Organizing my reading list in Mendeley I keep publications from the literature in Mendeley for later reading on my iPad. There are many publications, so I need some sort of way of prioritizing the ones I need to read first versus the ones I might read someday. Right now, I use folders with varying priority levels. The biggest problem is that I cannot move articles to different folders on the iPad, so I have to do this prioritization while I'm at my computer (where I usually have more important things to do). Also, I feel like I spend most of my time assigning priorities to articles rather than reading them, which is not ideal.

Do you have better suggestions on how to prioritize and organize the publications I want to read using Mendeley?

One option would be to create a tags P1, P2, P3, P4 ... and assign "rating" to articles how much priority they have. Tags could be updated as priority changes.

(similar system could be used with Delicious.com tags to websites)

Tags are more flexible then folders. Mainly - Multiple membership in more than one tags


How to deal with procrastination and delays in final assignment of undergraduate class? This semester I taught an optional course for undergraduate students. While I find it normal that fewer students attend optional classes, presence in class itself was low even for the enrolled students, and now the only requirements for evaluation have not been met by most of the students. Only 7 out of a total of 21 students have turned in their final written essays until the deadline.

The problem is, the university grading system allows for students who have not passed the exams during the semester to take a "recovery" exam/written assignment. Through this loophole, students who have not even written their essays may pass if they get good grades in this "recovery" exam. While I think it is somehow unfair for the other students, because it allows procrastination and delays of over a week, and gives a second chance for students who did poorly during the whole semester no matter what the reason, it is not clear if I am supposed to apply this "recovery" exam or if this is optional.

The question is, if I do not do this (accept procrastination and delays), most students will not pass.

Should I just accept it or be strict with rules and deadlines?

If the students were reasonably expecting the option of a recovery exam, it seems unfair to deny it for the current run.

In future, you could offer the recovery exam only to those who tried to pass in the regular way, i.e. handed in an essay on topic (but maybe bad and hastily written - so more unpleasant grading for you).

Generally, I would suggest talking to some students to figure out why they didn't hand in an essay. Maybe it was plain procrastenation, maybe it was wise prioritizing because they had other, more important deadlines in the way, maybe they found the course not that interesting and decided not to complete it. In my experience, undergrads often have more self-awareness of their learning process than we would expect :)


To what extent can advisors edit our writing? When advisors edit our thesis work, what kind of changes can they make? Is there a limit to what they can do? There's proofreading and also editing for style and clarity. Is asking students to paraphrase what they wrote something that occurs commonly? If it's not, what can I do?
Does anyone know any resources where I can read more about this?
Thank you.

Do know that there are a lot of moving parts in this dynamic: your and your advisor's personality, interaction, language proficiency, etc. factor in as well.
In term of convention on how much and advisor edit the student's work, there is none. Some like to be more hands on, treating it as a collaboration; some like to be more hands off, treating it as a consultation. Some may render more help (justified or not) if the thesis language is not the student's primary language.
Instead of "how can I change the advisor," I'd suggest focusing on how to "get the most learning out of this situation." Not all good researchers are good language teachers, they could be writing well and yet unable to explain why they wrote that way. So, some active deciphering would be needed.
First, put all emotion aside (I know, having your writing mutilated does not feel good, but still put that aside) and try to figure out the motive of each edit. Usually, they fall into a few major categories:

Grammatical: tenses, plural/singular, etc.

Clarity: unaccounted pronouns, run-on sentences that detach the subject and the action, etc.

Contextual: the language was right, but the concept was wrong. Maybe due to misinterpretation of some results, derailing the discussion.

Stylistic: the work makes sense overall, but not on par with professional convention. For example, using future/present tense in Methods rather than past tense. Using APA format instead of Vancouver, etc.

Idiosyncratic: these are more like individual preferences that are either "my mentor's mentor's mentor did it that way, so I do it the same way," pet peeves, or habit stemming from misinformed grammatical rules.

