As an undergrad student, what should I do after taking 2nd-year grad-level math courses? I'm an international undergraduate junior at an university in the U.S. whose math PhD program is ranked about 20th in the nation. By the end of my next semester, I will have taken 16 math graduate courses, most of which are for second year graduate students (e.g. Shimura variety, advanced algebraic geometry, and some special topics courses). Thus, in my senior year there will be not many courses new for me. Also, I have to pay $40k/year. Therefore, I'm considering to graduate a year earlier. However, applying directly to the PhD programs of my choice, such as Princeton, is not a good idea, since I don't have as much research experience as the successful applicants of those programs. Therefore, it is preferable if I can concentrate on research without paying too much. One solution is to go to a less competitive PhD program, including the one of my current institution and then to apply to programs of my interest a year later. Is my idea bad? What other opportunities do I have?

From my personal experience it is unusual for undergrad students to have taken 16 math graduate courses while he/she is still in the junior year. What you have taken clearly exceeds the expectations of most graduate programs. If the professors who taught the classes think highly of you, that could be a strong selling point for your graduate school application. As for research experience, you may not want to take it too seriously as a budding mathematician. As Krantz explained in the book A Mathematician's Survival Guide (which, btw, is a book you may want to read):

  Mathematics is a bit different [than other natural sciences]. We don't use test tubes. The hard fact of life is that mathematics is a subject that builds vertically. You are not really qualified to do serious research - the sort of research that mathematicians actually do - until after you pass the qualifying exams.

So research experience is great in exposing you to the world of math research, but your coursework performance may be sufficient to get you to the graduate school you want to be. I think most graduate programs won't mind that you are graduating in three years as long as you complete the same workload as those who graduate in four years.

I should say that I'm not in a math PhD program; so take my advice with a grain of salt.


How to tell a professor you've changed your mind? I need some help writing a polite email to a professor from a different department at my university. A while back I emailed him because I was interested in doing graduate studies at his department (I'm at a department in a pretty similar field). I asked him about the entrance exams and all the subjects I would be required to take before officially applying to do graduate studies. He answered back very politely recommending me some courses and also telling me which courses I would be required to take before officially applying. Unfortunately, it was far more than I'd expected, and I realized I'd have to do an extra year of undergraduate studies in order to do it.

Since I'm currently in a field that's very demanding, I think I wouldn't manage to pass all those extra courses (there's more than 10), and would probably just end up having a burnout.
Now I don't know how to politely and considerately tell him I appreciate all the effort, but that I've changed my mind and I won't be applying to do graduate studies at his department. I feel like I just wasted his time because he seems to have put a lot of time in this, discussing it with his colleagues at the department and answering all my questions shortly.

I should say I'm at a small and not at all famous university in Europe, and they probably don't get many admissions or questions about graduate studies...

As others have said, keep it short and straightforward. Like this:

Dear Professor,
Thanks for all the info, I really appreciate it. Unfortunately, this list of courses is far longer than I expected. Given my other commitments, I'll probably not be able to pursue this further. Still, your response was very helpful in making an informed decision, thanks for taking the time.
--Name


How do you discover new papers as a mid-career academic? As a Professor, how do you identify new papers to expose yourself to new ideas?

Most of what I read now is derivative of old favorites or my own work. Journals in my area don't do a good job of grouping my somewhat interdisciplinary interests. I have found more new interesting work through popular sources like newspapers, Pocket, and magazines reporting on journal papers than any other source in the last year.

I want new favorite papers, unconnected to my present pet ideas. This is hard for me, and for several of my peers, when I asked. How do you do it?

I'm interested in useful strategies (a unconventional search ritual?), services (Pocket for journal articles?), or products (tinder for papers?).  I'm interested in things outside of what a google search about this will provide. Yes, I have heard of researchgate and google scholar.

CS/AI perspective

I get to them by

a. reviewing (you get stuff outside your field every once in a while)

b. Collaboration with colleagues outside my field (can be really fun but can take a while as you get used to each other’s discipline and its idiosyncrasies).

c. Going to seminars, listening to talks in conferences outside my field.


Writing a letter of recommendation as a graduate student I am a MA student who frequently works with undergraduates on projects. One student has asked me if I can write her a letter of recommendation for graduate school. Are there any risks to me submitting a letter, as opposed to her finding a faculty member (who likely would not be in the same field as her interests)? For graduate school applications how much does the position of the person writing a recommendation letter matter, as opposed to his/her academic familiarity with the student? I have already advised her to check with the programs she is applying to in case they have requirements.

Edit: I realize I left this unclear before-- she has two tenured professors willing to write letters. If I agreed to, I would be the third letter. The department is small, so there might not be too many options for an additional letter.

[H]ow much does the position of the person writing a recommendation letter matter, as opposed to his/her academic familiarity with the student?

It matters very highly.  For most graduate programs it would be better to have a letter from a very eminent and trusted person which simply says "Student X's performance in my class convinces me that she will be successful in a top master's/PhD program.  I highly recommend that you admit her." than a more personally insightful letter from a less well known faculty member, let alone someone who has not even completed the degree that the student is applying for.  If you have not yourself completed a master's degree, how can you certify that the student will be able to do so successfully?  (Well, of course it may well be that you probably can, but what degree of trust can the reader put into your letter?  Not very much.)

In general, I would recommend that even postdocs and temporary faculty should defer to more senior faculty, if possible, when writing letters, and in any case the student should make sure to get at least one letter from a senior person. If someone who has a PhD (let's say) but is otherwise very junior can say something about the student that other faculty cannot, it could be a good idea to send along a letter, but it would be better to have that be an additional letter beyond the number required.  However, for someone like you who has not even completed the degree the student is applying for, I would simply say that you should not write a letter for the student.  If you want to help, I would recommend that you find a faculty member who is senior enough but doesn't know the student very well and give them the information that you wanted to convey in your own letter.  (Don't write the letter for them!  Just give them the information.)  It helps of course to find a faculty member that you are comfortable with.

By the way, if you are in the habit of mentoring grad-school bound undergraduates, you
would be doing them a favor if you let them know as early as possible that it is in their best interest to make significant contacts with senior faculty as well as with you.


No reply from my thesis adviser I am currently doing my master thesis on Greenhouse gas emission from solid waste management. I already finished my data collection and now analysing them. But some of the results are not as I expected. So I find the different ways and proposed to my adviser. But my adviser doesn't give any comments about that. And that part is not very important part of my thesis. It is just a small one that I can even leave it if it is on my own. Is that possible to cut some part of my thesis? I have been stucking in this stage about three months. At first, I thought I could publish my thesis and I am hopeless now. And publication also takes time. Please suggest me if there is anything that can help me to move from this stage. Your kind suggestions will be very much appreciated.

Formulate a version of your thesis without the problematic results. Write it up, at least as an outline, but probably more completely. Analyze it.

But also consider the fact that the results that aren't as expected might invalidate some expectations and lead to a different result. If that is the case, it may be that the "odd" results are pointing you to something important. If so, write that up, instead. Analyze that version.

Then give either or both versions a good look and see how it appears to you. Do you have any results of significance that will carry you to your degree? The next step is to show this work to your advisor and get whatever feedback you can from them. Point out that you have dropped one aspect or changed the focus, but that it holds together, assuming you judge that to be true.

Then take whatever advice you get from the advisor. I suspect you will be told it is fine to proceed, but if not, work out a plan for completion with the advisor.

In general, "not as expected" is a research opportunity, not a setback, but you can probably be successful on one of the two paths.


How to speak fluent English being a mathematics teacher? I am an assistant professor of mathematics (and pursuing in service Ph.D in mathematics ) a non native English speaker. I was not bad at English during my school days. Gradually, my effeciancy in speaking English seems to have gone down badly through years of pursuing mathematics (a dry subject without language). How do i improve myself now with minimum time and effort?

I think minimum time and effort as a goal will defeat you. They are also somewhat inconsistent. To reduce the time (a bit) take a course in speaking that forces you to actually do it. But that takes effort. To reduce effort, just practice as you go along, increasing time.

But the way to learn to do pretty much anything is to practice it and get feedback. In the case of teaching, if you are doing so in small classes, you can just inform students that you aren't a native speaker and are open to being corrected. But that takes a bit of courage and isn't without risk.

If you are in a situation in which you can speak your native language, then try to resist doing so as much as is possible (and polite). Force yourself to speak English in all possible situations.

You can ask colleagues to correct you if you trust them, of course. Again, it takes some courage and patience both from you and them.

If you asked how can I become an Olympic Swimmer with minimal time and effort, the answer would be "You can't". It is similar here.


High school summer research in fields other than biology/medicine I am currently in high school in the USA, and it is relatively common for students to work with various researchers in the summer. The majority of the work done is the medical/biology fields, and I would like to know whether this is a common practice (or a possible practice) in areas outside of biology and medicine.

