Literature Review Tables: Plagiarism or Fair Use I am in a debate regarding tables developed for a literature review which include Author, Year, Type of Study, Methods, and Results. I believe all components of the table should be paraphrased, but a colleague directly copied methods and results which has resulted in a debate. Is this direct copying of these materials plagiarism or considered fair use as it applies to a literature review?

Note: The copied material is anywhere from one to seven sentences total for each reference for methods and results.

Note 2: I should also note this was in a table we previously stated we created and there is no indication the material is directly copied.

First, please note that plagiarism is a different concept from copyright infringement/fair use. To summarize what I will explain here: as long as you put quotation marks around everything that is copy-pasted AND you clearly cite each instance, I don't think you have any problem with either plagiarism or copyright violation; this would be fully morally acceptable and within your fair use rights.

Here are my detailed comments:

Plagiarism: In general, as long as you properly cite your sources, there is no issue about plagiarism. (Plagiarism is strictly about copying words from other people without giving them credit. It has nothing to do with copyright violation.) However, your scenario is a bit tricky because even if you cite your sources, copy-and-paste almost always requires quotation marks; however, you might possibly get away without quotation marks in a table (if it were copy-and-paste into regular text, you would most certainly need quotation marks). To be safe, I would just put quotation marks around everything that you or your colleague copies-and-pastes AND also cite the source each time. If you do this, then there is absolutely no concern about plagiarism.

It is also very important to understand that "paraphrasing" does not let you escape from claims of plagiarism. If your paraphrase is still too close to the original quotation, some people might still consider it plagiarism, even if you quote the source. (I personally disagree that that would be plagiarism because you quote the source, but,  unfortunately, I know for a fact that some people do consider it to be plagiarism just because the paraphrase is still too close.) So, according to what you have described, I think paraphrasing would be a waste of your time: simply copy-and-paste, put quotation marks around each copy-and-paste, and cite each quotation clearly--if you do that, there is absolutely no concern about plagiarism.
Copyright violation and fair use: I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, copying bits and pieces from several different articles (even entire paragraphs) and assembling them into a table is fully within fair use limits. Fair use will generally let you copy entire tables, so assembling your own table from various sources should definitely be within your fair use rights. (And note that fair use is your right; the copyright holder has no right to restrict people from making fair use of their copyrighted work--copyright is not unlimited.)


Applying for MS, what role should a cover letter have? I'm interested in applying for a MS in the natural sciences with professors some I have worked with in the past and other new ones. What role should a cover letter have as I reach out to these professors? My goal is to follow standard procedures but also not be excessive in my approach, thus I'm wondering whether to send one or not in the following context:

I'm not formally applying yet, rather I am early in the scoping process, reaching out to potential advisors to state my interest and request a meeting to discuss opportunities and options to work with them. I figure I will include my resume in an email reaching out to them, and that email itself is like a brief, informal cover letter. I have prepared a cover letter that I'd use in my formal application, but it is like a longer, more formal version of the email I'm sending to these professors.

Maybe for some or all cases it is more appropriate to send a cover letter and resume, letting those attached documents speak for themselves and keeping the email very brief? Some professors I'm reaching out to are people I cross paths with once or twice a month and am on a first-name basis with, some I have studied with in the past but they may only remember my face and not much else, and some I've never interacted with before.

A brife email with your attached CV is enough for information email communication with professors. unless you are applying formally to a MS program that define the length and the scope of the needed cover letter, you do not need to send one to your professors.


Should I mark every glossary term, or only the first one? There are some terms in my Bachelor's thesis which I would rather add to a glossary list. Say that the term appears on page 23, 25 and 31. Should I only mark the first occurrence, or should I mark them all?

A pattern that I have repeatedly seen and that seems reasonable is:

mark all occurrences (maybe excluding mere mentions of something that is not discussed or applicable at that location)
bold the page number of the "main" occurrence (e.g. definition, detailed description, etc., not necessarily the first one)


Necessity of tenure for lifetime academic research For context, I've been a postdoc in computer science for about 3 years.  I recently wrote a grant and was awarded a fellowship for 2 years.

I've heard from multiple sources that if I don't get a tenure-track position in the next two years it will become very difficult for me to have an academic research career.  But I don't need the kind of job security that allows me to get paid if I stop working—I just need some kind of agreement that I can keep my job while I'm productive.  This is pretty common in other jobs, so why in this case am I being told that it's basically tenure or nothing?

The reason is simply that possessing a tenure-track faculty position (and then obtaining tenure) is the primary performance indicator for long-term careers at most institutes where research is the primary responsibility.

There are some exceptions - some universities offer a research professor position: you pay your salary from grants you secure, and as long as you do that you can continue working there.

You can also work as a lab manager/research scientist in a university, which is a term contract that is extended based on merit.

Some private research institutes (Google/Facebook/Amazon etc.) offer research positions (that are highly competitive and well-paid), but there are also many other private research laboratories that offer a similar deal to what you describe (though in that case your research needs to be focused on what these institutes care about, and is not entirely up to you).

I'd also mention that tenured professors are still expected to be productive and get grants. Though it is more difficult to fire them, becoming completely inactive for no reason is probably not going to be good for your long-term career. In other words, to some extent tenure track faculty face the same agreement, especially when they're not tenured yet.


Should I translate experimental materials for my thesis? For my Ph.D. thesis, I developed a new usability method which focuses on a survey. The main contribution is a description for practitioners how to conduct such a survey. For this, I could not develop a standard questionnaire, but gave guidelines on how to construct one.

I am validating the method by conducting such a survey myself. My target population consists of German-speaking people (I’m measuring the usability of a software available only with a German interface), so my questionnaire is in German.

I want to add the questionnaire in the appendix. But my thesis is written in English. Now, my question is: Should I provide the questionnaire in English or in German?

If I provide it in German, some readers won’t be able to understand it, and it won’t be useful as an example if some of them want to apply the method themselves. Note that my reviewers speak German, so this won’t be a problem for them.
If I provide it in English, it won’t be a documentation of what I actually used in the experiment. Note that in psychometry, a translated questionnaire is not considered equivalent to the original and when a standard questionnaire is developed, any translation is required to be validated again.

What is the proper thing to do here? Use the original experiment material, even if it is of no use to many readers, or create an approximation which has not really been validated and whose usefulness is thus diminished as well?

Returning back to my old question, now that I am close to finishing - there is about 15 pages per questionnaire, with 4 questionnaires, so I already have a 60 pages in this appendix. I also have another appendix with 50 pages. If I double the questionnaire-containing appendix, I will have 170 pages worth of appendices at a 100-115 pages thesis, which seems excessive.

Providing both the original and the translation would satisfy everyone.


Can my PhD main supervisor claim the "corresponding author" role for papers from my thesis even if he didn't provide much support during my study? I graduated last year and is now a postdoc in another university. My current boss (who was also in my PhD supervision team, but not the main supervisor) encouraged me to publish parts of my thesis as a journal paper. I wrote the paper during working hours and my current boss gave me guidance and advice. My plan was to include others who were in the supervision team as co-authors and have my current boss as the corresponding author. However, my main supervisor was pissed off when he learnt about it. He said he should be the corresponding authors for all the papers from my thesis. Is what he said correct? Is it a must? Actually the main supervisor gave me minimal support during my study and I don't think he deserves to be the corresponding author. The funding for my study was provided by the government.

In general, no.

There might be exceptions, but those should have been communicated to you in advance by your supervisor, rather than after-the-fact.


Discriminated by senior researcher because of my ethnicity I am working on a collaborative project between different parties, and there is a senior researcher who underestimates constantly what I ever propose or speak, and  he tries to illustrate that I am doing nothing new.

Although I have proven for the second time that there is a limitation in the study, he doesn't listen. I have witnessed that he respects and appreciates Asian students more than me.

Of course this just my side of the story, but I know many people from his country do not like women wearing traditional clothes as I do.

I don't know how to solve this problem, but I am not the only case. Many others are being judged by him based on their complexion, appearance, and garments.

I am kind of frustrated, trying to be amicable. Of course, there are other members in the project who appreciate me, but this senior researcher has clout over them.

What I should do in that case?

EDIT

I know I cannot change some people opinion about people from specific religion or ethnicity, what I can do psychologically to override that, I am trying to do my best as much as I can, but still, I had the same behavior.

In the comments you mentioned that getting an ombudsperson involved was not an option for you. However, your advisor does not necessarily need to know that you talked to the ombudsperson. Ombudspersons are often required to keep discussions confidential unless you explicitly tell them otherwise. You of course need to check that before with your ombudsperson before you go that route. Just discussing your options face to face with another person who has to treat that discussion confidentially is probably of enough value in and of itself. And maybe (s)he can do even more.


E-mail address to use in publications It is customary to use one's academic e-mail address as contact address in publications; I have seen once or twice an @gmail.com address being used instead, but it simply looked unprofessional.

However, I already experienced personally twice that system administrators love to deactivate e-mail addresses when people leave the institution. In a time when serving 1 GB of data costs one cent, apparently it is too demanding to set up forwarding for a few old users.