Based on the prevalence of each type, you can decide what improvements may be called for. Grammar, clarity, and style are often well-documented in textbook and professional manuals.
For idiosyncratic types, I usually let those stay as I believe there are more than one way to say the right thing, just some people prefer their "righter" way. But of course, if the changes are harmful, feel free to discuss or edit it to avoid that issue.
If you found most of them are contextual. Then it may be better to change the writing submission protocol. For example, before sending in the full text, generate a writing outline. The outline should include bullets of your interpretation in short sentences, and the bullets should be grouped by paragraph. This would help the advisor spot any misunderstanding earlier, and the list would also prime the advisor about your layout. This could temper their surprise when they see the full text not laid out as how they envisioned.
If this analysis gets too difficult, prepare an original version and a clean edited version from your advisor, and consult a professional editor who is experienced in your field. Basically, ask for an analysis on the two piece and how can your version be improved.


What would be the potential consequences of offering to fund your own graduate degree? I am aware that being funded by a grant greatly improves your chances of receiving a master's degree, however, hypothetically what would be the potential consequences of offering to fund your own? If the negative consequences are minimal, how does one go about offering this to a potential supervisor without under-selling themselves?

I'm applying to programs in Canada.

Getting funding usually stipulates that you have a project that is related to the fund that you have applied to. That being said, it is not always the case. Whether you are self-funded or funded does not necessarily mean that a particular supervisor will work with you. If your research interests are not aligned with the professor's, then it is likely that he/she will reject working with you, even if you are funded. It does not really matter if you are funded or not. It looks better on your CV, however, if you do get funding.

Furthermore, being funded does not guarantee that you will receive a master's degree. Hard work and dedication do. It is the same in any academic program.

If you want to work with a certain professor, I would suggest that you email him/her with a research proposal. That way he/she is able to 1) know that you exist and are keen to work with him/her, 2) that you have a project in mind, and 3) you are open to criticism concerning your research proposal.

Professors like working with students who want to work with them, usually, and they also like students who have similar research interests, or have stimulating proposals for new avenues of research.


Is there something between auditing and taking for credit? Is there a system in place that is in between auditing a course and taking it for credit?

I have audited a course before and I didn't learn enough material to prepare for the actual course.

This depends on your institution, so you will have to ask someone there, a general answer is not possible.

My undergrad institution allowed for taking some courses (specifically, those not part of the specific requirements towards your degree) as pass/fail rather than graded, which meant if you scored at least a C you got credit and if you scored worse than a C you didn't, and the course wasn't included in your GPA.

However, auditing a course typically gives you the same access to course materials as taking it for credit; the opportunity to learn should be the same however course credit is assigned. Auditing is not typically a way to prepare for a course, but rather for self-enrichment and perhaps to learn material outside your area of expertise without being evaluated to test your interests.

edit: The OP has since indicated that their reason for auditing these classes was that they hoped to prepare ahead of taking the course for a grade, due to disability they experience. I would recommend consulting with the institution's disability office to get proper accommodations rather than using the audit or pass/fail system directly.


What can I do if I wrote a grant proposal with a professor, and now that it is funded he refuses to hire me? I discussed my ideas with a professor at a university here in China, where I live. He said that I should write a grant proposal and he will submit it, and if he gets a grant he will hire me (as a postdoc). So I did write a proposal and finally he got a grant, which will start in September-October. The funds seem to come from this Chinese university.

I do have some written communications in which he stated (or suggested) that he would "hire" me if the grant got funded.
But now he does not want to hire me!

What are my options?

I declined a position because he promised to hire me. Now I have 3 months left in my current position and then I will be unemployed.

He will get the money from this grant with me or without. I just wrote a proposal statement. I am listed in a budget section as a Postdoc fellow and the proposed salary is also listed. My salary is the main part of the budget. It seems to be a good idea for a Prof to kick me from this budget and get a big piece of a pie. (Fortunately, this Prof is not able to get any results from my proposal because he has no idea what I am doing.)

Yesterday, when he said this news, I said that I do not want any explanations. A few hours later I sent him an e-mail where I asked to give me explanations. I have got no answer yet.

There are at least three possible explanations as why the professor told you he was not going to hire you for the up-coming project,

He wants to do it by himself.
He wants to hire somebody else who has similar qualifications and research capabilities to do it with less salary.
He wants to hire you with the salary less than listed on the proposal budget section to do it.

The first possibility is unlikely because he has no idea what you are doing.

The second one and the third one are equally likely. Both are for the reason that he wants a bigger share of the pie. I cannot tell which one is more likely because you did not get his explanation.