The biology and medicine fields make sense for several reasons:

My area (a large US city) has a large biology and medicine faculty (especially because it is considered a "hub" for medicine)
Biology and (to a lesser extent medicine) seems to be more accessible to a high school student with a background in the AP curriculum and the medical programs available to students at the local districts. Subjects like mathematics are hardly accessible to undergraduates, much less high school students.
Biology and Medicine are largely laboratory sciences, while the same can not be said about things like mathematics. Furthermore, the social sciences and the humanities (less present in my area, but still significant) seem to be nearly absent in summer research type work.

It makes sense, therefore that with a large population of students wanting to be in the medical field, and a large research faculty, that the practice of either formal (through a program), or more informal (E-mail a researcher for a spot in lab rotation), research happens in these fields. So, is there a similar practice in mathematics, physics, the social sciences, or any other area of science?

EDIT: In response to amlrg's post I have some further questions: how can I tell if a researcher in physics or math is studding a computational area? How should I go about approaching such a researcher>

It is interesting to note that the fact that a similar thing does not happen in the non medical/academic disciplines popular around here. For example, as an Engineering hub, you might expect that it would be common for students to shadow or intern with engineers, but this is much less common than high school research in academia.

This is not really a proper answer, but rather more like a stretched out comment. In the field of biology, lab hands can be relatively quickly trained. Now, they probably won't understand much of the science that is going on behind the scenes, but doing some of the routine tasks of "pressing buttons", they can free the more senior researchers to do the more challenging parts of the research.

Mathematics, on the other hand, often requires several years of training before you can start contributing in any way and there is no good way to avoid this. A beginning university student might have heard of the concepts that are being researched in some lab, but it is unlikely that a typical high school student can do much. This is all something that you already mentioned in your question.

Having said this, many things in the field of computational science (be it physics, mathematics, astronomy, biology, sociology, or whatever) are rather mundane and could easily be done by someone with a limited knowledge of the field (and I remember there being a recent example in astronomy where a high school student coded up an algorithm to find some shapes of galaxies/starts/something, and it worked so remarkably well that it ended up being published, but I could not find the reference right now). If you truly are motivated enough to contact and seek advisers in your area yourself, I am sure that many would be happy to show you the ropes. Don't be too discouraged, though, if some refuse (or do not even respond), as they might be too busy doing their own research to train new people who will shortly be leaving the lab, anyway.

EDIT to reflect the revised question: I want to point out that earlier I suggested computational science, but there are also experimental physics (for example) labs, which might also have something to do for an interested high school student.

There is no separate department for computational science, because it is not really a study of its own; rather you can use computers in any field (for the sake of completeness, there sometimes might be a department called computational science, but its scope is usually more limited than my definition here). Suppose you were interested in physics at institute X. Go to the website of the department of physics of X and see what the groups are working on. Find the homepages of the individual groups (professors) and see if they seem to be using computers (it will usually be more or less obvious from the types of figures on the website, or they might just explicitly mention it) and if their research appears to be of interest to you. See their publications, and while you some of the papers might be behind a paywall, try Googling the titles and you might find them on arXiv.org or similar free to access preprint servers.

Now the publications themselves are often quite technical, don't get disappointed if you don't understand much, but the introduction section should often be more or less understandable. One of the things you might want to look for is to see whether the group is using some software package (they should cite it if they do), or if everything seems custom made. In the former case, a considerable amount of the work might be in preparing files for the software and with some training could easily be done by a high school student.

As for approaching a professor, and I am hoping that other users on SE might comment more on this topic, the best way, I think, is to have read a paper or two by the group and to point out in your email that you have a rudimentary understanding of the science and the scope of the work. I, and I am not even the group leader, get emails from students (often from other countries) looking for a position (bachelor's thesis or something similar) at our lab because they are 'engineers'. Being an 'engineer' hardly qualifies them for the rather specific work we do and shows that they have not done any research as to who to send the email to, nor to what the group is working on (as they never, ever, specify what they want to do or why they want to join our group, in particular). These types of emails probably never get a reply from anyone (although a high school student just might, for their lack of knowledge as to the specifics would be more understandable). Essentially the more specific you can get in showing your knowledge and asking some questions, the better.

Much of what I write about is a lot to ask from a high school student, and might not even fully pay off in the end (i.e. you might get rejected). I hope that in any case this gets you interested in reading academic papers and gives you a better understanding of what it is that scientists do.


Referee recommends paper rejection with no further comment - how to react? I submitted a paper to a journal, after 2 months and some days of review I get a rejection with a referee report "I find the paper not suitable for the journal", without any further comments and without explaining the reason of the rejection. However the journal publish articles in the topic of my paper! I find it unfair. How could I react to it?

Submit somewhere else.

The accept/reject decision is made by the editor, based on the recommendations of the referee(s).  In this case, the editor felt that the referee's opinion of unsuitability, even without any explanation, was sufficient to reject.  Maybe the editor felt that the unsuitability was self-evident upon inspection.  Maybe the editor trusts the referee's judgment so implicitly that they didn't feel the need to ask for any explanation.  Maybe there were other referee reports that the editor decided not to share with you.  We don't really know.  But in any case, whether this decision was made well or poorly, I don't think there is anything you could say that would be likely to change the editor's mind.

You could of course decide not to submit to that journal any more, and you could share your experience with colleagues.  You could also try to have your paper looked at informally by colleagues in the field, to see if it has severe flaws that you haven't noticed.  You could even complain to the editor-in-chief that you don't think the editor is giving due consideration to the papers they handle (though this if the editor-in-chief agrees that the paper is self-evidently unsuitable, this will only annoy them).

But don't try to pursue publishing this paper in this journal - it's a waste of time.


Using the h-index to compare researchers from different fields We are all aware that the h-index of a researcher is the metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of his/her research publications. I am asking the question regarding a doubt that arises when we compare researchers based on the h-index.
I come from a background of theoretical physics where we come across two types of researchers: (1) those who works on theory and (2) those who works on data analysis (mostly within a collaboration). For example, consider the following two researchers:

One is a senior professor who works on quantum field theory and string theory and has produced several outstanding papers over 25 years. His total citations = 7311, h-index = 40, i-10 index = 57.

The second has obtained his PhD in gravitational wave astronomy about 3 years ago and is presently a postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Most of his papers involve doing data analysis as part of the gravitational waves collaboration. His total citations = 31121, h-index = 46, i-10 index = 75.

So, in my opinion, it wouldn't be a wise idea to compare them based on their citations and h-index since the more experienced researcher has a much lower h-index even though he has produced several outstanding papers in his area of expertise.
My Question:
In view of the above example:

How do you compare the  quality of two researchers when they are in different fields of research? Are there any other means to evaluate the quality of research?
How do you evaluate researchers where most of their citations come from papers where they are one of a large number of co-authors and their non-collaborative works are cited much less often?

Reliance on any single index has many confounds. And these flaws are amplified when you attempt to compare academics across disciplines.
That said, there are more thoughtful ways to make use of metrics.
Here are some of the main things that should temper your use of h-index:

Proportion of first-author or lead-author papers (e.g., 1st, 2nd, last author): All else being equal, the esteem attributable to an author in  publishing an academic paper is increased when the author leads the work.
Number of authors per paper: All else being equal, fewer authors per paper suggests that the author of interest is contributing more to each paper.
Average time since publication: Papers accumulate citations over time. So, an academic with many recent publications may have many papers that will ultimately contribute to their h-index after a period of time has elapsed for those citations to accrue the requisite number of citations.
Discipline-specific citation practices: Disciplines vary in their referencing practices. The two big differences are (1) number of references per paper, and (2) citation half-life, which is to say the time it takes an article to receive half of all the citations it will ever receive. People who are in fields with more references per paper, get more citations and as a result, a higher h-index. People in fields with shorter citation half-lives see a more rapid rise of their h-index, although eventually (10 to 15 years after publication), differences in citation half-life will generally matter much less. In addition, citation databases vary in coverage of different fields (e.g., web of science probably makes biomedical researchers look much better than computer scientist compared to  Google Scholar).

What are you trying to measure?
Here are some fairly orthogonal elements from which you can conceptually derive other indicators:

Annual Output: Their contribution in partnership with others to Annual Academic Output, where output corresponds to overall value: some kind of  product of both quantity and quality (or impact).
Personal Contribution: The proportion of their contribution to that output.
Career length: The number of years that they have been making this impact.

So, from this perspective, h-index is mostly a function of annual output, career length, and the vagaries of discipline-specific citation practices.
Personal Contribution Indicators:
If you are interested more in personal contribution, you might get some of the following indicators:

Number of first-author and lead-author papers. This could be broken down based on the quality of the output as indexed by things like discipline specific journal ranking (e.g., Q1 on Scimago) or annual or total citation counts.
Fractionated paper or citation counts. E.g., sum of papers where the value of each paper is one over the number of authors. This would mean than one sole-author paper equals 10 10-author papers. Other weightings are possible to incorporate the value assigned to first-authorship or incorporate the assumption that actually having 10 10-author papers is more valuable than 1 sole-author paper.

