APA citation: book versus electronic book I obtain many of my reading sources from online, instead of form a hardcopy in the library, even for books or book sections. The APA citation requirements for citing printed books and citing e-books are different. If my source IS indeed an e-book, I wonder whether I should really cite e-books according to the e-book citation requirement, which includes URL and all kinds of extra information than citing a printed book. Can I just cite it as if it is from a printed book?

Do not take it for granted that different versions of a book are identical.

Either cite the version you've used, or use the version you want to cite.


A journal published my private home address alongside my publication. Can I get it removed? Some years ago, I published an article in a Springer journal. However, when I accessed its online version today, I found out that the publisher has swapped my residential address for my correspondence address. Since I am the corresponding author and this information is public, I am concerned about my security. I have already tried contacting Springer to no avail.
How should I proceed in order to get this issue fixed?

Springer has a privacy policy. It seems to be largely based on the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
According to XIV, point 2, you can request a removal of your personal data on specific grounds, e.g. because the data are not needed, or because you withdraw your consent. This seems to be the case with you.
You can contact their Data Protection Officer about that (dataprotection@springernature.com). Explain your situation and ask for the data to be removed.
The Data Protection Officer should react swiftly, as there might be grave legal consequences if they violate your data rights (at least if the EU's GDPR applies to your case).


What generally happens if a department is unable to attract students? Say the math department used to teach 200 students, but because each year the number of students interested in math has decreased, now it only teaches 100 students. What are the usual practical consequences?

This clearly depends on the internal policy of the institute, but I wonder if some generalizations are possible, e.g. whether the department will be forced to downsize or whether people outside the department will intervene and try to help the department get more students.

As comments already indicate, this is hugely dependent on the country and university.

When I was in the Netherlands funding of the university was directly related to the number of students and the number of students who finished. This dependency was passed on by the universities to the departments. Typically, there was some sort of delay build in, so the budget would not become too unpredictable.

Usually fluctuations are not as dramatic as in your scenario, and smaller decreases can usually be covered by reducing the budget for conference visits, inviting speakers, etc.

However if the number of students halfs then cuts in personel are pretty much unavoidable, as personel is by far the largest post in the budget. However, firing people on a permanent contract is hard. It is much much easier to not prolong a temporary contract. The department usualy consisted of a small number of professors (on permanent contract) plus a larger number of lecturers (some on a permanent contract and some on a temporary contract). So the professors and lecturers on a permament contract are safe, but they will have a smaller department.

So this is a case where there was an explicit policy to add such a feedback. However, this description is specific to the Netherlands (and may not even be current). Other countries are organized differently. Even within countries there can be a difference between universities or types of universities.


Waiver for conference registration fee Usually there are some ACM/IEEE conferences which takes registration fee around 350 to 550 US dollar. For a student, it might not be possible to deposit such amount of money.

Under this circumstance, is it ok to ask conference organizer for 100% waiver in registration fee?

The dominant cost of attending most conferences is not the conference fee but the travel costs (e.g., airfare + hotel). Moreover, most conferences (including most ACM and IEEE conferences) offer a reduced rate for student attendees, often half or less of the rate for professors. If you cannot afford that lesser rate for students, you probably cannot afford the travel costs either.

There are two good ways to try to get around these problems, however:

Some conferences offer the chance to apply for student travel scholarships. These typically both waive registration fees and help cover travel expenses.
Many conferences draw on student labor to help run logistics, e.g., manning the registration booth, acting as ushers. These students are typically compensated by free registration. They are usually drawn only from the hosting institution(s), however.

The best way, however, if you are a graduate student, is to see if your professor or your department can support you.


Why are there so many papers written in bad English? I am pretty sure that anyone who has spent some time reading academic papers have come across quite a few "lemons" among them, with bad grammar, strange word choices and incoherent sentences. Such papers are always a chore to read, even if the topic is interesting and the research is good, and I have found myself throwing away papers just because they are so awful to read.

The strange thing is that these papers have been peer reviewed and are published in reputable journals. But still they are often near unreadable because of bad language. Why is this the case? Why isn't bad language picked up and corrected when peer review is done? I understand that a lot of these academics don't have English as their first language, but publishing a paper that reads like it was translated from Chinese to English with Google Translate and a thesaurus is not a good way to publish your research.

I like V. Rossetto's answer (+1), but I think the level of cynicism it contains is more appropriate as an answer for why bad papers are published (to which I would add that there is now a glut of mediocre venues looking for content ... everyone wants to be editor or co-organiser of something; and I would also add that, unfortunately, authoring and peer-review is still done by humans).

But as for badly written ... I feel a little balance is needed. In particular, I feel it's important to caution against a common hyper-sensitivity to language problems in publications.

The phrase "badly-written" is subjective. Sure, the readability of the paper is an important aspect of the quality of the paper, and there is some minimum level of language quality that is a prerequisite, but that level can be artificially high for some academics.

The majority of research is published in English by non-native speakers. Many papers are primarily authored by students in their 20's/30's who might be quite new to English and to writing scientific works. Even certain native English speakers will struggle to structure a paper in such a way that it reads well (sometimes because they are still of the belief that things have to be complicated and difficult before they can be published, so they write in a complicated and difficult way).

As an example of hypersensitivity, I am a native English speaker and for a journal paper I was primary author of, I once had a reviewer complain that the paper was poorly written. His/her main complaint was that we were confusing the semantics of "that" vs. "which" in the paper, saying that mixing the two up is not up to the formal standard of English required for journals. Eventually I did actually manage to stop laughing, but as I picked myself up from the floor, I realised I'd have to "correct" it for the revision. Three hours of Ctrl+F'ing "that/which" in a 40 page journal paper (and even worse, fixing the resulting bad boxes and widows again) wiped the smile off my face.

I also find that students new to reviewing, particularly non-native speakers, tend to expect a very high standard of writing. For example, I assigned a workshop review to a student once that wanted to reject the paper, primarily due to having "several typos". These would take 5 minutes to fix and didn't affect the paper at all. I asked the student if he had had any problem reading the paper? He said he hadn't. Did he learn something from the paper? Well yes, X, Y and Z. Why is he rejecting the paper? Necessary has two 's's.

Yes, the quality of writing often sucks in published works, but I don't believe that a paper should be automatically rejected just because it could be labelled as "badly written".

The goal is to communicate ideas with good science/maths, not to give an exposition of English grammar and phrasing. The original versions of many important publications were almost indecipherable in their writing. Even if an idea is written in such a way that you have to spend a few more hours to understand it, the idea itself might influence you and many other people in a positive way for many years.

Yes such influential papers are rare, but there are many shades of grey in between black and white.

And think of all the raw brain-power we will be missing out on if we perpetuate a culture that implicitly discourages non-English speakers from publishing!

In any case, for journals, I would tend to blame poor copy-editing and typesetting from the publishers. Most journals employ professional technical writers whose job is to avoid this situation. (I don't envy them their job, but still.)


What is the goal of research questions in a paper? I'm a PhD student about to begin writing my first research paper for a software engineering conference. My research is about an approach to measure the performance of software systems. I will evaluate and compare this approach to other state of the art approaches that measure performance to compare the performance of the approach itself and the accuracy.

First, I wanted to know what the goal of research questions are in research papers. Once that is clarified, I believe I would be able to decide if my paper should include research questions.

I think it is important to understand, especially as a new author of research articles, that unless otherwise specified, the term "research question" does not necessarily need to be a sentence or sentences that end in a question mark and actually ask a specific question. On the contrary, a research question is most often not a question at all, but rather an explanation of why the work you are describing is important and how it will advance your field forward.

For example - and this is particularly true within the scientific community: the entire "Introduction" section of a research article acts as the research question. In other words, this section typically gives a background of the research area, explains what work has already been done to advance this field, focuses on what still has yet to be done, and then concludes with what parts of what has yet to be done will be addressed by this particular paper. As you can see, this presents a research question in a very practical way without actually posing any direct questions at all.


How to approach a professor giving a presentation to work with him? I am a master's student in Applied Math with two undergraduate degrees in physics and math. There is a professor who is coming to my university to give a talk on his research, and I read his abstract for the presentation as well as part of his most recent publication and I really would like to work with him doing this over the summer. He is from a National Lab I have interned in before as an undergrad. There is almost no programs for graduate students at that lab and, since I am an international student, I am ineligible for the only one I found there. Is there any way for me to approach him to ask him for the possibility of working with him?

I have a pretty strong research background, and professors I work with at my university will be at the talk he is giving. I don't know if this could help me in any way.

I would send an email a week or so before the visit, saying about what you have said here and asking if the two of you could have a conversation during the visit. That would be better, I think, that surprising him at the talk. It will give him a chance to review any opportunities that there might be. He might also think of others who might be able to help you.

If you just surprise him with a request he won't have that opportunity to think about it, and the circumstances of the visit might make it impossible to make contact in an ad hoc manner.

But if there is nothing he can do for you directly, perhaps the contact can develop into something longer term.


