I want to completely redo my thesis without repeating the research course. Has anyone had a similar experience? I have completed all but one course (which is tied to the final three chapters of my thesis) for my M.Ed. My research was designed back when I was teaching and I designed an experiment for use in my own classroom. I had to postpone conducting my research (and graduating) because my family relocated and I had a baby. I now want to finish my Master's, but am unable to complete my research, and would like to choose another topic altogether.

I would like the be able to start from scratch, write the first three chapters of my paper outside of school, return for my last research course, take my comprehensive exams, and graduate. Does anyone have any experience with a similar situation? Of course, I realize that this is likely a school-specific question, however, are there any users that have had a similar experience?

I know there must someone who has had to change their research question at a similar point in their program of study; I would love to hear how your situation was resolved before I speak with my advisor about this. Thanks!

In all of the Masters programs that I have encountered, the specifics of one's thesis are largely unrelated to the classroom courses that you have taken. As such, changing thesis topics would not be any problem as long as you have (or can find) and advisor who approves of the new topic.


How Long Should I Wait After a "I’ll be in touch soon" reply, to follow Up? After writing to a potential postdoc advisor in the US, I got replied like;
"... will follow up soon.
....................
...new project is matching with your profile.
....................
Again, I’ll be in touch soon. "

I genuinely like this research group's work. This is one of my best choices among those that I still have a chance for.
Just for the cultural differences and curiosity, I would like to know,
How to politely follow up?
Because waiting longer makes my other chances fade away. So I want to make sure if I am In or OUT.

A reply is appropriate after a few days. Say you are (very) interested in the position and ask if there are other actions you should take at this time.
Asking for something specific is more likely to result in a follow up reply than just the "thanks".
If you have specific time constraints, not just worries, you should probably mention them. But academic time can have a very slow clock at times. This is one of those times.


Are there differences between academic papers and industrial papers? Are there differences between academic papers (f.e. a (conference) paper written by PhD students and/or professors) and industrial papers (f.e. a conference paper written by engineers working for a company)?

I am a scientist working in a company and frequently collaborating with university academics.  There is no difference between the papers we write.

People at companies are more likely to write more applied papers, and people at universities are more likely to write more theoretical papers, but the distributions are highly overlapping.


Methods for finding graduate programs for specific areas of research What types of methods are available to students today who want to find a University for a Master, PhD, or postdoc program that supports the student's obscure/specific area of research?

For example, I am looking for PhD programs that specialize in software engineering metrics analysis and process improvement.  I have looked at the websites of about 15-20 universities that offer PhD's in Computer Science.  Sometimes, I'll find "software engineering" listed vaguely as a research area, but as I research the publications and activities of the faculty, there will be just a single faculty member who does work in an obscure aspect of software engineering, like applying CASE tools to data modeling, validation of aeronautic systems, etc.

Look at affiliations in papers.

When I was looking for a PhD position, I systematically did an extensive literature survey. I didn't really read the articles, looked mostly at the abstracts, but I particularly looked at affiliations. At the time, I simply wrote down all academic institutes I found that were in Europe. In a more extended version, one could somehow assign a score based on the number of papers coming from a certain institution and the impact of each paper.

The big advantage of this is that one will find mostly groups doing active research in the field. Whether we want it or not, published peer-reviewed papers are (at least in my field, atmospheric sciences) the method for determining impact. I won't find groups that fail to publish using this method, but I probably don't want to do my PhD there anyway, so nothing is lost from my perspective.

For my PhD I ended up staying exactly where I already was, but now I'm about to do the same for finding institutes with a post-doc. It's one degree more complicated now because of the two-body problem, but even there: my significant other and I both make such a list, then we'll plot them on a map and look at pairs that are close to each other. But it all starts with:

Look at affiliations in papers.


The Ethnography Of Obscure References I want to understand how absurdly obscure references are discovered by authors when preparing papers for publication.
Although the availability of large online searchable databases obviously makes things easier today, I still occasionally come across a paper or a book, sometimes from decades ago, which somehow discovered a paper or letter to the journal editor, written 50 years ago, in another country, in a foreign
language, in an obscure long gone journal, from an unrelated field, which deals with a highly specialized problem, that has a shockingly generic title, and presents not the same idea, but one which can be shown to be equivalent to it, in a brief parenthetical comment, using defunct jargon, dead
nomenclature and outdated notation.
Although you don't often find strictly all of the above to be true at the same time, some generous subset of it does occur more often than one would expect.
How are these references discovered? Is there an army of science historians scouring agricultural journal from 19th century Prussia for proto-theories of quantum entanglement? Does every academic department dedicate a portion of its budget for the care and feeding of some tiny Hungarian septuagenarian savant with eclectic tastes and photographic memory? Or is the reference librarian a vastly unappreciated form of superhero?

Update #0: Case Study: Logistic Regression
As an example, consider the origins of the logistic equation as a model for population growth. I came across "The origins of logistic regression" , Cramer 2002 on wikipedia in the context of machine learning. Cramer traces history back to the independent rediscovery of the equation by Pearl (Bio statistician at Johns Hopkins) and Reed in the 1920s which appeared in the "Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences", in "The Quarterly Review of Biology" and others. Cramer notes that the name Velhurst is first mentioned in a footnote in one of their papers which he cites by year but does not appear in the bibiliography (Pearl and Reed 1923), and on page 560 of pearl's 1924 book  Studies In Human Biology we get the following:

(This criticism distorts the facts, according to Cramer).
Pearl and reed cite Verhulst which published, in french, in the 1844 proceedings of the Bruxelles Royal Academy, but actually earlier in 183/8
in a journal published by his teacher Quetelet (Who Developed the Body Mass Index], in the Netherlands.
Du Pasquier cited this work in a paper published in 1918, 74 years later after Verhulst, in The " Vierteljahrschr der Naturforsch" ("Nature Studies Quarterly"?) which was apperently a german general published in Zurich, though Du Pasquier's paper on population models, "Esquisse d’une nouvelle theorie de la population" was in French. How did Du Pasquier learn of this 75 year old paper? According to WP he studies in both France and Switzerland, and was not only a mathematician but also "a historian of mathematics and mathematical sciences" (!). It seems plausible that Reed and Pearl could have been aware of a paper published 2 years prior,even in foreign language and journal. And if not directly, their wider circle could have turned their attention to it. Though, reading the quote, they seem to  possibly be saying that they reached the Verhulst paper by a different and unspecified route.
So, in this case, a polyglot European mathematician with a passion for math history, discovered (again, in 1918, from a foreign journal) an obscure 80-year old work, cited it in his own paper, which was enough to get it over the ocean to america two years later, where the same ideas had been redisovered, but much more effectively publicized. With that, the citation link was forged, and now we have the Pearl-Verhulst logistic process.
One conclusion is that you don't necessarily need someone who knows the obscure paper, you just need to transitively traverse the citation graph and hope that someone cited it at some point, and that you hit the natural limits of exponential growth before you stop looking.
Update #1: Before Information Overload
a suggestion received from an unexpected source. In reading the 1988 article "What's Wrong With This Lagrangean?" by David Mermin, he suggests a fact which explains how knowledge of sources used to be work:

We've known for some time that, roughly speaking, nobody any longer
reads anything but preprints, the archival journal of choice, which
for many years now has been Physical Review Letters, and secondary
references cited in these two primary sources. But the preprints have
been coming thicker and faster. And Physical Review Letters now
publishes almost as many pages each month as all of Physical Review
did back in 1956, when I was starting graduate school.

[...]

the disaster looming over science libraries, and therefore over
science itself, as a result of the irresponsible way we have allowed
scientific journals to proliferate; and, not unrelatedly, the
lamentable decline in the quality of scientific writing.

In other words, a hundred years ago, before volume became unmanageable, people actually used to read what was published.
Update #2: Memory In Judaism
Regrading the role of persons possessing exceptional memory abilities, specifically in the scholarly context of judaism, here is an extract from "The Esential Talmud", Ch.6, by Adin Steinsaltz:

The work of preserving and codifying the vast body of oral law went on
for several generations, but its importance waned as the main focus of
Torah scholarship shifted elsewhere. Those scholars who engaged in
memorization of the vast number of baraitot were still known as
tannaim, but the term took on new significance. Tannaim were no
longer creators of the oral law but individuals gifted with
phenomenal memories who did not always comprehend the full
significance of what they were memorizing. They were to be found for
many generations in the larger academies, serving as living archives
utilized by the sages in order to clarify and elucidate various
problems that cropped up in the course of the study of the Mishnah.

See also the related, tragic, short story "Mendel the Bibliophile" (1929) by Stephen Zweig. These persons are rare, but have played an important role in preserving knowledge throughout history. I've ran into more than one, behind the counter at this or that second-hand bookshop.


Should conference papers in computer science contain full proofs, and should these be checked by reviewers? I am a mathematician. In my subject, the normal means of disseminating research is to write it up with full and detailed proofs of the main results, which are then typically subjected to a rigourous peer-review process which can often take several years.