Productivity indicators:**
If you are comparing researchers at different career stages, it can be important to control for the fact that people with longer careers have had more time to publish and more time for those publications to get cited.
If you are more interested in research productivity, then you probably want to focus on indicators of either average annual academic output or output over some recent time period (e.g., last 3 years, last 5 years, etc.).
A few indicators include the following:

H-index divided by years since first publication. Variants include the annual rate of increase of h-index over the last five years. Note that this does not control for variation in personal contribution or discipline citation practices.
Number of first or lead author papers per year. This could be adapted to focus on number of such papers in journals of a certain quality.
Average annual increase in annual citation counts over the last x years.

Summary:
All citation-based metrics have issues. That said, if you are aware of the limitations of the different metrics and draw on a complementary set of indicators, you are more likely to make a considered assessment of an academic's research impact.
In general, it makes most sense to compare researcher metrics to discipline-specific norms. It's important to characterise their publication style: quality versus quantity, degree of involvement in each paper, small number of authors per paper versus many authors per paper, etc. And it's also important to be clear on whether you are interested in recent productivity versus total career output versus total career impact.
More importantly, metrics are heuristics. Where important decisions are being made, they shouldn't replace reading the person's actual work or seeking out assessments by knowledgable experts.


Would requiring students to use Twitter as an integral part of a course potentially conflict with FERPA? I'm not planning on requiring my students to use Twitter, but it popped up on someone else's syllabus and got me thinking as to whether it's appropriate with respect to student privacy.

I don't think it's right since Twitter allows public viewing of messages and their sender, exposing the enrollment of the course to the wider world and the CMS the professor uses has sufficiently similar technology baked in that's FERPA safe.

I'm curious if anyone else sees it differently.

Per comments, I should note that this is not just a marketing-type class.  The syllabus I saw intended to have students comment, converse, and critique work on-line.

To elaborate on @Danny Ruijters comment:

The acceptableness of using Twitter as a course requirement greatly depends on the course itself and how Twitter will be used. Courses which could easily integrate Twitter are business courses focusing on topics such as:

Marketing
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SMO (Social Media Optimization)
SMM (Social Media Management)

If a course wanted to use Twitter as a form of communication (could be an argument to make with a business communications course depending on the syllabus) then there's no reason to use Twitter. I don't know a single school that doesn't have a student email system and more and more schools have online learning centers used by both virtual and ground (in class) courses.

In a case where Twitter was acceptable students should NOT be forced to use their own personal accounts or even release the name of their personal account.


What are merits of having a PhD degree? What are the benefits of having a PhD degree? Why are PhD programs so competitive? I mean, why do many people apply for PhD programs?

In STEM fields, it is usually possible to get a better-paid job in industry with a bachelor's or master's degree. On the other hand, PhD programs are usually long, hard and low-paying — if there is any paying at all — and job prospects for PhD graduates are not that impressive too. So, what am I missing? Why do so many talented people try to get into PhD programs if they can get better jobs outside academia? Is it merely because of personal interest in research, teaching or learning?

Although opinions are important, I sincerely appreciate it if facts and experiences are shared. I agree that this question can be opinion-based but one of the reasons why I am asking this is that choosing to do a PhD degree and possibly pursuing an academic career is a very important decision. Based on personal experience, I have seen many fresh graduates who face the same question (and also a few people that, first, made a decision then faced the question, only to realize that it is late) and I hope that, apart from satiating my personal curiosity, it will provide factual and helpful information for those who have not made their minds yet.

You are asking why people might choose a doctoral candidacy over a better-paying job in the industry.
The straightforward answer is that - at least to the respective people - other factors are given more weight than achieving a maximum in payment alone.
These other factors can include:

freedom in choice of tasks
flexibility in working style
ownership of what you work on
autonomy in collaboration with internal and external partners
authority to draw further people in to your tasks
your colleagues are probably there because they're enthusiastic about what they're doing, not just because they want some job with an acceptable salary
your organisation probably covers a wide range of topics, and any acquisition of knowledge within (or sometimes even outsode of) your organisation can be reasonably counted as working time

Evidently, various of these aspects depend a bit on the concrete situation a doctoraĺ candidacy takes place in.

Lastly, even a payment angle can play into it: I consider it a significant advantage that during the time of my doctoral candidacy (this being a government-funded job), I used to be paid based upon a salary table with automatic raises rather than having to negotiate for any amount of money.


Are there open-access, free, non-topical academic data and research archives? I am looking for an archive where anyone can deposit both data and research papers, which does not require creators or users to pay, does not require registration for users to access materials (hence not academia.edu), and which is not restricted to specific fields such as math or computer science (though the content could be limited to academic stuff as opposed to recipes). If that's not enough, the web site should provide "adequate amounts of space", which I know is field dependent, but let's start with 250 GB per user as a baseline. I presume that creators of content to be posted on such a site would have to register. As far as I can tell there is no such archive, but I may have missed something.

In addition to the already mentioned figshare service, I would recommend you to take a close look at Zenodo service. While Zenodo also offers a set of features, similar to figshare, including an automatic DOI generation and assignment, there are at least three significant differences (and Zenodo's advantages, that is, for the appropriate cases) that ought to be considered, as follows:

Zenodo offers git and GitHub integration, so, if you plan to publish your research source code, I would go with Zenodo (and I actually did with my dissertation research source code - it's a bit tricky, but nothing that cannot be solved);
Zenodo is backed by world-famous CERN and its solid IT cloud infrastructure, so your data is IMHO more safe than with figshare in the long term.
Additionally, from an organizational perspective, a related argument is that Zenodo backed by a stable organization and European Union's multi-year projects (and, thus, funding), whereas figshare, while an independent organization, is backed by two not very well-known private (and, thus, not so stable) companies.


How do conferences detect double submission? My first year undergraduate teammate has submitted our project work to multiple conferences. I want him to pull back the submission before reviewers take action against us. But he wants proof that conferences actually care about it and can detect self plagiarism and double submission.

This is in electronics, where conference proceedings count as publications.

"Actually care about it": Read the conference's rules.

"Can detect": Irrelevant.  Like many things in academic research, this is primarily honor system.  If your teammate thinks that whether something is acceptable is determined by whether you can get away with it, they need a serious attitude adjustment.

By the way: do you have a faculty advisor on this project?  They need to know about this.  They would also be the best one to give you advice on the specific norms of conferences and publishing in your fields.


Quickly pulling together thesis after unexpected failure of oral exam I failed my oral exam unexpectedly. My advisor had the impression that it would be less formal than it was (or at least that is what he told me) and I wasn't prepared. I thought it would be more along the lines of a project proposal, but instead my committee wanted my thesis to be close to half done.

It is not. The problem I have been working on is fairly unique, and there wasn't a lot of existing work for me to base it on. I've needed to run a lot of numerical tests to ensure my conjectures are correct before trying to prove them. Consequently, progress has been slow. But there have been some results, and I know that it is a good idea.

My second oral exam will be at the end of spring, and if I do not pass then, I will be removed from the program. I'm sure I could finish this in time to graduate, but with a hard, career-endangering deadline in sight, I'm becoming very worried about the timeline. I didn't expect to be in this position.

I've contemplated switching problems to something with a more predictable timeline, but at this point, starting over seems like a poor option, even if the new problem would be faster. I've thought the same about my advisor. It seems like time has locked me into playing what I thought was a good hand, but am now realizing may not be.

Are there any suggestions or advice for how to pull research together quickly for a deadline? (Other than work like hell, which I am doing.)

If it helps, your failing is probably more representative of your committee criticizing your adviser rather than you alone. Let me guess -- you work for a assistant/junior Professor or a tenured professor who has fallen out of political favor within the department? My guess is they are "beating on you" as a proxy for your professor because that is how academia works.

My advice to getting out of this rut is to suss out who on your committee is your adviser's enemy and work more closely with them. To handle a similar situation I had in my PhD I attended "enemy" group meetings and presented updates on my work directly to "enemy's" group. I could learn any objections to my work from the "enemy" right away before presenting in the exam. Over time the deadline for retaking exam became more flexible. I ended up satisfying it a few months before defending my dissertation. Enemy turned to friend and helped me with providing materials and access to characterization tools. Enemy-turned-friend wrote stellar recc letters and helped organize job interview for me. I ended up drafting and publishing 5 manuscripts from the research, on 2 of the papers I offered "enemy/friend" coauthorship and he/she declined. After graduating enemy-turned-friend became department chair and took away my adviser's labspace and used my PhD apparatus for his/her own research.


What does "engineering experience" entail I'm a rising senior in high school and i applied for this engineering exposure program over the summer. My application didn't include any practical experience in the field, which I thought was fine because, as advertised, it was an EXPOSURE program. Anyway, I got accepted. So it should have been fine.

But the organizers made us do a conference call before camp began, and now I'm getting the impression that I actually needed experience (they had us fill out a form that asked us stuff like if we knew how to use a 3d printer, [insert program I don't know how to use], coding, etc.

