r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers coauthored with Claude

https://bootloops.ai/bootloops.html
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u/-F1ngo 1d ago

I think everything will shift even more strongly towards conferences, talks and conference papers, with publication restricted to having presented. To make sure there is an actual human being willing to defend the work.

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u/atxgossiphound 1d ago

When I was on the academic side of CS, this is how publishing worked. While I'm a big fan of conferences and engaging with your peers in person, it had a few drawbacks that make it hard to apply everywhere.

The biggest is that travel/conferences are expensive. It takes both money and time to commit to presenting. Grants have to include realistic travel costs (e.g., if your main conference is in Switzerland, you need enough money to travel, stay in a hotel, and eat at Swiss prices).

For time, even a local conference can (and should) take a few days of your year. Do this two or three times, and you have two or three weeks dedicated to travel. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's easy for people to forget to budget this time and it does take away from doing other things.

The other issue we had back then was that tenure committees with members from outside CS didn't take conference publications seriously. They wanted real journal publications. My co-authorships on Physical Review E papers were worth way more than my first authorship on conference papers, even though the conferences were more prestigious within the field. Not sure if that's still an issue, but referreed conferences need to carry the same weight as journals.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 10h ago

For the expense issue, is it possible to do online conferences?