How to write the abstract for a paper

[Zanket]

I think this is a bit rich ... a great many PF-ers would be delighted if you could point out an inconsistency:

I thought it was a bit rich too, which is why in another thread I asked for clarification. The rules for the relativity forum say “[this forum] is not meant as a soapbox for those who wish to argue Relativity's validity”. The clarification I got is along the lines of what you say. I think the rules should be amended to say what you say.

My original idea was to link to my paper in a post here at PF, and let it be vetted here. I think there are enough people here who are smart about relativity. But in this thread ZapperZ cautions that no significant contribution to science has been published outside of a peer-reviewed journal, and my paper would be banned from those journals if I publish it elsewhere first (they want first dibs). I imply from this that publishing here on PF would doom the paper to obscurity, even if not refuted. Do you have any comment on that?

c ) with good observational or experimental results (OTHER than those already discussed at considerable length in the professional literature).

Not sure I get this one. How can I show that a new metric is confirmed by tests of GR without referring to the results of some of the same experiments as for GR? I do show that the new metric predicts different results than does GR for tests not yet done; is that what you mean?

 

[ZapperZ]

My original idea was to link to my paper in a post here at PF, and let it be vetted here. I think there are enough people here who are smart about relativity. But in this thread ZapperZ cautions that no significant contribution to science has been published outside of a peer-reviewed journal, and my paper would be banned from those journals if I publish it elsewhere first (they want first dibs). I imply from this that publishing here on PF would doom the paper to obscurity, even if not refuted. Do you have any comment on that

You are bombarded with many information each day. How do you discriminate what you pay attention to, and what you barely pay attention to, and what do you ignore?

Most physics journals, especially the popular ones, get tons of submission EACH DAY. If they pay equal attention to ALL of them, I will say without hesitation that nothing will get published because they will not be able to hire enough people to process them, and they will not be able to find enough referees to review them (I'm on my 3rd week reviewing one single paper right now).

Based on this info, consider YOUR situation: (i) From what I gather, you are the sole author of this paper, no? (ii) you are not part of a collaboration of well-known group or authors (iii) You have no previous track record of publication, presentation, work, etc. in the field you're writing on. (iv) Your paper didn't come with any endorsement from someone working in such a field.

Now tell me, if you receive 2000+ papers today, and yours is one of them, would you pay much attention to yourself? MORE prominent authors than you have been rejected for publications. So what makes you think your chances would be any better?

And what journal did you submit this to? In all of this, you have neglected to mention the name of the journal that has rejected your submission. You didn't send it into Nature or Science, did you, because if you did, I could have saved you the trouble and tell you this outcome before hand.

What about working from the ground up? (i) find some expert in this field (NOT on PF!) and ask him/her to review your work! Unless you can get someone to endorse it, I do not see a good possibility of getting a publication (ii) aim for the lower-tier journals. I do not see Science, Nature, PRL, or even PRE in your future. To be blunt, find some obscure journal that covers this area and submit it there. This is the ONLY way that I can see to build a track record in your case.

Zz.

 

[Zanket]

Now tell me, if you receive 2000+ papers today, and yours is one of them, would you pay much attention to yourself?

I would not. That is why I had forsaken the peer-reviewed journal route to begin with. Ideally a journal would be up front to deny submission in the cases you mention (if they won’t read it, why should they allow it to be submitted?); but I didn’t expect them to do that either.

MORE prominent authors than you have been rejected for publications. So what makes you think your chances would be any better?

I figured my chances would be near zero.

And what journal did you submit this to?

To Science, only because if my odds are near zero with all journals, why not start at the top? The rejection was not unexpected. Still I will ask them for a scientific explanation for the rejection. If everyone summarily rejected bombarded them with emails, it might induce them to change their submission process to deny submission to papers they won’t read. Or they are especially haughty they’ll send those emails to a bit bucket.

What about working from the ground up? (i) find some expert in this field (NOT on PF!) and ask him/her to review your work! Unless you can get someone to endorse it, I do not see a good possibility of getting a publication (ii) aim for the lower-tier journals.

That is good advice, thanks. I will work on those. I have looked for a lower-tier journal; do you know of one that is not full of UFOlogy?

 

[Andre]

I do hear a grin in the back, somewhere shut up, Thomas Kühn.

You can look for your "wheel barrow" whatever you want but if your crackpottery encompasses more than one speciality, you have a big problem. Believe me.

 

[jma2001]

Zanket,

I sent you an e-mail this morning, offering to read your paper and give you some feedback, but I haven't heard back from you. Are you afraid someone is going to steal your idea?

 

[Zanket]

I just saw your email; I'm here sporadically. Since you mention it here, I'll reply here: I appreciate your interest. I'm going to first try ZapperZ's suggested route, of getting an expert in the field to review it. If I am unsuccessful in that then I will email you back. (Keep in mind that you need a good intuitive understanding of SR and GR as a baseline.)

