Editor rejected my paper stating that reviewers had refused to review it long after submission; How can I understand what is wrong with my paper? I am having very  frustrated at the turn of events and review process. I had sent a paper to an International Journal. The paper was based on my work and well received by PhD committee of my Institute. The paper was submitted 3 years back. The paper was in status "Editor Assigned" for 6 months. After that its status changed to "Under Review". After 9 months in this status (15 months after submission date), I sent a polite mail to editor asking about how much time it will take to complete review? There was no response. After I month similar gentle mail was sent. There was no response. After month, I again sent query (18 months after submission). At that Editor replied saying that they could not review the paper as assigned reviewers either refuse to review or did not agree to review. The paper was rejected after 18 months without any review comment.

So how does one know where it requires improvement? If paper was not of required quality why they kept with them for so long?

I feel that it is wrongly rejected.

Is it correct answer?

How can it show status as Under Review and then Editor says no Reviewer did not accept or refuse. My understanding is that paper goes in "Under Review" state only after "Reviewer" accepts to review. So what would have happened? Why Editor requires 3 months just to tell the status and comes back with mail like this? Editor did not bother reply to mail. Is it that he got angry because of persistent queries.

I had even worst experience with next Journal. The paper was submitted and it remained in status "With Editor" for 9 months. Wiser by experience, I asked Editor about status? After persisting with it for about 2 more months, Chief Editor said that they rejected paper based on quick review as paper is not suitable to Journal as it does not meet its criteria like Originality, Depth etc. Again there no review comments about improvement.

It is not sour grape, I do feel that around 60% papers in that Journal do not possess these qualities and have been published in 6-8 months (after revision).
If paper is not of required standard, they could have rejected in 2-3 months, why it took them such long time. If I would not have sent mail, probably it would have remained with them for long time. This work is now 3 years old not published anywhere and I even do not know what to do to improve. I am feeling very bad and really do not know what to do?

What would happened? Is it wrong to ask editors about status even after 9 months or year? Our University requires two Journal publication for PhD thesis submission and really do not what to do?

Many friends are suggesting that publish in Open Access Journals.

The delays you mention are really excessive (note: I feel that way even though I am a mathematician), and your anger is quite deserved for that.

From what I heard from editors I know, it can happen that a paper is sent to successive referees who decline to referee, or worse accept and then don't do the job and do not respond to queries. At some point, the editor have to either do a referee's job themselves, which usually do not happen, or reject the paper. Usually, this happen with papers that are not clearly wrong or uninteresting, but that are difficult to read and do not really interest the tentative referees. In some case, you can have better result by submitting to a different, e.g. more specialized journal.

In your case, what bothers me is that being in a PhD, you have an advisor. What does she think of the paper? If there is no obvious problem in it, did you submit to journal suggested by her? On what ground? Is it possible that your institute, whose PhD committee you says received your work well, has much lower standards than international journals?

In any case, the only effective answer to your question is: seek feedback from a knowledgeable individual. It could be your advisor, but if needed it could also be another senior researcher in your field and institute, or even someone working elsewhere in your field. The closer the better, as it increase the probability of getting the feedback and the probability that it will be honest.

Last, as already mentioned, open access journal can be as toughly selective as subscription journals, and should not be considered easy shots when everything else has failed. I would not recommend submitting to a shady journal, let alone an OA one since shady OA journal often charge several hundred of dollars for publication.


Replying to potential professor about my position I sent an email to  Professor A sometimes ago and he has recently showed his interest in my work and replied my email. He is asking about what is my research plan for my future. At the moment I am a postdoc in another country and I am looking for a postdoc position with respect to my research goal. In this respect, I have recently  applied for a postdoc position such that the result of accepted candidate will be announced soon (probably next week). My question is: Is it necessary to write about this details ( my recent application for postdoc position) in my replying email to Professor A?

You could easily reply now and say you are looking for a position and have made some applications. Just start the conversation. It may be that by the time you get a reply from him you will know more about your other prospects.

Perhaps the first mail need not be very detailed, but you could ask about the possibility of working with him if you haven't done that already.

It might be valuable to keep in touch even if you wind up with the other position. Nothing is forever and a circle of collaborators is valuable.

And you might get a reply around the time that you hear about the other position and can make some decisions or follow up more seriously.


How to deal with my academic advisor who offered me a postdoc position and try to prevent me getting other offers? I recently graduated and my co-chair offered me a postdoc position which I haven't started yet. I first thought he was trying to help me. Now I am getting other good offers from others.

I received a very good postdoc offer and was in a very good lab. I told my co-chair, that I will leave if I get that one. After the interview, the main PI told me that he will contact my references and will get back to me within one week. Later, he sent me an email saying he offered the job for someone else. Before the interview, he was writing me and even shared some confidential information even before they released them through the HR.

The way he handled my application gave me very high hopes on getting the job. Now I suspect that my co-chair who was known to my future PI changed the post-doc hiring committees view of me. He has given me very good reference letters in the past for other academic positions that I can start in several months if I was selected. I am now confused, and not sure how to handle this supervisor. Any help/advice greatly appreciated!

This is a common reason why job references are normally asked from the former employers but not from the current employer. If the current employer would like to keep a specialist, adequate recommendations just cannot be provided because of the conflict of interest.

Try to get alternative recommendations. Maybe your work included cooperation with other laboratories, or maybe you had some more junior "intermediate" supervisor, or maybe you have worked along speciality at least part time? Suggest these people instead.

In the worst case, you may even ask for recommendation from another co-worker like you. Not very good yet better than nothing.


Can I get admitted to a master's program at top European university with an average GPA? I study business economics, and I would like to study abroad in Denmark, precisely in Aarhus.
I've already talked with the staff via email, and despite the fact that they are a top university in Europe in the area of business, administration / management and finance, they have no restrictions on intake, taking in consideration only ECTS and English score.
Why do they do that? Can I be sure of  passing the selection criteria for admission  if I have an average or not excellent GPA (example: 3.0, 3.3)?

they have no restriction intakes ,

Why they do that ?

Caveat: I'm in germany and in a STEM field.
Many European countries have rather open admission systems for university, in particular if the program is not overcrowded. These programs in turn tend to have high failure rates at exams.
The philosophy behind this is that everyone should get their chance, but to go on, you need to produce the goods.
Also, since the pace and organizational requirements at university are quite different from school, many students struggle with their exams in their first year, even students who then "wake up" and become top students towards their BSc thesis. This makes it a bit difficult to use a grade average for distinguishing consistently weak students from very good students who had a slow start.

taking in consideration only ects and english Score

ECTS do not measure your performance, but roughly how many courses you took and studied so you did pass. English score probably because they teach in English.
ECTS are to weed out applicants for whom the courses are not meant (if you don't meet them, you'll need to attend at least some Bachelor level courses) - I expect the ECTS points also need to be in certain subjects. A BSc in physics won't get you admission.
English score is to weed out applicants who cannot possibly follow courses taught in English.


Acknowledge somebody whose advice is not relevant to the current manuscript anymore? I received some advice from two researchers, which were helpful at the time. So, I mentioned the researchers in the acknowledgements section of my paper’s early version.

After the first draft, the paper has been substantially modified, and their advice is no longer that visible on the paper. Should I still keep the acknowledgement? I feel it is difficult to remove it, since the paper is being circulated between more than ten co-authors. I would have to give some reason, but then I don’t know if I look silly for saying that their advice was after all not so useful.

What to do?

How to decide who to include in the acknowledgements?

Generously.
If people gave up their valuable time to help you in the process of developing that paper, it is kind to acknowledge that.  This is true even with contributions that are very helpful but may not be directly reflected in the final text, such as avoiding a long rabbit-hole or programming for some data collection or analysis part of it.
Per Mad Jack's answer, you can have the acknowledgement accurately reflect that the contribution was to an earlier draft, or whatever the contribution was, but they still helped.


Can I rewrite sentences after my article has been accepted, when reviewing proofs? My paper got accepted in AEÜ. I want to make some changes in my article. Can I rewrite some sentences when reviewing the proofs from the journal?

The key word in your question is "some."

If "some" refers to a small number (less than about 10), and the "rewrites" are relatively minor, this should not be a problem. On the other hand, if you have an extensive list of changes spanning multiple pages, and the changes affect the interpretation and argumentation of the article, then the publisher will likely balk at making all of the changes without obtaining editorial approval


What does author order indicate? When you look at a paper, what order to you assume the authors are in? Most important/most work done first or alphabetical? In my group we usually use alphabetic order, but I've been wondering if that might create a misleading impression with lots of people.

On a related note, would you expect the name of a PhD student to be always first on publications related to her/his work?

The answer is strongly conditional on discipline and, to a lesser extent, country of origin. Conventions vary widely, as does the degree to which they are institutionalized. For instance, in some fields (e.g., Philosophy), co-authorship is not common and there is no convention about attribution, so absent an explicit note people are are likely to think the more senior author is the primary one. In Sociology, co-authorship is common and the convention is that the first author is the lead author unless there is a note indicating equal authorship. In Economics, co-authorship has become increasingly common over the past few decades but the convention is to list authors alphabetically, regardless of degree of contribution. In some fields the primary author may be determined by looking to see if there's a note specifying to whom correspondence should be directed, regardless of order of authorship on the paper.