If he did not have a candidate to replace you yet, I guess the reason he said he was not going to hire you was an attempt to negotiate the salary. In other words, he wants you to take a pay cut.

I would suggest you to approach him by a face-to-face meeting if you really want to work with him on this project. During the meeting, politely ask him to explain to you why he was not going to hire you for the project. If he ever expresses the desire to cut your salary, then it's up to you whether to accept the offer.

There could be a fourth possibility that he did not want to hire you because the relationship between you is bad. I exclude this one for now because there is no strong indication in your question that this is the case (otherwise he would not ask you to write the proposal in the first place). If indeed the relationship is bad, you'll need to figure out how to repair it if you want to work with him.


Should I send reminder to a professor in a school I applied to, for an introduction email I sent two weeks ago? I have applied to 4 PhD applications in Computer Science and I have sent an introduction email to a professor in each of the schools I have applied to. In this email I first introduced myself and then mentioned one of their papers I'm interested in, and at the end asked them for any time they can give me to meet them in person and talk to them about my future plans.

But, I just heard from one professor and the rest have not replied my email after two weeks. How could I write an email to remind them about my old email I sent them?

I googled and did not find a concise answer. Any help is appreciated.

As a busy professor myself, I personally appreciate getting a reminder email. I fully intend to reply to every email I get from a prospective student, even if only to say "Sorry, your research interests do not seem to be a good match for the work we are doing in my group." But in practice, life gets busy. I'm traveling. Or I'm booked solid with meetings and so I don't have time to immediate answer the 50 or so daily emails requiring responses. And so some emails fall through the cracks. Thus I appreciate receiving a single reminder email. Such emails help me do something I want to do: namely, be the kind of person who gives every serious inquiry the courtesy of a response. (A second reminder email is not necessary. If I haven't replied the first two times, there is likely a reason.)

As for what to write, anything short and sweet and non-accusatory should be fine. Personally, I prefer the polite fiction that perhaps I did not receive the original email. You know it's not true, I know you know it's not true, but in phrasing your note this way we agree to mutually overlook these facts. I'd suggest something very simple, such as the following.

  Dear Prof. X,

  I wrote you a letter a few weeks ago, but given the uncertainties of
  email I do not know whether you received it. Thus I am resending my
  note just in case.

  With my best regards, Joe

  [and then append the earlier letter here]


Topical tag cloud generator for researchers/academics I've seen a few academic homepages with tag clouds indicating their topics near the top of the page. I quite like the idea... it gives a nice simple/quick overview of the topics the person is interested in.

Thus I was looking for a tool to (help) generate a tag cloud of my own topics. I'm not looking for a generic tag cloud generator. Rather the tool should take a list of PDFs of papers, extract the topical keywords and then generate the tag cloud. Ideally the tool should be clever enough to rule out noise or common stop-words like "related work", "funded by", and so on.

Alternatively, multiple tools could be used: e.g., one to do the extraction of weighted topics from the papers and another one to generate the image.

Just to pull a nice looking example from some random topic searches on Google images ("tag cloud logic programming" in this case):

Source.

EDIT: Why can I not use a generic tag cloud generator like Wordle?

If I use Wordle or generic tag cloud generators, I get "et", "al", "logic", "programming", "figure", "table". I can filter stop-words manually but I still get single words with no n-gram detection ("logic" and "programming" do not convey "logic programming").

On the other hand, there are tools for topic extraction that will intelligently extract n-gram topics from PDFs (using k-means, gazateers, tf-idf, that sort of stuff ... I'm not an expert). However, these are typically not weighted for sizing in tag clouds. Hence it seems you need a tool that connects/does both.

As I understand the main issues are:

how to extract text from publications,
how to extract disciplines/subjects from the text.

In the first case, following @ff524's comment, see Creating a word cloud from PDF documents. In general, you can try to search for pdf to text conversion (as PDF is a graphical format, sometimes it is tricky to get all content in the exact order, but for this application it should work fine).

When it comes to topic extraction, and elimination of common words, you need to compare your n-grams (i.e. sequences of n words) to some other dataset (for the one by Google). But maybe you need to compare it to n-grams created from scientific words (to eliminate see Fig, et al., previous works).