This leads to "e-mail rot" in many published papers, also for addresses that are explicitly designated as contact addresses. If one happens to have a popular name, it might become difficult to identify them using a search engine after the e-mail address becomes invalid.

What is your proposed solution to this problem? Should we (well, the ones of us that have tenure and power) put pressure on system administrator to change this practice? Should we use in our publications a different, more stable e-mail address than the academic one? Should we maybe get rid of the e-mail and contact address in papers overall? Should we insist that the journal publishers set up an alternative contact system (good luck with that)?

Related question: Changing mailing and e-mail addresses as corresponding author--which to include?

Personally, I think that (in academia) sticking to official e-mail addresses is an atavism.

Currently, one's personal e-mail (say, ...@gmail.com) is better because:

usually more efficient/stable/etc,
lasts for longer than 1-4 years.

While names like mad_theoretican_666@... may sound ridiculous for professional communications (but it's rather a matter of taste than anything else), I don't see anything wrong with e-mails like name.surname@ or n.surname@.

However, I heard quite a few times that non-institutional e-mails sounds less serious.

But honestly, if someone builds his/her value depending on how his/her e-mail sounds (and doing it against very practical reasons), it is the thing that is ridiculous.


Submission of survey paper and graduation thesis almost in same time Location: South Korea. I am writing a survey paper and PhD graduation thesis and will submit them in 2020 July and 2020 June respectively. I am going to use Section II of my survey paper in my graduation thesis. If I submit the survey paper to the journal after I submit the graduation thesis, of course, the Section II I used will be shown as "plagiarized" in the journal`s system. In this case, will the journal accept the survey paper because the author of both works is the same or will I have to paraphrase Section II?
PS: Graduation thesis will be checked at https://www.copykiller.com/ (plagiarism detection service in Korea) and the result will be submitted to the University.

This is ultimately up to the journal to decide - so you should contact them/consult their guidelines. I cannot imagine any scientific journal treating a thesis (PhD or MSc) as a prior publication, but this might be field dependent. In any case, you should explicitly write in your paper "This chapter is based on the author's PhD thesis to be defended (...)" or something to this effect, and I would think that this will be enough for the journal.


How to establish partnerships with a university As a young assistant professor in civil engineering, i was tasked with building a new education program that leads to a masters degree in engineering. In order to offer the future students of this program more opportunities, I would like to establish a partnership with a foreign university, to allow the exchange of professors, students, and other types of collaborations that are usually covered in these types of partnerships.

How would you advise me to proceed ?

I am probably not  qualified  to  answer  this  question,  but    the process  should  start  with you  talking  to other   faculty members and the chairperson of your  debarment   then  the  dean  of  the engineering college  and possibly other  colleges. if    the  college    that  employs you  is part  of a  university. Uou  and  others  need to see  one  or more provosts,   At  some  point  you  need  to  talk  to   one  or more  lawyers.

Tulane  University   has  an   agreement   with  university  in  Cali  Colombia,   or  at  least  the  medical   school  and  School  of  Public  health  and  Tropical  Medicine that  split  off  from  the medical  school in the late  1960s have   an   agreement   that  is 50  years  old  or  older..

I am/was   a Tulane University faculty dependent.  When my  father  had  to  semi-retire in  1976,  he   went  to  Cali  Colombia   TWICE  to  work  with  a  professor  down  there., Tulane  also  has   an  agreement   with  Sewanee  University  in  the  United   States.

My closest  friend     from  college  is now   a  full  time  faculty member  of  a health  sciences  technical university  who is on   several   degree    or program   creating  committees for  that university. She's  also  the  contact  person   between   the university   and   several hospitals. They have   an  existing  agreement  with  the University  of  New  Orleans,  When   her  university   could not hire  someone  to  teach  required introductory level physics  course   for  existing  degree programs,  They  ended up  sending   several   students,  who had  to take  the physics  course  to      to  graduate, to  UNO.

At  some point   you  need  to  get  legal  counsel  involved.

Repeating myself, my  suggestion  is  talk   to OTHER  faculty members     who  have  been there  longer  to  see  who  they may know  or  who  have  worked  with   faculty members  who   are  now   working  at  foreign  universities.  Then  talk   to  the   department  chairman,    the  deans  of  on  or more  colleges  ,  then  people  in  the  university  administration,  one  or  more  provosts.  One  of  the  reasons  for   going  to  college NOW  is to form  foundation  of  professional  social  support  network.    Even  as  relatively NEW  Ph.D.  you  already   should  know OF    other   faculty members   at  other   universities  , including  foreign universities.  If  you  don't know  anyone,  certainly other  faculty   members  who  have  been there  longer knows  or  has  worked   with  someone  else at  a  foreign university.

Do you have  any  visiting  professors  in  the  college   who  also  are   faculty members   at  a  foreign university..   I know  someone  who  now  has  Ph.D. in physics  who had  spend    one  Christmas    vacation  in  Madrid  Spain   because  his  dissertation   adviser    was  in    in  Europe    for   a  scientific  conference...

I  apologize  for assuming  you  are  in  the  United  States.  I know that may NOT  be  true. And  repeating my  self.  but  following  some professors   advice  to  repeat  everything  THREE   times. There may by  typos   I  did not  catch  and  correct.


Is an unaccredited online Master's degree comparable to a typical Master's if from a reputable university? I'm considering applying for an unaccredited, online, Master's program at a university in the UK that is itself fully accredited.

I'm interested in pursuing a Master's degree purely for my own interest and to broaden my knowledge. I don't want to switch careers or necessarily pursue a PhD afterwards. I unfortunately have too many financial obligations to quit my job in order to pursue postgrad education full time.

I have my bachelor's in psychology from an accredited university here in Canada.

So, I'm just wondering: are there any reasons why I shouldn't apply for this online Master's program, given that it isn't actually accredited? Will the lack of accreditation cause me problems down the road?

It tends to be harder to stick with things that feel "optional," especially when they compete with necessities like holding your job. Thus, the biggest downside to this would be if you do not have the time or energy to pursue the Master's program and this results in poor marks.

If you apply for other degrees and/or visas, you may still have to declare that attendance and coursework, possibly with transcripts. (See Can I omit my undergraduate school from my CV? and Can I legally omit the fact I hold a Ph.D. degree?) You could certainly explain the circumstances when you're forced to mention it, but ideally you don't have to explain anything away to begin with.

You could avert this problem in several ways, such as officially withdrawing from a course instead of failing it (if possible in that system) or making sure to devote your full energy to each course you take.

Given your purposes for taking the class (interest and extending your knowledge), would it make more sense to seek out an open online course instead, or an interest group local to you?

This is a warning about a factor you may not have considered, and I don't mean it to sound needlessly harsh. You could learn great things from this program. Successfully completing this degree will probably be neutral-to-beneficial when anyone reads your resume/CV, and what you learn and practice there may be adequate proof of the program's success. Further, if the program later becomes accredited, your degree will accordingly gain in prestige.


Where do people leaving academia go? Is there any extensive research/study/survey that looked at where people that leave academia go?

I mostly interested in the computer science field (machine learning) in the US, but curious about other fields and locations as well.

People leaving academia can be PhD students or after (tenure-track, tenured, soft-money research positions, national lab researchers, etc.).

Copied from this question per Franck's request: the NIH recently examined where people with a biomedical Ph.D. ended up. The results of their survey are discussed here.


Should I feel bad for applying to two postdoc positions? I'm a finishing PhD student in math. I want to stay in academia so I am applying for two things:

A year-long postdoc position
A 6 month postdoc position

I have been in contact with two professors regarding the two options and am going to send the application forms off today. But I feel bad because suppose I get job offers for both the positions, then I'll have to say no to one of them. Then they will get annoyed at me for wasting their time and will probably never want to work with me on anything again. Both are highly respected so it's doubly bad. What should I do?

Edit: the applications will be decided by a committee, not the professors concerned. Both professors are happy to work with me. I'm in the United Kingdom.

Everyone who is hiring knows that applicants are applying for multiple positions. This covers everyone from McDonald's to Harvard. It's expected. They will get multiple applications and will only take one, so you must apply to multiple positions to have a chance of landing one. Unless you have an offer in hand which you have already accepted when you apply for another position, you haven't done anything wrong. I'm surprised you've only applied to two.


Ethics of contacting potential post-doc mentor in mathematics It is rather common in many different disciplines to contact faculty members(potential post-doc mentors) asking if they take post-doc students. I was wondering if it is ok to contact a potential mentor of a post-doc position in mathematics that is publicly advertised?

Yes it's good idea, but the point is just to make them aware of your application.  In particular make sure the application is already posted in mathjobs when you send the email.  Keep your email short and don't expect a reply with any content.  You want to say your name, your advisor, a sentence about what you work on, and a brief expression of interest in working with them.


I am taking a Bachelors in Information Technology, but I have a massive fear of public speaking So I am attending a polytechnic(Tech school), getting a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, I am wondering if I am expected to do presentations/speeches and if so, am I able to somehow not do them but still earn my degree.