Meanwhile in many lab-based science disciplines, where it's sole authorship that's rare, author order is governed by different norms. In some fields,  the first author is the one who is primarily responsible for the paper (what that means can vary, too), the last author is the lab head or primary grant-holder, and the order of authors in between is sometimes influenced by other norms. But other conventions exist, too. Knowing what they are and how to interpret them is part of one's socialization into a discipline.

To make things more complicated, some fields—or some journals, or some labs, or some individual authors—may have their own rules or conventions designed to clarify things by listing credit more explicitly. Even worse, there may be a kind of hermeneutics of author-order where people parcel out credit to different contributors regardless of order of authorship, as when someone says "Sure, X is the first author and Y helped him write it up but it's obvious the paper was Z's idea".

In your case, if your lab or unit is using a convention that's not standard in your field the most straightforward solution is to make a note of this in your articles. This isn't an ideal solution because papers will still be cited or referenced without people paying attention to your clarifying note, but there isn't much you can do about that.


Do I cite introductory material in a subject that helped me indirectly? I am writing my undergrad Bachelor's thesis in computational physics where I do C++ programming. In some C++ books, I read some things that were quite useful during programming, but they do not have a direct connection to the physics.

Since I was proficient with LaTeX before I started the thesis, I do not see a point in adding anything about that in the references. That is rather a skill than specific facts, and I did not really read about it during my research.

Another thing are resources that I consult for an introduction into a topic when I do not understand something in a paper. After reading that introduction material, I often understand the paper to a sufficient extent. When I then write the text, I think I could get by by only referencing the paper since it contains virtually everything needed. But it also seems wrong to omit that I read introduction material.

Should I cite sources like the C++ book?
Should I cite introduction material like Wikipedia, websites or easy books?

You don't typically cite material that helps you understand a topic. You cite material that you explicitly use in a paper. So source books like a C++ book don't need to be cited unless you're using an unusual and explicit construction mentioned in one of those books. For example, there's a technique to draw a geometric object using GPUs that was first mentioned in an graphics programming textbook: people using the technique will cite that textbook.

Wikipedia is not supposed to be a repository of original material, so if you found something on wikipedia then there's likely to be an original source that Wikipedia should cite and that you should as well (once you verify it).

For a website it's a similar principle. If the website contains code that you're using, then cite it (or better yet, cite the associated material that the code authors might suggest you cite instead). But if the website merely contains expository material that helps understanding, then you don't cite it.


My R01 application was re-assigned to a study section that doesn't seem like a good fit (NIH) I submitted my first ever R01 application a few weeks ago and indicated that it be assigned to a specific study section (let's call it study section A). Yesterday, I received an email from the chief of an integrated review group (IRG, let's call it IRG 2) but not the one in which study section A belongs to (I'll call this one IRG 1). This IRG 2 chief tells me that the IRG1 chief felt my application was not a good fit and redirected my application to IRG 2 chief who assigned my application to study section B.
I have a problem with this reassignment because
- my application does not contain any of the keywords that are in the description of study section B
- when I searched for the best study section for my application using the ART tool on the NIH website, study section A was of strong relevance (though study section B was too, surprisingly)
- when I look at the funded grants that are similar to my application using the "LikeThis" search engine, I see that most of these funded grants were reviewed by study section A.
- most of the people in my field have their grants reviewed by study section A.

I've asked around what's the best thing to do in this situation and I am getting mixed advices. One of my mentor recommended that I let it go and not piss anybody off at the NIH. I should wait for the reviews to come back, and if I notice that they didn't "get" my proposed research, then that would give me a reason to ask for a reassignment.  This person also said in passing that it's so hard to get a grant on first submission nowadays that it won't make a difference if my application is reviewed by study section A or B (or any study section for that matter). I have a problem with this advice because the way I see it, if I get reviews back and ask for a reassignment, then it means I'm basically starting from square 1 with new reviewers and I've lost 6 months, in a way. Plus, I think it may annoy the SRO and/or the IRG chief.

Other colleagues advised me to reply to the email received from chief of IRG2 and ask for reconsideration. There is another study section (C) in this IRG2 that would be a good fit for my application (I had considered it before but ended up favoring study section A).

Has anyone ever been in this situation?
Would anyone have any recommendation?

Thanks academic friends!

I think the problem is that you "misunderstand" the sections, and whether that is right or wrong, you have to change that perception.  I have a PI with a similar problem, and she decided to resubmit and "play along".  R01s are hard to get funded when you're new.  Plan on that  -- average age of new PIs in the 40s -- not 30s.  That said, I would say if you can ask for clarification (playing coy), that might be your best option.  The PI I support said, "we had X-topic expert on our proposal and they still said we didn't have enough expertise on x-topic!"  Sure, she could misunderstand what expertise in that topic looks like, but I think in general, if she wants the funding, it behooves her to ask the relevant NIH person more specifically what expertise one needs to be convinced that this PI knows what she is doing and how to get the proposal funded. Sometimes you have to bend (who you include, how you write them in); other times, we have to convince the agency.  Do your docs help convince the agency of your POV?

In general, I don't advise faculty to antagonize the PO, but they are supposed to be the public face of a program, and they should be able to answer some of these questions.  Asking questions about submitting is not too much.  That is the job of the agency, to answer your questions on the application process.  Forge ahead there!


Is tertiary education free of cost in Spain and Portugal? I know that in some EU countries tertiary education is absolutely free (i.e., supported entirely by taxes) if someone knows the languages up to C2 level.
For instance, I know that irrespective of country of origin (EU or Non-EU) tertiary education is 100% free of cost in Germany and Poland if someone is proficient in the native language of those counties up to C2 level.
Is tertiary education free of cost in Portugal and Spain if someone is proficient in the languages of those countries?

No it's not.
You always have tuition fees, which in absolute term may seems negligible (between 1 and 2 thousands euro per year), but it can be a relevant chunk of a family income, considering the average salary being in the 700-900 euro range for most of the people living outside the major, rich, urban zones (Madrid-Valencia-Barcelona-Lisbon-Oporto, to name the largest).
Specifically to Portugal, there is a rule[1] the Ministry of Education establishes a minimum amount that varies each year depending on the minimum national wage rate.
According to Portuguese regulations, the minimum amount of tuition fees students are required to pay is 1.3 times the minimum national wage rate. For the year, 2010, the minimum national wage rate amounted to 475 EUR per month.
For upper education (like Ph.D enrollment) in Portugal the tuition fees may reach easily 2-3000 Euro.
[1] rather absurd, in my opinion Art. 16, comma 2 https://dre.pt/web/guest/legislacao-consolidada/-/lc/107958193/201708090100/73459622/diploma/indice


Where can I apply for a third party Travel Grant? I am a fresh graduate (LLB) and I was selected as an volunteer for a conference in UK (held in June 1st & 2nd). They don't provide travel or accomodation expenses.

I'm a Sri Lankan citizen who resides in Sri Lanka and this volunteering opportunity will definitely be a great experience in my life. I really can't miss this opportunity.

But as a citizen from a developing country, its really hard for me to spend on huge airfare. Is there any place/organization that I can apply for a travel grant for my volunteering? (It will be a great help if I can gain even only the airfare, then I can spend my own for accommodation)

Speak to the conference organizers, although you claim that they don't offer travel, you don't say how you know this. Have you asked them? If you approach them with a polite email expressing your intense interest and disappointment that you cannot attend, maybe some money can be found.
Can the conference sponsor help? Often these conferences are sponsored by a large company looking to hire fresh talent. This is a good way to get noticed, so maybe they can throw a few £100 in your direction. Make sure you talk to the right person in the company.
Can your (past) institution in Sri Lanka help? Don't just look at what your department offers, scour the websites for any kind of money that is available for student travel. Speak to your former advisor. Speak to the head of the department. Speak to the careers advice team.
Are you a member of any learned society or institute? They will often have discounted rates for students and unemployed, but offer bursaries for (recent) students attending conferences.
Does your government fund any programmes that might be of use?
Are you in a minority or in some other group that gets targeted for extra money? Don't be shy, go looking for it.

Finally, what kind of price quotes are you getting for your airfare?


Verification of PhD from Harvard A person claims to have earned a PhD from Harvard University, but is offering no credible proof. How can I verify their claim?

Harvard has a page on their website dedicated to this exact question, and the answer turns out to be simply "contact the specific school and request verification of the degree."

To speak to the general case, just call the university registrar and ask how they go about verifying degrees. This is a very common scenario and they will almost certainly have a process in place for it.


Resources of APIs for automated paper citation aggregation I'm looking to do an extensive literature search.

I would like to start with about half a dozen or so survey papers in the field, and look at their bibliography. Then, I would like to go through each of those papers and look at their bibliography.

