I Lost a Publication
April 2022
I recently noticed that one of my first publications has disappeared from existence. By existence, of course, I mean Google Scholar. The paper really does exist; I have a physical copy of the journal issue. The associated website for the journal has disappeared, so it is no longer discoverable for a search engine.
During undergrad I was lucky to be able to work on an AI-related project with a professor. The topic was abduction as applied to optical character recognition (OCR). I had no idea what I was doing, but had a lot of fun writing code and running experiments. Working on that project was what solidified my desire to continue on to graduate school.
My advisor was able to write up two conference papers based on the work. I really knew nothing about the publication process, so I relied on him to take the experimental results and turn them into a publishable unit. After I graduated and moved onto graduate school, he tied the papers together with some additional work into a journal article. Again, I knew nothing of the process at the time and he took the lead in finding an appropriate venue. Eventually the paper, “Using Context to Improve Hand-Written Character Recognition” was published in a venue called ISAST Transactions on Computers and Intelligent Systems.
My first clue that the article was not long for this world should have been the fact it appeared in Volume 1. Every journal has to start somewhere, but given the Lindy effect, a journal just starting out will have a shorter expected lifespan than a more established journal. Not something that was on my mind when the article was published. The current website ISAST does not appear to have anything to do with the original journal. With the Wayback Machine, we can see what the website once was: ISAST in 2011.
Ultimately, this publication disappearing does not matter. It is just one publication and was not cited more than a couple of times. After another 15 years of experience with research, I can confidently say the scientific community will be just fine without access to this work. It was the naive work of 22-year old me and not particularly rigorous in terms of experimentation. That being said, I am uploading the first issue of that journal for posterity’s sake: ISAST CIS Volume 1
While this instance does not matter, it does make one think about the state of academic publications more generally. Many academics do not maintain a list of their own publications and instead rely on Google Scholar to keep track. If you are the head of a large group and putting out a dozen or more papers per year, it must be freeing to no longer need to keep track. However, it does come with a risk. For instance, the majority of my papers are associated with the IEEE. While it is highly unlikely to happen, if they went bankrupt and their website disappeared, so would the majority of my publications. That is also true for many of the researchers at Google, so maybe I can relax and let them worry about solving that problem if it arises.