I am diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder(On my medical records it says I have Extreme Anxiety) so in my bias opinion this is beyond the " Fear " aspect and is mentally scarring. While attending middle school/High School I failed and outright skipped 99% of the presentations I had to do so I sort of digged myself a grave in terms of experience and preparing for this.

Side note, I remember in middle school I told my teacher about my distress towards having to do a history presentation, and although she made me do it(And I failed), she let me practice infront of her and another student instead of the whole class, which helped a little.

I don't know anything about your specific condition, but for some things that seem similar there is a possible solution.

It may not be possible to overcome the actual fear of speaking, but it may be possible, with practice, to overcome the appearance of fear, so that you can actually be effective in spite of it.

Unfortunately most careers, even those that are quite technical, require some interactions with people that may be very stressful. Autism is a different condition in which people don't pick up the cues that others do, making them awkward in public situations. Fear isn't the issue for them, but the solution is similar - or can be.

The trick is to learn to "play a role" when you are forced to speak in public so that it is your "character" standing in front of those people, not you. You deliver the lines as if you are Romeo on the stage, simply separating yourself from your role. In fact, one way to learn to do this is to join a local theatre group and take a role in a locally produced play.

But one iteration isn't going to make much difference. Your experience with the prof who let you give a more private presentation is a start, but from there it is possible to branch out to put yourself in other situations so that they become more familiar and you learn to quickly turn on your "speaking role" that you hide behind.

Not easy, but others have done it. Most people can do hard things if they want it badly enough and find a path to the goal, even if it is difficult.

It is even possible that with enough practice, in safe environments especially, you can learn to overcome the actual fear.

It would be wise, of course, to check this advice with your advisor/physician.


Applying to religion affiliated universities: how to write Statement of contribution to mission There is an opening for an assistant professor position at a US university, that I really want to apply to. However, it is a Catholic university and the application requires a "Statement of Contribution to Mission." I have read the university's mission statement which, besides the usual academic missions, includes quite a few religious missions. I am not Christian; in fact, I am an atheist. From the answers to this related question, and that the job posting states clearly Equal Opportunity, I understand that I can still apply to this position. But I have no idea how I should write such a statement. Of course I won't lie in the statement to pretend that I'm Christian. But having no clue and personal connection to those religious values, tradition, and missions, I find it impossible to write even one word.

Is there any suggestion for writing such a statement? Or should I not apply?

I think you should certainly apply, as long as you have no personal opposition to Catholic education writ large; the previous question you link is a great source if you are uncertain.

As to your question, for an example, I pulled the mission statement for Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI.

  Marquette University is a Catholic, Jesuit university dedicated to serving God by serving our students and contributing to the advancement of knowledge. Our mission, therefore, is the search for truth, the discovery and sharing of knowledge, the fostering of personal and professional excellence, the promotion of a life of faith, and the development of leadership expressed in service to others. All this we pursue for the greater glory of God and the common benefit of the human community.

Following this broad statement, they have four subsections on Excellence, Faith, Leadership, and Service. Of course the mission of your university may differ but I presume it will paint similar broad strokes.

I would write a statement that addresses the primarily non-Faith elements of the mission. Quoting again from Marquette, on Excellence they state:

  education must encompass the whole person: spiritual and moral as well as intellectual, the heart as well as the mind

Without aligning with their religious beliefs, you could certainly contribute to education encompassing the whole person, particularly in intellectual pursuits.

Most U.S. Catholic universities that I am familiar with belong to either the Jesuit or Franciscan orders, though there are others as well - it might be worth spending a bit of time researching the order of the university you are applying to. Painting in a very broad brush, Jesuits tend to value intellectual pursuits as valuable contributions to society, and lean quite a bit more liberal than official Church policy on social issues. Franciscans are particularly concerned with service to the poor, and as such their universities try hard to accommodate students with financial difficulties. Even if you disagree on the religious aspects, you can probably find something in the general mission of these orders you also support.


Is it appropriate to ask colleagues opinions when reviewing a paper? Several times my supervisor has asked me for my opinion on papers he is reviewing. I find this helpful as it encourages me to read things I otherwise would not, helps me understand how to review articles, and can lead to interesting discussions. Presumably my supervisor also finds it useful to have a second opinion or sometimes to act as a sanity check.

Recently I was wondering is this entirely appropriate. Not least because all the manuscripts for review have confidential for review only in bold at the top.

So my question is what are the legal/ethical issues with asking a student/colleague/supervisor's (depending on your position) opinion on a paper you are reviewing?

Note I'm not saying that they write the review just that you get them to read the manuscript and ask their opinion on certain points.

I think that this practice violates the usual "confidentiality agreement" that presents (formally, or customary) in a review process. However, I would agree that this is a common practice, and for some people it is just hard to work on their own, although technically you are supposed to give your own opinion on a paper you review.

I would say that if you really need to show the paper you review to someone else, you should check the following boxes:

make sure the person understands that they are looking on a paper under review, and agrees to maintain the confidentiality, i.e.: not to talk about the ideas from the paper with someone else, not to produce own work based on these results until they are made public, etc.
 The actual material paper, and the file, do not change hands: do not send the pdf manuscript to your colleagues, do not leave the printed paper with them for a while.
 Ask specific question(s) about the paper, for which you need second advice, not just a general opinion. Remember, that you should review the manuscript yourself. Definitely do not use the second opinion to shake some work off your shoulders and go.


Any data for average number of papers per year at different career stages? Is there any data for the average number of papers published per year by individuals at different career stages (ph.d. student, postdoc, tenure-track, tenured associate/full professor)? It would obviously be dependent on research areas and I also realize that such data may not be easy to obtain - hence the question to put it out and hope to get some direction for my study. I am interested in data from the Computer Science and/or Applied Mathematics fields, but answers for other research areas could also be interesting. In absence of data, anecdotal experience in one's branch may also be helpful.

UPDATE:
- Obviously, the number of paper per year is highly field specific. So is citation counts (which includes all the analysis it comes with such as average citation counts, h factors, impact factor of a journal and so on).
- Several countries such as the New Zealand, have their own research evaluation system in which one of the important evaluation criterion for research-groups or even individuals is the number of papers published in one to six years span. The data for average number of papers by individuals in different disciplines may put these evaluations in perspective with the global averages. e.g., individual publishing two paper per year in a sub branch where the average number of papers per year by individuals is one should not be directly compared to those publishing 10 papers a year in subbranches in which 15 papers per year is the average norm.
In short, the purpose of obtaining such data is to provide corrections to the evaluation systems in such countries.

Italy introduced a few years ago a habilitation process which involves heavy bibliometric evaluation, and in the process they computed median values for all the professors in Italian universities for:

number of papers published in 10 years
citations per year
a sort of normalized H-index: the number h such that the person has h papers with score >=h, where a paper published Y years ago with C citations has score 4C/Y. (more precisely defined here (Italian) and here).

The medians are separate by discipline and academic role (associate and full professor only --- not for assistants, unfortunately). You can find them here: associate full, and a legend for the codes of the scientific disciplines is here. The documents are in Italian, but you can google-translate them (or guess the meaning of most words, it's not too difficult for an English speaker).
For instance, in computer science (01/B1) the medians for an associate professor are

10 journal papers / 10 years,
9.15 citations / year
"contemporary H-index" 5.

and for a full professor

12 papers / 10 years
14.8 citations / year
"contemporary H-index" 6.

The calculations are of course imperfect, but they are very interesting to browse and give an idea of how wildly these numbers vary across different fields. For instance, the typical professor in nuclear physics (02/A1) publishes 59.5 papers over 10 years and gets over 104 citations per year, while one in mathematical logic (01/A1) publishes 5 papers in 10 years and gets 1.74 citations per year.


The GRE is not held where I live. How badly does it reflect on me if I ask for it to be waived? I am graduating with my MSc early next year and would like to pursue my PhD in a closely related field (Stats/Financial math).

I am hoping to study either in Europe or HK/Singapore and most of the universities I hope to apply to state a GRE is required.

The GRE is not held where I live, and I'm very strapped for cash meaning that I don't really have money to spare to fly to the nearest test center and sit it. I'm wondering how poorly it would reflect on my application if I asked for a test waiver explaining this?

I have already emailed NUS in Singapore asking about this, and they said I was exempted but that it would be better if I did include it. This makes me feel that borrowing some money and doing it would be best, or I'd risk ruining my chances of getting into a good university.

It is fine to ask for a waver of admissions requirements.  Just keep in mind that the university may say no.

To increase your chances of success, clearly state why you want to enrol, why you think you are qualified, and why you need a waver.


How can I approach my professor when he is sending me indirect messages with another person? After achieving my masters degree, i applied for a phd program at the same university i was graduated from. In Germany, a person has to find 2 advisors to be registered as a phd student and thats it for the begining.

I approached a professor whose area is related to my research.I told my intention and research idea to him and he said he would like to be my advisor but he officially cannot be the first advisor due to the number of students he already has. Instead, he suggested that he can be my second advisor and i should find another professor as my first advisor, in this way we can continue working anyway.

