Timeline for Tips for reading arXiv papers in mathematics
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 9 at 10:55 | comment | added | David White | @timothychow of my 32 publications, 5 have been double blind review: 3 in math adjacent fields, 2 in stats/data science education. I did what you're doing, and kept it off my webpage and arxiv till accepted. I think senior people can afford to wait, and to support double blind. Maybe someday the culture around it would change and there wouldn't be pressure on junior people to have public preprints. Anyway clearly it starts with people like us with stable jobs. | |
| Mar 9 at 6:36 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @SamHopkins I just submitted a paper to the American Mathematical Monthly and the instructions said that I should not post my manuscript anywhere publicly until the journal arrives at an editorial decision on my paper. I don't think they would reject a paper if they discovered it on the arXiv, but this illustrates that the tension between double-blind refereeing and posting on the arXiv is not just hypothetical. In my case, I decided to comply with the request, but as you point out, there are many reasons why early-career mathematicians in particular might face a quandary. | |
| Feb 11 at 15:49 | vote | accept | Shaun | ||
| Feb 7 at 21:56 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @LSpice: Just try searching for a post-early-2021 paper on Sci-hub (by date of publication). At the moment, even the old ones are hard to access, but they are duplicated on the annas-archive.org mirrors. | |
| Feb 7 at 21:53 | comment | added | LSpice | @darijgrinberg, re, has Sci-Hub stopped getting new papers? Wiki notes that archive efforts were undertaken in case it was taken offline, but not that it is no longer adding new papers. \\ Also re, I mention that it is not required to provide source, and some authors don't like to. But even more readers don't even know about the option for the papers that do, so it's always good to spread the word! | |
| Feb 7 at 17:04 | history | edited | David White | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 7 at 16:02 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @DavidWhite: Yes, but that's on the authors of the paper being cited. I'm talking about the steps that the authors of a paper citing it should be taking. | |
| Feb 7 at 15:24 | comment | added | David White | @darijgrinberg I think we'd both agree that the best solution is for authors to upload the last version of their papers to arxiv as I suggested in (13). | |
| Feb 7 at 14:09 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @DavidWhite: Since sci-hub stopped getting new papers (ca. 2021), there is no reason to expect readers to have access to published versions. Thus, many will be reading the arXiv version one way or another. If the numbering differs, they will be confused. (Even more so if there is an uncorrected error in the arXiv version.) | |
| Feb 7 at 14:08 | comment | added | Monroe Eskew | @DavidWhite If double-blind leads to less open-access (or slower speed of access), I doubt it being overall a positive trend. That's a big trade-off. | |
| Feb 7 at 14:05 | comment | added | David White | @JoeSilverman I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. I usually wait a week or two between arxiv and submitting. Very junior people might add the step of emailing the preprint to specific math friends to get feedback. I'm glad to know math is moving more towards double blind, for equity reasons. I've published several double blind papers in applied statistics and for those I left them off arxiv till the paper was accepted. | |
| Feb 7 at 14:04 | comment | added | Monroe Eskew | @darijgrinberg I find that due to specialization, anonymity is practically impossible to maintain even for first impressions. I even worry that people are able to reliably guess the identity of the referee based on the way the comments are worded and what kinds of things they say. | |
| Feb 7 at 14:03 | comment | added | David White | @DenisT Sorry if I upset you in some way. When giving career advice to young people, I strive to be forthright and realistic, instead of presenting an idealized view of the math community. There are MANY examples of prominent senior people getting upset over a perception of being snubbed. I recently read a long horror story from the category theory community. And, scooping does happen. We should aim to stop bad senior people but we should also alert junior people to potential dangers (fortunately, still pretty rare). | |
| Feb 7 at 14:00 | comment | added | David White | @darijgrinberg Thanks for clarifying what you meant. I do think it's important to cite the published version, because of citation metrics for the author and journal. If there's a mismatch between theorem numbering, I cite the journal version because it's more stable. The author could conceivably change the arxiv version after my paper is published, so in your example one would also need to state which version it's 3.2 in, which makes the in-line citations even longer. I also strive to normalize relying on the published literature more than preprints. | |