However, even carefully looking at frequencies is not enough to eliminate all "common words". For example, if you paper discipline-specific words or expressions, it may be hard to distinguish them from discipline names. And, depending on your taste, you may or may not want to include them.

To extract disciplines you need to have some list of it, so you can compare with it. Some time ago I was collecting one (see this gist). One trick to make one is to look at Wikipedia for articles related to your branch.

If you are more in natural language processing, you can look at:

P. Buitelaar, T. Eigner, Topic Extraction from Scientific Literature for Competency Management

or search for similar publications.

For tag cloud visualization you can use http://www.wordle.net/ or something similar. But beware, some people are highly opinionated against tag clouds.

SIDE REMARK:

Personally, I think that graphs are a better tool to convey information, as similar concepts are clustered together (in opposition to having a soup of concepts). See things in line of e.g. TagOverflow or maps of SE (disclaimer: these are my projects).
Once you get tags and some quantity relating them, it is easy to make a nice graph with Gephi.


Should I get a Second Bachelors and Masters to Make My PhD as Broad/Interdisciplinary as Possible? I've currently decided to get a second bachelor's in Statistics over 1.5 years after finishing my first bachelor's in math. Both of these degrees are debt free and follow a passion of mine. The next goal is to work in industry for about three years at my parent's home while taking one class a semester in Computer Science online to save for a master's in Statistics with Thesis where I hope to take some really advanced courses over two years.

The big idea is that I could grab courses like Categorical Data Analysis, Multivariate Statistics, Nonparametric stats (and maybe substitute mathematical stats 1 and 2 with graduate Measure Theory) etc during my second B.S. and then focus on the really advanced statistics courses and math courses during my masters like advanced graduate topology, experimental design and bayesian analysis

Then I would start a PhD in say Computer Science focused on Machine Learning to develop cutting edge statistical tools based on theoretical principles in Statistics, computational topology, measure theory etc.

Would this be too much education? I want to do more than just take classes on various statistical methods before a PhD.

Edit: I should add that the answer I received from r/datascience was to go straight into a Masters program. But since I can't afford that yet, I guess the answer in my circumstances is that I can do a second B.S. in Stats or Comp Sci if I'm making good money near my parent's home?

I would agree with the answer from r/datascience. Go straight to MS.

The main reason you cited for waiting on the MS was that you could not afford to pay cash for grad school and you didn't want a loan. Keep in mind that cash and loans are not the only two options.  There is a significant amount of financial assistance available for grad school. E.g. you might be able to get a teaching assistantship (teach an undergrad class in exchange for tuition), research assistantship (work on a professor's research project in exchange for tuition), or a fellowship/scholarship.  I got all three of these at various points in my program. I have a MS and a Ph D and I literally paid zero tuition for both of them. My wife and my sister both have MS and neither one paid any tuition.

Research assistantship is very common in technical fields where corporations sponsor research projects. E.g. Apple or Microsoft might give a CS professor $200k to study some challenging problem. The professor will spend that $200k to hire grad students to do the work.  You work on the project part time, say 20 hours a week, and that pays your tuition. Now if you were talking about studying history or poetry or violin performance, then money is a lot harder to find. But Comp Sci, you have a good chance at finding some money.

The only reason I can think of to do a second BS before the MS would be if your BS was in such a completely unrelated area that you would be unlikely to get admitted to the graduate program. For example, if you had a BS in English Literature or Violin Performance, you would be unlikely to get into an graduate program in Statistic or Comp Science.  But I don't think that applies here.  With a Math degree (assuming you have good GPA / GRE scores) you should be able to get into a good Statistics or Computer Science program.

EDIT:
Let me try to put this a different way.  To a large degree, the value of a BS is less about the specific facts/skills that you learned, and more about proving to a potential employer or grad school that you are a hard worker (see Signaling theory).  Opinions vary, but let's says it's 50% about what you learn, and 50% proving you're a hard worker. If you get a second BS, it's only worth half as much as the first, as you've already proven you can do work at the BS level. If you get an MS, you now prove to potential employers that you can do work at the MS level, which is worth a lot more than proving you can work at the BS level. Let's just say that an MS is worth twice as much as the first BS for this. Then an MS is worth four times as much as a second BS. And since it will take a similar amount of time, why waste your time getting the less valuable thing?