I decided to approach another professor (who is also a colleague of 2.advisor) and I asked him if he could be my first advisor and he accepted. We have exchanged more than 10 e-mails, talking about my proposal. When he came to my city, we met and everything looked fine. I continued to work on my proposal and sent him after a while. I needed to get a reference letter from him, as I am applying for potential scholarships. Some of these scholarships demand the reference letter to be sent directly by the professors. He has written the reference letter and wrote me an e-mail saying that he has sent the letter to the grant givers i asked him to send. I have asked him to send the letter also to me as a pdf, since i need to upload it personally as well. He has not send it to me and since weeks he is not replying my e-mails.

Instead, he has sent me an indirect message with a friend of mine (also a student of his), saying that I should work more on my proposal and it would be difficult to get a scholarship with such inaccurate proposal. He told her that I have been rushing to finish it and I should stop and reconsider my steps. He also added that, due to the inner conflicts he has with the faculty, he will be resigning in two years so maybe i should consider to find another first advisor as well.

I found this indirect communication unusual, disturbing and i must say, unprofessional. I decided to send him another e-mail, asking him if he can approve what I heard from my friend so that I can begin to search for another first advisor. Because if he officialy does not write it, i'm still registered as his student and it would be awkward to search for another one while I still have one. He is not replying to this e-mail as well. I have been applying for another scholarship meanwhile (only with one reference letter which is from my second advisor) and today i recieved a note from this scholarship, saying that my file has been taken under consideration but i should send the other reference letter as soon as possible.

My professor is literally blocking me from applying further. I have understood what he meant by taking more time to focus on my proposal but for now I need this reference letter from him. It just doesn't make sense that I cannot have the letter when it is already written for me. My question would be, shall I contact and ask my second advisor about his opinion on this situation or shall I take a step back and wait for my first advisor's conflicts to be cleared and hopefully he writes back to me?

Have you contacted the second supervisor about this problem? If yes what does he think about this problem? Is he able to contact the first supervisor?

If you haven't contacted the second supervisor about this problem I would do so ASAP


How to find out paper from phrases like "Chun and Seymour (1989)"? I'm a senior college student and start to read papers for my final year project. I find phrases like " Chinn et all (1982)", "Garley et al(1978)" and  "Chun and Seymour (1989)". When I type those phrase in Google Scholar, its results are not relate to graph theory at all.

I'd like to know how to find papers from this phrases accordingly: )

Format Chun and Seymour (1989) means that there should be a full reference in the bibliography (at the and of the article, chapter or book; or sometimes in the footnote).

In case if it is missing, you can use Google Scholar with

author:Chun author:Seymour

then in the options set date range to 1988 -- 1990.


How to obtain number of publications by year on a given subject? Does anyone know of a good way to obtain data on the number of publications per year on a given subject? Scholar has an option to sort search results by date, but there does not seem to be an automated way of generating a report. In the worst case I will write a script that extracts the data I need, but perhaps someone knows of another system that offers such a facility? Thank you.

ISI Journal Citation Reports
ISI Journal citation reports might give you some useful information (your university may have a subscription).
It allows you to browse citation reports by subject category (i.e., discipline).  It includes things like impact factor, total counted citations, total articles in the focal year.
You can then click "view journal summary list" which will give you an overview.
For example, here is sample output for psychology in the 2013 JCR:

Of course, this only includes articles in journals indexed by ISI.
Publish or Perish Software
More generally, you might want to check out Publish or Perish. It is free software for Windows and OSX that provides a way of searching Google Scholar particularly suited to bibliometric analysis.


Advice for On-Campus Interview? I have an on-campus interview next month. Being my first time to make an on-campus interview, I have no experience on how to properly do that. I was asked to give a teaching demonstration for 30~45 minutes. The university is focused on teaching  and they have only a master program (no PhD ). I am planning to present my research work as "a teaching demonstration". Is that okay?

I do not suggest this. You should probably be tailoring the presentation to be aimed at 1st, or maybe 2nd, year students/classes and you should attempt to make the lecture be understandable to non-majors. You should be pretending that the audience of the class is a general elective audience. While in actual practice a lecture in a class does not need to be self contained, a teaching demo should be.

Getting back to the question, almost anything that would be considered research related would be too advanced for a general elective audience. Now this does not mean to go completely away from your area of research. If you are electrical engineer whose research is biomedical
in nature and are interviewing at a joint EE/CS department, it probably doesn't make sense to give a CS lecture on compiler design or even EE lecture onpower enginnering. You would be better served by giving a biomedical lecture. Of course, if the job advertisement asks for someone who can teach compiler design, well then, there is your lecture topic. Similarly, if the search chair suggests a topic, follow that advice.

The biggest thing to remember is teaching schools are not inferior to research institutions, they are simply different. They want to make sure you care about teaching and not your research. They generally tend to look at research as a way to get students to learn. Focusing on your research will probably send the wrong message.


Is it a bad sign if I do not get anything from problem discussions with professors or fellow students? This is a question specifically about mathematics.

All math people I've talked with like discussing problems (or math in general) with others, and most people claimed that they learned most from communication rather than from reading textbooks. My situation is, however, different. Most of the time I have math-related conversations, I find that I'm not comprehending what I'm being said, even if it's something not hard (unless I'm familiar with the topic being discussed very well). [In particular, this is true of lectures. However, I am able to understand my notes.] (I'm not sure what the reason is.) In contrast, I learn much more from books and, more importantly, from posting questions on math stackexchange. I was wondering whether this is normal, and whether this will be an obstacle in writing a potential PhD dissertation, since in that case my adviser would probably be the primary source of information, and I wouldn't be able to write a math stack exchange post asking for help.

I suspect I have similar issues as you: when others talk about complicated subjects, I find they're speaking in English, but they're also not speaking in English (because I don't understand them).

I've thought about this a bit and although I am by no means an expert, I think the cause of the issue can be understood with the VAK learning style model. (Note that this model has been heavily criticized; however my perspective is whether it's correct or not is unimportant if it works for your particular case). Basically, people can be very broadly divided into three groups: those that learn best by doing something, those that learn best by listening, and those that learn best by reading. You are good at learning by reading, but poor at learning by listening. If you go to a lecture where the lecturer does not prepare lecture slides, only stands there and talks, you find you struggle. Comparatively if you do get lecture slides, then everything makes sense and you learn smoothly. If you can have only the lecture slide or the talk, you would much prefer the slides.

The bad news is, being bad at learning by listening is of course detrimental. It's just so much more convenient to explain something instead of get out pen and paper. The good news is, if you know what the issue is, you'll able to compensate for it. You'll need to concentrate on these conversations because if you drift, you won't be able to recover easily. Don't be afraid to say "can you repeat that?", and don't be afraid to ask for clarification if something is not immediately obvious to you either. You can also try bringing around a notebook and immediately writing down something you hear, since you are liable to forget quickly otherwise.

If you are so bad at learning by listening that face-to-face meetings with your supervisor are unproductive, try telling him that and suggesting email instead.


In a peer review system, what does "accepted for first look" mean for a submission? As the title puts it, what is the real meaning of this stage of a peer reviewing process and how are the odds for having a submitted paper accepted change if it's accepted for this stage? (Does it mean anything other than the editors decided not to reject it from the start?)

"First look" is a stage in the ScholarOne Manuscripts (S1M) system used by many journals. The First look stage means that your manuscript, after an "Accept" decision is scrutinized to see if it adheres to journal standards (a.k. Instruction for authors) and that figures are of sufficient quality (resolution for bitmaps). The journal editor(s) handle(s) this stage. Your paper may be returned to you to fix specific formatting problems BUT NOT changing the content. See S1M pdf

So "First look" is not a general name for a stage but is specific to S1M. Other systems or journals may of course be using such a term for other purposes but it is not a general publishing term. The stage it represent will, however be found in all journals.


How should I cite the ministry in my own country in APA? In my research paper, I have cite from a curriculum published by the Ministry of Education in my country. Should I cite the name of the ministry in my own language (i.e. Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı; MEB as abbreviated in subsequent citations) in Turkish or in English translation (as Ministry of National Education; like MoNE, 2020)? And how should I reference it at the end in the sources section?

The standard in APA when citing something titled in a language other than the one you are writing is to use the original title (transliterated to the Latin alphabet if necessary) but to also include a translation enclosed with [ ]s.
For an example from the link below:
https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2018/09/how-to-quote-a-foreign-language-source-and-its-translation.html

Bussières, E.-L., St-Germain, A., Dubé, M., & Richard, M.-C. (2017). Efficacité et efficience des programmes de transition à la vie adulte: Une revue systématique [Effectiveness and efficiency of adult transition programs: A systematic review]. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 58, 354–365. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000104

See also https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa6/works-in-non-English-languages and https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/referencing/apa6/works-in-non-English-scripts


Two Papers Accepted. Co-authors presenting I am a first-year PhD student and I have two accepted publications as a first author since the start of my program.
The thing is I thought I would be the one to travel to the conferences and present my work but my advisor is making the presentation, as he made me aware of it today. The conference is in Europe. He gives me an excuse that the reason he will be going is because he will be on the committee of reviewers for the same conference next year and this will be a good opportunity for him to know what is going on.
The first conference is somewhere on the west coast and his co-PI also will be making that presentation.
I feel a little frustrated that all my hard-work is being presented by people who had little or nothing to do with the hundreds of hours of work that led to these results.
I feel this might be a trend that will continue throughout my PhD. My question: do you think I should challenge these folks or quietly accept their excuses for wanting to go, though unhappy about it as it is, and hope for a better deal in the future.