This can continue until I have, say, 500 - 1000 papers in a a relationship graph, after I've pruned papers that do not contain certain keywords or words in their title/abstract. Then, I can rank the papers based on their connectedness in the graph, weighted by the age of the publication.

Sounds great, but I can't see any easy way to accomplish this. I've looked at DBLP and crossref.org, but neither of these show the bibliography of the papers. Web of Science has an API to which I may be able to get access, but I don't think that will provide bibliography either.

Short of manual web scraping, is there any way to achieve this?

I can't scrape Google Scholar since it doesn't show the bibliography of papers, but Microsoft Academic Search does. MSAS does have an API, but you need to apply with information like Project URL to get access, which is not applicable in my case.

The name for the type of research related to your question is referred to as: Bibliometrics or Scientometrics.

That being said, the answer to your question is not simple since it depends on a few factors. You could be lucky and have a service such as this available that has a lot of the data available for you:
http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=22078&tip=sid&clean=0

There is also a whole host of tools that can help you parse the files without using an API:
https://www.mat.unical.it/ianni/wiki/ScholarHIndexCalculator
https://sites.google.com/site/hjamali/scientometric-portal

In my case they did not provide all the information I required and ultimately I had to write a few tools of my own. The problem with this approach is that most papers are only available in PDF and requires PDF text extraction. Plenty of frameworks available to assist with that, but the structure of the document needs to be customised for each source of information since they are not all the same. Long story short, the following API's helped me a lot.

A list of scholarly APIs that can assist:
http://libguides.mit.edu/apis

Text extraction for individual files:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/
https://pdfbox.apache.org/


Is it okay to discuss multiple interests when writing statement of purpose for attending a conference? Question: I am interested in two fields, mathematical biology and cryptography. Is it okay to discuss both of these interests in my statement of purpose?

I'm currently a junior majoring in mathematics. I have to write a statement of purpose so that I can be able to attend a mathematics conference. During the conference there will be a time where we can submit applications to graduate schools there. I'm not sure if it is for seniors only, but I am writing one just in case. I don't know which schools are going to be there. If I did I would just choose one depending on the degrees offered by each school, but I don't know who is going to be there.

Keep it short and succinct, I would say a paragraph is good, unless otherwise stated in the application. If this means that you only have enough space to talk about one of those areas, then pick one.

If the conference is more geared towards pure mathematics, I would suggest expanding on your interest in cryptography. Otherwise, if it is an applied mathematics conference, then talk about your studies in biological math. Chances are schools which specialize in pure mathematics will attend a pure mathematics conference, and likewise for applied math. If you want to find out the universities who are attending, just ask an event coordinator. I'm sure there isn't any secrecy surrounding who is attending.


What's the name of Wikipedia's default referencing style? What's the name of the Default Referencing Style that Wikipedia Uses? Specifically, I'm looking for the name of the style that is used when you use the referencing styles use by default when you click one of these four options:

As you can see above, references to journal articles from the English Wikipedia are styled in the following manner:

  Author, First A.; Author, Second B.  (year). "Title goes here". Journal of failed experiments volume (issue): pages-pages.

This is documented here. It corresponds to the APA citation style, with additional quotation marks around the paper title (which are not present in the standard APA style). Also, the references are styled as footnotes rather than “(author year)”.

In addition, note that it is not a strict Wikipedia requirement: the documentation I quoted above says:

  There is currently no consensus on a preferred citation style or system for Wikipedia. If you cannot decide on which style to use, or if you do not know what information to include, an example partially based on the APA style is given below.


Search if a term already exists in an older research My research led me to introduce a term that describes a certain group of web applications.

In order to ensure that the term does not already exist, I searched on IEEE, ACM and Elsevier libraries, using keywords, but I feel this search is incomplete.

What is the most efficient way to search for a term by name (search for the word "MyTerm" in all the archives)
and search a term by context (search for a derm that defines specific characteristics of a group of applications, in all the archives).

Thanks.

So far as I can understand what you are looking for, it seems that Google Scholar is likely to provide what you need.  As with most search engines, you can request literal terms and can constrain your search in various ways. Moreover, Google Scholar has fairly comprehensive reach across scientific documents (including much "grey literature"), while still being restricted to the scientific and technical realms.


Journal sent review request to my supervisor but the email was addressed to me My PhD supervisor received an email from a journal asking for review of an article. However, the email was addressed as "Dear {my name}". Even the journal office created an account in my name on Editorial Manager to access the manuscript (as mentioned in the email).
My supervisor is not interested in accepting the review request since the email was not addressed to him. Now I am not sure how to proceed from here.
UPDATE: Per @wimi 's answer, I contacted the editor asking if I was the intended email recipient and expressing my willingness to review. The editor clarified that there was indeed an email mess-up and I have been invited to review the manuscript!

Your supervisor does not want to accept this review request. Your course of action depends on whether you want to review the manuscript:

if you do want to review the manuscript, contact the editor letting them know about the mistake, asking whether you were the intended recipient, and expressing your willingness to accept the review. If the editor confirms that you were the intended reviewer, or that your review would be welcome, proceed with the review.

if you do not want to review the manuscript, just reject the request. It might be worth contacting the editor anyway and letting them know about the mistake, in order to make sure that future review requests arrive at the intended recipient.


I discovered a mistake in my own published workshop paper, how do I handle errata? I am PhD student and the main author of a research-in-progress report in computer science. The paper is already published at a workshop (in the proceedings, this is not a journal paper) and was presented there a few months ago.

While continuing to work on the topic of the paper, I discovered a mistake I did in the already published workshop paper. A value that is referred to twice in the paper is wrong; it is still unusually high but lower than reported. The value is also mentioned in the summary of the paper. First I told my coauthors who sit in the next room in the same institute.

Now I want to publish an Erratum on my academic website.

My first idea is to publish a text file next to the download like that is labeled "erratum" (it is a single mistake). As an example for this "text file", I looked at the following webpage.

My second idea is to change the author version of my workshop paper that is downloadable as PDF file from my website. My current idea is to solve this via a footnote in the PDF version of the paper. So how would I handle that? Do I correct the value and add a footnote saying that the original published value was wrong and explain the mistake? The other option that I think is unsuitable is the following: to leave the wrong value in the paper and add a footnote that explains that this value was a mistake and give the correct value in the footnote?

Also, are there websites on how to handle errata for conference/workshop papers in technical fields like computer science? Please note also that in my field conference papers are quite important (e.g., the POPL conference) while in some other fields only journal papers count (sort of).

Mistakes happen. I would say that since it's a conference proceedings, therefore often the presented work is short of proofs, it's work in progress and it's very quickly baked, mistakes happen.

It is probably impossible to post errata to the paper. I would suggest the following steps:

If you put it on arXiv, upload a new corrected version.
If you put it on your personal webpage, add the errata there.
Make sure that once you sumbit it for journal publication, the mistake is correted.


How to "cultivate" a postdoc position during PhD program? Imagine you're a PhD student, and you found a research group, in another university, that you'd like to join for a PostDoc period.

You want to join that group because you really like their subjects, and their projects, and/or for other reasons. You just dediced you would like to join them.

Now, what could you do during your PhD to augment the probabilities to reach this objective?

You might say: just relax, make an awesome work, and then, when you're ending your doctoral period, contact that group PI and ask to be hired (we already discussed how to cope with this phase).

Okay, but, is there something you could do during your PhD before that moment?

What could you do?

Keep up-to-date on their scientific papers?

Email them? About what?
Visit their lab?

Thanks a lot

You want to establish substantial professional contact with the head of your target group long before your doctoral period is about to end.  They need to know who you are already when your postdoc application crosses their desk.  It is never too early to start.  Here are a few suggestions.

Ask your advisor to invite the head of the group to give a talk in your department.  Meet with them one-on-one.  Ask about the possibility of a short visit to their lab to give a reciprocal talk.  (Prerequisite: Have something compelling to talk about; be a good speaker.)
Ask about the possibility of summer internships.  (Prerequisite: Be a good candidate for a summer internship.)
Ask your advisor to suggest a one-semester student swap.  (Prerequisite: Be someone that the other person would want to hire as an RA.)  More generally: Convince your advisor to collaborate with the other group.
Ask the head of the group to be an external member of your dissertation committee.  Ask at least two years before your defense. (Prerequisite: Have a thesis topic that they will care about.)
Talk to the head of the group and/or his students at conferences.  Join them for lunch, or dinner, or coffee, or beer, or whatever.  (Prerequisite: Be an interesting human being.  Know a few good places to get lunch/dinner/coffee/beer/whatever.)
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.  Cultivate multiple colleagues.  Some may develop into future employers, others into future research collaborators, still others into letter-writers, still others into mentors,  perhaps a few into friends, and most into nothing.  (Prerequisite: Know more than one person.)
Most importantly, don't think of this process primarily as "cultivating a postdoc position".  Think of it as cultivating a research community.  People will notice if your motivations are mercenary, if only subconsciously.


How to fall in love with reading? I've searched the Stackexchange sites and found several potentially good places to ask this question but I have eventually chosen here as here where I personally found it best fits.

