Timeline for Publishing papers that became classics before they were submitted
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
40 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 14, 2022 at 3:07 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jun 15, 2022 at 3:05 | |||||
| Jun 12, 2022 at 13:42 | answer | added | Alison Miller | timeline score: 10 | |
| Jun 9, 2022 at 23:02 | answer | added | Edward Dunne | timeline score: 8 | |
| Jun 9, 2022 at 21:13 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Who doubts this is not now and never was about MathOverflow, or maths in general, but rather about technical papers in general? Should I not care? | |
| Jun 9, 2022 at 3:52 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | For the OP: I fear that this question is in danger of just attracting answers where people like to post their favourite examples of "unpublished classics" while not addressing the question you have put in bold "how should an editor deal with this". Is there anything you can do about this, or are you happy with the current trend of answers? | |
| Jun 9, 2022 at 1:24 | answer | added | Margaret Friedland | timeline score: 9 | |
| Jun 9, 2022 at 0:03 | history | protected | Yemon Choi | ||
| Jun 8, 2022 at 23:47 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | @Trunk Don't you think the whole point is that in terms of publication there can be no significant difference between the essential content of the eventual paper and the paper itself? What is any paper for, but to publish its essential content? | |
| Jun 8, 2022 at 12:55 | comment | added | Igor Belegradek | @Kostya_I: usually, when the author of an important paper has also written many other papers and knows all there is to know about publishing them (and hence has no need to seek advice at MO). Another common situation is when an important preprint is produced early on one's career and the author then leaves research mathematics, and at some point wants to publish it. Then it is best to seek advice from trusted expert(s) in the field. Some of the experts could be also editors and may solicit the paper for their journal, if they find it appropriate. Without seeing the paper not much can be said. | |
| Jun 8, 2022 at 7:16 | answer | added | David White | timeline score: 14 | |
| Jun 7, 2022 at 14:00 | comment | added | Kostya_I | @IgorBelegradek, 'If a paper becomes a classic, rules don't apply.' - in fact, I would be also very interested in what the ground rules are. What if it's not quite a classic, just important enough to become known to the community? | |
| Jun 7, 2022 at 12:21 | comment | added | Matthew Pressland | I realise I should also mention Auslander: some of his most influential work was only originally available in the form of lecture notes, and only formally published posthumously in collections of his work. However, it was available to sufficiently many people before this to attain 'classic' status despite the lack of formal publication. | |
| Jun 7, 2022 at 12:19 | comment | added | Matthew Pressland | @RobbieGoodwin While the OP does refer to other situations as well, there are several instances in which a manuscript is widely circulated (nowadays usually as an arXiv preprint), without being published in a journal. I would still refer to such a document as a 'paper' but others might disagree. David Speyer mentioned a preprint by Postnikov above: there is highly-cited work by Ginzburg on Calabi–Yau algebras which has remained a preprint for more than 15 years, and an influential manuscript by Buchweitz from the 80s that was circulated widely (before eventually being published very recently). | |
| Jun 6, 2022 at 11:14 | comment | added | Trunk | @Robbie Goodwin It's clear enough that OP refers to the essential content of the eventual paper, not the paper itself. I get the impression that the "exposition" would be rather high-level and the "proof" perhaps clear only to those working in that area and capable of filling in the missing parts of a publishable (rigorous) proof. My own remark on this situation would be how healthy it is to have at least one academic field where the progress of human knowledge is seen as more exigent than the progress of the author via a brilliant publication, as it sadly often is in other fields. | |
| Jun 6, 2022 at 1:10 | answer | added | Pace Nielsen | timeline score: 12 | |
| Jun 6, 2022 at 0:01 | comment | added | Robbie Goodwin | Could you re-phase that? "Publishing papers that became classics before they were submitted" seems to me, for one, way off the mark. The papers did not become classics, or anything else; they simply did not exist. The exposition here seems to describe, for instance, Pythagoras' theorem being somehow accepted and later Pythagoras - or anyone - publishing some combination of a detailed argument for why the theorem works, or an explanation of how it was discovered. If I was editing The Journal of Geometry in Greece Today I'd bite the writer's arm off, and who would not? | |
| Jun 5, 2022 at 23:44 | comment | added | Michael Greinecker | An example from economics: The 1977 paper "Nash Equilibrium and Welfare Optimality" by Eric Maskin was published in 1999 (in an excellent journal). It was the main paper that lead to Maskin receiving the Nobel memorial prize. | |
| Jun 5, 2022 at 20:32 | answer | added | Olaf Teschke | timeline score: 17 | |
| Jun 5, 2022 at 19:22 | comment | added | Dmitri Pavlov | An example: Segal's “The definition of conformal field theory” (where functorial field theories, including TQFTs, were originally defined) is an extremely influential paper that was only published in 2004, as an unrefereed paper in conference proceedings. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 20:44 | comment | added | Hollis Williams | Many of Wolfgang Pauli's results were unpublished and are known because he wrote them down in letters which he sent to other physicists, including his prediction of the neutrino. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 16:34 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jun 4, 2022 at 14:45 | answer | added | Alexandre Eremenko | timeline score: 35 | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 14:38 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | While this sort of thing does seem to be rare in other fields, I can think of one possible example. Some philosophers are interested in some of Saul Kripke's unpublished work. I'm not familiar enough with the details to cite a specific example, though. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 14:33 | answer | added | Venkataramana | timeline score: 17 | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 14:28 | comment | added | David E Speyer | Alex Postnikov's "Total positivity, Grassmannians, and networks" has been around for 20 years now and probably has been cited hundreds of times. I still hope he'll submit it. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 14:13 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 33 | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 14:05 | comment | added | Igor Belegradek | If a paper becomes a classic, rules don't apply. Still I don't see old classic papers eventually appearing in top journals. Sometimes, a paper is put in a special issue of a journal (or conference proceedings) with a foreword explaining the historical context. Another option is assemble several such papers in a book, see e.g "The Hauptvermutung Book: A Collection of Papers on the Topology of Manifolds". Finally, one could publish the paper in collected works by the author. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 13:50 | history | edited | Sam Nead |
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| Jun 4, 2022 at 13:16 | comment | added | LSpice | Based on the (very interesting) answers so far, I think it might be good to put up front—even though you have bolded it already—that you are not just looking for examples, but specifically about how an editor should treat such a submission differently from any other. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 12:47 | answer | added | Alexandre Eremenko | timeline score: 40 | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 11:32 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Asaf Karagila♦ | ||
| Jun 4, 2022 at 10:24 | answer | added | Joe Silverman | timeline score: 26 | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 9:07 | comment | added | Dan Petersen | @MattF "Calculus III" had been circulating as a preprint (and used and cited) since the 80's. My understanding is that all main results were already there. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:57 | comment | added | user44143 | @DanPetersen, in that paper “the theory has evolved over the last two decades and the paper reflects this development”, which is not quite the situation described in the question. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:56 | comment | added | Ben McKay | An example: McLean, Robert C. Deformations of calibrated submanifolds. Comm. Anal. Geom. 6 (1998), no. 4, 705–747. Hitchin's MR review: McLean's paper has been highly influential already. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:55 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jun 5, 2022 at 16:25 | |||||
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:52 | comment | added | Dan Petersen | An example: zbmath.org/?q=an%3A1067.55006 | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:40 | comment | added | user44143 | Since the post gives no examples, I have voted to close as needing details. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:34 | comment | added | Kostya_I | I'm not posting in Academia since I've never heard this to occur in other fields. | |
| Jun 4, 2022 at 8:33 | history | asked | Kostya_I | CC BY-SA 4.0 |