I frequently google interesting topics and end up reading papers written by people in academia and they rarely have a date stamp.
Seems logical to put a date written right at the top, wondering why isn’t this the convention?
Here’s an example:
http://infolab.cs.unipi.gr/pubs/confs/pci05_maretal.pdf
It is the convention to have the date on the paper. It’s also the convention to have the name of the journal on it. And by “convention”, I mean that no paper will ever be published without both of those things. The paper you linked is at best a preprint, most likely a class project by a student who didn’t know how to format it correctly, and at worst a hoax.
Well, Google Scholar claims that it’s a book, and formats it thus: Marketos, Gerasimos D., et al. Intelligent stock market assistant using temporal data mining. University of Manchester, 2004. No idea what it really is - it doesn’t seem long enough to be a book.
Most of the articles I find are this way (that was just one example that finally triggered the thread), they have a title, list the authors, have an abstract, then various sections with a conclusion and finally references, but no date and no publication.
Certainly not all hoaxes, are these unpublished articles that people link to on the University website?
I think they’re most likely to be not-yet-published papers that the authors are still shopping to journals.
More examples:
http://vortex.cs.wayne.edu/papers/ijns1997.pdf
http://www.cscjournals.org/csc/manuscript/Journals/IJHCI/volume3/Issue1/IJHCI-34.pdf
Ok, that would kind of make sense, although it still seems more natural to include a date than not include a date even if not published.
Not necessarily, because once it is published you’ll probably want your paper to appear as “new” as possible. I have a paper coming out soon that has been kicked to different co-authors for 3 years. I don’t have any copies of it available to the public, but if I did I wouldn’t want a date on it because I wouldn’t want any confusion when it finally does get published.
Also, check out reference 9. It’s a MPhil thesis that involves “temporal data mining” written by the 2nd author of this paper, in 2005. This appears to be a collaboration between 4 Greek colleagues at two schools in Greece and the UK, two of whom may be related.
Journals are in business to make money. Why would any journal agree to publish a paper that’s been on the web for free? This is formatted like a book. Still, there are no page numbers. I don’t know the field of Economics, so maybe they have a standard I’m not familiar with. No journal will publish anything without all the information necessary to produce a citation. The impact factor of a journal is directly related to the number of citations the journal gets.
I think that this paper has not, and will not, be published in a journal.
Because doing so makes them a lot of money. Believe it or not, the authors of a paper (or, more realistically, their grant) actually pay journals to publish, and then turn around and pay the same journal for a subscription, too.
Publishing papers that have already been on the web for free happens all the time, at least in my field. And I literally mean “all the time”: Almost everything that gets published in physics nowadays first gets released to the Arxiv, and I understand that other fields have similar preprint services. The official publication is much more about prestige, than it is about getting the information out.
Paying journals to publish? Is this particular to the sciences? I do not believe it is true in any of the humanities.
Note the { } braces around the email. It’s telling the copy editor to make it a link or something like that.
Some journals allow you to do things like host a “crappy” version of your paper on your university website, with proof features like the figures in the back instead of embedded.
I’ve known a few, one off the top of my head is well regarded. Another is new-ish, but a spin off of a big journal. The dichotomy is basically:
Some journals will have a submission fee, say $50-200. The purpose is similar to a college admissions fee; it reduces the number of spurious submissions. If you’re shelling out a few bucks, you’re going to want to be really certain that you’re submitting something worth publishing. Other journals might have a fee for each color figure, or for each page. These serve to encourage an economy of words and figures which I maintain is a good thing. Few of the journals in my field charge, but in principle I don’t really have a problem with it. Keeps out the riff-raff. No reputable journal will operate on a simple “give me money and I’ll publish your findings” model.
You’re looking at maybe a few hundred dollars at most to publish. Even as a lowly master’s student I was blowing through thousands of dollars worth of reagents a year, sharing millions of dollars worth of ship time, and was using up a few tens of thousands in salary and tuition reimbursement, so it would have been a drop in the bucket.
Ok, this thread has hit on one of my hot issues. I know I’m veering away from the OP a bit, but I’m going to try to come back to it.
This is more likely to occur with Open Access journals, though doesn’t happen with all of them. The physical sciences are further along the path to broader OA acceptance/use than the humanities or the social sciences, but I expect you’ll see more of it happening in the next few years - the current journal model is simply unsustainable. If an author wants to specifically publish in an OA journal Sherpa/Romeo can help them find one, or just check the OA policies of the journal/publisher they’re working with.