I'm an academic student and a language learner, autodidact, researcher, enthusiast and translator. Theoretically, I like philosophy, literature, culturally and mentally enriching works of writing, knowledge, books, etc and etc; but as mentioned, all just theoretically, not practically at all, and this is because of one reason, and that is I dislike reading; most of the time I just hate the idea of "what about reading that book right now" or "I must read this article on Stackexchange, it includes exactly all I need to know of a very valuable information that matters so much to me". Reading bores me way too much more than merely sitting on my a** for an hour doing just nothing. Reading makes me very nervous that, no longer than a couple of minutes after I start reading something, I start scrubbing my scalp, vibrating my legs and wonder when the time will come where I would have finished whatever I'm reading. Also, I feel that my eyes start confusing the lines sometimes, and because I wear glasses, when I'm reading off a screen, I find myself reading from above my glasses because it seems it practically comforts me more, and that is not medically good of course. I think I sometimes even get heavy breathing reading because I don't have enough patience and it seemingly makes me too nervous.
Now that's exactly what I don't need in my career and my field of study, I have so very big ambitions and dreams that require me to sit still and READ, and just read; and that obviously, I can't do.

My question is, if there's a method or a solution that somebody knows, scientific (I'm physically a very active person by nature) or practical, to solve this misery of mine and save my future?

All of the symptoms that you describe sound like symptoms of a reading or attentional issue. My wife has a doctorate in psycholinguistics and thinks that you're describing someone who should talk to their school or university psychologist or reading counsellor.  They could give you information on how to deal with the anxiety you feel when reading and help you learn strategies to enjoy reading.

Good luck!


The university does not want me to include my advisor's name on my PhD dissertation My advisor is leaving academia and I will graduating and writing a dissertation on the work that I have done in his lab under his supervision. I have no problem to include him on my dissertation but the university is not allowing me to do that.

Will it be misconduct if I did not list him as a contributor in my dissertation?

If your university requires you to list a different person as thesis advisor, then that's what you need to do---rightly or wrongly, your university determines its policy there, and you need to follow it.

You, however, can certainly make the contributions of your former advisor clear in the acknowledgements.  As with many ethical questions, this can be safely navigated by the application of sunshine: if you clearly state your former advisor's contributions in the acknowledgements, along with the reason that they are not listed as your advisor, then you should not have any trouble with people thinking that you unfairly chose to exclude them.

Note also, that if you later make any peer-reviewed publications out of this work, then if it would be appropriate to list your advisor as a co-author, you can and should do that.


How can we effect institutional change to make academia climate-compatible? How can we create an environment in which academic institutions are responsible for the carbon footprint of the research carried out under their auspices?

For context, I am a postdoc working several thousand miles from home.  I try to mitigate my carbon footprint, but there is absolutely no incentive not to travel, other than personal conscience.  In fact, one actively harms one's career prospects by not travelling to academic conferences, for research visits, etc.  Currently I am using my own money to carbon offset every flight I take, but I cannot avoid flying if I want to retain my job.  I am certain that I am not the only academic unable to reconcile my love of my research with the entirely unnecessary environmental damage which it is causing.

The individualism of academia means that my university appears to take no interest in mitigating the climate impact of the research going on within it, and seems to consider any action on the matter to be my personal responsibility, rather than their responsibility as my employer.  This should not be a matter of personal conscience (or financial resources) for junior members of staff on precarious contracts.

I am aware of initiatives such as Flying Less, but these largely rely on individuals to risk their career progression by participating. It clearly is not enough to tell academic staff not to attend conferences or to travel to perform research that will further their careers.  How can institutional change be effected?

Some thoughts, which would likely need support from national-level funding bodies to implement:

Could carbon offsetting costs be factored into research grants?
Could carbon trading schemes be instituted?
Could universities cap the maximum air miles of their staff?
Could remote participation in conferences be incentivised?
Could conference funding be made contingent on climate mitigation measures being implemented?
How can we push institutions to create the systemic changes to our profession which are clearly required?

I am of course aware of the arguments that, e.g., academic travel is a negligible fraction of total air travel; air travel is by no means the largest part of the problem; we need more research in order to combat climate change, not less, etc.  However, it is my opinion that academia needs to be an exemplar of adapting to become sustainable.  If we as scientists cannot alter our own behaviour in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is actively harmful, how can we expect others to moderate theirs?

I can think of two main ways to reach these goals:

Method 1: grassroot campaign

For example it could go something like this;

Create a group of researchers from various fields who share this goal.
This group reaches a consensus for a set of realistic measures that an institution could pledge to apply.
Reach to the most prominent scientists from various fields, ask them to:

publicly  support the pledge
lobby the institutions/organizations they belong to to sign it
boycott the conferences which don't sign it.

Keep the pressure from the scientific community until most major institutions are compelled to sign the pledge. At this stage extend the scope of target institutions to funding bodies and big industries.

Rationale for targeting the most prominent scientists: because they have the visibility and influence, they are on the board of the most important conferences, they can afford to boycott conferences and their boycott could destroy these conferences.

Method 2: patience

This kind of measures are going to be taken sooner or later, when the damage is too obvious to be ignored (recent research point to more death caused by air pollution than by smoking). At some point it will simply look ridiculous for academic institutions and funding bodies to insist on ethics in research while paying travel expenses across the globe for researchers. But that's going to take a while.


What does "archival quality" mean in the context of journal aims and scope? What does "archival quality" mean in this context? Is it just a posh way of saying they only want a paper if it describes an important breakthrough?

  IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation publishes archival
  quality original papers in evolutionary computation and related areas
  including nature-inspired algorithms, population-based methods, and
  optimization where selection and variation are integral, and hybrid
  systems where these paradigms are combined. Purely theoretical papers
  are considered as are application papers that provide general insights
  into these areas of computation.

Note: I think this may be a duplicate of What does archival contribution in journals mean. However, even if it gets closed as a duplicate, it will help others searching for the information. And it would be nice to have a more extensive answer, either here or on the other question.

Generally "archival quality" implies some level of "completeness" and comprehensiveness (to the degree that any work of science and engineering can really be "complete.") In many fields, early work can be published in some conferences, but journal papers that are expected to be "archival quality" are supposed to be more mature.

To quote from this Guidelines for Expanding Conference Papers for Submission to the IEEE Sensors Journal:

  Conference papers are usually short, and deal with very recent research results or new ideas illustrated by preliminary experiments. An archival journal paper, on the contrary, contains an overview of the state-of-the-art (with references to other’s and one’s own past work), a problem statement, the concept of a solution, a discussion of the theoretical
  background, experimental set-up, sound measurement data, an evaluation of the results, discussion and conclusions – a much more complete presentation of the overall project and its results.


Would citing a political book be considered credible? I will be doing a presentation on fracking in the United States, and in the current president's book, "Crippled America", he states his administration plans to endorse fracking within the United States for the sole purpose of "creating more jobs." Would citing a political book be considered credible?

I could be misinterpreting your question, but I believe you are running into a difference in the popular (non-academic/scientific) definition of what a citation is for, the journalistic/communicative use of citation, and the scholarly purpose of citation.

In the popular idea of citation, you are citing something to add credibility or "proof" to your argument. For instance, "a medical publication from researchers at Harvard said eating tomatoes increases cancer risk [citation here], so you should stop eating tomatoes." You are citing to be persuasive, by borrowing legitimacy and authority from those that have it and seeking to use it to support your agenda.

The journalistic use of citation, in theory, is to communicate the source of some statement or argument that you are reporting. Done right, this allows people you are communicating with to more easily locate the relevant materials they can investigate further on their own, if they are so interested, as well as to help ensure that the journalist is being honest by making it easy to check their work.

The scholarly purpose of citation is to indicate the source of ideas and work that is not your own, to make it distinct from your own contributions. This exposes your assumptions, directs researchers to closely related works, and can be used to indicate whether what you are doing is normal (by showing other researchers who've done or found the same thing), or if you need to justify your comparatively unusual practice or findings. It is also used to externalize support - so if you want to use a method because some other researcher's work said that method was useful for the problem you are working on, you just cite that research to support your use of the method. This effectively "includes" their work into yours, without the need for reproduction (copy-paste).

So with that said, let's take your example from a scholarly perspective.

If you make the statement that a US president supports fracking, especially for the purpose of job creation, you should cite why you think that is so - and citing their own book would certainly be a good way of supporting such an assertion. In indicates the source of data from which you draw your assertion.

On the other hand, lets say you want to state that fracking will create more jobs in the United States. While you could certainly cite a political/popular book, the response to that from an academic perspective is simple: the book you cited is just another persons unsupported opinion, and does not indicate scientific or otherwise scholarly support for your statement. The citation does not include research, novel methods, an analysis of an existing data-set nor the collection of new data. In short, it does not support your statement in a scholarly way, and would further make a listener/reader wonder if you know what you are doing at all.

