What should I do if I want to work in computer science but my advisor actively despises the field? I am a PhD student in computer science.  My advisor is a Professor in another department and complains that computer science has a poor culture, where people publish lots of rubbish papers instead of a few good ones.  My advisor prefers to publish in journal papers rather than conferences, and when my papers have been accepted to (good) conferences  didn't want to come to the conferences with me.  My advisor has published in computer science conferences in the past but now he seems to have little interest in CS or the CS community.

I am worried that I will not be able to have a career in computer science under these circumstances.  What should I do?

My question to you is why would you have non-computer science advisor if you are in the computer science field? That being said, you should change your advisor


Whether or should I ask for a reference from my advisor who I believe does not like me? I have good reason to believe that my academic advisor does not like me. However, I will need a reference if I am going to apply for graduate study.

What can I do now? I got an excellent mark in my dissertation (I do not know if she marked it, or how exactly it works here in the UK), but I am pretty certain she does not like me very much. Assuming my judgment is correct, what would be the best course of action? Shall I risk asking her for a reference and hope she will be fair, or rather ask somebody else?

While I don't doubt your judgement of the situation, I think it's best if you put your doubts to one side.

Let's consider the best case scenario: you contact your adviser and they agree to write a strong reference letter for you, based on your excellent performance over the course of your dissertation. Great!

Now let's consider the worst case scenario: you contact your adviser and they refuse to write you a reference. What then are your alternatives? I would suggest contacting your personal tutor from university, or another lecturer who you knew well and have fewer doubts about their attitude towards you. As a last resort, you could ask someone in your place of work e.g. supervisor, line manager. Explain to them that the letter needs to emphasise your potential to succeed in graduate studies.

Finally, let's consider the most likely scenario: you contact your adviser and they agree to write you a reference. They remember that your working relationship was not the most positive, and this may be reflected in the tone of the letter. However, after six months or a year, this impression may have faded. The excellent grade in your dissertation, however, is concrete evidence of your ability to achieve, and they base their letter on this. The reference may not be glowing but it will be an accurate reflection of your potential.

As an aside, I would hope for your sake that your adviser is able to put their professional judgement of you above their personal feelings. Good luck!


A professor commented that my research is too simple as compared to my colleagues. What does that mean about my future prospects? I gave a departmental seminar yesterday. It was a short 20 minutes presentation of my PhD thesis. I had presented two of my published works during the seminar. My research topic was to model an experimental manufacturing techniques. I have published two papers (in decent journals) and will be submitting few more.

One of my departmental senior professors privately told me that I am doing too simple research as compared to my labmates.

I know that I am an underperformer in my group, but I never thought my research to be simple. Now, I am worried how my research will be perceived by prospective future advisors and faculties. My advisor says not to heed to the professors comments and that I have done a good job. However, deep down, I feel that the professor might have a fair point. I don't know what can I do now. I have already submitted my thesis and will be defending in couple of weeks, though that professor won't be in my committee.

Perhaps the best route is to split the difference. Note the concern of one professor, but take heart from the support of your advisor. There are a lot of possible explanations.

Perhaps the professor making the comment is overlooking some aspects that are harder than they think. Some things that look easy from the outside are harder when you get into the details. And, perhaps, that professor is just so brilliant that the crux of your problem seems obvious to them. There are such people, of course.

Perhaps your current research really is simpler than that of others in their circle. But you are still early in the profession. You will probably do better work as you advance. The dissertation shouldn't be viewed as your life's best work, only the first.

There is no real reason to worry at this point, and certainly not to panic. But long term, consider the advice you were given. Perhaps a bit more experience will help you judge its merits or lack.


How to deal with a supervisor who engages in micro-management and does not give their PhD student any autonomy? What should a PhD student do, when his supervisor actually give directions on each and every thing to do (forced spoon feeding) instead of letting the student do his research and come back with some ideas and discuss the pros and cons and then move accordingly? Which will actually groom the student research skills?

Also if at some point a student disagrees then the student feels the change in the supervisor behaviour (on the negative side).

What should be the best practice to keep the balance in working environment and work as well?

If the student wishes to be self-sufficient in PhD research, then she/he ought to express that the student is competent to do so.

There are supervisors who tend to give sufficient freedom for the student to do their research in their own accord. There are some others who feel much more procedural in their approach to build and shape their scholars to their view. Both are actually fine as long as they confirm to the type of their respective students. There are some who require more attention that others, and some others less so. If the student feels that she/he does not require to be spoon fed, then it would be up to the student to show that she/he is capable of producing valuable result by him/herself.

The student ought to exhibit active involvement in the research and request for suggestions to the advisor. Here are a few examples.

  There is this new problem I've just came across while doing this work. It's about .... May I look further into this?

or

  There is an idea I would like to discuss regarding .... Shall I try this one out?

The point is to show how eager you are to be able to do research with lesser support. Of course this might not work all the time (depending on your advisor). This would, however, show how capable you are and is certainly worth a try.


Don't want someone else to continue on the topic of my thesis Today I defended by Bachelor's thesis and I did well. The thesis is handed in. However the process of developing it was a real nightmare, I had many panic attacks, etc. and it was just awful. But now I realized that I have mentioned in my thesis that there is room for more research in this field when there barely is any and if someone decides to continue my research with my results they are going to have a really bad time. I just really don't want anyone to suffer the way I did or even more.

Should I be stressed about it and is there any action I can take?

Congratulations on the successful defence of your thesis. If at all possible, take some time to relax.

I understand your concern, but you have no real reason to worry. In general, there is always room for more research on any given topic. Now, anyone who wishes to advance your work will either be more senior than yourself or working for someone more senior than yourself. It will be their responsibility to decide if they want to invest their time and energy in the project.

If you are ever contacted about your thesis, then you can explain why you are less optimistic today, than you were in the past. It is very likely that the other person has some fresh ideas and together you may move forward.


Swiss cheese holes in my education. Do I go back and fill them? In this recent blog post the author lists several interesting concepts he has discovered pertaining to learning. One thing he mentions is the following:

  Mastery is more important than passing grades. You will reach limits
  in learning when you have a "Swiss cheese" foundation full of
  misconception holes. Master each concept before building on top.
  ~Salman Khan

(This is actually from Salman's TED talk which you can view here.) My questions is as follows: I graduated about a year ago with a Master's in Applied Physics from a reputable university. I've been a B student throughout my academic career and I feel like I started building on un-mastered concepts somewhere towards the end of high school. Despite obtaining a relatively tough engineering degree, I cut corners whenever possible. If I could pass an exam by being able to do all the exercises, I would get to that level and stop there. I would rarely - if ever - go for complete mastery. As a result I feel like I have Swiss cheese holes in my understanding that date back to high school.

If Albert Einstein's quote is anything to go by:

  If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

I'm afraid I can't simply explain a whole lot. For instance I would not be able to explain simply:

What is the proof of Euler's identity?
Why can you express a wave as an imaginary exponential?
How does a photon have momentum, but not mass?
What is the intuitive understanding of eigenfunctions, eigenvalues and their physical manifestations?

With the wealth of knowledge available today on the internet, I could look up any one of my knowledge gaps, and with some effort I feel confident I would be able to fill them. My question is, would that be worth it?

First, for context, I'd disagree strongly with a too strict notion that "mastery" is required before "moving forward", for several reasons. It is easier to understand the purpose of something after one sees how it is used. It is all too easy to acquire a fake mastery that is not functional, but only refers to some artificial tasks created for a textbook, and, all the worse, may be wastes of time. And, finally, the kind of "mastery" we are often led to think we should attain is basically unattainable... That is, unless one keeps ones list of things-to-master really short, very elementary, and uncomplicated, this "mastery" is just unreachable on the terms a novice or even journeyman conceives.

So... don't over-interpret "mastery".

On the other hand, _of_course_ it is good to go back and fill in. And one will find oneself doing this many times, as one discovers, upon "stressing" one's knowledge, that what one thought one knew "well enough" was not quite good enough.

For that matter, even with an excellent memory, things slip out of a person's head.

My bottom line recommendation is to maintain (at least) two "threads", one to review and backfill, the other to move forward.

The latter is surprisingly useful at helping review make more sense! :)


The archive with all the LaTeX material as a camera ready version This happened to me for the first time. The organizers of the conference asked everyone to send them the archive with all the LaTeX material as a camera ready version of an accepted paper.

Is this a legitimate request?

I've notice this becoming increasingly common in CS. It's annoying, but if the conference is well known, it shouldn't be an issue.


Withdrawing paper from a conference after presentation due to error Please refer to the following link for details. I am planning to send an e-mail to the conference chairs regarding my withdrawal.
I wanted to seek help from the experts in the community for drafting the e-mail since I believe that it should be very carefully crafted since it is going to cause inconvenience to the conference committee(even though I haven't submitted the copyright form and the paperwork hasn't started yet).

