How to politely decline a postdoc job offer after signing the offer letter? I recently was offered 2 researcher job offers in two different countries. The first one is from the USA and the second one is in Japan. The professor in USA prepared all the documents for a J-1 Visa and after receiving them I have been issued a visa for 2 years.

I have now been offered another, more suitable job in Japan (more related to my interest and higher salary). I am also very interested in living in Japan. Although I applied to both jobs at the same time, the selection process in Japan took a month longer than the US process.

I accepted and signed the offer letter from the USA professor. This is an agreement to the professor that I will join, moving forward the professor will issue the documents for J-1 Visa. I was also asked in the interview whether I am considering any other job positions somewhere else. I replied yes, but my first preference is this one (the USA one).

How can I politely decline or inform the US professor of my changed situation? How would the professor in the USA feel after everything is done and I decline at the last moment?

Joining the other commenters: I'm not sure what you think a "commitment" is if signing an offer letter and having your employer issue a visa do not qualify!

I'm not sure why you think that your answer in the interview is relevant: it is perfectly normal for you to consider other positions until you accept one, at which point you should take yourself off the market.

I think it is very likely that the offer is not legally binding: I have seen such things happen to departments, and they have never pursued the matter legally.  What will happen though is that the people who offered you the job will feel that you reneged on them, and in particular that you broke your word.  That they have gone to the time and expense of successfully getting you a visa is likely to amplify their feelings of ill will.  (Also, it could make them be less willing to hire foreign workers needing visas in the future: please think about the implications of that for a while.)  It is possible that this could damage your academic and professional reputation in the long-term with this faculty member, at this university, and perhaps in broader circles containing them.  It is also possible that they will get over it rather quickly and hold no lasting grudge.

If you want to renege for a permanent academic job in a country that you distinctly prefer living in: in my experience, while some will call that action dishonorable, most will ultimately countenance it as something that you needed to do in order to get the happy life you want.  But if this is a temporary job for which you cannot see your way to your next job or staying in the country you want to live in: this could turn out to be a decision that you regret.  Whatever you do, I certainly urge you to get up to speed on how academic hiring works: this will stop you from making serious mistakes in the future (and may convey other advantages in your future career).


How to annotate/summarize research papers for long-term retrieval? I am new to my field (cell biology / immunology) and I would like to ask about the best practice to annotate or summarize research articles and reviews for long-term retrieval. When I start reading into a new topic, I end up highlighting almost each paragraph of the paper/review. This doesn't make any sense, and it is actually making me slow and frustrated and it is holding me from reading more. Could you please share your thoughts.

Update: although two very important points of how to approach new papers and how to tag them have been addressed in the answers so far, my main concern was about the new acquired details which I can't remember a few months later. For example, I read a paper about JAK/STAT signaling two months ago, now I can't remember for example which JAK attaches to which cytokine receptor and interacts with which STAT. I need to skim through the paper again to find this piece of information. So, what I am looking for is an approach to accumulate the new knowledge and to facilitate reviewing them without the need to skim through the paper again and again. I know this will come with experience, but at the beginning there are too many new facts to keep track of.

I find it important to be as active as possible in your reading, especially for papers close to the questions you are working on. If you are only highlighting, then this is largely a passive activity, and does not help much with retention or even later rereading. If you are making notes, it is a little bit better, but still largely passive.

For important papers, I try to read the paper and then write up a quick summary for myself of the key ideas relevant to my interests: a sort of mini-review or personalized-abstract of the paper. For papers that don't contain important tools I use, but contain facts I have to cite I usually include a section that lists in what settings I would expect to cite this paper. This helps a lot at the writing stage. These little summaries of the paper are usually too rough and critical to be useful to others, so I keep them private.

I usually organize these summaries in a little personal wiki like Tiddly Wiki where I can tag and do full text search as well as include links to the original PDF of my computer. Each article gets its own tiddle and is tagged according to topic. Other useful tools are available in:

Is there any efficient non-linear note-taking software?

For some heavy papers (say important math papers) the reading has to be even more active. Usually including reproving the theorems and sometimes presenting these proofs to others in my group.


Is it correct to submit a manuscript as a writing sample for graduate admission? I am applying to a master program in cognitive sciences and they ask for two writing samples. I have read that published articles and even manuscripts can be good writing samples, however I have the following questions regarding the ethical and/or legal issues of doing so:

Should I include all the authors as well as their institutions and
e-mails in the manuscript I send?
Should a writing sample include a brief introduction?
What happens if you are not the ONLY author of the paper you want to
submit? Should you specify your contribution? Does it help that you
are the first author?
Can I send just some paragraphs of the manuscript in order to keep my
sample short? If I do this, should I modify all the references so that they are kept in order according to Vancouver style?
Probably a little paranoid but, could the university use/ distribute any results I report in this unpublished manuscript?

Presumably they want a sample of your writing, not the result of you drafting something, somebody else writing it up, some referee suggesting corrections and your advisor giving it final polish and blessing.


Should I abbreviate the author names due to the page limitation? While I am writing the references for my paper, I usually copy and paste the bibliographic information and use it directly. AFAIK, most of them are in the full version, meaning that all the author names are spelled out, e.g. James Rhianna Smith. (They can be really long!).

Also given the fact that some conferences do have a page limit (e.g. 6 pages maximum), directly using those tedious full names is sometimes a luxury I cannot afford.

Under this type of circumstances, should I shorten the author names?

This is almost always dictated by the style guide of the journal/conference/whatever to which you're submitting. Check with them, or better yet, use a bibtex style definition file provided by them (e.g., IEEE).


My Prof Does Not Know My Thesis Field Well I am doing my MSc thesis research and it is becoming apparant to me that my supervisor does not have that much domain knowledge in the field that I am in. She has some idea but by no means is she even close to an expert in the field - I say this because I am reading papers in my field (Operations Research) and her papers are not published in OR journals.

I am curious if others have had this experience and had to essentially lonewolf their MSc thesis? It's unfortunate because I would like to have conversations with her about the field, but she doesn't know enough to talk fluidly.

I don’t think this is that strange. My PhD supervisor had almost no clue about the intricate details of my field, and no previously published papers in the field until we began to work together.

I was able to identify his strengths and use them to my advantage. For example,  he was a very talented mathematician and I was working on some heavy-duty equations which I struggled with. I knew he would be able to help, without having the slightest idea about what the equations physically represented.

In your words, I (and probably many other people) had to “lonewolf” the majority of my PhD with only little nuggets of help along the way. I think it is our own responsibility to read the literature, find gaps etc. then seek help when you have a real problem? Not just “what papers do I need to read” and so on.


Is it good to leave hyperref activated on a conference paper? It is recommended to send a copy to an IEEE conference with the hyper-references activated?
This includes hyperlinks to sections, equations, tables, references, etc. The paper was written using LaTeX.

Yes, with a caveat: make sure that the hyperrefs don't include any information that can't be gleaned from the text itself. For example, a common mistake is to use \href to hide a URL, as in:
Our tool is available online \href{http://www.github.com/some/repo/}{here}.

This is acceptable on websites but not in a paper because if the paper is printed, the URL is not visible and impossible to recover.
Similarly, this is bad:
As we showed \hypertarget{page1sec2}{earlier}, every Foo Bar is a Foo Baz

since it only displays the text "earlier", so an offline reader will have trouble following the backward reference.
Generally, tools like cleveref (\Cref / \cref) do a better job of displaying something that is readable both in text and in interactive form.


Advisors asked for a complete draft of the thesis - should I include the acknowledgement? I have written an acknowledgement in my PhD thesis thanking my advisors. Meanwhile they have asked for a draft of the thesis (before I submit it). Can I include the acknowledgment in the draft or will it be awkward for them to read my appreciation? I am also afraid that they might comment on it, causing me to change it.

Different universities may have different rules on this. At my university, there is no policy that prevents including it with the draft.

Can you include it?  Yes, unless there's a local policy in place.

Should you?  Up to you. I didn't - I didn't include the Acknowledgements until the final version (which they still see and approve).


How to reference data someone told me in person? As a part of one of the graduate course I am taking, I need to develop a business plan for a coffee shop startup. I have chosen a office building as the location of the shop.

I want to provide some numeric data about the building. I had a chat with the financial investor of the building and he gave me some numbers giving clues on how profitable the coffee shop will be.

As this data is not from a credible resource I am afraid that the marker may assume I have made it up.

Do you think can I still make use of this data without treated as a plagiarist (or perhaps data fabrication)?

The conventional way to attribute such information in your references is to cite your source as "So-and-so" (i.e. the person's name) -- "personal communication".   Of course you should get the person's permission to reference them, ideally in an email or some other written format, to be sure that there will be no miscommunication about them having given permission for you to reference them and the numbers they told you. HTH.


What is the correct manner to make it clear that your passage is paraphrasing a reference, that itself is refering to another reference? I'm sure that this must come up a lot when writing papers.