So in the end, what you should cite, and how you should cite it, will depend on what the role of your presentation is and the nature of the argument you are making. If you are quoting something, cite the source of the quote. If you state that so-and-so supports a certain policy, cite the source that establishes that that person indeed does support that certain policy.


Standard protocol for withdrawing published paper that has wrong (or erroneous) data (published without wrong intentions) Suppose a research group publishes an article after thorough data analysis, statistics based on repeatability and reproducibility of experimental data. Now I consider three cases:

a). Published article had erroneous uncertainties associated with measured data

b). Published article had erroneous measured data notwithstanding repeated experiments

c). Published article had wrong interpretation of measured data

Now, in such cases, what is the standard protocol for withdrawal of published paper, and whether it is really necessary? If the same research group publishes another article giving more accurate experimental data with revised uncertainties with more reliable and logical interpretation, does this in any way puts a question mark on the credibility of the research group?

What according to the strictest ethical rules of publishing should be done in order to accept mistake and provide justification on why the earlier interpretation was wrong and what makes the research group change its view on the same experimental data (in this case, revised data)?

Not every published paper is right.  Publications are a snapshot of authors' understanding at a given time.  If they don't stand up to history, the literature corrects itself.    Descartes's publications on the pineal gland as the generator of motor actions have never been retracted!

If a paper is wrong because new data or new understanding has changed the authors' outlook, perhaps the best course of action is to publish a new paper, specifically discussing the previous paper.

If there is a real MISTAKE or MISREPRESENTATION in the original paper, the editor should probably be contacted about the possibility of publishing an ERRATUM.  Retraction should be reserved for the most severe of cases.


Is it necessary to show what improvements you have made to similar work in literature reviews section? I have seen quite a few research publications where the literature review section doesn't compare past work to the author's work. It's like:

  [1] did this using X technique. [5] used Y technology. (etc.)

This type of literature reviews are easier to write as I don't have to read similar works in extreme detail to create a list of things that we are doing and they are not. I can understand their technique by reading their abstract but it won't matter too much as long as I am using a completely different technology.

I have also seen some good publications which compare each and every work in literature review section to their own work and say "They did not do this", "Their work couldn't do that". While, of course, this looks a lot better but it's a lot harder to write.

Let's say I using queuing theory for a similar work which has been done using some other technique. I can easily state that they used this technique in their work instead of trying to find drawbacks in their work.

So which approach is better when writing the literature review section?

Contrasting your work with earlier work on the same topic (same or related questions) is a crucial part of a scientific publication. You have to explain to the reader what makes your approach better (or worse) depending on the exact problem to solve.

Now, whether you should do this in the section devoted to review of the existing literature is debatable. There are no strict rules, so as long as you do it somewhere and the paper is clearly readable, just do what seems best to you. If you have trouble writing, I would suggest you separate the content into a simpler form:

State of the art: review of the existing literature. What problems are solved, what are remaining questions, where can we make progress. This is the motivation of your work.
Your methodology
Your results
Discussion of how these results compare to earlier work: you're doing better than A and B on large matrices, but the approach means that you will be slower than C on sparse matrices, that sort of stuff.


Take non-tenure track position or wait? I am currently considering offers for non-tenure track teaching-oriented positions (full-time, multi-year contracts) and wanted to get advice on whether to take the offer now, or wait another cycle to apply again for tenure-track positions.  My ideal job would be a tenure-track position with a better balance of research and teaching responsibilities.

When I graduated from my PhD program two years ago, I had a tenure track offer but decided to decline because I wanted to experience what it was like to work in industry.  However, I quickly found I missed academia (the agency, the ability to contribute new knowledge, working directly with students) and decided to try to return to academia after working for a year.

However, I think my lack of recent publications during the time I was working in industry hurt my job prospects, and the only offers I currently have are for non-tenure track (all worse offers in terms of both salary and start-up package than the tenure-track offer I had two years ago).  The industry job I currently have is not research oriented and would not afford me the opportunity to publish the work that I do day-to-day.

I worry that the teaching responsibilities of a non-tenure track position (6 classes a year) will make it difficult for me to devote time to doing substantial research.  At the same time, being in a university will provide facilities as well as students to be in a better position to do research in whatever time I may have outside of teaching.  I'm also concerned that staying in my current industry position will not improve my chances during the next application cycle as I am not doing publishable work.

Should I take the teaching position and just do my best to publish and keep my eyes out for a future tenure track position?  Or is there another option I haven't thought of?

Sorry to say this, but if this is an adjunct position, I'd advise you to run like hell from it if you have indeed set your sights on a future TT position in a research university.

No matter what they say publicly, there are many who view a history of adjuncting on an applicant's c.v. as the mark of Cain when it comes to hiring for a TT position, at least in science and engineering.

I suspect people might be a bit more reasonable in the liberal arts and at teaching focused institutions.


How to decide whether the amount of study material provided to students is enough? Arguably the most time-consuming component of teaching is preparation of study material (especially when in comes to a fresh lecturer of a new module).

First of all, every presentation should have slides. Who takes a lecturer without slides seriously? (with the only exception of, perhaps, really senior professors). If one dares to use a black- or whiteboard, students will take pictures on their iPhones instead of following the lecture, pretending they will follow it at home, which they never do. And students who miss the lecture will complain, since the slides are not available.Secondly, some question / exercise sheets are important to keep students entertained and busy in class / tutorial. Question sheets imply answer sheets, with (some) of solutions worked out, to help students prepare to the assessments. Lecture notes, to collect all relevant information in one place, and save students some trouble looking for it in various textbooks. Helps with those students who are hip enough to never use a library. Practice instructions, to carry out lab classes.

This is just a basic list, which comes to my mind, and I'm sure that other types of study / supporting materials are used in teaching.

I've heard rumours about some loci amoeni universities in the US, which provide their lecturers with all (or most) of these materials, professionally prepared by academic publishers. Apparently, this is not the case in the UK, at least not at every university. And I can now appreciate, that preparation of all these materials to every lecture / tutorial class can take a very considerable time.

Question: How do we decide, which materials are the most important for the class, and which are not? How do we assess, that the amount of materials prepared is sufficient?

Specs (by popular request): I am teaching Maths at BSc and MSc level in the UK. However, I would appreciate answers regardless your discipline / profile.

Use backward design, start with what you'd like the students to become or to achieve at the end of the course. Then, according to each of these "wishes," determine the best way to collect evidence on learning, and according to each of these evidence, design the teaching/learning experience. Formats should not drive the contents; it's the experience you wish to achieve that drives the formats. If lecture with slides is the best way, then lecture with slides; do not add lecture with slides because it's your institute's status quo.

Here are some of my anecdotes addressing your points:

  First of all, every presentation should have slides. Who takes a
  lecturer without slides seriously? (with the only exception of,
  perhaps, really senior professors).

Teaching in a US university, I have started to see students showing excitement because a certain lecturer does not use slides in the class as early as 2010. That got me start thinking if slides are still a viable teaching tool. After some thought, I made the decision to go slide-free and have complete done away with slides two years ago.

I like the format so far because slides had been acting as an invisible wall between me and the students. Just because I have clicked through them does not mean I have taught them. However, I felt safe behind the screen, and perhaps had grown to relish that false security too much.

I replaced the slides with what I call a "learner's package" (more details below) and I immediately felt a lot better. There are more discussions, questions, and interaction. The questions became a lot more spontaneous. In the beginning it can be daunting, but once I got into the rhythm I can never go back to the slides. As of now, four cycles into this new scheme, 80 students taught, and none of them complained the lack of slides in the evaluation.

  If one dares to use a black- or whiteboard, students will take
  pictures on their iPhones instead of following the lecture, pretending
  they will follow it at home, which they never do.

It's not if they will or will not follow up; it's if you have structured the activities or evaluation exercises to make them follow up or not. If there is no reason, why would they be motivated to look at something they have already archived?

  And students who miss the lecture will complain, since the slides are
  not available.

Many technological solutions here: e.g. First, make it clear in the syllabus that it's their responsibility to solicit notes from their peer if they miss a class. Second, consider video-taping your lecture. Third, consider using screen capture with audio recording if you will be using slides. Talk to your IT folks for possible supports.

  Secondly, some question / exercise sheets are important to keep
  students entertained and busy in class / tutorial.

While I love the idea of enriching the types of formats and interactions, it should be based on the desirable outcomes of the course, and not based on entertainment (though I sense that your questions are portrayed with a bit of sarcasm). Different types of format have their pedagogical pros and cons and they should be used to best fit what you want to achieve.

  Question sheets imply answer sheets, with (some) of solutions worked
  out, to help students prepare to the assessments.

I'd disagree with making it a routine to provide answers; this can cause them to rely on the eventually available right answers. Instead, I'd suggest base the questions on a defined set of skills (that you can point to at a section of the text, or on a certain page of the notes) with mild to moderate modification. That way, you can point them to the section to see how similar questions are solved, and encourage them to revise their answer.

If possible, base your answer scheme on instant feedback of the class's performance. E.g. if last week's quiz shows that only 35% of the class got question 6 correct, then consider making a detailed answer scheme for that.