How hard is it to change universities after one year in a graduate program (USA, PhD in Chemistry)? Let's assume I am going to a University for a PhD program in the  US. After attending for one year, I feel that it would be better for me to switch programs and University. How hard would it be to do that? I'm an international student not yet admitted to a graduate program.

In chemistry (or physics) it would not necessarily be hard if your 1st year grades were great and you made progress in other activities during that year that showed you would be successful in US PhD system. The application timing is the difficult issue, as you apply in the fall to new school and you would have had no convincing track record by fall the first year.

People are accepting of helping (recommendations, etc) a good student switch if it is clear that no group within the department is suitable for that student due to funding, or subfield interest.

However, your email appears as if you are asking how to work the system to apply to one school  to get into the US, but then go somewhere else? Faculty are not clueless and some will be pick up on what feels like a lack of good faith or transparency during your year or two at the first institution. It will not lead to faculty being helpful. (And some resentment if it felt that scarce resources as TA or RA slots were 'wasted').


Time for journal reviewing / referring in mathematics - Is there a recent study? In the question: Lengths of review process of mathematical journals a nice question was asked and answered: how to compare journals in terms of time for the review processing. The article cited in the answer is quite nice http://www.ams.org/notices/201310/rnoti-p1390.pdf but is from 2013. Seven years after, are there some similar studies which can tell what kind of backlogs/ times needed for mathematical journals to accept / reject articles? A young mathematician asked me this today and I gave him the link, but a more recent one would certainly be more helpful.

The American Mathematical Society provides regular (annual, I believe) on journal backlog times. The latest can be found here: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201910/rnoti-p1713.pdf
Depending on your subfield it may not contain data on all relevant journals, but it is quite comprehensive. The reports are published in the November issue of the Notices of the AMS, which is also available online.

The data in the report is based on information provided by the journals itself.


Does the journal editor have authority not to publish my article after clear acceptance? It is to ask that I sent my original article in some journal, reviewers asked me to make some amendments which I did on time. The editor then sent me an email with their decision of acceptance.
Now they have published their journal new edition, but my article is not published. Is it legal or ethical to do this?

If they've accepted it, they will publish it (eventually). They have nothing to gain otherwise by holding your paper. That it's not been published in the latest issue isn't a sign that they're not going to publish your paper at all - they could for example have a lot of papers that are online ready waiting for an issue, and they've hit their page count limit for this issue.

Whether the journal has the authority to reject your paper after accepting it is a separate question. In principle, they can: nothing gets published without the editor-in-chief's approval after all, and he can change his mind. In practice, this happens extremely rarely. If they find out for example that the paper is plagiarized, then it can be rejected. But to reject it because they changed their mind about whether it's publishable - that's almost never going to happen.


My paper is posted to arXiv; how do I get it endorsed? I own an article on Arxiv and I am not currently an endorser as it is my first paper. I want this article to be endorsed.

My supervisor is qualified to endorse it but Arxiv is asking for an alpha-numeric endorsement code. Where can we find this code?

I think you have misunderstood how the endorsement system works.  Endorsement isn't something that's applied to an article, it's applied to an author.  It's a one-time process that some people have to go through in order to gain the privilege to submit articles.  Others are granted "automatic endorsement", by virtue of, say, having an academic email address

So if you have already been able to successfully submit a paper, then you don't need endorsement and you never will, and you should just ignore the whole thing.

If you had needed endorsement, you would not have been allowed to submit your first paper, and would instead have been given instructions that included the alphanumeric code.  You would then have given this code to your supervisor, and by logging into their arXiv account, they would have been able to use it to endorse you.  Then you would have been able to go ahead with submitting your paper.

The fact that you are not an endorser simply means that if someone else wants to submit their first paper and needs endorsement, you won't be able to be the one to endorse them.  You'll gain this privilege after you have more papers.  But you can't speed it up by being endorsed by someone else.


Strategies for reviewing a paper that has non-English references I am reviewing a paper that quite heavily builds upon work that has only been published in Russian and Romanian, which are languages I (unfortunately) do no speak. Therefore it is quite difficult for me to assess how this new work builds upon this previous work.

