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Does Anyone in IT Read Academic Literature? 73

Posted by Cliff from the where's-your-head-at dept.
digital book worm asks: "I'm a soon-to-be fresh-out with a Masters degree in Computer Science. For the last several years I've had paper after paper shoved in my face, and following some of the major publications (such as Communications of the ACM, IEEE Software, and some of the IEEE Transactions series) and conference proceedings has become second nature. I can't help but wonder though: For those of you outside of academia, do you find that there is any benefit to following the latest research on a regular basis? Clearly there are times when it is appropriate to go back and look for papers that solve a particular problem you're working on, but I'm finding it a little difficult to believe my professors' hype that the latest and greatest is the stuff that goes on in these papers, and that I should make it a life-long goal to keep current on many of the publications listed above."
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Does Anyone in IT Read Academic Literature? More

Does Anyone in IT Read Academic Literature?

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  • Digests (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pentagram ( 40862 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @06:29PM (#12525086) Homepage
    There is a great deal of dross that is published in even the better scientific journals and it is quite a task keeping up with even a small field. I can't imagine many people who are not directly involved in research would be able to find the time to keep abreast.

    I'd like to see better summaries of research published; something available in between reading all the abstracts and interesting papers in the top journals of the field and just reading the occasional flasgship paper in /Science/ or /Nature/.

  • Yes. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @06:35PM (#12525128) Homepage
    When I was in software design (with some hardware work), I followed several academic journals and a plethora of trade papers to keep up.

    Now, after a career veer into network and systems administration, I haven't run across much worth reading on a regular basis. It may be there, but I haven't found it.

    Even with the "dross", and the stuff I didn't care about, it was worthwhile when I was in software and hardware.
    • Well I dunno about IT. I mean instaling software and plugging in network cables and adding users to a server doesnt really require much in the way of the latest academic research.

      But as a software developer I have often needed to look up academic journals. Sometimes scientific, sometimes engineering. Depends on the projects though. Just as often I have to look up tax and finance law as well, for the financial software.

  • They should! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ponos ( 122721 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @06:36PM (#12525136)

    There's a saying:

    A few months in the laboratory (or coding, in your case) can often save you a few hours in in the library.

    The hard part is actually being able to keep up (i.e. knowing the language, which journals to trust, what's going on etc). Since you are following the literature closely you should not abandon it. Those that don't follow it will definitely have a hard time starting, though.

    P.

  • go with the flow? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by macshit ( 157376 ) * <(snogglethorpe) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday May 13, 2005 @06:57PM (#12525325) Homepage
    I certainly don't religiously keep up with things, but I love periodically going to the library and checking out the latest journals etc. because there's always something cool to read.

    I do seem to find the most interesting stuff through references from other sources though, e.g., someone will mention a paper on a mailing list I read, or I'll do a google search on some term I see in patch which will turn up relevant publications.

    So my impression is that you can keep abreast of things pretty well simply by "remaining engaged" in whatever activity/community interests you, and that the current interesting ideas and research will inevitably pop up if you do. Reading journals and conference proceedings (or at least browsing through the contents to find the cool stuff) can be part of that, but it hardly seems necessary to worry about it too much.

  • There's some merit to either viewpoint. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mellon ( 7048 ) * on Friday May 13, 2005 @06:59PM (#12525348) Homepage
    On the one hand, if you stay on top of research, even though most of what you read is useless, you'll be in a good position to integrate what you read and it will probably kick off thinking processes that will be of value. Having a good overview of what's going on helps you to see connections between work that the authors may not even realize is related.

    On the other hand, there's a tremendous amount of stuff out there. I don't mean crap - some of it's quite good. But staying on top of it could easily be a full-time job, and then some.

    So I think your professor is right, in a sense, but what he's saying may not be practical in the real world, even if it makes sense in academia.

    I would suggest that you decide how much time you're willing to spend reading papers, and make a habit of doing it, and when you run out of time, stop. If you have nothing that's obviously interesting in your stack, skim what's on top. If there's something interesting, skim that, and if you still think it's interesting, read it more carefully (if you need to - often skimming is all you need). But always cut yourself off when you get to the end of the allocated time - don't bog down reading papers all day.

