Ask HN: Does anyone do academic writing in their own time? It has been a few years since I got my masters degree, and I never had the ambition for an academic career. Pursuing a tech one at the moment. Still miss writing about topics that interest me. Is there anyone here who incorporates (academic) writing with a non-academic career? How do you manage? |
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I’m not sure I understand the question though, what seems like the hardest part of writing, what is stopping you from doing it now? Lots and lots of people write in their spare time, and there are plenty who write on academic topics and submit papers to journals and conferences. Is it finding the time, or doing the research? Being motivated, or fear about being accepted as an academic while not part of an academic institution?
FWIW, you can certainly research & write on academic topics without trying to publish in journals. Plenty of people have blogs with articles that could be journal papers if they had only a splash of formality. Lots of people are more interested in doing the reading & writing than they are in publishing. Quite a few people like that here on HN.
Not all that interested in publishing in academic journals persé.
As for databased or access to journals, luckily there is SciHub.
The supervision might actually matter. But you might be able to get some. Pick the best of your former professors. Drop them an email, giving your approach. Ask if they see any red flags. If they say yes, listen.
Beside actually doing good research in the first place, there should not be major barriers to writing and publishing a paper and I don't think there is the kind of gatekeeping that people think there is. Pick a small conference or workshop to start with, read a few papers from previous years to understand the format, style and conventions of the medium, and then you just write and upload your paper by the deadline. There's no more ceremony or secrets than that compared to writing a good technical blog post.
Of course, your research has to be good in the first place. I've seen people try to write papers and get them knocked back and they think it's because they're outsider, when in reality they didn't actually have a research contribution in the first place.
I don't have the time or patience to go through the whole peer-review process in my spare time. Furthermore, some aspects of peer-reviewed scientific writing are quite boring to me e.g. introductions, trying to sell the importance of your results.
Instead, I find that I can scratch my research itch by doing what I want, then uploading the results to GitHub. So far I've re-implemented a couple of recently published papers, and put in a modest contribution of my own. If you want some discussion on your work, you can turn to a pertinent online forum.
Apart from being much faster than writing a full paper, another advantage is transparency and reproducibility. It has become a fulfilling hobby.
I published the first three while in grad school. After grad school, my advisor and I just kept collaborating meeting once a week for an hour or two. I was never paid to do academic research, it has always been a hobby for me. I have only published one article where I was the sole author.
I published more than 50 papers, some in top journals, and most of them as the first author; I still find frustrating that companies (recruiters, hiring managers, peers) don't associate that kind of production and its determinants (scientific skills, coding, writing, persistence) to proxies of potential added value to the company.
Edit: 10
2nd Edit: changed "manuscripts" to "papers"
When I write about my understanding for my clients it is sort of like training and marketing at the same time. It forces me to know my subject better to make sure I am giving good advice to my clients. This is not documentation, I keep that separate. But I am finding more Digital Ocean articles the cross this boundry between mere documentation and useful teaching/tutorials.
So it feels like a natural fit, I am interested in research and writing and others need what I know to do better at their work/business.
But, I have other personal topics I research and write about (history, religion, health, etc...) that is not work related, but I keep them separate from work complete, keeps stress low. But I do use tech skills to help me with them. (ie, data scrapers and manipulation, graphs, analysis, apps, database access and APIs, etc...) But this relationship is one way, "work -> personal research", almost never "personal research -> work", unless it's purely a side effect of knowledge gained...
These personal writings are more critical, some extensive (many years of research, writing and editing) and I have a family and decent social life. I just don't have real hobbies or too many time wasting activities, and I keep my personal research separate from my work research. I guess it's all priorities?
Obvious caveats are:
* In some areas such as CS, you'll want to publish at a conference. If you submit a paper, one named author will have to agree to present it. If that has to be you, you'll have to pay the travel and registration cost for the conference.
* IP / ownership issues are big, particularly if you work for a BigCorp in a field close to that you are publishing in --- these tend to be pretty inflexible on this. I found it difficult, but not impossible at the BigCorp I worked for. I'm in a small consultancy now, and it's a breeze.
I’m lucky enough to be on a good PhD programme so my 9-5 is now academia, but in my late 20s a typical weekend and weeknight would involve a couple of hours of academic writing which I would be doing “for free”. I’d be first or second author on the papers, but I’d be publishing under the institution of the group I’d tagged on to.
I intend to keep on researching since research is fun. But writing itself is not as much fun, so I wonder if I will try to publish as much.
1. Collaboration. If you look at my publication records, I only have a single paper where I am the sole author, and I made sure a few very knowledgeable friends read it. So find someone sharing similar interests and talk to them. Once a collaboration starts, it is much easier to get going.
2. Branch out. Recently, I improve algorithms in areas (more applied operations research) close to mine (theoretical x {computer science, combinatorial optimization}). This includes 3 of the papers I'm preparing. It only took a few hours to realize improvements are possible, although it takes much longer to polish and present. It also leads me to an interesting problem in my own field.
3. Giving talks. It is probably much easier to have an opportunity to give tech talks. Giving the talk itself forces you to organize your thought well. I often find better ways to organize my writing after I've given the presentation. (I really should give talks before writing the paper...
I think it helps if you have a good group of people to work with, since it motivates you, and you get good feedback (also helpful if they're still in academia and can easily register/attend conferences and/or pay open access fees).
I guess we could create a small "research group"... I would join and give my contribute.
while working on my phd my focus was on biometrics where i had a few publications, but moved onto robotics/autonomy so it took a bit to ramp up in the domain, but after a few years i'm close to where i was and just submitted 3 papers to ICRA last week
to echo other comments here, there's no way i'd have any output if i wasn't working with others on these papers