 

[gazzo]

I just got our national math journal in the mail today, and most of the papers published were received ~2 years ago (eg one was received 02/05).

Just suprising, didn't think the reviewing process would be that long...

 

[Monique]

I just got our national math journal in the mail today, and most of the papers published were received ~2 years ago (eg one was received 02/05).

as in Februari 2005? :zzz:

 

[Andre]

That seems to be normal:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3S-4D981HT-7&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F01%2F2004&_rdoc=4&_fmt=summary&_orig=browse&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0b284267bd4253e881e9a30a3ae22780

Received 19 October 2002; revised 17 February 2004; accepted 6 July 2004. Available online 11 September 2004.

 

[Zanket]

An update on the saga of me trying to get my paper published:

I’m learning a lot about the process, mostly that science is a “conforming members only” club subsidized by the taxpayers. I’ve learned that most peer-reviewed journals are closed to either unknown submitters or novel ideas. The quality of the paper is irrelevant. For example, http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:7T80CoxZEcUJ:www.iscid.org/papers/Tipler_PeerReview_070103.pdf+einstein+%22peer-review%22+planck&hl=en by Tipler was an eye opener; apparently some Nobel winners had a hard time getting groundbreaking ideas published—they often got rejected even though there was nothing wrong with their paper. What chance do I have then?

After getting summarily rejected from the journal Science (presumably because I’m an unknown, as corroborated by others) after spending some hours formatting my paper to their specs, I have taken to emailing the editor of a journal first, to ask if they reject out of hand like Science does. I politely ask if my paper will be read given that I am unknown and the paper challenges the status quo. The answers are diplomatic, pretending openness, but I’ve worked for bureaucratic organizations enough to plainly read between the lines, “We’ll reject you even before the last bits of your paper hit our server!”

I’m trying to get an endorsement on arxiv.org now, so I can submit the paper there. This page warns endorsers, “You should not endorse the author if the author is unfamiliar with the basic facts of the field, or if the work is entirely disconnected with current work in the area.” The first part is of course fine, but the second part reads a lot like, “or if the work is a novel idea.” So I may come to find out that this avenue is closed to me too, and again regardless of the quality of the paper. But there’s hope yet.

I take comfort in that my government affords me copyright protection, and let's me self-publish to a web site. At least that way I got the paper date-stamped. I’m not complaining about the way things are, but I do wonder (like Tipler does) to where science would be progressing were things different. Who knows how many great ideas are being lost to science because it is a “conforming members only” club?

 

[ZapperZ]

Who knows how many great ideas are being lost to science because it is a “conforming members only” club?

None. Because so far, all people have done is speculate, but no one could show even ONE idea that was "lost".

Zz.

 

[jma2001]

I take comfort in that my government affords me copyright protection, and let's me self-publish to a web site. At least that way I got the paper date-stamped.

Well, if you do self-publish your paper to a web site, please post the link here. After all this discussion and debate over a paper we have never seen, I for one would very much like to read it for myself.

 

[Zanket]

None. Because so far, all people have done is speculate, but no one could show even ONE idea that was "lost".

That is the finest example I've seen of putting the cart before the horse.

 

[Zanket]

Well, I sent a mail to be posted to sci.physics.research requesting an endorser for arxiv, including a link to the paper. This is a moderated newsgroup. I just got a reply back from the moderator saying that my mail cannot be posted to the newsgroup because the paper is overly speculative. I replied to the mod:

That's bull****, with all due respect. Each section of the paper builds on the last to culminate in a rock-solid experimental confirmation section. How could I have overly speculated to end up matching all significant digits of a bunch of experiments? I don't think you read the paper. You only glanced at it and it didn't match your worldview.

Jma2001, I’ll send you the link by email. I won’t put it on PF.

 

[ZapperZ]

That is the finest example I've seen of putting the cart before the horse.

Fine, let's examine what YOU have done, shall we?

Go re-read that link you gave by Tipler. I find it appaling that you would cite him RELIGIOUSLY in here and in that "other" thread about the TD section when it suits your need, and yet, you IGNORED completely when he CLEARLY said that with regards to Einstein's 1905 paper, it was, in the truest sense, "peer-reviewed".

Secondly, I was going to just let that snide comment of yours about the taxpayers subsidizing the "conforming members only". But it appears that someone (me) has to knock some sense of reality into you. First of all, as one of those people funded by "taxpayers money", I hold ZERO copyrights on ALL my papers published while I am funded. Every single work I've done and published belongs to the "taxpayers" and in the public domain. Next, if I ever file a patent, the patent does NOT belong to me, but to the funding or public institution that I either work for, or funded the work. If the patent ever makes any money (more than half of patents never see a cent), I only get a small percentage of that money based on the agreement of the contact that I signed. Thirdly, do you know how many times we are reviewed on what we do every year? Our program is reviewed once a year by the Dept. of Energy. Our division review us once a year internally. The U. of Chicago (that runs the lab under contract from the DOE) review us every other year. And this doesn't count yet the additional safety review we go through every so often in a year! So before you settle comfortably in your smug ignorance about what it means to be taxpayer funded, try getting those through your head.