Reference A1 gives a lit review of a field. A passage talks about paper B1, and I summerise B1 also. How do you make it clear in your writing that reference B1 was found through reference A1 (after all does A1 not deserve credit for bringing this to your attention??)

And furthermore that if you are paraphrasing A1, who has made reference to B1, you ensure that the paraphrasing is made crystal clear. (For the record lets assume that one has read reference B1 as every good academic should! And that you agree with A1's summary of the work.)

does A1 not deserve credit for bringing this to your attention??

Not really, however it is often beneficial to the reader to include a reference to a review paper, as it may be a good aid to their own understanding, as presumably it was for you.

e.g. "A good overview of the field can be found in A1".

  ensure that the paraphrasing is made crystal clear.

State it explicitly.

e.g. Author A1 (2017) gives a good review of recent research into ...., they note that in B1 ....


How to demonstrate the ability to represent your university at international meetings? (postdoc application form) I was applying for a postdoc position and I came across this sentence in the online supporting statement.

Ability to represent X University and the consortium at national and
international meetings related to the project.

I really don't know to answer this without being a bit repetitive. Does this mean I should talk about my past presentations at international conferences? Because I have already talked about this before. I was also a member of the organizing committee of many scientific events, but this highlights my ability to work collaboratively within a team. Any ideas?

Your ideas about what is being asked seem to be correct. But rather than being repetitive, perhaps it is enough to just refactor the entire application, moving some statements from other sections into this one.
But the section need not be long if you say something like "As I wrote in my SoP, my experience and commitment to ..."
Don't leave it blank, of course, in case someone is mostly just interested in that section, but don't be boring. Think of the application as a whole and not as just a bunch of parts.


Is there any research direction which is closely related with map reading? I like maps very much, any common maps, geographic, historic, statistic, etc., or I would say reading maps is my favorite hobby. I can sit at table and read maps for several hours without any stop.

I was studying courses about math and physics in university. I am planning to pursue a PhD degree in the future. It would be great if I can convert or leverage the my map hobby as my career.

So my question is, considering my background, Is there any research direction which is closely related with map reading? If difficult to find such position in academia, is there any jobs in industry can greatly fulfill my idea?

Since I'm not really sure what is available in the GIS field for research I won't try to answer that part, but when I was in university I did some consultant work for a GPS company called baseline geo.

They had me in to help with some database stuff, but much of what they did seemed to be making custom gps/gis maps for various clients. For example they might have a client who is a fisherman that needs a map of all his fishing areas, or where his traps are. Another example could be a wildlife preserve where they need to keep track of the animals with gps trackers in realtime. Either way it would fit both your skillsets. This is just a industry example and you seem to me more looking for a research position or ideas.


What to do with threats of blacklisting? To be brief, I am a PhD student in the UK, and I have recently had some disagreement with the way my advisor handled our collaboration on research. This was initially a fairly minor thing. Not in the sense of what has happened, but minor in the sense that I only wanted to move past it, and to continue productively, but unfortunately he appeared to be too preoccupied, or for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to work together on correcting our results. Frustrating and not good for me, but ok, fine. At the time, no harsh words were exchanged at all, and there was some degree of understanding, although I was not happy with the mistake.

This has escalated beyond belief as soon as I relayed this problem to an administrative person, to explain there was a mutual mistake and I needed more time to submit. I explained the situation briefly to the person responsible for these things, made it clear I held no animosity or any interest in dwelling on it, and just needed some recovery time to move forwards. This was made totally clear to him and he was fine to shift the submission date and funding termination back slightly and he had agreed with me that there should be no blame here.

This has resulted in my advisor going on a furious rant at me in public, saying he refuses to work with me anymore. In private, the advisors have said that my 'complaints' have made the group look bad (no complaint was ever made, only a request for further time), and that they have now lodged some files or something on me with people at the university marking me as problematic. I have also been told that my complaints will make it difficult for me to get a job even after graduation, if I get to that point, because my advisor has no intention of giving me a reference, much less a positive one, and that they can make finding a job very difficult.

What on earth can I do? It seems that my career is now in ruins before it even started.

This whole situation has made me disgusted since it appears to have come almost out of nowhere, based on one conversation with an admin person. But I cannot work elsewhere if they follow through on their threats. How can I salvage my potential career?

Edit: There are just too many details I left out to edit down to size, and I would like to simply close this question or delete it if possible, due to confusion. I would prefer this to editing a popular question with too many specifics.

You went to the administrative person. That was your error and the core issue.

Allow me to give an example from the other side in which this happened:

While I was at another institute, I was asked to take over a lab for another person. The lab hosted a guest cohort from another country so the university needed someone with content knowledge and dual language fluency on short notice. So I was asked if I could take over the lab for a week.

Suffice to say, I did not know that there were particular rules for this lab. Some were obvious (like not leaving equipment plugged in) but I was a little overwhelmed with taking over a course last minute. Further, my work is primarily computational rather than lab focused so the reflex nature of lab rules was not there for me.

After a few nights, the lab manager came in and saw the lab after I had left it. Equipment was left out and plugged in. All a very big mistake on my part. The way she responded was where things got messy.

In hindsight, a more measured response would have been talking to me or even the lab's PI to find out what was going; even going to the department head. Instead she went to the Dean. She did not know the situation with the lab and the dean didnt, but as soon as it went to the dean, the situation became "administrative". Funds were threatened and it ended with me having to write a formal apology to the department head and the lab manager with everyone CCed on the email.  Everyone was aware the situation and most parties were mainly pleased that I was willing to write the apology so the "administrative" side of the situation could go away and we could fix things in house. (I ended up just getting an assistant who was a little more lab savvy). The department head came by and gave me a sympathetic pat on the back.

Was I wrong, certainly. But it was likely an issue that could have been dealt with "in house".

So, what was the end result of going to the administration rather than keeping things in house?  At one end, awkward elevator rides when the lab manager and I crossed paths. She found out the situation, and to find out, she didnt even know I was in the lab. I heard she thought it was an undergraduate group. On the other end, it did leave some lasting trust issues and undermined what had been before a very good working relationship between two labs. But I think that things have smoothed out since that happened.

In other words, once you go to the administration, the situation becomes administrative.


If I work on a project but don't do research, should I be included as an author on a paper? This semester I started working with a professor and a PhD student on one of their major projects, which is an application of their research. Though I was not involved with the research that went into developing the "idea" for the project, I have spent a significant amount of my time helping them to actually build the project, and a lot more work is planned.

Would it be typical for someone in my position to be included as a co-author on the paper that motivated the project I'm working on? Again, I wouldn't say that I have done any research myself, but I have done significant work in getting this project built, and the project is the main product / showcase of the research they performed.

Assuming it's reasonable for me to be included on the paper, how should I go about bringing that up?

That's research in my book. I would include you as a co-author, but I'd also make you write up some of it as part of your learning experience.


Advisor wants me to send manuscript to a potentially shady journal I have a paper that has never been submitted elsewhere. Now my advisor thinks that this Elsevier journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals (CSF) is a good fit. A cursory search shows that this journal has had a history of misconduct involving the chief editor. When I brought this up, my advisor told me that this happened over ten years ago and the journal seemed to be doing okay after the relaunch. He tells me that his peer had a good experience with them and peer review seemed to be at work.

Obviously, I don’t want to argue over things like this with my advisor. After all my paper might not even get published there. But I am also worried about ruining the credibility of my work given the reputation of this journal. Should I go with it? Is it okay to publish in a journal with such a history?

Why not? A quick look at the controversy indicates that the disagreements were entirely around the editor-in-chief publishing his own papers in the journal, papers which were lightly reviewed + indulged in a lot of self-citation. This means:

It's only the editor-in-chief's papers that are affected; none of the papers by other authors published in the journal are;
Once the editor-in-chief changed, it's no longer a problem.

So even if the editor-in-chief was in the wrong (which is not certain), it should be fine for you to publish there.

If it still concerns you, note that Clarivate Analytics / Web of science still has the journal indexed, i.e. they think the journal still meets their standards, and it has an impact factor of (as of time of writing) 3.064 which is good for the field.


How to address a knighted academic? How should I address a knighted academic in a letter or in an email? The person in question is a chancellor of a university, so the odds are that he has at least a PhD. He is a CEO of a multinational company, too, so it is difficult to guess whether he has been a professor at any given time (at least there's no search results for "prof. [name]").

The canonical reference for this subject is Debrett's (via the Wayback Machine). They recommend that a letter to a knight should begin "Dear Sir [given name]," regardless of whether they have other titles such as "professor".

In fact, they advise against mixing titles granted by the sovereign (such as knighthoods and ranks in the armed forces) with titles not granted by the sovereign (such as professor) but, as others have observed, "Professor Sir [Given name] [Surname]" is common usage.

In an academic context, your alternative option  for a salutation is "Dear Professor [Surname]". However, as I noted in a comment to the question, it's unlikely that somebody who's the CEO of a multinational company would, in fact, be a professor.


