Is there a place for publishing ideas (no tangible results)?

While you might struggle to publish something like this in a journal, in Computer Science there are other venues to look out for, such as conferences and workshops. These are smaller (and sometimes less prestigious) than journals, but usually with a tighter focus: you can often publish work-in-progress or position papers.

Edit: Some conferences are large, prestigious events, and will expect a substantial contribution to the field, so before you decide where to submit, take a look at past papers, and the sort of thing they tend to publish.


Short answers: A blog. An e-book.

A blog meets the basic criteria of your question. You can publish your ideas on the Internet and there will be no tangible results. And you can make a blog for free.

You can also write your idea down into a Word document, put some graphics in it, and output a PDF. Then convert the PDF to a few e-book formats and upload to Amazon. This might cost a little bit of money to get started. But think about it - people might pay money to read your ideas!

There are also "idea websites" that come and go as well. You can publish there too knowing that two years from now, they will no longer exist.

Ideas are a dime a dozen - maybe cheaper now due to inflation, population growth, automation, and get-rich-quick schemes. In my experience, actually doing the work to implement the idea, doing the research, etc. is the only way to make real headway. An alternative strategy, if you truly believe that the idea is valuable to society, is to KickStarter it (or, if you are from the future reading this, whatever crowdsourcing/project funding platform is available to you) and then hire some people to help you do the research and implement the idea. Ideas are brainfarts. Research and implementations require blood, sweat, tears, money, and sleepless nights.

Okay, all of that was a bit cynical. But there was truth in there too. And you can definitely publish both blogs and e-books and slowly gather a following of those who hang onto your ideas. Good educators are always on the lookout for good, doable ideas they can have their students work on. So it really depends on how far you are willing to take your idea.


If you can write down what you want to say in <200 words you could give The Journal of Brief Ideas a go. Publications there are archived, searchable and citeable.