Publishing a framework review

Question

I have been examining a novel machine-learning framework for a seminar at uni. After some people asked me whether I would publish the results in a paper so they could see them as well, I thought I might as well put some more effort into it and make a publication out of it.

However:

1. I am not sure whether this adds any research value since I did not really do something new, I just summarized the key concepts of the framework and took example use-cases to compare their implementation with and without the framework (implementations without the comparison have been done in blog posts).
2. I have recently been told that publications in a non-high-ranking journal can actually hurt your career. I do not want this to negatively affect my PhD application later this year.

My question is thus: Is it worth publishing a paper that is only an examination of a framework and a comparison with not using it?

Some technical background: the framework in question is Google's TensorFlow and I am comparing plain Python implementations of machine learning algorithms with the implementation utilizing the framework. I wanted to also briefly summarize the framework and compare it with other machine learning frameworks already out there - this is only half a page regarding performance, capability etc though, no code is compared here. Ultimately, the paper aims at people currently using Python who are not sure whether they should switch.

Answer 1

I think that there are two questions in here that it may be useful to separate out:

1. Should you spend the time to prepare a well-written analysis that you make publicly available to others?
2. Should you make your analysis available in the form of a peer-reviewed paper?

For the first, it seems that you've done much of the analytical work already, and that there are people who will appreciate it. I thus see no reason not to produce a good write-up and publish it.

Whether you should publish it as a peer-reviewed paper, on the other hand, is not so clear to me. I don't think that you need to worry about being looked down upon for publishing such a paper: that concern is more about bad work, not work with a clear, intentionally limited scope. I just don't think there's much to gain from going through a formal peer review process here unless your work involved more experimentation and surprises than it sounds like it did.

Instead, I would recommend posting your analysis as a technical memo (many institutions have a mechanism of this sort), a whitepaper, an arXiv pre-print, or other such semi-formal document. A semi-formal publication of this sort can place your work in a permanent archive with a DOI and clear means of citing if people find it useful, yet also is fast, easy, and need not be a significant distraction from the main thrust of your research.