How is a new academic journal born? We have witnessed (heard or read) about the birth of new academic journals many times. I have a vague idea how that happens:

A scientist or a group of scientists recognize the need for an academic journal in a specific field or a new scientific society considers to publish a journal,
they choose a group of experts as founders and/or chief editors,
they determine a scope and some basic rules for the journal,
they decide about the number of issues in each year and similar things,
they find a publisher or decide to publish the journal entirely on web, they establish a web site for the journal,
and then they announce the new journal in the related scientific community.

Did I miss any stage? But I suspect there are lots of discussions, negotiations, arrangements and cooperations behind the curtain, which public (the rest of the related scientific community) doesn't know. So my questions are:

What is a typical procedure for establishing a respectful academic journal?
Do financial considerations play a key role?
Should the founders be top experts (to some degree) in the field?
Is it important the new journal be affiliated to a scientific society or be published by a recognized publisher?
Why are some new journals published only on-line?
What are the influential factors for the success of a new journal?
How do the founders choose the editors?
What else should one consider for initiating a new academic journal?

Please share your partial answers too if you don't have all the answers.

Disclaimer: I am just curious and I don't intend to initiate any new journals in the near future.;)

Here is a first attempt at providing some short suggestions:

You need to identify the scope of the journal and it is best if it does not directly compete with others. Competition is more detrimental if the scope is narrow, it is unavoidable if the scope is wide. You need to make sure it has an international audience (a local journal would probably not end up prestiguous). Find a set of editors that is international in composition, preferably with well known active researchers at the helm. And then you need to look for publishers. I would say that Open Access is what you should go for. Many government funding agencies in Europe now request researchers to publish in Open Access.
Financial in what sense? If you manage to get a commercial publisher to publish your journal they will most certainly set up a budget of some sort. This question is the most difficult to answer. You need to get some finances in to support review systems, type-settings (and by the way, LaTeX would be your way to produce consistent high quality journal papers most easily; you also need someone to design the journal for you). In Open Access journals people usually pay to submit papers, in commercial cases, published papers are charged per page. Many review systems take a fee for each paper submitted. So there will inevitably be some finances involved but they will be determined by the systems you chose.
Yes, without having the journal stamped as serious by established scientists, it will not be easy.
Scientific Society would help but they will probbaly then take over the journal. A publisher/distributor (commercial, society, other body accepted by the community etc.) is a must. You need systems for submitting, managing and publishing manuscripts as well. Getting branded through a publisher is a good way to become recognized.
I would argue that it is only a matter of time before all journals are on-line only. Printing is no longer necessary and really only a waste of time and funding (not to mention resources). Any new journal will almost certainly be on-line only.
A strong line-up of editors and then try to get established scientists to commit to publish in the journal to set a good base-line. You need to work up citations to make the citation index, which takes effort and some time. The citation Index, whether you like it or not, is a hurdle that will make or potentially break any effort. In the long-term people will not published in journals that are not ISI listed.
Chosing the editors should probably be done as publically as possible. I can imagine getting names of persons that are willing to run together and then put them up for a public vote within th ecommunity. This way everyone (who will hopefully send their papers to the j) can feel they are part of the process.
Just make sure it is a communal effort and not a private enterprise. Get as many as possible involved by starting discussions early on in public. Use conferences and listservers (if the community has one) as vehicles for this. Facebook, twitter etc. might also be possible to involve.

EDIT: The journal The Cryosphere is a good and successful  example of a new journal (Open Access). It became ISI listed after a very short time because it received the support of the community in terms of good papers to establish it. It is now a key publication in the field. (and I am not paid to say this!)


Should I cite or credit images I found online for a conference presentation? I am going to do a conference presentation on so-called Smart Cities

As you can imagine, the concept of a Smart City is best conveyed using pictures (it is worth a thousand words).

I found a picture which I think can capture this concept

There are others like it,

Since I didn't create them, therefore technically I think I should credit these images, but it is a lot of extraneously and unnecessary information for the audience.

I also see that many people do not credit images when they are presenting, and I would wager a guess that most of those images are not generated by themselves.

Should I attempt to credit or cite this image?

(Not an IP expert, just a researcher who has struggled with the same question).

Even citing them may not be enough. Fair use doesn't extend as far as most people think it does: for the exception to apply, you have to be using the materials in a "transformative" way, not in the same way as the original work. Further, the conference may be considered a commercial activity even if you personally are not benefitting financially. Note also that the copyright holder may not be the author, but the journal in which the figure was published.

Thus, I suspect the "legally correct" answer to your question is that you should ask the copyright holder for permission to reproduce the image, and also ask them if they want to be attributed.

As you say, most people just use images willy-nilly, hoping that the copyright owner will not complain. In a conference talk in which the slides are not publicly available, that seems like a safe bet.

Note that for more mundane pictures (e.g., a picture of a dog for a computer vision project), there are some sites that specifically waive copyright and do not request attribution. This may be a good way to reduce the number of pictures that you need to cite and/or try to get copyright permission for.


What are the consequences of using Sci-Hub? A student of mine has told me about Sci-Hub, where people can download copyrighted scholarly articles for free.

I have cautioned him that it is illegal, but he challenged me asking me what would be the consequences for him if he only downloads files uploaded by others.

So my question is, what are the potential consequences of using Sci-Hub?

It's of questionable legality, but it's not going to lead to prosecution. For me personally using sci-hub has led to new research results in fields outside of my specialization that will (very likely) appear in leading peer reviewed journals. One problem I'm not sure about is whether it's wise to say in the acknowledgements: "I thank Alexandra Elbakyan for setting up Sci-Hub without which the research results reported in this paper would have been impossible", in an Elsevier paper.

Using sci-hub therefore has at least the consequence of your personal scientific enlightenment, and possibly even of many other people who benefit from research you have been able to as a result of using sci-hub.


Publishing outside of my PhD Research I am currently undertaking my PhD in a very niche sub field of Artificial Intelligence. However, I have, what I consider, a strong background in programming and often contribute to many open source projects in my spare time. I have recently started an Open Source project which solves a very particular problem, but is outside the scope of my PhD research.

I wish to publish my hobby research and I doubt this is something my project supervisors, or university would be interested in. Should I go ahead and publish without their knowledge, or should I ethically bring it to their attention before I send it off? It should be noted, because it is my hobby project, I don't particularly want it influenced by an academic agenda.

This is something that you need to discuss specifically with your advisors. They may or may not be interested in the publication—but they may also have an interest in ensuring that your goal of publishing doesn't interfere with your paid work. (For instance, spending a lot of time editing your "hobby" manuscript when you should be working on your talk for an upcoming conference for your "paid" project.)

You should also check with your university's intellectual property office about the guidelines for such work. So long as you're doing things on your own without university assistance or resources, there might not be a problem. But if you need to use equipment owned by them to produce your idea, things might change.


Should I take undergraduate CS classes if all I do is applied software dev and data science? I am a PhD student in social science who got interested in programming via data analysis in R and various utility tools in Python, SQL, Java (for web scraping, data querying, etc.).

I am considering whether I should take several undergrad CS classes at my university, including 1) Data Structure & Algorithm, 2) Software Development (both in Java), and 3) Database.

My concern is that I've seen various posters on this site claiming that what's taught in CS program has very little to do with the craft of programming itself. My main goal is to better my data analysis skills (for a data science career) and perhaps learn some machine learning and agent-based modeling. Given that goal, should I those classes? If not, what's the best way to learn programming the applied way?

(A common answer to "how to learn programming by yourself" is to do a project. However, engaging in a project without guidance and quick feedback is a very easy way to get sidetracked, especially since I'm in social science where programming skill is nothing but a tool and not valuable in and of itself. So, if your answer is "to do a project", please provide more details on how to get guidance, e.g. data analysis books)

If you are considering such classes, then go for it!

You are right that basics of computer science have little to do with direct application (its unlikely that you will need to invent a new sorting algorithm). But:

algorithmic thinking is invaluable,
getting it at level of computer science students (rather than "computer science for liberal arts majors") may be a challenge worth it,
getting contacts and interaction with CS students is invaluable (you may learn a lot about applied programming by immersion),
learning advances CS will pay off (regardless if you stay in academia or not).

Dedicating a year or whole studies to something is a commitment people sometimes regret. Taking a one or two courses someone is interested it is rarely regretted.

@EnergyNumbers warns you against lack of focus. But hey, you are not taking a random subject! It is a thing that will boost skills you need for the things you are doing.

Source: I did take one such class (while majoring in phys/math) and it was great (my only regret is I didn't take more). Now I am doing data science.

Disclaimer: I do like to side-track and I have little respect towards entrenching oneself in one, arbitrarily defined field.


