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Why do we write?

Phew. The CHI 2008 paper deadline was yesterday, and our people where involved in a total of five different papers. That’s a lot of work, and a lot of time. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves why we do it.

Indeed, people inside and outside the Yahoo! organization often ask “Why do we publish academic papers?”. On its face, it would seem like writing papers is not only a waste of corporate time and money, but may also expose techniques and valuable knowledge and insights to competitors. Indeed, other companies (that shall remain nameless) had generally not encouraged participation in academic discourse by their (sometimes) brilliant researchers. Luckily, in our Advanced Development Research lab (aka Y!RB), the approach has been a little different. While we are not under constant pressure to publish papers, it is certainly encouraged and expected that we do.

Asking questions like ‘why do we publish’ usually grows into a much larger and philosophical question of “What is research?” Let’s not go there just quite yet – more on that later.

To me, there are a number of reasons that make academic papers a worthwhile endeavor (warning: personal opinions follow; the list below and the words above do not represent the views of Yahoo!, Yahoo! Research, Yahoo! Advanced Development Division, or my dog Mingus).

1. Writing makes you organize your thoughts. It’s akin to authoring a presentation; one that you are required to submit in advance and that can be rejected. To write a research paper that will get accepted to a top conference, you need to crystallize your thoughts, express your hypothesis and claims clearly, and be able to show significant results. The process forces you to do a better job in understanding, situating, evaluating and defending your work and its different components. I cannot tell you how many times we have started writing a paper just to realize, based on the initial writing, that we are doing something wrong (or not well enough).

2. Publishing is the best way to get feedback that in turn can validate and improve your work. At the basic level, getting a paper into a major conference serves as external validation that your work is worthwhile. You can be working in the dark for years and keep patting yourself on the back - but convincing the reviewers of a major conference or journal that your work is important and interesting is a mark of success that can be trusted (let’s assume a perfect reviewing system for the moment - this is certainly not often the case). At a different level, feedback from reviewers, people who read your work, or (more often) from those who attended your conference presentation, can greatly improve your work. People are often keen, perhaps too keen (argh!), to give you ideas related to your presented work or how to do it better.

3. Publishing papers gives back to the community and facilitates and invigorates academic discourse. Other than warm fuzzies, this gives you a chance to make an impact that exceeds the boundaries of your organization. Of course, the contribution gets you - and your company - credit as good citizens in the academic community.

4. Publishing is an opportunity to steer and inform the research community about a direction in which you are invested. Simply by writing about a new research problem, there is a chance that other researchers will become interested and start looking at the same domain. Such a chance to transform and inspire other brilliant researchers requires a well-thought of problem definition and some initial attempt at tackling it (i.e., a research paper).

5. [This is a weird one] In a large company, publishing a paper in a conference can be the first time when the relevant people in the company are exposed to your work. As absurd as this may sound, in a large organization, internal communication is as difficult as one may imagine. A conference brings people with the same interests together and they will find you instead of you having to find them. For example, our CHI 2007 papers had little exposure internally at Yahoo! before the conference. Many of our UED and UER people were exposed to this work at the conference, and a much wider internal discussion followed. This is not a Yahoo! thing. I have also heard stories from friends in other research labs that had their research “discovered” by product teams when presented in public conferences.

6. Publishing leads to recruiting from academia. Nothing tells exceptional students (and faculty) that Yahoo! is the best place for them like a brilliantly delivered presentation of deep and thoughtful ideas. And sometimes, even our presentations are enough to attract such interest. At least three researchers and interns in our lab are here mostly because they have seen a researcher speak at a conference or another venue about our work; countless other CVs were received.

7. Writing can be an outlet of creativity. We’re not all Dick Bulterman (see here for example), but at least we can pretend…

Anything I missed?