I’ve been fascinated with game theory for some time, and as an engineer, I have a solid grasp of the math. Using game theory, I’ve come up with an odd way to formulate concepts like hope, despair, and complacency. This could help game theorists arrive at a better model of human behavior.
I’d like to pursue this further, but I have no access to academia. Are there any journals open to laymen that might publish something like this?
You might try a mainstream science magazine. If you pick up a copy of Writer’s Market (or check your local library for it), you’ll find listings for thousands of magazines with descriptions of submission requirements and what kind of articles they accept.
Write a good solid query and send it in. At the worst, you’ll get to start a rejection slip collection. At best, you’ll get a check and a byline.
As for the academic journals, I’ll leave that question open for someone who knows academia better than I.
This article might be helpful – (“Advice for amateur mathematicians on writing and publishing papers”). It’s by Henry Cohn, a mathematics professor and former head of the cryptography group at Microsoft.
But perhaps you’re not looking to be published in something like “International Journal of Game Theory” so much as the “Journal of Human Behavior”?
All academic journals are open to laymen. Just visit the websites of the game theory journals you think might be interested in your work and submit a paper in accordance with their submission guidelines. Keep in mind that to be taken seriously your paper will have to be written in an academic style, and with appropriate references to previous work. If you haven’t written a journal article before, then it would help to visit your local university library to peruse some to get an indication of what’s expected.
Rather than submitting your work to a journal, though, where the bar is usually set very high, you might consider submitting it to an academic conference instead. Conference proceedings, while usually peer-reviewed, are not as prestigious as journals, and tend to publish a wider range of articles. Note that you will be expected to actually present your paper at the conference, so be sure to select one that you’ll be able to attend (and afford).
As anson2995 wrote, your paper sounds like it would be a contribution to psychology (or maybe sociology or some such), not a contribution to mathematics. The first thing you need to do is figure out what field your paper applies to. For instance, economists use game theory a lot. What institution you’re affiliated with isn’t important. What is important is showing that your contribution is correct and relevant and useful to the field. Find copies of the journal that you want to submit the paper to and make sure that that’s the right journal.
Thank you all for your comments, and I’ll see what I can do to write a proper academic paper. To start, I’ll couch my concepts in objective terms: “positive after-effect” instead of the thrill of victory, and “negative after-effect” instead of the agony of defeat. Then, “negative anticipation” instead of despair and “positive anticipation” instead of hope.
If I get published anywhere, I’ll certainly let you guys know. Thanks again!
You also need to research whatever might have already been written on similar subjects. Nobody will take you seriously without a zillion footnotes and references to previous papers.
And research will also give the right jargon to use. For example, putting “positive after-effect” into Google Scholar gives 132 hits, most of them absolutely ancient. Even conferences screen requests for papers ahead of time, and using obsolete jargon will ensure that you get ignored.
That’s the biggest problem with laypeople in academia, BTW. They assume they’re doing something new and then find it’s been chewed over for decades. And that’s because they don’t do their homework first, which means putting in hours going through every database at a big university library. To get published as an outsider you have to be more professional than the professionals. It’s the only way.
A few years ago, there was a young girl, 9 years old IIRC, who got a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine. She came up with a simple experiment to test aura therapy for her school science project, and did it thoroughly and well enough for it to be published, so it was.
I agree that it sounds like what you’re talking about isn’t Game Theory in the academic sense, but rather some form of psychology.
What sort of games are you writing about? Abstract theoretical games or actual real-world games that people play? Sports, board games, or videogames? Games played by children or adults? How you answer these questions will determine where you should submit to.
If you find a journal which publishes papers like yours, send a note to the editor asking if your topic is in line with what they publish. I hope you’ve read a lot of the literature on this topic. You do need references, but you also need to match the structure of papers in this area.
My old boss was a mathematician who worked in engineering, but he had a mycology hobby, and did publish as a layman in many mycology journals, so it does happen. He did have experience with writing papers, so that surely helped.
Her name was Emily Rosa and she was eleven years-old. Her article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Here is the full text of the paper (free).
ETA: You are right that she was only nine years old when the study was done.
You might ask the people here whether there’s any reason for you not to make it readable to the people of the SDMB. Possibly there would be someone here who would be able to more specifically guide you if he knew precisely what field your paper would be most applicable to.
