From Newsgroup: sci.electronics.design

On 27/12/2025 4:47 am, john larkin wrote:

On Fri, 26 Dec 2025 16:30:32 +0000, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 26/12/2025 13:48, john larkin wrote:

On Fri, 26 Dec 2025 02:54:33 +1100, Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
wrote:

On 25/12/2025 11:24 pm, john larkin wrote:

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Company-Publications/General_Radio_Experimenter.htm


There was the HP Journal and BSTJ too. And the Tek circuit concept
books. That sort of stuff isn't done any more.

Of course it is still done, but now it gets published in peer-reviewed >>>> academic journals that John Larkin doesn't read, and doesn't even seem >>>> to know about.

If you publish good stuff in academic journals it gets cited in other
academic journals, and that makes you more employable in universities
around the world. It can also get noticed by people in industry, and
that can help you get an even better paying job.

How's that working for you?

Most of the sci journals are paywalled, and most of the papers are
silly.

Increasingly they are not. Premium content like Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society used to be but went free access about two
years ago. They have all had to adapt since these days almost everyone
puts their preprint work onto arXiv which is pure free access for all.

Elselvier tend to be more awkward. But you can always read them in any
copyright library and most departmental libraries for a given subject.

ADS abstracts will often allow you to see enough to know whether it is
worth a trip to the library even for serious pay to view stuff.

When I'm in a good library I browse The Review of Scientific
Instruments, for the hilarious schematics.

Physicists do design (that's not the right word) some pretty odd stuff.

They have a compulsion to use discrete-component diffamps and current mirrors.

They know they have to keep up with the physics literature, but they are
less aware that the electronics business develops new and better parts
at much the same kind of rate.

My 1996 paper on a milli-degree thermostat was novel in using a cheap
20-bit A/D converter. They'd been around for couple of years when I
designed mine in in 1993, but when I got around to submitting the paper
in 1996 none of the reviewers suggested that it was a
less-than-interesting innovation. My scheme for reducing the low
frequency ripple coming out of my mark-to-space switching current drive
(which I'd thought up around 1975) was probably still a patentable
innovation in 1993, but nobody commented on it at all.

And I published in the British "Measurement Science and Technology" -
formerly the "The Journal of Scientific Instruments" which was always a
bit more commercial than "The Review of Scientific Instruments."
I'd refereed a couple papers for them earlier, long after I'd moved into industry.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2