Much of my work, however, has an overlap with theoretical computer science, and I am often asked to referee articles sent to computer science conferences, which sometimes seem to me to have a slightly less rigourous review process. Therefore I have the following questions:

As a reviewer, should I insist that CS conference papers contain full proofs of their main results?
Should referees of conference papers actually check these proofs before accepting an article for publication?

These questions stem from a number of bad reviewing experiences I've had recently (as reviewer), in which I've rejected papers for basically a lack of rigour. One, which was submitted to a highly reputable conference, contained about ten additional pages of key proofs in a technical appendix, which was to be consulted ''at the reviewer's discretion'', and which would not have formed part of the final article. I rejected this on the basis that not only were the proofs themselves highly suspect (obviously grounds enough), but that the reader would never have had access to them and would have had to take everything on trust!

However, it turned out that I was the only reviewer who had these issues. The others were not only happy to have the main technical content of the paper relegated to a disposable appendix, but had not even bothered reading it! Eventually the paper did get rejected, but only after a fair amount of arguing on my part.

This is not by any means my only experience of this kind of attitude in computer science peer-reviewing (which would be frankly unthinkable in mathematics), but it illustrates the kind of problems I have as a reviewer.

I understand that there are cultural differences here, and that the speed of the conference system has its merits, so I am wondering whether I am being unfair to judge this system by the standards of rigour one normally expects from mathematical journals?

"Rigour" is a nice sounding word. I like the way it feels when I say it. But aside from making nice sounds, it has some issues:

  ... which are then typically subjected to a rigorous peer-review process which can often take several years.

Let's forget about how nice the word sounds and take a stab at a pros and cons analysis of having fast-to-write, fast-to-review, fast-to-publish, not-so-rigorous conference papers.

Pros:

Time-to-publish is reduced (moving from a couple of years to a couple of months), meaning that results can have impact faster.
Other authors will become aware that there are results in this area, rather than trying to prove results that have already been proven but are stuck in a multi-year peer-review process.
Reviewers have to expend less effort reviewing less rigorous papers in a less rigorous way. They can use that excess effort elsewhere.
Authors have to expend less effort to write less rigorous papers. They can use that excess effort elsewhere.
The ability to write less rigorous papers does not preclude the possibility of writing a follow-up paper that is more rigorous.
Authors have something to lose by publishing incorrect non-rigorous results: their reputation. (Not really a pro, rather more of a check-and-balance.)

Cons:

Less rigorous papers may be more prone to being incorrect. This may lead to incorrect papers building on these results.
Once a lack of rigour seeps in, one is on a slippery slope. Without any rigour, one is not proving anything. The whole thing become pointless.

I do not believe in some absolute notion of "rigour" for any non-trivial proof. I believe it's a relative term. One writes proofs for one's audience. The notion of "rigour" is thus community dependent. It is up to a community to decide what level of "rigour" is most appropriate for that community. If the "rigour" drops too low and incorrect results become a problem, the community should adjust. If the "rigour" becomes too high and reviewers have to spend months checking the dotted i's and crossed t's on long proofs for results that are simply not worth that effort, then that will carry its own costs, particularly in terms of the capacity of the community to do work, where diversity of work will inevitably become the first victim (the trend will be towards safe incremental papers).

Applying the standards of rigour from one community to another is, in my mind, thus inappropriate in and of itself. Rigour is, in my mind, not the goal. The goal, in my mind, is that the community be "productive" in whatever notions they and society deem productive (in the sense that society, after all, is funding this cost, and will not continue to fund this cost if the community is expending its capacity in pursuing rigour for rigour's sake).

tl;dr: I believe that "rigour" is a means, not an ends. I think if you really want to take exception to the lack of rigour in a community, you should show that the cons are outweighing the pros, which is to say you should highlight incorrect results and the time wasted by the community on following-up those incorrect results. Simply arguing that community A chooses to have less rigour than community B and thus community A is doing something wrong, is, in my mind, insufficient as an argument. You need to argue that the perceived lack of rigour is a problem.


How to analyse the following reviewer comments? How can I improve a paper which has the following comments from the reviewer:

There are missing references to recent literature, which are closely related to this submitted work. A proper comparison of results and the methodologies among these efforts, as well as clear motivation for the incremental progress is typically required.
In addition, the submitted paper has several typographical and organizational errors.

Is the reviewer asking me to cite more references?
What does it mean for a paper to have  "typographical and organizational errors"?
Can someone tell me what is the reviewer asking me to improve?
The decision is "reject".
Should I resubmit to the same journal after making corrections or to a different one?

These are all fairly clear.

  There are missing references to recent literature, which are closely
  related to this submitted work.

Exactly what it says on the tin. The reviewer believes you are missing references, and importantly, recent references in areas close to what your paper is on. You should find them, and include them. More importantly...

  A proper comparison of results and the methodologies among these
  efforts, as well as clear motivation for the incremental progress is
  typically required.

Your reviewer is asking you to put your paper in research in context with those papers. What does this add? Why did it need to be done. What is the motivation of the work?

  In addition, the submitted paper has several typographical and
  organizational errors.

This, again, means exactly what it says. The reviewer has found what they believe are typographical errors, and errors where the paper isn't well organized - for example, possibly where a section relies on something not yet introduced.

  The decision is "reject".

  Should I resubmit to the same journal after making corrections or to a
  different one?

If they wanted you to revise and resubmit, that would have been the decision. A flat "Reject" decision means you will need a new journal, though I would suggest taking the reviewer's comments to heart. It's possible they're correct, and it's possible you'll get the same reviewer again.

To expand a bit on your comments, because replies are a bad place for nuance:

  I have one question? suppose i sent this paper to a lower standard journal and the same reviewer gets hold of the paper, will his/her review change subject to the journal

This is very unlikely. You might get away with it if the primary criticism was about the novelty or importance of the paper, or not fitting with the right audience. But, to be direct, the reviewer's comments are things that would be fatal flaws in most respectable journals - just going down a tier won't fix them. Instead, I'd strongly suggest you mull over the reviewers comments, go looking for the recent studies they mention, etc.


If I rederived a result (oblivious that it already existed), should I cite the original paper? I derived a minor result on my own, as part of a paper that I'm working on. I recently discovered that this result already exists in the literature.

If I cite the original work it will seem like I simply took it from there, but if I don't it might seem that I omitted a due citation. Is it more appropriate to

cite the original work
not cite it
either of the above with a comment (if so how can I phrase an appropriate comment?)

Citation has multiple purposes, as described by several answers on this site (e.g. 1, 2). Broadly speaking, those purposes mostly fall into three classes: giving a trustworthy source, giving credit, or suggesting further reading. Any individual citation might serve several of these purposes, or only one of them. So when you cite a paper, that doesn't necessarily make it seem like you took the result from there; you might simply be giving credit to the first person(s) to publish the result, or referencing an external source to back up what you're saying.

What this means for your case is that you should definitely cite the other paper. The exact wording you use to do so depends on several factors, including whether you think an explicit statement of the result, and/or your derivation of it, are still worth including in your paper - for example, if you think your derivation is more clear, or relaxes some assumptions of the original, or so on. Here are some possibilities along the lines of what I've used or read:

"This result was originally derived in reference [1]." (possibly in a footnote)
"For a more detailed derivation, see reference [1]."
"Here I present an alternate derivation of the result in reference [1]."
"(statement of result) [1]. In brief, this can be derived as follows: ..."
"This uses the result that (brief statement of result) [1]." (probably in a footnote)

and so on. Or you can just cite it without comment, and unless the conventions of your field are otherwise, people won't necessarily assume that you took the result from the other paper. (Nor will they even care, in most cases.)


How to explore Physics research as an undergraduate, keeping in mind the ever increasing weight on publications? I am currently 3rd year Physics UG and have been working on Cosmology for past 3 years.

I want to explore different areas like QFT, Quantum Gravity and maybe a bit of basic Math research as well, before I enter into PhD.(I have 2 more years of MS education)

However, with an ever increasing stress on Publications for PhD applications, it's very hard. I can try get 1-2 publications if I continue in Cosmology, as I already know the bare minimum and can start my projects with comparatively less reading. But if choose a new field I'll first have to do a lot of preliminary readings and only then start my research projects. Thus lower chance of good publications.

So how should a Physics student go about exploring different fields?

Note: [I am not considering doing a course in QFT, Math as exploring the topic]

PS: I am from India where it is much less common for UG students to get publications compared US/Europe. So, if possible, please do consider this.

It would be amazing for you to get 2-3 publications before you enter PhD.  Maybe it’s just the semantics of what is meant by “getting 2-3 publications” but just participating as co-author in one publication in first- or second-quartile journal is not that common, and it’s extremely unlikely that this would be “your” publication, i.e. that you would be the major contributor to this.

It is not easy to publish original work in a mature field like cosmology: the low-hanging fruits have long been picked.  In other words, all the easy work has already have been done by current researchers or their graduate students or their undergraduate students, or by the generation before them.  Rejection rates in well-recognized journals are generically above 70% of submissions, and these are submissions by authors who considered their work sufficient good to submit to those journals in the first place, i.e. the rejection rate would be much higher if it weren’t for a significant self-filtering of submission to good journals.

