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Is electronics driven by scientific publication, similar to other academic fields? Two famous publications I came across, Gordon Moore's seminal paper, and Leon Chua's discussion of the memristor, did not leave me breathless.

Coming from a mathematics background, I have been disappointed by electronics theory. No visionaries stand out, especially contemporary ones.

Is electronics simply not a publication-driven discipline? Are there examples of seminal papers where theory paved the way to technological breakthrought?

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"Losing...consciousness. Must...read..electronics...papers..." - Paraphrased from The Tick – Rocketmagnet Aug 9 '12 at 21:56
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Not sure if you consider this "electronics", but there's Shannon's paper that created the field of information theory: cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf – The Photon Aug 9 '12 at 22:09
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Who downvoted this, and for what reason? – Rocketmagnet Aug 10 '12 at 8:27
When you search for "publications" are you including patents? – endolith Aug 11 '12 at 4:13
@endolith: I guess, yes, somewhat half-heartedly. – Randomblue Aug 11 '12 at 10:47

3 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

Electrical Engineering can be seen as the practical application of Physics. As such, EE is not so concerned about carefully controlled scientific studies and research. To make matters worse, there is a lot of money to be made in the EE field, so any research done tends to be done by well funded companies who have economic reasons to keep their results either a trade secret or to patent them.

Any scientific papers on EE that do get published are generally done by universities and published in journals more suited to physics or other hard sciences.

Electrical Engineering was not always this way. Up into the 1970's it was more common to see private corporations sharing information with the general public in the form of papers. But that really died off in the 1980's and is almost nonexistent today. I'm not sure exactly why that is. Around the same timeframe this industry has also become more lawsuit-happy and patent-happy which might have something to do with it.

It is not surprising that the papers and other work that people have mentioned in other answers and comments are all mostly pre-1980's.

There still is the IEEE and ACM groups which do help advance the state of the art somewhat. But even these have lost much of their impact in the past 25 years. The papers they publish now are either university studies (nothing wrong with those, really) or not exactly groundbreaking new research from corporations.

So today, EE is mostly the practical application of physics. Of course there is always some overlap between physics research and physics application, but these days there are not many published papers from that area of overlap.

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This is pretty much the group I wanted to cover with my anemic answer. Well done, sir! – drxzcl Aug 10 '12 at 20:28
But Robotics is the practical application of a bunch of things, and that is massively publication driven. – Rocketmagnet Aug 11 '12 at 15:53
@Rocketmagnet Yes, but there are many areas of robotics. The part that people make money off of (factory automation, etc.) is written about much less than the more research-focused parts. – David Kessner Aug 11 '12 at 19:15
I've seen quite a few papers on factory automation, although I couldn't tell you if the number is significant. – Rocketmagnet Aug 11 '12 at 22:53

Classically, look into the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Oliver Heaviside, and Hans Christian Oersted. On the more contemporary side, look into Nikola Tesla's work, and pretty much anything that came out of Bell Laboratories. That is ground zero for modern electronics. If a seminal paper is what you're looking for, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain's 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics paper is probably it.

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Do you have a link to Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain's paper? – Randomblue Aug 10 '12 at 10:37
I can't find it just floating around on the internet. You could definitely get it from the Nobel publications. – Matt Young Aug 10 '12 at 15:16
"anything that came out of Bell Laboratories" might be excessive. They had an entire journal to themselves, the Bell System Technical Journal, and probably published 100's of papers per year. Only a very few of those would really count as "seminal" papers. – The Photon Aug 10 '12 at 17:20
Not excessive at all. There was a lot of significant work done at Bell Labs. I made a point to only mention one seminal paper, without which, we wouldn't have SE at all. – Matt Young Aug 10 '12 at 17:50
@Matt - Nonsense! We would have our Zuse Z-2012 relay computer running at a 100 Hz clock, 7-pipeline! That's all you need for the internets! – stevenvh Aug 15 '12 at 16:47
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The IEEE has a collection of classic papers. I believe it is free/open access, though I'm a member so I might have a login cookie set.

Besides the Bell Labs Technical Journal (it's had various names over the years), on the mostly computing side the IBM Journal of Research and Development is worth looking at for some classic computer (hardware / computer engineering) related papers.

Additional random suggestions. Most meta-references which might point to classic or at least interesting papers.

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(I wasn't sure whether to edit this in, or make it a separate answer, so I figured a comment would do:) Similar to the IBM Journal, HP used to publish their own magazine. HP had their own share of computing milestones - including calculators - which were published in the HP Journal: hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/hpjindex.html – Ward Aug 19 '12 at 6:27
@Ward, thanks, I hadn't seen the HP Journal before. They also host old Tandem, Compaq, and Digital Equipment (DEC) technical reports which does include topics such as some ECL-logic papers, but the majority appears to be software / computing oriented. – mctylr Aug 21 '12 at 16:59
If you're interested in calculators (and what EE isn't?) the HP Journals are awesome. HP 35 Jun 72, HP 21/22/25 Nov 1975, HP 67/97 Nov 1976, HP 01 watch/calculator Dec 1977, 41C in May 1980, 28C in Aug 1987 (I always liked the folding form factor of my 28S), 48SX Jun 1991, 48GX Aug 1994. – Ward Aug 21 '12 at 23:10

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