My question: do you think I should challenge these folks or quietly accept their excuses for wanting to go

Well, you've already asked about going, and the answer was "no." Nothing wrong with asking again, though.

However, I want to point out that the way your question reads, it sounds like your previous conversation was more about your PIs attending, not you. So, you should make it clear that you are interested in going. If you were to ask again, I would suggest asking something along the lines of "are there any funds available for me to attend the conference(s)?"

If this conversation does not change the outcome, you could always check with your institution to see if there are funds available for students to travel to and attend conferences. Some schools have these, some schools don't. You may be able to receive some partial funds and be required to cover the rest of the cost out of your own pocket if you really wanted to go and were willing/able to pay your way. In any case, it's a good idea to see if these funds are available to you.

  though unhappy about it as it is, and hope for a better deal in the future.

No, hoping for a better deal in the future is not a good strategy. You need to have a chat with your advisor(s), and express your desire to attend the conferences where your work is presented. Again, as above, ask specifically about whether or not there are/will be any funds for you to attend conferences.

Depending on the answer, you may be satisfied that you will be taken care of the next time around. Or, you may find that at your school/department, students are more or less on their own in obtaining funds for attending conferences (at my PhD-granting institution/department, it was common for the PI to secure the funds for their students to attend conferences where their work was presented — your field/institution may be different).

In the end, if you are not able to come to an agreement about how your travel to conferences will be covered, it will be up to you to decide if your advisor's inability (or unwillingness, etc.) to help you cover these costs is a deal breaker or not.


Losing confidence after a series of paper rejections I don't think I have a concrete question to ask but I want to hear other researchers' opinions. I am pretty sure that there are many researchers who went through this and others will go through it in the future unfortunately.
I am a postdoc researcher with a limited contract and aim to apply for professorship positions. Therefore, I am actively submitting papers (working more than my contracted hours as there are no PhD students to co-supervise and publish papers with) to come up with a good and long list of publications. However, a lot of my papers are getting rejected with a huge disparity in the reviewers' scores. As a reviewer in almost all conferences I submit my work to, I find that my submission is better or equal to top accepted papers (I don't know whether this is a bad lcuk or just an illusion).
I focus mainly on top conferences with acceptance rates of less than 30% or 25%. I was almost sure that my last paper would be accepted because I am an expert in the area and because I learnt to assess paper quality, but it got rejected a few days after another rejection. Now, I am doubting my research capability (although I used to publish easily to these conferences when I was a PhD student). I am wondering whether I am a bad researcher or just an unlucky author.

This sounds like a pretty common case of the human condition.  In my single days, I used to think of dating like "strikes and gutter balls".  That is, either I was getting many dates in rapid succession or going through a prolonged dry spell.  In the former, I was feeling pretty good about myself and was quite down in the latter.
In my current research days, I find a similar emotional oscillation.  This is the nature of research, in my opinion, and it builds character.  You actually sound quite productive, and the results will come.  In fact, I would encourage you to try to get more enjoyment from the process of seeking truth rather than putting all your eggs on the often opaque 'accept/reject' decision.  If I may with another analogy, it's like learning golf.  It's a slew of mishits, duffs, shanks, slices, hooks, flubs, and ineptitude until suddenly you smash a beauty down the fairway and are the envy of your friends.  If the one great shot makes up for the many bad shots, you're hooked.  If not, you're probably going to quit.
Also, pragmatic advice holds: get sleep, review diet, practice self-care, take mental health breaks, seek advice from colleagues/advisors, confirm writing and presentation adequately represents results, etc.


Ask professor for reference and at the same time propose to do phd with him? (UK) I need a reference from my former professor, for my PhD application, but I would also like to work with him for my PhD. He would be my top choice, but I will of course need to apply to other universities too. How do I do this? I feel like it's a bit much too ask, and I feel unsure about how to phrase these things.

Also, if I apply to do a PhD with him, can he also write the reference for this application too or would i need to find a different academic?

edit: I am in the UK, and I hold a MA, so I would be applying straight for PhDs (no Master included etc.)

Keep the email brief and to the point. If you haven't spoken to him in a while, introduce yourself and tell him what you're doing (1 sentence should suffice).
Explain that you're applying for PhD positions and that you would like him to write a reference for you. It's probably a good idea to mention your research interests and remind him of any projects you worked on together, so he can write an effective reference for you. At this point, you can also ask if he is currently looking to take on a new student, as you're very interested in his research and would like to work with him.
If you do end up applying to work with him, you will need a reference from another academic. There's no point him writing a reference for you which he will then read. He will be able to find out more about you and get the full picture if you have a reference from someone else.
Note that most UK PhDs will require at least 2 references anyway, so you should have at least 3 people in mind who you can ask should the need arise.
Your first email to him may go something like this:

Subject: Reference letter
Dear Professor X,
Hope you are well. I am writing to let you know that I am planning to apply for PhD positions in Y and consequently need some letters of reference. Would you mind writing a reference for me?
It would be helpful if you could mention when you supervised my work on project Z, as this project was very successful and the topic is in line with my current research interests.
On this subject, I noticed that you recently published a paper on topic Z. Are you currently looking to take on a PhD student? If so, I would be interested in applying for the position, as our research interests align well and we had some success with the project I mentioned above.
Many thanks and best wishes,
George Welder


How to secure recommendations and apply for PhD after having worked outside of academia for two years? I have been working in a big-shot multi-national corporation as a developer for two years now, with a possible future as a software architect in some eight to ten years.

Now I want to enroll in a PhD program. I am planning to quit my job and join some university for PhD programs. Now most of the universities needs some research papers, of which I have none. They also require recommendations from professors, however I have already quit college two years back and don't have a working relationship with those professors.

How should I secure letters of recommendation? Will a letter of recommendation from my manager help? Does academia really care about professionals wanting to enter back into the world of higher education again? Will I be able to apply to competitive universities with my profile?

I'm not a computer science guy, so I don't really have experience with the norms of a CS department in a university.  But I can give this general advice:

If you want to do a PhD, you should at the very least: 1) know you enjoy research; and, preferably, 2) have specific research problems you really want to work on. Don't enter a PhD program if you don't like to research. If you're not sure, start with a master's in a program that has a history of allowing master's students to graduate into PhD programs and in-so-doing take advantage of their master's coursework.
References: get them from people who make you look good and make sure your letter-writers know what makes a good grad school letter of recommendation. If you have a good manager who can attest to your capabilities as a learner, sure, have him or her write a letter.  However, not all managers are going to know what graduate schools are looking for -- so educate the writer. Grad schools want people who can learn and work independently above all.  Emphasize that. And, of course, if you are interested in a certain kind of research, make sure your letter-writer knows that and can comment about it!
The personal statement matters. In your post here you mentioned your strengths (professional experience at a good firm) and weaknesses (disconnected from academia, non-academic references).  Be straightforward about those in your personal statement. More importantly, use the personal statement to discuss what you want to research, why, and your prior experience in the area. Furthermore, explain why you are a good fit for the department...
Fit. You need to fit in at your department. This basically means you should apply to programs where you can have an appropriate mentor who is an expert in what you want to study, or expert enough to guide you along. Do not just apply to any-old program, or a program with a good name. Read through the department web site, figure out the kind of work they are doing, and contact possible mentors/advisors with questions that show your interest and help you decide if the program is a good fit. Having prior rapport with the faculty will help you, and if the department knows you want to be there, this will bump you up a little in the stack of applications. Of course, having good credentials and clear research interests is what makes for a successful application, but departments don't want to waste giving offers and potential funding to candidates who are unlikely to attend the program should they be admitted.

Hope this helps.


What is the best approach to fix the date in a weekly seminar/colloquium with the potential speakers by email I am organizing a weekly seminar (at specific day of every week) at our department. We will have 12 talks for the next coming semester. We have a list of n potential people for these talks (suggested by seminar committee). It is clear that not every people on this list can actually deliver a talk (for time restrain or personal reasons), so n should be larger than 12.

The invitation is done by sending an email to the potential persons, asking if he/she is interested to give a talk. We don't necessarily have a phone number of these people.

What is the best approach to propose the date of seminars to the interested people by email?

If I list all the available 12 dates to the first person who replies positively, he/she may not quickly select the desired date and asking to answer quickly may be sometimes uncomfortable. If I have his/her phone number I immediately call him/her for fixing the date, but some people don't like to share their personal phone numbers, also office public phone numbers are not always working (once I almost spent the whole working day to call someone at his office but nobody was there). Also while I am waiting for someone to select his date, it is difficult to propose the same dates to another person as both may select the same date.