How to talk to a project advisor as an undergrad? I'm an undergraduate working on a small project with an esteemed scientist, whom I met through a connection. I'm communicating via email due to distance. The problem is that I'm having a lot of troubles with this project, and the last time I asked him a question he just told me to re-read the information he sent me.

I want to tell him that it doesn't make sense (I think he made an error), but to do so without appearing arrogant or ignorant. He's intimidating and it always seems like he's two seconds away from declaring me incompetent. Yet, I am very interested in his field and this project could yield a publication.

I don't know what to do; should I just keep asking questions (if so, how do I word them in a way that shows that I'm not just being lazy), or find a way to drop the project? I don't want to close doors on future collaborations when I'm more knowledgeable.

Thank you.

If you think your advisor made an error, then I would suggest you figure out how to prove he made an error. This is the first step to showing someone they've made an error without being ignorant or arrogant (the rest follows from general customs about politeness, but you absolutely must do this first bit. He supposes, presumably in good faith, that he proved something to you; the "burden of proof" that he's wrong now lies in your hands). Besides, this is a good exercise. Lots of things don't seem like they make sense until you yourself figure out how to make them make sense to you. This can be a lot of work. This act of "hacking" someone else's grand idea until it makes sense to me is how I spend most of my time. Thankfully this often leads to totally new ideas and directions that the first guy didn't see (or thought too trivial or obviously wrong to mention, yes that happens too...)

The problem is that, in very many fields, undergraduates are actually extremely frustrating to work with. They don't yet speak the language, or have the baseline knowledge that all of your colleagues share. But nonetheless, this person is not the ideal advisor if he lacks the patience to put up with a lot of questions -- this is absolutely normal behavior for an undergraduate advisee, totally to be expected and many advisors find the interactions quite rewarding!

On the other hand though, you have some hard questions to ask yourself. Basically, you say that you want to ask questions without sounding lazy, but you must be honest with yourself about whether or not you are in fact asking lazy questions. The research process (again, at least in fields I'm familiar with) is most emphatically not "do exactly what some famous guy told you to do." It generally involves painfully slogging through material that no one really understands and proving everything you think you know to yourself repeatedly, and then to others, and then occasionally having it pointed out that you made a really silly assumption, or that some obscure paper already solved everything you had set out for. Again, the point is to create new knowledge, and so you have to know your tools inside and out. In fact, if your advisor is explaining anything at all clearly and to your satisfaction, what he is explaining is, by definition, old knowledge.


How do I inspire my students to work through problems on their own? I recently took up a job at my Alma Mater as an adjunct professor teaching an undergraduate embedded systems course. Due to the nature of the school, and this being my first teaching assignment, I work in conjunction with a more experienced professor; he handles the lecture and one of the lab sections, I handle the other lab section.

I find that my students seem to grasp the concepts discussed in the lecture, but fail to connect what they have learned to actually, practically writing code to solve the problems presented to them. It is as if they can describe what needs to be done, but they can't actually do it on their own. Now, I did some tutoring as well when I was an undergrad, and I saw a similar effect. I know the students are capable, because I have seen them do very similar things before, however as soon as they get stuck on something, they freeze up and even the most basic, prerequisite concepts (programming, in this case) seem to leave their heads.

It is very frustrating, and I have to resist the urge to just hand them the answer, but I feel that as the semester progresses and we encounter more difficult topics, we are going to have issues completing the labs. How can I inspire my students to realize that they do possess the knowledge to solve the problem and that they do not need me to take them to the answer one step at a time? It seems callous to just say "You know this, I'm not helping you" (obviously with less harsh words), but I really don't know how else to get that point across.

Other Thoughts:
Based on some of the answers (which are great, by the way), it seems like I may be mistaken in my assumption that my students know how to program, and that may be related to the fact that this course spends a lot of time trying to teach the important parts of embedded systems, without stressing the programming piece as much, because hey, the students already took a programming class. They already know how to to it.

This is actually something I plan to discuss with my dept. chair. Unfortunately, since I basically handle the lab section for now, and the semester is under way already, I can't exactly modify the course curriculum.

I think we as an institution need to alter the course to have more general, thought provoking programming assignments in addition to the "easy-code hard-implementation" of embedded programming. For example, have the students write a prime number generator in C (for a homework assignment), even if this week's lab is as simple as blinking an LED. Or maybe not even a direct programming assignment, something more like "Explain what could happen if a function that declares a variable calls itself from within itself (recursively) 1 million times?" Its open ended, but with a little research and critical thinking it should be apparent that you'd eventually have a stack overflow/stomp on memory somewhere else. Its hard to make programming assignments that are compact and can't be found on Google.

Thank you all for your answers.

How do I inspire my students to work through problems on their own?

By giving students assignments that they truly work on their own, with minimal hand-holding, then assigning the appropriate grade. Some students will be upset enough with their less-than-desirable grades such that they become "inspired." The other students who fail to keep up with the pace of the course will earn the grades which truly reflects their lack of ability/skill/etc.

Sitting down with the under-performing students, and explaining that they may benefit, for example, from retaking the necessary prerequisites may be in order. It's not easy to tell a junior/senior that they should probably go back and retake a sophomore-level class, but that's life, and it's better for everyone in the long run.

Although I've not been in my current faculty position for very long, I've already seen the consequences of dumbing down the assignments, and the effect that it has on the quality of the follow-on courses, both in student capabilities and my ability to teach the things that need to be taught at the appropriate pace.

The way I see it, you can either make your assignments easier, or be tough: I have (somewhat reluctantly, at first) grown to prefer the tough route.


Work in an area or work on problems? I have a question about two possible career paths, for which I was unable to come up a better title. Let me explain what I mean:

Path 1, Working in an area: By this I mean, making a career by adding to the knowledge of a field of study. This may include sorting out open questions in that field or identifying new issues or pushing the boundaries of existing knowledge. This typically involves having a larger perspective and understanding of the field and its relevance to the world.

Path 2, Working on problems: By this I mean making a career by solving a series of specific challenging problems not necessarily belonging to a common field of study. Here one only attempts to understand enough about the problem at hand to solve the problem, but does not show an interest in developing the area as such.

Working in an area requires one to have a broader vision, scholarship and commitment to the development of the area. Working on problems does not involve commitment, but requires one to repeated invest oneself in learning about a new area. By working in an area one can encounter a degree of monotony. By working on problems, one can potentially find new challenges at every juncture.

So my question is: career wise, what is a better option? Specifically, which of these kind of academics are more valued by the community? What, if any, are pitfalls of these paths?
Meta question: is path 2 a path at all or do all academics eventually settle into path 1 after spending some time on path 2?

Edit: I guess the key difference between the two paths is that path 1 leads one to become an "expert" with extensive knowledge in a particular area. Path 2 exposes one to a variety of problem situations and makes one a better problem solver, though it may not make one an expert in any field. For the purpose of this question, you may take the area to be a well studied field such as, say integer programming, which has some long-standing open problems, but is not necessarily so young that it allows for a variety of research opportunities.

Without knowing anything about the specific area, I'd say that you've set up a false dichotomy. I don't know if anyone ever consciously does one or the other exclusively. Sometimes you work bottom up (i.e path 2 -> path 1), and sometimes you work top down (path 1 -> path 2). Both these "paths" should be dimensions of your research.


Research Grant - Difficulty in Obtaining and How? I'm an undergraduate student taking psychology.

Although my primary interest is counseling, I also have a strong interest in behavioral psychology - especially as it relates to operant conditioning for combat (I love combat psychology.)

In general, how difficult is it to get a research grant? There's relevant data that hasn't been explored and I'd be interested in doing it.

I imagine being at the undergrad level is a problem, but I'm asking for general information - if I have to wait until I'm in a doctoral program or I've finished it, that's fine.

Also, how would I go about obtaining the grant? We can define what makes me a good candidate, but then where do I go?

Your question is very broad for this site. I will try to do my best to give you an overview, but you should really ask a more focused question if you hope for more specific answers.

Generally, what opportunities for research grants there are depends on many factors, but foremost where you are geographically and which career stage you are in. Geography matters because most basic research funds are national funds, that is they specifically fund research conducted e.g., in the US, in Switzerland, in the European Union, etc. The career stage matters as most "normal" project grants are available only to people in a certain career stage or position, typically faculty (sometimes also postdocs). For more early-career researchers, other special grant types are often available, such as PhD project funding, young investigator's grants, or similar. However, these usually differ from regular grants in that they often need to be applied for in collaboration with a faculty advisor, mentor, or host. One of the functions of this mentor is to make sure that the grant money is used correctly.

  I imagine being at the undergrad level is a problem, but I'm asking for general information - if I have to wait until I'm in a doctoral program or I've finished it, that's fine.

You are likely correct. As an undergrad there may be very few opportunities to apply for grants in your own name. Very few undergrads are academically mature and well-developed enough to form and implement their own research agenda, and giving out grants to students in such an early phase of their career will often be seen as too risky from a funding agency's point of view. Even being a doctoral student is already quite early to apply for project funding in your own name. Most grant opportunities open up for you when you are faculty at a research institution.