What are the details that I should include in my e-mail? Do I need to be specific about the error or just write that I've discovered an error in the paper(considering the fact that I will continue to work on the paper and submit it to a journal)? Also, what possible responses should I expect from them?
Any help would be highly appreciated. I am having problems sleeping since the day I've discovered the error and cannot concentrate on my work. I just want to make the fact explicit and move ahead.

You are overthinking it. A simple note is all you really need. "The paper needs to be withdrawn as we have found a serious error that we don't believe can be corrected in time for the conference."

This won't have been the first time that a paper has been withdrawn. It is a matter of scheduling sessions for the program committee but some of the members are probably familiar with that. There may be some scrambling, however, if proceedings have already gone to press. But they should have copyrights in order before that happens. If they don't, then it is their problem, not yours.

No, you don't need to detail the error, just that it exists and that you don't have a ready fix. If the conference is part of a continuing series you may have it ready by next year (or whenever).


Legal protection for the title "university" in California Some non-academic organizations in United States use "university" as part of their name without official accreditation, and I've been struggling to figure out to what extent the university title is protected in the U.S. I'm particularly interested in California law.

In New York State, EDN § 224 prohibits non-accredited organizations from referring to themselves as a "university," but I haven't been able to find similar federal or California regulation.

Unlike some other countries, there is no strong federal regulation that controls the titles like "University" and "College".  A few states have state level regulations, but federally there isn't any.

By the looking at the number of degree factories in California, I doubt that state of California has strong control over the title as well.

Some people became professors in regular four year colleges outside of the states with PhD's from these colleges without attending the class once or even visiting the campus - well, there isn't any campus to visit anyway.


Free, open-source substitutes for Mendeley? Mendeley is (mainly) a proprietary social network to share basic citation data and research papers. see also

Are there any free and open source substitutes for this service?

A technical possibility: users could collect BibTeX data and a hash and share this information.
It would be very useful to have such a free service because every journal provides the citation data in a different format. That includes false field entries, broken files and hidden download buttons on the website.

The only alternative that comes to my mind is Zotero:

It is open-source,
it comes as a standalone application or as a web-based version with Firefox, Chrome and Safari connectors,
it integrates with Word or OpenOffice,
it syncs with the Zotero server,
it has BibTeX export,
and more.

The Zotero standalone client is cross-platform and open-source (AGPL licence), and it can be run on its own or synchronized with the web version. The web service is free to use up to a fixed storage quota, with paid storage available, and there is an open-source implementation of the dataserver available if you want to roll your own. The local client stores its data in SQLite format so in principle your data is not locked in, but the database is relatively hard to trawl externally; however, since the client is open source there are relatively few future-proofing concerns.


Recommender used an online template for my recommendation I've contacted a professor who I have taken 2 courses from and who has known me for over a year. I asked him for a recommendation letter and he agreed to write one. The moment I got his letter, I knew it wasn't entirely his words since he doesn't have a good command over English. So I ran a plagiarism check and found he took paragraphs out of this letter that is freely available online: https://www.eduers.com/reference/template/

Now, I'm a bit concerned about this. If the graduate admissions run some plagiarism test on this letter, this would almost certainly be flagged and that might void this letter entirely and reflect poorly on my entire application.

The way I see it, I have 2 options:

Contact another recommender
Somehow let my professor know about his plagiarism and request a new letter. (Not sure how I could address this via email appropriately!)

To address the first point, unfortunately, he is my 3rd (last) recommender so I have no one else to go to. Regarding the second point, he does not have a good command of English, so I'm not sure if he would be able to express his thoughts concise and precisely. And finally, I cannot have a face to face discussion since I'm not in the same country as him now, so the only practical interaction is via email.

That's my current situation, any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

The problem isn't so much the plagiarism, but that the letter is generic. The best letters include examples of interactions between the student and letter writer. Consider this paragraph

  At a personal level, Jane is a well disciplined, industrious student with a pleasant personality. She went well beyond the course requirements in the quantity and quality of her project, putting in a lot of extra research and attending office hours every week. Throughout the course, Jane demonstrated great perseverance and initiative. She was not only interested in and motivated to learn the material, but put great work into assimilating it to her own experience and developing her own ideas about each ethical topic that we discussed.

Were are the personal details. How did Jane show that perseverance and initiative? Did she just come to office hours, or was their a memorable interaction about Ethical Relativism? The best letters are personal. The template is nice in that it touches upon the important topics for a letter, but it still lacks the details that readers want to see.


Asking part of the salary in advance while starting a postdoc at a US university I'm not a US national, moving to the US from a foreign country to start a new postdoc at a US university. Considering the initial expenses (especially the deposit for the rent, which is three times the monthly rent), it'd help me if I could get part of the salary in advance.

My question is: would this be really a strange request to ask the department about it? Has anyone done it before with a positive result?

My university would give you a moving allowance that could be used to cover first and last months' rent plus security deposit on an apartment or rental house. You might start with asking what kind of moving allowance or support they offer and whether upfront rental costs like these are covered. This is not considered an advance on salary at my university, but is part of the cost of hiring. The university simply pays it to get good people to come work there.


Should I just move on if a professor doesn't answer my emails requesting a letter of recommendation? I've asked a professor who I did research with over the summer to write me a letter a recommendation for graduate programs, but he hasn't responded for over a week. I've resent him an email and have received no answer, but a peer who also worked in his lab over summer got an almost immediate response when asking for a letter. We have both done the same research in his lab and known him for the same amount of time. I don't mind if he declines, but I haven't received any word from him. Should I just move on and ask another professor?

Stop by his office (if in town) or pick up the blower.  Just ask him directly if he'll do it or not.  A lot of people are not so email/text centric.  He'll either say yes or no, but at least you'll know the answer.  (And if he says no, just drop it and move on--don't argue.)

Personally, I wouldn't cross off and move on, just because of not responding to email.  Especially if he's the best one.  He is probably just busy.  Or a procrastinator.

Voice or face to face are direct.  An email is like a letter.  Easy to ignore, to get to it later (which becomes never), etc.

When you do confront him if he says, he's unsure of what you did, offer to give him some bullet points and a BRIEF explanation of what you're going after and key features to emphasize.  (In the nature of making his job easier.)


Reapplying to graduate schools This was originally posted on math stackexchange and I was told this would be a better fit. If this isn’t the right place to post this question, please let me know.
Question: Is it looked down upon to apply to PhD programs in the US if I’m currently enrolled in one somewhere else?
Some context: I just graduated with my Master’s in mathematics from a well-known university in Europe. I had applied to grad schools in the US, but a combination of poor GRE subject test scores and the pandemic meant that it wasn’t safe/feasible for me to go there this year. I’m currently enrolled in a math PhD program in Europe for a research project in analysis. Unfortunately, my interests are in combinatorics-adjacent fields, and while I enjoy the occasional analysis, a PhD is a huge commitment. The school has a small department and my funding situation also means there’s no way for me to change research projects. This was absolutely a last resort for me - I did not want to start a PhD only to abandon it after a year. Unfortunately, as an international student, and because of the sudden pandemic, I didn’t have any other options left. To clarify: I am of course going to give this current program a chance, but unfortunately application deadlines are much sooner than that so I have to apply if I want to keep my options open.
I feel very guilty about this whole situation, so I’d appreciate any advice.

Is it looked down upon to apply to PhD programs in the US if I’m currently enrolled in one somewhere else?

No: You've found a bad fit with your current programme, so switching is a rationale decision, just like you'd switch ill-suited jobs.


Is it reasonable and ethical to apply for two PhD positions with two different professors at the same faculty and the same institution? Note: I saw this link, however I'm hoping to get wider range of opinions to help me make my decisions.

Problem statement: I sent an enquiry email to professor A of faculty X at university Y. Today, I saw another PhD offer posted on the web for another PhD position with professor B of same faculty X at same university Y.

Questions: Is it ethical to send enquiry email to professor B? Should I mention that I've sent an enquiry email to professor A earlier?

Yes, it's ethical. Everyone applies to multiple positions. Everyone knows this. At least this is my impression from the US. You don't say which country, so it's unclear who might be funding your position if you're eventually accepted. It's also unclear if you apply to the university, department, or professor directly. This might have some slight influence on whether you tell A and B about your cross applications. If they are going to be meeting together in committee to decide about applications, it might be better if everyone knows that you've applied to work with two different professors but really only once to the university. If each professor has sole discretion as to whom they hire, and only they see the application, then it probably doesn't matter.


PhD funding 1st year I am a Spanish student who is intending to apply for a PhD in electrical engineering in some US colleges. As far as I read in the web pages of the graduate schools, they financially support all the students they admit to their programs.

Anyway, in the application program they ask for information about the external funding I am asking for. I will be asking for It, but the period to ask for is after the university application is over.

Also, lots of the fellowships i have seen are only for PhD students that are already in 2nd or 3rd year,while the TA and RAs are also starting from 2nd year(as far as I know), so I wonder how important is it to have the external funding to get accepted? And if I would not get It would I get funding from them?

Thanks!

You do not need to have external funding to be accepted to graduate schools, and your situation is the same as every other student who applies: most of the time, the results of the fellowship applications won't be known until after the application deadlines.