I technically took classes on C++ and Java, but my teachers were subpar, so I'm not really sure if that would be helpful. I was under the impression that I was accepted because of my experience with the sciences (I took AP Bio, Chem, and both Physics C's), but it doesn't really seem like I'll be using those skills.

Right now I'm guessing I should pour all my time into coding better before camp starts? What should I do?

I'm asking here because I feel like people here would know how much weight qualifications and exerience actually hold. and honestly the engineering forum looked kind of intimidating.

The form was asking if you knew how to do those things, not saying "you better know how to do this or else!". A little preparation in those areas may be nice, but judging from the situation, you don't need to spend all your time coding.

Here's my thoughts on it: if you're going to do an "experience and learn" type thing, you want to be in a position to get the most out of it, right? For example, I'm in an engineering internship right now (I'm a little younger than you, and my situation is kind of odd, but what I'm doing is pretty similar to what you'll be doing, sounds like).

If I didn't know some math and programming, and some bare basics about electronics, it'd be pretty miserable for everyone involved. But nobody expects me to win a Noble Prize in my first week. Everyone expects that, hey, I'm learning, and I'm probably going to need guidance to solve a problem, and I might need instruction in how to use such and such program, or whatever.

So what I'd do if I were you: brush up on programming, trying to understand the basics. You don't know what language they're using, and you have some Java/C syntax experience, so maybe try a different, easier language like Python that's quicker to write (or do whatever language you're most comfortable with; I just happen to be a Python fan) and try solving some of the Euler problems online (not problems written by Euler; they're just called that) using programs you write. That's a good way to practice if you know what you're doing to some extent, but need practice.

(Don't be afraid to google "finding length of list in [language]" or "doing [thingamajig] in [language]". I feel like, especially when starting out, a lot of programming means: run into problem, google error, google function used to solve error, type into program and adjust for situation.)

You can also review math (algebra II should be sufficient; I assume you've already taken it) and a little of the physics you've done if you want. If you've ever used a CAD program, you can review using that; if you haven't, maybe try downloading Autodesk Inventor - it's free for the non-pro edition, or something like that - and go through some tutorials with it so you get an idea how to use it.

Maybe look up some stuff about electronics, or about circuit board layout programs (I think there's one called Autodesk Eagle that might be free like Inventor). I don't know what all your thing will cover, but you get the idea. If you think something'll be covered, try to get a cursory knowledge of that thing, so you know what questions to ask and you're confident in your ability to, at the very minimum, figure things out going into it.

In the end, it sounds like you're going to learn a lot. "The forum sounds intimidating." That means there's a lot of cool people and topics that you don't know about yet that you're going to learn about! That's pretty cool.

Also, feel free to ping me in chat or in the comments if you want any specific advice on resources for different things.


I accidentally failed to disclose a school I briefly attended. Have now been admitted to grad school; how to proceed? When applying to grad school, I did not think enough about the requirements of disclosing past education.  I failed to disclose a school I attended because it was so short and brief and I received all W's, there is no GPA, but there is a transcript.  I did not realize how big a mistake this was at the time.  Now, I have been notified of acceptance from the department, still waiting official acceptance from the institute, and I am very nervous that this will all get messed up.  What should I do?  Tell the school? Decline offer and reapply next year with correct info?

Your options seem to be: tell them, don't tell them and hope for the best, or withdraw.

If you tell them, the worst that can happen is they revoke your admission and invite you to reapply next year. If you withdraw, this will happen for sure. So, I wouldn't even consider withdrawing.

I usually suggest not over-analyzing things, but in this case, I wouldn't just let the sleeping dog lie. You don't want this hanging over your head for the rest of your career. So, I would just send a brief e-mail saying exactly what you did above (and just as concisely) and asking how to proceed. I expect they will say that they will update your record and do not anticipate any problems -- but you should prepare for the worst-case scenario just in case.


Professor won't let me see final exam grade I emailed a professor asking for my final exam grade (just the number). Nothing else in the email, tried to keep the inquiry as short as possible. The professor refused.
Is there anything I can do about this, or are professors able to withhold grades at their discretion (other than the final course grade)?

In most universities professors are encouraged to be transparent about grading, but whether they have to show you your grades is up to university/department policy.
If it’s important to you then seek recourse elsewhere: does your school have an ombudsperson or undergraduate academic support? If so - ask them to help mediate. It may also be helpful if you get other students on board: if you’re the only one complaining it’s less likely that you’ll be taken seriously.
In my department, for example, I have to tell students exactly how much they got in each assessment criterion (assignment/project/exam etc.). In addition, I must tell them (in the syllabus, before the course starts) what the numerical to letter grade conversions are (so what grade qualifies you for an A+/A/A- etc.). But this is by no means the norm in other universities to my knowledge.


Loss of perspective after short-term postdoc I'm a physicist and I might have figured out too late that I really like research, even if it hurts. I had a tough PhD, during which I worked in isolation on a new technique. I didn't publish along the way (my supervisor didn't believe in conference papers, I got scooped and in general nobody cared, even if I repeatedly stressed the issue). After my defense I was unemployed and I finished the paper on my thesis work, which has a couple dozen authors (I'm first) and was published on Scientific Reports. I had a 2 years postdoc offer in the department I did my PhD in, but I felt I needed a change so I said no. I opted for a five months postdoc on a topic slightly related to the one I worked on during my PhD, and I loved it. The advisor was great and I really enjoyed being treated as a human and having the opportunity to work on a hard problem. Unfortunately the data I worked on was meh, so although I developed a new software suite it's still not clear if the data is good enough for a publication (I think so, but let's see).

I am applying for postdocs, and I am not getting any interview. Is it because I only have one paper (three more in the pipeline), although introducing a brand new technique? I have the impression I have been cheated: everybody kept saying publish and it will be better, but things are not better (except for the fact that I closed a quite big problem). I got interviews with a few software companies, but I have a strong feeling that I will miss the opportunity to do research independently, instead that implementing something... Do you think this is unreasonable?

I'm probably better than average as a researcher, but I have a worse than average track record. Is there a way to fix things or is it game over?

Reputation: Regarding if your publication record is a problem, it depends on the field. I suggest searching on Google Scholar researchers at the same stage as you (ending their PhD and those that have started their first postdoc) to get a better idea.

Network: If you are on good terms with your first postdoc PI, which I assume you are, then also ask them if they know of any positions. It is insufficient to be applying for postdocs, in some areas they are very competitive. Your advantage is that you have solved a big problem (apparently), but who would know that? Use those that do know to help you out, they might specifically mention you to so-and-so who is looking for a postdoc.

Publish-or-perish: Stepping out of academia will put you in a worse position, I think it will be hard to return.


Do grad schools need an official transcript from universities where I was an exchange student for only one semester? I am a European non-EU student that went on an Erasmus exchange for one semester in the UK during my third year. Now, two and a half years later, I am applying to grad schools in the US, and the official transcript in my home university lists the courses taken in my exchange.

However, I was wondering if I need an official transcript from the Erasmus university as well. Getting this would be a big problem, since they only give them in person, and I have no way of getting one. Is it enough that the courses I took on my exchange are listed on my home university transcript, or will I have to do the impossible and get one from the Erasmus university too?

This is likely to be specific to a particular graduate school, but I studied in the UK for a year during my US undergraduate education. The courses and grades were listed on my transcript. The graduate school that I applied to (and to which I was accepted) did not require a separate transcript from the UK university.


What is the "power" a PhD advisor has over their advisees? I'm an undergraduate Physics and Mathematics student, who is planning to do a PhD. I have seen many PhD students on this website who are struggling to solve problems about their advisor in authorship, advising, relationship or in unethical manners, etc. and also many answers which are strongly suggesting that they shouldn't prolong the problem if it is possible and try to graduate once like they have the power to destroy the students all career, at least it was what I've perceived.

So, I am asking what is the power an advisor has legally or illegally over their own advisees?

Note: I couldn't find more appropriate word instead of power :).When I said power, I generally implied the rights the advisor have which can affect the student's PhD negatively.

In many programs, the advisor signs off on the PhD student's thesis. If the advisor doesn't approve the thesis, it is difficult to impossible for the student to graduate and earn the PhD.
In many programs, the advisor is responsible for securing funding for their PhD students. If the advisor withdraws funding that the student was expecting, the student might not have another source of financial support.
Advisors are responsible for training and mentoring their PhD students, which is a major part of the PhD. If an advisor withholds that training, their PhD student might not become a successful researcher without it.
In general, advisors interact closely with their PhD students. If these interactions are unpleasant or abusive, the workplace becomes very, very uncomfortable.
Faculty tend to have a lot more influence in an academic department than their PhD students do. An advisor can potentially make things difficult for their PhD student with other faculty in the department.
In many cases, on applying for jobs after a PhD, a student is expected to have a recommendation from their PhD advisor. Without it, it can be much more difficult to find a job. Also see: How to handle not having my PhD advisor as a reference? and What to do when a thesis adviser refuses to recommend me?