To give you one example from Switzerland: most funding provided by the SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) is given out through their individual project funding scheme. There are many restrictions on who can apply, but most importantly you need to be working at least 50% of your time in a research-active institution in Switzerland, and you need to hold a PhD degree since at least four years or hold an independent research position, e.g., be an assistant professor (Chapter 2, Article 4).

Your own salary cannot be funded by such a project grant, so it's only used to cover e.g., PhD students that you advise. This also clarifies why the SNSF largely restricts access to these funds to professors - the applicant needs to be somebody who can provide guidance and formal advisory to the staff employed in the project, and they assume more junior researchers will not be able to do that.

  In general, how difficult is it to get a research grant? There's relevant data that hasn't been explored and I'd be interested in doing it.

This depends on the grant, but in general it is very difficult. Most grants worth applying to have acceptance rates below 10%. Interestingly, the SNSF project funding scheme mentioned above is an exception, with acceptance rates in the 40% to 50% range

Further, and this is another reason why you may have to wait until you can run your own project, a large part of the grant evaluation procedure is usually an evaluation of the Principle Investigator. Quite frankly, a funding agency will look at grants by established senior researchers much less critically than by academically young or not yet established ones. While this may appear unfair, for the funding agency it is just much less risky to give money to a person that has already successfully conducted many projects than to somebody who hasn't.

  Also, how would I go about obtaining the grant? We can define what makes me a good candidate, but then where do I go?

This is not a question that can be answered with the detail that is provided. My suggestion is to keep your ideas in your head, maybe work on them in your free time or as a side project, and then revisit them once you are in the right career stage to apply for your own funding. This will also have the advantage that you then already have preliminary results during the application phase, which is another factor that you can use to tremendously increase the chances of your grant application.


Do I have to disclose that I have a masters degree if I am applying to a second masters in an unrelated field So I have a horrible GPA of 3.33/4 in Masters in Computer Science. I also have a Bachelors's degree in Computer Science as well. I was 21 years old when I flew into America to get a Masters's Degree. Back then I had no idea what Masters's is or what Grad school is. I did it to get a high paying job and only because everyone else around me was doing it too. Back then my only concern was to maintain a 3.00 GPA so my visa wouldn't be canceled and somehow make enough money working a minimum wage job to pay my house rent. For all practical intents and purposes, I did not take my master's degree seriously.
Now. I am 29 years old and I want to do a Masters in Robotics. I work as a software engineer. My employer will most likely pay for the second master's. I want to become a Robotics engineer or follow up the masters with a Ph.D. in Robotics. Do I need to disclose that I already have a master's degree? I am simply not proud of my GPA and I don't feel it is even relevant to the application process. In most of the place, a Masters in Robotics is offered by the Mechanical engineering department not the computer science department.

Yes, you should reveal that you already hold an MS in CS. Don't be overly concerned about the GPA, but be prepared to explain your priorities at the time that had something to do with your grades. Hiding things is generally bad practice and most such things can be checked and any time gaps will certainly be questioned.
But your overall application, including letters of reference, has to be sufficient to allow someone to predict that you will be a success.
The time gap is probably in your favor here as people understand that others can change. Make sure that your statement of purpose is forward looking and points to success and clear goals.


Is mathematical aptitude the limit of how well I can do in an interdisciplinary life science field as a computer scientist? I apologize in advance if this question is too broad, or too subjective - I couldn't think of a better place to ask it.

Summary: does mathematical aptitude impose an upper boundary on how well one can do in research areas where life sciences intersect with engineering and computer science? I.e., is an ideal researcher in such fields either an experimentalist or an applied mathematician/physicist?

I'm a computer science graduate thinking about pursuing a PhD in an interdisciplinary life science field; specifically systems biology, synthetic biology, bioinformatics, genomics or cognitive (neuro)science. Characteristic of all these disciplines is that they seem to - ideally - require one of the following two profiles:

someone with great experimental/domain skills (e.g. molecular
biology, neuroscience methods etc.),
someone with great quantitative skills (math/physics).

By virtue of my undergrad background, I'm likely closer to the second profile, even though I have some domain knowledge. However, here's where my self-doubts begin. People of this profile seem to be - in the long term at least - expected to produce new theoretical knowledge primarily by employing advanced math. Top research papers seem to be full of it. I'm concerned about this for the following reasons:

my mathematical skills and aptitude in the context of this profile are average, or a bit above average at best. Sure, I can handle ordinary differential equations and numerical integration, but once it gets to the postdoc level and above, I'm competing with people who are elite talents and have backgrounds in math or physics from top schools. I don't believe I posses anywhere near the math talent that they have, and I simply wouldn't be able to do the job as good as them - and I don't want to be producing subpar research. Furthermore, I spent a significant amount of time studying things that don't seem applicable to this type of research, like CPU architecture or OS internals. Because I'm targeting programs in Europe - where a PhD is normally 3 years - I can't in this short time develop my math skills enough to close the gap, especially considering my less-than-elite talent (funny as it may sound, I believe I have a much greater talent for the humanities/philosophy, but the amount of positions there is close to zero).
by far my strongest actual skill is coding/programming, and I could probably get some kind of position based on that. I believe I could do
well enough to produce some tools and maybe even get a (likely mediocre) PhD eventually, but
after this step - when an independent research path is expected - it
seems to me I would be at a disadvantage and heading for the
industry, because implementation skills are simply not enough, i.e.
they seem to have merely a supporting role in academia (since they alone cannot generate new knowledge, the main objective of research). Permanent faculty positions seem
to go out at much higher rates to math-inclined
individuals, who are at an advantage when it comes to formulating a
unique theoretical research statement. At least, this is my
observation.

Should I choose something else if I'm not a top math talent and thus can't evolve into any of the two profiles mentioned?

Or is such categorization of researcher profiles in fact a false dilemma and there are more options, i.e. not everything required to perform well in these fields can be reduced to mathematical aptitude?

For what it's worth, I did undergraduate research in computational biology that lead to published papers, and sure I could handle math at that level, but it just seems to me that to make it as a top full-time researcher, I would either have to become an applied mathematician or an experimentalist.

Speaking as a computer scientist who works with life sciences: there is a lot more use for computer science than just modeling.

Consider:

Who makes and maintains the instruments?
Who handles LIMS development and deployment?
Who develops automation systems and precision protocols?
Who develops the control mechanisms that actually implement biomedical intervention concepts?
Who develops taxonomies, interchange standards, and data representations?

This just scratches the surface of computer science opportunities in the biomedical
Unfortunately, the view that you hold of "you're either an experimentalist or a modeler" is far too prevalent in biomedical culture, and computer scientists often get little respect for their contributions.  That culture is starting to shift however, and especially in younger and more engineering-centric subfields like synthetic biology... and especially in some of the awesome things the younger practitioners are doing.


What should be the theme of a presentation in a research visit? I am having a one-week research visit in a far east country.

I was asked by the head of the hosting group to give a presentation. I have never done this before, hence I am quite confused about the content of this presentation.

To provide you some extra context: I am the first member of our group visiting this group, at the same time I am the most junior member in our group. As I am visiting this time, we expect in a reasonable amount of time to have a member of their group visiting us.

Some information that I could include in the presentation are:

information about our group (history, group members, research focus, ongoing projects, methodologies, tools...)
information about myself (personal info, academic experience, research focus, detailed explanation of most recent work, desire to learn from the visit...)
information about the city we are located at (to make the case that it is worth sending a student...)

I think the list is too extensive. What would be a goldilocks in terms of duration and content to include in the presentation?

I have to make the most out of this visit and presentation, to be able to build upon it later on. The hosting PI is top 5 in the world in his respective field.

Short answer: ask them to clarify; ask your PI.

To offer my own opinion, I would expect that for a research visit the appropriate contents of your presentation would be your latest research results. As you are visiting on behalf of your group, start with an overview of the group's main research areas and latest results (ask your colleagues to each make you a slide about their work). Then you could go into more detail about your own work later in the presentation. Perhaps pose some research questions that you think your two groups could work together on (take advice from your supervisor here).

If you get to set the time, a one hour slot with 45 mins + 15 for discussion will be plenty.


plagiarism and transcription of audio recordings Does it count as plagiarism if a student pays a professional transcription service to transcribe an audio recording of a social science interview/focus group for the appendix of their written assignment?

Note that the appendix is not graded as part of the assignment.

What is important here is to check the experimental protocol for any data protection/privacy issues.

Because you conducted an experiment involving human subjects, there should have been an approved protocol that tells you how the data can be handled. It is important to see if it can be sent to a third-party service, and what precautions are necessary.

In some cases, the recordings have been anonymized and nothing sensitive is discussed, so it may be OK. On the other hand, if there is personally identifiable information, or sensitive medical information is disclosed, laws, like HIPAA apply and special agreements and arrangements are necessary with the transcription service.