For undergraduates, is publishing "weak" research better than not publishing? As an undergraduate student, I have worked on some projects for my own interest, and recently a professor said that one of these works can be published (in a Elsevier journal with impact factor of about 2). I personally think that this work is not strong enough to be published and included in my resume. (I don't have any prior experience in publishing and related stuff.)

Can a weak research article published in a journal affect my application for graduate school in a negative way?

There are very few circumstances under which I think it's a bad idea for undergraduates to write research papers. These primarily have to do with the quality of the journal: so long as it is a reputable, peer-reviewed journal, I wouldn't be too concerned with the "strength" of the work.

The reason is that publishing while an undergraduate—particularly as a primary author—demonstrates that you have already started to learn the basics of how to do research in your field. This means that you're less of an "unknown" quantity, and therefore less of a risk for a department reviewing your application. If you don't publish the research, then there's no tangible proof, and then you need to rely on your research supervisor to make that point in a letter of recommendation. (But then the question becomes: "if she could have written a paper, why didn't she?")

As for the exceptions above, so long as you don't publish in "vanity" journals (those which will publish basically anything, so long as people pay the appropriate publication "fees"), you should be fine.


What are the equivalencies between the higher education in France (Licence - Master - Doctorat) and the higher education in the United States? In France the higher education is like this:

3 years of "Licence"
2 years of "Master"
3 years of "Doctorat"

But what about in the United States?

I heard that they have things called "undergraduate", "graduate" and "postgraduate". How many years do each of those take? And what are the equivalencies between these and the "Licence - Master - Doctorat"?

Note: If the answer to this question depends on the field of studies, then the field is physics.

Since France is a member of the Council of Europe and follows the Bologna Process, this question could be very well be applicable to many other European countries as well.

The bottom line is that undergraduate studies in the US are basically thought out as a four-year program, not three years. France -as most Bologna participant states- has chosen the three-year option for the first stage of university studies, in this case the License. This is a bit different from Spain and the UK, where there is perhaps more tradition of working respectively with Latin American and US universities. Recognition of Licence and undergraduate studies in either direction is not immediate in other cases.

However, there are perhaps larger possibilities for American universities to exercise their own judgement and flexibility as to recognizing foreign titles, than in some European countries. So, in some cases it may be possible for an American university to say: "OK, I recognize your French degree as 3 years studies, now you need to pass this, this and that courses to enroll in graduate studies."

There is a good article on the subject here , that basically states that American universities are aware of the problem and are increasingly open to finding solutions for European students.

I would go straight to the Admissions people at your university of choice, find out how they see your precise situation and what advice they can give you.


Can graduate students be forced to leave graduate school under pressure from their advisers? And how often does it happen? I know someone who was de facto kicked out of Harvard due to some conflict with his advisers, though he was later able to transfer to Caltech.

As an example - what if there was an irreconcilable difference between the student and adviser, and what if other advisers were reluctant to take the student on (for whatever reason)?

This is such a loaded question I'm hesitant to answer. While it might seem that a student was "kicked out" of a program for conflicts with an advisor, most departments (including ours!) have a procedure and policy for when students are asked to leave the program.

Usually, the reasons would be some mixture of lack of basic minimum grades and lack of satisfactory progress. if there's conflict between a student and advisor, there's usually some departmental mediator (a director of the graduate program) who should be able to step in and deal with the situation (either finding the student another advisor, or something like that).

But I'm not aware of it being generally possible for an advisor to fire a student and have that student then be removed from the graduate program: these two things are usually separate.


Can I annex fewer certificates for a shorter application? I want to apply at a German university for Computer Science. The instruction tells me to annex documents about additional qualifications.

So I decided for the ten most important and most related qualifications and awards I got and wrote an overview page for them. They are grouped by field and date, and there is a short description of about two lines for every qualification.

Now I need to annex the actual copies of the certificates. I feel uncomfortable with handing in ten copies, plus some other documents. I think providing the certificate for every qualification might result in too much pages which won't get read but make a negative impression.

Can I just provide a few of the copies and tell the University staff to ask for more if wanted?

It has been my experience that to not include a certified copy of each qualification at least can potentially result in unnecessary delays in processing your application.  Essentially, I have found that many universities frown upon incomplete applications.


Does the academic community perceive letters and short articles differently from longer articles? There are some journals that accept short articles of 2 to 4 pages.

I have submitted (and had accepted) such a letter (Cannot specifically name the letter) which is 2 pages in length but it is a SCI-E journal.

How would such an article be viewed by the academic community? Is there a big difference between the two?

Similarly, how does academics view journals that only publish such short articles?

Thanks.

There's an interesting study of ecology papers by Fox et al., finding that at least in that field, longer papers tend to be cited more. The explanation they advance, however, is that longer papers contain "more and a greater diversity of data and ideas," not that scientists feel more warmly about long papers than short ones. Also, the effect size they found was small, with less than a 2% increase in citations per 10% increase in page number. This suggests that padding out a short paper with extra analyses is not an efficient way to raise its profile.

(Short papers, of course, can be very influential: the first paper to accurately describe the structure of DNA was almost exactly one page.)


Including teaching statement in RA position application package It seems to me that it does not make sense to include my teaching statement in an application package for a research associate position (UK), which is focused on a specific research project (the only teaching-related activities there might be presentations, seminars or similar events). Could including teaching statement hurt or, vice versa, benefit the application and subsequent decisions?

I wouldn't hold it against anyone personally, but it could be bad or it could be good. If there are teaching or training opportunities as part of the job (like there are for people I hire), then it might be marginally helpful. It at least indicates an interest in the ancillary functions of the role. However, if it's a pure research position unattached to an organization with no possibility of a teaching role, a particularly unkind or paranoid sort might hold it against you since it could serve, to them, as an indication you'd prefer a professor/lecturer position, and that you are likely to not stick around very long if you can find one. This kind of stuff matters a lot more to some folks than it does to me personally. There's some legitimacy to this kind of thinking since the hiring process is time-consuming and expensive. You don't want to lose someone shortly after getting them on board.

My recommendation is to stick to the requested materials and no more. Tailor your application, CV, and letters to highlight the things that the position description wants.


What is the easiest way to check for plagiarism in student essay papers? I've had to grade quite a few essay papers in the classes I've taught, and I've suspected some may have plagiarized but I never really pursued check on them because it would be too time consuming to check their sources and pursue any/all possible sources where they may have copied from.

What's the easiest way to check for plagiarism?  Is there a search engine tool that one could use to upload a paper and check for it?  I doubt it, but other than that, I don't know of any other way to check for it than to put in more effort than I have time for.

There are plenty of tools out there. The best 'seems' to be TurnItIn. It's costly so if the school won't pay for it, you might not be interested. My school does not so I found other options.

Here is a tool called WCopyFind that is very good at finding plagiarism when one student copies from another but it will not find something online. After collecting papers for several semesters it has been catching more and more and most students take the same easy way out.

There are other options if you search for online plagiarism checking but they are not as robust as this tool above...however to really see the benefits, you need to maintain a library of old papers to compare against. What I like about it (besides being FOSS) is that it is highly configurable (consider a match 6 words in a row, or consider a match 9 words in a row where 70% of the words match). It all runs local (since there's no internet search) so it's quite fast.


Is it okay to assign free marks for students assignments? Regarding to a course for undergraduates (especially in computer science, but i would love to hear opinions from others too):

Is it okay to assign free marks for assignments? Meaning, the students who submitted the assignments will be assigned full marks.

If yes, in total how much percentage of free marks you assign from the overall 100% of the course? Is 30-40% too much?
How many assignments do you give?

This is because, students tend to discuss or copy paste the assignments from friends. And I don't want them to do that because of fear of losing marks. When I say I don't deduct marks for a particular exercise, I see that some students are willing to take the challenge and be creative with their answers, although their answers sometimes are wrong. I believe that people learn from mistakes.

But people might question me if I just give them full marks for 30~40% from the overall course marks. I couldn't measure whether I am too lenient, unbelievable, too dumb, etc, because of lack of experience.

So please, any opinion would be appreciated.

This heavily depends on your country, institution and position (most professors can get away with everything in regard of teaching if they research well).

In my country in Central Europe, this strategy is in universities not unheard of (because of the arguments you mention). One of my high school teachers even claimed that she is not allowed to give marks about the content of the homework, only about whether we did it in time, read the assignment careful and wrote comprehensively.

Of course, you could also make the homework weigh less.

Personally, I like this approach if you not mark the contents but whether or not they tried the tasks in a reasonablr fashion.


How to get a list of researchers ranked by their h index? One way of identifying influential researchers in a field is to rank researchers by their h-index.

I found only a list of researchers ranked by h-index for those with very high h-indices ( >40). However, I cannot see the ranking researchers that are under this number.

Is there a way to get a complete list of researchers in a field classified by their h-index (e.g., h-index > 5)?