Use your teaching assistants. Make them try your questions. They can i) find typos or errors, ii) give you a sense of how much time was needed to complete each question (multiply it with a factor of 1.5 to 3.0 to factor in the fact that the TAs probably can complete the exercise in a shorter time,) iii) draft the model answers.

  Lecture notes, to collect all relevant information in one place, and
  save students some trouble looking for it in various textbooks. Helps
  with those students who are hip enough to never use a library.

I agree a one-stop reference point would be helpful. It can be a set of notes or a list of materials hosted on the online learning website (like Blackboard.)

In my "learner's package," I included the followings:

List of learning objectives
Learning resources, which include corresponding sections in the textbook, readings, videos, etc.
Self-assessments. This section contains a list of activities and exercise with answers for students to test their own understanding. It's not graded.
Lesson evaluation. This section details how the students will be evaluated formally. I often put the link to the weekly quiz here. And if appropriate I also suggest some mile stone that they should achieve in this week with their personal final project. (I provide rubrics and so, but this answer is long enough so I'll save it for another day.)
All the notes, with citations.
In-class exercise and activities.
I use the Tufte LaTeX codes to compose the notes. I picked it because of its pleasant layout and ample amount of space for students to write.

Lastly, here are some titles that have inspired me with trying different instructional designs (I'm not affiliated with these authors nor Amazon.com):

Wiggins and McTighe. Understanding by Design.
Smith. Conquering the Content. It's for online course design by the contents helped me greatly in designing the online teaching platform.
Dirksen. Design for How People Learn
Ambrose et. al. How Learning Works
Davis. Tools for Teaching


A life of PhD: is it feasible? In the next year I will (hopefully successfully) graduate from a PhD programme in pure mathematics. The location is (continental) Western Europe, the topic of the thesis is arithmetic geometry, if it matters. During my PhD experience I have found out the following things

being a pure math PhD student is a relatively stress-free existence for me. I can just waste all my time learning some math and occasionally writing some papers;
the stipend does suck but I am frugal person from a very poor country so I do not care that much (nor do I have a family to feed);
if I could, I would not mind spending what is left of my life in a PhD programme. In particular, I do not feel any intrinsic motivation to try to get a tenure-track position.

The question is: is it feasible for me to keep applying and getting accepted to pure math PhD programmes before I die or decide to retire? To clarify, I don't really think that I will be a problematic student; during my PhD programme, I got 3 publications accepted in reasonable journals (rank A in AustMS ranking) and I think I could maintain a similar rate of work.

Are there any "magic words" I could tell the committee that considers the applicants to improve my chances?

Holding a PhD in math would usually disqualify you from being admitted into a PhD program in mathematics. Even if it does not do so officially, I'd consider it next to impossible to get scholarships.

That said, being a postdoc in math is not really much different from being a PhD student. However, even being a postdoc forever is not easy. Many funding sources have restrictions on how long ago your PhD may have been - after 5 years you already have fewer options, and continuing long after 10 years will see you face exclusion from many funding sources, as well as a strong social pressure to get a "proper" job (i.e., a faculty position).


What should I do with small research results in theoretical computer science? I am a PhD student who works in theory. I was working on some problem for the last 6-7 weeks. After doing a survey for two weeks it took me about four weeks to solve a research problem.

Along with my research supervisor, I was able to solve the research problem, after having a conversion with my research supervisor I came to know that it is a very small result (not yet to publishable), he suggested to do the same kind of work for some closely-related problem and then we can submit by adding something more.

I am very much satisfied with my adviser's opinion. I am just wondering what else I should do in this situation. Should I write it and upload it on arXiv or to do something else.

Please note that I am not going against my research supervisor; I am just wondering what the other possibilities are. I am asking this question because I  am new, not because I don't trust my research supervisor.

In my opinion, nothing new is not publishable. Small results are not prestige-ly enough publishable, that's it.

So, if you want to publish this result, find a venue small enough for it and submit. Another issue, however, if your advisor tells you to wait, you should rather wait.

It might be, namely, that by combining this result with a minor further development, you might seriously bump up its "prestige", i.e. the possibility it gets accepted at a larger or more important venue. Advisors typically know this stuff better than PhD students.

To give you an example. I played once with PGP public keys and found a way to visualize them as a nice image. After a literature research I found that noone did it like this before. So, it was a new scientific result, but not very publishable, just as your issue. Then I thought a bit more, what properties does my visualization have. I found SHA1 collision data, applied my visualization, and saw that I can tell the two files with same hash apart with my approach. Now, this is quite big. (But little work for me.)

I further looked around where to publish it (Visualization or Security), it successfully landed at the Visual Computer.


Submitting an improved result before the acceptance notice of another result I have submitted RESULT 1 to conference A. The notice of acceptance/rejection of conference A is in 1 month. This is the kind of conference with a rebuttal phase. During the rebuttal phase my paper got very good reviews, and all referees recommended acceptance. But that does not mean it is accepted yet.

Some months after submitting RESULT 1, I obtained RESULT 2, which generalizes RESULT 1, but whose proof requires completely different techniques. I want to submit RESULT 2 to a conference B whose deadline is in two weeks.

I'm hesitating in submitting RESULT 2 to conference B before receiving the notice from conference A because of the following:

RESULT 1 gets accepted. Great!
RESULT 1 gets rejected. This is bad, not only because of the rejection, but also because since RESULT 2 implies RESULT 1, I think this would invalidade the possibility of submitting RESULT 1 to another conference
while RESULT 2 is under review, or if RESULt 2 is accepted. I trully believe that RESULt 1 should be published independently, since the proofs therein are much more elegant, although not being the strongest result.

My impression is that from the reviews RESULT 1 has a good chance of being accepted at conference A. However, I have had papers in the past with three recomendations to accept and which where rejected at the end.

Additionally, I am afraid that by submitting RESULT 2 to conference B, my chances of being accepted at conference A would be decreased. For instance, a common referee could point out that a paper with a better result is being submitted to another conference before the acceptance notice, and this might influence in the decision of the programm commitee.

QUESTIONS:

What is the best way to proceed in this kind of situation?
Is it correct to think that submitting an improvement to conference B would decrease the probability of acceptance to Conference A?

Personally, when it comes to conference publications I don't worry about this type of issue.

First, there is typically a fairly low chance that the second submission will affect the chances of the first: even in the unlikely chance that the same reviewer is looking at both papers at the same time, they are likely to understand that the second paper builds on the first: if they like the second, they'll probably suggest accepting the earlier result as well.

Second, and more importantly, conference publications are typically not the final form of a strong result.  Rather, the final form is the "extended version" journal paper that follows and supersedes the conference paper.
As such, if the second conference accepts while the first conference rejects, then there is still a clear path to publication for the results sent to the first conference: combining them together with the other results into a strong journal paper.  If the two results are related, the I think that you should be considering doing this in any case, given the typically larger scope of journal papers.

It is true that, in the worst case, it will give you one less conference publication for your C.V. If you're doing good research, though, that's not a big loss, since the work will be superseded by the journal paper in any case. Certainly it is less of a loss than not submitting to the second conference and getting rejected from the first (assuming both conferences are relatively similar in quality).


Submission on hold on arxiv I have recently submitted a paper to arXiv, but the arXiv moderators put my paper in status "on hold", because they have to make a decision on the right classification for the paper.

To those who have experienced a similar situation, how long did it take before they made a decision and published the paper on the arXiv? I just want to have an idea of how long I will have to wait.

I had the same experience with arxiv and it took only 1-2 days after they change my paper track. However, they mentioned it may take up to several days. The arxiv helps says

  On Hold

  Your submission was identified by arXiv administrators or moderators
  as needing further attention.

  Submissions may be put on hold for a variety of reasons, ranging from
  questions about proper classification, pending moderator approval,
  presentation issues, copyrighted PDF, etc., to editorial concerns.
  Most of these do not require any further input from the submitter and
  will be dealt with in due course. arXiv urges submitters to be
  patient. Due to the large volume of submissions, it may take several
  days before a resolution is reached.

  Note that oversize submissions are automatically put on hold, and this
  is one particular circumstance in which submitters should follow up
  with arXiv administrators.

  Submissions in this status will not expire. Authors must not create a
  new submission with the same content when a pending submission is on
  hold.

  Please be sure to include the submission identifier of the form
  submit/NNNNNNN when contacting arXiv administrators.

wait for few more days and send them an email. They are quick in response.


How to justify capability for securing research funds in a faculty job application? I am a professor of mechanical engineering in Russia. I have an excellent record of publications and some visiting experiences in the US. Now I want to apply for a faculty position in the US.

One criterion is a strong record of previous funds obtained. In Russia, the funding system is completely different. If I list my funded projects, the values look ridiculous in comparison with the US funded projects (where an assistant professor secures millions of dollar). This does not mean that my research projects have not been funded as well as the US rivals.

How can I convince the search committee that I have capability to secure research funds from the US funding agencies?