This work was submitted for an English-speaking venue in which normally all papers only reference papers in English. At first glance, the venue only request the actual paper to be in English, but makes no mention about related work.

How to proceed?

Evaluate the correctness and significance of the results as best you can.  On the topic of novelty, include in your referee report exactly what you wrote here:

  [This paper] quite heavily builds upon work that has only been published in Russian and Romanian, which are languages I (unfortunately) do not speak. Therefore it is quite difficult for me to assess how this new work builds upon this previous work.

Then let the editors decide.


My university is listed on Anabin as H+ but my degree is not listed. Should I worry about this? I'm planning to do my MSc in Germany and found that in order to apply a master program in Germany, I should check my undergraduate degree is whether acceptable(H+) or not(H-) via Anabin database. The problem is my university is listed on Anabin as H+ but my degree(Abschlussbezeichnung) isn't. The thing is most of the universities listed on Anabin seem to have the same problem. I searched for the BSc-Physics in the US universities but there was only one on the list. Should I worry about this?

In the hard end, what some random listing says about your school is irrelevant. You will get accepted or not.

The only way to find out how much importance your prospective places for MSc studies place on the listing (or not) of your undergraduate degree is to ask them directly. Attach a short description of your undergraduate studies, state the degrees listed in Anabin, and give e.g. your GPA. It might just be that your curriculum is too new to have been included, or has not been presented for evaluation, or has other external certification that might be relevant. That you'll have to ask locally, and add to the above.


Online job application systems Some tenure track positions require you to submit a CV and fill out online forms with the same information. Do search committees use the online information or just the supporting CV and teaching and research statements?

I think both. Scanning lists of applicants within the electronic system, only the info entered is visible. Only when looking more fully at an individual file (as opposed to scanning aggregate lists of applicants) is the "custom" information visible. So it's good to take the trouble to be sure that the "entered" information is accurate, otherwise the CV itself may never be seen, etc.


How do I 'read the room' and adjust my pace while lecturing? I am a PhD student. I've never taught a lecture-style course before. I just filled in for my advisor at the last minute, giving a lecture in an undergrad course.
I taught from the lecture slides that my advisor had prepared, drawing diagrams and examples on the whiteboard where I thought it was warranted. I stopped often and asked if anyone had questions, and if nobody did I posed questions to them, e.g., "What do you think is the benefit of this system over that?" "What did you learn about X?"
My impression was that approximately 30% of the class was pretty engaged, asking and answering questions, etc., 50% were taking notes and paying attention but not really speaking up, and the rest were zoned out. I think this is normal (from what I remember from being an undergrad), so I thought I was doing OK.
However, towards the end of the lecture, a few students said that I was going much faster than normal. And, I did get through more slides than my advisor said I should expect to, so they're probably right.
My question is:

What clues do you look for to "read a room" to tell that you're going too fast, even though people seem to still be "getting it"?
What can you do to slow down, beyond asking if anybody has questions and bringing up more examples (I can only think of so many examples)?

I am asking specifically about teaching undergrads, because I think they are more difficult to read than postgrads, or senior academics in the audience of a conference talk.  But I would appreciate answers that apply to the latter scenario as well.
Also, I understand that things like clickers and discussion groups can make a difference, but I am asking specifically how to improve my lecturing, not how to restructure classes so I spend less time lecturing.
A related question is How to improve myself as a lecturer, where one answer says "Never assume that students follow you" and suggests you "see if they get the idea, sort of get the idea, or don't get it at all." I tried to do this, and it seemed like the students that were willing to engage were "getting it." Apparently they were getting it, but I was still going at a speed that made their heads hurt :)

In my experience it's easy to be misled by a few good students who are able to engage with you and answer your questions. This doesn't mean the majority of students feel the same way of course. I always try and bear in mind the weakest (and often the quietest) students in the class and try and not be lured into accelerating due to a few bright sparks at the front.

Asking if there are any questions or bring up examples is a good way to try and gauge the classes response. But if the class is shy or unresponsive (as is often the case initially) I find it very hard to know whether I'm boring the pants of them or they're completely lost.

