A successful academic is a successful product manager. Someone like Jeff Huang has learned to make well calibrated predictions about demand for a prospective product (a paper, from a project) in a prospective market (a journal or conference). How do you teach that?<p>If papers are products, what features differentiate the accepted from the rejected? It would be interesting to have a corpus of papers, where they were submitted, and whether they were accepted or not. Only the survivors are published. What didn't make it? Reviewers comments would be interesting as well. Journals have all this information; research groups have a similar but smaller and biased sample. Opthof, et al, "Regrets or no regrets" [0] is one study on this theme.<p>A given research project may have expression in multiple papers. A given paper may be submitted multiple places. Researchers would have this. Opthof, et al also looks at eventual citations.<p>Academics are custodians of their disciplines who are working at the leading edges of it and intersecting disciplines. Grant approvals/rejections will tell you the mind of the market. Colleagues and students will tell you if something is interesting. What other tools could academics use to inform investment decisions?<p>[0] <a href="https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/article/45/1/255/414169" rel="nofollow">https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/article/45/1/255/4141...</a>
Leslie Lamport has some similar narratives for his papers: <a href="https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html" rel="nofollow">https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html</a><p>Previous discussion on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23344666" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23344666</a>