How to prevent papers from being published in advance by others?

Question

I have a new idea, and the experimental results are also good. But my mentor does not allow me to publish it yet. But I am worried that the idea will be robbed by others. So is there any way to not publish it now, but I will take advantage of this idea first？ I am a computer major, and I mainly publish conference papers. If I upload the paper to arxiv, will others not be able to use the same idea as me? If I upload it to arxiv, many people will have seen this paper. When I submit this paper again after a year, will it be because it is a previous one, and everyone has seen it, so it won’t be accepted.

Answer 1

If I upload the paper to arxiv, will others not be able to use the same idea as me?

They absolutely can, but because you have uploaded your paper, you have established precedence: you can claim you had the idea and did the work first. Others can still use your idea (and you should feel flattered they do!) but they would have to cite you.

There are many papers on the arXiv that have accumulated lots of citations but have never been published in journals, e.g. this one. If the authors of that paper ever submit it to a journal, there's a high chance it will be published quickly, simply because it is so impactful.

Answer 2

You can't prevent or control parallel research. If an area is "hot" at the moment or there is an outstanding problem that is blocking progress in an important area, then you can assume that there will be many people working on it in parallel. The crux of a solution may first be seen by someone, unknown to others. But if that first person doesn't get their work published (and I mean by a reviewed journal or conference) then anyone can be "first to print".

You can't "own" ideas.

You can claim priority, but it is in the publication that it gets recognized. It is even possible that parallel researchers "share" priority when publishing the same thing at about the same time. This gets questioned, of course, but it does happen. I know of one important case and knew the people involved.

To be honest, I've had a lot of ideas that I never followed up on. Later, I've seen one or two of them appear in print. Good for the authors. Maybe I should have done something. The honor is theirs. But one of the ways in which I discovered I was "smart enough" was that some of the ideas presented at conferences and workshops didn't surprise me.

Some people like to try to use arXiv (and related) to "protect" their ideas. But I don't think they really do that very well. Until a solution to some problem is, not only made public by its authors, but also vetted by the community it is subject to debate and correction. If you really want priority, finish the work and submit it to a journal or conference. ArXiv is intended for preprints of articles entering the review process, not for publishing unfinished ideas. Some things there seem to be very good, but it isn't a panacea.