How to make a concise dissertation defence in Math department I am a math student in the US preparing for an hour long defense of my thesis. I am assuming that the dissertation committee has already read my dissertation by the time of my defense.

Any advice for preparing and giving the dissertation defense talk?
What balance between presenting subtle parts of the proofs and a clear big picture of the results obtained should I aim for?
Would it be more interesting for the committee to hear me explaining more technical parts of the proofs rather then the statements of the main theorems obtained?

I don't think there is a meaningful answer to this question that is helpful across all US math departments and advisors.  There is too much variation in what is expected.  You need to find out what your committee expects.

That said, if I had to answer without knowing your department or committee, I would recommend trying to focus on the big picture but making sure that you spend most of your time explaining your contribution to that big picture.  That's certainly what you'll want to do for job talks, which you're presumably also giving around now.

If the committee is concerned about your understanding of the technical parts of the proofs, they can ask you in the closed exam following the public talk.


Grades from transfer university, impact on graduate admissions? I am wondering about what the impact of a poor grade that is taken as transfer credit would be.

I am taking a core EECS (Logic Gates) class at a different university for some transfer credit because I am working full-time this school year (as a co-op). Since my university required only a C for transfer, I was not planning to put much effort into the class because I'd be busy with work.

However, I recently found that some universities like Berkeley require transcripts from all schools attended. In this case, I'm sure that it'd look bad, but I am wondering how bad it would be?

For graduate admissions, transfer credit is treated the same way as regular credit.  Most universities will want all your undergraduate transcripts for graduate admissions.


Does inclusion on the ARC ERA 2010 journal ranking list imply the journal is not predatory? Leading up to 2010, the Australian Research Council’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative categorized journals (and conferences) into four categories A*, A, B, and C (see this Wikipedia page for details).

C-ranked journals (with the lowest ranking) are described as journals:

  that do not meet the criteria of higher tiers

which is not particularly informative.

I’m not sure if this initiative excluded journals that would be considered predatory (check your email spam folder for examples of predatory journals).  B or higher ranked journals would not be predatory, as there are people who vouch for them as containing some high-quality publications.  I’m not sure how the C journals were included.

Question: Does inclusion on the ARC ERA 2010 journal list imply the journal is not a predatory journal?

There are various point systems that I've seen used that assign rewards based on the number of publications at A*, A, B, and C levels. Also, as the Wikipedia page says, proposals for inclusion needed to have endorsement by academics. Thus, my starting assumption would be that a journal with a C ranking was considered by the ARC to be legitimate, and therefore not predatory.

Of course, it's possible that some of those assessments were incorrect or a journal could change its practices over time. And there are a range of pay-to-publish journals where the practices are in a grey area (e.g., publishing mixed or low quality work). So I don't think that knowing that a journal is ranked C is enough. If you are submitting your work, you should know more about a journal than that. But it might be a reasonable working assumption for administrative purposes.


Acknowledging funds from an award tied to a specific individual I am organizing a conference at a major University. Much of the funding for the conference has come from the an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation award received by a particular scholar. He controls the funds tied to the award and has chosen to give some funding to support the conference. Should this be acknowledged on the advertising material associated with the conference? What wording should I use, if so? It looks strange to me to include the name of the academic, viz. "This conference has been made possible by Prof. X", but if I simply say "This conference has been made possible by the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation", this gives the impression that they directly funded the conference, which is not the case.

Advice is appreciated!

I have seen this kind of acknowledgement. It was phrased something like "We are grateful to Prof. X for supporting the conference through his Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding.".


Submit in journal with no DOIs? My professor and I have been trying to publish a paper, but it keeps being rejected. A journal emailed my professor asking her to submit the paper to them, but I am not sure it is legitimate.

None its papers have DOIs.
It is OA, but only one issue is available and it has <5 papers

Are these warning signs?

Yes, they are warning signs.

DOIs are cheap. Not having them is a definite red flag.
Being OA with <5 papers means, at least, this is a new journal. Depending on how many years it's been since the first paper was published, it could mean the journal's editorial board is inactive, or the publisher is not giving the journal much attention. If the journal does not go anywhere, or (even worse) if it shuts down, your paper is not likely to be read much.
Finally you write that a journal emailed asking your professor to submit the paper to them. This is weird, because the journal is not likely to know your paper's been rejected by some other journal.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't submit to the journal anyway, but be careful.


Fairness of assigning different reviewers for final decision on paper I recently submitted a paper to a journal. My paper came back with a reject and resubmission allowed decision. When I resubmitted the paper it went to other reviewers.

Under the journal's rules, this is the last time i will get reviews and after that paper will be either rejected or accepted. How is it fair to send the paper to different reviewers, who will than again give their comments on the paper? If the reviewers are changed shouldn't the author be given one more chance to address the comments?

When you submit a paper to a journal, you agree, in essence, to go by their rules and procedures for that paper until and unless it is rejected. It is too late, now, to object.

The fact that the editor wanted additional views of the paper is a good thing, for the journal and its readers. Their goal is to publish high quality papers.

And, if you are rejected, by whatever process, you have the opportunity to submit the paper elsewhere, of course.


Listing Latin Honor GPA while you are still undergraduate in your CV I am wondering if my GPA is in the category of one of Latin honors like Cum Laude or Summa Cum Laude but I am still undergrad can I include Latin honors in CV while applying to graduate school?
This post is talking about this case however whoever asked the question did not specify whether he is still undergrad or graduate student.
Honor Listed in undergrad. Should it go on the CV for grad applications ?

I would not include such a statement in your CV, since Latin honors are normally awarded at graduation. Until you have actually received the honors, don't list it in your CV. (Moreover, putting "eligible for magna cum laude" or the equivalent makes it look like you're trying too hard to list extra prizes, which reflects poorly on you.)


Is it considered cheating if I purchase an essay but then don't use it? According to one of my friend's suggestion, I visited a website and was going to find some tutoring support, then I ended up hiring a person to write the essay.

However, I changed my mind and I did work on the essay by myself without reading the bought essay. I am going not to come back to the website again. So if I just hired the essay writer but am not using their work, am I called a cheater? If I pay for a writer am I already cheating, or only when I use their work?

If your task is to write an essay and you let somebody do it for you, then you are cheating. If you copy somebody's work (even just a part of it) then you are cheating. If you try to let somebody's work pass as your own, then you are cheating.

You are saying that you are not using their work – I hope that means that you are not using their text (in total or parts of it), you have not just obfuscated the text and try to pass it as your own, or have not rewritten the essay in your own words (keeping the ideas and golden thread of the bought essay). If this is true, then (at least in my courses) you would not be a cheater. In all these cases you could replace the bought essay with the essay of a classmate and we would have a very similar question. The only difference is that you have paid money for it.


reuse of text between publications (CS) This probably depends on field, but in Computer Science  it is common for people to publish similar material in workshops, then conferences, then journals.  Each time it is acceptable to reuse some material from one level to the next as long as there is some new material (journals sometimes will publish verbatim but that's anohter matter).

So, is it acceptable to borrow significant text from one conference paper to use in a second conference paper?   In my experience the answer is no, but I'm curious if there are any guidelines, and if so, whether they vary across disciplines.

BTW, after posting I came across this: Attitudes towards self-plagiarism ... certainly related to this.  I commented there, and should have mentioned here, that a complicating factor with regard to reuse of text arises from the use of blind submission: if you can't say who you are, you can't admit to copying your own text.

I would say it depends:

Some papers go from Abstract to Extended Abstract to Full Paper. In this case I see nothing makes it unacceptable. The same goes if you are extending your own results.
I often see the same material copied in the Background (and
sometimes in the literature review) section with the same authors for
different papers. That is in addition to Definitions and common
notations as @Suresh said.
I believe in this case it is ethical and valid since Background (or Definitions) is not the paper contribution.  This ,in turn, has a disadvantage (and I really suffered from this): if you were not able to understand some parts of the background in the first paper, you will stuck there. In other words, you will not find another wording of it.

Returning to the question:

  is it acceptable to borrow significant text from one conference paper
  to use in a second conference paper?

If the significant text is not significant part of the contribution then IMHO Yes. The word significant here is the key and it is ambiguous but let's say its 40% of the paper.

The bottom line is:
Removing the borrowing text, does your paper have a contribution by its own?

I have seen the opposite where some papers are very similar to others and I think this is a bad habit. At the end, you are trying to discover new things not to copy them.


Does an admission committee assess Verbal/Analytical Writing scores differently for International applicants? I have always wondered how admission committees in the US look at the Verbal/Analytical Writing scores for international applicants.

English is my third language, although the primary language of instruction in college. As I have studied in an engineering field, some of the words I encountered in the verbal section are completely new to me.

