Re: Rush to publish

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

I agree with some, but not all of the "rush to publish" comments 
below.  Some of us are in this for the excitement of the hunt for big 
game.  No matter that no one else is going to shoot that Lion.  We are in 
it for the adrenalin rush.  Further, if some of us (like me) don't go after 
it as if it were a crisis, it will soon fall to the bottom of the stack and 
never get completed.  So I am all for going flat out to complete the 
job.  It does not have to be the best possible job, just good work.  The 
best possible work sometimes never gets published since it never gets 
finished.

I too have been on big papers.  Five hundred authors.  It is not any 
fun.  Not only do you not know the content of the paper, but you know only 
a small fraction of the authors.  Sigh!  That is why I promote individual 
effort here.  Get the joy of doing your thing.  I see no reason to take on 
a co-author just because he is an authority on some type of object.  Study 
and make your best analysis.  Then label it carefully with your reasons for 
the classification and label it "possible" if you are not certain.  Then 
the experts gets to write his own paper with his reason for a classification.
I know such a comment will rub some the wrong way.  Remember, I am an 
adventurer.  We are sometimes a little rough.

So I say do some good work, display the proposed paper here, then when the 
constructive comments die out and you are left with nothing but "more data 
would make it a little more certain" publish the darn thing.  It is a good 
thing the star is setting, or you could "little more data" it until you 
lost interest in the process.

I will do the best I can to follow my own advice.  Since the pipeline 
started working for me I have been going top speed to get an "engineering 
run" paper together.  I figure it will take several 
months.  Hmmm!  September 15 th.  There!  I have set a goal.

Tom Droege

At 10:49 AM 6/4/02 -1000, you wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>There isn't any... rush to publish, I mean.  Unmitigated opinion follows:
>
>The important thing to remember is that there just aren't that many people out
>there looking for variable stars.  I'll guarantee you that no one will beat
>you to *your* star.  We amateurs get caught up in the rush of the moment, and
>want to be the first to stake our claim - a holdover from the days when all we
>could really discover were comets, and an occasional bright nova.  Got to get
>your name on that comet!  Things take place at a more leisurely pace when
>we're doing 12th magnitude variables, though.