How can I quickly prepare an application for a tenure-track assistant-professor position? I am a postdoc applying for a research-level tenure-track assistant-professor position in 1st-world English-speaking or German-speaking countries. The area is Computer Science. The Web is full of recommendations on how to write an good job application of this type. Now, I'm spending about a week on a single application. I have my templates, which I adapt to the institution in question, but the adaptation process and the submission process takes really long, since the processes of the institutions differ. It ranges from different web sites for submission and ends with different names of documents (e.g., Reseach Plan vs. Reseach Statement vs. Research Objectives, ...) and their lengths. Sometimes, the references letters should satisfy particular requirements (such as on letterhead, signed, and scanned), and this should be  properly communicated, too. You know how bad it can get, even if the types of all institutions are the same (e.g., CS departments at R1 universities). I'm not the strongest person in my subfield, so, I have to apply a lot (200+ applications) and widely to get a chance of, say, 50%. Therefore, I'd like to reduce the time from 1 week to, say, 1 hour.

What strategy could you propose to reduce the time while maintaining the quality?
If you have gone through this process already, what was your personal way of reducing the application effort?

Partial answers specifying, e.g., the time you take for different stages of the process, are also accepted:

adapting the cover letter,
adapting the CV,
adapting the teaching statement,
adapting the research statement,
adapting the publication list,
filling the forms on the Web page of the prospective employer,
getting informed about the prospective employer,
asking questions via e-mail or phone and receiving answers regarding the advertised position,
requesting reference letters,
...

For context, let me first answer a question raised by RoboKaren in one of the comments:

  Once you have three or four applications filed at different types of schools (research university vs. small liberal arts college; different types of departments) I am unclear why it would continue to take more than 3-4 hours per application to tailor.

This is probably true in the US, but in Europe, where OP is apparently also applying, universities often have weird standard CV layouts to use (see bottom of the page) or specific templates for all application material.

The rest of my answer really only relates to applying in Europe. I think for the US, you should be able to just send your standard package anyway.

  What strategy could you propose to reduce the time while maintaining the quality?
  If you have gone through this process already, what was your personal way of reducing the application effort?

I have gone through the process, and I don't think there is a silver bullet. In reality, I have, for every application, made a conscious decision of whether my predicted chances or my preferences for this position warrant spending however time I expected to need. That is, if they university used a sane, standard application process, I would apply to everything where I saw a sliver of hope or which I thought I might like even a little bit. Conversely, in the few cases where I thought I would need to basically re-write the material from ground up, I generally decided not just to apply.

That being said, a full week absolutely seems excessive just for adapting your material. The most I was ever willing to spend was one or two days per application for reformatting / rewriting (not taking into account when I originally put together my application package). Obviously, we can't remotely tell what you are doing wrong, but maybe you are focusing on the wrong things here? My basic principle has always been that these formatting requirements usually come from administrators who are not deeply involved in the actual decision making process, so as long as you are not obviously violating explicit rules (e.g., if they ask for a 5-page CV, don't send them 18 pages), I have always taken a lot of liberty in interpreting the rules so that it fitted my standard package as closely as possible.

As for how long different stages took:

  adapting the cover letter,

About 1 hour. The cover letter was usually fairly geared towards the university, but it needs to be short anyway. And in reality, after a few applications, I had a number of standard phrases that I mixed and matched as suitable.

  adapting the CV,

Between 0 and 1 day.

  adapting the teaching statement

About 2 hours. My general teaching statement remained the same, but I usually looked through their current curricula to figure out how to best position my teaching.

  adapting the research statement,

About 2 hours. My general research statement remained the same as well, but I tried to familiarize myself with the relevant faculty at the institution and I had a dedicated section that explained potential for collaboration that I sw.

  adapting the publication list,

Was part of my CV, nothing to adapt.

  filling the forms on the Web page of the prospective employer,

Very much depends on the position, but even in the worst cases this should not be more than an hour or two.

  getting informed about the prospective employer,

This really is the most time-consuming part, as university web pages are often horrific, and this part I think actually matters to some people on the hiring committees.

  asking questions via e-mail or phone and receiving answers regarding the advertised position,

0 hours. I know some people are big on getting in touch with the committee in advance, but I never did it and my personal impression from observing people who do it regularly is that it gives you little new information and no competitive advantage. The story is different if you know a person in the committee well personally, but I am assuming this is not what you mean here.

  requesting reference letters,

0 hours. I told my references I am on the job market and they should not be surprised if requests come in. For the positions that require you to upload the letters yourself (yes, those exist in Europe), I had generic versions of the letters available.

  I have to apply a lot (200+ applications) and widely to get a chance of, say, 50%.

If you do the math, you will learn that it is unlikely that you will actually be applying to 200+ positions. Frankly, if your scope is Germany, Austria, Switzerland, UK, Canada, and the US, you are not going to find 200 suitable positions to apply to. I am all for not putting too many eggs into one basket, but you probably need to be realistic here. Your field may be small and competitive, but other fields are also competitive, and if you are currently working in a different field and you yourself judge yourself to be a somewhat middling candidate and you are unwilling to spend any time on your application package, your chances are so low that you should evaluate alternatives.

I would propose that you write serious applications for the, say, 30 to 50 most suitable positions you can find, and then figure out what to do if none of them pans out.


French M2 research internship as a UK MSc student? I'm planning on starting a UK MSc degree in September, but keen to get some research experience abroad.

I'm wondering if anyone knows if French universities/research labs would be accepting of a candidate from a UK university for advertised positions for a M2 stage (2nd year Masters internship), considering that a student on a UK MSc will have only been studying on the programme for 6/7 months.

Any insight appreciated!
Thanks

I do not see any particular obstruction for you to get accepted in an internship program for M2 students. The only legal requirement is that you are currently enrolled in an M2 program or equivalent. In our Master, the program starts in September and internships in February/March.


Will having a recommendation letter from someone in a different subfield hurt my chances of admission to PhD programs? I am applying to the graduate program in astronomy in US universities. In support of my application I have provided three recommendation letters.  Two are from my thesis advisors, while the remaining one is from my course instructor who works in condensed matter physics. He is well known in his field, but perhaps not in astronomy. I did very well in his course and he agreed to write a good (but not detailed) letter for me. Will this hurt my chances of admission?

Obviously, the better your letters of recommendation are, the better they support your application package.   Impersonal, though supportive, letters may not hurt your package, but they don't help as much as fantastic letters from people who know you well.

So, not so much "hurt", but "not as much help as it could be", which some would say is equivalent to "hurt"


Criteria for choosing undergraduate school to prepare for graduate study: "focus on undergrads" & "extensive rigorous curriculum" mutually exclusive? I'm trying to figure out which undergraduate colleges are most conducive to graduate school applications, but it seems to me that (with few notable exceptions) my two main criteria that lead to this sort of success are mutually exclusive. Are there any schools in the U.S. that have both an extensive mathematical curriculum and a focus on their undergraduates?

Schools known for being strong in math (such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford), seem to be very heavily focused on their graduates, with comparatively less attention payed to their undergrads. I'd like to avoid classes taught be TAs and be able to learn from and get to know my professors, both for the improved learning experience and the improved graduate school recommendations that will inevitably eventually result. Perhaps even more importantly, it seems that research as an undergraduate tends to improve students' chances at graduate schools; thus, colleges that have significant research at the undergraduate level are most appealing.

However, schools with the above desirable criterion tend to be less mathematically rigorous, especially in pure math. I've found a handful of schools that will even keep a math major occupied for a whole four years if they've taken only introductory multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. I don't want to have to sacrifice an education for attention -- I also want to go to a school considered highly for graduate school that has extensive course options.

Is the first criterion a fair voting system and the second a dictator? Is there any intersection of the above specifications? My own rudimentary research suggests a few options, but these hardly make a list even the best students can expect to be comfortable applying to.

I want to make sure I have the best options for graduate school in the future, both in being a qualified applicant with the opportunity for stellar recommendations and in having learned the extensive mathematics required to give me a head start for future research.

You'll need to decide for yourself which sort of school is the best fit for you educationally (this is a highly personal decision, and a school that's a wonderful fit for one person might drive another crazy).

However, I don't think a focus on undergraduates matters much regarding preparation and admission for graduate school.  Not even in the ways you'd think it should, like getting good letters of recommendation: there are disproportionate numbers of students in top graduate programs who attended institutions nobody would describe as focused on undergraduates, so this is clearly not keeping them from being admitted.  In particular, faculty at universities with strong math programs know what it takes to be admitted to top graduate schools, and they provide what's needed.  You might have to put in some effort to make sure you don't fall through the cracks, and this could be a hardship depending on your personality, but for many people it's not so difficult and in any case it's a valuable life skill to develop.

If you're looking to judge universities by how well they will prepare you for graduate school, the main factor I'd look at is how many students they send to graduate programs you might like to attend.  If the number is large (relative to the size of the undergraduate program, of course), then that's a very good sign.  Clearly they're doing something right, and you'll have the benefits of a strong peer group already as a undergraduate.  If the number is small, then you should worry.