    Heck, this is advice I should probably take. Thanks for asking! ;')
  • I've seen academic papers. Some projects like Plan9 are a part of research (and many others by students in big universities), but the vast majority of 'projects' are either on a personal level or on a business level. When I was in college, and when they were teaching me pascal programming, I realized that Academia isnt exactly cutting edge in IT.

    For that you'd have to look online, google around, find mailing lists, download code and compile it.

    Heck even for projects like Plan9, you'll learn much more by d
    • Well it depends on the school, places like MIT and Carnigie Mellon have cutting edge tech classes. Your not going to get cutting edge in underclassmen CS and IS classes because they need to get all students up to speed on basic concepts first. IF you went to college and thier CS program never got beyond Pascal for a programming lanuage, you went to a bad college.
    • I don't agree with you. You have to think about what you were being taught and why a particular tool was used for teaching. It is quite possible that whoever was running your course was a crusty old academic who had no idea about the real world, and still thought that Pascal was a must-have on your CV.

      However, if you went to a half-decent college, it's more likely that they were trying to teach you the fundamental ideas of your field. Perhaps Pascal had a particular quality that meant that it was useful fo
  • I've worked for various companies as a consultant, and as a member of an IT dept for a major retailer, and now work for a company that does military R&D. What I can tell you is that until I got to my current job NOBODY EVER looked at academic research papers. In my current job, however, it's definately encouraged. Unfortunately, after nearly 10 years of working in the commercial sector, I lost all interest in research and academic papers. Some of them are good, most are drivel. But they ARE important as

  • No (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @07:33PM (#12525591)
    Part of the reason I bailed on my PhD was that one of my profs was an editor for one of the big journals. I probably reviewed a couple dozen papers a year and saw how tit-for-tat things could be. An unknown with a good paper could still get published but a incrementally improvement by one of the big research schools was always rated higher than it should have been. The papers aren't written for most of the audience anyways; they're written to impress reviewers. So that's one reason I don't read them.

    The other is that they just aren't that relevant to my career. I once heard cutting-edge software engineering literature called "intellectual porn". Just like porn, all the little imperfections are smoothed over and if you read enough of it you believe that every company (or girl) is perfect and yours is the only one that's this messed up. Talk to guys that have been around (jobs or girls) and they'll tell you that they're all messed up. The ones that look perfect are the worst of all.

    Personally I try to keep up with trends that have caught on. I didn't jump on Agile or Extreme Programming even though parts of it sounded good. Over the last several years I've learned Java, Photoshop, ASP, Perl, JSP, Flash, UML, Design Patterns, J2EE, and now DotNet. Not once did I pick up a journal article for those, but just looking at job postings, resumes, and the shelves at mega bookstores will show you what's hot. Sure you'll be a little behind the curve. If you want to stay in front of it, get to DotNet or Java user groups and watch the respective web sites to keep up with the up-and-coming features.

    • "The papers aren't written for most of the audience anyways; they're written to impress reviewers."

      This is, IMHO, a manifestation of the "publish or perish" paradigm so prevalent in academia. I read quite a few academic papers (in a broad range of fields), and most of them are so full of fluff and BS that finding the substance is like peeling an onion.

      Most academicians and the papers thereof are so full of it (and I do not mean "information technology" that to even a well-versed engineer, biologist, or ot
      • You admit you don't understand them, and yet, you feel you can criticise them as "BS" and "fluff". Interesting. Somehow I think the fault lies you.

        I particularly liked your complaint about "esoteric terms". Apparently you have something about using technical terms. Perhaps we should all just say things like "thingy" so that you can understand them. That, or you can get an education, because you're in dire need of one.
        • There is often a thousand ways to describe the same thing. There's a USPTO way, there's a college textbook way, etc. Just because someone is so proud of their work they vomit pride all over their peers when they speak doesn't mean they are some god or something. Sometimes, it just means they are just an asshole.
          • And sometimes it just means you're damn fool for cursing those muckity-mucks for using the proper terms.
        • There's a difference between using proper terms and purposly wording something in an unclear (but impressive sounding!) manor. I think this is what they were getting at.