Supposing that the h-index could be used to measure researcher influence (which is debated), I would strongly suggest, in addition to @Significance, to use at least the three main sources: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. In What do bibliometric indicators measure?, 2007, Kermarrec et al. showed the high disparity in coverage and results, and the sensitivity to errors (same names, duplications).  This information can be complemented by Which h-index? – A comparison of WoS, Scopus and Google Scholar, 2008, Bar-Ilan. The bias observed with Google Scholar is highly dependent on the field.

Using a measure with three different tools (after some cleansing), and plotting the profiles on a 3D axis might help to avoid "missing" influential authors who lay off the main diagonal (data from Bar-Ilan's paper):

A pending issue is the difficulty to get authors assigned to a field.  Journals can be associated to differents fields, and you could make a rule like: "an author who has published at least x papers in a journal from the field is taken into account". A drawback is that an author in that may have an high h-index mainly  because of papers published in different fields. So although "influential" in your sense, he might as well not be influential at all in your field.

A solution could be to collect DOI of papers, and then use retrieval tools as the ones described in Scientometric/bibliometric data retrieval from a list of DOI.


Acknowledgment to a referee of a different journal who previously rejected an article I received a referee report on one of my articles. The report is amazing and gives me wonderful directions to improve my work however he rejected the article. Now I rewrote the article considering his comments and I am going to submit the article to a different journal. I would like to thank him or to say this version is thanks to this referee. Is this regular and how to say it?

Yes, it's certainly regular: acknowledgements to referees are not uncommon. I'd formulate the acknowledgement in the following way or similarly:

  The author would like to thank the anonymous referee who provided
  useful and detailed comments on a previous/earlier version of the manuscript.

The qualifier earlier should be enough to disambiguate. In addition, once the paper is published, you can also write an email to the editor of the journal where you had once submitted the manuscript, asking them to pass your acknowledgement to the referee.


What to do with research results while being in high school? I have written a math paper on combinatorics (a generalization of a math olympiad problem) and am looking to get it published. I believe I have discovered something new (although I don't claim it is "important" in the sense of being a breakthrough or anything) and want to get credit for it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find anyone to endorse me to publish on arxiv, so I'm trying to get it published in another (less popular) repository that doesn't need endorsement.

Any suggestions? Things I have looked at so far:

academia.edu - apparently this isn't safe enough for protecting your work.
hal archives ouvertes - I tried searching about this one but there's no information regarding how trustworthy it is, etc.
github - this seems to be for computer science.
vixra - looked promising at first considering the "everything gets accepted" rule, but then the downside is that people have started viewing it as an arxiv for crackpots, so it doesn't seem like a good idea to publish there, but this being my first paper I'm not so sure.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this and any advice you can give.

Note: I'm not prepared to send my paper to any journals so that is out of the question at the moment.

First, if it is not submission-ready, then it is unlikely that it is arXiv-ready either.

If you put it in another place, you won't get much prestige or recognition, so I would aim at a place accessible to everyone (without login) - your homepage, GitHub or anything (it does not matter). It may be a good place if you want to start discussions.

Second, it is rather unlikely that it's something ground-breaking that everyone would like to steal from you. (But don't get discouraged -  it is certainly possible that it is an interesting result!) You would benefit more from discussions than have to lose.

Third, some guidance is needed. Ideally, you can consult it with a friendly teacher, professor or PhD student. If not possible, one way to go is to try some research-level competitions for high school students (e.g. like First Step to Nobel Prize in Physics, European Union For Young Scientists or something in that line). Even if you don't win anything (those are very though competitions) you might get some feedback. Additionally, even in Poland there are a few local competitions for works in mathematics by high schools students (e.g. this and that). I am sure in UK there are also some. If you did something in a Math Olympiad, you can try asking organizers if they know such competitions (or someone suitable for mentoring you).


How to substantiate the claim that something is not known? I am writing a master's thesis (in Number Theory) and there are multiple places where I need to claim that something is not yet known. Since I am not an expert (and even if I were) I would like to reference some more authoritative source than myself or, say, Wikipedia.

For example, consider the following statement:

  In 1980 Schmidt proved that [some property holds]. No other necessary or sufficient conditions are currently known, though.

For the first sentence I can cite Schmidt's original paper, but how can I substantiate the second claim?

One way, especially since you are not an expert of the field (and even if you were), is to not make such an absolute claim:

  To the best of our knowledge, no other necessary or sufficient
  conditions are currently known.

At least in my field (robotics), this is quite common and I think an appreciated amount of humility.


Can I have both my supervisors write reference letters? It seems like most PhD applications require at least two reference letter. One of my Master's thesis supervisors (a PhD) has written me a reference letter. Can I ask my other supervisor (a PhD student) to write me the second one, or would that be redundant?

The other alternative letter writers are all professors who have only seen me in class and can't really comment on my research potential.

I've sat on my department's graduate studies committee during application season, and so I can provide at least one point of anecdata for how PhD application recommendation letters are used, at least in my tiny corner of the academy. YMMV.

First, These letters are among the last things that are looked at. We don't have rigorous thresholds for grades, GRE scores, subject GRE scores, publications, etc. But all of those things are used to "objectively" sort the pool. First the obvious admits are skimmed off the top, and fellowship offers are made to some of them. This is the first place where letters are important, since quotes are mined from those letters to try and win funding for these students from the University (i.e., we entice the student with a prestigious award, and the department doesn't even have to pay for her!) The money quote is usually a ranking and/or direct comparison -- "In my twenty years at Giant State University, I've seen no more than 5 students of X's caliber. I would say her talents remind me of Y's at that age, who is now a professor at Prestigious U" -- and this is why even a mediocre teaching letter is more useful for this purpose than a nice letter from a PhD student (who can not be counted on to have a reasonable intuition for another's future potential).

Second, we work our way down to the marginal cases; this is much more difficult since the marginal cases require a more holistic take on the application package. No one gets immediately thrown out just for bad grades or a bad subject GRE score, but we expect some explanation of a mitigating circumstance (not an excuse!) in the personal statement, and hopefully reflected in the letters as well. For example, if you were dinged in the first pass for a low GPA, we would like to see that it was a bad first year (and not a bad fifth...); that you are on an upswing. If you think you might be a marginal case for whatever reason, the letter from the PhD student might be helpful -- perhaps you don't have any publications, but the PhD student can vouch for your work and verify that you have something in preparation, or explain why your project failed (projects often fail!) but that nonetheless you mastered some state-of-the-art technique on the way.

On the other hand it is a big waving red flag if those things are then not pointed out by your actual boss (the PhD holding supervisor). If you think the student will write a better letter, then you're probably best off having that student lobby on your behalf with the professor, to make sure the professor's letter is strong, and then get a second letter from someone else.

I would strongly recommend you do not ask for a letter from a non-academic unless it was an actual research position (and even then, these can be iffy if the supervisor has no letter-writing experience). On occasion we see glowing letters from a student's supervisor at their summer construction job, or a call center for a political campaign. Well-rounded students are great, but such letters are almost useless.


Should I report a PhD student’s incompetence to their supervisor? I had a short exchange of mails with a PhD student who wished to ask some questions about a paper of mine, which was troublesome in many respects:

The student had a blatant lack of basic knowledge and techniques of their field. (Imagine a computer scientist not knowing what object-oriented programming is, a mathematician not knowing what fields are, etc. They did not change fields for the PhD.)
The student should be able to answer some of the questions with very little work.
Initially, the student did not give me even remotely the information I needed to answer their question in a useful manner.
The student seemed utterly overwhelmed with their project.
There were strong hints of a “do my work for me” attitude.

For the purpose of this question, assume that I am very likely correct in my assessment.
Going into details about why I arrived at this conclusion would be beyond the scope of this question and be disclosing too much.
I also wish to make clear that I am not annoyed by the questions or similar, I am just worried about the situation.

I am now wondering whether I should write a mail to their supervisor (whom I don’t know and who is not at my institution) informing them about this incident.
My considerations so far are:

I am pretty confident that this student will not finish their degree (by honest means).
As long as they continue with this, they waste time and resources: their own, their supervisor’s, and other researchers’ whom they are emailing.
If I were this student’s supervisor, this is something I would like to know since it can prevent me from wasting my time and resources on them.
On the other hand, I hope that I would quickly notice these qualities in a PhD student.
This problem will likely escalate soon anyway.
It’s the supervisor’s job to talk to the student and give them the possibility to clarify in case I misjudged them.
However, if I am wrong, my information may wrongfully harm the student if the supervisor overreacts or the student’s image is tainted subconsciously.
Depending on the situation, such a communication as mine may allow the supervisor to smoothly get rid of the student – which is good if I am right and the student is incompetent, but bad if I am wrong.

My question is this: Is there anything else I should take into account when making this decision? (I know that, at the end of the day, I have to weigh the arguments myself.) Note that I already sent a mail to the student but am skeptical whether they got the message.