On the possible obsolescence of research paper titles starting with "On the ..." I have observed that most papers with titles starting with "On the ..." are theoretical ones, like pure mathematics, physics, computer science, etc. Most of these papers are relatively old, though I can find a few recent examples as well.

Are such titles becoming obsolete?
If not, when is it appropriate to use it?

As I always understood it, a paper called Zero-dimensional vector spaces claims to be an exhaustive overview of the topic, while On zero-dimensional vector spaces would be merely a contribution to the study of those spaces. So it is humility on the part of the authors.


Should a professor recommending me talk about my (bad) grades in his or her letter? I recently graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics. I'm now applying to research internships and some of these need recommendation letters from faculty.

I did very badly during the first 2 years at college (having scored around 6/10 (=2.4/4) GPA in my courses until the end of my 4th semester) -- however, I learnt from my mistakes and became much more disciplined in my 3rd year, when I scored an average of 8/10 (3.2/4). At the end of 3 years, I had to graduate with a sub-3 CGPA of 6.88/10 (2.75/4).

I did really well on research projects and other quantitative projects at college, which is one reason why I've found professors to recommend me. I understand that my poor GPA will probably put me in a bad position, but what's done is done and I digress. One of my possible references asked me to draft a letter for him and that he will make changes as necessary before sending it in.

My question is: should I ask my references to talk about my poor grades (something along the lines of "While X does not have impressive scores in his undergraduate degree, it can be clearly seen from his transcripts that he picked up pace and discipline during his final year. I believe that X has taken home the importance of hardwork after a few hiccups in his academic life".)

Even if the above phrasing doesn't seem good, in general, is it a good idea to talk about your bad grades in a recommendation letter? Or is it simply better to let this go and concentrate on my strengths?

It really depends on how the professor knows you.

If the professor only knew you "after the change", the letter might say "I am aware of student's relatively low grades during the first few years, but by the time of my class, they were a top-performing student", that kind of thing.

If the professor has known you for years, it might be appropriate to comment on having observed this change, and expressing confidence that you can handle the role in question despite the low cumulative QPA.


What is the reason that some departments do not allow PhD students to be instructors of record? It is common that PhD students have teaching duties as TA. In this case, the person ultimately for the course (the instructor of record) is a faculty member. I should note that I am talking only about enrolled PhD students at the same university as where the undergraduate course is taught.

In some places, it seems that PhD students can serve as the instructor of record, but at many other places they are not.

What are the reasons why PhD students are not permitted to be  instructors of record at some universities in the USA and Europe?

My institution (which is a highly ranked R1 private university) tries to differentiate itself from other universities by advertising that all of our professors teach  and that the undergraduates -- if they choose to come here -- will learn directly at the feet of the greatest scholars in the world (blah blah blah..).

My cynical quip aside, we try very hard at least nominally to ensure this. All professors in the arts and sciences teach their own classes (research staff at the medical school are of course exempt), although some teach less than others.

Very few graduate students are permitted to be instructors of record -- only just a handful of 6th and 7th years are given this right, and only in very focused seminars.

For us, it's a bit of a matter of pride -- what differentiates us from some of the other R1s. But like most things in the neoliberal academy, there has been talk of bringing in adjunct faculty and other changes that will certainly dilute the claim made in the opening paragraph above.


Licensing under author name? What does it means a project being licensed with the name of the author?

I mean, one instance is: there is an author X, that writes an open source book on biology with git and at the end of the README file is © 2017 X. Other instance is when the same author X, writes his webpage and at the end of the page put his characteristic © 2017 X.

It is evident author does not get into the game of licenses (justified or not!!). But what should I interpret with his license? Every change (in any sense) that I want to make I should contact him? What is the (legal status) point of this license "© 2017 X"??

Example of webpage

A statement such as this "© 2017 X"  means that the author want you to know that he is the author of this page, and that he has the copyright over the content of this page. In simple words, this means that this is some original content and that it belongs to him.

If you want to copy some of that content in your own webpage, book, or other documents, or modify it then you should do it in a way that will respect the copyright law  and the license of the content chosen by the author. If the author does not provide a specific license for his webpage such as Creative Commons, then you should ask the authors about how you can reuse his content and if he agrees or not. You can send an e-mail and ask him if you can modify the content and republish it for example. Maybe he will say yes, maybe no

But beside that, you can still cite his work. For example, if you want to copy a few sentences of text from his webpage, you could use the quotation marks " " and cite his webpage as the source of the text. In this case, you typically don't need to ask the permission for that because you are citing a short part of the text.

By the way, a book can be open-source (you can see the code of the book), but "open-source" does not mean that you are free to do whatever you want with the content. The copyright still belong to the author and you need to follow the license that he choses.


Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in literature review? Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in literature review as long as they are relevant and contribute to the presentation of the summary of literature?

In other words,
I am not intending to reference or cite any of my experiences as a source, but rather, I am seeking to use my experiences to essentially add to the research story.

For instance,

The Blah Blah theory by Smith (2010) suggests A, B, and C. I experienced event M and I observed event N, which may potentially be manifestations of the phenomenon described in the Blah Blah theory, with event M being a possible example of A and event N being an example of C.

Something to this extent.

Many of the papers I have read primarily use examples from their studies or hypothetical scenarios to explain models/theories, but I have only ran across personal experience examples in textbooks and not in academic review papers or theses.

Although you didn't quite ask it this way, I see two parts to your question, and I will offer answers accordingly: "Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in academic writing?" and "Is there any difference when it comes to literature reviews?"

Is it okay to discuss personal experiences or observations in academic writing?

Although it is controversial (some people will tell you never to include personal experiences), I think there is a place for personal experiences. But first, you need to understand why this is generally frowned on.

Everyone has personal experiences and everyone has different ways to interpret them. Anyone can write a magazine or blog article sharing their personal experiences. That's just their opinion, which the reader could take as good or bad. What separates an academic article from such opinions is that academic writing is usually expected to be fairly objective (tries to take a disinterested third-party perspective) and critical (takes nothing at face value, but tries to dig under the surface to understand what is really going on from multiple non-obvious perspectives). (One notable exception to this is critical social theory, which does not necessarily try to be objective, but nonetheless strongly emphasizes being critical.)

So, where do personal experiences fit in here? Most of the time, they are not objective (by definition) and all too often, they are insufficiently critical. This is why they are often frowned on. However, I believe they could be helpful and acceptable if the writer considers their own personal experiences this way: "What makes my personal experience more outstanding than other random personal experiences related to this phenomenon?" If there is nothing particularly outstanding about it (e.g. it merely serves to illustrate the point, as do other people's experiences), then it is best not to mention it, since such a mention would weaken an otherwise strong academic argument. But if it is unique or original (e.g., the entire study is propelled by the fact that the writer's personal experiences contradict the dominant scholarly discourse), then it is definitely worth mentioning. However, in such cases, the writer should try to describe their experience as objectively as possible and should be critical in not accepting their own interpretations of their experience at face value. When presented properly, such personal experiences can strengthen the credibility of the writer.

Is there any difference when it comes to literature reviews?

I believe the principle I laid out for academic writing in general also applies to literature reviews. However, there are two levels or two aspects to a literature review that you need to distinguish in this case:

Including your personal experiences as part of the "literature" being reviewed: NO. Your personal experiences are not "literature". "Literature" means published works (by "published" I include grey literature such as working papers; I also include non-scholarly practitioner publications). It does not include unpublished, unwritten anecdotes. That is at best to be considered primary research, which is never part of "literature" being reviewed in a literature review. (Don't misunderstand me; you are certainly free to supplement a literature review with original primary research if you want to, but you just have to clearly distinguish that from the "review" part of the article or chapter.)
Including your personal experiences as part of the introduction or discussion of your literature review: In this case, since you are clearly not presenting your own experiences as part of the "literature" being reviewed, then my comments above apply. I see no problem with this if it is done properly. But again, this is controversial; "controversial" means that your supervisor or journal editor might disagree, and so you might have to drop it regardless.


How to avoid the "need" to learn more before conducting research? I am starting a PhD this Fall, and I'm absolutely terrified that I'm nowhere close enough to the "frontier of knowledge" to enable me to do quality research.

For background purposes, I have a BSc in Chemical Engineering and a BSc in Pure and Applied Mathematics. I finished both of these simultaneously in a 4 year span, as my philosophy was always that I need to be as efficient in my learning as possible and race to that mythical place where the edge of knowledge resides. The issue, however, is that it's now all too clear to me that I'll never be quite where I initially envisioned I would be before starting my PhD.

It is also clear that I have a lot to learn before being able to contribute significantly to the project I'm being placed on, and I worry that I'll spend too much time taking classes and learning what's already known, and not enough time exploring what is not known. This is all made worse by the fact that my PhD will be mostly theoretical in nature, so I feel that the lag time between when I am done "training" and when I can start publishing papers is significant. I did a lot of experimental research in my undergrad, and it was clear to me there that this problem does not exist in as dire a form as the path I chose to go down (and that I am actually excited to go down).