Selection committees know that there are different standards in different countries. What is important is that you give them a list of the grants you have obtained, along with a perspective on what that means in your country. In other words, document things such as the typical size of grants, the success rate of proposals, or maybe the typical amount of grant funding a professor at one of the better universities in your country has. All of this puts your achievements in context, and allows the selection committee to already get an idea how competitive you have been in securing grant funding and how that might translate to your competitiveness in the US.

If you make that hurdle, and the selection committee is still interested in your case, then there are sufficiently many international faculty in the United States that a committee can always call up someone who knows the system in your country and ask them what they thought of your track record regard research funding.


Famous modern-era academics without academic degrees? Are the any famous or well-known (today-living) researchers without academic degrees working as professors or permanent staff members?

There are two related questions:

PhD without previous academic degree: truth or myth?
Is it possible to obtain a Master's degree without Bachelor's degree?

However, I am curious about the no-degree (past upper secondary school, i.e. no BSc, MSc, PhD, etc) case.

In regard to your question's topic, at least two relevant terms come to mind: lay scholar and autodidact. Once we establish the right terminology, it is not too difficult to find information that you're looking for. In particular, this Wikipedia list and this list seem to be rather comprehensive (you will have to filter the information to select the modern-era academics without degrees).


Effect of bland cover letter for journal submission in biology I'm not used to writing covering letters for journal submissions, and I believe this is pretty standard in maths. However, I got into a conversation with a friend in biology, who said they expect to write about a page explaining why the paper is so great.

To me this seems an unhelpful practice: a paper should be judged by the quality of the paper, not by the quality of some other document.

We came round to the question:

  How would an editor of a biology journal react to a paper submitted with a covering letter that amounted to 'here it is'?

All journals I have come across their guide for authors require a cover letter. Although it's probably partially a remnant of older times, where letters and manuscripts were mailed to the journals, it does have functionality.

The cover letter is a quick way for the editor to decide if it's even worth opening the full article. For this reason, arguments on the novelty, findings, importance, challenges and perspectives of the work should be demonstrated. In practice, it might not be much different than the abstract (different structure of course), but some journals also ask for specific questions to be answered.

It also helps the editor, who might not have the same expertise as the manuscript, to decide whether it's worth sending the manuscript to external reviewers. It also saves him a few hours of work from reading the whole article to understand its value.

It also adds a degree of personal communication between the corresponding author and the editor, rather than being a automated, impersonal submission process.

Finally, I usually add sentences like "all authors have agreed to submit the manuscript in this journal" or "no conflict of interest" etc, which adds a signature under the statements.

In the case a cover letter would only say "here it is", I think the editor would probably drop it in the trash bin, unless:

The title (and the abstract) conveys a subject so important that any editor could not bear not to check it out more thoroughly.
The corresponding author, or one of the co-authors, is a really big name in the field, that (even if the article is not that important) the editor cannot just reject it.

So, in mathematics, maybe just saying "Here is the solution of the problem X" and everyone knows the problem and die to see the solution, then you don't need to add much. But in sciences where a problem doesn't have a name, a more detailed explanation might be required.

Lastly, the manuscript is indeed evaluated by the manuscript itself. However, a good cover letter might make the editor check your submission more thoroughly, out of the tens or hundreds of manuscripts they may receive.

I think of it as the trailer to a movie. If you like Batman and you see Batman on the title, you will check the movie a little more before deciding if it's a crap movie or not. If you see a movie is directed by let's say Spielberg (and you like him), you may do the same. But if you are unsure about the title and you don't know the actors and directors, a trailer might convince you to watch the movie.


Late followup for Internship Opportunity About a week and a half ago I received an email from a mentor with whom I'd previously inquired about internship opportunities, informing me of possible projects I could join. I accidentally let it slip for a bit and responded after 4 days. It's been almost a week since - how should I go about following up? I'm really punching myself in the gut, this was perhaps my "dream" work per se.

Simple enough to just ask. Ask if the offer is still open and what your next steps should be. And express your enthusiasm as you have here.

Four days isn't actually that long. Nor is a week without a reply. But if it is upcoming soon then an email now should be fine.


How to report spam pdf links in Google Scholar? I sometimes find that the PDF linked to a reference in Google Scholar is spam.
For example, it might have the first two pages of the journal article followed by a link to some website (often in a foreign language).

This is a bit annoying given that often users have a choice of clicking on the PDF or going to a more official publication website.

How do you report spam PDFs  of articles linked to references in Google Scholar?

After a little more hunting, it seems that there is a general "contact us" support page where issues can be submitted.

https://support.google.com/scholar/contact/general

Presumably, this would be a way of notifying Google Scholar about spam PDFs.


How to properly add "scientific reading" as personal interest in CV? I'm applying to a Ph.D. program (in the field of robotics) and I have a hard time to fill the personal interests. I initially was going to avoid that section but then I got convinced that it's not a bad idea to have it. But I digress...

One of my hobbies is reading* about science, mostly in mathematics, [astro]physics and science in general. The problem is, I don't know how to write this in a clear, honest and concise fashion. I don't want to simply write "reading" because I don't want to be that generic applicant! Also I want it to be clear that this reading is not related to my professional field. And last but not least, I don't want it to sound fake!

*also watching or listening. Sometimes I also code for fun, generally speaking I fool around the science.

Just don't.

As an applicant to a scientific PhD program, if you weren't doing a lot of scientific reading, that would just be weird.

Thinking it's something special to be reading scientific literature every day, is a small warning sign in itself.

And the interests section is there to indicate some kind of balanced personality and the existence of a life away from narrow study.


What does the With Editor status mean for an Elsevier journal after being with the Managing Editor (ME)? I submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal, but it was not assigned to a reference number. They sent me a mail stating that the paper with the managing editor for initial evaluation . After tow weeks later, I got mail stating that the paper is with the Editor. And it was assigned to a reference number. What does this mean? Thanks in advance.

"Managing editor" can mean many different things, e.g. for one of the journals I used to handle, the managing editors were effectively editor-in-chiefs using a different name.
In your case most probably the managing editor is some kind of gatekeeper to the journal. It could be the editor-in-chief, or it could be an employee of the publisher. They looked to see if your manuscript was within scope of the journal, and if it was, who the best member of the editorial board to handle it is. Then they forwarded the manuscript to that editorial board member.
There's nothing else to do except wait.


Can I improve the idea of the paper on arxiv and publish it again? I have an idea, and I did experiments and then wrote a paper. But the conference I want to submit does not start until a month later. I want to upload it to arxiv first. But I found a description of the shortcomings of arxiv on Google. Others may scoop papers by improving the papers uploaded to arxiv.
If others see my results. Then immediately embark on the same experiment. Then change the description method (note that the ideas in some papers are very new, but once thought of it, it is easy to reproduce). Or they use the same idea to do some other evaluations (such as changing the background). If this is the case, won't my efforts be wasted?

Authors are not barred from uploading their papers to arxiv and
similar sites. But please note that such ef- forts may compromise the
double-blind review process, so please exercise care when discussing
your submission in public forums. On a related note, unrefereed
on-line pre-prints are not assumed to constitute “prior work” – in
other words, reviewers cannot penalize an HPCA submission because it
does not cite a pre-print with lim- ited visibility.

This is a passage from the conference where I want to contribute. It can be seen that he is not opposed to uploading the paper to arxiv.
But what does the last paragraph of it mean?

On a related note, unrefereed on-line pre-prints are not assumed to
constitute “prior work” – in other words, reviewers cannot penalize an
HPCA submission because it does not cite a pre-print with limited
visibility.

Does this sentence mean that it doesn't matter if you plagiarize a paper on arxiv. Because they don’t think arxiv is “prior work”.

arXiv is a public repository/a preprint server for research papers (that are either under review or currently being worked on. There are other such servers hosted by publishing houses as well like Elsevier's SSRN or MDPI's preprints.
In accordance with your question to the following paragraph:

On a related note, unrefereed on-line pre-prints are not assumed to constitute “prior work” – in other words, reviewers cannot penalize an HPCA submission because it does not cite a pre-print with limited visibility.

What they are trying to convey is that, if a paper (an online pre-print i.e., present on any of the public repos/databases) is somewhat relevant to the topic you're targeting in your paper and you don't cite the paper in the related work/prior work section you won't be penalized for it or asked to do so. The reason they don't consider arXiv prior work is clear that the PC is strictly adhering to papers that are rigorously peer-reviewed and published by a journal.
Also, it clearly does not indicate that you can plagiarize anyone's work.


Paper submitted by co-author without authorization I'm one of the three coauthors (A, B, C) of a research paper, to which I (A) contributed extensively in providing results and drafting the initial version (I'm academically younger than B and C). The corresponding author is B.

We have recently received the third round of reviews for this paper (it's been quite a lengthy process, approaching two years). The Editor gave us 120 days to resubmit the new version. This happened just before I was going to be unavailable for two weeks. Therefore, I emailed B and C explicitly asking to hold the paper until I provide comments on my return.

However, when I was back I found out that B sent the paper the day after my email without waiting for me, justifying it with a need of speeding up the process. C supported B's justification. Note that this is the second time in a row that this happens, as well as other B's unprofessional behaviours, which I all raised personally with B to no avail (with C in copy).

