Creating a new publication model

I like to gripe about our current conference/journal system, and how ungainly a method it is for publishing and disseminating quality work. Not surprisingly, other areas of computer science appear to have similar issues as well.

Hal Daume, my colleage at the U. of U., has sparked off a rather interesting discussion with his post on NLPers about the need for a new open-access journal for NLP research. The original motivation for his post is partly NLP-specific, but the evolving discussion over at his wiki provides a closeup view of the process of designing a new publication model that sits somewhere between traditional journals and traditional conference.

It’s too early to tell what will come of this, but if their model gains some traction, it might provide a good exemplar for future reform in other disciplines in computer science.

Tracking changes in LaTeX

A rather long time ago, I had asked how to track changes in Emacs/LaTeX, along the lines of what Word can do. There were many suggestions at the time, along the lines of using CVS, and one person had even mentioned ‘texdiff’.

I actually got around to trying latexdiff today, and it actually works quite well. Given an old and new LaTeX document, it will output a “diff” TeX file that when compiled marks changes in coded colors; blue for insertions, red for deletions. People I know use this all the time for managing changes with collaborators.

The program itself can be run as a standalone Perl script, so it’s quite portable. I plan to use it more often.

Latex For Blogger

This is a neat plugin. And just to test it, here’s the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma:

For any and any integer n, let be a positive integer such that

Then for any set of points of n points in , there exists a map such that for all ,

Not bad at all !

On ranking journals

Via Cosma Shalizi comes a new way of ranking journals developed by Jevin West, Ben Althouse, Martin Rosvall, Ted Bergstrom, and Carl Bergstrom. It works on the PageRank principle: take a random paper from a journal and do a random walk on the citations, using the stationary distribution to rank journals. The result is eigenfactor.org, a website that catalogues many journals and other publications, and provides both a ranking by their “pagerank” but also a “value for money” that might be useful when deciding which journals to purchase for a library.

Impact measurement for journals has become a popular parlor game, as well as impact factors like the ‘h-index‘ for individual researchers. There are all kinds of problems with these measurements in general, and Eigenfactor does provide a way of eliminating some of the usual problems with measuring impact across multiple communities with different citation mechanisms, community sizes, and so on.

Eigenfactor has a few top 10 lists for different areas (science, social science, etc): here’s my informal list of top ranked computer science algorithms (and friends) journals, ranked by article impact factor (all scores are percentiles over the universe of 6000+ journals considered):

• SIAM Review: 98.35
• J. ACM: 97.91
• IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory: 95.05
• Machine Learning: 93.92
• SICOMP: 93.04
• JCSS: 90.93
• Journal of Algorithms: 90.31*
• DCG: 85.29
• CGTA: 81.96
• Algorithmica: 79.13

* The ACM Transactions on Algorithms, which absorbed most of the editorial board of J. Alg, is too new to show up. This ranking should probably reflect the historical relevance of J. Alg as well as its current state.

Anonymizing PDF

File this under ‘late-night LaTeX griping’:

Is there any way of stripping metadata from a PDF file ? I’m writing a referee report for a journal, and used PDFLaTeX to create the report. When I scan it in acroread, there’s all kinds of meta data that could identify me.

Now pdftk is a useful package that can strip out some of the simple metadata like ‘creator’. However, pdftex adds “Advanced” fields, and one of them is the full pathname of the original LaTeX file. If your filesystem (UNIX) is anything like mine, then a part of that pathname is the /<username>/ section, which in many instances is an almost unique identifier. This also happens with dvipdfm, which uses the gs backend to create the PDF file, and with ps2pdf. pdftk cannot strip out these fields, because it doesn’t appear to see them.

I suspect that if I owned a copy of the very-not-free Acrobat, I could meddle around with this metadata. Obviously I could submit the review as a Postscript file, but in general I prefer to maintain PDF. Further this problem also occurs if I want to do due diligence when submitting to conferences with double blind review, and sometimes I don’t have the option to use PS.

Dating a result..

The PCP results appeared in conferences in 1992, Sanjeev Arora’s thesis appeared sometime after, and the “journal version” appeared in 1998. Similarly, the PRIMES in P result was announced in 2002, but was published in the Annals of Math in 2004.

If I’m trying to write something that talks about the history of a set of results (let’s say I’m talking about PCP), it is generally recommended that I cite the definitive version (i.e the journal paper). So I’d talk about a PCP result “published in 1998″, which seems silly given that everyone knows it appears much earlier. Given the lag time of CS journals, this is more of a problem than in other areas.

Is there any clean way out of this dilemma ? Should I cite the journal, but attempt to avoid any mention of dates in the text ? Should I use the “first published date” in the text, and cite both the earlier, conference version, AND the journal version ?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because the only results worth announcing well before publication are so famous that such questions are moot, and “everyone knows when it appeared”. I don’t have answers here: I’m just confused.

WADS deadline fast approaching

For those of you nursing your poor SoCG/STOC/PODS rejects, the WADS deadline is fast approaching. WADS (The Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures) alternates annually with SWAT, the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, and is being held this year in Halifax, Canada. Lest the title fool you, WADS is actually an honest-to-goodness conference; proceedings are published in an LNCS issue.

The deadline is Feb 23, more than enough time to even invent a problem, solve it, write a snappy intro, and send it off. So get cracking !

Update: The deadline has been moved to Mar 2. Heck, you could write TWO papers in that time.

p.s Not that the WADS folks are asking for my opinion, but I don’t like it when conferences shift deadlines.

Weird BibTeX problem

This is puzzling me, and I am hoping my readers might help:

I want to add a reference to this entry:

@article{ref,author = {First Last and First M. Last, III},title = {Insert Title Here},journal = {Int. J. Comput. Sci.},volume = 1,number = 1,year = 2010,pages = {137--154},}

and it comes out looking like this (in my .bbl file):

\bibitem{ref}{\sc Last, F., and First M.~Last, I.}\newblock Insert Title Here\newblock {\em Int. J. Comput. Sci 1}, 1 (2010), 137--154

As you can see, there are two problems:

1. The second name is not formatted in the style of the first
2. The second author has been replaced by their grandparent (!) (the III has been replaced by I).

This is using the acm.bst style file. I tried using plain.bst, and the problem persists: the second author is listed as III First M. Last.

I tried standard tricks like enclosing the III in braces, placing commas in certain places, removing them etc. No luck.

Paper ? what’s paper ?

True episode:

I was looking for a paper in the university online journal listing. It’s a SIAM paper published prior to 1997, so LOCUS is where it resides. Unfortunately, our online journal listing didn’t seem to have LOCUS, and so I clicked on one of the help buttons to talk to a librarian (on live chat). A few minutes later, she points out to me that this particular issue of the journal is physically available in our math library.

Till that point, it had not even occurred to me to check the physical stacks.

p.s I’m just back from the CG PC meeting and the McGill workshop on limited visibility in Barbados. I had to leave early, so discussions continue. Barbados (and later, Bellairs itself) was off the internet till I left on Monday, so I have a collection of posts that will dribble out over time.