To be clear I am not expecting to make monumental revelations in my PhD, and I don't think anyone is really expecting me to do that either. I am just wondering how someone that carries out theoretically/computationally focused research decides when "enough is enough" and stops taking classes. In sorting out my class schedule for this Fall, I am worried that my addiction from undergrad of taking as many courses as possible will interfere with my research, and at the same time I am not confident that I know enough to conduct research of any sort at the moment.

So if your PhD was largely theoretical and computational in nature, I guess I'm wondering how you were able to balance learning and researching? Anything you wish you did differently? Is it normal to spend a couple years accruing knowledge and not publishing much? Do you have any books/resources you recommend that deal with this sort of dilemma?

I sympathise completely with your situation, as I went through exactly that thought process when I began my PhD. I am in my second year.

I did not begin my PhD with a tightly defined research question, and I would guess that you are not doing so either. I did have an idea of what general area of research interested me and spent a lot of time looking at  published papers. Sometimes, while reading a paper, I realised that I needed more general understanding of that topic, and then read text books, or attended classes.

I also attended seminars and such like, to get some idea about how other researchers in my general field go about their work. And I volunteered to give talks on quite general subjects in my broad field, on the basis the best way to learn a subject is to try and teach it to somebody else. I have been surprised by how much of that haphazardly gathered learning has turned out to be helpful in my own very specific research - sometimes directly relevant but more often by suggesting ideas to me about a way of looking at a problem.

I thought, and still think, that it would be a mistake to take classes and read textbooks until I was at the frontier of knowledge, because I would never reach the frontier that way.

What I did instead, after reading, more or less deeply,  a few hundred papers, was to realise that none of them really addressed a particular question that I was interested in. Having, almost inadvertently, identified a specific research question, I could then conduct a very intense literature review to confirm, or otherwise, that nobody else had researched that question.

Guess what! I had reached the frontier of knowledge. I am now in the process of seeing if I can push the frontier further out.


Student continues to email me after I told him I would not regrade his paper. Do I need to reply? I have a student who wrote a final paper for a class in a masters program. He was disappointed with his grade. His paper had extensive copying, so I had a zoom call with him explaining why that was a problem, and then both my teaching assistant and I gave extensive written feedback on his paper, final grade of 69. He has written several times about it, claming that we took points off unfairly. I re-explained why points were taken off, and where, He writes back "but I thought the grading rubric meant..." or "I explained this, here is what I meant", etc. After five go arounds, I said I had nothing further to say, so I would no longer reply, and he would need to raise this with the department if he would like further review. Today, he sent me an extensive email again re-hashing points that I have clarified and explained again. I should add that he has a history of grade grubbing. Since I told him in 2 emails that the mattter was closed, and I would no longer reply, do I need to reply? Thank you.

No, you don't need to reply, but you should make sure that you retain all evidence for your decisions in the event the student complains to some higher authority. Retain the email thread as well.

You've already said it was closed. Stick with that unless your chair or other such people force it to be reexamined.


What figure formatting can, should, or will be done by a publisher? Background
When preparing a final version of a figure, it appears that some changes could be more easily made in a graphics software (gimp, inkscape, scribus, adobe) as opposed to R. Such changes might be done more efficiently, and more to the publishers standards, by the publisher. Apparently, the publisher uses some such software to makes final changes to the image anyway. Presumably, these changes can do it more efficiently and to their standards. Also, some tasks would be trivial or would be done anyway by the publisher.
Some tasks that I am currently doing to prepare figures for a journal article:

move / add text
change font
change line thickness
change background color

Something that would be neat to do:

integrate figures into text, in the style of Tufte:

Questions:

What formatting is commonly done by a publisher rather than an author?
Is it reasonable to make requests?
If so, what work will a publisher be willing to do?

For many years, the standard on the part of journals is to do absolutely nothing with respect to journal articles. Essentially all of the work in terms of preparation falls on the authors. Previously, figures had to be "camera-ready"; now, they "just" have to be publication quality. The journal production staff will not do anything, except potentially change the size of the graphic to better fit the column space.

You should check with the journal about the regulations on acceptable graphics; they should have them available for your review on their website. If there are questions about the use of graphics outside of those guidelines, send an email to the journal office.


Is it appropriate to email a professor during summer for a difficult question? Tl; dr : Does a math professor get annoyed or think of it as a waste of time if he is emailed a difficult math question from an undergraduate student whom he is fairly acquianted with? Or is he ok with it?

I am currently an undergraduate at an U.S. university. I have taken two math courses with a pretty renowned (though not world-famous, though I might be wrong) and super-nice (i.e. very kind and skillful both in teaching and in math itself) professor in the past, got A's on both, and am also decently acquianted with the professor (I went to lots of office hours while taking the course). I am self-studying a math topic (set theory) he should be very familiar with (he is a tenured logic professor, and logic and set theory often go hand in hand). I recently came across a question on the math topic that's hard to answer, and wanted to email the professor about how to solve the problem. However, I am afriad that the professor might think of my question as a nuisance  / waste of his time, especially since he might well be busy (he's tenured professor at a university that is ranked wihin top 5 in the world in mathematical logic, so he might have lots of conferences/research/meetings/etc). I don't want to be a bother for him in any way, but I think he can help me solve this rather difficult question. Should I email him or not? The last time I took a course with him was like February 2018...

In general, how do professors react to this? If you are a professor (who is not someone who doesn't care about students) please comment below. Are they annoyed, or are they ok with it/delighted? What if they are busy?

Please gear this toward summer! Lots of people may relax during summer so it might be different... Also I am not sure if this is relevant but he doesn't have a family (i.e. single) and is like age 42 or something...

I emailed a different professor once about a math question and his reaction seemed to be "I'm annoyed".. I actually wrote an email to another professor and he was like "I would be able to answer you if I am on campus but sorry I'm not and writing math via email is too much so I can't answer you"... Are these reactions generic or are they exceptional?

Let me try to answer some of the questions in the body of your post:

  In general, how do professors react to this? If you are a professor (who is not someone who doesn't care about students) please comment below. Are they annoyed, or are they ok with it/delighted? What if they are busy?

Of course the answers are "it depends". What does it depend on? Here are a few factors:

The tone of your email: of course, people tend to respond better to polite requests than something that seems demanding or pushy. You say the professor "might well be busy". I can guarantee you that he is busy. He may or may not make the time to answer your question nevertheless, but you should make clear that you understand he is not under any obligation to do so.
The difficulty of the question: you say your question is "rather difficult", but what is rather difficult for you may not be for a professor who is expert in the subject. If your question really is something complicated that will take a long time to type an answer to, people will be less inclined to spend that time just to satisfy your curiosity.
The clarity of the question: if you choose to write and ask, you should be absolutely sure that your question makes sense and is clearly and unambiguously stated. Nothing is more vexing than putting in time to answer someone's question only to have them change what they are asking.
Personality: some people just enjoy answering questions more than others; some people guard their time more closely than others.

Speaking just for myself, if I received such a question over the summer that was clearly written, not overly complicated, and phrased in a polite way, I would be pleased (maybe not "delighted"), and if I had time, I would try to answer.


How do I respond to a professor’s email refusing my recommendation request? My professor has refused to provide a recommendation that I requested from him and directed me to approach the head of the department.

How do I close this communication with him?

Would a thank you email be necessary?

You don't need to reply to him at this point, what you should do is to follow his advice and contact the head of department.

You could, if you really want to, reply to him saying thank you for the advice - but this may or may not be received as you expect - far simpler to leave it and move on.


What does "funding" mean for undergraduate students performing research over the holiday period? I am currently an undergraduate student interested in gaining research experience. I recently asked the research coordinator of our faculty if there were any opportunities to conduct research over the holidays, in preparation for graduate studies. I was told that there were no available summer research programs at the moment, and that I should approach individual faculty members and ask them. They also told me something about them themselves not being able to support any research students over the summer because they don't "have the funds". I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding what this means, but I'm actually not interested at all in getting paid; I just want to gain research experience. Is this what the individual meant, or does it mean something else?

There are two things that require funds for a summer studentship:

Paying the student living costs
The cost of the research materials themselves (which might be more or less important depending on the subject, but in my field we budget about £10,000 (~$15,000) a for a full time year per researcher.

As has been pointed out it depending on the local laws, you might legally count as an employee. I would expect that to be the case in many european countries. In fact its a big grey area in UK law, and working out if you an employee, a trainee or a volunteer is complicated.
But the law aside, I personally do not take unfunded summer students because the privilege those that have the means to support themselves without income for several months over those who can't. The system of unpaid internships in law, media, politics etc, has long been seen as a source of the unrepresentativeness of those professions and research is no different. There is a big move to here outlaw unpaid internships explicitly. I do not want to be part of that system and mine is not an uncommon position here.


How to find an arXiv endorser I have recently completed a manuscript and I want it to submit to the arXiv. But there I find that there is an endorsement requirement. But since I am quite new in this field (and this is my first time wanting to submit to arXiv), I don't know how to find an endorser myself. I have mailed the admin also but in reply they also told me that searching for an endorser is a responsibility of the author himself. So, can anyone help me regarding the process as to how to find an endorser?