Send an invitation to your top 12 candidates. List all 12 dates to all candidates. Ask everyone to reply whether they can and want to come at all, and to indicate their first, second and third choice of dates.

Track answers. Any date that is chosen by exactly one person as his first choice is blocked. Clear any conflicts in first choices among the people involved, using second and third choices.

After one week, remind those that haven't replied yet.
One week later, assume those that haven't replied after the reminder will not reply at all. Assume that k people will come. Send out invitations to your next 12-k candidates, shortening the list of potential dates by those that have already been blocked.
Iterate until all dates have been filled.
Expect people to cancel at short notice. Have someone local as a backup speaker (yourself?).


High likelihood I'll be unable to submit my thesis before the deadline... What's my outlook? Ok, so I'm in a pretty dire situation here. I'm coming towards the end of my PhD contract in France. For a litany of reasons, it hasn't gone too well.

I had extreme difficulty getting my experiments to work, and as I'm working with living organism (microalgae) this often meant months of delays. My experimental schedules were often incredibly strenuous and I had nobody to help me with them.
My supervisor is a kind person but far too busy for me, and I've never really been a real priority to her. She's often away for weeks, responds incredibly slowly or not at all to requests for review of my work or help, and has decided to go on a research cruise just before my deadline date (while continuously delaying review of my currently written chapters). I don't want to be too pessimistic but I feel like she gave up on me months ago and didn't suggest I quit because she wanted me to finish the work and publish the papers.
Ridiculous bureaucracy in France has no leeway on deadline for submission -- 2 months before the prospective defence date and no later, and no defence date outside of contract end (to avoid paying unemployment benefits to students while they continue to work). Apparently I am unable to waive this either, as I would be happy to do if it meant a few weeks more time.
The difficulties of living abroad and alone exacerbated incredibly my pre-existing depression and anxiety and this meant me having extreme difficulty self motivating and keeping good time. I've had probably 4-5 mental breakdowns over the last 3 years due to experimental scheduling.
I didn't have a good grasp of what I was supposed to do in my PhD apart from experimentation, and I was ostracised pretty badly by my mostly French department (I'm English). Other PhD students (French) all received great advice and tutelage under the senior members of staff, whereas most staff here don't know my name nor have ever tried to talk to me.

I feel like I've just failed life. I don't have any idea what kind of employers would accept me after this 3 year mess. Due to my extreme experimental schedule I feel very underdeveloped as I didn't manage to publish anything (yet), go to many classes, go to any conferences... etc. The only thing going for my is 5 years of lab experience. However most lab jobs I've seen (in the UK - my home) that pay well require experience in techniques I haven't used, and low paid ones that I could adapt easily to require only A levels; having a first class masters would probably mean they think I’m overqualified.

Science was always my dream and it's been my career path since my youth. Now that I have the experience of what not to do in a PhD I feel like I could enter another program and succeed easily. I made SO many mistakes this time around that could've easily been avoided if I'd known what to expect. Unfortunately, almost nothing at all was communicated clearly to me on what I had to do to succeed until it was too late, and the language barrier meant that I had a hard time finding this info myself. However, I don't know at all if another project would accept me. Also, I don't know if I could handle the stress.

Sorry for the rant. The advice I'm asking for is:

Do I have any career prospects?
How on earth do I present myself to prospective employers as anything but a failure?
Would a potential future PhD supervisor ever consider me given my failure? It's unclear, while I feel like i'm advantaged because I know what to do now and I'd have the confidence and drive not to repeat the same mistakes, I don't know if anyone would see me like that. I've truly learned from my mistakes.

Thank you for your time...

The situation you are describing might sound like a difficult one, but I am pretty sure that if you go and talk to your doctoral school you will find that is not an uncommon one.
Instead of relying on what your supervisor says, you should probably just describe your situation to your doctoral school and see what possibilities are before you. It is, in a way, the role of the doctoral school to provide counseling in such cases.
In the meantime, if you do not know what ATER are (Attaché Temporaire d'Enseignement et de Recherche), have a look at these specific positions. They are sort of TAs positions. The link is in French, but in your case, the most important sentence might be:

Pour devenir A.T.E.R., il faut être dans l’une des situations suivantes :

[...] soit être inscrit en vue de la préparation d'un doctorat, le directeur de thèse devant attester que la thèse peut être soutenue dans un délai d'un an ; [...]

This means that you are eligible for such a position, only if your advisor is positive that you can defend within a year.
Finally, while your experience feels wrong, you sound like you have learnt quite a lot from it. I guess you should focus on finding the positive sides your experience.


Should I be honest about my past history of attending a Master degree in the past? I am planning to attend a PhD program in the future. Should I be honest that I have some experience of attending a full-time Master degree in the past for three years? I had a somewhat rocky relationship with the thesis supervisor resulting in me being kicked out from the program. I am a bit worried that revealing this might be not too beneficial for me during the application process. Can I pretend that I did something else during the three years? In reality, I did some work in a part-time manner while attending my old program (self-employed).

Consider the worst case scenario under each action: telling them and not telling them.

Under the first it might be a bit harder to get accepted and your search might take longer. You have more to explain about how you will be a success.

Under the second, you are found out and expelled and blacklisted for dishonesty. Academia is a kind of a small place in each discipline.

The best scenario for both is about the same.


How do you find the "rank" of a school or program? I am preparing to pursue higher education and I was reading articles about schools. In one of the articles it was mentioned that the author attended a "high teens" ranked school. There was no mention of who ranked this school, how it was ranked, or why. I assume the idea was that I should be impressed by the implication that his school was ranked between 19-16 (my scale for "high" teens).

Who is ranking these schools and what does this number mean? How do I find out my schools ranking?

Anyone can rank schools.

Some rankings are more popular than others (e.g., US News) and some may do so based on particular metrics but there is no de facto ranking system in the world.

What they actually mean is up for interpretation, and unless they provide the complete methodology then it is rather difficult to find meaning in them at all.


Starting a research with a professor as a business professional When I graduated from college in 2012, I was quite excited about my job (although it is a small hi-tech company.) My goal has always been to either start my own business or get back to school for PhD. Ultimately, be able to live a life filled with research, and learning.

I have been working for almost two years now. And before going back to school, I really want to publish a paper and make myself a better PhD candidate. And ideally this would help me better discover my field, gain confidence, and maybe discover assistantship opportunities.

I think I've found a quite interesting topic for a paper that also leverages my work experience in transportation technologies. The paper is about accident prevention and I am targeting a public health professor.  I contacted the professor and I was not able get any response back yet. (It has been 2 days.) I am not sure about the right strategy to follow to communicate such idea and gain her interest. I wrote an email with 3 paragraphs and 350 words. And briefly tried to explain the  possible research context and my intention in starting a PhD. But maybe I was just supposed to ask for an appointment? It is a wise way to sent a follow-up email stating how valuable I think this paper would be? and ask for an appointment?

Many professors take a while to respond to emails. I would give it at least a week before you follow up with her.

When you do send a reminder, keep it brief and polite, and send it as a forward of your previous email, so she won't have to go searching for your other message. Reminding her of why you think the paper is valuable could be a good strategy--if you do it in a way that's not heavy-handed and that you think is true (i.e., it's actually of value to her career aside from another line on her CV).

It's always nice to give her multiple options for responding--you might include a line to the effect of, "If you'd prefer to chat about this over the phone, I'm happy to schedule a brief call at your convenience." Saves her time from having to compose a reply email.


Is it safe to post one's research on web sites like Math Overflow for "peer review" before submitting to a journal? Suppose in mathematics, someone finds a completely new elementary proof of a famous theorem and wants his work ''peer reviewed'' on a site like MathOverflow or MathStackExchange before submitting to a formal journal. How safe would this be ?

If you post under your real name, I think that it is quite "safe" in the sense that your work is unlikely to get stolen because of this.  In fact, posting your work on a public forum is the best defense I know against intellectual theft.

On the other hand, "Is this proof of a known result correct?" is generally not regarded as an appropriate MathOverflow question.  There can be a fine line between asking questions that come up in one's research and asking others to vet your research.  The former is the purpose of the site, whereas the latter is discouraged.  Your question seems to fall on the wrong side.  I think it would stay open, at least, on math.stackexchange.com.

If you have not already published work in the past, I might recommend that you try to get one-on-one help from a qualified (and trusted) mentor, rather than trying to crowd-vet your proof.  It is not impossible to do research mathematics completely independently and with no academic affiliation -- I have seen people do so quite well -- but it is very rare and much harder than doing it with some assistance.  It would be reasonable to seek help from the math department of any university near you.  If the mathematicians you get in contact with can't help you, see if they can connect you to someone who can.