I recommend students not to play it safe at the undergraduate level, i.e. if they would like to learn about cryptography then take a crypto course rather than some other “safe” topic which might narrow rather than expand their expertise.

There is this nice article published in the NYTimes which makes a similar point, although in a the context of students obsessed by grades and from a more “dealing with failure” perspective.


Double or single quotation marks non-obvious citation in citation? My university’s guidelines about say that quotations in text should appear in single quotation marsks whereas when the writer quotes something in that paper and I am using it, I must use double quotation marks.

Now what confuses me is that I am quoting some bits from a paper about someone’s lectures, and the author of the paper gives a footnote saying the text is edited and annotated, but he doesn’t make clear which bits he annotates or he has edited himself, although this might sound simple it is a bit confusing.

Where should I use which quotation marks?

The rule you are referring is probably a convoluted way of saying that:

In general you should use single quotation marks.
When the text you are quoting contains quotation markes, you should turn them into double quotation marks – no matter what they were before. (This is probably unless when the quotation marks appear in a quotation in the text you are quoting, in which case things get ugly.)

So, suppose the book you want to quote is one of the following:

  Prof. Smith said “Hello” to the students.
  Prof. Smith said ‘Hello’ to the students.

Then your quotation you should quote it as follows:

  The book mentions: ‘Prof. Smith said “Hello” to the students.’

Or (though I would advise against using such a construction at all):

  The book quotes the Professor: ‘“Hello”’

If the text you are quoting does not clarify whether something is a quote or not, this is not your problem (except that it may render it unreliable as a source of information). However, you might want to mention in general that you are quoting from a book which states that it has edited the quotes within in it.


Can I publish a paper on my PhD work without informing my old supervisor? I was a PhD student and working on a paper. My adviser told me that he could not support me anymore so I left him. Now I am wondering if I could publish that paper on my own. There were 3 other coauthors on that paper but I was the first author and main idea was from me.

Your paper had other authors. Generally, if you want to publish it, you have to communicate with the other co-authors (whether they were your supervisor or not).

Regardless of who the first author on a paper is, if other individuals made authorship-worthy contributions to the work, you can't publish it without communicating with them first.


StackExchange Rank in Resume? I'm ranked as one of top 4% users of Data Science Stackexchange.
I'm applying for a PhD program in related field.

Shall I mention my Stackexchange rank in my resume?
If yes under what title?

You may mention it, but it's not going to carry a lot of weight. What I'd focus on would not be the particular rank you have there, but that you have been active in the community of Data Scientists for a good while and believe that this has given you a good overview of this area. That's what matters, not what you do in your spare time.


How likely is for the head of some University/Institution to ask other professors for further details related to the candidate? I am thinking of applying at several Biology PhD programmes and for this I need several recommendation letters. Have you experienced the situation where the head of the targeted Department asked the person that recommended you further details about you, even though the letters already contain references to your work/behaviour in the lab? How much does the content of the letters count?
Any shared experience will be greatly appreciated!

Letters of recommendation often end with

  "...If you need further details do not hesitate to contact me on...",

and this is not a useless formality. If committee members have some questions about the candidate, they are very likely to email or telephone the person who wrote the recommendation and ask them. The content of the letter matters greatly, but it is even more important that the person who signs under the letter actually knows you well.

This is the main reason why a general and vague letter does not make you much good. Sadly, some professors are too busy to write the letter themselves, and they sometimes ask their students to prepare a letter which they are happy to sign. Be vary of this line, as the busy professor is likely to forget your name the next minute you step out his door, and therefore will not be able to provide details on you if asked. This also diminishes the effect of the recommendation, if not negates it.


When did English come to lead in published research? As any modern student knows, nearly all published research these days is in English. That's just the way of the world. But it didn't used to be that way. Many of the most pivotal pieces of scientific literature in the world, like the writings of Riemann, Cantor, Einstein, Galois, Schrödinger, (Gregor) Mandel, Linnaeus and many, many others were written in German, French or Latin. These days, publishing in a language other than English hurts your credibility, and is largely discouraged.

When did English become necessary for publishing scientific literature?

English became the dominant international language of science across the first half of the 20th Century.

To summarize an excellent BBC article on the subject:

At the beginning of the 20th Century, there were three main language of science, French, English, and German, essentially corresponding to the biggest economic and political powers of the time (England, France, Germany, and the USA).
After World War I, Germany and the German language were essentially ostracized by the victorious nations, including an (unconstitutional) ban on the language in the United States. Europe was also generally weakened as a power.
The continued devastation of World War II and the rise of the US as a technological superpower cemented the collapse of German. French took longer to decline, but network effects and relative power had their impact eventually.

Thus, by the middle of the 20th century, English had become, in general, the dominant language of science. It was by no means absolute (and still is not), but its dominance has further strengthened over time. How long this will last and what will replace it are for anyone to guess.


Is there any standardization of figures for scientific publication in any field? Short Version: Making the data behind the figures openly available is undeniably a massive help to the research community. What are some enabling systematic efforts (standard, file format requirement, tools to extract data from the figures) who are pushing for this openness available? This is not to ask for people to share their tabular data, but to use a figure file format that is easily extractable.

Imagine a day that we can do a meta-analysis on a large number of scientific papers to build a big AI. Or a software that can extract all the figures and build a massive database of data that can put the research into a quick use by engineers or others. Perhaps if there is a standard or framework for figures it would help this happen faster (the same goes with the objectives and hypothesis of papers).

Are you aware of any effort in this direction?
Is there any framework for figure structures, locations of content in the figure that is mandated/suggested by journals for better OCR in any field or certain experiments?
For example, the data in Matlab fig files (no matter how many curves or dimensions) can be accurately extracted. Is there any journal that asks for such file formats from which data can be easily extracted?
Link here: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/100687-how-do-i-extract-data-from-matlab-figures

As an example of figures that work as a scientific report, but their data if extracted can help the bigger scientific developments, here are some examples. I doubt if an OCR-like algorithm can extract 100% all these data accurately.

There is no need for it.

  Or a software that can extract all the figures and build a massive database of data that can put the research into a quick use by engineers or others.

This is pretty much what Information Retrieval systems do (Yes, I'm looking at you Google).  I worked with interpretation of images through AI in the IR area and finding that something is a figure or not is easy.

First of all there aren't many document formats, almost all papers are either in PDF or PostScript, which have a stamp that something is an image or figure.  The same is valid for Word documents and even HTML.  Then the question simply becomes what is a figure (in the sense you mention in the question, i.e. something generated from data) and an image generated by a snapshot of reality (e.g. a photo).

A figure (in the sense above) will have few edges in an ordered fashion, whilst a photo will have many edges in an unordered fashion.  Even a photo of a white table on white background has enough noise to produce more edges.

The interpretation of what the figure shows is a completely different thing.  It is much, much, much harder to do with AI.  But then again, a standardised way of placing the figures or placing content in the figure would not help with that.  Interpretation of a figure is something we humans have some difficulty to do.  More often than not, looking at only the figures in a paper does not make you understand what the paper is about.

To produce a meaningful interpretation of figures in papers you would need to understand the paper first.  Just like we humans do.

One note on MATLAB's .fig I'd like to add is that asking for specific file formats that are not publicly available may produce a lock-in problem.  This is not a particularly good example of a lock-in since MATLAB provides discounted student (and sometimes general academic) licences.  Yet, there are some countries where these licenses are not available or in which even the discounted ones amount for a big sum due to monetary differences.

Therefore requiring specific file formats may lock some researches/students out of a journal.  Something that would not be a good sign about the journal's openness.  The tech wars, notably between file formats are sometimes more fierce than between options about well debated scientific topics.  I'd prefer a journal that stays out of those (although guidelines on how and article should be formatted that are independent of the software used are definitely good).


Notetaking with Latex and collapsing text for research papers I am looking for a note-taking software with the following features,
I would appreciate any advice!

Collapsing or folding text (Like FoldingText or other outliners)
Ability to quickly write up formulas (Like stack exchange's Markdown)
Relatively pretty
Nice writing experience
Hopefully cheap

This would be helpful while taking notes from research publications side it is highly unwieldy to have a sparse collection of text files.

You could use Emacs/org-mode. Advantage: It is a simple yet powerful (and in principle infitely extendable) plain-text outliner with all the features that you require. Disadvantage: It requires some familiarity with the Emacs-editor, which has a relatively steep learning-curve.


Admissions - University - Graduate School. Is this a commitment? I recently applied to a graduate engineering program at a university and was contacted by a professor who was interested in my application. We discussed the projects that he is undertaking and seems to think I would be a good addition to the team. A week after the interview, he reached out stating that he has instructed the university to offer me the MASc position in the program I was applying for, and discussed the courses he would be interested in having me taking and the total funding he is willing to provide for the program. I replied back stating that I would love to join his team.