My verbal scores are what one would call "average", although being an international student I felt I did quite well considering my background.

Admission processes in the US is not standardized so no one can give you a definite answer. Some schools may consider the fact that English is not the applicant's first language, some do not. Some of the institutions are a lot more transparent and rigid when it comes to the scores' minimal requirements and it wouldn't hurt to ask the registration person.

There is an extra layer of complexity as well: even GRE itself is not uniformly regarded positively by admission committee members. Some may give it all the weight, some may consider it a flawed method and would rather use a more holistic evaluation.

As a former foreign student in the US and now a serving committee member in my department's admission committee (in the US), my personal advice is if your GRE verbal and writing are low, try to have a good TOEFL score (iBT > 100, CBT > 250, PBT > 600) as a back up. GRE verbal is notorious for testing words that are extremely infrequent in everyday life (even academic life) and most members in my committee do not consider it a specific enough test for identifying if someone lacks English communication skill. However, TOEFL is designed to assess people with English as second language and its scope is a lot closer to day-to-day communication. We tend to be more lenient with international applicants with strong TOEFL, well-written statement, but relatively weaker GRE verbal and writing scores.

As for the analytical score, I have not witnessed a big enough difference that would hint a special consideration.


Notating one rough semester GPA-wise My first semester of college was extremely rough GPA wise. I am an otherwise almost straight 4.0 student (up to -0.02), but my first semester of college I got a 3.46 because of both adjusting to a new  environment and an extraordinary amount of personal/familial issues that came up simultaneously (it really was an inordinate amount - I even got 4.0 during Covid-19).

Would it be wise to notate this separately on my CV/grad school application? If so, how would I do so? I don't see how to do it without making it look like an excuse and it would be taking up valuable space (although more of a problem on the CV than on the application).

To clarify, I understand that for most applicants, this would be ok. However, I am trying to get into extremely competitive programs (ex. CS@Stanford/Google), hence the concern.

I got a 3.46

In general, a 3.46 is reasonably good. Given your otherwise excellent performance, it is not necessary to make excuses or explain. In fact, I recommend not doing so, for two reasons:

Grades are only one part of your application. You are clearly a "check" in that box, so there is nothing to gain by dwelling on it. In fact, this is likely to come across unsympathetically ("I'm a millionaire, but listen to my explanation about why I'm not a billionaire....")
The explanations/excuses you would offer (transition, personal conflict) are not particularly compelling, and are largely aligned with what the reviewers would have assumed in the absence of any such explanation.


Add acknowledgments and self citations to paper only after the blind review? I am writing a conference paper of the first time, and the conference I am targeting requires anonymized submissions for the peer review. But at the same time, we (as in, my research group) are required to acknowledge the grants and support of our funding agency in all our publications. Plus, I also need to refer to a previous work of our group.

Is it appropriate for me to leave out the acknowledgements section and the reference to my work while sending the paper for review, but add these details later on if and when the paper gets accepted?

Is appropriate to add details (the acknowledgments section, for instance) which were not a part of the paper when it went for review?

I could think of this as the only way to satisfy all concerns. Are there better suggestions from more experienced people in academia?

You're required to acknowledge grants and grant agencies in your publications. Right now, all you have is a submission. If and when the submission becomes a publication will be the time to add the grant information in, especially if the venue has a strong anonymization policy for submissions.


Does anyone fund research in mathematical finance? The question is pretty much the title.  If you are an academic, is it possible to get anyone to pay you to do research in mathematical finance?

You can interpret the question broadly, to include mathematics or computational science that is used in finance, as long as this research has some real connection to finance as practiced today.

Ignoring the somewhat tendentious statements about mathematicians and funding mathematics, the National Science Foundation in the US is one example of an agency funding research in mathematical finance. In fact, all I did was type "nsf mathematical finance" into google and I got three awards listed in the top 10. I'm sure there are many more.


How can I cite my dissertation in a paper that will be double-blind reviewed? A chapter in my dissertation has not been published in an archival conference. I am writing a paper based on the chapter for a conference that does double-blind paper review.

The paper will include pretty much the entire chapter, which presents a method, and will perform additional analysis of the method. The analysis on its own, without the method, is not enough to merit a paper. In the interest of the full disclosure, I should cite my dissertation. How do I do that without revealing my identity?

Is citing my dissertation without name and institution, just the title, appropriate or not?

I know there were similar questions recently, but none asking about the dissertation. The dissertation is different because it is a publication, a literature search will return a hit, but does not count as one, and is considered OK to publish chapter from in conferences and journals. The field is Computer Science.

The challenge here is seems to be to ensure that if the reviewers do stumble across your thesis, then the failure mode will be penetrating blinding rather than accusations of plagiarism.

It is my belief that with an "extract" paper like this, the thesis should be cited in any case.  In most cases, there will be some connection to other portions of the thesis that could motivate such a citation (e.g., a motivation or an application).  I also think that it is good to explicitly acknowledge the relationship to the thesis, e.g., "This manuscript is based on work also presented in [cite]", though the customs of your field may differ.

Then you can appropriately blind the citation to the thesis, e.g., "Ph.D. thesis, blinded for review."  This makes the relationship clear without violating blinding.  At that point, you are preserving blinding to the best of your ability, and while a reviewer can certainly try to penetrate blinding if they want, you certainly won't run into any problems with misunderstanding about plagiarism.


Professors meeting undergrads in social events I know a professor in my university that I was close to when I was an undergrad, not in a academic setting, but in a social setting (church in my case). I did not take his class, but I do know that he is close to many other undergraduates in the social circle, and many of them do take his class.

While I'm fairly certain that he does not play favoritism, I'm unsure if the professor should withdraw himself from such social circle because he is bound to have his personal friends take his class, and that might be a potential conflict of interest. However, the town is a small college town, and it's unreasonable for him to switch to another social circle (church) since all churches are full of undergrads, and perhaps that is asking for too much.

How should professors behave in this situation? Is it ok for him to be part of a social circle with many undergrads, knowing that some of them may take his class in the future?

It would certainly be unreasonable to expect professors to leave a church because the church also has undergraduates in it.

What you're describing isn't really what's usually called a conflict of interest: the professor doesn't actually stand to gain in any concrete way by giving the student better grades.  What you're concerned about is bias, which is a real, but generally lesser, problem.  It's basically unavoidable to have some potential bias involving students - professors will inevitably end up with students who they know from outside school, or who are identifiably the children of a colleague or administrator or donor, or who we just find ourselves naturally liking (or disliking).

It is the responsibility of a professor to avoid letting this bias turn into favoritism, or even the appearance of favoritism, but the usual approach to this is to have clear standards and try to grade blindly (without knowing whose work we're grading), not to try to eliminate all possible sources of bias.


How to find the money for an Open Access publication fee, if you're a postdoc and you don't have any funds? Last year I finished my PhD in Europe and now I'm a postdoc in North America. I work on computer science.

An year ago I wrote a paper with my former Europen supervisor and a former colleague, and submitted it to a conference. My former supervisor presented the work at the conference.

Now we just discovered that the steering committee selected our paper for a post-conference supplement in a Open Access BMC journal. We're very happy for this selection (they chose 5 papers out of 52) but there's a problem: we don't have funding to pay the ~2,000 euros publication fee for the journal.

My former supervisor has no funding at the moment; my former colleague is still a PhD student and he's broke; myself I'm a postdoc with no research funding and I'm not going to ask to my current supervisor to pay (because I don't think it's fair and anyway he'd refuse).

What should I do?

That journal publication would be very important for my career, and quite useful for our scientific community. This supplement is a very unique occasion.

I see several routes to proceed, in the order in which I would suggest that you attempt them:

Check if your former or current institution has an organizational affiliation with the journal that will allow you to publish there for free (i.e., the OA version of a subscription).
Ask your current supervisor.  They might be willing to pay despite not being an author, provided that you list you current affiliation as well as your former (which is generally reasonable to do).
Many universities now have an open access "slush fund" to help deal with situations like these.  Check with the department leadership and the libraries at both your current and former departments and see if there is such a fund.
Contact the journal and explain the situation: they may be willing to waive the fee.
Publish the paper in a "traditional" journal that has no fee.


Are there cheaper alternatives to ACM and to IEEE Xplore digital libraries? The faculty in which I am currently working is planning to subscribe to the ACM Digital Library and to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. I am not pretty sure how much are the real costs of the subscription because for example in:

http://librarians.acm.org/sites/default/files/ACM_DL_PricingGuides2014_NoTabs_V19_Academic.pdf

it appears something about tiers; I suppose that for a small access to this material oriented only to students that are doing their bachelor's final year projects, we will be in tier 1. About IEEE I still do not have information about it.