Postscript: I have observed on this site and others that amateur mathematicians often have significant concerns that their work will be stolen.  I think these sentiments are very unfortunate, because they can serve to prevent these people from getting what would benefit them most: qualified help and supervision.  I don't want to say that it is strictly impossible for someone's work to get stolen, but here are two things: (i) I have done mathematics for my entire adult life (more than 20 years), and I have never seen or heard of an amateur mathematician's work being stolen by a professional mathematician.  Reports of theft of mathematical work of anyone by anyone have come to me...but very, very rarely.  (ii) I would estimate that about 90% of the work done by amateur mathematicians is not publishable.  This is not to say that most amateur mathematicians are hopeless or incapable of doing real, publishable work.  However most professional mathematicians train for years and make use of enormous amounts of human capital in order to get to the point where they can do and write up publishable work.  If they had been afraid of showing their work to their mentors, they would not have gotten anywhere in most cases.  Just something to think about.


How to minimize cheating with open source assignments? For my computer science programming-based course, I'd like to:

1) host my course and assignments (without solutions) open and free to all (e.g., as public GitHub repos)

but this seems at odds with also wanting to

2) not have to deal with rampant cheating.

Any open source assignments seem to suffer from the problem that a random stranger could do the assignment in her spare time and then post the solution online. So in theory, publicly hosting the assignments has created an avenue for my students to find a free solution.

Hosting my assignments on GitHub lubricates this process because the programming community knows how to click "fork" and any forks are listed right there for future students to browse.

What are recommendations or best practices to find the right balance?

The extremes have clear tradeoffs:

A) go full public. this is easy for me to implement using GitHub, but even students in our classes will have easy access to other students in the same section. I can run/threaten to run MOSS, but students may still try to beat it and that will create a hassle.

versus

B) go full private. I lose all the niceties of the GitHub interfaces, lose my open source freely available and advertised assignments to the larger community and world.

As somebody who has, for years, hosted assignments publicly I feel that you are vastly overestimating the threat case here. If all you do is make your assignment and material public on GitHub, it is extremely unlikely that somebody will just browse by, do it out of fun, and then make the solution available to your students.

I often analyse GitHub data as part of my research, and the number of repositories out there is downright staggering, and by far most of them get no traction at all. In order to make a repository visible, quite a bit of active marketing is necessary. If you don't go out of your way to advertise your assignment, and if your assignment is not somehow extremely intriguing so that a random developer would really want to work on it, it is very likely to just sit there, all in the public, without getting any kind of attention at all.

Additionally, even if somebody would solve your assignment and make a solution public, so what? You presumably do some sort of plagiarism check on the solutions your students submit anyway (otherwise, how do you ensure that different students or teams did not copy from each other?) - this is just one more existing solution to compare your student's solution to.

In my experience, by far the most "rampant" type of cheating is student teams copying from each other, and this is really unaffected by how you decided to host your assignment.


best practices for organizing digital and physical articles As a thirsty graduate student, I've amassed a burgeoning collection of research articles in both paper and digital formats. Right now I manage pdfs and references with Zotero, but I'm still searching for an organization logic for paper documents that allows rapid access and prevents redundant printing and storage. Some have suggested organizing by topic, while another approach is to sort by author name. Topical organization has not worked well for me in the past because my research is highly interdisciplinary, confounding my categorization efforts. For a coupled digital-physical organization system I'm considering the following:

Digital documents and references stored and tagged in Zotero
Indicator in Zotero whether or not I've printed in the file
Physical documents stored in manila file folders labelled alphabetically

What is the most effective way that you've found to maintain both paper and digital document repositories?

I have them organized similarly to the blog post you linked. I'm not sure it is the optimal way, but it works quite well.

The central search key for me is (First)AuthorYEAR. By now I know my way around in my field so that the author names are meaningful. And easier to remember exactly than title abbreviations.
I try to have almost all papers also digitally, and organize them with jabref. I started using jabref before Mendeley, Zotero & Co came up and didn't change.
jabref allows to assign the papers to topics/groups, which can be hierarchically organized, but a paper can also belong to several of them.
This is important for me, because one paper may be about an application (e.g. tumor diagnostics -> group with tumour or cell type), use specific measurement technique (group that), and maybe use or invent an interesting data analysis technique (group there).
Jabref stores its information in a .bib file (with a few non-standard fields and some more info in comments at the end). But essentially I can work with this file as with any other .bib file.
.bib and digital versions are in a git repo which basically solved the mess of having lots of copies that go out of sync while I'm still able to work completely offline. As .bib is a text format, version control works fine with that. Papers usually do not change, so it doesn't really matter for the version control that they are binary data.
When looking for a paper, I usually search for it in jabref, and then look whether I do have a printed copy (I'm too lazy to keep track of printed status).
physical copies I keep in two drawers with a suspension filing system. One has collections of important papers on topics I'm interested in. The other keeps other physical copies alphabetically by author name (one folder for each letter so far, some will be split soon).
I tried before with normal lever arch files, but was too lazy to put papers away into their proper place.
For a while I had the luxury of working with dual monitors. During that time I printed considerably less papers. Now I have to work with only a single (and not too big) monitor again, and again print most papers.


Is it appropriate to ask a student I tutored how their exam went? I tutored a student in math for two weeks to help her prepare for an exam. I expected her to inform me how the exam went, but she did not.

Is it appropriate to ask her how the exam went?

We are in Ireland.

I expected her to inform me how the exam went

I'm not sure why you expected this. While it's certainly not unusual to follow up with a tutor (or thank them), it's not a requirement.

  Is it appropriate to ask her how the exam went?

I see no reason why not.


Is it worth posting reproducibility studies As an undergraduate interested in Academia, is it worth posting your reproducibility study of a paper on arXiv and linking to it on Google scholar? Is it useful to future graduate schools? Specifically with regards Machine Learning and Computer Science..

Yes, publishing reproducibility studies is encouraged:

It helps the research community determine whether the original study is valid and reliable.
It helps other researchers or students reproduce the study themselves, in particular in order to improve or build upon it.
It benefits your reputation: people might cite it, and it will be taken into account when you apply for a position or a grant later.
Some conferences/journals in ML encourage submitting reproducibility studies, so you might even be able to get a peer-reviewed publication out if it.


Advice for early grad student: how to professionally present tentative research idea(s) before one has chosen a topic I'm a 2nd-year grad student in a US PhD program in one of the social sciences. Coursework has forced me throw out the initial ideas I had about research, which I proposed in my application nearly two years ago. Now I'm actively hunting for the "right" topic.

People ask me all the time, "what's your research on?" and I'm not sure how to answer.

This is not about "how to pick a research topic" as much as how to professionally present one's very tentative research idea(s) before one has a topic.

Should I:
1) Preface any response to the question with "I'm still early in my program and haven't written my dissertation prospectus yet, but I'll probably focus on ..."
2) Should I be honest about having multiple ideas or just pick one in order to better focus the conversation?

Any advice probably differs across contexts -- i.e. talking with peer, talking with senior scholar. All tips are appreciated!

I know this question is subjective, but I think about the situation every day, and I feel like I need some advice.

You should be honest for sure. If you don't know something, do not pretend you do because you may face a person who really knows what you try to talk about and then, if you have only a superficial grasp of the subject, you are toast. Just say straight that you've heard that X is an interesting subject, that you have already read , that you want to learn more about it and, perhaps, try a research project in that particular area, and that you have this and that idea and wonder what can be made of them. That will get you the warmest response you can expect from the person you are talking to ("the warmest" doesn't mean "warm", by the way) and you may get some good advice or help this way from a "complete stranger".

I admit that many people fail to understand that knowing and openly delineating the limits of one's knowledge and powers is "a professional behavior". Nevertheless, those whose respect you should really earn during your academic career (whether they are your professors or your fellow students at the current moment) will judge you from this standpoint. The opinions of the rest may make a lot of difference on the short run but none on the long one.


How can an undergrad from a country with little 'international' research improve his chances of being a "good fit" for a top PhD program? I am in my senior year of studying electrical engineering in an african university. I intend to apply to grad schools(Ph.D) a year after graduation, possibly to the top EE programs in the US (MIT, Berkeley, Stanford...) Despite the fact that ground-breaking/stellar research is virtually impossible to come by for undergraduates in my country, I have sort of gathered some. I have an accepted poster presentation(based on independent research) at the major national conference in my field, and  my present senior year thesis/project may yield three-five papers at IEEE conferences around Africa. I should also be able to get two publications(also independent research) in a continental journal which is popular only among  African Engineers in my field and not much outside.

My degree is a five year bachelors programme interspersed with three internships/co-op experience. One was a summer spent in a local R&D electronics lab/company in which we completed several design projects although all were adaptations/imitation of existing projects to solve problems facing developing societies like ours. Another one was a long internship (~8mths) in the EE division of a world-renowned company with huge presence in my country during which I worked on a major design project which required a lot of technical knowledge and was evaluated. I have also done some remote/virtual research for a foreign, not well-known, research institute in my field and I have completed a technical report (no peer review) of my research(not particularly breath-taking) which they publish in their report series.