Emailing the supervisor and saying "this student is incompetent and you should get rid of him/her" would come across badly, for a few reasons:

You lack the information to make a holistic assessment of the student.
Even if you're right and the student is weak, weak students can improve.
The supervisor and their institution undoubtedly have their own methods of quality control.
Most importantly, it's not really any of your business.

It's nice that you made a good faith effort to answer the student's questions, but if the exchange has become annoying for you, your best recourse is to simply stop responding and forget the student exists.


How much time does a university typically give a professor to draft a syllabus and how long before they are approved? I was wondering about the process of accepting a syllabus, and if it was different for the Humanities and in the Sciences.  Suppose, just so the question is less abstract, there is a new software program that helps research, and a professor wants to add it to a syllabus.  Would he/she need to get approval from the department chair?  How long do changes/updates to a syllabus usually take in a US University?

Let's take for example an Introduction to Literature class, and typically there are six texts in the course.  A professor wants to exchange one of the texts for another one.  What would be the process of getting that done?  Would there be endless meetings or could the professor simply add the text.  Who would need to approve this sort of change in the syllabus?

Or let's take a Science class.  There are always advances in science.  How long does it take for a syllabus to change to include updated texts?

Academic freedom means instructors can choose the material they teach.  Professor are loosely bound by the course calendar - if you are assigned a course on Greek drama and you teach instead Latin drama you may be reassigned - but otherwise you’re largely on your own: you can choose the Greek dramas to be studied in your course.

If the material is repeatedly too hard (high fail rate) then the Dean (usually in consultation with the chair) may reassign you but in a functioning unit some collegiality will usually resolve such issues, and will efficiently link courses in a pre-requisite chain.

There is usually an administrative procedure to make substantial changes to a calendar entry for a course.  Where I work it takes 2-3 months, mostly because the appropriate meetings (which must be done in a specific sequence) are rarely held “on the spot”.  The change is approved by the department, then by the Faculty, then scrutinized by some academic committee for justifications, additional resources etc, and if approved then onwards to Senate for final approval.

Completely new courses are usually tested out as “special topic” for,one or two years  to see what works and what doesn’t work.


What can a student who works hard,is motivated to learn do to improve his grades? Background:
I am from Nepal (neighbouring country of India). So, our education system is different even though the syllabus is similar to the west. Majority of our grades come from final semester examination. The questions asked in exams are mostly repeated from the last 5 years(10 questions papers i.e every year 1 Regular and 1 Supplement exam). The exams are relatively far easier compared to what it would be in the west, BUT here is the catch. The teaching is below par, culture of reading reference book is rare among students, mainly because less time for students to be able to do so. So, what it does is that you put x hrs in class for the sake of attendance(75% attendance is a must to pass the class), you learn nth in those x hrs and you study for another y hours, first trying to  learn the basic that you should have got in the class and again trying to actually solve old questions.
Problems:
I am in engineering. It is worrying because-:
I like studying.
I don't memorize much, I study to learn.
I study very hard. I put lots of hours in study.
I even solve old questions during these 3 days exam gap.
How I study?
During semester, I properly do assignments, I do much of the assignments by myself.
During 3 days exam gap I buy a note that consists old questions solutions. Then I put my assignment notes and laptop in front  of me. Then I start to solve old questions by using notes solutions and internet videos. I solve last 5 years(only 5) of questions and other related questions that have not came in 5 year(only 5). For eg-: If there is a question "what is aquatic animal" I also study topics related to "what is terrestrial animal" and "what is aerobic animal".
History:
I have always got great marks in exam. Be it 90%+ in SLC and 87% average in +2. People think I am rattu tota (Hindi/Nepali for parroting from memory) who memorizes everything, but no I don't memorize anything.(But yes I use mnemonic techniques to remember).
What could my problems be?
(This is what I feel but I am unsure if they are really the problems)?
Whenever  I like some subject, I study almost everything related to that topic. Turns out, questions mostly come from last 5 years and not much from too much of the past. Since I dedicate more time to 1 topic, it makes less time for other topics. And if hard questions come from those topics I put less time, then you know I will do bad in that subject.
I have found that I do good in subjects that I find hard rather than subjects that I find easy(irrespective of if the subjects are meant to be hard or easy).
Also I always feel that if I studied 3-4 hrs more in the exam study gap, I could have scored better. i.e It would make up time for my revision and I could score better marks. (Even though I do active recall after solving every old questions).
At this moment, I am genuinely frustrated, extremely frustrated. I am dedicated, all teachers get surprised when they see my final marks, and I am actually learning something and not memorising.
Can you suggest anything for me?

I think your difficulty is with prioritizing tasks and committing to them. Don't worry, it is not uncommon, and its easy to solve once you accept it.
First, you need to decide which is more important to you at present, doing well in the exam or learning the subject well.
(Obviously learning the subject well is very important, but the exam grades may be a more immediate and pressing concern. Possibly they impact future prospects significantly, or maybe they are not so relevant). If the exam is important now, then be strategic about it. The deep appreciation of the subject should have started earlier, and if it didn't, you should revisit it once you get through the exam. If the exam isn't so important, then relax and keep enjoying the subject.
Second, about topics to study. A few days before the exam is not the time to play favorites with topics. At that point it shouldn't matter what you like or don't like (again, this is something for either before or after exam week). So spend an appropriate amount of time on each topic. A lot of students spend more time on topics that are graded heavier - this I personally detest, but it is strategic and meets a short-term goal.
Finally, mnemonics and active recall (I'm not familiar but this sounds a bit of voodoo) and the like are probably best left behind in school. I know it takes some pain to change mindset and the way you approach subject matter, but there is a reason university is distinct from school. Sure, use mnemonics when they are a standard tool (colors on a resistor for instance), but don't use them to start committing regular subject content to memory. Even if you have understood the topic well, this will serve as an unhealthy crutch that you'll keep falling back on, and will feel helpless without.
Apologies for being a bit blunt, but one of the distinguishing skills of a university education is realizing that we are responsible for our condition and our actions alone can improve them. Its certainly not late to start seeing that.


Do community college transfer students have a disadvantage when it comes to graduate school admissions? I spent a year at a community college working in industry straight out of high school. I recently got into a top cs program and will be attending starting spring 2015. However, the school only gave me until spring 2017 to finish my degree, which means I will be at the 4-year university for 5 semesters. Will I be at a disadvantage when applying to top graduate schools in comparison to my peers, who have been at their university for 4 years? I am a CS major who will attend a top cs program.

Also, due to my transfer situation, I feel that I am severely disadvantaged in terms of research opportunities. This is because for most of the labs at my school, professors have formal requirements which often entail good grades in high-level electives specific to the research. Unfortunately, I probably won't have time to complete many of these electives, and even if I do, it will most likely be during my last year. I want to get started in research as soon as possible, but I also know that I don't have much specific experience for my fields of interest (which include AI, NLP, machine learning, and data mining). How should I reconcile these gaps, and what tips do you have for a new student getting engaged in research?

Simply having attended a community college earlier in your academic career is not going to hurt you if you have a degree, good grades, good letters of recommendation, etc. from a top program as well as all the other stuff that matters like good tests scores and research experience. Having attended a lower status school is not a permanent black mark and simply will not matter if your subsequent work proves that you are top-notch student and researcher.

Having less research experience than your peers who are applying for the same graduate positions will put you at a disadvantage. Ben Bitdiddle's answer on how you might go about getting that given your relatively shorter period of time at a research university is good as are the answers to many other related questions on this site about getting research experience as an undergraduate.


Do academic seasons matter post-PhD? Master studies start per semester, and in some places PhD studies do, too.
What about post-docs or other positions that do not heavily rely on teaching?
Does the time of year make any difference for openings?

This is based on my experience in mathematics in the United States (other cases may differ):

In principle, a postdoctoral position could start at any time if grant funding is available.  In practice, it is generally tied to the academic calendar the same way other positions are, and any deviations from that schedule would be unusual.  If you are doing an advertised search for a candidate, then there are enormous advantages to timing it with the usual job market cycle (at other times of year very few applicants will be available), so off-season hiring typically takes place only when a perfect match is made through personal connections.  The other issue is that most Ph.D. students get their degrees at the end of the spring semester, and most faculty positions start in the fall semester, so academic-year-based postdocs are convenient for most applicants.


How should I start my own private post-doc research project? I am interested in pursuing my own part-time postdoctoral research in computer science, with a view to getting one or two publications over the next two to three years. My motivations are personal interest, and also to keep my options open in case I decide to apply for an academic or research post in 2016.

I am not sure where I should start looking for a project.  Should I read academic papers until I get ideas?  Should I just try and brainstorm my own ideas?  Should I go back to my current university supervisor, or my previous PhD supervisor?

My Background

I am nearly 41 and married with two children (aged 10 and 13).  I gained my bachelor's in computing in 2006. In 2012 I submitted a thesis in artificial intelligence (case-based reasoning) and the PhD was awarded in 2013.  My family are not keen on moving and we live in an area with very few high-tech or academic employment opportunities.