As for RA's and TA's, that's a field-dependent thing. You may find that some departments use "central" funds to support students in their first semester or even first year (especially in programs where there is a lot of coursework to complete).


Is attending conferences while teaching considered an absence? Is attending conferences considered an absence? If not, then is there a limit on how many conferences a faculty can attend?!

While I have never experienced a department that defined "absent days", if your department regulates these things, you need to ask you department chair what the policy is.

Departments that I am familiar with expect you to either teach when you are supposed to, arrange someone to cover the teaching, or rearrange the session. In some situations an out of class activity wold be acceptable and in rare cases outright canceling of the class. One should try and keep these to a minimum, but to the extent that the students are not complaining, you can probably get away with it.

I have never seen a department which limits the number of conferences, but if you are rarely around, it will probably come back to bite you. In general, if you are worried about these things, you should ask a senior colleague.


Parts of thesis draft published without proper credit My Master's thesis instructor has copied a chapter of my thesis draft into several publications, sometimes listing me as an author and sometimes not. They said it won't cause me any problems so I gave permission in one case but not the others, where I was just informed afterwards. As they were my boss and instructor, was in a hurry to submit the publication and insisted there will not be problems I didn't feel like having another choice.

After consulting with my supervisor I'm starting to feel doubtful, especially if any automatic plagiarism checking is involved because searching for various numeric results and phrases from my thesis in Google returns results with the exact same text and without my name in the list of authors.

I'm supposed to hand in the finished thesis this week and don't have time to rewrite the affected chapter. My supervisor said I should at least include a footnote explaining the situation. What should I write? I wouldn't want to cause trouble for the instructor either, they're a nice person in a difficult situation.

The other publications are all reports or conference proceedings available free of charge from government sources or the university's website so commercial publishers' copyright claims should not be an issue.

Your instructor has committed serious academic misconduct several times: if it is your words or your work being published, you should be one of the authors and your permission is required for publication.  It's also not clear from your post whether the same material was published multiple times, which would also leave you vulnerable to accusations of self-plagiarism.

It sounds, at least, like you are no longer working with this instructor, which is a good thing.  You should always look to separate yourself from seriously unethical people, lest you be tainted by association or involvement in their crimes.

Now you are faced with a problem of cleaning up a toxic mess, because your instructor has also lied to you about this "not being a problem" for you.  There are three different aspects of the cleanup that I can see:

What should you do in your thesis?  I think that your supervisor's suggestion here is good: put in a footnote at the beginning that explains where else the various pieces of the chapter have been published (both with and without you as an author), and note that due to misconduct on the part of the other author, you were not listed as an author.  Note that I am assuming the instructor is not required to sign off: if they are, this may be a problem.
What should be done about the papers?  Once you are safely graduated and are secure from retribution in another position, you can contact the publishers and request to have the record corrected.  The note, signed off in your thesis by your supervisor, will be useful here.  If material was inappropriately reused in multiple publications, you might instead ask for some of the publications to be retracted. Don't be surprised, however, if the publishers fail to take action, as many publishers are not very responsive when asked to correct the record.
What should be done about your instructor? It is very difficult for a student to accuse their instructor of misconduct.  Fortunately, it sounds like you have informed a responsible senior individual (the tenured supervisor), and it would now be appropriate for you to pass the responsibility of deciding how to proceed to that person.  Unfortunately, it sounds like this person may not actually take any action, so you may wish (again, once you are away and secure from retribution) to contact people who actually have authority over the instructor and may be willing to act.

Finally, be prepared to simply walk away if you need to: fortunately, this is happening only at the Masters' stage, and so all of this mess can likely be rendered irrelevant by your future work as long as you take precautions (like the note in your thesis) to avoid it coming back to bite you.


Will publishing a paper hinder graduate admissions if errors are discovered? I believe I have developed a formal proof for an unsolved conjecture in mathematics; however, I'm not yet enrolled in university and I know maybe one individual who could check my proof.

Should I still submit this paper to a journal and risk it being published and then later errors being discovered? Furthermore, would an incorrect paper hinder admission to graduate schools? It's not that I would be upset about being wrong, it certainly wouldn't be the first time I was ever wrong. I just wouldn't want those errors to ruin my future. I wouldn't be concerned if the paper was denied by the journal because the error wouldn't be publicized.

I'm confident that my method is rigorous and proves the conjecture. However, I know the likelihood of errors being present is almost certain.

The overall question is: If I submit a paper to a journal and it is published, but later errors are found, will that hinder admissions to graduate school; or is that just a risk one takes in sharing research?

Note: I don't expect that the proof is wrong, I truly believe that it is correct. However, I must consider the event that it is proven incorrect.

Have the one you know check it out. If it has merit, they'll know who can look at it closer, and tell you what to do.

It is very probable that your proof s wrong, or contains holes. Even so, you learn something (and learned by working it out).


How do some researchers consistently get published in venues with low acceptance rates? I'm more interested in answers from researchers in the field of computer science/electrical engineering.  Having said that, readers in a different discipline observing such phenomenon are welcome to contribute.

I know of a few 'famous' individuals who have copious number of articles appearing in top journals/conferences every year without fail.  Looking at their CV, it seems that they have a 100% success rate at these top venues.

Question: as we know, the review process is random at times, with 'dumb' reviewers rejecting papers for no good reasons.  This in turn forces us to look for an alternative or perhaps lower ranking venue to publish our articles.  Given this fact, how do the said individuals have such a consistent record?  Is there a level one can get to where every idea is gold and every presentation is such that even a dumb reviewer can't recommend a reject? Or is it the case that there is a 'back door' or the individual or institution reputation is so bright that any reviewers are obligated to accept the article?

What is their strategy?

Since people rarely document papers NOT published, a 100% success rate for papers in a CV is kind of guaranteed.

It does often seem like some PIs have the 'magic touch' when it comes to publishing, and here are some factors that may contribute to this success:

they work on a very hot topic
they are very established

[a] unfortunately publishing begets further publishing as ones name becomes associated with a high quality record
[b] they are possibly personally acquainted with some of the reviewers, which could help grease the wheels

they are at a top institution (yes, this probably helps)
they are working on several projects in tandem and so submit more papers in general
they may be a pro at working the review process: invalidating certain dissenters by request or by inviting comments on a  manuscript prior to publication (disqualifying them), or through fierce contest when papers are rejected.

The publication process is far from a perfect or even acceptable, and many factors contribute. Those that know how to exploit these factors will be more successful, deserving or not.


possibility of changing the corresponding author in IEEE transaction Is it possible to assign one of the other authors as corresponding author in IEEE transactions during the peer review (i.e. changing the corr author) by any reason? If yes, at which stages it is possible? Is it possible when a paper received the A.Q (Accepted with mandatory minor revisions) status?
If not, is it possible to add the second corresponding author at any stage of peer review?

It's possible, but explain why you're making the change to the editor(s). Changing the authors of a paper is suspicious, but if you have a good reason to do it (e.g. original corresponding author moved/died/graduated, new corresponding author took over the project, etc) then the journal/publisher usually won't object.
Odds are you can make changes all the way up till you get the proofs, if you have good reasons.


My colleague is monetizing our contributions and not compensating us A few years back, my advisor began a project (received funding for, etc.). My advisor funded a student (we'll call them "CEO") on this project, who's now working on a startup in this area and is nearing graduation. Eventually, a more junior student "B" comes along, and works on the project.

Recent Timeline:

So I agreed to work with B and "CEO" on this project, as I've had a specific idea to improve the work in mind. I prototype and evaluate the algorithm, it seems to work, people get more excited. "B" helps me write up the theory and present it to our advisor.
Authorship is discussed and the order filters out to ["B", Me, "CEO", Advisor], with both "CEO" and Advisor as tentative authors, given their other commitments. I'm happy for "B" to go first, even though the core idea was mine, because this paper supports their thesis work, and they've been at least an equal partner in contributions.
My idea works even better: "CEO" suggests we change metrics for evaluation, and our performance is more clearly better. [They are not without contribution on the paper]
"CEO" suddenly gets their startup funded by our university to do prototype development and to market research.
I explain to "CEO" that they should offer my advisor equity (as my advisor was the first to identify this hot area), because this never occurred to them.

Here's the problem.

Technically my contribution doesn't belong to me (University owns everything), and the University is okay licensing its discoveries to this startup.
But, I strongly feel that the startup is not realistic or viable without my recent algorithmic contribution, and while "CEO" is technically an author on the paper, they explicitly tried to talk me out of trying my approach "too simple", "no way it will work", etc, before I came up with numbers.

Even if I don't agree to be CTO (and I don't want to), the sheer amount of money I've saved this fledgling startup (with my more efficient approach) is more than their net-worth in server costs.