If you go to a paper on the arXiv (for example, this one of mine: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7357), at the bottom, there is a link that reads "Which authors of this paper are endorsers?"  If you click through, you'll see something like

  Ben Webster: Is registered as an author of this paper.
  Can endorse for math.AG, math.AT, math.CO, math.CT, math.GR, math.GT, math.QA, math.RA, math.RT, math.SG.

which means I can endorse submitters in algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, combinatorics, category theory, group theory, geometric topology, quantum algebra, rings & algebras, representation theory and symplectic geometry.

Presumably you know of some papers on the arXiv related to yours, so look at their authors.  If you don't know of any, then maybe you should rethink whether the site is a good fit for you.


Will anybody actually read your research and teaching statements? When applying to faculty jobs, how much weight is given to your research/teaching statements?  Talking with a few folks on admissions committees at Very Good Departments in Big Research Universities, I was told in no uncertain terms that

your letters get you the interview,
your talk and individual meetings get you the job,
nothing else really matters,

where "nothing" includes your research statement, your teaching statement, the content of your publications, or your hairdo.  Of course, I am working with a very small sample here.  How true is this sentiment?  (And if it is true, why keep asking us young folks to write these hackneyed teaching statements that nobody ever reads?)  More importantly,

Question: For those who have been on faculty hiring committees, what are the actual criteria you use to invite applicants?

By actual (in bold and italics) I don't mean "what the job posting specifies" or "what the department charter says you're supposed do," but rather "how you actually make these decisions in a meeting right before lunch while preoccupied with a grant proposal due at midnight and the fact that the cafeteria is going to fill up with noisy smelly undergrads if you don't get there soon."

I am the chair of the faculty recruiting committee in a Very Good Department at a Big Research University.  I read research and teaching statements.

I need to know that you have a compelling agenda for your future research; your letters won't talk about that at all.  I need to know that you can describe and motivate your research agenda well enough to attract external research funding.  I need to know that you know why (not just "that") your work is interesting, visible, important, and likely to have high impact.  I need to know that you communicate clearly enough to be a good teacher, and that you care enough about teaching to formulate a coherent teaching philosophy.  I need to know that your research, teaching, and career goals—as you describe them—match those of my department.  I need to know that you are taking the recruiting process seriously.

In the long run, your publications (which I also read) and your recommendation letters are probably more important.  But saying that your statements have no importance is a dangerous exaggeration.

Also, I don't eat in the cafeteria.


How are PhDs from foreign universities percieved in the US? I live and teach at a university in S. Korea. I may have an opportunity to complete my PhD in TESOL or English linguistics at this university. However, I am reluctant because I have heard that PhDs from non-Western universities (in particular, Korea) are not valued or equatable to US PhDs. Anecdotal evidence from my department supports a similar notion: all the PhDs in my department were received in the US. So, my question is, how are PhDs from non-Western universities perceived? Would a university rather hire someone with a US PhD rather than a US citizen with a Korean PhD?

I may have an opportunity to complete my PhD in TESOL or English linguistics at this university

If you decide to do PhD in English linguistics, I would advise you to do it in an English speaking country. The reason is simple, how do you convince others that PhD in English linguistics in S. Korea, where English is a foreign language, is worth something?

On the other hand, if you decide to do PhD in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), where that "other language" is Korean, then I think a Korean university may be a reasonable choice if the quality of both the PhD program and the university are quite good.

Your job opportunity in Korea after you obtain your PhD may not be good if you stay in Korea after you graduate. However, you may actually have advantage over somebody who receives PhD from a Western university because their lack of practical knowledge - teaching English to Koreans if you go to countries other than Korea.

I met many Chinese/Koreans in the US, who had gone to English schools. Many of them told me they wish their English teachers had trainings in their native languages so they would have less difficulties while learning English. I deeply believe those English teachers should have gone through trainings by the PhDs like you.


Who get rebuttal in conference submission? When a conference has a date for Rebuttal, does this mean they send the reviews to all submitted papers including accepted papers? Or is it just sent to borderline/rejected papers?

The answer will depend on the conference, but reviews are typically sent to all authors, to give all authors an equal opportunity to respond. At this stage, reviewers might not have seen other reviews, hence, no decisions will have made.


Any disadvantage to multiple applications? I am considering applying for PhD programs in CS. I've been reading about the process, reading the sorts of things that programs want and I would say that I am an OK (but not stellar) applicant. For instance,  I'm missing some math classes that I could take next year. I've also been working in industry, so I could certainly get more involved with research (I'm working on a few in-progress papers now). I think that if I waited a year I would be a more competitive applicant. Is there any particular reason not to apply now, see how I do, and then potentially reapply in a year? If anything, applying a second time (as a stronger applicant) would show that I really want to do this. Right?

I don't think there is anything wrong with this, as long as on the 2nd application a year later, it is made clear that something changed in the year prior. This could be additional courses taken, higher test scores (GRE for example), etc. I think if your application is legitimately improved over the year, no one would ever have a problem with this, but a potential reviewer might be annoyed if they receive the same application year after year without notable changes/improvements.


Difference in length of study between Europe and the states? It seems like in most European countries a student has to take a 3 years B.Sc, 2 years M.Sc and then 5 years phd program while in the U.S the M.Sc is skipped but the length of the phd stays the same...

(Specifically talking about CS, but may relate also to other fields)

Is that correct, and if so, why is that?

Your understanding of the duration of PhD programs in the US is a bit off- the average "registered time to degree" beyond the bachelors degree for PhD recipients in the US is more like 7 years.  See

[http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/][1]

In recent years there have been some attempts to reduce time to degree, and the data reported in this link are more than 10 years old, but the situation hasn't changed very much in the last 10 years.


Is it usually allowed to use grant money for voluntary contributions? Recently I watched a series of video talks that greatly helped me understand a topic I am researching. I wanted to help the author create more such videos by making a Patreon donation. This made me wonder whether such donation can be done using money from a research grant? I looked at guidelines of some local grants. They usually allow to pay for professional courses related to the research, but do not say anything about donating to free such courses. Do other funding bodies have an explicit policy about this?

I have to guess on this one, but can imagine that they haven't mentioned it because they haven't thought of it. I also imagine that they would be somewhat upset to learn of it unless you make provision for it in the grant application.
The reason for my speculation is that few grantors are so rich that they don't much care how their, perhaps, limited funds are spent.
But if you use something that is explicitly funded by donations, then you may be able to make a case that you should donate. Your suggestion of Patreon's involvement suggest that you may be in this situation.
But not all "donations" are prohibited or discouraged. Putting grant funded software in public repositories and making it open source or giving generous licenses to it is often encouraged. Another possible form of donation is the funding of a person so that they can donate their time and efforts to worthy public projects that can't afford their own funding.
I would ask the grant administrator before doing this, and suspect that different people will give different answers. And if the donations are a minuscule part of the grant, it is less likely to be forbidden. But that, too, is speculation.


How to present work that includes replicating results of another study? I started working on a research project for a class that was at first meant to be a collaboration between a lab at our university and another university. The only information that I was given to start with was a basic problem statement and a vague description of results with no idea of how they were generated.

This work was unpublished and currently they have a paper under review. I tried to get in contact with the authors to get more information, but was unable to. I have been unsuccessful in getting any information at all about the paper that is under review. I was intending to look at extensions of their work or work related to theirs, but with almost no information about methodology and especially context and limitations I was skeptical of their results.

It should be noted if their work is published it will most likely create small subfield. Lacking important information I decided to see if I could, using my own method, replicate these results. I found my own dataset and managed to get preliminary results using the method I developed and from this came up with directions for future work.

My advisor wants me to present my work at a poster session at an upcoming local event. Is it acceptable to present this work with preliminary results and possible directions for new research?  If so how do I acknowledge the slight contribution from this lab?

I think the best way to approach this is to write a polite email to your collaborators showing enthusiasm for the work and letting them know that you were able to extend it. You may also want to propose if they would like to contribute to the poster. This can strengthen the relations and may result in a fresh collaboration.


What are some tips for passing qualifying written exam (i.e., writing a lot in a week)? My school's comprehensive qualifying procedure has thee parts.

A paper that is a synthesis and analysis of the literature on my topic,
A written exam that lasts 5 days, and
An oral exam on my topic.

This question refers to the second portion.

After reading your paper, each committee member writes a question for you to answer (total of 4). You have from 9 am Monday to 5 pm Friday to write a 2,500- to 3,000-word response to each question (not including bib). This isn't necessarily something you can study for.

I am historically not the fastest writer. I also have a tendency to not always be clear in my writing (it is clear in my head, but not always on paper).

My question is: How can I prepare to successfully pass? I need to write a large amount of high-quality work in a short amount of time with no time to prep for questions ahead of time.

Thanks in advance.