In any case, I would like if there are another alternatives to those two digital libraries, excluding Arxiv because a lot of their articles have not been peer reviewed.

Any suggestion?

PD. Update information:
We would like to access to articles about all the fields of Computer Science, the access would be for around 20 students maximum each month (that is the number of students enrolled in their last bachelor project). We need only the articles to be reviewed for their research as supporting literature.

If you are needing frequent access to particular articles published by ACM and IEEE, then ACM DL and IEEE Xplore are really the only ways to go.

However, if you are needing to be able to find and reference general background information across a broad range of computer science subjects, then there are informal access methods which also work quite well.

First, Google Scholar is very good at finding non-paywalled copies of PDFs.  This is especially the case for computer science, where many conferences have very liberal policies about self-archiving and where many people strongly believe that material should be made accessible online.  Some organizations, such as AAAI and AAMAS just always put everything online for free as a matter of policy. Even IEEE and ACM are fairly liberal about this and rarely interfere with authors who do not follow the letter of their law.

Second, the ResearchGate site has an option for privately requesting copies of publications from authors, and most computer science authors are quite willing to share (again, there is a strong "information wants to be free" culture in much of the community).

The efficacy of these approaches varies from subcommunity to subcommunity, but it sounds like the type of general access you're looking for may well be sufficiently served by them.


How much info should I put in my CV under education In an academic CV, how much information do you put in the education field for each degree (assume the person is a post-grad/early career)?
Option 1: Degree, Specialization, Department, University, Year, Advisor, Thesis

Ph. D. in Foo science (2012)
Some Named School of Science, University of Bar,
Thesis: Qux control in Baz networks
Advisor: J. Q. Public

Option 2: Degree, Specialization, Department, University, Year

Ph. D. in Foo science (2012)
Some Named School of Science, University of Bar

Option 3: Degree, Specialization, University, Year

Ph. D. in Foo Engineering, University of Bar (2012)

Option 4: Degree, University, Year

Ph. D., University of Bar (2012)

I've often seen options 1 or 2 and in some cases, where there is a bigger body of work (publications, grants, etc.) to speak for the person than their degree, I've seen option 3. Option 4 is rarer, but one common trait among those that I've seen it with is that they are now working in a field different from what they did their PhD in and do not wish to bring attention to that (lest it hurt any chances). For example, a PhD in Physics now working in Computational Biology. I think CGPAs are pretty silly when it comes to research positions, but I'm not sure if I'm the only one.
However, I don't know what the expectations of the person seeing my CV are. I don't mean random visitors to my website or corporate HRs, but other academics who might be interested in working with me. Granted, if they're an academic, they'll probably focus on my publications more, but there's also something that's expected from a CV.

I would agree that option 1 is the most likely option for someone who is just coming out of graduate school, and is looking to continue in the same field for a while.

The department should be listed when relevant—that is, if the program in which the degree is awarded is different from the specialization in some where. For instance, if your PhD is in engineering, but the department conferring it is materials science, you should say something like number 2, rather than number 3.

I don't think there are many instances in which number 4 is very useful, because it looks like you're hiding what you did for a PhD. There are very few circumstances I can think of where this would work—except if the job call specifically required a degree from a particular subset of disciplines, to which you don't belong. But then something will probably come to light from the letters of recommendation, or from some other part of the application.

So, I'd stick with options 1 or 2, for the reasons I've outlined above.


Not credited in paper written by boss I'm a contractor hired by a software engineering company that is branching out into research. For the last two years I have been working almost solo on a research project for the company. A number of other people have come to help out on the project at some point or another, but currently all code in the codebase is written 100% by me. All of the novelties developed throughout the project were also done solo.

My boss has just written a research paper about the project which has been accepted by a low-tier journal. I got to read the paper today and while a number of my coworkers are credited, I am not. The credits consist of every non-contractor that has touched the project, as well as a number of higher ups in the company.

Furthermore, I created a number of figures used in the paper and edited the abstract.

Is this standard practice? Would it be reasonable to ask to be included in the authors list?

Edit: Just to update, my boss said that he had me in the authors list on the first draft, but when he ran it by my contracting company they said to take it off. I'm following up with them now.

As a contractor you may have explicitly or implicitly given over all of your intellectual product to the company. If that is the case then what they did is (minimally) acceptable. But in human terms it may not be proper. Certainly not "neighborly".

Since you indicate that there is a difference in how contractors and non-contractors were treated there may be some underlying justification, valid or not, for what was done.

I suspect that the practice is pretty common, but not universal.

However, it would be reasonable to ask for an acknowledgement at least, and maybe authorship. You can ask, at least. You might be refused and you might be given reasons why refusal is necessary, but you gain nothing from silence. At a minimum you will learn whether it is in your best interest to continue under such a relationship.


How does graduate admission committee detect plagiarism in letter of recommendation? If my current recommender recycles the letter from previous recommender after each other's consent, will this be classified as plagiarism?

This is for MS programs to US universities FYI.

This will not be classified as plagiarism. A letter of recommendation does not pretend to be original, it is just a bureaucratic document that is supposed to give information on the extent to which the recommender recommends you.


Research publications in string theory/QFT by undergrads Possible Duplicate:
  Importance of Undergraduate Research

I am a physics undergrad interested in pursuing research in string theory/ Quantum field theory for my PhD. I am feeling pressurized by the notion, that you NEED to publish a paper to get admission to a good grad school. I was wondering how common is it for a undergrad to write a research paper in these areas? Do most of the students selected for PhD admission in these areas at top universities already have research publications? Also how much is an undergrad aspiring to pursue these areas know before entering grad school.

I'm not in the same area as you are, so I couldn't speak for students in theoretical physics. However, generally speaking, a publication doesn't make or break a graduate application. They are definitely a plus, but I don't believe any department would simply reject a student because they have no publications.

If you wanted to find out if graduate students in your area had journal articles published during their undergraduate, you can browse the websites for the related departments of schools you are interested in. Almost all of them have lists of their graduate students, some of which may have uploaded their resumes. You can check the dates on their publications.

Although I said publications don't make or break an application, previous work including internships, projects, research with an advisor in a related area is definitely a must. You are required to show that your interests led you to pursue further work in your fields of interest. This doesn't even have to be the same field that you are applying to graduate school for. But you are required to demonstrate that you are willing to put in the time and effort to go above and beyond in what you like to do.


Application for a PhD in Germany: how specific do I need to be about my thesis plans? I've just finished my master's degree in physics and now I'm searching for a PhD position. I found a working group at a German university that is searching for some PhD students. In the vacancy it is asked for a CV and a statement of research interest. I know that I should write my motivation, qualification etc. for working at the research theme. But how precisely am I supposed to give the topic of my doctoral thesis? Is it sufficient to have a broader view of the topic and themes the working group is dealing with or is it necessary to formulate the concrete topic of my planned thesis? Also should the statement be part of the CV or should it be a separate document?

But how precisely am I supposed to give the topic of my doctoral thesis? Is it sufficient to have a broader view of the topic and themes the working group is dealing with or is it necessary to formulate the concrete topic of my planned thesis?

In general, most hiring PIs will want to see that you have "done your homework", that is, you have a good idea what the group does and that you're motivated to work on these kinds of things.
On a more specific level, you should address any concrete hints from the job advertisement. It's a good idea to be as specific as possible and mention a few ideas for topics you would like to work on. But unless the job advertisement explicitly asks you to do so, it wouldn't be required to have a detailed proposal of your thesis project.

Also should the statement be part of the CV or should it be a separate document?

If the advertisement explicitly asks for a "CV and statement of research interest", it should be two separate documents.


Controlled publication of an efficient factoring algorithm? Is there a procedure in place to cover the possibility that someone might find an efficient algorithm to factor large numbers and thereby break RSA encryption? This is just an instance of the more general problem where someone wants to publish a result that breaks an encryption standard. It seems like there are two main possibilities (I welcome the consideration of others):

Full publication, say, to a widely-read web site, newsgroup, etc. Likely outcome: chaos on a large scale as criminals break into the private spaces of innocent individuals.
Limited dissemination, perhaps to a few mathematicians or a government agency. Likely outcome: the government grabs control of the algorithm (and potentially its discoverer) and does the unpleasant things governments do with such things.

Of course, possibility 2 could easily devolve into possibility 1 if the algorithm becomes public.

Is there a consensus in the academic world about what to do with this problem?

You can prove that you have the algorithm without publishing it by publishing the factorization of a large number of well known test cases. Then people have time to adapt to a possible threat. If you are afraid of the government or the mafia, there is a sufficient number of ways to publish the algorithm at a preset date in the future, from cron jobs to hidden messages to good old notaries.