My gpa though not near-perfect is on a 'first-class' (we use the british system) and so I am a high-ranking student in my university. We do not use the four point system and as much as I would not like to compare apples with oranges, if I convert my cgpa to the 4.0 scale it is just over 3.6 although our scale is much larger and high-end grades are more difficult to attain than what is obtainable in the US system. I am also a recipient of several national awards/recognition for academic merit.

Given the aforesaid and also assuming that I ace the GRE (math especially since I'm in engineering), my questions are these:

How do you think I can improve my chances of being a good fit for top U.S. graduate schools noting the difficulty/impossibility in doing any ground-breaking research especially as an undergraduate here?

Ok, good question, but let's eliminate the phrase, "noting the difficulty/impossibility in doing any ground-breaking research especially as an undergraduate here?"  This actually applies to almost the entirety of the undergraduate population.  Very few undergraduates work on ground-breaking research projects -- and, if they do, their role on the actual project is unlikely to be the intellectual driver.  They might have done some lower-level work under the supervision of the principal investigator (PI).

So, your question is really about how to improve your chances of acceptance in general.  That really depends on the discipline, and it really depends on the program to which you are applying.  Every program has a unique admissions committee that will review applications and assign different levels / weights to factors they consider important in making admissions decisions.  Thus, certain programs may place a lot more emphasis on GRE than other programs.  Some programs might consider letters of recommendations to be very important, which other programs may consider letters of recommendation to be of little importance (since most letters of recommendations are cherry picked from the possible letter writers).

That said, your task is to tailor every application to the programs where you are submitting an application.  A general snowball approach where you submit the same application everywhere is an alternative strategy, but one that I advise against.  Learn what those programs value most in their admissions decisions, and tailor the application accordingly.  Of course, it is hard to figure out what they value, so you have to do a lot of researching -- e.g., any published data on the current and previous cohorts?

Good luck!


Will it be considered duplicate submission in a venue, if we knew that the article will be rejected for sure in another venue? The reviewers have already commented on our article and the conference management system shows us each of their comments. Based on the comments, we know that the article will definitely be rejected. The final verdict is scheduled on 15 days from today.

We are interested in improving (based on the presently seen reviews) the manuscript and submitting it to another venue.

Will it be called duplicate submission in the new venue, if we submit now?

Formally, yes.  Until you have actually received the accept/reject decision, your paper is still under submission and cannot be submitted elsewhere.

On the other hand, you can avoid this conflict (at least in principle) by formally withdrawing your original submission. Normally I would advise against withdrawing so late, since you'd arguably be wasting the PC's time.  But if the work has already been done and the outcome is clear, the PC is just wasting your time by making you wait two weeks for the official decision.

If you do withdraw and submit elsewhere before results of the first conference are announced, you should make the situation very clear to the new PC chair. In particular, you should forward the formal acknowledgment of your withdrawal.  There is a nontrivial chance that the two PCs overlap, and that someone will flag the "dual submission" without realizing that it was withdrawn.

Finally: If the reviews are so obviously negative, you might consider giving yourself more than 15 days to improve the paper before submitting again.


Would it be okay to provide a template when asking reference? I am applying for grad school this year and I am considering sending an email to ask a professor to write me a reference. He had previously agreed to write me a letter because I took one of his advanced courses.

I am not sure if it'd be okay for me to offer to provide a template to him for the letter. The reason I want to do this is I will be applying for a PhD in a different, though quite related, field, and I want to make sure that he knows what the advisory committee will be specifically looking for in his letter, and make sure that his letter corresponds well with my statement of purpose.

Is this an acceptable practice between professors and students? Or would they consider it offending since he is supposed to provide his independent opinion? And if it is okay, how can I offer it in an appropriate way?

Personally, I would be somewhat offended if a student gave me a template for a letter, and I wouldn't use it.  (Unless I had asked for one, which personally I would not.)

However, it is perfectly appropriate to say, "I believe that the committee will probably be interested in my ability to dangle participles and reticulate splines; it would help if your letter could address this."  It is also fine to include a list or resume of your other activities that he may not be aware of, but leave it up to him how to use this list.

It's quite possible that your professor has written letters for students in this different field before and already knows what is expected.  Also, for letters which are submitted online, the writer normally gets a message from the requesting institution explaining what issues should be addressed.


Should you disclose the name of an institution that made you an offer? I am in contact with institution A about a potential tenure track position. Meanwhile another institution, let's call it B, has offered me a position. Naturally, I have to mention to A that B has made an offer.

  Should I mention the name of B to A when being asked? Or should I just say "another institution has made an offer?

You may not have a choice. If I were A and you were to tell me you had an offer from another school, I would immediately ask the name of the school B.

Your refusing to tell me B's name may raise some red flags for me (indicating a level of shiftiness about your candidacy that I may not have been aware of). I cannot think of a good reason why you wouldn't tell me -- other than B is so far below my institution's rank that it'd be laughable (aka, A=MIT and B=Poconos Community College).

However, if B=CalTech and A=MIT, then I would very much make sure that we were processing your application with all due haste.

With the new details that A=preferred for personal reasons but B=higher ranked, then certainly you can tell A that you have an offer from B. It would likely lead to increased interest in your candidacy if A is at least somewhere the same ballpark as B.

That is, if A were Poconos Comm College and B were CalTech, then A may feel that there is no possibility of getting you and drop you even before an offer for being overqualified. You need to emphasize why you are so interested in A.

Note that lying is a bad idea. If we phoned  our colleague at CalTech and they had no idea who you were, you'd be immediately dropped.


Is It appropriate to put code in slides for a technical presentation? I am doing a technical presentation on Minimizing Real-Time Data Stream Latency:  Node.js and Asynchronous Operations. I've done some thorough research on the topic and I want to add some code blocks to a few slides to visually show Asynch Programming in Node.js as well as to visually show pros and cons.

The presentation is for 30–40 minutes.   I want to keep it to about 10–12 slides.

Questions

Is it appropriate to add code blocks to some slides?
If it is appropriate, how many slides is too much?

It may or may not be appropriate, depending on your audience (I also feel this way about equations). A couple things to keep in mind:

If you have non-technical people in your audience, you'll likely lose them for these slides, and there's a risk you'll lose them entirely.
Even if people are technically-inclined, they now need to read your code block, interpret it in their mind, and think about it long enough to see your point. And they'll have the distraction of you talking to them at the time. That's a pretty steep thing to ask your audience to do.

Generally, I think you'll likely be better served talking about these issues conceptually, rather than with code, which will require people to wade through it. If you must include code blocks, make sure they are clear, in a very recognizable style (no personal quirks or idioms, clear variable names, etc.) and clearly annotated as you walk through it.

But honestly, I don't think I've ever seen a talk with code-as-content (beyond "These 2 lines instead of these 15!") that I thought was aided by having it there.


Is it acceptable to say that a reviewer's concern is not going to be addressed because then the paper would be too long? It is my understanding that philosophy papers have less chance of being published if they are over 7,000 or 8,000 words long. But at the same time we philosophers often complain that a given author's work was not considered in a manuscript. So what should one do when a reviewer asks for consideration of a whole additional facet or philosopher in a paper? Is it understood that in that case, the author can substantially increase the wordcount of her manuscript? Even over the limit stated in the submission guide? (I've seen published papers of 13,000 words in a journal that indicates a limit of 10,000).

This is the kind of thing you ask the editor about. "If I include this philosopher's view, the manuscript's length will increase by roughly 40%. Are you sure?" If the editor says yes, you're in the clear - they are clearly going to waive the word limit. If the editor says nevermind, you're also in the clear - even if the reviewer objects, the editor's on your side and can overrule the reviewer's objections if the reviewer recommends reject.


Do tenured faculty get to micromanage clinical professors and other non-tenured instructors with respect to the classroom? Do tenured faculty get to micromanage clinical professors and other non-tenured instructors with respect to the classroom?

Shouldn't clinical professors be allowed control of their own classrooms and operate with intellectual freedom (in general)?  Let us just assume for the sake of simplicity that we are talking about a clinical professor who has done a good job in the classroom (good student evaluations, good DWF rate, hard working, dynamic, puts in a lot of effort, meets course description, etc.).

"Micromanage" includes things like forcing someone to adapt a communal exam format, removing the ability to emphasize/de-emphasize certain topics in the classroom, etc.

Also, do lecturers, adjuncts, and teaching post-docs (all with PhDs) get the same (or similar) set of rights?  Let us assume the same set of circumstances as I listed above for clinical people.  What would be the potential consequences of simply saying "No, I won't participate in being micromanaged." and fighting for your right to intellectual freedom?

It's is very common for certain core multi-section classes to be coordinated or standardized in some way.  For example, the textbook and sections covered are fixed, or there is a single final exam for all sections.  Such arrangements apply to all instructors in that class, no matter what their title.  Often there is a "course coordinator" who has some of the responsibility of enacting these department policies.  It is not unusual for the coordinator to be tenure-stream research faculty and the other instructors not to be, but it's also not unusual for experienced lecturers or clinical professors to coordinate.  (It would be quite unusual for a postdoc or other less experienced person to coordinate.). The level of micromanaging varies by course and department, but usually applies equally to all instructors regardless of title.