I can't see a way to extend my PhD research.  I have never worked as a post-doc; before the PhD I was a database administrator and immediately afterwards I was a software developer.

Fortunately, late in 2013 I found a position on a UK government scheme known as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.  I am employed by a Scottish university to work within an English manufacturing company, to use AI techniques to solve a particular engineering problem.  I am based at the manufacturing company and I see my university supervisor very rarely.  I am not allowed to publish anything from this employment. The contract ends in August 2016.

The KTP project will probably use standard AI methods; I won't be inventing any new techniques.  If the manufacturing company consented (and they will not!) it would be possible to publish, but it would only be as an interesting application of AI, not a new way of doing AI.

I have a substantial training budget (GBP £2000 a year) which—with the approval of my employer—I can spend going to conferences, buying books etc.

I have discussed the idea of doing research with my university supervisor, either performing experiments myself, or a literature review paper.  She made some nice noises but she was not overly enthusiastic.  I think she is worried that it will divert me from the KTP project (for which her university gets paid a lot of consultancy money) and possibly upset the construction company who I am based with.

My interests and skills lie in artificial intelligence (neural networks, case-based reasoning), computer-aided design and software engineering.

I still have my PhD supervisor on my LinkedIn page and I could approach her.  However, I worry that she will think it is strange if I ask to collaborate with her, given that I am currently employed by a different university.

I can commute to my current workplace (it's about an hour away) and there are 2 good universities (and another two not-so-good ones) about 60-90 minutes' commute from our family home, so location is the biggest restriction for me, I can't force my wife and children to move.

Partial answer: start reading!

Read for both breadth and depth, and be sure to occasionally step outside the boundaries of what you are familiar with, even exploring fields that seem only tangentially related. In the process, you will almost certainly discover an area that is begging to be explored further. Indulge yourself, dive into the literature, buy books and attend conferences (for which you say you have a budget), and keep excellent notes while doing so.

You may discover that you can write a literature review fairly easily, and will probably also find that you have identified exactly what you wish to pursue for your research project. At worst, you will have spent many enjoyable hours increasing your knowledge; at best, you will be well on the way to completing your research.


Could Brexit negatively affect PhD students in the UK who are EU nationals? This question relates to the potential withdrawal of the UK from the European Union, a.k.a. Brexit.

I am an Italian citizen, and I will start a (funded) PhD in the UK in September.

Right now I don't need any particular documents to stay there, but I am worried that if the UK decides to leave the EU my position could be in trouble (especially with regards to funding).

What would happen in such a situation?

I am aware this question might be labeled as opinion-based, but I am looking for people who already got answers from their universities. I imagine financial plans have been established for the next two-three years already.

Update on 2016-06-28: The UK Government has put out an official statement on this issue.

The short answer is "We don't know yet, but for a PhD program likely not."
The terms of Brexit have not been negotiated. They will may start to be negotiated if and after a vote to leave wins the referendum. (So that's the "we don't know".) On the other hand, it will be at least two years after the vote before the actual British exit from the EU (presumably to negotiate and to allow a graceful transition). If you are starting a 3-year PhD program this fall, there's a good chance that the negotiations will not have concluded fast enough to directly affect your research.

Source: the BBC writes

If the UK left the EU would UK citizens need special permits to work in the EU?
Lots of people asked about this. A lot would depend on the kind of deal the UK agreed with the EU after exit. If it remained within the single market, it would almost certainly retain free movement rights allowing UK citizens to work in the EU and vice versa. If the government opted to impose work permit restrictions, as UKIP wants, then other countries could reciprocate, meaning Britons would have to apply for visas to work.
What about EU nationals who want to work in the UK?
As explained in the answer above, it would depend on whether the UK government decided to introduce a work permit system of the kind that currently applies to non-EU citizens, limiting entry to skilled workers in professions where there are shortages.

and

How long will it take for Britain to leave the EU?
This was a question asked by many people. The minimum period after a vote to leave would be two years. During that time Britain would continue to abide by EU treaties and laws, but not take part in any decision-making, as it negotiated a withdrawal agreement and the terms of its relationship with the now 27 nation bloc. In practice it may take longer than two years, depending on how the negotiations go.


No response from Journal editor after misinformed rejection I recently submitted an article to a journal, which was later rejected. But the grounds for rejection were completely unfounded.

Also, a few oddities stand out with regards to the rejection. Normally, the rejection from this journal is signed by the editor but in this case it was unsigned.

We promptly emailed the editorial office asking for a clarification, as clearly there had been some misunderstanding. Since then, the assistant editor has continued to provide stereotypic responses which can be summarised as "we have emailed the editor with a reminder". Since our first correspondence with the editorial office regarding this issue, almost a month has passed.

Please note, the article in question is a short format article, and for this particular article type the journal normally responds to article submissions within two weeks.

This is an article coming out of my PhD and it has got me worried about what I can or should do to get a clear and concise response from the editor.

I would personally start wrapping my head around the idea that you will (a) not get the "clear and concise" explanation from the Editor-in-Chief that you are hoping for, and that (b) this publication is unlikely to appear in this specific journal. In short, it may be time to move on and think about alternative publication venues.

On this site, we have many questions related to appealing journal decisions, and (in cross-field agreement that is rather rare around here) most experienced researchers here agree that fighting a review decision that you perceive to be unfair is a wasted effort. Decisions actually being sent out "by mistake" is very rare (to the point that I am not aware of a single such case in my circles), and that the authors do not agree with the content of a review is basically never grounds for a re-evaluation of the manuscript.

The fact that the editor is not really getting back to you on this is another strong indicator that this is not a case of a silly mistake, but that the journal stands behind their decision and wants to cut short any possible discussion related to this manuscript.

You can definitely draw your own conclusions from this experience (such as to not submit to this journal again), but there is no formal recourse against the decision of a journal to reject a paper, and them backtracking on this is unlikely enough that you should not delay your manuscript further while you are trying to fight.


Minor contribution to software publication: To coauthor or not to coauthor? I've been invited to be a coauthor on a software publication for an open source program where I contributed a minor bugfix.

My contribution was small, and I certainly wouldn't have been offended if I hadn't been included in the author list. But they've chosen to invite all contributors, and I'm trying to figure out whether I should accept.

On one hand, I could do with a bump to my paper count (post-doc looking for TT), and this is a project I'm proud to have contributed to. (I've joked that in code-multiplied-by-computers, my 2-line contribution to this takes more drive space in the world than my 10000-line domain-specific program).

On the other hand, I wouldn't have invited me as a coauthor. Also, I feel weird that a paper with such a minor contribution may end up near the top of my most-cited, and I'm not sure how that will appear to the job market.

Is there a downside to joining the author list for such a minor contribution?

Is it unethical to benefit from someone else's bar for coauthorship being much lower than mine?

(Looking at other invited coauthors, I see some people with similar contributions going either way; yes or no.)

Imagine the following scenario from the point of view of the main authors. They have been working on a piece of software of which they're proud, and they're writing a paper about it. They were happy with contributions from all kinds of others. It costs them literally nothing to add those others as co-authors to the paper. The resulting goodwill might strengthen the collaborative ties with those others: maybe the contributors might contribute more later. But even if they don't, and this is where the collaboration ends, the main authors have lost nothing by adding more co-authors.

Wolfgang's comment may be spot on: they may be trying to convince you to be part of a larger, longer collaboration. If you would like to be part of that, and if you are confident about the quality of the paper as a whole, I would accept. After all, they are happy to have you in the author list.


How soon after the application deadline do search committees start looking at the applications? I notice that a lot of academic faculty positions have deadlines that are on a weekend, or during a holiday. It seems reasonable that an application will not be read until the holiday is over.

How soon after the application deadline do search committees usually start looking at the application?

The actual timeline for filling a faculty position is often almost entirely decoupled from the stated deadline.  The stated deadline is often set through interaction with an HR department or other formal process, and may or may not reflect the hiring committee's actual expectations of when they will get the applications in which they are most interested.

In the case of applicants who are likely to be seriously considered, the committee will often have effectively begun considering their application before they ever submitted it, based on interactions at conferences and other forms of networking.  Other applicants are likely to be triaged as they come in, with likely prospects given serious consideration quickly and unlikely prospects.
In the end, however, every faculty has its own process and expectations, which may vary widely: in some cases, they may be closely tied to the deadline, and in other cases they may have little or nothing to do with.


Why law and business faculty are paid the highest salaries? According this site
https://www.higheredjobs.com/salary/salaryDisplay.cfm?SurveyID=28

"Legal Professions and Studies" and "Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services" are paid higher than faculty in more research oriented fields such as engineering.

It is because of:

More demands for law and business faculty and graduates
Higher tuition in such fields
They bring more grants to universities
other points?