My concern so far is that I have not received an official letter of admission from the university and I am not sure if it is practical or ethical to apply to other universities in the meantime in order to ensure that if things won't work out I have a backup plan.

My question: is this the right thing to do or should I wait for the decision to arrive from the main university I applied to?

Not knowing the policies of the university and whether the offer from the professor amounts to a commitment or not, I'd say yes, you can apply elsewhere, but as you have given at least a verbal/email/whatever assurance, you can't accept any other offer.

I would make other inquiries somewhat discrete, however, so as not to cause concern should the first professor learn of them. You also shouldn't represent yourself as being entirely free to accept an offer in the interim.

But you can also inquire of the administration of the first university what is the actual meaning of the offer given and accepted. Can you expect paperwork to follow or is it still tentative? You have a right to know this, of course.

You could also, perhaps, ask this question of the professor involved, asking him/her whether you should keep looking or is it a signed-sealed-delivered offer.

You don't need to leave yourself at risk, but you shouldn't put others at risk either.

And congratulations.


Sexually harassed by postdoc supervisor and forced to quit I was forced to resign from a postdoctoral position in a major research institute in the US because of sexual harassment. It's been 4 months since I resigned, but I'm still struggling to move on from what happened.

It started a couple of months into my postdoc. He started leering and staring at me in public and moving too close to me during one-on-one meetings. At one point, I moved away from him slightly when he started getting too close which made him really angry. I also tried to keep the door open when we have our one-on-one meetings, but the same thing happened. He got so angry that he started criticizing my work in a loud voice. He also made everyone believe there was something going on between us. I just stopped talking to him during social gatherings and generally stayed away from him, which I think made him angrier. He also started bullying me and putting down my suggesting during lab meetings. It effected my self-esteem so much that I stopped speaking up in meetings altogether. He brought up my lack of participation in meetings during a progress review. I made excellent progress at the beginning of my postdoc and had my first manuscript ready in a matter of months. But after the harassment started, I got so depressed that I couldn't focus on my work and my progress suffered.

After putting up with his abuse for over a year, I reached my breaking point when he invited me to go to a conference with him. On the surface it seemed harmless, but it was a small conference on the other side of the country with hardly anyone I know attending it. I made a polite excuse about a prior commitment, but he didn't buy it. He got angry and started to bully and harass me even more. I was so depressed at this point that I tried to commit suicide. I almost succeeded had it not been for the fantastic work of the doctors and nurses at NYP. After 3 days in the ICU and a week in the hospital, I recovered from my suicide attempt (at least physically). I went back to work a week later. I didn't tell anyone what happened, but my postdoc supervisor made it clear that he knew. He mentioned in passing that he has access to anyone's medical record, and in another instance, made a snide comment about me trying to kill myself for my work.

I handed in my resignation a couple of months after this. I wasn't in a place to apply for jobs let alone go for interviews while I was there. So I quit without having a job lined up. I also started seeing a therapist around this time and I think my mental health has somewhat improved since then. However, I'm still so traumatized by this whole experience that I can't seem to bring myself to apply for jobs. Every time I see a job I could apply to, I get paralyzed with fear that the same thing will happen. How do I move on from this and go back to work? Any advise or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

There are a lot of bad actors out there, of course, but not everyone. Your therapist can probably give you better advice on dealing with the future than you will get here.

But I'm surprised that you haven't raised the roof at the former institute, and/or consulted a lawyer. Reputable institutes and universities have offices that are supposed to deal effectively with these things. I don't know whether you still have access to them after resigning, but a lawyer is worth consulting here to give you the peace of mind that comes from fighting back against such improper, even likely illegal, behavior.

The perpetrator of these transgressions has no business being in the profession.  It was, among other things, an abuse of authority as well as common decency.

I can't recommend that you fight it, as you know the overall situation better than I do. Your own health is more important than any fight. So your therapist should be your first source of advice on this. But you can explore a fight for vindication with the therapist.


Do non-English papers/publications have value in a CV which is going to be sent to an English company/university? Some of the students are doing research in another language than English because they are living and studying in a non-English speaking country; they may be doing research in their mother-tongue language because they are studying in their own country or they are studying in another country in which the language is not English.

If these students have non-English language publications which are published or sent to a non-English conference/journal; Do these publications still have the same value in their CV when they are going to send it to an English speaking university/company? Or only publications in English are of value in those institutions.

PS: I think the situation is easier for the students having English publications in their CVs and want to send it to a non-English speaking university/company as they welcome and accept those publications.

In an academic mathematics context: it's not a question of English itself, neither of the paper itself nor of the journal, but of the reputation of the journal. At the very least, French, German, English, and Russian are languages in which there is a very well established mathematics literature. I think all the better mathematics journals accept submissions in English, French, and German, at least.

It is true that perhaps one's paper will have the widest readership these days if it is in English, although 40 years ago anyone learning mathematics had to learn to read French and German, perhaps more than English, because the previous 150 years' mathematics was written primarily in those languages.

It is nevertheless possible that a very provincial situation or person would have a prejudice about non-English (or non-whatever) research papers or journals, and there is little one can do to guard against this.

It may also be the case that there simply are very few high-reputation journals published in "minor" languages, and this may be tangled up with the difficulty of readership. I do regret that I never learned Russian well enough to read mathematics in it. Similarly, there are many important mathematical papers published in Japanese in Japan, and I cannot read them. I would not be surprised to learn that the same is true in China, but I cannot personally certify this.

But any reasonable scholar would certainly recognize the possibility that a good paper can be written in a language other than English. The question of its inaccessibility if written in a language not widely used in the subject at hand is different. Perhaps one could wonder about the wisdom of writing in a not-widely-read language, but, again, that's different from the science itself.


Can an extended journal version of a conference paper include different list of co-authors? If a conference accepted a paper with 3 authors, and the 2 co-authors were mainly reviewers. When submitting an extended version to a journal, should the co-authors be included or they can be removed? Can the paper include new authors?

If the work is extending the original, then all of the original authors should be retained.  New authors can certainly be added, however, if they have contributed to the extension.


Graduation letter vs certificate Someone graduated from a university few months ago. She asked for certificate but university staff informed that it will take around 9 months to be ready and stamped from authorities. They offered to give Graduation Letter signed from university only and transcript.

The degree is in Arabic Literature.
Can she use this letter for registration in another university for post-graduate studies or finding jobs as a teacher. she is looking to study/work in another country.

Thanks

Can she use this letter for registration in another university for post-graduate studies or finding jobs as a teacher?

Yes, but, whether it will be accepted depends on the recipient. You could check with the recipient to be sure.


What is a proper balance between reading research papers and reading books? I am a student of electrical engineering and am currently involved in research. In order to remain active in research, I think we have to constantly keep reading the latest research papers.

However reading books is also very important. What is a good trade-off between reading books and papers? How many research papers should students be reading on a weekly basis? I will be thankful for any suggestions.

I make a simple distinction based on what I'm looking for. Essentially, am I tackling a problem that I know about, or am I looking for a new problem/area to expand into?

I'd suggest you to have atleast this broad an idea before dipping into any material, otherwise you may easily get lost in the sea of information available today. The risk of getting too deep into something and forgetting why you got there on the first place is very real.

EDIT: For this problem, I'd recommend taking a look at this question.

Now, if a problem is known, I'd go straight to research papers and get an idea of what approach people follow, what is being tried, what gap areas exist, and so on. I'd go to a book only if (a) it is referenced in a part of the paper I find relevant, or (b) the explanation proposed hinges on something I know very little of. In (b), a book is good because typically it is written in a more pedagogical style and hence easier to understand.

On the other hand, if I'm looking for an area to expand into, I'd first consult books on related topics to acquire some understanding before jumping in to literature. Yes, it is time consuming, and reading papers directly seems like a shortcut ('you anyway need to read them once you select your problem, so why not start there'). Nevertheless, I personally believe that a firm understanding at the beginning is necessary to attempt formulating your problem.

Just to reinforce, let us consider these two situations and see what happens if we reverse the approaches.

(a) You know the problem already, but start off with a textbook- you will spend a lot of time reading. Since a good book is engaging, you will find it hard to put down, and may start jumping from the chapter you were interested in to another chapter that is referenced somewhere (another quality of good books). At the end, you've spent a lot of time, gathered a lot of information and hopefully some knowledge, but you are no further on your research problem.

(b) You don't know a field, but start reading literature- you may get lost in jargon. Also, you may think a contextual statement is generally valid, leading to misconceptions. Finally, you will rely completely on the approach and methodology of a particular author with a particular agenda (i.e. to advance a particular viewpoint/theory) and therefore adopt all his/her biases. A book will generally be written in a neutral way (the agenda is to disseminate information), which will help you to critically analyse any research result.


Applying for PhD as a transferred undergraduate: do I need transcripts from my previous institution? I am an undergraduate student planning to apply for Ph.D.
The thing is that I spent the first year of my undergraduate at another university. I did transfer some credits but I didn't transfer any major credits. The question is - do I need to include my transcript for the first year in the application? Or could it be based on the institute I am applying to? The GPA of my first year is not bad but getting the transcript is a little bit tricky since the institue is in another country.
I really appreciate your input!