Common basic information and research for journal club presentation I'm currently in the process of preparing a journal club presentation (I'm a Psychogeriatrics physician). I've done a couple before, but always seem to re-invent the wheel when it comes to what basic information should be covered.

For example: checking author biographies and previous work so that I have a sense for the context, potential conflicts of interest, etc.

Other areas I usually cover: papers that cite this article, funding sources and journal impact factor.

Is there anything I'm missing?

PaulV's contribution is excellent.  In addition:  Understand the context that the paper appeared in, i.e. try to understand why the author wrote the article.  See the article in its historical context.


How do academics in humanities such as philosophy apply mathematics or physics in their discipline? (I am from an engineering background and know very little about liberal arts
and humanity programs, so I apologize in advance if my question sounds condescending or ignorant.)

I am often puzzled as to how academicians in the humanities (<- corrected) such as philosophy or religious study or in other branches of liberal arts, apply or integrate what we usually think of as "hard sciences" such as mathematics or physics into their studies. This is partially motivated by the plethora of questions on academia stackexchange asking about the feasibility of switching between from one to the other and vice versa, such as,

Teaching philosophy with a PhD in math

Changing field from Computer Science to Philosophy

I have two main questions:

I am not certain as to the difference between, for
example, a computer scientist like Stephen Cook, versus a philosopher
of computer science (there is certainly no shortage of philosophizing computer science, see
https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf). In particular,
could your average researcher or a student studying the philosophy of computer science feasibly come up
with new results in computer science or theorems on complexity theory?
Are there well-publicized research performed by religious
scholars or philosophers that actually inform or advances or guides
the development of mainstream theory in say astrophysics, biology,
medicine, mathematics, etc.?

While I am aware that these titles are not mutually exclusive, i.e.,
   a student of philosophy may well have a background in mathematics and vice versa, ultimately I am not certain about how subjects such as mathematics and physics can be made relevant to philosophy (or other areas). This has kept me wondering about the hypothetical questions: what would Kant say about string theory? What would Spinoza say about ZFC?
   What would Kierkegaard say about neural networks? Or the other way around, in what ways can quantum computing inform phenomenology?

First, a historical note: The idea that philosophy and mathematics are separate fields is a recent invention. A few hundred years ago, they were spoken of as one and the same. If you go back even further to the 16th century, physics becomes part of that same field, and even further back the term “philosophy” referred to any systemic investigation whose result was knowledge. For example, Newton’s great work was titled Principles of Natural Philosophy (in Latin) and while Aristotle more famously wrote on ethics and metaphysics, he also wrote on zoology, logic, physics, and biological taxonomy amongst other topics. Herodotus (primarily a historian by modern standards) and Hippocrates (a primarily a physician) were both considered philosophers. Herodotus wrote important religious theory in his history books and Hippocrates wrote important ethical ideas in his medical works (ask any western doctor about the “Hippocratic Oath”). These didn’t seem like digressions and interludes to contemporary readers. These were all works addressing topics of philosophy.

  What is the difference between the Philosophy of Computer Science and Computer Science?

Roughly, science studies X and the philosophy of science studies people who study X, ideas about X, and the connection between X and other philosophical questions. Topics in the philosophy of X (for every science) include questions that define the scope and nature of the field, as well as its epistemic standards such as research methods and standards of evidence.

Three examples of questions along these lines are:

In physics, there is generally a preference for a theory that possesses “mathematical elegance” over one that appears to be more ad hoc, even when the two theories have identical observed evidence. Is having this preference legitimate? If so, can it be justified based on the practice of physics alone or does it require appeal to other principles (maybe ontological principles, or epistemic ones)?
In computer science, one studies computers and computation. Given an object, how do you tell if it’s a computer? What does it mean to solve something “via a computation” or “via an algorithm” as opposed to via other means?
In physics, one studies the physical properties of objects. Someone might be tempted to say that mathematics analogously studies the mathematical properties of objects. However, we are used to thinking of physical properties as being those embodied by physical objects that exists in physical space (that is, mass is a property of this ball that exists in the world). Is there an analogous sense in which mathematical properties are embodied by mathematical objects that exist in mathematical space?

Over the course of the investigation of these topics, topic-specific questions tend to crop up. Contemporary philosophy of mathematics is extremely concerned with ontological and epistemological questions, while contemporary philosophy of medicine is primarily concerned with ethical issues and the philosophy of biology involves questions about the precise nature of life and the implications of extraterrestrial life.

It’s quite possible that someone could be an expert in subjects like this and not be able to do cutting edge mathematics and physics, though answering these questions certainly requires a substantial knowledge of the fields of science you are analyzing.

  Are there well-publicized research performed by religious scholars or philosophers that actually inform or advances or guides the development of mainstream theory in say astrophysics, biology, medicine, mathematics, etc.?

The answer historically is yes, even setting aside the historical note I opened with. Thales, Aristotle, Alhazen, Ptolemy the Second, and Jean Buridan are all famous people who would be considered philosophers by today’s standards who made substantial contributions to physics, astronomy, biology, medicine, mathematics, and other fields of science. If you’re looking for more recent contributions it’s more difficult.

There seems to be a historical bias in categorizing people as scientists when they did both science and philosophy (by modern standards). Although he’s far more famous for his work on calculus, Leibniz was also a very influential philosopher, and probably more influential as a philosopher in his time than as a mathematician. You’ve probably heard of his theory that we live in the “best of all possible worlds,” because an all powerful and all good god wouldn’t let us live in anything else. These ideas were so influential in his day that Voltaire became famous in part for attacking Leibniz’s philosophy, such as in his book Candide. Einstein, Minkowski, Turing, and Nash all did philosophy, but that aspect of their work is less well-known to the general public.

There are some people who are widely classified as philosophers who made substantial scientific advances in recent times. The work of the logician Gottlob Frege (1848 - 1925) was ignored in mathematics for a while, but the mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Giuseppe Peano would revolutionize mathematics by introducing axiomatic systems of logic and arithmetic grounded in Frege’s work. Linguistics is an example of a science that recently grew out of a field of philosophy, and so many recent philosophers have had substantial impacts on linguistics, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) and Saul Kripke (1940 - Present). The philosopher of mind and philosopher of language David Chalmers (1966 - Present) is hugely influential in the development of fields of computer science such as artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Chalmers is one of those people whose ideas are used to benchmark and understand developments in AI, as he has written extensively on the concept of intelligence and coined the term “the hard problem of consciousness.”

David Hume (1711 - 1776) wrote a book called an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding which is undoubtedly one of the 10 most influential philosophical works ever written in the West. Although it’s impact is most prominent in philosophy (Kant famously claimed that it woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”), it also was highly relevant to scientists and the sciences. Einstein had the following to say about it in a letter to Moritz Schlick, 14 December 1915

  You have also correctly seen that this trend of thought [positivism] was of great influence on my efforts, and specifically E. Mach and still much more Hume, whose treatise on understanding I studied with fervor and admiration shortly before the discovery of the theory of relativity. It is very well possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.

This wasn’t one of your main points, but I also wanted to address this:

  ultimately I am not certain about how subjects such as mathematics and physics can be made relevant to philosophy (or other areas).

They don’t need to be “made relevant to philosophy.” Anything that increases ones understanding of the world is something that is relevant to philosophy. However, one could wonder to what extent the technical details of scientific theories or scientific methods affect philosophy. Like any question about the interdisciplinary use of techniques developed in one field but applied to others, the answer to highly depends on the field of philosophy and the skill of the philosopher, but virtually every scientific advance gets used by some philosophers for something. There are ontologists whose arguments about the philosophy of time that revolve around technical details of Einstein’s theories of relativity, epistemologists who use category theory, philosophers of mind who use results from cutting edge neuroscience research, and ethicists and metaethicists who read and make extensive use of results from social sciences such as economics, behavioral psychology, and decision theory.


Got 0% on a midterm in Math Graduate school The title says it all, I studied very hard I would say, and it’s seemed to amount to nothing. I mainly focused on one part of the material since we only had to solve 2 out of the 4 problems on the exam and usually 2 questions where from what I focused on. As luck had it, there was only 1 problem for what I have studied for, and the problem was very hard and I could not solve it. The other problems seemed almost unsolvable unless you have seen the trick before , which I have not. Thus I could not solve any of the problems.  The exam was supposed to mimic the qualifying exam, and the mean was 65%.

I have no idea how to move forward from here. It makes me feel like I am not cut out for math graduate school. What keeps me sane is the fact that I do well on the homework’s , when I have time to look at them.

Oddly enough I think the biggest pain is the shame and feeling of disappointing the professor. I visit his office hours regularly to ask questions and I end up with a 0%.. it will be humiliating having to pick up the midterm.