The complication is that the paper has now been accepted (and the journal is rather good), but having had a careful read of the paper, I'm not happy with some of changes B made, which I wasn't given a chance to check for two times in a row (I've reasons to believe that C hasn't reviewed it either). Besides typos, there are some incorrect statements and very confusing parts (e.g. reference to parts of the text that have been deleted, including in the conclusions!), which however they won't twist the essential content and outcome of the research.

I'll notify my dissatisfaction to B and C soon, but I do not expect that B will bring this to the Editor, as he/she should.

My questions are:

What is your best suggestion to have such amendments in the published version, without losing acceptance? I believe they can be too significant to be picked up at the proof stage.
Perhaps writing directly to the Editor? In this case, how to justify the situation without jeopardizing acceptance?
Finally, do you recommend writing to B's Head of School to inform him/her of B's repeatedly unethical behaviour? I'm not interested in working with B any longer, but I'd like to keep fairly good relations (e.g. references) with C, who is a highly-ranked academic and unfortunately is de facto more or less tacitly supporting B's unprofessional behaviour.

Ask the editor - with coordination with B and C - to fix these minor "slips" (as you will say).

Incorrect statements need to be fixed, and missing references to be amended, that's an objective thing that does not need discussion.

I would stay polite to B, even if you plan not to work with them in the future. You are angry, but you are not going to change them. Hopefully, you are going to be able to fix this paper, and that's what you should concentrate upon.


Online/Distance Math Teaching I am a math instructor at local community college. I am in mid 60's and in good health except for a minor mobility issue. Teaching is mentally very rewarding. Beside teaching, I am also tutoring students on Calculus by Skype in my spare times. In fact, I have a corner my home converted to a mini studio complete with big whiteboard, HD camera, special lighting, etc. Although I have only a few students right now but they all express great satisfaction with my distance tutoring for its convenience and flexibility.

In my thought of thoughts, I used to muse that, wouldn't it be great if I am able to work as adjunct online math instructor, such that I may still have a rewarding activity in my retirement years when my mobility issue become a major issue? I would like to make small baby-steps one at a time. But I do not have any distance teaching experience. I have been trying to gain a foothold in this online craft by applying to small part-time online teaching position but without success. Here are my two questions:

(1) Is there any prep that I can do right now to improve chance of getting hired in the future? Certification perhaps, but what certification? Maybe volunteering at a non-profit institution, but where?

(2) My understanding is that almost all online classes are either on BlackBoard or Moodle platform. Does this mean that my experience with Skype distance teaching is irrelevant when applying online position?

I would appreciate any help or suggestion from you. Thank you very much for you time.

There is very little regulation with regards to online teachers, so you probably wouldn't need to get a certification.
False! Not all online classes are on BlackBoard or Moodle. There's Khan Academy, Lynda, and a bunch of other spots online that are similar. Your skype teaching experience is also not irrelevant at all. A lot of these courses do "workshop" style classes, which are essentially group skyping.

A few things about teaching online:

don't expect to be paid a whole lot
if you're looking for something lucrative, it can be way easier to join some sort of tutoring program than to teach traditional classes in an online setting with multiple students
most online teaching is now happening in a pre-recorded video format. Production values seem to keep getting better and better. Have you checked out MinutePhysics?
there are so many ways to teach online. If you're looking for a more standard university experience, plenty of universities have online programs. Occasionally these programs get outsourced, so I would look into the companies that they outsource to. The ones that don't outsource, of course, tend to hire in-house, but I feel like they would be open to a new application. Perhaps that's something to consider?

Anyway, I know this is maybe a less clear answer, but hopefully it will give you some ideas with regards to what your options may be.


Suggesting my own paper when serving as a peer reviewer I am reviewing a survey paper in a good journal, where the paper missed important papers in the field including my previously published articles. I plan to suggest a rejection due to this serious lack, but I want also to encourage the authors to resubmit it again by pointing out the weaknesses of their paper.

In addition, I want to recommend them to cite some papers (since it is a survey paper) including my own. I don't know whether this is ethical (because I am one of the authors and it is clear that I found them interesting).

My personal rule for this is that I go ahead and suggest the paper in my review, and in the "Notes to the Program Chair/Editor" I disclose that I am suggesting a paper of my own.

That way, I am covered on both fronts: I am suggesting papers that are relevant to the authors and I let the Editor decide whether it is a fair suggestion.


Is there added value in having your own presentation layout and using it consistently? From the perspective of a Ph.D. student, how much of an added value is it to have your own presentation slides layout, that is used consistently throughout your Ph.D. conference presentations and other talks (and possibly throughout your academic career afterwards)?

Here is one such example from the Computer Science community.

This as as opposed to using existing Beamer templates with LaTeX, or built-in PowerPoint templates, or simply preparing each presentation on its own (without a specific layout).

A couple of axes I can think along:

Creating a signature layout that distinguishes one in their community
Ease of preparation of presentations (especially over time), maybe overcoming constraints with existing templates.

Note that I am not concerned with the question of content, but just design and layout.

I don't think there's any inherent value in having your own "signature" presentation layout.

Generally, you want to keep the focus on the content of your talk.  If people are noticing your layout, they are paying less attention to your science.  Would you rather stick in their minds as "the speaker with the cool result" or "the speaker with all those weird colors on their slides"?

If you really dislike the usual templates, or you can make your own workflow more efficient by creating your own, then go ahead and do it.  But I would suggest keeping your (visible) changes conservative; if your layout is radically different from what people are used to seeing, it may become distracting.


Is it advisable to use a URL link shortening service when writing an academic article? Is it OK to present a URL using a link shortening service such as bit.ly? The reason I'm asking is that I think it's a lot easier to enter this URL (e.g., if you read it in a paper) as opposed to full URL. Or is this a bad idea?

You should never offer a link shortener as the only option in an academic paper, for two reasons:

It's adding another point of failure: if the shortening service is down, then the link cannot be followed.  This is a particular worry over time, since the service may go out of business.
One of the big reasons why link shorteners are so popular is that they keep track of usage statistics.  I'd be offended if I thought an author was using this to monitor when the link was followed, where the people following it were located, etc.

So if you offer a shortened URL, it should only be in addition to the real URL, not in place of it.  However, I'd tend to avoid even that.  It doesn't look professional to me, and I don't think there's much savings for the reader.  (Online papers should have clickable URLs, or at least ones that can be copied and pasted, so this only arises for someone who has a printed copy but no online copy.  That can happen, but it's hardly a major issue.)


Are my chances of getting into a PhD higher if I choose a "not-so-accomplished" supervisor? Some professors are very accomplished, others are younger and maybe not yet so accomplished (although admittedly this does not need to correlate with age of course). I presume everyone wants to work with the accomplished people, and not so many people want to work with the people who have just started their careers.

However: Say I really wanted to get into uni X, because of personal reasons (I can't move to a different city because of my wife etc., so just personal reasons; also I do not aspire an academic career after the PhD, I have other reasons for wanting to complete one), would my chances be increased if I were to target a not so accomplished/famous/senior advisor (all other things being equal)?

The answer to this can be a little tricky. I would say : it depends.
Let's say you have the means to judge that a supervisor is "accomplished" or not and that you have not a GREAT background.

The accomplished supervisor might have nothing more to prove. Thus he can select you because "he has not much thing to lose" if it does not go well (this is subject to debate also). In the other hand because he is already accomplished he might be used to quality work. So why bother himself with a lower quality student ?

On the other hand if you go with a not so famous supervisor. Given he wants to be famous, he might refuse you because he wants a better student to help him also. He might accept you because he has not much choice and need ASAP a PhD student.

In resume the chance of being accepted depends MORE on you and your background than the celebrity of the supervisor. It's normal to want to go with the one you think accomplished because: more contact, more funding. However the less famous can give you much more of his time.


How to calculate overlap with a previous publication I have a paper that was a published in a conference proceedings. This paper was extended and turned into a journal paper. However, some things like figures from the motivation section or the experimental setup (used same metrics) are the same. The journal paper was reviewed, and one reviewer raised some concerns about a possible overlap with the conference paper. At the moment I'm preparing a response to his comments, and would like to present a percentage of the overlap. Is there a method to calculate the overlap with a previous publication? Are there any common guidelines that are used when presenting an overlap with a previous publication?

Your problem is that you need to show your paper is sufficiently original to merit publication.  Calculating a measure of overlap will not help you achieve that goal.  Instead, you need to:

Clarify the original aspects of the paper.  For example, you might write in the paper "Previously we showed [minor progress]" and then "but we did not solve [major problem in the field]" and finally "in this work we achieve [important step towards goal]"
Justify to the editor why some overlap is necessary.  For example, "This paper is about x, which is well known to experts but may be unfamiliar to some readers of this journal.  Therefore, we repeat our introduction to x from our conference paper."
Remove unnecessary overlap.

The editor will be looking for meaning, not quantity.  Don't invent metrics where they are not needed.