They will probably ask for it.
That being said this is a question for the institution you are applying to. Send an email or call their graduate college to figure out what is necessary in your particular case.


How to build a list of seminal papers in a field? This question is similar to this one, but focused on papers rather than on authors. Does anybody know of a systematic way to build a list of the most cited and/or influential papers in a discipline?

I've tried to use Google Scholar, but I was not able to search papers by label, as you can do in the case of authors (see the accepted answer here).

I have undertaken to create such lists as an academic exercise myself, and quite a lot of effort is involved in doing this. There are a variety of approaches that I will suggest, and I would place more emphasis on the first approaches.

Literature review papers: Look for literature reviews on the subject of interest. Read the reviews' analysis and discussion of the state of research, there should usually be a discussion of how the state got where it is, and their citations should point you right at the seminal works.

Paper Cites: review known papers of interest for their citations. You'll want to recurse back to this strategy as more papers become known to you.

Textbook tables of citations: Review several respected textbooks that cover the subject, and inspect their citations for more works that you want to be aware of.

Reputation, reference: Ask professors and PhD students in the field what papers they think are important. Some professors may not be particularly helpful, but some may drop a comprehensive bibliographic database right in your lap.

Seminar Reading Lists: Ask for the reading list for PhD student seminars in the field.

Most Downloads/Read: This might not lead you to seminal works, per se, but seminal works will tend to be more read, and this provides another way of categorizing and prioritizing your review the literature. For example, if one paper has been downloaded at a rate 1000 times higher than another on the same topic, you might choose to examine the former first.

Also, you'll need to keep track of your efforts. Expecting to solely rely on your memory is not only wrong, but likely to mean you've wasted much of your research time. I use Zotero, a free bibliographic database with integration in Firefox, to track the papers I've read. If I get papers or books in electronic form, Zotero can also store the electronic copy for me. It can also quickly create a table of references for you, and has some other nice features. It also has competitors that I'm not as familiar with, of note are Mendeley, a freemium model platform, and Endnote, a rather popular and mature commercial platform.


Where can I find the IEEE list of research topics? I'm trying to submit to IEEE Transactions on Computers, and their web form offers an 8-line box with a list of hundreds of topics to choose from.  The web form does not identify the list, but I am sure it is published elsewhere.

Can someone link the topics list that IEEE is using?

edit: I used a regex replace to mine the list from the page source, but the link might still be helpful to others.  It has 2261 items, to be exact, and you can view 8 of them at a time.

This link has the up-to-date list as of August 2016 (and I will not be keeping it up to date): http://alejandroerickson.com/j/eggs/IEEE-Keyword-Ontology-2016-08-18.html

From IEEE:
https://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/peer-review/docs/taxonomy.pdf

Below are two items from the list, for identification purposes:

C.2.1.h Network topology < C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design < C.2 Communication/Networking and Information Technology < C C

G.1.7.d Differential-algebraic equations < G.1.7 Ordinary Differential Equations < G.1 Numerical Analysis < G Mathematics of Computing

The IEEE makes their 'Taxonomy' available on line (linked to in their Author FAQ under the Publications page), but this is only a hierarchical list without the designations you have given to identify something as the C.2.1.h topic. Surprisingly (to me), neither the author kit nor the editorial manual discuss this hierarchy.

In contrast, for the American Institute of Physics, the PACS codes are available on-line at PACS 2010.


Postdoc project with poor scientific content and unlikely to lead to publications I have started a 2-year postdoc six months ago, in the US. I am starting being concerned about its outcome in terms of publication and scientific production in general. These are the issues:

the project is basically turning out to be pretty poor in terms of scientific content, and that was sold in a completely different way when I was offered the position. In particular, what I was meant to do was developing mathematical models and implementing them as new code. However, what I am actually doing is just debugging a pre-existing code, which is hardly leading to significant publications.
Mind, I wasn’t expecting to publish during the first six months of the postdoc, but looking at what is planned for the future, I can’t realistically expect that the nature of the project is going to change. Moreover, my institution is trying to keep alive a rather obsolete and seriously limited code, which is unlikely to be competitive with other research groups. Unfortunately, I do not have much freedom change code and/or approach (see point 2). Whenever I proposed something new, it was basically dismissed as a distraction.

Due to my group policy, I do not have much independence to add anything to what the sponsor is paying for. I cannot even use my affiliation to publish independent research that I may carry out while being off duty (this is security policy, providing details is not going to add any significant information).
In my PhD, I doubled my publication outcome by doing research in my free time, now I’d have to publish without an affiliation. While I knew this in advance, I was expecting to be able to publish from my main project. In any case, I don’t believe that having to rely on my free time is the best way to grow and be productive.

To sum it up, this is looking more technical consulting than scientific research.
Given this, I am being seriously worried that this might impact negatively on my future career in research, unless I become permanent at my current institution (which is not granted at all, especially  considering the project I was put onto). It is hard to grow as a scientist or even as an engineer by doing ‘‘monkey’’ work.
I am asking for advice on how to prevent this. As I have said, if things go on like now, I will have a two-year ‘‘publication hole’’ in my resume that won’t likely help me to find new positions. I will be really sorry if this happens as I was able to publish much more than the average during my PhD, and I don’t want to ruin it all.
On the other hand, if I stay open to other opportunities now, I am not sure how well it may be perceived.
So, I’d wish to know what you think about this situation: am I worrying to much or am I right to be concerned? I am not learning anything from this activity, nor producing, in a period in which I’d wish to grow further, and I am feeling like wasting all my previous efforts and results.
And for the better of my future career (I want to go on doing research), should I wait till the contract ends or should I act now and look for something else?

I think that the more you stay in the position the more you’ll be trapped into it. I see in the comments that you are at a national laboratory, so I understand that the salary might be tempting and that’s not easy to give it up. However, from a long term perspective, you could lose an opportunity to flourish and to get known. Plus, how long is your contract, 2-3 years? None or few publications could harm your chances to stay in the field, particularly if you want or have to move to another lab or university. It comes down to choosing between being well paid today or increasing your chances to be successful in the future, unless you think you can change your situation without leaving.


Should I notarise my transcript or attest it? US universities ask for an official transcript. Can I send a notarised copy of my transcript? If yes, is it better to attest it by my university officials or notarise it?

When a US university asks for official transcripts, they are asking for transcripts to be sent directly from the institution at which the coursework was completed or the degree earned.

If your previous institution cannot send transcripts directly, find out from the US university what their specific requirements are. For example, see this FAQ from the University of Mississippi, which also describes how to get officially certified transcripts in case your institution cannot directly issue official transcripts.


Can I include my published paper in the mail? I have written a professor from the USA about a Ph.D. position with my CV. He replied saying its excellent and I should apply in the next fall. Now I have some queries which I will ask him in my next mail and one of my paper has been published today in a very good journal (which I wrote 'submitted' in my CV). Should I include my paper in my next mail saying you can have a look? Will it add extra value or a good impression?

Honestly, I find the whole discussion in the comments and the other answer rather strange. There are two options:

The professor doesn't care about reading the paper. If you sent the paper attached to the email, he can just ignore it.
The professor wants to read the paper. If you attached it, perfect. If you didn't, either he has to go look for it on the journal's website, log in the publisher's website because many don't do IP-based authentication anymore, and eventually find the "PDF" button behind all the crap that publishers put on journals' website these days; or ask you to send it to him in case it's not public yet (e.g. it was accepted today and it will be months before the journal even mentions it publicly) or his university doesn't have a subscription to the journal. That's a complete waste of time.

We're in 2019. Getting a 5 MB attachment in one email is completely insignificant. If the professor is on a roaming data plan in Belize and hasn't set his email client to not download attachments automatically, it's his own fault, and he will rack up hundreds of dollars in charges anyway from all the email a professor routinely gets every day.

My opinion: write your email with your additional queries and so on, and conclude with something like "By the way, the paper 'XXX' that was listed as submitted on my CV is now accepted in journal 'JJJ'. I have attached it to this email in case you would like to take a look." Unobstructive, no pressure.


Student discount on international conferences for non-matriculated students In computer science many conferences provide a fee discount for PhD students.
Currently I am also a PhD student in Germany. In Germany there is a program in which you are registered as a PhD student at a university, but not matriculated.

Can I still register for conferences via the student discount?

You're a PhD student, so, yes, you can register for the student discount.*

*Ultimately, conferences make their own rules, so this may not apply to every conference. In such cases, just ask the organisers.


Should I cite sources about a technology description? I want to add some description of a technology (Node.js = server-side JavaScript) in my thesis. The description is about what exactly this technology is, how it works, what it can do etc.

I want to use Node.js Wikipedia page, a blog page, one of my supervisor's lectures for gathering information.

Should I cite these sources, given the fact that they say pretty much the same things and these things are just observations, not scientific contribution?

