Scientific Research Publishing - Unspoken Rules [closed]

Question

Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.

Closed 7 years ago.

I would like to know more about some (unspoken) rules in scientific research publishing. More precisely, i am interested in computer science field.

Can someone expect his papers to be published in any top level journal (M23, M22, M21) without completed bachelor studies or master studies?
Is it true that professors have better chances their papers to be published than graduated students or it is just a justification for academic exploitation?
Can someone who works in IT industry or is unemployed expect his papers to be considered or even published?
What are the differences between the first author and other authors? Taking the academic exploitation into account, is it profitable for a student to be the second author after the professor?

In the case of computer science, a couple of venues (conferences and journals) have recently introduced a double-blind review process, which means that the reviewers do not know the identities of the authors. That being said, a professor typically has more experience in writing publishable papers than an undergrad, which may be helpful when trying to write a publishable paper. — lighthouse keeper, Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 15:57
Please ask one question per post. Also, some of these questions have already been asked and answered on this site. — ff524, Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 16:11
See: What does first authorship really mean?, Does one need to be affiliated with a university to publish papers? — ff524, Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 16:13

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-10 14:12:13Z

In order:

Theoretically, sure. Practically, almost never going to happen. The chief reason for this is that graduate studies are designed to instruct you on how to conduct and report on original research. Even a bachelor's degree alone will usually not be sufficient; anything less than that, and you probably don't have enough expertise to conduct cutting-edge research.
As @lighthousekeeper pointed out, being a professor usually means you have more experience in producing papers. As with most things in life, practice makes perfect.
Someone in the IT industry -- most certainly. Researchers at Facebook, Google, Amazon, HP, and many other companies have dozens of papers (if not more) published every year at top CS conferences.

An unemployed individual certainly could get published. But see #2 for why this is unlikely to happen. In addition, not having access to research databases and journal databases will stymie most individuals looking to conduct independent research (though not all).
Entirely depends on the field. In some fields, author names are listed alphabetically, so it doesn't matter who is first or last. In other fields, the first author is usually the researcher who wrote the majority of the paper. As a student in CS, there's nothing wrong with having second authorship on several papers. You'll want to eventually have first authorship on at least one or two publications, but any authorship is valuable when you're starting out.

Even in CS author order may be purely alphabetical (depending on how theoretical the field). — Tobias Kildetoft, Commented Jan 18, 2017 at 16:27

1 Answer 1