Any advice as to how to move on From here would be appreciated. Should I treat this as a wake up call and start studying harder and use this as motivation? Or should I just give up?

Remember exams are supposed to measure your mastery of the material, and if you focus on only two out of four topics, you haven't mastered all the material - at best you've mastered 50%. Trying to game a passing score this way is not a winning strategy; even if it works, you'll come out of grad school thinking you barely learned anything (example).

That said, one failed midterm isn't the end of your graduate program. It's likely even one failed course isn't the end either. You will however need to step up your game. If you're able to do the homework but not the exams, figure out why. You alluded to you being able to "having time to look at the homework". If this is the reason, then you must work faster. Try doing the homework problem with solution covered up, and timing yourself. Repeat it several times. The time you need should go down, and if you can do that, you can solve the exam questions in the time available too.


How long does it typically take for Chinese universities to accept or reject applicants? How many days does it normally take to receive an admission letter after applying to a university in China?

I am a student from Bangladesh.

It depends on the programme of studies, the director that will see your application, plus whether there are additional requirements for your discipline, for example a portfolio. You might get lucky if you can email admissions again to ask which state your application is in, and how many stages you have before they conclude the process. Normally in a Chinese uni though they will ignore you until it is time to inform you.


Will the admission committee try to get in touch with the referees who wrote the recommendation letters? [Graduate admission] I am currently in an institution wherein most of the academic body in my department (Electrical Engineering) have a rather poor (and that's putting mildly) mastery of English.
My concern is if I miraculously manage to get a letter of recommendation from one of them, will the admission committee try to get in touch with him/her for further inquiries? Because I don't think (It is certain) they will manage a detailed and meaningful discussion (which is what I think the committee wants) without some external help, which I highly doubt they'll even bother to seek.
So, to reiterate the question, does the committee generally try to reach the referees? What would you advice someone in a position like mine to do?
Thanks for reading.

I have written many letters of reference.
I have also been contacted, over the phone, by HR or admissions who wish to discuss the candidates, just to expand on experience or whatever.
So, if they wish to contact the people who you put as referees, then they will do so.


How should I cite an invited paper? My discipline is Telecommunication engineering and I am writing a paper for an IEEE journal. I want to cite an invited paper published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. My question do I need to mention in my citation that the paper is invited? If yes, how? As part of the original article name or the journal name or somehow else? Same with correspondence papers which are not full length articles, but short ones on some emerging area. What does IEEE say about it?

No, cite it as you would any other paper. You do not mention the paper status (“invited paper”, in your case; “review paper”, “perspective”, “editorial”, etc.) in the citation, unless that is formally part of the title (which it typically is not), or unless the citation style explicitly calls for it (IEEE does not, and I know no citation style that does).

In IEEE's templates and LaTeX classes, the only place which mentions invited papers is a command to indicate when your paper is an invited paper (here for IEEEtran):

  Special paper notices, such as for invited papers, can be declared with:

\specialpapernotice{(Invited Paper)}


Accepting and then declining PhD offer, I recently got accepted into PhD programs at University A,B,C, and D.

I interviewed with Professor W at University A, Professor X at University B, Professor Y at University C, and Professor Z at University D.

I chose University B.

But now I am having doubts about B  and wish to go to University A to work with Professor W.  How do I tell Professor X that I want to change my mind and work with Professor W?

I also had additional conversations with Y and Z at C and D; they were pretty helpful and gave good guidance and tips about going to A and not going to B, so I feel even stronger about my decision to attend A over B.

University C and University D are on the east coast, while A and B are on the west coast.

How should I handle this?

Will I be burning bridges with X, Y and Z at B, C and D?

I wish to do my post-doc someday at University D or maybe C so it's important to not piss off X and Y, who both know B very well since the area of research is quite small.

W also knows X Y and Z

As you as you are professional and upfront, this shouldn't cause any hard feelings. Go with the one you like the most, after all, it is your research and time that you will be spending. You can always change your mind and email professor at A with a brief message explaining that you prefer to go to a different school. Keep in mind that you will be just starting your PhD and who knows if you will have the same opinion about going for a post doc or maybe get lucky and find a faculty job! Opportunities can rise out of no where.

One more question, why did the other professors suggested that you go to A and not B or even their university? Do they know the professor at A? Or because of the university's reputation or lab?


Should getting no response in this timespan be understood as a no? What should I do in this situation? I am starting my Ph.D. and am interested in a specific field of research which seems quite promising for the next years. Now, my masters supervisor does not work in this field, nor anyone in the department, and it seems in the country.

Nonetheless, he is interested and suggested me to find an expert in the field from another country to collaborate and said he would sign a recommendation letter1. In the better scenario this would be a formal co-supervision, but not a requirement.

So, I sent an email to such an expert (in fact it seems one of the researches who started the field) with my masters thesis attached as well as the recommendation letter. After a week unfortunately I didn't get any response.

I asked my masters supervisor and he suggested me to reply the email resending it, because he said that usually there is an answer. He also told me to add one line asking if someone else could be suggested.

I've sent the message last week and no answer as well up to now.

To be honest I'm confused. I mean, the thesis has been quite complimented by a very famous researcher in my country who integrated the examination board. The recommendation letter speaks quite well about my work. Finally my university seems to be respected internationally. With all this, I thought at least a no as answer I would get.

Perhaps the only point is that I have not worked in that field in my masters, but that was because no one in the country knew it.

Now, is this lack of response, in the timespan I told about, effectively a no, totally dismissing the possibility, and so should I already disconsider it? Or a no would be really be said explicitly? Should I wait more before looking for some other possibility?

Edit: In trying to make the question more concise and to the point (whether or not one could expect an answer in the timespan of more or less 10 days) I left out a detail. The email was focused on asking for a collaboration. Of course, formal co-supervision would be better, but it is not required, and we briefly mentioned it. So the email was entirely focused on collaboration. The scholarship pays for just a collaboration also, where the PhD student spends one year working on the group of another researcher.

1. I don't know how things are done in other places, but here it is possible to establish a collaboration with a researcher from anywhere, including other country, and have it all paid by the scholarship if you need to stay a certain time working there with him. This may or may not be a formal co-supervision, so that the researcher has the option to not sign if he cannot.

Your time scale seems too short for me. Patience might be a virtue here. But sending the thesis and the request at the same time is probably a pretty heavy load to drop on a person.

Ask your advisor to follow up with a request and a recommendation. It might be more successful coming from them than from you.

But in general, making a request and offering to show related work in the initial request might be more successful than just sending it all at once. Some people get a lot of these requests and have learned to ignore them.


UK Postdoc - Is salary negotiation even possible? I have an interview later this week and the advertisement goes something like:

  Grade 7: £31,604 - £38,833 p.a.

While talking to a postdoc at my own department, she told me that the scale wouldn't actually matter, that I'll always be placed on the lowest possible spine on that grade and it's just to show that every year I can move up a spine. She said even attempting to negotiate would be seen as a major red flag by the interviewers.

I wondered if anyone here can confirm this. It'd be amazing if you've been hiring postdocs in the UK so you definitely experienced this. Is there a way to be placed somewhere else on that scale, let's say on £35K?

Disclaimer: I'm not greedy or material-minded, but life is expensive especially with two kids and being a single parent. This position is also in a pretty expensive area.

There is no reason why a post doc cannot be appointed at a higher point on the spine if there is money there, that said, rarely is there money available. The number of people doing multiple post docs in the UK is smaller than in the US, and they usually stay at the same school. That means they often can be appointed to a higher grade. Therefore grants for post docs usually budget for the lowest salary and normal progression. A school or university funded postion would have more flexibility, but the head of school is not going to authorize more money from their budget.

I would not bring up the salary until after an offer is made. Once an offer is made, it cannot really hurt to say "hey, I deserve to be at the top of the scale since ...". They will then laugh and say you are right, but that is all they can offer.


Writing a review article on a similar topic already published by other authors There is already one review article on a topic of interest published few years ago. I want to write a review paper on that broad topic with some new insights.Can I cite the papers that are already used in that older review article?? Or should I only use the newer research articles which were available after the publication of the older review article??

If you're writing a new comprehensive review on the same subject you'll probably end up citing many of the same references. To be explicit, yes, you are allowed to, and supposed to, cite relevant literature. Suppose instead that your review article focuses on newer developments, or some specific aspect. Then you can refer the reader to the old review paper, and include references to the most important papers therein. No matter the form you choose, I would be very surprised to see two reviews in the same field with zero overlap in choice of references.

A related question is when a new review is justified. There's a nice discussion in
A systematic review already exists in the literature. When is a newer one required?