If something can be deemed common knowledge in your field there should be no need to cite it.

MIT define common knowledge as;

  Broadly speaking, common knowledge refers to information that the average, educated reader would accept as reliable without having to look it up.

There is further detail on that link about Common Knowledge and it's applications. They also say that there best advice is: 'When in doubt, cite your source.'

That said if you are taking something verbatim from a source you should cite it.

Just on your sources; in academia you tend to shy away from citing from wikipedia etc. You can see a discussion on that issue at this question


I start an Assistant Professor position in August (in USA). Is it better to hire a Phd in August or January? I start an Assistant Professor position in August at a USA university (ranked between 30th and 70th). I am already advertising the two PhD positions I got in the startup, and for one of the two I already have a list of good candidates, in particular I like a lot a specific candidate. Which one do you think the best move is? Asking the candidate to start in August with me (beginning of fall) or in January (beginning of spring)? Which are the pros or cons? I spoke with the graduate school coordinator and he said both options are possible, I have to choose. And also the candidate said he has no particular preference, he finishes the Master in June and he might do a short internship until December (or take a break and visit family) if he will have to start  with me in January.

Note:
I will hire the second PhD in August 2018, cause it comes from different funds, available only in August of each year, and the deadline for those is past.

Often, your first semester in a faculty position flies by...especially if you are teaching (which you do not mention). You often meet with HR and administrators, learn where everything is on campus, and settle into your new home/hometown (I've started as a new faculty member at two different universities in my career). Consider that you might not have a lot of time to supervise and manage people during your first semester, which will waste your start-up funds. Waiting to hire the candidate in January will give you time to set up your program of research and have a full list of work for the candidate to work on when they start. Just a thought. Congrats on the job!


Applying to a job after just accepting an offer I just accepted an offer after the usual cycle of tenure-track applications starting in December. However, there's another job posting I'm very interested in that was just posted now for some reason(*). Is it possible for me to apply anyway? On one hand I'm just curious to see if I might get interviewed at least, on the other hand I'm pretty happy with the job I accepted, but this second one is closer to home, so I might want to try to negotiate a double position or something (spending half the year at either university). Field is math btw, both are TT positions.
Assuming it is not unreasonable to apply (don't want to get on people's bad side), I assume I should explain the situation in the cover letter. So I guess part of the problem is coming up with a "valid" motivation for applying. If I tell them straight up I only want a double position, they might not consider my application at all(?).
(*) I don't understand why it's posted so late. It also says review will begin immediately - maybe they already have someone in mind?

This is an excellent way to burn bridges at two institutions, do not do it.  The interview process for a TT position is long and daunting for everyone involved.  It is also expensive - even if this was a purely virtual interview cycle.  The sheer number of hours that the hiring committee put in to your application and interview when they could have been doing something else in their busy schedule means that they have a good reason to expect that someone who has accepted the job offer they gave will actually do that job.
If you were offered but did not accept, or were still in the interview round, this would be a very different question.  But since you have accepted the job offer then reneging on what you agreed to will look pretty bad on you.
I can see this going poorly for you in several ways:

You apply to the second position, get it, and then try to negotiate a double-job.  Both institutions would reasonably be confused and upset here, with the second job offer probably being pulled and the first institution probably eying you with suspicion.

You tell the first place what you're doing, and apply anyway.  I expect they will be quite concerned that your intention is to jump ship whenever a slightly more interesting position becomes available.

You tell both places what you're doing right from the outset.  The second institution is unlikely to consider you unless you are amazing at what you do - they want a tenured prof eventually, that's a lifetime committment - and still the first place eyes you suspiciously.

The only way I see this working, and it is not ideal, is for you to apply to the second position, get it, and then leave the first to work at the second.  But, you've just gotten a TT position that you seem to be interested in...why would you do that?


Main result unpublished at the end of the PhD Before giving the context of my situation, I sum up my questions:

- As a 3rd year PhD student, what would you do if you have a nice result but cannot publish it because your advisor is too busy and doesn't help?

- If the main result of your PhD is not published by the time you apply to postdocs, can you still talk about it in the research statement? Will it have much less impact than if it was published?

I am currently a third year PhD student in the field of mathematical physics in a small unknown university. I will graduate before June 2019, but I will apply for postdocs this year.

For the last 1.5 years, I mostly worked alone on a theory A, and I found out that there was a correspondence between this theory A and a theory B. Each of them have raised a lot of research in their own direction since 30 years, but I never found anything on the literature about a possible connection. So I guess it's interesting.

The problem is that I got kinda far from my advisor research interests: he is a specialist of the theory A, but B sounds esoteric for him. The first time I asked his opinion, he was suspicious "no no, it has nothing to do". When I came back with more "proofs" (one year ago), he got much more enthusiastic. He wanted to publish a paper by the end of summer 2017, and  sent me an outline for the paper. He even discussed with the "boss" of the theory B (who knows almost nothing about A), and he seemed really surprised and intrigued.

Since one year, NOTHING happened. I did further and more precise computations, but he is very active in his own fruitful research and travels a lot. Since last summer, I sent him several versions of my notes and asked about discussion, but every time we discussed a little about it (maybe 3 times in one year?), I realize that he didn't read anything. Several weeks ago, he said it would be nice to publish the paper before I apply for postdocs, but that maybe he is too optimistic...

Today, I feel kinda discouraged and powerless. I am in a weird situation where I think I have nice unexpected results which raise many new questions, but I have on the bottom of the bottom of the list of my advisor priorities. Besides him, scientifically I am completely isolated in my university. I am supposed to apply for postdoc in September/October, and I put a lot of hopes in those results. I have 2 other papers but I find them way less interesting. I don't know what to do.

I would be interested to know if someone have been in a similar situation, and how was it during the postdoc process.

You should publish it, independent of your future carreer plans. But of course, journal papers help for postdoc positions!

I would recomment to write a first draft and send it to your supervisor. If you feel about it, ask him, if you should contact the big boss of theory B as potential co-author to strengthen the paper. If he agrees, you could at least get one feedback.

Usually supervisors are becoming more active if their name is on a paper - they don't want it to be low quality. But maybe this is the problem of your supervisor: Since he is not into the topic, he might not be able to judge whether the paper is good or not. Therefore you could offer to publish the paper as single author and just mention your discussions in the acknowledgements if he prefers this. But I would leave this open as a last ressort.


How do I complain to chair if my advisor regularly writes to scam journals to get tenure? My advisor and his PHD Students are writing regularly to journals published by a publisher, which is on Beall’s list of Predatory Journals. I emailed Beall and he told me that the journals were advertising as non-profit but usually publish if you pay them.

I am in US. So recently the PHD Student and advisor published to this predatory journal’s conference taking place half way down the world and obviously it got accepted. So my advisor approved the student’s trip to that country (almost 1500 $, so it had to be approved by chair), but the chair rejected it saying it’s not worth the expense.

Now I want to directly email my chair and point out to him about my advisor’s publishing record. I am angry that instead of publishing to genuine journals, my advisor (who I believe is incompetent but has good political clout in the university) is publishing to these scam journals and wasting university money to achieve her tenure requirements.

Since I am still working in lab, I need advice on how to approach my chair so that I can keep myself safe from possible wrath of my advisor and at same time negate the contributions of these journals for his tenure.

Edit 1: The conference listed Google Scholar as one of its sponsors, so I emailed Google and they told me they never sponsored this journal and will order removal of their name from the sponsors list. So yeah, these are all first rate scam journals and I have all these emails, if I ever need to communicate with the chair. I have done my investigation; I just need to get my results across.

Your relationship with your advisor is extremely important for you getting a PhD. I would only contact the chair if you are absolutely certain that you would be able to find a new advisor if things went bad between you and your current advisor. When her tenure comes up for review, someone on the panel will know that these are scam journals. The fact that the chair has already denied one of her expenses means there is likely a red flag in her file (metaphorically). Now if she forces you to publish in one of these journals, you should absolutely complain, but don't complain about what she is doing with other students unless you think it is worth losing your advisor completely and creating enemies in the department. You can talk to the student who actually was going to go to the conference suggest he complains, but ultimately I think that is his responsibility. So again, refer to the first point; make sure you have an escape plan so to speak, and make sure that you are OK with potentially not earning your PhD because you stood up for yourself.


Feeling like stuck in a wrong field of study due to inept technical background. Seeking advice on how to sustain in academia and research? I completed my PhD from North America recently in a particular subfield in mechanical engineering. Though, I have published 3 decent publications and got a postdoctoral position afterwards, I am feeling lost about my ability to contribute well in my field of research.

The reason being that my research area is interdisciplinary and researchers from different fields like physics, computer science, electrical engineering, materials science, mechanical engineering, civil engineering work in this "hot" area. My background is materials science.

Mathematical expertise ( mainly Calculus), programming proficiency (python) and knowledge of statistical methods (for deep learning applications) is a huge advantage in my field, which I lack due to my poor mathematical background. My undergraduate mathematics grades were all B- and C. Didn't take any grad level mathematics courses.

