Publication of Papers, Questions

[T.O.E Dream]

If someone has written a paper on physics (e.g. like Einstein, papers on Relativity) and wants to publish it what to they have to do? Who do they sent it to,,, you get the point?

 

[cesiumfrog]

Pick which journal you want to have it published in, and follow the instructions on their website for sending it to them.

 

[T.O.E Dream]

what do you mean by journal, can you be more specific? Sorry.

 

[berkeman]

what do you mean by journal, can you be more specific? Sorry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_journal

.

 

[jtbell]

what do you mean by journal, can you be more specific? Sorry.

A magazine for professional scientists, in which articles are reviewed by experts in the subject matter before publication (this is called peer review). Some journals are published by scientific societies, some are published by for-profit companies.

For example, the Americal Physical Society (APS) publishes the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters.

http://publish.aps.org/

 

[confinement]

Fortunately it is impossible to do groundbreaking work like Einstein's without being familiar with the science journals in which such work gets published.

Many works which are deemed unacceptable for peer reviewed publication can be found in the ArXiV (search google).

 

[ZapperZ]

Fortunately it is impossible to do groundbreaking work like Einstein's without being familiar with the science journals in which such work gets published.

Many works which are deemed unacceptable for peer reviewed publication can be found in the ArXiV (search google).

Er... there are MANY "acceptable" peer-reviewed publications that appear on Arxiv. Arxiv is not refereed, although it requires endorsement after the administrator found out that crackpots were also uploading their "papers". Still, there are many manuscripts that are there that were also submitted for publications. Many even appear after they were published, especially if these appeared in Nature or Science that have a stricter embargo than most other journals.

Zz.

 

[Unknot]

Er... there are MANY "acceptable" peer-reviewed publications that appear on Arxiv. Arxiv is not refereed, although it requires endorsement after the administrator found out that crackpots were also uploading their "papers". Still, there are many manuscripts that are there that were also submitted for publications. Many even appear after they were published, especially if these appeared in Nature or Science that have a stricter embargo than most other journals.

Zz.

Crackpots still upload their "papers" from time to time. But again, Perelman did well just with arXiv.

 

[confinement]

Er... there are MANY "acceptable" peer-reviewed publications that appear on Arxiv.

Of course, I never said anything to the contrary. The statement that the Arxiv contains papers satisfying such and such proposition does not afirm or deny the existence of any other papers in the Arxiv which might satisfy other propositions.

There is an old joke about the wife of a mathematician who was tired of his pedantic use of language. One night when they were playing bridge with another couple the husband signaled that his hand of cards meant imminent victory, at which point his wife said "Oh dear, I have 11 cards." The mathematician threw down his cards, frustrated by the perceived misdeal and then his wife said "but dear, I didn't say I had only 11 cards" i.e. she had 12 cards and her statement of having 11 cards was still true.

 

[jtbell]

It might be worth reminding the "young'uns" of the system that arxiv.org was originally invented to replace.

When I was in graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, i.e. before the Internet became a general means of communication, physicists (in particle physics especially) who wanted to get their latest results and ideas out quickly, distributed photocopied "preprints" to universities and laboratories that might be interested in them. These were often drafts of papers that had been submitted for publication in some journal, hence the name "preprint," derived from "reprints" of already-published articles. They also included reports that might be of interest to others in a particular sub-field, although not significant enough for a journal article; lecture notes from talks presented at conferences or specialized summer schools; etc.

At my graduate school, new preprints were placed on racks in the back of the departmental colloquium room, next to the coffee pots where we had coffee and cookies available every afternoon at 3:30. New preprints stayed on the racks for a week, for everyone to browse. If you were particularly interested in one, you wrote your name on the front page. After that first week, each preprint circulated in turn to the people who had signed up for it, and finally went into the filing cabinets at the back of the colloquium room.

Here's an example that I posted a while ago in another thread. I was the second person to get this particular preprint.

 

[berkeman]

Very cool, JT. Thanks.

 

[T.O.E Dream]

Thanks. But sorry i have to ask this again. Say someone has a ground breaking theory like relativity, what exactly do they go and do to publish it. And remember it's not just a little article it's really huge. Again thanks.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Thanks. But sorry i have to ask this again. Say someone has a ground breaking theory like relativity, what exactly do they go and do to publish it.

cesiumfrog answered.

And remember it's not just a little article it's really huge. Again thanks.

Special relativity was published in a paper that's 23 pages long. General relativity, one of the most difficult theories in the field, is 53 pages long. It's not the case that grounbreaking theories are "really huge". de Broglie's paper was two sides of one sheet of paper.

 

[T.O.E Dream]

what i meant by huge wasn't that it's really long, i meant huge theoretically like the papers are really important.

 

[confinement]

Thanks. But sorry i have to ask this again. Say someone has a ground breaking theory like relativity, what exactly do they go and do to publish it. And remember it's not just a little article it's really huge. Again thanks.

If the exposition could be reduced to a reasonable length it would be published in a journal like the Journal of High Energy Physics or Physical Review Letters, or Science, or Nature.

If the article must be "really huge" then it should either be broken up into a series of smaller subarticles and published in the above journals, or if the author feels strongly that the work should be published as a whole then they would need to make an agreement with a book publisher to produce a monograph. Since getting a publisher's attention can be difficult and expensive, and certainly impossible for an academic outsider, the best option in this day and age is to self-publish. In other words you typeset your own article and post it as a free PDF download at one of many websites, the most popular of which is the Arxiv.