I applied for a PhD but was rejected after the interview. How do I request feedback? I interviewed for an advertised PhD and got an email thanking me for interviewing but advising that I wasn't successful. They encouraged me to apply for PhDs at other colleges and their college. I have actually already applied to another advertised PhD with the same supervisor (who knows I have applied), but don't know whether they just didn't like me as a candidate or did like me but had another better candidate. If the former, I won't be considered for PhD2 but if the latter I may be.

This was my first PhD interview and I want some feedback, whether it is about my performance at interview (too nervous, talked too much), or other factors affecting my rejection (lack of research experience, average scores in a particular module that required high scores).

How do I politely request this feedback?

This is the kind of conversation that is important to have for your professional growth, but also difficult to have. This is not something that will be done "on-the-record," for obvious reasons, and the answer may be as simple as "there was another candidate who was more highly qualified." (This is very often the case!)

But if you'd like to ask more details about the interview, email the contact person for the position, and ask if you can talk by phone about how the interview went, and if they can offer you any constructive feedback about how to improve your application for future openings.


How can one when not affiliated to an institution get access to very common piece of equipment for a subject? I am working on my next geology research project, after recent publication, that has no affiliation to a research institute (e.g. I am conducting research in my spare time). I am now thinking how I might be able to access a petrographic microscope and a point counter, two commonly available pieces of equipment found in any geology department at a university.

I would like to get try and get access to the resources free of charge offering acknowledgement space on what I hope to be published work. If it is possible to gain access with a small payment it would be interesting to hear.

I believe there are two ways of approaching this:

Approach a researcher directly about the project and propose it as work to be associated with that researcher perhaps through coauthorship
Approach a university about the project and propose acknowledgement of the university in the paper

Coming from a point of ignorance about gaining access to university resources can anyone advise how should one go about this?

I am working in the UK and most convenient places for me to get to institutions is in London or the South East of England.

Find someone in the institution (your approach 1), write to them, and ask.  You'll need a brief description of your experiment so the recipient knows what they're agreeing to.  If this is common equipment in your field and you're not proposing to take over the lab for hours every week, just ask.  The worst they can do is to say no.


Etiquette in asking for funding proposal example I'm a postdoc and I have never submitted a research proposal.

There is a funding project at my current University open to postdocs. I have a list of past winners and I'm tempted to ask for their proposals to give me some guidelines in writing mine. Obviously I can just ask and I know that professors share winning proposals, but usually, they know each other. But I've never met these people and the only thing I have is their contact information.

What is the correct way to ask for sample proposals and is it considered good manners to ask such a thing?

First: Good approach to looking at successful proposals first. You cannot write a winning proposal if you don't know how winning proposals look like.

Second: Most people will probably be loath to share their proposals with anyone they don't know. But at the same time, most professors will (or at least should!) share their proposals with those they mentor in one way or the other. In fact, they may also take the time to walk you through the process, look over your proposal, give you feedback, etc. So ask your superiors, your department head, or others in similar position who look after your career development to help you with proposals that have been funded.


Is it common for people in academia to experience prolonged lack of sleep and how to deal with it? Stuck in the lab again, for the third night in a row. I have never done three in a row I think I might just break a record. I cannot sleep, because the lab is super crammed and uncomfortable and I am afraid that someone will come in and take my belongings, I am afraid that I will fall sleep for so long that I will miss something so important that will ruin this semester, especially at a time when I beginning to see the light at the end of a long dark tunnel that has been both physically, emotionally and mentally draining.

Why not go home? Because home is an hour drive away and I am stuck working on multiple projects that lasts from 8 in the morning to 3 in the morning. Have to get up to school again at 9 am. Not much time left in my time zone. Should I go to sleep? Might just wake up in a lab full of people and look embarrassed. Should I stay awake? I will just wind up falling asleep in the lecture which is ten times worse!

But that's not the point I am asking this question. I am asking this question because I am the only one left in the lab. Eyes wide open from dusk till dawn, headed for a big crash. Can't form a full sentence, my mind is going blank. I am starting to wonder if it is just me. What is it about me that forces me to wonder the halls at 4 in the morning to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth? What forces me to drink energy drink at 11 pm at night and wonder how long before I will have my first heart attack? Can you call an ambulance over the internet, my phone is dead.

How do academicians view the subject of sleep when things left undone, problem left unsolved swirls around your mind? How to be productive, meet deadlines, and get adequate sleep?

There are three basic approaches to handling this:

Paul Erdos' approach.  Pros: it worked for Erdos, after a fashion.  Cons: you are not Erdos.
Crack, maybe have a psychotic episode, and leave academia.  Pros: it's the easiest course, and the one you're on now.  Cons: everything else about it.
Recognize that your career is not a sprint, but a marathon, and start triaging less important work in favor of sleep.  Working sleep-deprived is exactly as smart as working drunk, so you are already cutting your productivity, just in an uncontrolled manner.  Pros: Survival, possibly having a career.  Cons: you will have to say "no" to people.

The truth is, in academia there is an endless amount of work that you could be doing: you will never be done.  The only choice you get to make is whether you will choose the things that you do not do, or whether you will make self-destructive choices that mean those choices get made for you arbitrarily by the fracture points of your body and mind.


Is it bad to apply for the same Master's degree program in consecutive years? I am an undergraduate majoring in computer science. I want to apply for a top Master program in the US. I have done the GRE test and most of the other things required.
I am currently doing research with my professor so there might be more publication to come but it will be later than the application deadline.

I don't know if I should try to apply this year. There are certain things I am concerning (my GPA might be lower, my reference letter might not be as strong as before, there might be more applicants in the next year) .

There is one thing I don't know how will the admission office work on.

If I failed the first year, will it be a negative factor for my application the next year (say if I could been admitted originally, but because I failed the last application the year before so I am not accepted)?

will it be like I revealed too much information so they can see my change between the two years(for example they found I didn't make much progress like the years before in that year)?

will they compare the two applications(for example they found there is lots of change in my SOP, like my life goal changed largely)  or will they be processed totally independent?

Just say I have 25% possibility to get admitted, my situation might be better or worse the next year. If I failed this year I will reapply the next year. Is it worth a shot to apply this year?

I applied twice in two consecutive years for graduate school. Some universities do not track or compare current applications to previous ones, so those schools likely would not notice (and thus would not care).

Some institutions do track if you've applied previously. This isn't a deal-breaker, but then you'd want the year gap to show you made significant gains and improved your application.

Thus, my advice would be: if you want to apply this year, go for it. If you don't get in, find a job or internship and/or take classes that let(s) you improve your application significantly. Develop new skills, showcase an ability to be successful in more advanced projects.

Then, were you to apply that next year, don't mention that you applied to that institution before and got rejected, but do emphasize all the skills you gained during your time off. Talk about how that year prepared you to be a successful graduate student in your essay, make sure the skills developed during that year are clear on your resume and in your description of projects (if there is one).

Edit: If you are concerned the graduate program is a reach for you, you might consider taking a year off to build your skills anyway. You could probably make a decent amount of money for that year, and you may be less stressed and able to get more out of graduate school.


Early Career Research Fellow Application What does a research panel look for in the research proposal of an early career research fellow applicant?

An early career research fellow is defined as a person who has completed PhD within five years of the application deadline. A small university in my area is calling for applications for early career research fellow application. The research proposal is part of the application process.

For very early career (few years after your PhD), most people will value signs that you are carrying good research independently of your Phd advisor. You gained you PhD, and presumably you did good (because you found jobs since then, you haven't left academia). Now, as an early career scientist, you need to show that you can design, implement and manage your own research projects. Basically, they want to see you as a leader with high potential.

So, in general these are the most watched points:

is the candidate able to put up a good and coherent research project, explaining its context and impact
did the candidate publish without his advisor?
did she mentor/advise (or even work with) younger students?
has she created new collaborations?


Are U.K. grade cutoffs for PhDs hard? I recently learned that most U.K. universities advertise themselves as having a minimum grade cutoff of a 2:1. I’m an American, and according to Cambridge’s website, they consider a US 3.5 to be the equivalent of a 2:1.

I did some google searching, and on College Confidential people seemed to think that that is a hard cutoff, and your application won’t be looked at if you’re below a 2:1. This really surprised me because, in the US, failing to get a 3.5 is detrimental, but by no means the end of the world, for PhD applicants. I’ve seen plenty of schools advertise a 3.0 cutoff.

Is a 2:1 a hard cutoff for U.K. PhD applicants? Is a 3.5 a hard cutoff for Americans who want to do PhDs in the U.K.? If you do a masters before your PhD, does this apply to the masters coursework?

With the caveat that I don't speak for my department or institution (although my experience informs my opinion):

My inclination is to say that in practice the cutoff can be softer than the official advertisements or instructions, but this isn't guaranteed, and may even vary between departments at the same university.

