🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1ial6nINNk7j@agate.berkeley.edu> lazzaro@boom.CS.Berkeley.EDU (John Lazzaro) writes:
>Does someone lose priority on a research idea presented in a technical
>report, if it turns out they are unable or unwilling to publish in a
>journal or conference?

If person A predates person B with an idea, no amount of publishing by
person B is going to change that fact.  On the other hand, B may have
much more influence on the field if B publishes and A doesn't.  That's
just the way it goes, & person A has to be aware of that possibility.

Let's face it, people simply are not going to comb through tens of
thousands of technical reports (or at least titles) per year from all
the organizations that do research in a given field in the hopes of
finding the very first mention of an idea.  Most people will resort to
something like the Science Citation Index -- which doesn't list tech.
reports.

In article <C0E059.J03.2@cs.cmu.edu> nivek@cs.cmu.edu writes:
>Wallace et al, First Results in Robot Road Following" 
>Proceedings International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
>(IJCAI), Los Angeles, CA 1985
>
>This should be available in most university libraries.

Getting back to my original point, this is what I would have hoped a
good reviewer would do!  To be honest, if I were reviewing a paper, I
probably would not strike references to tech. reports, but I would
expect the *author* to supply me with copies on request.  I'm still
not keen on using them as primary sources.
-- 
	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Christopher Ian Connolly			connolly@cs.umass.edu
Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics		wa2ifi
University of Massachusetts at Amherst		Amherst, MA 01003