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Comment by FullMetalJason | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the pointers. How do PhD admissions look at self-publications? What are your thoughts on below two situations evaluated by the admissions committee at a good university(say MIT/Caltech)?

1. A strong LOR from a PI managing a known lab(but with few moderate pubs on my name) vs. 2. No great LORs but self-publishing one or two good papers(quantified with good number of citations and overall quality)

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It's definitely better to have a strong LOR from a PI, even moreso from a PI at the school to which you're applying. "No great LORs but self-publishing" can be shortened to "no great LORs."

Why do you see these things as mutually exclusive? You could self-publish and use it as an "in" to working for a PI over the summer. If you do well and the PI likes you, they likely have a lot of sway with admissions and can help you get into whatever grad program they work with.

Disclaimer: Never applied/went to grad school but know many people who did... I've seen the strategy I described work at a high tier school.

> You could self-publish and use it as an "in" to working for a PI over the summer

This. Publishing is not an end onto itself. Think of it as a chance to get your foot in the door of the research community.

In most schools, PhD admissions are mostly decided by the profs you'd be working for, and they are well-equipped to judge papers on their contents, not where they're published. They may also assign papers to their grad students (your future colleagues) to read and rank. In either case, they're being read by people who know the literature and hope to find people they'll be able to do good work with.

I myself don't put much faith in LoRs unless they're from someone I know pretty well. Other people differ.

If you're sure you can produce a good paper, I think that's better than a LoR. But research can be hit-or-miss.

Your self-published paper on arXiv is not going to get great (lots of) citations. Being a sole basement genius yet doing work that will be noticed by mainstream academia doesn't exist (any more). Even for grad students it's hard finding subjects and angles om them that are publishable.

One counterexample: https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.09308v1

papers in top journals/conferences supervene everything but let's be realistic: if you're asking here you're probably not publishing in nature/annals/nips etc so unless there's something else exceptional about you (that you're publishing in mediocre journals as a high school student) LORs would carry more weight.

You are right :) If I had something that's good enough that it gets through nature then it's a different game altogether. But let's say even if you had something that was good enough to be published in Nature, what are the chances that it will get through if I directly send it in myself as a single author?(do they even accept such submissions?)

If you had something that good I'd find someone on twitter or locally who would read it and if it was good send it to someone they knew who could help get it published. And if they thought it was good they could forward it on to people. Basically building up a chain of trust via vouching.

A strong letter of recommendation with a few publications is definitely strongest.

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