I believe that there are (at least) two main reasons for this:

Law and business faculty generally have alternative job prospects that pay extremely well. That means that universities have to pay enough to compete with those alternatives in order to attract and keep their faculty.
They both generally teach in professional schools that are not part of the main university (at least in the US). Professional schools (especially top ones) usually have high tuition, high enrollment, and healthy donor bases (due to the aforementioned high potential income), and therefore they have very strong revenue streams. They also don't incur many of the costs that the rest of the university does (e.g. sports facilities, dorms, financial aid). Together, this means that they have significantly more resources to pay their faculty with.


Quitting Physics PhD to become engineer? After a couple of years in a decent grad school, passing quals, many times thinking about quitting (the usual: impostor syndrome, stress etc), and one paper. I feel like I have a clear head to make this decision. I do not want continue with a career path in academia, I want to be an engineer (or other technical field). In short, I will be happier that way and need to support my family with a better income.

I love physics and it will always be a part of my life and would love to still work with it. Currently, I work in experimental condensed matter: know a lot of fabrication techniques, studied lots of mechanics, can build circuits and perform fairly complicated electronic measurements, written programs for analysis (mostly Matlab, but some C in the past). The list can go on... I feel like the transition with this track record shouldn't be hard - but I don't want to be misinformed or get too "cocky".

What can I do to be a competitive applicant that will have to contend with people that have engineering degrees and training?

There are actually a few areas where you might stand out more than someone with a straight up engineering background.

Look at specific types of organizations like Space research and exploration organizations. These typically have other PhDs in Physics in their program and you might have a better shot. A collection of such roles is here:
http://tapwage.com/channel/space-doctor
Another area are interesting startups. Something like 3D Printing focused startups are looking for bright scientists. Given your experience with mechanics, electronics and tools like Matlab, that could be an interesting area and startups might be more amenable to looking beyond very structured educational experiences as they look for good talent
http://tapwage.com/channel/engineer-in-3-dimensions

Ping me via the tapwage.com site if you have further questions or clarifications and I'd be happy to answer.


How much actual funding does a Marie Curie fellowship entail? The EU has a research fellowship program named after Physicist Marie Skłodowska-Curie. The website lacks a bunch of information, but I'm specifically interested in understanding what kind of funding it actually provides in the Individual Fellowship (IF) track. The linked-to-page says:

  The grant provides an allowance to cover living, travel and family costs. In addition, the EU contributes to the training, networking and research costs of the fellow, as well as to the management and indirect costs of the project.

If you've received such a grant, participated in fund allocation, or saw the "books" at a hosting institution, I'd like to know more about what amounts of money they're talking about.

Specific points you could elaborate on:

Is the funding a lump sum? Per-year? Per-month?
Is the host institute's part figured as a percentage of the overall funding? Independently of it?
Do the applicants (individual + institution) ask for certain amounts, or does the program set them?
If it's the latter, what are the fixed amounts? Or the criteria for setting them?
Can you give a specific/typical example (no personal identifying information please) of the amount of funds some researcher, and their hosting institute, have gotten?

Obviously - no need to address all of the points.

The website has a bunch of information if you look in the right place, in the applicant guide. All your questions are essentially answered by this paragraph:

The living allowance is the EU contribution to the gross salary costs of the researcher and amounts to EUR 4,880 per month. It can only be used to this end.
This amount is adjusted through  the  application  of  a country  correction  coefficient (CCC) for the cost of living according to the country in which the beneficiary is located. For the outgoing phase of the Global Fellowship, the country correction coefficient of the TC partner organisation will be applied. However, the adjusted amount will not change in case  of  secondments  to  a  partner  organisation  in  another  MS  or  AC.  The  country correction coefficients that will be applied are indicated in Table 1 in Part 3 of the Work Programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions).

I'll let you read the rest. There is also a mobility allowance of 600€/month and a family allowance of 500€/month. There are also a few annex costs. Bear in mind that this is a gross amount.
I didn't search for the Work Programme (it's somewhere online, I imagine), but in France, the resulting net salary is around 3000€/month, which is extremely good for a postdoc; to give an idea, the median net salary for employees is 1789€ nationwide. I have a few friends who got or supervised postdocs like this in several European countries, none of them had to complain about the salary, quite the contrary.


What excellent university DSP programs exist and what makes them excellent? In the same vein as this question, but making sure to abide by Good Subjective/Bad Subjective, what DSP programs are out there that are excellent and why?

Please give concrete examples or at least a cursory explanation for what makes them good/thorough, and stand out from other programs at different universities.

Firstly, lets assume you're talking about graduate programs. X being such a specialized program would only be available at that level of study.

In a nutshell:

Large list of cross listed (undegrad/grad) or only grad courses in all areas of study. You still need to have courses that can advance your overall knowledge of engineering.
Large variety of courses in your area of study. (If your studying DSP, its not enough to just take a DSP class, you may find it relevant to study data compression, machine learning, Free-space laser communications.) This also means you wouldn't have to complete a large number of independent study programs.
Large Number of Faculty in your research area. If you are interested in studying music signal processing, you would want to do research with a professor who has experience in that field. If there are 10 professors, you could be more selective about who to work with or who will be the best fit for your research area.

As for schools with decent program: Binghamton University, while it is not well known outside of New York, its master's programs is well structured, large number of faculty in EE at least 3-4 DSP professors, 10-20 graduate level courses offered a semester and large number of those are DSP related.


Almost 14 months after submission the associate editor informed me they still did not start with the review process Few days ago I received an email from the associate editor. He apologized for my paper has mistakenly been left outside of the normal review process. This happened almost 14 months after my submission. I asked the journal editor for information on the status of the review process about 7 months ago and received an email from the technical staff that my status is "in review" as can be seen in Editorial Manager system. The journal is highly ranked and the review process usually takes a long time. So, I thought everything was ok. The associate editor is asking me now if I still want to proceed this submission. Should I say yes?

Unfortunately, these things happen, and it sounds like the journal is at least being appropriately apologetic.

If you go do a different journal, you'll be starting all over again.  If this is a good journal for your field, and you think it's an honest mistake, then I would instead recommend asking for an expedited review process.  Since the editors are acknowledging they messed things up, you are likely to get faster and better consideration from them than another equivalent peer journal.

So: be collegial and gracious about their mistake, and next time you'll have good reason for when you send an earlier status query.


How to search for graduate schools that have Masters in Complexity Science/Complex Systems? I'm an undergrad student who is interested in pursuing a Masters degree in complexity science/complex systems in the U.S. I know some schools put this program under physics, math or computer science departments.

I'd like to know which schools that provide such a program. Unlike physics, maths or cs programs, it is not straight-forward to find out such a list. Any recommendations on how to get a complete list of schools that provide a masters degree in complexity science/complex systems?

Try looking at speakers from conferences dealing with complex systems, e.g.:

European Conference on Complex Systems
NetSci

You can also search for other conferences (e.g. at http://www.conference-service.com) and then check the speakers. Furthermore, looking at affiliations from recent (say - last few years) papers you like my lead to some good trails.

When it comes to webpages being hubs from complex systems, try looking at:

http://www.complexssociety.eu
http://www.network-science.org

Some positions (including doctoral programs) and other resources are at http://www.barabasilab.com.

Also, some group websites are in my collections of links (Delicious: complexity and networks or search at my Pinboard).


Is there a rule for repeated letters when creating acronyms/initialisms/abbreviations? I'm writing my master thesis and I've created an initialism that has the letter S repeated three times in a row (the initialism is OSSSP and stands for Optimization Search Space Scope Parameters). In my opinion, the constant repetition of letters in initialisms, abbreviations, and acronyms makes them look ugly, but I couldn't find a well-accepted rule for what to do in such scenarios.
Turn my initialism in something like 'OS3P' is an option, but it seems to be naive and informal. If I knew how to do it for this specific case, choosing synonyms to replace the original expression would be an option too. Any other thoughts on this?

Turn my initialism in something like 'OS3P' is an option, but it seems to be naive and informal.

There's no rule against such kind of initialisms, and I wouldn't consider it naive either. Actually, there are standards designated in similar ways, e.g. the I2C and I2S data busses, also spelled I2C and I2S.


How to deal with an adviser that wants to force you to get his desired results? I'm doing research for my PhD thesis based on a sensitive subject related to biomedical applications. In fact, our workflow is:

Build a computational model
Verify the developed computational model based on tests and data available in the literature
Apply this developed and verified model to some other data to measure an important parameter for clinicians that people's life will depend on that.
Investigate the result of this application on that data as well as its outcome and relevance for clinicians.

My problem is the fourth stage in this workflow. First of all, nobody ever did the fourth stage in this workflow for that particular application before. There are some similar models in the literature that tried to investigate the outcome of applying a similar model for that application but their conclusions are so general and vague where a definite conclusion cannot be drawn. When we apply that developed and verified model to that data, it produces some results which may look counter-intuitive at the first place, but there are a few papers in the literature that actually confirm similar observations. These results are not bad but kinda look like a negative result. We are confident in our results because this model is validated and verified based on several independent cases.