A simple trick is to give a short relatively straightforward exercise and ask everyone to do it there and then. It should only take a minute or two. You can then briefly walk through the students and ask them how they are getting on. It should become obvious if many of them are struggling. Walking among the students and directly interacting with them isn't going to suit everyone though and if the class is large (or the seating is inaccessible) it will be more difficult. But it's crucial to get some feedback and if that means taking a more proactive approach then why not? I make sure to smile and encourage them since some students will be nervous if the lecturer asks how they're doing.


I found a huge error in my master's thesis which I defended a year ago I defended my Master's thesis last year and continued on to pursue PhD in the same university under a different adviser. My Master's thesis adviser and I were getting ready to present a paper pertaining to the MS thesis at a conference in two weeks. The paper is already accepted.

Earlier this week, in preparation of showing reports at the conference, I started re-running my Master's thesis code to obtain fresh reports. The results gave me the nastiest shock of my life. The new results I was getting were a magnitude off from the results I had before. I could not believe the new results. Thinking that I had done something wrong in the current run, I re-ran my previous projects which I had used to obtain the results for the thesis document and defense. Even these runs gave me the same results as the new results I was getting. When I dug into it further I realized that I had misinterpreted the value of a single variable which changed all my result values by a magnitude. This reverses half of the conclusions I made and slightly alters the rest. I immediately emailed my adviser for a meeting to discuss this issue. I am meeting with her next week.

In the meantime I am panicking that my adviser or the school board might think that I deliberately presented the wrong values since I was getting better results. I am scared that they might not see my mistake as a mistake or even if they do see it as a mistake, they might take some strict action like revoking my MS degree or suspending me from school or even expulsion. I am panicking. Please advise. Thank you.

Correct the mistake for any peer-reviewed publications (journal, conference, etc). Don't worry about the thesis published at your institution.

Reason being, your committee signed off in the work as a whole as fulfilling the merits of the degree. Yes, it's unfortunate, but theses often aren't indexed by journal searches, and even when they are, they are generally interpreted with less weight.

On the bright side, you recognized an error others might not have. Apply this lesson moving forward. In any other case, you'd have to retract.

PS - I did the same thing during my masters thesis. Didn't sleep for a week.


Can a postdoc write a letter for someone applying for a postdoc? I'm a PhD student currently applying for postdocs and while I have secured my first and second letters of recommendation from faculty, the professor that had agreed to write me my third has unfortunately passed away recently.

I don't have a fourth professor sufficiently familiar with my research to write a strong recommendation letter. If I were to ask one, it would be one of those "good but also kinda filler" letters written by someone who knows me but doesn't know me.

Alternatively, I could ask a postdoc I worked closely on several projects for a letter. He would be able to write a strong letter, but of course that's still not ideal because he's a "mere" postdoc.

Which one would you recommend? A good letter written by a professor mostly as a favor, or a strong one written by a postdoc?

(There are similar questions on this site, but those concern Master students requesting letters from a postdoc when applying to a PhD position. Since a postdoc is still above a PhD student, the context is different, so the answers there don't necessarily apply here.)

EDIT: I'm applying for postdocs in Europe and North America.

In every situation I know of, a postdoc would be allowed to write you a letter.  In general it's not a good idea to get a letter from a postdoc when you're applying for a postdoc.  But that doesn't mean it's never the best option.  A strong letter from a postdoc isn't going to actively hurt your application, it's just not going to help you the same way a strong letter from someone with more experience would.  The main problem is that a postdoc doesn't yet have the perspective to see what makes people successful in the long run and doesn't have a broad enough pool to compare you to.  It matters here whether the postdoc has great work and is relatively well-known, and it also matters how far out from PhD the postdoc is.  There are strong senior postdocs in my field whose opinion I would give a lot of weight to.  I don't know all the details, but it sounds like asking the postdoc might be a reasonable decision in your unfortunate situation.

All that said, I think your question misunderstands the purpose of letters in a way that's quite common among graduate students.  It's not necessary that your letter writers all know you so long as they know your work.  It's better to have a letter from an important figure in your field who understands your work, than to have a letter from someone local who knows you really well.  I always encourage graduate students to try to get one letter from someone at a different school.  If you gave a talk somewhere and had a productive conversation afterwards with the person who invited you, that person might be an excellent choice for a third letter.  It's pretty late in the process right now, so it might not be possible to get a third letter from an outside expert in a timely fashion, but in general it's something graduate students should be looking for.  You should not be getting letters from local professors who know you from class but who can't understand your work.