          We have a linear waterfowl problem
          or
          Our ducks aren't in a row

          Brett
      • I forgot to point out the irony of your sig. A more appropriate one has yet been found.

    • Re:No (Score:2)

      by MrWa ( 144753 )
      Talk to guys that have been around (jobs or girls) and they'll tell you that they're all messed up.

      Can you let me know where I can find some girls that have been around?

    • Re:No (Score:2)

      by deanj ( 519759 )
      The other thing you should add is that frequently, the author list isn't accurate. Many papers are written by one person, and their superior ends up slapping their name on it, whether they had anything to do with the "research" or not.

      The worst case I saw of this was a book, the majority of which was written by one person. Another person contributed a couple of chapters (fair enough). That book ended up having five or six "authors", instead of the two it should have had.

      This happens far to frequently.
  • Theory is nice and useful for a weekend on beach where I don't have a good net. However in practical terms I would not bother with a CS text book.

    Text books do not go to a point they are intended for training, if you want a exact relevant text go for an O'Reilly book.

  • Depends (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Usquebaugh ( 230216 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @07:44PM (#12525662)
    I tend to keep up with the latest ACM/IEEE published papers. But in 20+ years of IT programming I've only met a handful of others that do anything similar.

    Basically I read an interesting paper, suggest we use some small part of it at work, everybody laughs. Two years later I'm called in to explain what the hell I was talking about as it's now seen as the thing to do. (sigh)

    For instance, I recently commented that augmented reality is ready to make a move into the corporate world. Laughter all round.

    The very same day I was asked to re-explain the benefits of open source as the CEO had been told it would reduce the cost of IT. I just gave the same chat I did three years ago :-)

  • It appears to me that sotfware has finally gotten "componentized" enough that any given employer of a software engineer will probably focus their development efforts into a fairly narrow marketing niche. Sure, msft and google can afford to explore large swaths of interesting technology, but even then a given worker in a given department is intentionally compartmentalized. Anyone that can see outside their little area of expertise is either fired for being difficult or promoted to management if they can at

    • I've spent many afternoons reading and at least partially understanding printed matter that says "proceedings" or "journal" or "SIG" somewhere on the cover.

      I had a brief academic CS career: I read mathematics for my undergrad degree, but also studied for a CS diploma to make sure I had some grasp of the academic side of things before going into industry. Now I write mathematical software for a living, so I too have spent a few days reading academic papers.

      Today, I've basically gave up on academic re

  • I do (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    However I think I am in a minority (and really I'm not in IT; working for a consulting firm ATM). I have always been interested in it, have done some (published) research of my own in the past, and plan on applying to PhD programs next year, so it makes sense for me. It doesn't affect most people in "The Real World", unless they are working on the cutting edge, or are doing research for commercial organizations.

    And really, a lot of papers out there are crap. Interesting but, in the end, useless to anyone a

  • Whenever I'm doing exploratory coding and trying to figure things out, I tend to spend a few hours googling around on related topics. Often you'll turn up the solutions you need, or at least things that move you in the right direction. Doesn't matter whether what you find is a paper like the ones you're talking about, or the source code of some crappy perl module someone wrote - if it's related, you'll find it through google.
  • If I had the time, I would. But in this field it's a struggle to maintain employability. So I have to concentrate on established and popular technologies.
  • i also just finished a master's degree in comp. sci. (focussing in computer vision). i then landed what is essentially my dream gig at r&d driven firm. i spend quite a bit of time seeing what citeseer and acm's digital library have to say on matters of interest (i'm not an ieee member, although i should eventually look into it). typically, i either end up saving a huge amount of time eliminating approaches or i end up with cool ideas on how to combine approaches, which has thus far been really useful. y
    • I guess writing in all lower case is easier for computer vision?

      I certainly find using initial caps to assist in visually delimiting sentences to be useful, even if you are too modest to capitalize "i."

  • Current stuff? How about CLASSIC stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @09:47PM (#12526292)
    You're kidding, right?

    I've been able to do very well for myself by being able to apply classic engineering and IT things - you know, searches that aren't linear brute force, some of the more useful design patterns, knowing what a code profiler is. How many programmers out there have even tried to read the Art of Computer Programming, by the man your God, Knuth?

