Ask HN: Is it possible to do research outside academy?

18 点作者 warkanlock10 个月前

I've been diving into the lives of Von Neumann, Shannon, and Dirac, and they all have a lot in common when it comes to research and academia: they went to university, got great exposure to the cutting-edge stuff in their fields, and built a ton of connections. Even though I have a degree, I now think academia might be the only real way to do meaningful research.I got into this because I wanted to "do research," but the strict formats, all the requirements before you can publish, the references you have to use, the nitty-gritty of writing essays, and the conditions that seem to be part of the status quo and hidden secrets between universities make it really tough for an outsider.What do you think? I'm asking because I'm skimming through some ideas that I think could make a good paper or article, but the whole process seems so closed off that I can't see myself succeeding.P.S.: I know R&D departments also *do research*, but they seem just as closed off, if not more, than universities.

9 条评论

impendia10 个月前

I am a research mathematician, a professor at a US university.Anyone can do research. It is much harder to do research that other researchers will read and take an interest in."The strict formats, all the requirements before you can publish, the references you have to use, the nitty-gritty of writing essays, and the conditions that seem to be part of the status quo and hidden secrets between universities": If you want to write a paper which others will read, then you have to learn what topics others are interested in reading about, what other work has been done in the field, and how to write up your results so others will find them interesting. You would learn all of this (and much more!) in a good PhD program.But if you don't care about recognition? Then all doors are open to you. Just do it! I'm quite serious. Never mind what others have done; maybe you're duplicating something that someone else did seventy years ago, but if you're not gunning for an academic job do you really care? You'll need to accept that no one might ever take a serious interest in what you've done, but the joy of discovery and problem-solving is available to you, as it is to everyone.

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bell-cot10 个月前

Do Research in what field(s), with what skill and budget?Doing historical research is pretty easy, if you're fluent in the relevant language(s), and have good research skills and lots of time. And with the number of historians & history-adjacent professionals online these day - finding research-worthy questions would be fairly easy. Downside: "Research" probably means spending months meticulously picking through documents in an ill-organized national archive, or something similar. And at first, recognition (in anything like a serious professional journal) would be at the "mentioned & thanked" level.Mathematical research is "easy" - if you're OMG-level talented. Famously, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan</a> Otherwise, it's grueling hard work, with no guarantee that you'll ever discover anything worth publishing.If you need access to "trophy" scientific equipment (NASA' James Webb telescope, CERN's LHC, etc.) - sorry, even big-name establishment insiders struggle to get that.And if you're saying "do research" when you mean "receive research funding and get published"...sorry, but no. Up-through-the-ranks establishment insiders are struggling (and mostly failing) to get funded and published.

beryilma10 个月前

Sure, you can certainly do research outside of academia. But, for all practical purposes, you cannot publish at a reputable journal without an academic or R&D center affiliation.However, what you call "nitty gritty of writing essays" is there for a reason: to streamline the communication and acknowledge the contributions of others. As long as you are not inventing something unseen before, you just cannot "do research" without also doing those things.

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dash210 个月前

I'd recommend doing a PhD. Not everything in any science can be learnt from books. There is a lot of learning by doing.After that and a bit of experience, you don't necessarily need to be employed in academia. The obvious question is, how will you make money from doing research? If you are just doing it as a hobby, that's fine, but advancing the forefront of human knowledge is hard, intensive work and usually requires more than a part-time commitment.Here's something I published while not employed in the university system, just to show it is possible: <a href="https://github.com/hughjonesd/hrs-selection">https://github.com/hughjonesd/hrs-selection</a>, published version at <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-024-10189-8" rel="nofollow">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-024-10189-8</a>.

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coolradmab10 个月前

yes its hard, as somone who built a wetlab in a maker space for bio materials research and did the hours each day it took to push the bleeding edge on synthetic sea shell analogues to producing a working protocol. i haven't managed to publish the work in a journal due too the fees involved. you can find more on my site <a href="https://alexmakes.net/projects/sea_chells.html" rel="nofollow">https://alexmakes.net/projects/sea_chells.html</a>

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mikewarot10 个月前

I tinker with ideas all the time... as far as disciplined research, that requires feedback from peers. I wouldn't be a stickler about "qualifications" in the paper sense, but care deeply about actual competence in them.My hobby horse is the BitGrid, a "Turing Complete" systolic array that I hope to see actually reach Petaflop performance.Of course, it could just be a pretty stone of no practical value.

gus_massa10 个月前

In which field?Some ideas:Try to collaborate with a research group, so they handle all the nasty details like writing the introduction of the paper and fighting with the referees.Just publish in a blog. Is this research <a href="https://paulgraham.com/spam.html" rel="nofollow">https://paulgraham.com/spam.html</a> ?Contribute to an open source project that use the topic you are interested.> I'm skimming through some ideas that I think could make a good paper or articleThere are two problems:1) Ensure that it has not been discovered before.2) Ensure that it's ""interesting"" for researchers.Where I use quadruple quotes because some topics that are interesting are ignored by the research community, and some boring topics get hot.As an additional recommendation, try to avoid predatory journals that just publish whatever you want to publish if you pay them the fee. Nobody read them. Nobody cares about them.

brokenalgo10 个月前

Yeah it's called Wikipedia

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mintaka510 个月前

yes. stop filtering anything and all things knowledge through institutions that use academia as a business model. Any and all things can be researched by anyone, and don't let ivory-tower heads convince you they have exclusive access to knowledge. They don't!