It’s not a “crappy” version, but one of three formats:
[ul]
[li]Pre-print - accepted article, but the version before review by the publisher[/li][li]Post-print - reviewed, edited, but not formatted for publishing[/li][li]Publisher’s version - the version that the publisher would make available. [/li][/ul]
Which one depends upon whether the author retained copyright or signed it over, and what version the publisher allows to be posted. The SPARC author addendum is helpful as well. Good practice should have the author point out which version it is when they post it to their site or make it available through an institutional repository. If they are posting a publisher’s version, the date/volume/issue/journal information should be available within the document.
To the OP: Sometimes what you come across are papers from conference proceedings (fwiw, your original link looks like it may be, just based on the URL). Those are a whole different animal. Papers presented at conferences may be published in the proceedings, which may or may not be available online, or they may not be published at all, but the authors may be able to post them. You’ll also find variation among disciplines. It can be fun, if you like the hunt. Or annoying if you don’t.
For me it’s frustrating because when I am interested in the date it’s typically because I’m trying to determine if the results are current, or likely to have been superseded by someone with more recent work (mostly neural network type stuff).
On the other hand, I am happy they are making the information freely available so I can’t complain too much.
It is also quite likely that they have been published now, but you are looking at at a “preprint” version that was originally made available before publication (it can be a year or more between when a paper is accepted for publication by a journal and when the formally published version finally appears). In some cases it might be the author’s own manuscript, or perhaps a printer’s proof prepared by the publisher and sent back to the author for checking before final publication.
A very large proportion of the academic work that is freely available on the web is in this sort of “preprint” form. This is because once something is actually published the copyright (usually) belongs to the publisher, and you can only view the published version if you (or your library) has a subscription to the journal (which is often hundreds or even thousands of dollars) or if you pay for the individual article (typically about $30). If an author made a copy of the final, published version available for free online, that would be breaking copyright, but publishers will generally look the other way if it is a “preprint” version, so lots of them are available. Usually the content has no significant differences from the published version, but citation information (these days almost always printed on the first page of the article, although that has not always been the case) often will not be there.
Sometimes authors (or even people with no rights to the article at all) will just disregard the copyright issues and make the final published version openly available too, but they are taking slightly more of a legal risk than they are with preprints. There are other ways that authors try to finesse the copyright situation: sometimes authors will invite you to request a copy by email. I have even come across an academic author’s home page where he had set up an automatic system whereby, instead of simply downloading his papers, you could request one, and teh page would automatically email it to you.
If you get a preprint without citation information on it, the thing to do is to then search for the article on Google Scholar (I find searching for the full title is usually sufficient). Usually, the main link you are given there will be to an abstract on the publisher’s site, with a full citation. The publisher’s site will give you an option to buy a copy for an exorbitant fee. However, Google Scholar will often give you a link, to the right of its main listing, to a free PDF or HTML version of the full article, but these are usually preprints.
Note: The above is hugely simplified, and by no means covers all possibilities. The situation of academic publication and academic copyright is a mess these days, and very much in flux.
I should add: the journals I am talking about are usually online-only, and thus don’t charge for full color. I’ve not yet encountered a submission fee, but often see fees for open access, figures, or pages above a certain limit. Open access I’ve seen runs in the thousands of dollars. Other journals that don’t maintain a print edition seem to charge a couple hundred (flat fee + per page).
Those are scare quotes. It’s not bad and is perfectly readable; just that it’s not the final version. And some people may prefer that.
Another animal is that sometimes journals publish a whole issue devoted to only abstracts from talks/posters. The obvious way to recognize this is the length. Depending on the conference, they might be invited to turn that into a paper/proceedings.
[Big publication fees] are widespread but not entirely universal in my field. Off the top of my head I’m not aware of journals that are completely cost-free to the author. Many are free but charge for “extras” like color figures. Others will have nominal submission or publication fees. On the other end, there are a lot of journals that charge up to four figures for publication. These include open access journals, who have no other source of revenue. Niche journals, small publishers, and admittedly some “we’ll publish any crap you send us” journals also charge big fees.
Of course, in biological literature preprints are completely unheard of. The only unpublished things you might find online are student theses. There have been some attempts to set up something like arxiv, but none have caught on.
eta: Ninja’d six times in the last couple hours :smack:.
Chemistry may be an anomaly. The ACS has a pretty strong stranglehold on journals in my field. Almost all of the journals i read are ACS. I’ve never seen an article published on the web before a journal. They have their ASAP section, and that’s as close as it gets. I have never heard that ACS was pay to publish. I’m pretty sure it isn’t.