Newsgroups: sci.research.careers
From: gh@cs.toronto.edu (Graeme Hirst)
Subject: Re: Getting Faculty Position. What is the secret ?
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 30 Jul 92 19:36:23 GMT

In article <Bs7p4x.I6x@acsu.buffalo.edu> kumard@acsu.buffalo.edu (Deepak Kumar) writes:
>It is generally advised that you list publications under specific
>categories (Journal, Conference, TRs, etc). If I have a paper that
>was published as a TR first and then appeared as a Journal/Conference
>paper then a parenthetical in the Journal/Conference isn't enough
>(since most people only tend to SCAN CVs anyway). Not listing the paper
>under a TR would mean that you are leaving out a piece of work that
>belongs there that you have done. If all my TRs got published as Conference
>papers I wouldn't have anything listed under TRs which would imply that
>I haven't published any TRs! I'd rather list them in both categories
>with parentheticals. It should indicate to the reviewer that I try to
>pursue publications of my TRs to a wider audience. 

And in <1992Jul30.154813.9028@athena.mit.edu> solman@athena.mit.edu (Jason W Solinsky) writes:
>Where is the boundary between padding and listing?
>
>Typically the paper you write for a conference proceedings turns into a
>really polished paper in a Journal, should one of these not be listed?
>
>How about if that polished paper were rejected after several rewrites and
>wound up becomming a TR or TM? At what point do the papers become so similar
>that listing both is padding? Is there a cretain critical amount of time,
>data or rewrites that mark the point at which the two should be listed
>seperately?


OK, some clarification.  First, let's allow that different fields have
different standard practices re TRs.  My experience is that in computer
science, at least, there is little or no merit attached to the
publication of a TR, because anything anyone in the department writes
can be published as a TR, and moreover, almost all TRs (other than
theses) are papers that are submitted for publication elsewhere.  So
a TR by itself is little more than an as-yet-unpublished paper that has
simply been formalized for distribution by your department.  If this
paper is subsequently published, and is >95% the same as the TR, then
the TR doesn't deserve a separate listing, just a parenthetical note:
"Also published as TR-92-765" or "An earlier version appeared as
TR-92-765".  If the paper doesn't get published, then of course you
should list the TR.  And if a paper is eventually published that is a
substantial revision of the TR, then it's up to you to decide whether
or not the difference is great enough to justify separate listings.

The original motivation for TRs was to make available to the world
technical kinds of material that wouldn't normally appear in other kinds
of publications such as journals -- e.g., the gory details of your
system, which are too big to fit in your journal paper, and which are of
interest to only a very small audience.  And TRs like that are just
fine, do carry merit in and of themselves, and should be listed on your CV.

So the boundary is a fuzzy one.  But that doesn't mean it's unreal.
What you want to avoid is absurdity in situations in which you have,
say, six papers all of which were also TRs; you don't want a CV which
lists those six papers once as papers and then all over again as TRs.
That's what looks like padding, and that's what I was complaining
about.  Note, btw, that if you have a seventh TR in there, one that
wasn't published as a paper, it is likely to be overlooked by the
reader who decides in a quick scan that the two lists seem to be
identical.


>If you send in a long paper, will the people doing the hiring at least
>scan it and the abstract, or will it automatically be ignored because
>of its length?  Will sending a paper which is too long to read hurt you
>even if it is scanned and appears to demonstrate significant ability?

I'd hope that even a long paper would be lightly scanned, and the
abstract read carefully.  But don't expect more than that unless you get
onto the short list.  So the paper is not a substitute for a short
statement of research interests, for example.  

Once you are on the short list, then you get put under a microscope.

My implicit point, in my original posting, was that there are some
people whose applications give one the impression that they are more
concerned with quantity than quality, and that an application's chance
of success is in direct proportion to its physical weight.  Yes,
"productivity" does count.  But so does the quality of the product, and
you are more likely to convince me that you have both productivity AND
quality if you just give me a list of publications and a copy of your
one or two best papers than if you give me copies of everything, good
and bad, that you've ever written since your senior project.  (After
all, you've been learning and getting ever better, right?)


---
\\\\   Graeme Hirst    University of Toronto	Computer Science Department
////   gh@cs.utoronto.ca  /  gh@cs.toronto.edu  /  416-978-8747
Newsgroups: sci.research.careers