Is it appropriate to ask a professor how my grade was calculated? I took a graduate course (C.S) in a U.S university. We were not provided with any grading scale in the syllabus. I was assigned a letter grade but I have no idea how it was calculated. Below is an example of a grading scale from another course

If X is your overall course score, letter grades will be assigned
using the below scale. Scores will not be rounded.
100 ≥ X ≥ 93 A 93 > X ≥ 90 A- 90 > X ≥ 87 B+ 87 > X ≥ 83 B
83 > X ≥ 80 B- 80 > X ≥ 77 C+ 77 > X ≥ 73 C 73 > X ≥ 70 C-
70 > X ≥ 67 D+ 67 > X ≥ 63 D 63 > X ≥ 60 D- 60 > X ≥ 0 E

Can I ask the professor how my letter grade was calculated? if so, would something along the lines of "Could you please provide us with the grading scale used for the course or post it on Canvas?" be acceptable and non-offensive?

You can certainly ask the professor to justify how a grade was calculated and assigned. In most universities and most systems the professor is obliged by the rules to justify to students how a grade was obtained. Moreover, minimal decent teaching practice is that the manner in which grades are to be calculated and the conditions in which the evaluation is to occur are fixed in advance and known before evaluations occur and that the calculations are reproducible by the student evaluated (there are of course particular contexts, e.g. evaluating a student with discapacities or an exam that contains an error in a problem formulation or an interruption (e.g. power outage) in its administration, in which particular modifications might have to be made).

Assigning grades according to some scheme known only to the professor is considered something bordering malpractice in many countries. In Spain, where I work, a student always has a formal right to see how exams etc. were graded and to formally protest any perceived error in their grading.


Paper rejection due to being "correspondence": what does it mean? My paper was rejected a few hours after submission with the following explanation:

"Regretfully, your manuscript is being Immediate Rejected without review since it is a short correspondence item while we do not publish correspondence. "

What does this mean?  Is my manuscript too short?

Many journals publish correspondence or short reports that are brief research works, usually with a single finding, straightforward methods, and not much more than that. They are intended for quick, "Hey, we've always wanted to know the value of X, and turns out it's 7" studies - they belong in the literature, and may be useful, but are not a full research paper.

They are often also referred to as letters, notes, or by other names. Sometimes they're purely defined by concept, sometimes by word count.

For example, consider Ecology:

  "Notes are short papers that present significant new observations and methodological advances. Notes may contain results that are not sufficiently elaborated or developed as to justify an Article, but which are still of considerable potential significance."

vs.

  "...an Article tells a more complicated story with distinct components. The greater length of Articles relative to Reports must be justified by their greater complexity

Or American Journal of Epidemiology, which uses word counts:

  The maximum number of words per article, exclusive of tables, figures, references, and abstract, should be as follows: Original Contribution, 3,500; ...Brief Original Contributions, 2,000 (with no more than 2 half-page tables and 40 references)

or Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology:

  Original Articles should include a title page, a structured abstract of no more than 250 words (see below), a text of no more than 3,000 words, no more than 7 tables and figures, and no more than 40 references.

  Concise Communications should include a title page, a narrative abstract of no more than 50 words, a text of no more than 1,200 words, no more than 2 tables or figures, and no more than 10 references.

  Research Briefs should include a title page, a text of no more than 900 words, no more than 1 table or figure, and no more than 10 references. This category of article is intended for the presentation of short, focused, and evidence-based experimental observations: substantial preliminary and novel results of importance to the journal readership but not substantial enough in content to warrant a longer presentation. Research Briefs undergo the same peer review as longer article types.

Your paper is either too short, or only presents a short, focused result that the journal does not consider a "full" paper. It's hard to know, as they won't exactly lay out the definitions of papers they don't accept, but you may want to look at similar journals to see if there is a field-based consensus for what a sufficiently large finding is.


Writing recommendation letters for two fellowship candidates, conflict of interest? Let's say there are two applicants to a private foundation fellowship which requires a faculty sponsorship and additional recommendation letters. Would there be a conflict of interest for a faculty to sponsor one applicant with an accompanying letter, and write a recommendation letter for the other applicant?

I thought there would be no conflict, but my fellow faculty member disagrees. What are the possible issues with this situation?

There are no conflicts of interest for the letters. Many of us are at large universities where it is very likely that multiple students will ask for letters for the same fellowship/job. As long as you don't say that multiple students are each "the best student you've had in twenty years," you aren't perjuring yourself. You don't have to select a favorite.

Student sponsorship / mentoring-fellowship is more complex. It's often best to have the student write to the search committee and ask. Some places are fine with faculty sponsoring multiple students, others aren't. Some will note this explicitly in their instructions to faculty. It's best to check with the organization.

So I don't think there will a problem with the faculty writing two letters but only serving as sponsor for one student. And the fact they are not  the sponsor for the other student won't be seen as necessarily negatively prejudicial. Students select  their sponsors for a variety of reasons and vice versa.


Plagiarism or self-plagiarism, when there are multiple non-coinciding authors How plagiaristic is it when one of the authors A,B or C, who wrote together a paper, reuses part of this paper in a second publication, written with D and E?

Is that still self-plagiarism? Is that worse than when a single author plagiarizes his previous work?

If A, B, and C write paper X together, then they are all taking responsibility as co-authors for its content, which effectively belongs to all of them jointly.

Now, let's say that A reuses text in an inappropriate way in paper Y, authored by A, D, and E.  Even if A wasn't the one who originally wrote the reused text, A was certainly part of the editing and revision process and has actively affirmed that this text is a good expression of A's understanding of the material in paper X.

I would thus count such reuse as self-plagiarism: the material from paper X is part of A's prior work, and the issue is that this text has been reused in an uncredited manner.

In fact, I would even count it as self-plagiarism if is was D or E that copied the material (this situation could actually happen fairly easily, if D or E copies the material as "placeholder material" into a first draft, expecting it to later be revised).  Again, the supposition is that A, as an author of paper X, will know their own work and has a responsibility to ensure that it is properly credited or properly paraphrased in its new context in paper Y.


How can I prove that the head of the lab did not have contribution to my work? I performed part of my PhD thesis in a lab outside my university. After deciding to publish the result, the head of the lab did not give me the permission to publish it. He wanted to be the coauthor, himself and one of his students. But they did not have substantial contribution to the project. They allowed me to use their lab and their materials. he blocked my work totally. I do not have permission to publish the results just because I do not want to give credit to them since they did not contribute to my work. According to ICJME, technical help does not make eligibility to be the coauthor. Their lab knew these standards and accept them. However, the problem is that I cannot prove that their help was not that much to make them eligible to be coauthors. Even my supervisor believes that I should consider them as coauthors because he thinks that they helped me during my stay in their lab. Also, he thinks, like many other people, that it is a custom to consider the head of the lab as a coauthor.  Does anyone have suggestions for me? How can I unblock my work?

Sorry, I don't think you can do much at this point. These things should be negotiated before any resources are shared. Nothing is free, and different people may expect different forms of gratification- reciprocation, acknowledgement, authorship. You are entitled to having your opinions about this, and the correct time to voice them is at the beginning of the labwork/collaboration.

It is possible that your advisor has a prior understanding with this lab that you are not aware of. If this is not so, share your misgivings with your advisor and seek to learn his/her reasons for conceding authorship. With that knowledge, you can avoid such a situation next time.

This time, 'unblock' by giving credit.


What to do if authors don't respond to my serious concerns about their paper? I recently read a paper that conducted an experiment, analyzed it, and reached a conclusion. However, the way they conducted the analysis is seriously flawed and cannot be used to support the conclusion.

As far as I can tell, the experiment is valid and only the analysis is problematic. Thus the paper can be rewritten, although the conclusion may completely change.

The paper is published in a highly-reputable and prestigious scientific journal. The authors are all senior researchers at reputable institutions.
It's a bit of a surprise that this flaw got past the authors and peer review. I suspect that, because the conclusion confirms what many people already believe, the analysis was not scrutinized too closely. I only became suspicious of it because the measured effect was too strong. The analysis is also reasonably complex and the flaw is somewhat subtle.

I contacted all three authors by email and explained the problem with their analysis. I did by best to phrase the email appropriately.

A month later, I have received no response to my email. What would be a reasonable course for further action? Options include:

Send the authors a follow-up email. (If so, what should I say to get the message across?)
Contact the journal with my concerns.
Write a response. (Would such a thing get published?)
Do nothing. (I think the paper is too important.)

Write a response. (Would such a thing get published?)

This. Such things are usually titled "Comment to..." and, yes, they are published, typically alongside with a reply from the authors of the commented paper (the comment is usually sent to them by the journal editor).

As usual disclaimer, since things may vary across fields and journals, check if the journal in question has already published comments of this type and, in doubt, contact the editor.