I am self learning all the advanced concepts and relearning the fundamentals, but I feel that I will always be at disadvantage from my more fundamentally sound counterparts.

I am 30 now, want to give my best shot at academia for the next 3 years. I feel like I am stuck in a wrong field because of my poor fundamentals and knowledge. Any advice on thriving in such a scenario? I enjoy my research field, but being less technically sound makes me question my place.

I think I know what you're going through, since I'm also from a materials background and need to work with teams comprising mechanical engineers/physicists on mostly inter-disciplinary topics. Through some limited experience with your specified sub-field, I am quite confident that materials science by itself has very unique and valid contributions to make, even without the mathematical/statistical tools that you mentioned. (Those tools, incidentally would be great assets in almost any field, IMO).

The key fact is, on such teams it is necessary to speak the same language. You must pick up on the shared jargon and to resist the temptation to view everything through the lens of individual specialisation. This will force you to acquire a basic familiarity with other team-member's work. Once you acquire that and have a generally pleasing personality, you will likely find a lot of help and resources coming your way. In some sense, your team-members will become force-multipliers, and it will get increasingly easier to learn the ropes and find a niche where you can contribute uniquely. This may all take some time, so don't worry if there are some lows along the way.

Even while learning new things (it goes without saying that you must be open to this!), don't forget your primary specialisation/skillset, and look for problems that can be solved using that. If they aren't any obvious problems, look for places where you can help to optimise or enhance something. If even that doesn't work, start off by considering parametric studies, where you vary certain parameters unique to your specialisation and see the effect it has on the overall process. This will also accelerate your learning and help you get a feel for the field. Naturally, you will need to convince others that such studies are reasonable, so adequate background work and literature surveys will be required.

Finally, don't overlook the personality aspect, because you would like people to work with you, not against you.


Is this level of citation acceptable in a dissertation? Please can anybody reassure me that I am okay. I have been so distracted thesis that I’m behind in my revision for my finals.
Never once in my project did I take credit for something that wasn’t mine and I referenced all my sources of information and ideas.
However, instead of citing the same source over and over again I stated at the start of some chapters something like “the content of this chapter is mostly sourced from chapter X of book Y, but I add some details to proofs for clarity for the reader”.
I then go through my chapter and state the results and proofs I am interested in without further citation (unless I use a different source which I of course cite). I follow the proofs fairly closely and have my own extra details for clarity.
I submitted my project to TurnItIn which has highlighted in red a fairly substantial amount of material in some of the proofs. This is really freaking me out as I’m not trying to claim the proofs as mine or anything - I literally say at the start of the chapter where the material is sourced.

It sounds like the way you did the reference was fine and perfectly standard practice in mathematics. And I doubt Turnitin is remotely useful for mathematics anyway.
The more important question is whether what you did meets the expectations of your committee, and you'll have to ask them that.


How to find an editor for a statistics book? I am writing and self-publishing a book on statistics. More specifically, it is titled "The general linear model: Assumptions, violations and remedies (or what to do wen your dependent variable won't behave).

I have a general editor, but she knows nothing about statistics. I'm looking for someone to edit the statistical part.

Students can make good people to give you advice. If you pick someone who already has the knowledge they can probably give you good feedback on how what you say will work, assuming this is a text and not a professional work.

Graduate students in the field are often needing a bit of extra money and can often be recruited to help, especially if you also give them an acknowledgement. They are also good for providing solutions for exercises that you might include.

However, even advanced undergraduates can verify a book, both for readability at the level you are aiming for and for pointing out where they don't understand the formulas and technical terms you use. That can be especially valuable.

You are wise not to depend solely on your own reading. It is too easy to "see" what you think you wrote, rather than what you actually wrote. And for a textbook, someone who has taken the course in the not too distant past can have a valuable viewpoint.

I assume, of course, that you don't need someone to actually make corrections, as that may be beyond some students. You can do that yourself, certainly, as long as you learn where there are issues that should be addressed.


Fifth year of my PhD and I hate my project. What should I do? I am a PhD student in mechE. After paying the first year tuition out of pocket, I accepted a PhD project due to desperation for funding. However, after an year I realized that I hate the project. Here I made a mistake of not leaving/changing the project, I just waited out hoping I would like the project. I also asked my advisor a couple for a different project and he did not want to change my project due to sponsor obligations. For some reason I couldn’t assert myself and stayed on. However my hate for the project only grew with time and now I am in my fifth year. I have reached a stage where I absolutely hate the project and don’t know what to do. I can hardly do any work. I feel like quitting everyday and still feel it is wrong to quit this late. I have a very substandard thesis. I am lost and feel stuck, please advise on what to do. Thanks

DISCLAIMER

I serve as a mental health 1st aid officer at my school. I received basic mental health training but I AM NOT A PSYCHOLOGIST. During this role, I have assisted many PhD students going through the same dilemma.

PROBLEM

I totally sympathise with you. One thing to consider, however, is whether you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed. PhD is a long and tough journey. The more you know the more you know you don't know. This is normal. This is OK. During a journey, the candidate suffers a lot, and many teeny tiny triggers can accumulate very quickly into pushing any PhD student over the edge. Some personal issues do contribute to the stress as well. Writing anxiety, home sickness, work-life balance and upsetting news overhyped in the media are all factors that can manifest into feeling insignificant and depressed.

I noticed you are working in mechanical engineering (last year). A common case I witnessed with engineers, is that they enjoy the technical work more than anything else (a.k.a writing). Building cool stuff or writing a fascinating and concise piece of computer software is just euphoric. There is a chance that you experience these feelings because writing is due. There is also a chance that you feel the thesis is sub-standard because you wanted to go back and build new cool things. Basically, you need your euphoric fix.

ADVICE

My advice to you is not to rush. Buy yourself some time to figure out what the root cause is. You can consult a therapist or a life coach (you should have access to this service via your university). There are few steps to rewire your behaviour into accommodating the current inconvenience until you finish.

Take some time off (1 week would do). Just treat yourself in doing what you love. No work stuff. Play video games, travel, read poetry, etc. Whatever makes you happy.
Do not feel guilty for wasting a week not working and do not let anyone to make you feel guilty about it. You needed this time off. The project needed you to take this time off.
Go back to your thesis with a fresh attitude (not feeling guilty or late).
If you are experiencing the same feelings and still thinking about quitting. List the cool research or engineering ideas you would rather do instead of working on that project you hate. Pick one that takes N days and do it (don't work on weekends). Maybe you just need that euphoric fix. Set N=4.
Go back to your thesis again. If you still hate it, this time work on the project for at least 5-N days.
Repeat from 2 with N=N-1.

IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE

a. Your post-grad degree is just that. A degree. You have your entire life ahead of you after you finish.

b. The steps I listed above are from my supervision experience. While I consulted with a psychologist in designing these steps, they do work on case by case basis and are not scientifically tested. Think of these steps as a life hack.

c. If you feel like not getting from bed in the morning for two days in a row, seek medical help. It is probably nothing or just a dietary deficiency but you better check.

d. If you are an international student, explore the possibility that you may be feeling homesick. Do not get defensive or shy to admit it. It is real and it happens to almost everyone.

e. I am not advocating sticking in a program that does not work for you. There is no shame in quitting. However, if you are quitting I advise you to do it for the right reasons. Please be careful of the legal consequences, if any. Also please consider the career interruption period (5 years) on your CV.


Non-academic positions after PhD in computer science With the academic job situation so tight and uncertain, I am thinking of jobs outside academia (after a PhD in Computer Science). There are plenty of programming jobs that require an undergrad or even no degree. I tried some of them and they are so routine and so narrow that one gets frustrated easily. They also involve 8-5, M-F drudgery.
Can anyone suggest better alternatives. How do companies advertise for research positions? I haven't seen many ads for those. BTW, I live in Southeast of US and due to family reasons can not relocate far.

There is a large and active demand for computer science Ph.D. holds outside of academia. Some of the main classes of positions:

Contract R&D organizations like IHMC (near you in Florida) or my own employer, work a lot like soft-money academia.
Government laboratories are much the same, though the money works differently.
Government agencies need Ph.D.-level people to help manage their R&D portfolios, either directly as program managers or via private-sector contractors like Booz-Allen.
Giant companies like Lockheed-Martin, Pfizer, or Ford have high-tech or internal R&D sections that do Ph.D.-level computer science work.
Near any major tech university, you will find lots of startup companies and  consulting firms and other odd niches.
Finance companies and hedge funds will offer you lots of money in exchange for your immortal soul.

These are just a few of the more typical routes: the research ecosystem in the US is actually very complex and has a lot of strange niches; I don't have solid numbers, but I suspect the outside-of-academia R&D world is actually much larger than traditional academia, and that's even before we start counting non-R&D positions like hedge funds.