How do I communicate my value to the startup owner without "burning bridges"? and without actually owning the insight that just saved them an incredible amount of money. At least part of the reason I don't want to be CTO is that I don't want to get "in bed" with someone who doesn't already value my contributions.
Their previous approach isn't feasible to demonstrate to investors (too slow). I've thought I could pitch a "contracting fee" to implement the algorithm to the CEO, giving them a demo based on my new tech, and get compensated in this roundabout way. CEO brought up a "conflict of interest" complaint - claiming it would be more legitimate to "just give me equity" and make me CTO instead. I find their reluctance to pay me alarming, considering the actually have money now. Do they have any merit to saying that they can't pay me as a contractor because I'm also a University employee and that would be too conflict-of-interest-y?
Should I just stop working on this "hot" problem at all? Or do I have to accept that anything I come up with will make someone else money who has historically forgotten to credit others in the past?

I haven't yet discussed my concerns with my advisor. I plan to, but admittedly don't understand all the issues involved. I realize with anonymity, particular laws, etc, this can be hard.

We're in the US, "B" is an international student and probably can't be a contractor (VISAs are hard), but I would like to protect their research, somehow too.

Since you published your idea in a paper, you must accept that someones else implements and uses it. Don't ever expect much credit here, outside of academia.

It would be different if they used your source or a patent (but either of which would probably belong to your university; but most universities have a procedure for compensation then to encourage you).

Of course you could talk to them, and it would be appropriate if they paid you some compensation e.g. in form of a consulting fee. Then you may be willing to share further ideas early with them.


Asking about a colleagues post-grad work? This may not be the best place to ask this question, if so please inform me.

I am approaching the end of my program and will be applying for jobs soon. But some of my colleagues (some of which I'd even go as far as to call friends) have already decided their industry, company and even signed offer letters.

But when I ask details about the company, the salary, the benefits or scope of work. Some people get really defensive.

I don't understand why this is. Is this an academica thing, a culture thing, or am I just a bit more socially inept than I thought?

From my perspective as someone who is also soon graduating asking for insight on such things seems perfectly normal.

It's perfectly fine for people to be willing to share more "closely-held" details, just as it is perfectly fine for people to be unwilling to share.

Let's take the position of the person you are asking:

they might not want to tell you the salary, because it feels freakishly large to them after living on a grad stipend (or even compared to common academic salaries), and they don't want to make you feel bad or envious
the salary is low compared to what they hoped or thought would be common, and they don't want you to think less of their success or options
the person isn't sure they are supposed to share the non-public hiring data, and most places don't tell you in the hiring process "hey, feel free to tell everyone details of your work and pay!" - so they are concerned they aren't supposed to answer (while many Universities publish salary data as part of open records laws, private industry routinely hides this info)
point-blank asking someone something that they might not feel comfortable asking is often considered rude or excessively direct, especially if you do not show in some way you understand you are asking for something potentially sensitive, and especially if you don't give them a way to save face in declining to answer

To have better luck, I suggest a script something like this:

Setup why you are interested in more details. "I'm going to have to be evaluating offers soon, which is so tricky when you don't know for sure what to expect."
Ask in a softer, less direct way, that makes it clear you understand if they don't want to answer fully. "If you wouldn't mind, could you tell me about your offer?" This sets them up to be vague if they don't want to give details, like saying, "oh yes, XYC Corp is very generous" or "it certainly will be nice not to be on a stipend anymore!" Not helpful, but it puts people at ease.
Some people will just tell you out right, while some will be circumspect. If it's really information you want, you can push a little, with something like a little conspiratorial lean in, and a more direct "just between you and me...can I ask you what the pay is?"
If they tell you, thank them for helping you with valuable information, as this part of the process is hard and often vague. If they don't tell you, it's generally safe to reinforce you understand and 'let them off the hook' with a "totally understand, I don't want to pry". If they let you in on inside information, don't go blabbing about it to everyone, and keep your sources to yourself.
If someone asks you later for second-hand knowledge, be respectful of the fact that not all information is meant to be publicly available. If you aren't sure that you should yourself pass on the information, you can generally safely give a referral. "Oh I'm not sure, but so and so started working there, so you might ask them." Networking.

In closing, I will note that you are in fact correct that this is a cultural thing, and the norms vary. In the US business world it is common to treat salary info like something akin to a state secret, even though some are fine with talking about it openly and directly. I'm told that in east-Asian countries it's often the opposite, where it is commonly to openly discuss matters of pay as it's not considered so private.

As you go you just have to be aware of how people react to things and how people seem to act, and practice finding ways to navigate such varying cultures, as even workplace-to-workplace things can be very different. General rules of diplomacy and tact still hold, they just take practice and awareness to develop and apply as needed.


After getting a PhD at a low-ranked university, would it be harder to get a job at a high-ranked university? In more detail, let's say I get a PhD degree at a university which is ranked 51-100, according to QS ranking system. Is it possible for me to get a job at higher ranked university, like 1-50 ?
Let's say without extraordinary publication record, which I believe the answer would be possible..

Moving from a Ph.D. at a mid-ranked institution to a postdoc at a high-ranked institutions happens very frequently.  The easiest path for this is to have solid publications (extraordinary is not necessary) and a good relationship with both your Ph.D. advisor and the supervisor you do the postdoc with.

One of the important factors enabling this is that a strict ranking of Ph.D. programs does not make much sense once you get above a certain base level of quality.  Beyond that point, every program is extremely heterogeneous based on the particular professor.  Absolutely world class professors are often at "mid-ranked" universities, and people in their particular subfield will know it, and consider that university "elite" in their particular subfield.  It's just that you can't obtain this information from US News or other "generic" rankings.

An example: US News currently gives the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a rank of #60 in the US as an Engineering grad school and #76 overall, but they have an extremely strong artificial intelligence group that practically dominates in some subfields.


KAU is accused of hiring well-known professors to boost university rankings by adding affiliation. Is it ethical to accept this kind of offer? For those unaware of the situation, here are some links:

  Messerly, Megan. 'UC Berkeley Professor Critiques Saudi University's
  Recruitment Process Of World's Top Researchers'. The Daily
  Californian. Last modified 2014. Accessed March 16, 2015.
  http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/05/citations-sale/.

  Yahia, Mohammed. 'Are Saudi Universities Buying Their Way Into Top
  Charts? : House Of Wisdom'. Blogs.Nature.Com. Last modified 2012.
  Accessed March 16, 2015.
  http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2012/01/are-saudi-universities-buying-their-way-into-top-charts.html.

KAU is asking people to claim KAU affiliations on papers where no collaboration exists, thus boosting KAU's metrics in the easily-fooled US News university rankings. The existence of ancillary benefits, such as collaboration with local KAU researchers, seem to have been somewhat debunked by now, but this was not clear before. (There are some such benefits, but largely they fail to materialize.)

$72k per year is a lot of money, and there are some very accomplished people who have accepted this association. In a situation not too different from the one I am in now, I could easily see myself selling this part of my reputation for $72k. By no means can I stand above this deal on moral grounds.

Is it ethical to accept this kind of offer? What is the impact on prestige and reputation of the researchers who have accepted this offer, now that its primary motive of citation-gaming is unambiguous?

This behavior seems just as unethical as to put someone's name on a paper while he has not worked on it, and for the same reason: it provides the academic world with a wrong information about attribution, and the academic world wants to use this kind of information. Less abstractly, it means that students or scholars might be fooled into going to a university expecting to be taught by or to work alongside high-profile professors while the university really has much less to offer than it pretends.

Now, it could be argued that it is the job of the rankings to design them in a way that is not so easily played, not the job of the professors to act according to such ranking.

Also, we currently do not have clear and well-admitted ethic rules for affiliation, while we do have such rules for authorship. This makes the ethical lines much fuzzier, but in my opinion the conclusion to draw is that we should give ourselves such rules.


PhD admissions - (undergraduate) credit/no-credit influence on acceptance I plan on doing a PhD in computational linguistics, which I intend to start in about 3 years. I have one more year of undergraduate study, and 5/6 of the courses remaining are for my minor in Applied Linguistics.

I plan on taking 2/6 of those classes as credit/no-credit (CR/NC) because I'm also working two jobs, and worst-case scenario I'll fall behind in these classes, but not so far behind that I wouldn't pass with 75% (and still receive credit).

aeismail says in one of her answers that:

  Admissions committees do not place as much weight on courses outside the major as courses in the major. If you are a physics major, for instance, a C in a US History course is not going to be as problematic as a C in electricity and magnetism.

These CR/NC courses are not in my majors (Computer Science and French), so I don't think that they would raise flags to admissions committees, but I also don't want admissions to think "oh he seriously slacked off his last year of undergrad!"

Do admissions committees care about CR/NC courses in undergrad?

I wanted to expand on the point made by @StrongBad in the comments.  Even if the courses in question are not offered through the Linguistics department, any grade in a course that is closely related to the proposed graduate program will be weighted much more heavily than a random course taken for general-education or general-interest purposes.

For example, when I was on a graduate admissions committee in physics (during my grad student days), we did look at the student's performance in mathematics classes.  These courses didn't carry as much weight as their performance in physics classes, but a C- in multi-variable calculus or linear algebra would be troubling.  Seeing a "pass" indication in such a class would make me wonder what happened there, and would make me concerned that the student didn't really get everything out of the class that they would need for graduate studies.  Even if these classes weren't required for the student's major (an applicant who had majored in chemistry, say), it would still give me pause.  In effect, it's better than nothing, but not much better than that.