Is depositing a document already available online in ResearchGate a problem? Yesterday, I deposited an online document into my ResearchGate. My adviser prepared this document for a research proposal. I did not change anything and even I did not wrote that document at all because he just wrote that proposal and because my name was there I thought it's a good idea to put that in my ResearchGate account. Because it's already online somewhere and people could find it by searching in Google but it doesn't have DOI. Today, my adviser sent an email to me and said you can't publish something with my name without my consent and you should remove it from ResearchGate. I apologized and removed it immediately. I'm wondering because I did not publish it I just deposited that document into ResearchGate, which is already online somewhere else and people could find that. Furthermore, even I did not write that to need approval for the content because he wrote that completely. Right now it is completely deleted and I don't care really but I just feel that it was true that I should be blamed or not? I appreciate any idea or suggestion.

Edited:

I don't think my question was vague but I just reiterate my arguments more briefly again maybe it makes it clear.

This document, which we are talking about, has two authors: me and my adviser. So it's not the work of other people.
This document is publicly online in an university website and people could search it in Google, find it and download it so nothing is private, confidential or in the copyright of an publisher.
The document is written by my adviser based on a draft which I gave him sometimes ago So it is not a "new" document which I wrote it by myself to say ok you published something which is not reviewed before publishing.

So, I don't know what's wrong to upload a document, which is already online somewhere else, in ResearchGate for better visibility. I mean it's already out there but because it's not in a public research repository maybe has less visibility and that's it.

I don't think your question is (or was) unclear, but there are a few things you don't seem to consider.

First, each author has a say in a) the final form of the document to be published, b) when to make it public, and c) where to publish it. You seem to think that c) doesn't matter. While my opinion is that ResearchGate generally is pretty benign, your advisor might not agree. However, we don't need to debate the relative merits of ResearchGate to address this question. Suppose instead that your coauthor were to submit your piece of writing to a site you fundamentally disagree with, or one that's likely to reflect badly on your work by association (e.g. a site with a reputation for hosting crank or crackpot papers). Yes, you would be justified in being angry at your coauthor in this situation. To avoid such troubles, it's always best to discuss with your coauthors where, when, and how you submit something before doing so.

Second, when something gets published in a journal you usually sign a copyright transfer agreement. Depending on the journal, you might be allowed to host a copy of the published paper on your personal website but not third-party sites like ResearchGate. In that situation you might actually sabotage getting it published. Now, in this case you say the document is a grant proposal rather than a paper. I don't know if the same applies there or not, or if your advisor might simply want to keep the visibility low on this document, and instead focus on giving publicity to actual peer-reviewed publications later. After all, such documents might contain ideas that didn't work out, or ideas that a competing research group might "steal" if they were to see it online.


When exactly are you “promoviert” in Germany? In Germany, acquiring your doctoral degree usually involves the following steps (in that order):

You hand in your thesis.
The examiners review your thesis.
You defend your thesis and possibly take an oral exam (usually on the same day).
You publish your thesis (or provide proof that you already did so).
The diploma, certificate is prepared, signed, and given to you.

Step 3 usually is the big thing after which you are congratulated, celebrated, and get to wear the mortarboard, as there is hardly anything that can go wrong afterwards. Nonetheless, it is usually prominently made clear that only after step 5 you may call yourself Doktor (doctor) and you can get into big trouble otherwise. I am not asking about this.

However, in German, there is another prominent term for acquiring a doctoral degree or the process of doing so, namely promovieren or Promotion, respectively. I have some reason to believe that these terms refer to a slightly different thing, namely completing everything up to step 3:

Some people say this is the case.
When publishing your thesis (step 4) at my university, it is common or even required to write Tag der Promotion (day of “Promotion”) in the thesis with the day being the date of the defense (step 3).

However, apart from the above, I failed to find any evidence for this: Internet searches yield all sorts of unrelated stuff and dictionaries do not make such a fine distinction. Hence I am asking: When exactly can you call yourself promoviert in Germany? Be aware that I am looking for some information that goes beyond hearsay (I already have such).

For the search engines: Wann genau ist man promoviert?

The Promotionsordnung of my alma mater says this:

  §17(1): "Als Promotionsdatum gilt der Tag der bestandenen mündlichen
  Prüfung."

(The date of Promotion is the day of the successful oral exam.)

  §25(1): "Als vorläufigen Nachweis der Verleihung des Doktorgrades
  erhält der Bewerber vom Prüfungsamt der TUM eine Urkunde nach Anlage
  2, sofern die erforderlichen Exemplare nach § 20 fristgerecht
  eingereicht worden sind."

(You receive a preliminary certificate when you have submitted the required copies of your dissertation.)

  §25(2): "Vor Aushändigung der Urkunde nach Abs. 1 ist der Bewerber
  nicht befugt, den Doktorgrad zu führen."

(You are not allowed to call yourself a Doktor before you have received this preliminary certficate.)

  §25(3): "Der Bewerber erhält ferner eine Urkunde in deutscher und
  englischer Sprache nach Anlage 3 a oder 3 b, die mit dem Siegel der
  TUM versehen ist und das Promotionsdatum gemäß § 17 Abs. 1 trägt. ..."

(The date of Promotion is written on the final certificate.)

So, you could say you are promoviert when you have passed the oral exam. But since I'm not a lawyer I'm not qualified to give legal advice. Personally, I would avoid anything that could be seen as you saying you are a doctor before you are allowed to do so. Until then I would say "I've defended my dissertation successfully and am waiting to receive the certificate." When you have your certificate, the date of Promotion is the day of the oral exam.

In practice, you get the preliminary certificate rather quickly. I believe it was something like two weeks after the exam for me, but it depends on how quickly the head of examination and the administration works. The biggest problem was getting a Führungszeugnis in time since I hadn't considered that prior to the exam.


Is a preprint considered as dual publication? I am about to submit a paper to Nature but I made public the technical report supporting an important share of the results via BioRXiv a few weeks ago.

In the Nature submission system, they asked if the results have been published elsewhere. Is the preprint of my technical report considered as such?

Thanks

Nature encourages the use of preprints, as noted on their journal's policy page:

  Nature Research journals encourage posting of preprints of primary research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites, and open communications between researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint commenting platforms. Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server (as described in Preprints for the life sciences. Science 352, 899–901; 2016); preprints may be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Research journals. Manuscripts posted on preprint servers will not be taken into account when determining the advance provided by a study under consideration at a Nature Research journal.

The webpage then proceeds  to provide the details for their policy.


Is it rude to write in a journal paper "the proof is left as an exercise to the reader"? Many books, particularly in mathematics and related disciplines, contain sentences like "the proof is left as an exercise to the reader", which actually mean that the claim should be easy to prove for anyone reading until that point.

Can I write such a sentence in a paper submitted to a journal? Or will the reviewers consider it rude to omit a proof in such a way?

There are two separate issues here: omitting the proof, and calling it an exercise.

It is relatively common to omit some proofs in research papers. In particular, proofs that are long but routine, or that re-use the same method as other proofs in the paper, are often abbreviated or removed. It depends on the intended audience for the paper, to some extent. You will get a sense of this by reading more research papers. But caution is needed: one of the first places to look for errors in a paper is in results where the proof was omitted!

The question whether to call something in your paper an "exercise" is more difficult. I wouldn't be surprised if some people do it -- but some people don't write very well. The audience for a paper includes your peers, and you are not really in a position to assign them homework. There are other ways to indicate that a proof is easy besides calling it an exercise: "the following theorem follows directly from definitions", "the proof of the following theorem is routine", "the proof of the following theorem is similar to the proof of Theorem 1.3", etc.   Giving a small hint of how to prove the result can make the paper stronger, and it helps any readers who are not experts in the area.


How much should I adapt a paper to fit another conference than where I originally submitted? Me and my research buddies have written this paper, summarizing and drawing conclusions from a proof-of-concept we've coded and tested. This paper regards several fields or subjects in (applied) Computer Science, and fits relatively well the call-for-papers of a few highly-rated conferences. On the other hand, former papers on the same subject have been published mostly in a single conference, and only a few in one or two others.

We're a bit overdue on submission; and the most-relevant conferences' next submission deadline is in about half a year or never (one may have been discontinued, it was more of a workshop). So, we want to submit to a well-regarded conference, with a matching CFP.

Now, while the CFP covers our work, the conference's 'angle' is somewhat different. This while other papers on our subject build a sort of internal discourse amongst themselves, i.e. essentially pick up the discussion where other papers left off. More or less. This is obviously made more acceptable, or maybe made possible, by the fact that most of them are published in the same conference.

So my questions are:

Is it a good idea or not to try for the upcoming conference, even though we'll be the first paper on our subject to be published there? i.e. do we stand a reasonable chance?
How much should we try to adapt the paper, to sound less of a continuation of the 'internal discourse' of our subject and more likes something appealing to the 'crowd' of the upcoming conference?

PS - The results are sound. They're not the end-all of exploring the subject, but there's plenty of meat in there. So it's not a borderline-accept paper (if I can say so myself).