You might also consider posting it to Teemings, so long as it’s decently readable. (Or did the new Teemings initiative not get off the ground?)
You could also try sending it to an agent based systems workshop, conference or journal, as game theory is used a lot in the field, and the internal states and desires of agents are often important.
A workshop will give you the shortest turnaround time, with a conference slightly longer, but harder to get accepted at. Journals in CS often take around 8 months for an initial review, compared to the typical 2 months for workshops and conferences. Presenting a paper at a conference or workshop doesn’t preclude publishing in a journal later, but you will be expected to present the paper at the event. Right now, we’re in one of the “calls for papers” seasons in CS, so many deadlines are coming up (or just about to expire).
I’d get the paper written into a decent form then send it to a workshop for refereeing. The referees there will give you further hints on previous work, and where you need to improve. You’ll probably have to write it in LaTeX. Workshop websites will provide you with the necessary LaTeX style files that you need.
Those footnotes and references aren’t just for show: they’re to demonstrate that you understand how what you’re saying fits into previous research, and what part of what you are saying is original. So you’re going to need to spend some time in an academic or research library, finding and reading journal articles that might be relevant to what you have found. If you’re very lucky, you’ll find a recent book on the general topic: if you do, go through it carefully, finding what previous researchers have found.
Unfortunately, you might find that what you thought was an original insight has already been written about 20 or 30 years ago. If you do, you’ll need to show that you have something new to add, or you’ll get rejected pretty automatically.
Go ahead and tell us what you have in mind.
If this is what you think is necessary to publish in academia, then you’re really not ready to publish in academia.
Though it’s notable that she wasn’t the only author; it looks like here (presumed) parents did most of the writing and helped with data analysis, and they also worked with Dr. Stephen Barrett who did a lot of editing and background research. Dr. Barrett probably also lent some much-needed clout. This isn’t to take anything away from Emily Rosa’s quite impressive accomplishments, but rather to point out that publication is often a collaborative effort.
In the OP’s case, it would certainly help if he could find a collaborator within academia. Do the homework first, make sure you’re chasing something original and relevant, and then perhaps when you present to a conference you’ll have a chance to talk to other researchers interested in the same topic.
Don’t expect this to be a fast process. If you’ve got something worthy of publication, it’ll take years to get there. And you’ll need to be brutally honest with yourself as you write and re-write and discard whole portions of your ideas as you learn new things. Peer reviewers will not hold any punches when evaluating a submitted paper. That’s another good reason to find a collaborator, since they’ll be experienced with the standards for publishing in their field.
You may want to read some on behavioral economics to see what other people have done with similar ideas. Neuroeconomics is a closely related field. In that field the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are actually seen and measured in brain responses.
Thing is in academia you have do more than come up with a good idea, you have to come up with one that someone hasn’t already come up with or at least add something meaningful to it.
Read up. You might end up being disappointed to find that others beat you to it but thrilled to see the places they took the ideas to. Or you may have a unique angle that adds to the field.
It sounds to me like you have a mere idea about how game theory applies to human psychology. It sounds like you have done no experiments on the idea. This doesn’t sound publishable. There are certain fields where you can publish an idea accompanied by some detailed math showing that you’ve analyzed the assumptions of a field better than someone else, but I don’t think that’s what you’ve got. If you have no math and no experiments, I don’t think you have anything publishable. Before you even attempt to write the paper, find a journal where researchers are doing similar work. Notice what is necessary to be a publishable paper in that field.
Or do experiments! For a lot of game theory and economics experiments, the researchers just go and recruit the nearest bunch of broke-ass undergrads. The cost is dirt cheap compared to many other studies; something like $20 per subject per experiment (multiplied by a few dozen subjects), and whatever it costs to print up a bunch of fliers and post them around campus.
Notice that we’re all trying to tread a fine line between giving you a realistic idea of publishing, while still encouraging you to try. Ideally, science is democratic, and any idea with merit will be included. But that also means that your idea will be kicked around by some very smart and critical people, and may not survive the process. None of your reviewers will try to be nice to you – their job is to point out every possible flaw in your work. It’s intimidating, but don’t shy away from this process. It’s central to how science works, and how good ideas are sorted out from bad ideas.