When I started my life-long journey in the world of data analytics (which morphed into Data Science and modern AI-based predictive analytics systems), it was through academia. I even did a post-doc at one point, which although paid the bills, it was the worst-paying job I’ve ever had during my career. Yet, as long as there were things to learn and challenges to overcome, I was willing to see past that. As I matured, I realized that the only thing that mattered in that strange world, if you were to have a career in it, was publications. As I enjoyed writing, I gave it a shot. However, the needlessly long waiting time for any feedback, the low quality of that feedback, and the overall time it took for something to get published, put me off eventually. After that, I decided to pursue a career, any career, in the real-world, as at least here there is more meritocracy and smaller waiting times, enabling a much faster growth. A few months ago, I was approached by a big-time academic publishing house for an article in their encyclopedia of big data. I was surprised to see that after so many years they had come to be more progressive about the whole publications related business. As the topic was down my alley, I decided to accept their offer. At the time I felt that this would be my way of giving back to the data science programming community. I only asked that the companies I work with get mentioned in the article so that they can at least justify my being distracted by this project. The academic publisher accepted and said that these companies would be mentioned as my affiliations. I even provided their location details afterwards, so that they were going to be represented fully. Months later, I got some feedback, some really minor corrections, that I took care of promptly. Finally, last month the article was published. I was pleased, for a couple of minutes, till I realized that the affiliations were all screwed up. Up to this day I am not sure how this could happen. It would take a whole new level of incompetence to mess up such a simple task, more than I was used to seeing through my academic life. Of course, mistakes happen and since I’m not perfect either, I politely asked for corrections on this part of the article. I had to do this twice, since apparently the first time they must have forgotten about it (apparently these corrections were not a priority to them). Up to this day, the article remains uncorrected, since clearly this 2-minute task is just too much for them to handle, or perhaps there isn’t much of a motivation. If there was a slight chance of me ever working in an academic setting again, e.g. by writing articles like that one or academic papers, this is gone as this event proved what a colossal waste of time it is working with this sort of bureaucracy. Perhaps for you it’s different because you have higher tolerance or lower self-esteem (or maybe both) and you can put up with these clowns. However, if you are on a crossroad in your career in our field, be sure to explore your options wisely before being tempted to compromising with an academic publication gig. More often than not, it would not be worth your time, while all the other alternatives would be more rewarding. UPDATE: finally they managed to update the affiliations bit. I wonder if this article had anything to do with it! It's doubtful that I'll change my view on the academic publications matter any time soon though.
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Zacharias Voulgaris, PhDPassionate data scientist with a foxy approach to technology, particularly related to A.I. Archives
April 2024
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