Timeline for Obsessive editing/revising of math papers
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 16 at 9:25 | comment | added | Joshua P. Swanson | @LSpice I've occasionally felt the authors wasted their time polishing a paper that wasn't worth writing in the first place. Once this was in a quick opinion, where I pointed out they could have quoted a standard result and saved themselves 10 pages. Very nicely written otherwise--a shame. It was rejected. | |
| Sep 29, 2018 at 4:59 | answer | added | Brendan McKay | timeline score: 11 | |
| Sep 29, 2018 at 0:58 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 10 | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 12:41 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Sep 28, 2018 at 9:47 | comment | added | Mark Wildon | @Jeremy Rickard: As I'm sure was clear to you from the position of the second apostrophe, the answer is no! | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 9:37 | comment | added | Zach Teitler | There are some (small but nonzero number of) master’s or PhD theses that never got written up and published because of authors taking forever to polish them, and eventually something else came up and the author stopped working on it... and then eventually the thesis/dissertation disappears from the internet, and the result is more or less lost. So I guess take as long as you want to write a paper, but DO write the paper! | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 6:35 | answer | added | Nicola Ciccoli | timeline score: 16 | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 23:59 | comment | added | Christian Remling | @LSpice: There's an idea... (actually, the arxiv does work that way in part) | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 23:52 | answer | added | David G. Stork | timeline score: 30 | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 20:46 | comment | added | LSpice | @ChristianRemling, if only minor tweaks to one's papers promoted them in people's attention the same way that fixing a typo brings a years-old MO post to the front page …. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:48 | comment | added | Jim Conant | @CountIblis: Edits from elsevier and the like are usually surface level, mostly style suggestions. They won't be able to suggest pedagogical improvements or simplifications in the structure of arguments. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:43 | answer | added | Piotr Hajlasz | timeline score: 63 | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:35 | comment | added | Count Iblis | That's the job of Elsevier. They make a lot of money, employ vast numbers of people, so why should we do their job? | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:24 | comment | added | Christian Remling | Since your (or mine or anyone's) papers are unlikely to be read by anyone, obsessive editing of a paper is not nearly as disturbing as constant edits to an MO question. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:18 | comment | added | darij grinberg | The answer will of course depend on how finished your first version is. Some people start writing with the structure of their paper already fully established in their mind (or on their scratch papers); some just pile bricks one atop another in the hope of eventually obtaining a ziggurat. The former might be able to do with a lot less re-reading than the latter. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:17 | comment | added | Jeremy Rickard | @MarkWildon You mean you start by trying to decide whether more or fewer than 60 people are likely to read the paper? | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:12 | comment | added | Mark Wildon | I was once told that an hour of the author's time is worth a minute of the reader's time. I write all my papers with this firmly in mind. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 19:01 | answer | added | Gerhard Paseman | timeline score: 8 | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 18:40 | review | Close votes | |||
| Oct 1, 2018 at 15:20 | |||||
| Sep 27, 2018 at 18:18 | comment | added | RBega2 | At some point you are presumably introducing as many errors/issues as you are fixing. I wonder if anyone as introduced a (reasonable) model of this behavior and estimated an optimal stopping time. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 18:17 | comment | added | Ben McKay | Obsess when you have tenure; it is your duty to the community. But when you don't have tenure, just shovel the mathematics out the barn door as fast as you can. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 17:48 | comment | added | Greg Martin | I think this (interesting) question would be better suited for academia.stackexchange. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 17:47 | comment | added | LSpice | @FedericoPoloni, also readers! I have often read papers that could have benefited from more editing, but have never read a paper and thought "if only the author had taken less care in writing this." | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 17:46 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | @T_M Your anonymous referees must love you. :) | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 17:46 | comment | added | SBK | I've often thought there is quite a good argument for getting a paper to literally the minimum acceptable level and then just submitting. | |
| Sep 27, 2018 at 17:41 | history | asked | Forever Mozart | CC BY-SA 4.0 |