    How many people who call themselves C and C++ programmers do you know, who haven't read the C Programming Language, or the C++ Programming Language? ..for that matter, how many have studied the documentation that came with their compiler? understand the operation at a general level of the OS they work with? have a knowledge of security problems? care about any of that? ..becoming more cynical, know what the stack and heap are?

    My experience is that a large segment of the IT world is ignorant or dismissive of the classical stuff, so to hope for them to be aware of current developments that may or may not be useful to anything being done now is probably a far reach at best.
    • IBM Systems Journals are a great resource. Those old guys knew their stuff and did a good job of explaining it.
    • Well, it was a long time ago when I was a coder, but I not only read Knuth, our team used his code structures as the fundamental design of portions of our software. We turned some of his code into libraries so we didn't have to reinvent Knuth's wheel over and over. Our basic required-reading-and-comprehension bookset was Knuth's Vol 3 Searching and Sorting, and Wirth's "Data Structures + Algorithms = Programs." Our design and code teams spent a lot of time discussing these books and implementing the ideas,
    • For years I couldn't understand what the fuss was about...I felt that all I was doing was just re-implementing ideas other people had had years ago and that I'd picked up from reading papers or old implementations. Eventually I figured out that sure, that was what I do, but most people don't read any literature, so struggle to re-invent the wheel (and therefore make the same mistakes). Myself I find new mistakes more interesting.

      It's all about attitude. Do you keep learning, or just keep pushing forward

  • "IT" doesn't value theory or foundation knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I come to IT from engineering (EE). I've constantly been astounded by the shallowness of the average practitioner in this field. Not because they're dumb or incapable, but because they actively choose to tune out anything other than the latest products, buzzwords, and empty vendor promises (including open source stuff).

    In engineering it's common that the average engineer has a basic knowledge of, e.g., fundamental equations and how practical tools are derived from them. In IT, it's almost considered an *ad

  • Depends (Score:3, Insightful)

    by coaxial ( 28297 ) on Friday May 13, 2005 @10:52PM (#12526580) Homepage
    The correct answer depends on what you want out of your career.

    Most people here are quite satisfied with being essentially code monkeys that take the current "Teach Yourself Foo in 24 Days" book, and use that. If all you want to be is a guy that churns out VB code for an insurance company, make webpages, or reboot windows boxes, then no. There's no point to keep up with the field, because you're doing anything new. All you're doing is taking advantage of essentialy commodity techniques and technology.

    It is important to note many of these same people are hostile to research, criticizing academic papers as pointless, crap, and full of big-words (aka technical terms). These same people tend to think of themselves as God's gift to engineers, and therefore react negatively to anything they can't understand. Computer science is still a young field that is dominated by the young and experienced. It is no wonder, why the same mistakes are continously repeated in this field.

    Now, if you want to work and actually create new technologies (as opposed to simply products) then you need to keep up with the research. As a lowly coder, you can't take necessarily take advantage of what you read, but as a lead designer you can take advantage of some of it.

    If you decide you want more, then just focus on one or two lead journals most relavant to what you're doing. If you decide you want to write VB all your life, then don't bother. The choice is yours.
  • I mainly fall into the "no" camp because of a lot of things that I've seen. For example, I was once sent by my company to a "real time computing" conference in Seattle and after 1.5 days I concluded that it was nothing more than a way for a bunch of soon-to-be-graduated people to get noticed. They were talking about stuff that had little relevance to real-world problems. Another experience I had was with a guy who was wrapping up his PhD on processing large volumes of log data in real-time. The differen
    • Be fair. Most graduate students in CS or EE are paid for their research (although not very much) and given free tuition.

      I agree most of what people publish and talk about is crap. A conference of 50 papers is likely to have only a couple ones that are probably on track. Last year, a guy was presenting on a new asynchronous logic family he had invented. He compared it to a family I had introduced three years earlier--i.e., was bragging that his was faster. His scheme of course was _my scheme_ minus all

  • For the random schmuck coming out with a B.S. degree in some IT field, it's hard enough to even keep the acronyms and platforms du jour straight. Trying to add reading journals would cause many thousands of brains to explode needlessly.