If I'm reading your post correctly, you're proposing to take Computer Science classes pass/fail and then apply to a program in computational linguistics.  I'm not a computational linguist, but this seems like a bad idea to me.  On the other hand, you might be able to get away with taking a French class pass/fail, since the skills you would be learning in that class are not as directly related to computational linguistics.  (At least, they wouldn't be if your classes are anything like my college French classes were.)  And if the classes are completely unrelated (a class in History or Economics, say), then it's probably fine to take those pass/fail.

On a related note: if you do decide to take these courses pass/fail, you should be absolutely sure that you can still complete the proposed minor.  Many institutions (for example, mine) do not allow you to count pass/fail courses towards an academic major or minor.  Check with the department in question about this, if you haven't already.


Wrong article submission I submitted an article in a Reputed journal in mathematics.  It is in review process.  After 4 months, i realized that there are some trivial mistakes...   Article is still under review with journal.   What should I do?

If I have a corrected version, should I send that one?
Or should I share this situation with Editor?

I am feeling very bad because of me editor and reviewer are (will be) wasting their time with wrong article...

You should do both. Namely, send an email to the editor, explain the error and how you fixed it, and attach a revised version, and ask them how they would like to proceed. They might

Send the revised version to the referees
formally "reject" the incorrect version and consider the new version a resubmission
reject the incorrect version and the corrected version.

In any event, you must contact them.


Do some universities not give paper diplomas to their PhD graduates? In this forum, there is the following question: How can I find out if someone really holds a doctoral degree?

This question is about verifying someone's degree. In the comments to the question, in chat, there is a comment by one Jeff$\varepsilon$ saying

  Why don't you request the PHD title from the candidate — What's a "PhD title"? The only way I can prove to you that I have a PhD is by telling Berkeley to send you proof.

The idea that a university does not give out any form of certificate when someone earns a degree seems rather strange to me (but there are many things different cultures do that are strange to me, so I ask here).

Are there really universities in the world (nowadays) that do not hand out certificates for degrees?
If yes, is then contacting the university really the only way to check the validy of the degree?

Edit: I see this question was poorly received. Could the downvoter please explain why so I can improve the question? I honestly don't see what is wrong. Just to clarify: I do not plan to forge any documents (if this is the downvoter's point).

In the US, in general, universities do offer the student a fancy paper diploma when they complete a degree.  This is such a strong tradition that I would be pretty surprised if there are any universities that don't do it at all.  I don't think that JeffE meant to imply that there were.

However, in this culture, this diploma is usually considered to be purely ceremonial in function, and isn't normally used as proof of the degree.  For one thing, diplomas usually don't have meaningful anti-forgery security features.

And there are various circumstances in which a student who had completed a degree might not have a physical diploma.  Maybe they didn't attend their graduation ceremony, and the university didn't have their current address to mail it; or maybe they used to have it but lost it at some point.  Since it's a ceremonial document, some people might not go to the trouble to obtain or replace it.

As such, in the US, if Alice needs to prove to Bob that she holds a certain degree, the standard method is that Alice sends a request to the university that they send Bob a copy of her transcript, which not only records her degree but also her grades in all the courses she took.  This will normally be printed on security paper, sealed with an official seal, and mailed directly from the University to Bob, so that Alice has no opportunity to tamper with it.  (There could still be ways for Alice to have a fake transcript sent to Bob, but it's harder, and so this process is usually considered adequate.)

For privacy reasons, Alice's transcript can only be sent upon Alice's request (and she'll have to authenticate the request somehow, e.g. by giving her university student ID number which isn't normally known to anyone else).  Bob can't get it without Alice's cooperation.

JeffE may have overstated the case when he said this was the only way to prove it, but it's by far the most common in the US higher education system, and other forms of proof are much less likely to be accepted by Bob.

(I think JeffE was also objecting to the term "PhD title" since this term isn't used in the US to refer to a physical document confirming a degree.  So if you asked someone for their "PhD title", they would not know what you were talking about.)


Should I include interviewees in my dissertation acknowledgement? Background: I am writing a MSc dissertation in a technology/business-related topic.  I interviewed 15 people for about an hour each.  Each interviewee was given a choice of anonymity (e.g. tech-sector employee), organisation only (e.g. Microsoft employee) or named (Joe Bloggs of Microsoft).  Most went for named; although in the final version of the text when I referred to interviews I just used organisations (mostly for presentational reasons).

Question: Is it considered polite to include the interviewees in the acknowledgements (clearly just those happy to be named)?  If I did so I would probably email first to check they were happy (and I'd got their name/title right!); although might be overthinking this...

Edit: I have written consent from each participant regarding the use of the information they have provided.

I would think that it is probably enough to recognize them as a group: Thanks to the fifteen people whose ... enables this research. You might want to name the companies, provided that there was some cost (monetary or otherwise) to the companies.

Alternatively you might, at the end, without connecting any individual to their responses, thank them by name, maybe obfuscated: J. Doakes, M. Jones and thirteen others who prefer not to be named.

Likewise, if the positions held by the respondents is essential you might list that with or without names, even if it is just summarized: Three executive vice-presidents, one chairman of the board, and ... (That isn't the same thing as individual acknowledgement, of course, but informs your readers.)

My reasoning is that you probably don't want readers of your thesis to contact your responders, more to avoid them being bothered than for any other reason.

If the research requires that a name or other identifying information be associated with a response then you need explicit permission. You likely need to retain the written permission.

I'll also note that there are laws in various places that speak to issues like this. In the US, most universities have an office of research that will give you very detailed information about research, especially research involving human subjects. It may be the same elsewhere. In the US, see an officer of the IRB (Institutional Review Board) at the university. Your research may be covered or not. I suspect that for simple interviews it won't be covered, but you should check.


Are anonymous online surveys exempt from IRB? This is for a research paper, and the survey was sent to thousands of people through publically available email information.
Because the response rate is low, and we don't ask for any self-identity information, it is a truly anonymous survey.
We already finished the process, but someone shows concern about whether our anonymous online survey needs IRB approval.
Any ideas and links to valid sources are appreciated.

At least at my institution and I suspect at most of them, the IRB tells you when your survey doesn't need full IRB review because it is legally exempt (often through an expedited process). You don't get to skip IRB entirely because you don't think it's needed (unless your institution says this is the case, or sends you in an alternate path to determine exemption, like some other not-really-an-IRB-committee).
You also might be saved if you can operate under some sort of blanket exemption from IRB for a category of work. For example, courses for students might have such a protocol that allows review to be skipped as long as it fits in certain parameters (basically they've already gotten acceptance for a range of studies that fit those parameters).
You'll have to contact your IRB, and likely beg them for forgiveness. It doesn't matter what we think at all. See also here and another useful Q&A that applies to your question.


Attribution of authorship within undergraduate group project reports I teach a senior design course for undergraduate engineering students at a public university. Our senior design projects are all team based, usually with three to five engineering students per team. The teams are all multidisciplinary--e.g., electrical engineers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. all working collaboratively on a given project.

At present each student team coauthors a GROUP report that documents their project-level information--e.g., project history, problem statement, project concept, engineering merit and innovation, project goals and objectives, project requirements, risk management, constraints, budget, timeline, project evaluation, etc. Each student also individually authors an INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS report which details that student's contributions to their group's senior design project.

Because these reports are scholarly works performed within academia, I need to devise a method of identifying which student(s) authored which sections(s) within the GROUP report for feedback and course grading purposes. Right now I'm considering requiring the use of bylines throughout the report so that I can unambiguously determine which student(s) authored which section(s) within the report. This copious use of bylines might appear unappealing in the finished product, and it's a practice that's not commonly used in industry, but it does solve my necessity of ascribing authorship to specific students.

If multiple students coauthor a given section of the GROUP report, I will require that there be a principal author and one or more contributing coauthors. The principle author's name shall be listed first on the byline, followed by the coauthors' names. For course grading purposes, the principal author shall be fully responsible for all written content provided under their byline.

I would, of course, provide rules that define the criteria for qualification as a coauthor (for example, see section "2. Who Is an Author?" on the web page titled "Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors" on the Internal Committee of Medical Journal Editors website).

I might also allow an additional and separate contributors byline to identify students who do not qualify as an author, but who contributed in some way to the writing in a given section of the report. I'm thinking of placing the contributors' byline on a new line immediately under the authors' byline:

By: Jane Smith, Frank Cedars
Contributions by: Huan Sung

I'm wondering if anyone has comments regarding this proposed use of bylines, or perhaps has other suggestions for identifying authorship within undergraduate group reports produced as scholarly works within academia.