It's very hard to judge how well a paper will be received by a particular set of reviewers (which is the real question for paper acceptance).  It is certain, however, that the more that you adapt the paper to speak to the community that you are sending it to, the more likely it is to be well received.

I think that in making your decision, you would be well advised to think less about time and more about audience. Six months isn't very long to wait for a publication, so unless you've got a reason to really hurry, I wouldn't take that as a primary factor.  Instead, consider whether the work you are doing is an incremental step that would be best reserved for discussion in the focused community or whether you think it's broad and interesting enough that the larger community should hear it.

If the former, then finish the paper now and set a reminder in your calendar for a few weeks before the deadline of the focused conference. If the latter, then go for the earlier conference and put in as much work as necessary to speak to the broader audience.  Don't just send a narrow paper to a broad conference, though: even if you get accepted, you will have less impact than if you adapt the work for the audience to which you are intending to present it.


What if my professor writes me a negative LOR, in order to keep me working with him? I am a undergrad student, and I am currently conducting summer research under a professor.

During our last meeting, I have revealed that I wish to go to school A for my graduate study. But my prof rather wanted me to stay at my current school for master/phd; i.e., stay and work for him.

Well, I have already spent 3 years in my current undergrad school and I know it too well it is not where I want to go.

The problem is that, this prof is the only person who can comment on my research experience/potential.  (Because I have been working 2 years with him; this year is the second year).

Right now, I can sense something not right in the relationship between my prof and I. At the end, if I go ahead and ask him to write me a recommendation letter, I am sure he would write one. But the question is, there can be a chance that he writes negatively, such that I would get rejected everywhere, and have nowhere to go except staying at my current school and do graduate study with him.

What should I do?

More detail info:

There used to be a PhD student who published quality paper and taking care of things in the lab. The Prof is almost always away so he definely need someone to do this kind of lab managing job. As far as I know, none of his graduate students publish paper for 3 years in a row except for that Phd student. Currently, that PhD student is graduated this year so I guess he was looking for a candidate as a replacement.

Writing bad letters of recommendation because of personal disappointment about a student leaving is so disproportionately unethical that I cannot believe that it happens with any significant frequency. It is not what I would be worried about.

In the end, most professors take pride in their students growing up, going out into the world, and being successful. Students are a bit our kids too -- sure, it would be nice if the kids stayed in the neighborhood, could continue to mow the lawn, and come over for dinner twice a week; but if they move out and are successful, we're proud nonetheless and hope they stay in contact. And if there's something we can help for them to be successful (like writing letters of recommendation), then that's what we do!


Which Universities admit CS graduates for their theoretical physics course? Hello am currently an undergraduate student. My major is CSE. But I am very much interested to do my masters and then PhD in theoretical physics/mathematical physics. Is there any university that admits CS graduates for these courses?
I have looked up some universities that offer these courses.
Queen Mary University, University of Edinburgh and Durham University sounds perfect to me (I can meet their minimum requirements).
But I am not sure whether they admit CS graduates or not. I have not got any reply from them yet.
Would you suggest some Universities both in the UK and US that do? Would any university admit me directly for PhD (without masters)? Will having research paper help?
I could not find any university in the US that offer this course for masters.

I can't speak for the UK, which has a different educational system altogether, but in the US, most programs would find a CS graduate "acceptable" for a physics doctorate. This assumes a good record overall, of course, and probably a few physics courses in which you did well. In the US, a CS student probably has a few such courses, though not advanced ones.

But to actually be admitted you have to be better than "acceptable".

In the US, the graduate program has quite a few courses available, primarily to prepare the student for comprehensive exams. But the normal path would be into a doctoral program, perhaps with an MS along the way.

I would guess that in the UK the university would expect an applicant to be further along in the major subject, but others would need to verify.


How can I strengthen my submitted graduate application? I am applying for a master degree in Germany. I have submitted my application but wish to strengthen it as I want to be accepted. What can I do to enhance my application? Can I contact any of the professors or maybe the student advisor? Will it look artificial? If so, what must I say? (I am coming from abroad otherwise I would have visited the university).
Besides, can I email a professor and communicate to him that I am applying for graduate study, and I was intrigued by his research and wish, if accepted, to work with him? Is it too early to do so before even getting accepted?
I apologize if my questions seem trivial, but this is my first graduate application, and I hope to do all that it is in my power to get accepted.

For the sake of efficiency and fairness, candidate selection is a purely administrative process, based on submitted paperwork only, and handled by academic staff that adhere to strict rules and work ethics. You should not disturb them, nor should you hope for any good effect of doing so.
If you want to enhance your chances, then apply in parallel to other universities or/and other master courses. Submit paperwork that excels in contents and layout.


How do I survive academia as a Trump supporter? Academia is highly liberal - which is fine. I don't mind liberals in general. However I voted for Trump.

I had a weird experience recently. I was chatting with some people at a conference at dinner and one older, well established, professor started talking about Trump supporters. He talked about how awful Trump supporters are and started naming names. He said that such and such person at such and such university was a Trump supporter. As a Trump supporter this made me nervous. I try to hide my support for Trump but of course some people know.

Given that there are a lot of people who think Trump supporters are evil, and given that people have no problem naming names, and given that people know I support Trump, how do I best control the damage? Should I "repent" so to speak? Should I just keep my mouth shut and hope for the best?

I have political views, too, but I learned not to communicate them too much.
No matter what is your view and what you vote for or believe in, there will always be someone having a different opinion. Now we might of course think that in an academic environment, such opinions can be calmly and objectively discussed, but that is often not the case.
There are, in my eyes, two ways to deal with it:

1) You voice your opinion and stand behind it, support it with arguments and stand your point; all the while respecting other view points and staying calm of course.
2) You keep quiet about your views and if you get stuck in a political discussion, you try to take the position of a neutral, outside observer, discussing the current politics like you would discuss the pro and cons of political choices in history.

The first option will make it easy to make friends, but will also make you enemies. The second option is harder, as you have to cover your opinion, but it makes it easier to get along with everyone, as you don't openly oppose their believes.

I personally chose the second option for myself and it is really interesting to look at current political developments like a historian would do; seeing how both sides influence the people and witnessing so many fail to see things critically (even, as in your case, highly educated people).

It is up to you how you deal with these things, but you should be aware that both speaking up and staying quiet has its pros and cons.

PS: These two choices do not only apply to "Trump vs. Clinton", but to almost every topic where people have different opinions and where the "others" are evil for believing "the wrong thing"...


Can an energy drink or chocolate before an exam be useful ? What sort of other edible goods be helpful? At the end of a session, we have to give an examination where 2 years worth of syllabus is asked and it is the most important examination. It takes place in 2 sessions 9-12 and 2-5. I have heard from some of my peers that having things like energy drinks or consuming chocolate could help boost the performance, while others tend to thing it's useless and might even have a negative effect on our performance. We get only 1 shot at this exam and I don't want to take any chance with it. So what I want to ask is,

1) Can consuming energy drinks or chocolate have any effect on my performance (Positive/negative)

2) Are there things whose consumption or general recommendations which can boost my performance on the final day as after giving a 3 hour paper is quite exhausting mentally and physically. And also since it's lunch time, the type of food that I should consume (eg should I have more carbs to get energy or will it make me feel sleepy ??)

I think doing such things may be risky. Instead, do something natural. The most important is to get plenty of sleep the night before the exam and don't try to cram up to the last minute.

Between the two exams parts, get some light exercise and, again, don't cram. Let your mind relax and let it integrate what you know rather than trying to force it to absorb things that may mask other, more important things.

As for food, eat as you normally do but nothing heavy that will make you groggy and wanting an afternoon nap. If you eat differently, your gut may rebel against you.

If you have been taking good notes throughout the learning period, then summarizing them on note cards (big ideas only) in the week previous can be a good plan. You can then do a light review at the morning and mid-day meal. A light review. Big ideas.

But make your body and mind as comfortable as possible. Breathe deeply. Relax your face. Smile. (These are martial arts advices, actually.)


Tips for revising manuscripts months later While I tend to write articles quite quickly, whenever revisions come back from a journal, I find myself taking forever to finish them. Part of the problem is just that my mind is no longer in the same head-space as when I wrote the article, and so getting back into it is difficult. Also, changing the structure/flow of the paper after the fact I find painstaking.

Are there any good strategies for speeding up the revision process?

Just for context, I’m a PhD student in the social sciences, and work more with theory than with data.

Give working on the revision the highest priority within your research tasks. After all, this is the last step before getting your results published, so it's best to get that off your table as fast as possible!
As first step when you get the reviews, go through them carefully and note / mark every comment which you think requires you to revise something. Then, for each marked comment, make a plan how to address that point, and think about what a good sequence for working on the comments would be. For me it works better to first address the more large-scale points, but that may of course differ from one person to the other.
Deal with each comment one-by-one: make the required revision in the paper, and directly after (or maybe before) that write the corresponding response to the reviewer's comment in your response letter.