Step one, plan your writing. The most efficient way to work is to write an outline before you start.  However, in this case, where you have five days, you might need to alternate activities -- researching, trying out ideas, outlining and writing up parts you feel pretty sure about.  So you might find that after a couple of days of this, you've written a large part of your submission, without having gone strictly step by step (outline, then write from the outline).  In this case, you may have to produce an outline from your written paragraphs.  You might need to do this more than once.  Definitely do work with an outline, though, even if it's a bit of a pain to analyze your existing paragraphs and then describe them with an outline.

Why?  Because this will help you find places where you're being repetitive, or where you make a leap of faith and omit to explain how you got from Point A to Point B, or where some reordering would make things hang together better.

If you need to consider a major restructuring, it can help to print it all out and cut it up into pieces according to sub-topic, and then try laying out the pieces in a few different orders on the floor or a large table.

Ideally, though, after having written an outline, you would then churn out reams of words and sentences and paragraphs, using your outline as your guide.

Revision: Let some time go by -- half a day, or overnight, before proceeding to the revision stage. Ideas for finding errors and places that aren't clear: Read it out loud. Display it in a different font or different size, or on a different screen. Print a hard copy. Have the computer read it to you out loud.  These things will make it easier for you to find problems.

If you're allowed to, ask a friend to read a draft and circle anything that seems unclear or possibly having a spelling, punctuation or grammar mistake.

(The best way of all to prepare for writing is to pre-write with an interested live human being, who asks you, "What is your essay going to be about?")

Get lots of exercise and sleep between now and then, of course.  Make sure you have a reliable set-up with all the resources and tools and groceries and peace and quiet you will need, including headphones or ear plugs if noise bothers you.  Alert friends and acquaintances that you will be on the dark side of the moon for five days.

Use version control.  Save a new, numbered version every couple of hours.  Make sure your computer does an autorecover save when it crashes.

Practice makes perfect, and this is especially true with writing -- and revising.  So, you may wish to warm up your writing and revising skills between now and then.

Remember that they won't be grading only on the quality of the writing, and that lots of students find writing challenging, but somehow many of them graduated.


How should multiple Harvard references with same first author but different coauthors be made? This question was written by a friend of mine. I'm helping them by posting it here, with permission.
How should I use the name-year referencing system (loosely speaking, the Harvard system) in such cases where there are multiple works that have the same first author but a different set of coauthors?
In such cases where the maximum number of authors among all articles sharing the same first author is not more than three, or perhaps four, the solution is very simple. Just mention them all inline and use the reference list as usual. E.g. the following:

"... the complex formation was observed by Miller and Nelson (1991)"
"... cf. Miller, Nelson and Byrne (1993)"

However, if there are more authors in any of the articles, this gets quite tricky, since listing a huge number of authors inline is definitely not an option to me. I'd rather change to number references.
Now, making the references unambiguous is not a problem. For instance, the following references could be addressed to inline as "Barton et al." without in any way losing the one-to-one relation between inline citations and reference list entries. That is, the articles are differentiated, as the other is "Barton et al. (1980)" and the other "Barton et al. (1985)".

Barton, D. H. R.; Crich, D.; Potier, P. (1985). "On the mechanism of the decarboxylative rearrangement of thiohydroxamic esters". Tetrahedron Lett. 26, 5943.
Barton, D. H. R.; Dowlatshahi, H. A.; Motherwell, W. B.; Villemin, D. V. (1980). "A New Radical Decarboxylation Reaction for the Conversion of Carboxylic Acids into Hydrocarbons". J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun., p. 732.

What really is the problem is the alphabetical order in which the references should be sorted in the reference list. If the articles listed above are referred to just as "Barton et al.", the reader does not know the exact position in the reference list where to find the articles.
One solution might be just ignoring this slight complication.
Other solution is to use "et al" in the reference list, too, if absolutely necessary. Thus, in the example above, the first article would be referred to as "Barton, Crich and Potier (1985)" inline, and the latter as "Barton et al. (1980)".
In the reference list, they would be expressed and arranged according to the inline cites:

Barton, D. H. R.; Crich, D.; Potier, P. (1985). "On the mechanism of the decarboxylative rearrangement of thiohydroxamic esters". Tetrahedron Lett. 26, 5943.
Barton, D. H. R. et al. (1980). "A New Radical Decarboxylation Reaction for the Conversion of Carboxylic Acids into Hydrocarbons". J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun., p. 732.

Any other recommendations?
Please don't suggest Google, since I did not find an answer after 30 minutes of search. There are perhaps hundreds of "Harvard citation guides" available, but I found none that addressed this problem.

As eykanal said, journals usually provide their own formatting, and personally, I use latex/bibtex, so I tend to assume this kind of problems will be solved automatically.
That being said, in the case you describe, I would expect the ordering to be (first name, year), and in the case where there are multiple references with the same first author for the same year, then to use (Barton et al., 1980a) (Barton et al. 1980b). So your example would be:

Barton, D. H. R.; Dowlatshahi, H. A.; Motherwell, W. B.; Villemin, D. V. (1980). "A New Radical Decarboxylation Reaction for the Conversion of Carboxylic Acids into Hydrocarbons". J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun., p. 732.
Barton, D. H. R.; Crich, D.; Potier, P. (1985). "On the mechanism of the decarboxylative rearrangement of thiohydroxamic esters". Tetrahedron Lett. 26, 5943.

and the two references (Barton et al. 1980) and (Barton et al. 1985). That way, when I know I need to look first for the first name, and then to the year. Now, if let's assume that there is another reference by Barton and Alice in 1980, then you would have:

Barton, D. H. R.; Alice (1980a). "Bla bla", p2.
Barton, D. H. R.; Dowlatshahi, H. A.; Motherwell, W. B.; Villemin, D. V. (1980b). "A New Radical Decarboxylation Reaction for the Conversion of Carboxylic Acids into Hydrocarbons". J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun., p. 732.
Barton, D. H. R.; Crich, D.; Potier, P. (1985). "On the mechanism of the decarboxylative rearrangement of thiohydroxamic esters". Tetrahedron Lett. 26, 5943.

and the references would be (Barton et al., 1980a) and (Barton et al., 1980b).
As for the question whether you should put the one with Alice first or second, it does not really matter, since the reference is unique anyway, but in this case, I would go for the month of publication if you have it, otherwise with the alphabetical order of the second author (and of the third one if the first two authors are the same, and so on).


To publish or not to publish a paper in an ERA "type C" conference? I have been researching a topic in Computer Science for several years now. The topic was interesting, but while I managed to get some conclusive results, I was not completely happy about them. It was like something was missing, but I knew that I really needed to talk to somebody more specialized in the topic, but unfortunately a lot of external professors that I contacted did not have enough time to collaborate. Anyway I submitted it to two conferences, which were ranked like B according to the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) schema:

A* - flagship conference
A - excellent conference, determined by a mix of indicators
B - good conference, determined by a mix of indicators
C - other ranked conference venues

The final verdict at both conferences was a weak reject. So I made the corrections that the reviewers suggested and submitted it to another conference. This new conference has a rank of C, but it deals with the subject that I was making research; the final verdict was accepted as a borderline paper.

Now, the question that I have is that if I should present my paper at that conference, or should I try to fix other things and resubmit to other higher-ranked venues? For me it would be more practical to leave it as is, and let another researcher pick it up if she is so interested.

You should have asked yourself this question before you submitted to the conference. Withdrawing your paper now, after it's been accepted, means you wasted a bunch of people's time (editor, reviewers, ...). Do unto others ...

Additionally, given that it was accepted as a borderline paper and was rejected at two previous conferences may be a hint that your work is not perceived as top of the line by external referees. I doubt you can shoot much higher than what you have now.


Is it possible for a PhD student to survive in the USA only on TA/RA money? Suppose, a prospective PhD student doesn't have money to self-finance his PhD in the USA.

Is it possible for a PhD student to survive in the USA only on TA/RA money?

Agnostic of institution, each of which has its own set of policies governing TA/RA pay (more or less depending on the institution), a short answer is yes.  There are also, of course, different costs of living depending on where your institution is located (e.g., the cost of living in New York is much higher than in, say, the midwest). In any case, you will be paid a livable wage, but don't expect to be living any sort of lavish lifestyle.

Personal experience: I've been living off of TA/RA pay for the past 3 years. The pay offered by the R1 institution I attend and work for is located in the Midwest and, relative to other schools in our conference, offers one of the best stipends. As such, I've had enough money to not only live, but support my hobbies and enjoy a [non-extravagent] leisurely life during my non-working, non-academic hours (of which there are not usually a ton haha).


Second PhD and conference biographical notes I am sending a conference proposal as a Ph.D. student. I am expected to provide a biographical note. I already hold another Ph.D. and I am not sure should I stress it or not in my biographical note.
I was wondering what is the best practice here. Should I focus on what I am doing right now or provide information about my previous work and achievements too?

Biographical notes are completely your own choice to share your achievements with readers. Alongside your current work, I don't see any reason for not sharing information about your previous PhD and achievements.