(n.b. Assigning a single group grade is ill-advised for a number of reasons. Different students have different levels of writing competence--e.g., foreign nationals for whom English is a second language. In an undergraduate course, skilled authors should not be held responsible for, nor unfairly burdened with the task of, editing / correcting other students' writing in order to ensure the entire group receives a decent grade. Indeed, if the skilled authors do all the work there is neither accountability nor incentive for lesser-skilled writers to work at improving their writing skills. For what it's worth, these students receive feedback on their writing via peer review, rubrics, project advisors, and course graders. The project advisors and course graders are the ones who need to know which student wrote which sections of the GROUP report for feedback and assessment purposes.)

(n.b. I've already considered and rejected the idea of a two document solution where one document is the GROUP report itself, and the second document is a "key" that identifies which sections within the GROUP report were authored by which students. This "key" document adds extra work, its upkeep is clumsy and unreliable, it's another piece of paper that must be tracked, it slows down the grading and feedback process, etc.)

FWIW, I mocked up some sample reports--some having the byline style and some having the footnote style--and I've decided upon the byline style. I disliked more the presence of footnote numbers at the end of the chapter subtitles compared to the bylines.

Noting that the same student(s) could author contiguous subsections within the report, I think I'll use bylines only to indicate a change of author/contributor rather than requiring a byline within each and every (sub)section within the GROUP report.

The definitions for AUTHOR and CONTRIBUTOR I've settled on are those provided in the IEEE Publishing Policy and Ethics manual. The IEEE manual was chosen simply because the students I instruct/manage are electrical engineering majors, or computer engineering majors, or both, and the IEEE's style guides are relevant to both majors.


Is it okay to omit (one or multiple) middle names in a bibliography? Assuming that the cited work will not be less identifiable:
When including a paper in the body and bibliography of one’s work, is it okay to omit the author’s middle name(s) and just give the first and last name in the bibliography?

The main reason why I consider doing that is as follows:

I often cite different works by the same author, but one work lists the middle name, the other doesn’t.

Usually, when two works of the same author are listed in the bibliography, and the names are consistent, they will appear one below the other, and the second entry will not list the author, but a line of dashes:

Doe, John. Work 1, 1999.
-----. Work 2, 2003.

But if the author is not exactly the same in the bibliography database (in LaTeX, for instance), it will be listed as such:

Doe, John. Work 1, 1999.
Doe, John Jeremy. Work 2, 2003.

This in itself is just cosmetic: it may be bad style, but the bibliography is still correct.

Now imagine there are three works, and only the one that was published between the two others states the middle name of the author.
It would look like this:

Doe, John. Work 1, 1999.
Doe, John. Work 3, 2007.
Doe, John Jeremy. Work 2, 2003.

This is because the bibliographic system doesn’t recognize them as the same author.
This is a problem because the works don’t appear in order of their publishing date.

Bibliography entries should be faithful to the works to which they correspond: you should conform to the constraints of the style used by the journal, but you should not remove or add middle names or initials. The rationale for this is that doing otherwise makes it harder for readers to follow the citations back to the original literature if the names in the article are reported differently from the way they're indexed.

If the same author represented themselves differently in multiple works, that should be reflected in the bibliography entries, even if it makes things awkward for the author citing the works. If you feel you need to indicate that the authors are in fact the same individual, you may do so with a parenthetical comment.


How do I benchmark research if there is no previous work against which I can compare it? I'm working on a paper that there is no previous paper for it to distinguish. its an old tool like ant colony optimization that is used on a new approach. I have sent the paper to a journal and they have said it doesn't have a good benchmark.

A benchmark is a standard or reference that will allow other authors compare their algorithms with yours. If the problem is known and other papers were published to solve it, follow the lead and compare your algorithm with them using the same parameters. If there are no other paper solving the problem, look for similar problems and check how they are described by certain variables.

The most basic parameter is the problem size, ie how many instances your problem has to deal with. For sorting algorithms, it is the number of items to sort. Usually, we start with quantities that could be easily handled in memory, increase to the limits of available memory, up to numbers that will need disk to store all items.

The second parameter is distribution. Are all instances equally probable and distributed along the possible spectrum? For sorting algorithms, if the set of items is partially sorted or totally random will impact the performance. In my thesis, I worked with geographical objects like cities, which are concentrated in some areas that were difficult to process, and other areas totally empty that could be easily recognized and discarded as not interesting.

Each problem might have multiple parameters, some are important, others are irrelevant. Your work is to identify them and choose values that are realistic and could show the strengths and weakness for different algorithms, not only yours.

Another set of parameters, very common when comparing software, is related to hardware, like the number of processors, total memory, network speed, etc...

Hope it helps, without reading your paper is hard to be specific.


Average time to get a postdoc after finishing PhD? I am starting my final year of my PhD and am starting to look into postdocs. I am interested in how much of a lag I should expect between getting my PhD and starting a postdoc. For context, I'm in the United States in biology. I would ideally like to defend my PhD and move for a new postdoc position within a month but I'm not sure how realistic that is.

The reason I'm asking is that my landlord is expecting me to make a lease commitment and I'm not sure how long to commit to living here. The shorter the lease, the more expensive per month but too long and I have to break my lease early (expensive fines).

For those who have gotten postdocs recently (especially in the US) how long would you recommend expecting it to take if I'm starting looking now (12 month before defending)? Any good rules of thumb?

Just changed from one post doc to another. It took me 3 months to send 100 applications, interview at few places. Ended up with 5 offers and chose 1. The kind of lab you join is extremely important. So don't shortchange yourself by picking a not-so-good lab to save yourself a few hundred dollars. A good lab will ensure a good job after the postdoc. Bad lab (which I chose too) will leave you in a shaky position and you might end up having to do another postdoc. 1 month's time has high potential of getting you in a not-so-good lab (that doesn't mean you won't get a good lab but chances are slim). Give yourself at least 3 months AFTER defense. In that time, apply to lots of places, interview at some and then pick the one that is the best for you. 1 month's time is not enough for defense and postdoc search. Good luck!


Negotiating 1-year delay to my Assistant Professor Offer Recently I was offered an assistant professor position at a major R1 university. My problem is that I need to stay one more year in my home country due to Fulbright 2-year home residency requirement. I will apply for a waiver but just in case I'd like to negotiate the possibility of one year later start date. The department head is aware that there might be some delays due to legal issues, but I did not want to bring these procedures before signing the contract. It is my dream job at my dream college and I can be of a good asset to the department. How do you think I should approach negotiating and communicating this situation in a respective manner? Thanks!

Well, as a department head, I would be slightly annoyed that (i) you applied for a position you knew you couldn't take, and (ii) you didn't mention this earlier.

But it is what it is: You have no other option than coming clean, and so being honest should be your first priority. The people you're going to talk to are going to be your future colleagues and you will rely on their good will for the next many years. So playing games is not a useful strategy and all you can do is be forthcoming in explaining your situation, and ask whether there is a way to delay your starting date by one year. There is really no negotiating in this case: You need the department to agree to your demands, because if they don't you have a contract you can't keep (because you can't show up in person) and will likely lose your job. In other words, you're completely at the mercy of the department, and that's how you should treat it: With honesty and humility.


Is it possible to obtain a PhD in Canada without having to attend courses for a master degree? I am used to European university system and I don't know much about how things are working overseas.

I already hold a Bachelor degree and a Master degree. I will soon be looking for a PhD. If I am not mistaken, in the USA, someone directly jumps from a Bachelor degree to graduates studies which include a Master degree + a PhD, is it correct? Is it also the way it works in Canada (Vancouver, UBC)? Is it possible to make a PhD in Canada without having to take time for the Master degree?

I read somewhere that a Canadian PhD last between 4 and 7 years. Does it include the Master degree? If yes, how much time does the PhD only represents?

Canada is different from the USA, in that direct entry for a PhD after a bachelors degree is rare. The typical path is a bachelors, followed by two year masters, followed by four to five years for a PhD.

As far as I know, no typical Canadian PhD program also grants a masters, as in Canada, it's sort of implied that you already had one going into the PhD.

This is of course, based on my understanding of the sciences: Humanities and Engineering may vary.

EDIT: One note about courses: Course requirements vary dramatically from program to program, university to university. Some will require relatively few courses, others, many more.


Harvard citation of original journals but accessed online? I want to cite an idea found in a journal accessed via the web and uploaded as a PDF file (or whatever mean). When I want to reference it at the end of my paper, should I cite it as if I've read the actual HARD copy of the journal article or just treat it as an electronic source and therefore, additionally insert the usual "Available from: url, viewed on..." stuff?

If you read and refer to the final version of the paper, cite it as if you had read the hard copy:

I'd suspect the vast majority of journal articles only ever gets read in their digital form by people who cite them.
A journal isn't less of a journal just because it appears as a digital edition.


Abbreviations (abbrv.) in journal (jrn) articles (artcs) As we all know, you typically abbreviate something the first time that particular term shows up in a paper.  However, I've been told in the past that certain things in a paper should be written in such a way that 'it stands on its own'.  One such thing would include the abstract of the paper.  So, perhaps a <STRING> appears in the abstract that I want to abbreviate.  Now one of two things can happen.

1.) If <STRING> appears more than once in the abstract, I could abbreviate the first instance and then just use the abbreviation from that point on.