Unfortunately, in my PhD adviser's eyes, these results are worthless cause they are not desirable and he thinks nobody will buy this results if our conclusion is something counter-intuitive (well counter-intuitive based on his thoughts at least...). Every week in our group meetings, he reminds me that these results are worthless and I should change the developed model in a certain way. He doesn't give me direction regarding what way I should change the model, but it is important that we get intuitive results right now.

I'm feeling like he is forcing me to search for his desired results. It is possible for me to do that but I believe that's cheating or could be called hiding the truth. My question: Should I change my model to get his desirable results? if no, what's the proper way to convince him that this counter-intuitive results maybe is the truth and we should live with them?

The meaning of unexpected results

It is important to be skeptical about your computational approach. However, at the same time, computational approaches are (almost) completely worthless if we just ignore them when results are unexpected (unless you already have dominant evidence that the result is not only unexpected but also simply wrong). An exception would be if your approach is in the area of generative models, where a parsimonious model is suggestive of an underlying mechanism, which is not the area of your model: you are trying to do prediction for an unknown case (extrapolation).

The art is in determining whether your initial model of the world (i.e., expectation) is wrong or if your computational model is wrong.

In a long discussion in chat, I think we came to a conclusion that in your specific case, it may be that this is an issue of extrapolation to a condition where you do not have truly comparable training data.

How to stop worrying and learn to love the model

If you want to convince your advisor, colleagues, peer reviewers, or yourself that your model should be trusted, your next steps are to test the conditions that lead to your result.

Do all the appropriate tests for model convergence in the original training. Check for input parameters that are outside the range in the training set. Use graphical representations of your model to show how input are mapping to outputs. Remove or scale variables to test the sensitivity of your model to those changes. And additionally, as your advisor suggests, figure out what it takes to make your model fit the expected result. All of these approaches will help you find if something is wrong in the model or support you if something is wrong in the prior expectations.


Publishing a comment or contacting the authors privately? I have just read a recent paper in a well-respected journal. The work is technically sound and the results interesting. However, the authors comment their main results as unexpected and “extraordinary” (in the abstract and in the text), while it is an instance of a very generic and well-known phenomenon, which has been experimentally confirmed (and theoretically explained) in a large range of systems in the last decade. The author do not seem aware of the literature on this phenomenon.

Now, I am somewhat conflicted between two courses of action:

Raising the matter with them privately, making them aware of the literature they have missed so that they do not repeat the mistake, and telling them (nicely) that their claims of extraordinary behavior are not valid.
Doing the same thing, but through a formal “Comment” published in the same journal. This does not only bring the matter to their attention, but also to other readers of the journal. Right now, I favor this option, because I think it improves the scientific record.

The journal in question does publish comments, its policy on the matter is the following:

  These are a medium for the discussion and exchange of scientific opinions […] For publication of a Comment or a Reply, they must be judged by the referees to present new insights and be of interest to our readership.

Moreover, a Comment in the journal will necessarily include a “Reply to the Comment” by the original authors, as per journal policy.

So, how do I choose between contacting the authors in private, or submitting a formal “Comment” to the journal? What factors should guide my choice?

There is nothing stopping you from contacting the authors directly. In fact that might be polite. It may, however, be unfruitful. Submitting a comment is not considered less polite than contacting the authors directly first. Remember, the authors have, in your view, published poorly referenced/researched work (reviewers and editors are partly also to be blamed). By writing a letter/comment, you perform a scientific debate where you wish to correct a problem with said paper and that is clearly within the realm of what we can and should do as scientists without feeling impolite.

Before you do anything you should perhaps solicit colleagues to discuss the matter over. Since the results have been published, some form of publication discussing the problem must also appear in a publication. It is for this reason you should carefully discuss the matter, start writing a "letter to the editor" of the journal where it was published. The letter should contain the information that puts the "novelty" in perspective. Under such circumstances the authors will have the possibility of a rebuttal which typically is published at the same time as your letter, it is their opportunity to "defend" themselves. This is what typically is done.

Now several things might happen, for example, the authors get angry, the editor refuses to publish your letter. This is why you are better off not being alone behind anything you write. If the letter is refused, then publish it elsewhere. But, remember, the point of writing a letter is to set the faulty perspective of the paper in a more correct one so that the paper is not taking credit where not credit should be had. Do not stray from this endeavour.


Are there any research careers except professorship for a person holding PhD in pure mathematics? I'm interested in mathematical research, but want to know if there are good jobs besides being a professor.  Are there any lucrative research-centric careers out there for someone with a PhD in pure mathematics?

I can speak from personal experience. I have a math Ph.D. on a topic with absolutely no real world applications, I work in industry, and my job title is actually "Senior Research Expert". So yes, there are research careers in industry. And while I won't get rich off it, I can't complain about the remuneration.

However, (almost) nobody in industry will pay you for thinking about stuff, going to conferences and writing papers. My research is extremely applied, and I am very much constrained by a) what customers will pay for and b) what is feasible given our code base and software architecture. I simply can't go off on a tangent and argue that a particular algorithm is very elegant, if it is not implementable in a reasonable amount of time or nobody will buy it.

Depending on your Ph.D. topic, be prepared to change fields. I used to do something like discrete optimization - now I do statistics and time series analysis.

While I personally don't code (which the developers are very happy about), I work closely with the developers that actually turn what I thought up into software. Interpersonal skills and the ability to fit into a team and a software development process (Scrum) are much more important here than in academia.

Research mathematicians are rare, and few people understand what I do and why I'm paid. It took a long time and some very fortuitous circumstances for me to demonstrate that I do add value to the company, and I was lucky to keep my research job when my company was acquired - my new employer really doesn't have research positions as such, so I had to justify why I should keep my niche.

Finally, there are about five other originally pure mathematicians in the team I work with, two of them with Ph.D.s. None of them do anything that could be called "research". They develop software or do analytics.

Summarizing: yes, there are math research careers in industry. They are few and far between. Be prepared for an uphill battle, to change fields, to do what needs to be done.


Include background to ideas for future work in related work chapter of master thesis? First of all I hope this question is not too trivial for this site. It does say in the FAQ:
"This site is for academics of all levels". Furthermore, this question should be helpful for other novice researchers who want to write a paper or thesis.

I have worked for a good while with my MSc. thesis and what I did initially was to read a lot of related work in the research area of my project and also in perhaps more peripheral areas that initially seemed very interesting.

This initial review is the basis for a related work chapter that I have written. I was fully expecting to prune a lot of this text and have also done this according to what I eventually ended up doing. However, a lot of the descriptions of research that I have in the current version represent very interesting ideas for extensions to the current approach that I want to write about in a future work section.

Should I keep the sections in related work that are about research areas that I have not ventured into, that are not directly comparable but do represent possible extensions?

If possible I would also like someone to explain how related the related work section/chapter should be.

While is always interesting to venture in new areas while writing your thesis, the overall advise I usually get is to keep a solid straight line story, this way the readers won't feel confused on why did you put certain stuff that you did not use at all.

The main objective of the related work, should be to put your own work into context with respect to your peers, but your present work, not your future work. You would be basically citing your future work, which would not be good.

You can always write a Future work section that can be as long as you want.

My overall advise when writing your thesis (especially for Masters) is to keep it simple and straight.


Where and how to publish research paper as a non-academic independent researcher I am an independent researcher with out a PhD and because of my curiosity in science in my free time I carries out some minor experiments. Using those experimental data I wrote a paper and I want to publish it as a research article.

My first question; Is there any journal available where an independent researcher can publish his/her work?

As I believe no such journals are available I thought of sending my articles to other peer reviewed journals?

But the problem is how will I address my author information

In this paper author information is given like this

Nora D. Volkow,1,2 Gene-Jack Wang,3 Joanna S. Fowler,3 and Dardo Tomasi2

1National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892
2National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892
3Medical Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973
Nora D. Volkow: vog.hin.adin@woklovn

As I am an independent researcher who is not working in the similar field of my research work, how should I give my author information?

Do I give my current employment details as author information

Eka,
Supervisor,
XYZ company

or my last school details

Eka,
University of Earth

On the first question, you can and should submit to "normal" journals. There is no special publication track you have to use. Independent non-academic researchers are unusual in some fields but quite common in others,

On the second question, see this discussion - in short, you can give your own address, your company (if they're happy with this - ask), or just something like "independent researcher". Do not give a university you attended in the past, as this implies you carried out the work there and could be seen as misleading.


What to do if a conference rebuttal is closed before the specified deadline? My paper was submitted to a conference, and they sent me a rebuttal email specifying the deadline in UTC-12 time zone.
However, when I prepared my rebuttal and tried to submit it into the system, I found that the system was closed. The time was over in my time zone but more than 12 hours were still remaining in UTC-12 time zone.
Although my paper seemed to be accepted(maybe somewhat marginally), yet I did not want to demonstrate a naive attitude.
What is the best thing to do in such a situation?

There's always a person, and they're usually reasonable. Just contact the conference chair or program committee chair and ask them to let you know how to send in your rebuttal.
In short, talk to people.