| Feb 7 at 3:58 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @TimothyChow: Double-blind refereeing in mathematics doesn't mean total anonymity. It means that you don't rub your name in the referees' noses. This is the best you can hope for in a field that doesn't have hundreds of people. But it's useful for ensuring that the referees' first impressions are more or less objective. | |
| Feb 7 at 3:55 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @Kimball: I suggest citing both, but referencing the numbering of the arXiv one if they differ. So "By [15, Theorem 3.2 in the arXiv version]". Of course, the ideal solution is to ask the author to synchronize the versions, but in my experience authors rarely bother to. | |
| Feb 7 at 3:37 | comment | added | Kimball | Then cite the arXiv version! @darijgrinberg Are you suggesting to not cite versions that appeared in journals? Or just include the arXiv version number when the paper has not yet appeared? The latter makes sense to me, the former not. | |
| Feb 7 at 1:52 | comment | added | Joe Silverman | next comment, since I'm out of space. I think it's highly beneficial for people at every career stage to post their work to the ArXiv, although the timing is up to the individual. It's true that this means double-blind is less effective, since a referee can find the article's author(s) on the ArXiv. And for the many people who look at the ArXiv's daily or weekly listings in their field, it makes DB refereeing moot. But to answer the question you seem to be asking, I think that the benefits of posting one's work on the ArXiv outweighs the possibility that it will prevent DB refereeing. | |
| Feb 7 at 1:47 | comment | added | Joe Silverman | @TimothyChow The following is my personal opinion, it doesn't reflect AMS policy, and I certainly wouldn't try to speak for the entire mathematical community. So, my view is that there are good arguments for using double-blind refereeing, and also that there are reasonable arguments against. I lean toward the view that the upside outweighs the downside, but that the overall effect is probably not large. However, after the AMS has had (say) 5 years of experience, it will be interesting to try to quantify the (hopefully positive) effect. As for postig on the ArXiv, I'll need to go to the ... | |
| Feb 6 at 22:19 | comment | added | Sam Hopkins | @TimothyChow: I support the double-blind refereeing process (although it does have its issues). But there is no way that it will change the established practice of making your article publicly available before it has been accepted for publication. For example, say you're a graduating PhD student. Your results from your PhD lead to a paper. It can take months to years to hear back from a journal. When you give job talks, you have to be able to reference your work, and you want people to be able to look at it. | |
| Feb 6 at 22:01 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @JoeSilverman It seems that more journals nowadays are trying to use double-blind (a.k.a. double-anonymous) refereeing (including AMS journals). Does that mean that the mathematical community should rethink the practice of posting papers to the arXiv before submtting them for publication? | |
| Feb 6 at 21:01 | comment | added | Joe Silverman | A propos " I think it's good to target putting stuff on arxiv at the same moment that it's ready to submit to a journal." That's reasonable advice, but I'd add "put it on the ArXiv a week before you're planning to submit it, on the chance that someone will send you some useful comments that you can incorporate (with appropriate thanks) into the submitted version." | |
| Feb 6 at 20:12 | comment | added | Denis T | I especially like that the text above contains useful advices. One should not "fail to cite some prominent people"! One should be aware of "junior people getting scooped"! Apparently, supporting nepotism in academia and embracing the fact that nobody cares about mathematics (rather than "career") is the way to get by for a present day mathematician. | |
| Feb 6 at 19:42 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Stefan Kohl♦ | ||
| Feb 6 at 18:33 | comment | added | darij grinberg | "For any arxiv paper that I think I'm likely to cite, I keep my eyes open for when the journal version appears, and download it, because sometimes the theorem numbers in the arxiv version do not match the published version." Then cite the arXiv version! Your readers will probably be reading that one too. | |
| Feb 6 at 18:31 | comment | added | darij grinberg | You can compare arXiv papers by source code, which is more precise than what PDF comparers can give you. | |
| Feb 6 at 18:28 | history | edited | David White | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Feb 6 at 18:10 | history | answered | David White | CC BY-SA 4.0 |