Thirdly, for every Tipler ramblings you can come up with, I can come up with an opposite opinion. I am not surprised that you either did not read, or ignored Dan Koshland article in Nature "Crazy, but correct"[1]. He tried publishing back in the 1950's an explanation that countered the conventional wisdom at that time and was rejected by several journals. Unlike you, he didn't whinned and blame the world, but rather went to "lower-tier" journal to get it published. The rest, as they say, is history because what he publshed has now gone into textbooks. And since you like to play with the "quatation" game, I'll do the same:

Non-conformists are necessary for progress in science, just as mutations are necessary for progress in evolution. However, there must be constraints to select good mutations from bad mutations. Too many mutations block evolution, as error-prone strains of bacteria have proved.

But it is not easy to select between the unexpected and the impossible in today's world of increasing specialization and exponential increase in knowledge. The existence of multiple journals provides the final safeguard against too much conservatism and is the ultimate reason that science is more receptive to non-conformity than any other segment of our society

So what it boils down to now is that what you hold so dearly to what Tipler said is not some objective fact, but rather a subjective opinion based on a matter of tastes. Tipler and you have yours, and Koshland and I have ours. Except there is an important difference. While you rely on 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th hand information, I live and deal with this directly. I do not rely on hearsay, and I certainly do not base all of my opinion on what others think.

It is utterly arrogant of you to think that (i) you DESERVE to get published in Science, of all places and (ii) your rejection is anything SPECIAL due to your lack of "reputation" (even if this is true). Science rejects WAY more papers than it even considered! *I* have been rejected by Science. The paper that I co-authored eventually was published in PRL and it became the most-cited paper of all the papers that I've published! I know of bigger names in physics that have been rejected by Science, even BEFORE the paper ever got to the referees. You're not special!

What you have shown is your propensity to cite dubious sources, your lack of meticulous checking of information, and your tendency to only see and use what suits your needs and reject or ignore those that don't, even from the SAME source! Nothing that has transpired here reveal to me someone who can produce high quality work that can stand the test of being challenged.

Zz.

[1] D.E. Koshland, Nature, v.432, p.447 (2004).

 

[Zanket]

Go re-read that link you gave by Tipler. I find it appaling that you would cite him RELIGIOUSLY in here and in that "other" thread about the TD section when it suits your need, and yet, you IGNORED completely when he CLEARLY said that with regards to Einstein's 1905 paper, it was, in the truest sense, "peer-reviewed".

Two different threads, the same paper cited for different reasons in each. He said the opposite of what you imply. I’ll respond to this in the other thread. Please don’t merge threads.

So before you settle comfortably in your smug ignorance about what it means to be taxpayer funded, try getting those through your head.

Nowhere have I said that science is wasting taxpayers’ money, as you imply. The taxpayers are wasting their own money. The system they have allowed to form is suboptimal. They could easily get higher value for their money.

I am not surprised that you either did not read, or ignored Dan Koshland article in Nature "Crazy, but correct"[1]. He tried publishing back in the 1950's an explanation that countered the conventional wisdom at that time and was rejected by several journals.

Good to know. I’ll check that one out.

Unlike you, he didn't whinned and blame the world, but rather went to "lower-tier" journal to get it published.

All I have done here is put my saga and opinions. I am no more whining than Tipler does, or than you do in your three points above about the burden put on you by the taxpayers.

The rest, as they say, is history because what he publshed has now gone into textbooks. And since you like to play with the "quatation" game, I'll do the same:

I agree on Koshland’s quote on mutations. The problem in science is that mutations are inspected inefficiently. Eventual Nobel winners should not be getting rejected as a matter of course. There should be another avenue for the mutants, as Tipler suggests.

Re “multiple journals provides the final safeguard,” there is some truth to that but again it’s inefficient for an eventual Nobel winner to have to submit a paper to a succession of journals over a period of months or years. Tipler’s proposed solution is to set up a panel of open-minded experts to give the mutants an avenue that is not all but closed to new ideas.

So what it boils down to now is that what you hold so dearly to what Tipler said is not some objective fact, but rather a subjective opinion based on a matter of tastes. Tipler and you have yours, and Koshland and I have ours. Except there is an important difference. While you rely on 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th hand information, I live and deal with this directly. I do not rely on hearsay, and I certainly do not base all of my opinion on what others think.

Oh, the haughtiness!

It is utterly arrogant of you to think that (i) you DESERVE to get published in Science,

I said the opposite. I said I would reject people like me were I running their show, but I would do it by disallowing the submission. Please read my posts more carefully before responding.

The paper that I co-authored eventually was published in PRL and it became the most-cited paper of all the papers that I've published! I know of bigger names in physics that have been rejected by Science, even BEFORE the paper ever got to the referees. You're not special!

Yes, master.

 

[mathwonk]

moderator, please close this sad thread.