If you have a comment that raises issues with the overall flow of a section (for example something like "The introduction does not clearly lead to the problem that the author is dealing with."), it may be most efficient to rewrite that part from scratch instead of trying to revise it. Then you can also simply answer something like "The introduction was completely rewritten to address this point".


What is the reasoning behind the publication of poems in academic journals? It came to my attention that some journals in the humanities started publishing poems written by academics. Here are two examples:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077800417736333
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0740770X.2018.1477243

It strikes me as odd, that these poems do not seem to be published as historical sources or subject of investigation, but as academic contributions on par with peer-reviewed papers. I used to think that it is a common feature of all academic practices that their result is open to scrutiny of some form. Yet I can think of no form of scrutiny that is meaningfully applicable to poems.

What is the reasoning behind the publication of poems in academic journals?

Your first reference comes from Qualitative Inquiry journal, that describes themselves as:

  Qualitative Inquiry (QI) provides an interdisciplinary forum for qualitative methodology and related issues in the human sciences. The journal publishes open-peer reviewed research articles that experiment with manuscript form and content, and focus on methodological issues raised by qualitative research rather than the content or results of the research. QI also addresses advances in specific methodological strategies or techniques.

Emphasis is mine. It seems that publishing poem in that case comments on the fact that insomnia affects general academic performance. That is an "experiment with manuscript form" that addresses statistics of insomnia.

Your second reference comes from "Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory" which aims to publish:

  scholarly essays from interdisciplinary feminist perspectives. For us, “women” and “performance” denote not simply what we study but how we study it—that is, not preconceived objects of analysis, but rather an open assembly of political, ethical, and aesthetic orientations, feminism chief among them. We encourage dialogues among various fields of performance scholarship, including theater and performance studies, dance studies, music history and criticism, ethnography, new and digital media, cinema studies, and cultural studies; as well as queer, critical race, and post- and decolonial theory. Working with/in this disciplinary hybridity, we explore critiques of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, dis/ability, technology, nation, and capitalism.

Emphasis is mine. That poem seems to connect work of the artists and current events, put work of artists into context. But that is just an opinion.

The shorter answer TL;DR would be that these poems represent unconventional (for Science/Nature/Cell readers) opinion pieces.


Do notifications of conference papers' acceptance/rejection sent to all the papers' authors at the same time? I have two inquiries, please.

Suppose that authors X, Y, and Z submit 3 different papers to the same conference. Will they all get notifications of acceptance/rejection at the same time (or a short period of time) or not necessarily?
Is it possible to get a notification of paper acceptance/rejection before the notification deadline?

In my field (software engineering):

Suppose that authors X, Y, and Z submit 3 different papers to the same conference. Will they all get notifications of acceptance/rejection at the same time (or a short period of time) or not necessarily?

By and large, for most conferences, yes. But there are exceptions: For a conference with separate thematic tracks, it might happen that the tracks send the notifications at separate times. I have also seen very few individual cases of conferences where individual notifications were sent late, which made a poor impression on me (something that very good conferences want to avoid).

2- Is it possible to get a notification of paper acceptance/rejection before the notification deadline?

Absolutely, yes. From my experience, this is actually more common for top conferences than for other conferences.


Why is the prospect of external funding driving hiring? I'm curious about today's focus on external funding versus that of the past.

In Mathematics anyway, it seems that the quality of a researcher is increasingly being measured in dollars of external funding rather than by some other, more idealistic measure. That means that pure mathematics, for instance, seems to be much less valued than "fundable" mathematics.

Do any veterans have any perspective on what seems like a changing climate? Are things really different today than they were 20 years ago with regard to the importance of obtaining funding for ones research?

I agree that there is more pressure nowadays to get funding in areas like pure math in which it's valuable but not mandatory for doing great work.  It's still entirely possible to make an argument along the lines of "Sure, Alice doesn't get much funding, but look how wonderful her papers are," but it's slowly getting harder.

The short answer as to why this is happening is World War II plus inertia.  Here's a longer answer:

The first thing to keep in mind is that grant funding is on average genuinely good for universities, because the overhead rate paid to the university is often higher than any extra costs imposed on the university.  All other things being equal, it makes sense to prefer to hire faculty who can get funding, because they are subsidizing the infrastructure for everyone else (e.g., libraries and internet access).  Of course, all other things are rarely truly equal, and I wouldn't advocate for giving grant funding much weight, but there's a reasonable argument for giving it nonzero weight.

There's also a temptation to use funding as a simple numerical measure of popularity.  Universities should serve the public, and it's clear that people are much more eager to fund work in some topics than others.  It's not crazy to take that into account in university decisions.  However, if taken too far I feel it's an abdication of our responsibility for intellectual leadership.

But why do these things seem to be changing in recent decades?  Universities are generally conservative and slow to change, so it's always worth looking for an explanation of any movement, and in this case I think it's World War II.

Most funding agencies were set up in the aftermath of the war (e.g., the U.S. National Science Foundation dates back to 1950), and the whole tradition of large-scale government funding of research didn't even exist until then.  How academic leaders reacted to it was based on their personal history, and academic inertia meant the changes were slow in coming.  Some of the effects are still surfacing now.

Let's divide things up into academic generations since World War II, giving each generation a twenty year time span to displace the previous one.  Here are my impressions of what happened for cheap or theoretical areas in which funding is not essential to do good work (I'm sure things were very different in big science):

The senior faculty of Generation 1 (1945-1965) were strongly influenced by pre-war traditions.  They had never dreamt of making hiring decisions based on external funding and weren't about to start doing so now.  They were suspicious of how wisely the funding would be allocated, and they saw no reason to think these agencies were even going to continue indefinitely in their present form.
Those in Generation 2 (1965-1985) had still been brought up to be skeptical of paying more attention to funding track records than necessary.  However, they were getting more comfortable with the funding agencies and starting to wonder about how grants could or should be taken into account.  I believe this is the point at which listing grant funding on your CV became mainstream in pure mathematics.
The senior faculty in Generation 3 (1985-2005) went further and began taking funding information into account in ways that would have scandalized Generation 1.  If you didn't list grants on your CV, the dean might now complain about it.  But there was still a sense that this was somehow shallow and historically new.
Generation 4 seems to be taking the trend still further and normalizing it.

Of course this is all vastly oversimplified, and no serious history can be conveyed in a few paragraph-long sketches (even if I were an expert).  However, the key phenomenon is real: the funding landscape was revolutionized after World War II, and academic traditions have slowly been adapting to this fact.


9 years too late to ask for letter of support? A friend of mine applied to a distinguished professor and he asked for 5 letters of support. So, she reached out to someone she did a significant internship with 9 years ago and he doesn't seem to be responding. He had been helping her out until a few years ago. I thought it was a bit rude after all the hard work she put into the work.

Is she doing something inappropriate?

She has other supervisors from the corporate world. Can she nominate them instead? Would it work?

It's not too long, but the student should attach an unofficial transcript, a photo and perhaps something else that might jog the professor's memory.

One email is not enough.  Wait a month and try again.  Professors get busy and sometimes something slips between the cracks.


How can one compare a postdoc position in Europe and USA? I am an EU citizen, and 27 years old. I completed my Bachelor's and Master's in Electrical Engineering in the UK, now finishing up my PhD (in EE as well) in the USA.

I am currently applying for postdoc positions everywhere (EU and USA). I have, for the most part, adapted to life in the USA over the four years that I've been here. However, I am motivated by the idea of doing a postdoc in Europe, partly because I believe the overall culture there suits my personality more, and partly because all of my family is there too. I also want to experience the European way of conducting research (since a Master's in the UK didn't really involve all that much research).

My question is: now that I am still in the USA, and can get a work permit for 2 or so years easily, I am thinking that it would be a good chance to stay a bit longer and experience a postdoc here instead.

In general, I am quite adaptable and I don't have too many set expectations. I just want to conduct interesting research and have a somewhat decent social life to keep some sort of a balance. Money is not really an issue. Also, although I do not like to plan too much into the future (because you never really know what happens), I guess being considerate of the opportunities/prospects a position can offer in the future is healthy.

Given this information, what do you are the pros and cons of Europe vs. USA for a postdoc? Answers to this question probably require some over-generalizing, so I apologize in advance for that.

Let me list a few pros of doing postdoc in the US:

In many EU countries a postdoc in the US is considered to be more prestigious than a postdoc in Europe (assuming that the places you do the postdoc in the US and Europe are at roughly the same level), so a postdoc in the US is in general not likely to harm your academic career should you eventually decide to return to Europe
If you give staying in the US a really serious thought, the postdoc in the US allows you to initiate the application for green card; getting the latter will give you unrestricted access to the job market in the US (academic or otherwise), in addition to the EU one, which comes in handy on many occasions.
Given that you have your Ph.D. (and hence the largest part of your academic network) in the US, you have somewhat better odds at succeeding in securing a postdoc in the US (e.g. because the US people you will apply to are in general more likely to know your advisor than people in Europe, and the people in the US will be less hesitant to, say, give a phone call to the authors of your recommendation letters to find out additional details if need be).