2.) If <STRING> appears only ONCE in the abstract, then I shouldn't abbreviate it because then I would have defined an abbreviation that I would not have used again (given the concept of 'the abstract should be able to stand on its own).

The problem with (2) is that people will immediately think that the 'first instance' of <STRING> should be abbreviated and don't immediately consider the 'stand-alone' idea so I'm either having to revise or try to put up a convincing argument for what I did.

Also, I've been told by some that tables and figures should be able to 'stand on their own'.  So, if the abbreviation for <STRING> appears in the table somewhere (or the caption), then I should explicitly spell out <STRING> and then define an abbreviation for it right then and there, even if I have already done so earlier on in the text of the paper.

So, my question is, what is the proper way of handling these abbreviations and is the idea of 'this piece must be able to stand on its own' valid (and if its valid, what exactly does this idea apply to)?

Additional Information:

I am a computational chemist so we pretty much are forced to use the alphabet-soup of acronyms.  MP2 is preferred over "second-order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory" and is commonly used.  CCSD(T) is preferred over "The
coupled-cluster method that includes all single and double substitutions as well as a perturbative treatment of the connected triple excitations".  The list can go on and on.  If this wasn't abbreviated in an abstract, having to 'spell it out' even a few times would make for an incredibly long abstract, figure caption, table, etc.

In my opinion the general rule is that abbreviations should be used exactly when they make reading easier; in particular, in some circumstances it will be easier to understand a sentence when a long term is abbreviated (provided the abbreviation has been defined of course). The same rule should apply in abstract and captions, except that the cost (in term of reading comfort) of having to look for the meaning of the abbreviation is usually greater.

The problem comes from the fact that we tend to use abbreviations when they make writing easier (or quicker), and this does not coincide with reading easiness.


Advisor asking me to use my grant to cover his orders I am now working as a postdoctoral researcher in Japan. I came to work at this institute when it received a big grant from government more than 2 years ago. My research budget is paid from a small part of that grant. I am affiliated with a lab run by my current advisor, but I do my own research topics and build my own experimental setup without support from the advisor.

This year I applied for my own funding and was lucky enough to get a small grant for young researchers. My advisor applied to the same grant (more senior category) but failed, and later I learned that he has not succeeded to get any grant up to now. Last week he asked me to use my budget for his projects, because "in this lab, we share the budget together", as he said.

I feel awkward because I don't want to share my budget with him, but if I deny the request, our relationship will be damaged.
Has any of you experienced the same problem? Is my advisor a bad one? How should I deal with this?

This is delicate issue, and I would advise you to proceed with utmost care. There are a number of ethical, legal, and practical issues to take into account.

First, the legal side - as Bill Barth already mentioned, it is not a given that you even can (easily and legally) move money from your grant to somebody else in your lab. In a nutshell, only the funding agency or the respective support department from your university can help you with this.

Second, in terms of ethical issues, the question arises whether you do in fact "share budget in this lab". In other terms, did the lab head also share his budget with you when you did not yet have a grant? Do think about this critically. In my experience, young independent researchers (myself included) tend to take the support we get from senior researchers for granted sometimes, while being rather protective about our own funding. From your description, it does sound like you yourself are being funded from money acquired by the lab head. In that sense, asking you to give back a small part of your grant to support his research is not necessarily unethical. Further, has he helped you with your grant application? If he has, sharing a bit of your grant with him may be the right thing to do (if even possible, see above).

Thirdly, in practical terms, the question arises whether it is worth for you to fight over this issue. This largely depends on how bad it can end for you if the lab head is really mad at you (in Japan I would assume the answer to this is "very", unfortunately) and how much funding money is concerned. This is another issue that you can really only decide for yourself, but (again), do proceed with caution. You should consider that you not only need to work with this guy day to day, but you may also need his support for your next career step. I have unfortunately seen a few young researchers taking a stand with their mentors "on principle" over relatively minor issues. This kind of thing tends to not go as well as people hope.

All things considered, you would do well to not let your successful grant application go to your head. It is certainly a very important milestone in you career, but don't get into a lone wolf mentality ("I'm so good, I don't need anybody to succeed!").


How to request to be co-corresponding author We had a paper accepted in one of the top biology journals (IF=15). It is a work in which I participated in the part of computational biology, and was submitted by a colleague, she being the corresponding author since she is an expert on the field. We had a major revision and I had to do an outstanding work and a lot of calculations in order to have the paper accepted. I even developed a new approach. So now that we are at the proof stage, I would like to request her to appear in the paper as co-corresponding author since this is very important in my country. I do not know exactly how to do it. I will tell her to add me as co-corresponding with the text “to which all computational biology based correspondence should be addressed” since she is wet lab biologist. But I do not think this will be enough argument for her, i guess she will say initial ideas came from her side. What do you suggest for my “cover letter” to her?

While I don't really understand the value of this to you, not being in your immediate culture, the solution is clear as it is in most similar situations.

If you want something, just ask for it. Give her your reasons why it is important to you and why you need this at this time. If you ask it as a favor and not as a demand you might be more likely to prevail.

You may not be successful, but nothing you do can guarantee success. Asking keeps it collegial and preserves your relationship for the future.

Yes, you contributed, but so did she, I assume. In most places corresponding author is just a task, not an honor.

I'll suggest that whatever happens in the handling of a single publication it is unlikely to have much of an effect on your career. Working for long-term relationships is, to me, much more important than any check mark on a box or minor point on a CV.


Recommendation letter from CS faculty for math grad school (and vice versa) I am in kind of a dilemma(ish) situation. I am a rising junior, and I plan on applying to graduate school in math, but I have not shut the door on graduate programs in CS or applied math either (am interested in algorithms, combinatorics, optimization, etc.).
There is one professor at my school who I am pretty close with in the CS department, who I also plan on doing research with. This professor does research in algorithmic game theory, which for all intents and purposes (at least in my opinion) is hopefully pretty close to "math".
I think they would be able to write a good recommendation letter, and it certainly would be helpful if I decided to apply to CS graduate school. However, would math graduate admissions prefer such a letter over a teacher I had? I would presume so, but I just wanted to make sure.
Also, on the flip side, would a recommendation from a professor in math help for CS? The professor in mind mostly does combinatorics. Thanks for your help!

As a general principle, you want letters of recommendation from the professors who know your best work best. Letters from professors in fields closely related to yours are OK. (Applied) math and (theoretical) CS surely qualify.
In this case you should certainly have one from this professor. The professor would probably write slightly different letters for math or cs graduate programs - you can ask about that.
Good luck.


How can I most respectfully leave my current PhD position for a new one? My professor is a bully and the university will not challenge his behaviour despite numerous complaints from both staff and students. I am 9 months into the first year of my PhD. I love my work and all of my other colleagues but the professor's behaviour is unbearable and affecting my mental health. I have made the decision to apply for positions elsewhere.

How can I do so without appearing as a troublemaker? I am terrified that other lab groups will read my application and just see me as weak, lazy, or disruptive for leaving my current position. How can I mention the experience of my current position on my CV, and explain politely in cover letters etc. the circumstances without sounding like a brat?

Thanks in advance,

A very stressed PhD student

If you are moving to a new university, I think you can ignore most of your fears. You need to get accepted, of course, and may require letters of recommendation to do so, but I don't think you need to be very explicit about disagreements with your supervisor or your assessment of his flaws. It is enough, for most purposes, to simply indicate that you had an incompatible position and are seeking a better one. Keep any disagreements out of your written materials for application. If you are asked, don't emphasize the disagreements or the treatment. The old advisor probably isn't going to change and you are interested in finding a better situation rather than correcting the old one.

Write your materials, initially, as if you were starting fresh. Then add just enough to show that you are in an unhappy situation and want a better one. Don't try to hide it, but emphasize the positive.

I suspect that, except in a few narrow fields, what people think of you at the old place won't matter much if at all. The old professor may be known and can have some impact (hence being cautious), but other people in the lab are pretty invisible from the viewpoint of another institution.

On your CV, mention your current position, of course but without comment. In your SOP stress that you find your current situation "unsatisfying" and "not sufficiently productive".

While it may be unsatisfying not to complain about bad behavior, doing so from a position of little power can hurt only you.


Is it possible to get IRB approval after the fact? Generally speaking, peer reviewed journals will not publish research on human subjects that did not receive IRB approval.

If a study was done without the proper IRB approval, but the study itself was ethical and clearly would have passed IRB approval if it had been properly submitted, is it generally possible to get a post-facto IRB approval that is sufficient to publish in most journals, or is the work forever "tainted"? Is the fact that post-facto IRB approval is not often considered an option because it literally isn't allowed, or because research conducted without IRB approval almost always contains ethical infirmities that would have prevented IRB approval from the start? In other words, is the requirement to obtain IRB approval truly a "You absolutely must have prior IRB approval", or is it really more like "You absolutely must not conduct research unethically, and obtaining prior IRB approval is part of Best Practices in accomplishing this, because nearly all proposals that you or I might come up with are actually unethical and we need the wisdom of the IRB to show us the light and put us on the right path. If you forgo prior approval, you are wading in crocodile-infested waters, and you will have no one to blame but yourself, not the IRB, not your mom, not your advisor, but only you yourself, if you get your leg bitten off"?

