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I recently cowrote a paper which came out somewhat long: 40+ pages. We uploaded it to arXiv in this form, but afterwards decided that it would be preferable to publish it as a series of two papers. (It was a natural decision given the length and the fact that it naturally splits into two weakly interacting parts. On the other hand, there is arguably some added value in having a combined version of the paper available somewhere.) At this moment, one of these parts has been submitted to a journal, the other one is still work in progress (the introductory sections need to be written almost from scratch).

What is the best way to record this on a CV/publication list at this point? Of course, it goes without saying that arXiv preprints are not nearly as important as published papers, but it seems it would be honest to own up to all of my writings in some form.

Options I see: a) Just reference the preprint on arXiv, and worry about the rest when the other papers are accepted, b) Mention both the preprint and the submitted paper with an awkward note explaining what is going on (perhaps this should also involve uploading the half-paper to arXiv).

(If relevant, my field is pure mathematics, I'm a PhD student about to graduate. I do need an up-to-date CV.)

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  • 40 pages is long in pure mathematics? As far as I can tell it's about average no?
    – user9646
    Nov 30, 2016 at 8:21
  • How soon do you think the second paper will be ready to be submitted?
    – Alexander Woo
    Nov 30, 2016 at 17:46
  • @NajibIdrissi: This depends on subfield. It's probably average in algebraic topology or mathematical physics, but it would be unusual in combinatorics.
    – Alexander Woo
    Nov 30, 2016 at 17:48
  • @NajibIdrissi: It's a bit above the average. It would not be particularly unusual to have a paper of this length, but it's longer than optimal. Also, it combines some rather different tools, so we were worried it would be hard to find referees for the whole thing.
    – Jakub Konieczny
    Nov 30, 2016 at 21:40
  • @AlexanderWoo In theory, a week or so should suffice. In practice, these things tend to drag on.
    – Jakub Konieczny
    Nov 30, 2016 at 21:41

2 Answers 2

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Option (a) does seem to be a better choice at this point in time. Later, when one of the parts are published, it would be better to list only the published article instead of the preprint. If you are concerned about the visibility of the other part of the work, you may upload a preprent of just the other part to make sure there are no overlaps in your publications list.

Once both papers are published it would make sense to only include those articles without the preprint entirely.

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This answer is under the assumption that the second paper will be publicly available within a few weeks - before job applications you have submitted are likely to make their last round of decisions (which takes longer than you might think):

I would list the two papers you will submit on your CV, with a note about their relationship to the ArXiv preprint, so:

Paper 1, submitted, longer version available as ArXiv.blahblahblah

Paper 2, in preparation, to contain material from ArXiv.blahblahblah not in Paper 1.

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