    For the super-star designers out there, of course keeping up with journals could be helpful.
  • I just got back from the WWW 2005 [www2005.com] World Wide Web Conference, where I ran a session about the future of XML. A week from now I'm off to Amsterdam for XTech (used to be XML Europe).

    Conferences can be useful not just for papers but also to meet people who are doing interesting work, and to try and get a feel for recent ideas. In many ways I prefer them to the journals.

    Some people dismiss research and say they are in "the real world" but in fact universities and research laboratories are real places; I've s
  • SIGGRAPH has become a success for a damned good reason; it's a lot easier to understand and evaluate a two hour lecture than a paper. The paper still provides an important role in providing the mundane details, but all too often I find papers that are nearly wholly derivative and overstate their usefulness. From time to time, I find some interesting papers about stuff like recolouring a picture or video, but I don't go looking for it. The good ones come to me.
  • Do you need to keep up? No. That is not to say you should not. For starters this community should no better than most the speed at which this industry changes. Knowing what is coming and maybe even more importantly what is on it's way out can make or break a career.

    There are many markets where it really is necessary to reach that next tier of success. If you want to be a grunt, for now or for life, stay as a grunt. Not that you cannot be a successful grunt, but you are handicapped to be one without that

  • Only for the rich (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @05:05AM (#12527999) Journal
    Most IT workers don't have the necessary time and money to study academic literature, as they prefer to invest all of their resources to survive in the modern fast-pace high-demanding corporate world. As one of my university professors told us, only the rich have time to actually learn the sciences and study academic literature. If you need to work in order to have food on the table, you will prefer to study something that will benefit you immediately, such as industry white papers and how-to guides. In the modern world where everyone is seeking the money, scientific papers often won't benefit you for years, until you find a way to commercialise the new findings. This is exactly what the corporations want: Lots of IT workers trained in programming and networking but without the slightest knowledge of the underlying sciences. Corporations don't like philosophers and scientists, because they cannot be easily manipulated by the boss; they want you to be a code monkey. But knowledge liberates, and code monkeys can take their life in their hands if they learn the sciences and become philosophers. This is part of what I want to achieve with my site, Wikinerds.org [wikinerds.org]: to assist those who are seeking liberation through knowledge.
  • Many people here seem to doubt the necessity of reading academic literature. I was thinking, for example, do they intend to reinvent parallel algorithms now that multi-core is getting abundant (Athlon X2, Pentium D, PS3, XBox 360)? Is it really possible to do first class work (and I'm not talking about web site design or other artistic disciplines) without knowing what's technically possible? Furthermore, many of our favorite projects (pgsql, the kernel scheduler, the modern filesystems) use relatively mod
  • A wise person one said to me the two biggest problems in business in the future is the bandwidth between the ears and the bandwidth of the cable, in that order. So far, 25 years later this still holds true in my books. More "professionals" should read these journals, as say you are an eye surgeon, would you not want to keep up with the latest in ocular implant research if this is what you do? Far too many "pros" think learning ends with university... and all are shocked to learn it is just the beginning
  • Have transcended the realm of the purely technical, into the realm of the social and cultural. So while I hate to say the research is irrelevant, there is a gigantic market for people who will shell out money for 10-second 8bit 11khz clips of some obnoxious catch tune for their disposable cell phone. I think the research is mostly valuable in very vertical areas, e.g. search technology, heuristical spam filtering and network monitoring, media categorization. Unfortunately a large part of day to day softw
  • About 14 years ago, I could count on learning things in journals that would get me 5 years ahead of the competition.
    Now I can count on reading things that put me about 1 month ahead - which means that I can only count on learning what is out there now from Journals.
  • I still subscribe to some IEEE Transactions, but IEEE's "Computer" has degenerated into PR crap. I finally dropped the ACM publications entirely.
  • I may only do tech support on a few servers and a bunch of desktop machines but my interest is in supercomputers and high-performance computing. There's a staggering amount of research out there including some fascinating papers by IBM which are available free on the internet.

    The one caveat I would add is this, beware of the price of some journals. Some technical journals charge silly prices (like fifty USD per copy) for what is only a bunch of scientific papers. The supercomputer conferences also have ste

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