To be clear, I'm not asking whether it is possible to "whitewash" unethical research to make it look like no one was harmed when in fact people were harmed, but about institutional procedural violations in otherwise ethical research. I am well aware that one of the primary reasons for seeking prior IRB approval (other than because journals expect it) is to avoid committing unethical acts, so for the purpose of this question, assume that the researchers either just get lucky or are just so competent in ethical practice that their actual research demonstrates sublime virtue (just without IRB approval).

Clarification: Some people have seen fit to warn me that I am in danger of losing my job. I am not currently facing this issue. I'm simply curious as to what would happen or what typically happens in cases like these - that is, whether there are Best Practices on how to mitigate the fallout or even how serious it truly is - whether this is more of a "Calm down, it happens all the time, all you have to do is write an apology letter, sit through a five hour 'naughty, naughty bad boy, sit in the corner' lecture, be ritually spanked on the rear by your department head or the Dean, accept a 5% penalty pay cut for six months, and go through a retrospective IRB review." or a "Your career is doomed, don't dream of ever teaching or doing research ever again, you will be lucky if you ever find work cleaning floors."

The human research ethics committee is in place to ensure that human research is undertaken in a way that safeguards the dignity, rights, health, safety and privacy of those involved. This assessment is difficult to make by the investigator because he or she has a vested interest in proceeding. Thus, an independent body is required.

In the institutions in which I've been involved, conducting human research without ethical review is, quite simply, research misconduct and subject to investigations and disciplinary actions. A priori ethical review is required. Regulations are in place that specifically disallow approval of research that has already been conducted.

I've been a member of institutional review boards and have chaired three -- one based in a hospital and two in research-intensive universities. I've been involved in these investigations in the past. As the original poster implies, most are found at the point in which the journal requires evidence from the IRB and the author quickly shoot an email to the office requesting one. In these investigations, it is often the case that there is a lack of training in the expectations and regulations of human research and offenders usually fall in three categories:

inexperienced researchers, including students (often poorly supervised) or practitioners with no research training
researchers trained "elsewhere", including those from countries with little to no requirements for ethical review
researchers from fields that don't usually involve human subjects

My worst case was a person from an electrical engineering background who collected data on body image for an app he was developing. During these sessions, the person gave advice that drove one participant to self harm. During the investigation, the offender did not think that ethical review was necessary because the questions were "innocuous (his term)".

As I said, in most cases the consequences are far less severe than this. For example, a common scenario is a young doctor who collects information from patient files, performs a few statistical tests and write up the results of this audit and sends the publication to a journal that then requests evidence of IRB approval. In cases like this, IRB approval is not provided and the doctor is placed under supervision.


Is attending an academic conference beneficial if you are not presenting any paper? Does it reflect well in your CV? I have recently been given an opportunity to attend a conference on Robotics although I don't have any paper to present. The registration fee is around 7k. Before spending such an amount, I wanted to know if it is worth attending conference sessions just for its sake. Please help.

There is one additional benefit of attending conferences: networking.

Networking works best, of course, if you present a paper, because then you are formally advertising your work and yourself. But whether or not you are presenting, you should spend a lot of time talking to other people, getting to know them and getting them to know you. Spread your contact information and your research interests far and wide.

No, this won't show up in your CV. But knowing people and being known is usually far more important than whether a conference or a conference paper shows up in your CV.

Browse the many questions tagged conference or networking or both for ideas on how to go about this. (Hint: start preparing before the conference, by checking who will present and who you will want to meet. Maybe even contact a few people beforehand and set up meeting.)

Whether this is worth the registration fee (in whatever currency), plus travel time and costs will depend on you, your career plans and how well the conference and its attendees match your interests. I certainly have attended conferences without presenting for networking purposes.


A confusing reply from potential supervisor I emailed Professor X to express my interest in his research area and politely asked if he will be taking on new master students. First, I got a brief reply:

  Send me your transcript and any  papers/reports you have

So I emailed back to him with my transcript and some reports and he asked

  Did you apply for any external fellowship/scholarship or anything
  else?

I said I haven't applied for any fellowships. Then I haven't gotten a reply from the professor for a week. Why would Professor X ask the second question? Since I said I haven't applied for fellowships, could it possibly have changed his mind and decided to not take me as his student?

It's "standard" (depends on where you are applying to) for graduate students to be paid a stipend. The money comes either from the department or from the professor's own funds (this in turn is part of the reason why professors apply for grants - to hire students/postdocs).

The professor is asking you if you've applied for any external fellowships or scholarships because:

If you have, you've shown some knowledge of how academia works, and you've made some effort to secure funding for yourself.
If you were successful, you'd effectively be "free" - the professor doesn't need to use his/her own funds to pay for you.

It goes without saying that if you can say "yes I've applied", or even better "yes I've been awarded", it boosts your chances of the professor agreeing to take you on. Conversely, if the answer is no to both, it will definitely not help your application, and it's possible he cannot take you on if he doesn't have enough funding.


Is it ok to ask a potential PhD advisor for more information about their future grants? Is there an etiquette when asking Potential Advisors about their future projects?

The reason I ask this is because a Potential Advisor informed me of a future grant that she is applying for, which would have research a topic I am fairly interested in. The advisor gave me a general outline, but she left out some important details that are important to me; my fear is that the advisor will think I am trying to steal the grant idea. Perhaps I am making too much of this?

I think you can certainly ask (nicely) for some more details about her ideas and the research she proposed as part of the grant. Especially so if this is going to be something you end up working on, or close to your own projects. You are, after all, possibly going to work for her! I don't think she will think anything else than you having interest in her research, which is quite positive.

However, don't ask for the grant proposal (i.e. the written text) itself, as it could be seen as assuming. Ask the questions you have, and let her decide if she wants to reply or simply give you the document to read.


After the draft was accepted, can I ask the Editor to publish it as soon as possible? One of our drafts was accepted for publication in Nov. 30, 2020. It has not been published online yet. I have not even received the first proof. Is it appropriate to push the Editor?
Thanks!

You can ask, but "push" is probably the wrong verb. If you have a specific need to see it, then include that in your ask, but I doubt that you will be successful.
If the editor responded to every such request, I suspect there would be chaos and thrashing. You may have bumped up against year end holidays accounting for some delay.
And they will probably prioritize their own process over your request. But you can ask. Especially you can ask for an estimate of when it might appear.
Stay polite for strategic reasons if nothing else.


What are advantages/disadvantages of Habilitation over PostDoc in case of academic career? As far as I know a PostDoc in USA is 2 years of research program. Habilitation is 4-8 years program. So, why is this difference in time frame?

What are advantages/disadvantages of Habilitation over PostDoc in case of academic career?

PosDocs usually work on someone else's research programs. Often the program is an incremental or partial step in a larger research framework. Postdocs have some independence in choosing the methods for their research, but are largely supervised/trained by their PIs or mentors. Postdoctoral projects can be rather technical in nature. They usually result in a few journal publications. It is very likely that your colleague next door did or will do a few postdoctoral projects during their career.

Habilitation is a large piece of work focused on a large problem, performed completely independently by one person. It usually contains major theoretical breakthrough (e.g. a completely new methodology) and results in a number of journal publication and at least one major "manuscript" publication (e.g. book). It is not so likely that a random academic next door did a Habilitation (because in most countries PhD is a terminal degree and Hab. does not exist).

tl;dr: Postocs and Habilitation are completely different programs.


Are there any benefits for a researcher or university in terms of number of grants submitted? I was talking with a faculty member and her strategy is to submit to as many grant proposals even if the quality is not high. And in fact, one of her grants was accepted. Are there any benefits for a researcher or university in terms of number of grants submitted even if the quality is low-medium and they were not awarded?

There are no direct benefits if the applications are not accepted. There might be some indirect benefits, if during the writing process the researcher gains feedback on their ideas and plans from colleagues or reviewers. Or, it might be useful to show evidence to your boss that, in the absence of grant income, you are indeed attempting to secure some.

But one important benefit is mentioned in your question already:

  in fact, one of her grants was accepted

You've got to be in it to win it. There is definitely some unpredictability in the grant application process, in terms of who reviews it, who is on the panel, what mood the panel are in on that particular day, etc. So, (all else being equal) the more you submit, the more chance you have.

Importantly, there are also potential disadvantages of submitting large numbers of low quality grants. For example, NERC UK has instigated a "demand management" system for its standard grants, such that if an institution's success rate drops below 20% they will be limited in the number of applications they can submit the next year. The NSF (which is tagged in OP's question) places limits on the number of applications from an institution for a number of its grant schemes. For an individual researcher, this means that they probably need to get through an internal review before they can submit a grant application. In both internal and external reviews, it may not go down well with your colleagues/peers if you regularly submit low-standard grant applications, resulting in reputational damage.