Some of these sorts of jobs, you can find via ordinary online job listings.  You'll likely do a lot better, though, if you reach out through your professional network and research community.  Your advisor and other faculty are one good place to start: they'll likely have former students and other colleagues to put you in touch with outside of academia.  Another good step is to go to the big conferences in your area, especially those with a more applied flavor, and look for the industry people there.  You'll likely find quite a number of good opportunities, especially if you are a US citizen.


How to react to the retraction of a conference acceptance? One of my papers was accepted at a regional conference. The conference organizers wanted the presenters to register to the conference much more in advance than common. I wrote the organization chair and repeatedly expressed my sincerest intention to attend the conference. But with the conference being so far away and the registration being actually quite hefty, I asked the organizer about the cancellation policy, since there was none listed on their website. I also have a family situation that makes it hard for me to plan so far in advance, but for my career it would be important to present at conferences like this one.
As a response, I received an email in which the conference organization chair basically retracted my conference acceptance. I am a little bit shocked, since I really wanted to attend the conference and thought I had made that clear in my email.

What would be the professional way to react? Do I just accept the conference chair's decision to retract my acceptance and walk away? Or do I email the chair, explain that I really want to attend and submit my registration fee?

If you're willing to register by the stated deadline (and that deadline hasn't already passed), then you could call the conference chair and explain that you would still like to present at the conference and that you're willing to register before the deadline.  This is not the kind of problem that you'd want to resolve through emails.


Is it common to include author without any contribution in a paper? I have recently finished a paper and send it to my supervisor for review. He corrected it and before submission, he added some authors (some labmates, collaborators) who have no idea about my project. Also, he did not even ask me before adding though I worked so hard for that project. How ethical it is? Because he is my supervisor, I could not raise my voice. But I think this is not right. Is it so common phenomenon in academia?

No, it is not ethical.
Yes, it is common.
Particularly for countries that have requirements on absolute number of papers to be published by grad students prior to graduation, this is a relatively common practice. Many journals now ask for the authors to explicitly list what was each author's contribution to the article, but of course this is also quite easily padded.
A question to consider, however, is whether or not these other authors had any contribution to your project you're not aware of. For example, if you are doing experimental work, perhaps they built the system you use to acquire your data - even if they have no idea about your data or experiments. In these cases some argument could be made for their inclusion. Whether that's true or not in your case is up to you.
As to what to do about it, if you have a good relationship with your advisor, ask him why they are being added using the most neutral language you can find. They may have some very good reason for adding them. If you don't agree, you can voice your disagreement and go from there. If you have a poor relationship with your advisor, you probably will just have to accept it and move on. I don't recommend secretly or "accidentally" going against your advisor's wishes since this will likely backfire, and they will in any case simply correct it at the proof stage.


Should I report an accepted PhD thesis in which the literature review is copied verbatim from sources? While writing the literature review for my doctoral dissertation, I picked up a few recent dissertations on similar topics from the library to get some pointers on references and style. As I was reading some of the articles cited in one of these theses, I discovered that this person had lifted large blocks of text from the cited works verbatim. Although the original works were cited, the borrowed text was not presented as a quote, but used directly in the thesis.

I checked a few more, just out of curiosity, and realized that basically the whole literature review by this author (who graduated with a PhD two years ago) was cut-and-paste verbatim quotes strung together (and who knows how much more of the thesis is plagiarized - I only checked this one chapter).

This really ticks me off, as I (and many students like me) spend a great deal of time reworking cited information into proper coherent explanations for our projects. I happen to know the offending author's advisor pretty well, as we currently work together outside of my graduate program.

Should I say something or should I just let this person get away with plagiarizing large parts of their dissertation?

Edit:

I still don't know what I will do about this -- no-one wants to be a tattle-tale, and it really isn't any of my business how other people go about getting their doctorates. However, as I am currently writing my dissertation, it really irks me when I see someone else getting away with this, as I know from experience how much hard work goes into writing a PhD thesis.

I just have one more comment -- I ran the chapter in question through the TurnItIn software, which I have access to as an instructor at my institution. The thesis came back as 52% unoriginal. Turnitin only counts exact matches, so the 52% figure doesn't even include some of the paragraphs that I caught, where the author has changed one or two words but kept the sentence structure.

I doubt that there would be any legal consequences, even if I report the thesis for plagiarism -- it is more a question of academic dishonesty and what steps the institution that awarded the degree would take. I will show it to my advisor and see what he says before I do anything.

This is of course a sensitive issue. However, the ethically correct behavior is to notify someone responsible about the problem. Etiquette says to go to the advisor first, as the advisor is the person who, after the author who committed the plagiarism, stands to lose the most from the accusation.

However, if you feel squeamish about doing it by yourself, you can talk to your advisor about the best way to proceed.

The main issue on your part is if you will need to rely on the plagiarizer's advisor for recommendation letters. Then you should definitely proceed with caution, and with the support of your advisor, department administrators, or both.

Of course, make sure that you've done your due diligence before going public with your charges, and to have the evidence with you when you meet with anyone about this matter.


If I define acronyms in the abstract, should I define them again in the rest of the paper? I've noticed in some papers (CS) that even if the authors define acronyms in the abstract, they restate them once again in the rest of the paper. It is like "what happens in the abstract stays in the abstract"!

So, I was wondering if there is a rule regarding the above?

Abstracts are read separately from the paper itself. They aren't an introduction, but more of a condensed version.

So if the paper defines an acronym, it shouldn't rely on the abstract for it. On the other hand, the abstract is supposed to be fairly short, so there isn't usually much of a case for defining acronyms there.

It depends on the paper, of course, but consider spelling out the whole term in the abstract if it is referenced only once there.


Is it inappropriate to ask for a salary specification when interviewing for a postdoc position? I am in the last year of my PhD (neuroscience/biomed research) in Italy and I have applied for an interesting postdoc position in Perth, Australia, at a neuroscience research centre affiliated with the UWA.

The call that I have applied for is describe as “founded”, although without any hint about the actual salary. During the interviews and the few further emails with the new PI he has never mentioned the income, just stating that it would be provided “from internal sources” (so independently for grant funding) for the two years-contract. Btw he also offered me to help with visa, accommodation, etc, in case of hiring.

I haven’t pushed this topic any further and I am still waiting for their final decision. Do you think it would be inappropriate to ask the amount of my salary and how should I approach it? I am very excited about the idea  to have a postdoc experience overseas, but I am sure that relocate completely will be a quite big deal and I am not familiar with the Australian cost of life, so knowing the actual income could help me a little to evaluate the whole thing.

I think it's a pretty common situation, during my applications I have noticed one of the two alternatives with regards to salary when looking for postdoc positions:

it's clearly specified in the job advert. This typically happens if the salaries are somehow regulated at an institutional level, thus there is little room for negotiation (if any at all).
it's never mentioned, in the advert or during interviews. I have noticed that many hiring academics have the tendency to think that salary is not an important matter in the decision of an academic position. For the sake of the argument I'll not go into why that's a frustrating assumption, but the fact of the matter is that many group leaders assume that if you are applying for an academic position you have sorted out your priorities and the salary isn't on top of that list.

Let's come back to your case at hand; I don't think it's inappropriate to want to have an idea about your salary before accepting a position. After all it is a professional affair and you are entitled to know every little detail of the rights and responsibilities that come with the position you are considering.

I would however rather wait to see if they will offer the job to you, before taking up any negotiations. So in terms of priorities:

make sure it's you who they pick
try to see what kind of an offer they would be willing to make.

And finally regarding postdoc salaries in Australia; according to this link they are around $75-$85K/year (that is aussie dollars btw). I have no idea how reliable this source is, but that was literally on the first page of a google search, so I am sure you can dig into it if you put in a bit of time on it.

Best of luck! :)


Do presentations given during interviews count as invited talks? I am in the process of interviewing for faculty positions and trying to keep my CV up to date as I go.  Should I include research (or teaching) presentations given during on-campus interviews as invited talks? Or are they considered just a part of the interview process and better left off the CV?

I disagree with Dave.  An invited talk is, by definition, a talk that you've been invited to give.  Yes, interviews count.  (More-or-less inviting yourself is not necessarily different than a non-interview invited talk.)

I agree that you shouldn't reveal which of your invited talks are actually interviews, but that's only an issue if all your invited talks happen in the last semester before you submit your thesis.  (And maybe you should wait until after interview season is over to add them.  The people who are interviewing you are desperately curious about where else you're interviewing.)


Uncertainty in Essay Writing: How do I know I will find a good argument? I have a few things that I would like to explore for my Masters thesis. However, I don't know yet whether I am good at this kind of topic, its more historical than what I am used to etc.

But my question is this:

How do people settle on a research question they haven't really explored yet, but then also know that they will be able to have something (more or less substantial) to argue for / to contribute once they are in the topic?

I feel like have an interesting topic, but I have no idea yet what I want to argue for or whether I have anything to contribute yet.

Simple: You start exploring several ideas, gathering references, learning how the attempted solutions work, searching for possible extensions/alternative approaches.

As Edison said: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". You'd have to put in the "perspiration" part to be able to see the "inspiration" spark. Or, as Pasteur stated it, "Chance favours the prepared mind".