster than he could write them down.

Finally one professor saw what was happening, insisted that Gauss take some time off - being German that involved walking in the woods.

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