The cut-off is usually there as a first-pass filter for applicants who got their Bachelor's or Master's degree at a UK university. Conversion of grades from other systems, such as US GPA, is done according to some University-determined scale, but depending on the volume of applications at any given university there may be scope for some ad hoc decisions on edge cases.

It's also the case that the relevant admissions committee/team will probably look at the awarding institution, even if GPA is supposed to be standard. A 3.4 from an institution which is known to have a strong undergraduate program, or which has a positive reputation among the academics reading the application, will get treated more favourably than a 3.4 from somewhere that is "less esteemed" in some sense.

(I think one reason the cut-off is higher in the UK is because our PhD programmes are usually shorter than the US and have a less comprehensive training period in the initial stages - so we need to get people in who are better prepared, rather than take a risk on someone with patchy background but some signs of potential. But this is just my experience/opinion from mathematics, and it could be way off-base for other disciplines.)

Even within the UK it's not clear to me that the cutoff is as strict as official statements imply. To take a not entirely hypothetical scenario: an institution might say applicants in mathematics should have a 1st class degree or equivalent. Yet if they get an applicant who has a 2:1 Bachelor's from, erm, certain UK institutions, with good references and with some positive predictions about the Master's program on which they are currently involved... I think that such an applicant has a decent chance of being considered seriously by the departmental admissions team, provided that the application material has made it through the centralized university pipeline.


Advice for a hypersensitive postdoc who has a hard time reading social cues and making small talk Sorry to bother everyone, I am currently a postdoc at a research institution.  I have trouble in my scientific collaborations/discussions because I am hypersensitive to (get easily offended at) insensitive criticism/disrespect/microagression, whether expressed verbally or non-verbally (raising of voice, shrugging of shoulders, disdainful facial expression and other non-verbal expressions of annoyance/contempt/disapproval). I am totally okay with criticism which is well thought through, well explained, expressed in a pleasant/neutral voice, and without showing negative emotions.
I also have trouble reading social cues and making small talk because I am always afraid to talk about things I am really interested in since they may not be interesting to others and/or may seem simple-minded/sentimental/emotional, and I am very bored/not good at talking about politics/sports/other popular topics. I am also afraid that people are subconsciously discriminating against me/judging me because of my gender. When I was a Ph.D. student, I was able to work with my advisor with a degree of success because he had a very mild personality, soft voice, was supportive, never criticized anyone harshly, and in addition to this had some common interests with me outside of work. However, I was able to find very few such people in the scientific community, and their research interests/methods are not close to mine (my research area also has very few people of the same gender as me and they don't seem to have research interests/methods which are close to mine).
Therefore I am experiencing loneliness and dissatisfaction in my career, though I really like the area that I am studying (I am not able to continue working with my advisor effectively because it is much easier to talk to/understand him in person than online, and I moved to a different city). I also have trouble interacting with people at scientific conferences for the above reasons, and therefore cannot derive the expected benefits from them. In addition to the above problems, sexual attraction (note: I was never a victim of sexual harassment, but these things can show in subtle ways and disturb a sensitive person) which sometimes occurs in the course of scientific interactions can make them problematic and negate their potential scientific benefits (which could produce something valuable scientifically, but end up futile).
On the other hand, I enjoy and actively use StackExchange for scientific discussions because the above problems do not occur when using digital media. I would like there to be more online resources suitable for scientific purposes for people like me who have a hard time socializing in the scientific community in person. Anonymous online scientific communication also has the benefit of hiding the gender and eliminating associated subconscious discrimination/exclusion. Could you give me any advice (both for in-person and online interactions with colleagues)?
Maybe I should ask this question on a different forum, if it is not very suitable for this one (could you suggest one as I could not think of one myself)?

From Hamlet:
"...to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them."
Don't let criticism get to you.
It is common for all postdocs, and often quasi-bullying. Advice: become as independent as possible, and as sure in your own abilities and goals as possible, without social confirmation. Slowly, the hypersensitivity will fade as you realize it is contrary to what you know about yourself. I see it most in the best people, not the worst, who often aren't sensitive to this at all.
I would say it happens all the time for the wrong reasons, and is more about "territory" and allegiance than anything. People often highly praise those who are most under their thumb.
Everyone is hypersensitive at the beginning of every new profession and role, due to fear of mistakes, which lead to a general sense of failure throughout one's life. But anxiety is overcome by self-security, and from self-reliance. "Become your own man/woman". Then you are invincible and free.


Salary of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowships Does anyone have information about the standard salary packages for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action fellowships inside a Initial Training Network (ITN)?

If I am understanding the "Work Programme 2014–2015" of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions correct, then the amount of the living allowance is 37,320 Euro for early-stage researchers and 55,800 Euro for experienced researchers. This sum is multiplied by a "country correction coefficient" (see the very end of the Work Programme).


How to cite an old poem which appears in a new collection/anthology put together by a different editor? (Chicago) According to CMS, we should cite a poem in an anthology as we would a chapter in an edited book. But, what if the poem was orginally written in another year?
eg.

Hàn Mặc Tử. [1939] 2009.“Hồn là ai?” (My soul, who art thou?). In Hàn
Mặc Tử. Tác phẩm chọn lọc [Hàn Mặc Tử. Collection of poems] edited by
Nguyễn Đăng Điệp. Hà Nội: Nhà xuất bản giáo dục Việt Nam.

Is this correct? Putting this way might be confusing to the reader as they might think this collection was reprinted in 2009. The correct understanding should be that this poem was written in 1938 and published in 2009 as part of a collection.
Following this, should the in-text citation for the poem be

(Han Mac Tu 1939)
(Han Mac Tu 2009)
(Nguyễn Đăng Điệp 2009)

Please help!!

If the publisher gives you the option of using BibTeX, here are the BibTeX database entries I've used in an equivalent situation:

@INCOLLECTION{Newton:1726:PNP, crossref="Motte:1846:NPM",
author="Isaac Newton", title="Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica", pages="73--507", edition="Third", year=1726,
note="Translated into {E}nglish by {A}ndrew {M}otte; first edition
published 1687",
url="https://archive.org/details/newtonspmathema00newtrich" }
@BOOK{Motte:1846:NPM, editor="Andrew Motte", title="{N}EWTON'S
PRINCIPIA: THE MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY",
booktitle="{N}EWTON'S PRINCIPIA: THE MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES OF
NATURAL PHILOSOPHY", publisher="Daniel Adee", year=1846,
edition="FIRST {A}MERICAN", address="New York",
url="https://archive.org/details/newtonspmathema00newtrich" }

Then you can let the publisher's BibTeX style file sort out the CMS formatting.


New overlapping courses As departments grow, they tend to hire people in the same area of research. And different people from different communities call things differently. For example, people in Statistics may call it "Statistical learning", while others "Pattern recognition". If several departments or people within the same department propose courses with similar content but different names and no one wants to change, what can be done at this point? Offer 2 courses but allow students to take only 1? Offer 2 courses and try to minimize the overlap? A senior faculty, chair, or dean should decide on 1 course only? Other ideas?

If it is between 2 possible courses, its better to check what is different and what is the same, then join what it is the same and if there are not that many differences then add them all in the same course, if there are many, then you can either give one course with extra set of classes for each course (which is a bit of an administrative nightmare), or you can give 2 courses with shared classes of those that are the same.

As an example, in my university there are 2 extremely similar careers. 1 in the Licencee in Informatic sciences, and the other is the Licencee in Enginery of Informatic sciences. They are basically the same in most courses with same professors teaching in both, however, the first one has administration courses and the second has instead physics and chemistry. The other difference is that one has 1 semester of probability and another of statistics, and the other has both probability and statistics on the same semester. Who decides this? the direction of the school and the heads of careers/departments. they revise and update curriculum plans and then send them for approval/registration to the national education department, which might not be needed in your case.

My suggestion regarding the courses is in sum to check what is different between the proposed courses and see if it's worth A)to make them separate, B)Mash them together into 1 course, or C) Make 1 course with 'optional' extra classes needed for the student to Attain the credits to the different subjects.

Who needs to be consulted? All your stake-holders, meaning all the professors, chairs and  such that would participate in the definition of the curricula.


Refer to arxiv version? Am I breaking some kind of rule if I'm adding the arxiv link to the bibitem for an article that's published in a journal? I thought obviously not until I noticed that (link to arxiv) and (page number in journal) are quite mutually exclusive.

No.  I think giving the arxiv link is fine.  One alternative is to have two bibitem entries, one for the journal version and another for the arxiv version.  I find it valuable to include the journal reference, because that shows that the article has been refereed (so its claims gain legitimacy).  But I also see the value of including the arxiv version, particularly if the journal is hard to access.