How common is it for a paper to be wrong? I am a student in computer science and I recently started working on my M.Sc. thesis. Now I am reading a 2011 paper with about 170 citations that was published in a well-known conference.

In part of the paper, the author briefly states the complexity of their algorithm (in just one line) and claims a complexity order that I believe is false. But I am really in doubt because I think if there was a problem with that paper, that should have been caught earlier by the editorial board.

I want to know, actually how common is it for such errors to be found in papers published in a well-known conferences?

I'll try to give a general answer from a non-CS perspective.

tl; dr: yes, there are errors out there. A lot of errors, clerical and not, even in oft-cited papers and books, from any field. It's inevitable: though they do their best to avoid errors, authors are human after all, and reviewers are humans too (I know, you never find a damn robot when you need one). Thus, whenever you read a paper, maintain critical thinking.

EXAMPLES

I'll start the too long section with an anecdote. When I was working at my master's thesis, some twenty years ago, I needed a result published in a much cited paper from a renowned author in the field of electromagnetics. At the time, (almost) young and inexperienced, I thought that papers were always absolutely right, especially when written by recognized authorities. To practice the technique of the paper, I decided to rederive the results: after a week spent redoing the calculations over and over again, I couldn't find the same final equation. I was able to discover the correct equation – the one I was finding – in a book published later by the same author. Indeed, it was a clerical error that absolutely didn't change anything in the paper, but it was annoying and taught me an important lesson: papers and books contain errors. And, of course, I later published papers with mistakes in equations (not for revenge!) [*].

After that first experience, I've discovered that you can find more fundamental errors, even in well known books and papers. I'll give you here a few examples, taken from different fields, to underline how broad the phenomenon is (in bold, the mistaken claim; within parentheses, the field):

(Classical mechanics) In Newtonian mechanics, the correct equation of motion in case of variable mass is F = dp/dt. This statement can be found in many classical books about newtonian mechanics, but it is plainly wrong, because that equation, when the mass is variable, is not invariant under Galilean transformations as it is expected in Newtonian mechanics (actually, the concept of variable mass in Newtonian mechanics can be misleading if not properly handled). For a deeper discussion see, e.g., Plastino (1990), Pinheiro (2004) and Spivak's book Physics for Mathematicians, Mechanics I. As a curiosity, that wrong equation is used by L. O. Chua in this speech (14:50 min) as an example to introduce the memristor.
(Circuit analysis) Superposition can't be applied directly to controlled sources. It was just a few years ago when I came across this statement for the first time, and I was stunned: hey, I've applied superposition to controlled sources since I was in high school, and I've always get the right result. How it possibly can't be used? In fact, it can be applied, the important thing is to apply it correctly, but there are really many professors (I have several examples from Italy and US) who don't understand this point and fail to notice that the proofs of several theorems in circuit analysis are actually based on the applicability of superposition to controlled sources. For more on this, see e.g. Damper (2010), Marshall Leach (2009) and Rathore et al. (2012).
(Thermodynamics) The Seebeck effect is a consequence of the contact potential. This false statement can be frequently read in technical books and application notes about thermocouples.

À propos of my own errors, a couple of weeks after having written this answer I discovered an error in an equation of a published conference paper which I co-authored. A fraction that should have been something like -A/B became B/A. Hey – I told one of the other authors – how could we possibly have written this? And how did it get past the reviewers? The fact is, that that equation was associated to a simple, well-known, example given in the introduction, an example so simple that probably neither us authors nor the reviewers gave a second look at the equation (of course, how can anyone write this wrongly?). I feel that many clerical errors like this one happen because of last-minute changes to notation: you have almost finished the paper and you realize that you could have employed a better notation... so, let's change it on the fly! And here is where certain errors sneak-in. Avoid last-minute changes, if you can.


Regarding self-archiving embargos, what is the "official publication" date? Springer's self-archiving policy states:

  Authors may self-archive the author’s accepted manuscript of their articles on their own websites.
  Authors may also deposit this version of the article in any
  repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months
  after official publication or later...

http://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/authors-rights/self-archiving-policy/2124

Many other journals specify a similar embargo period.

My question is, what counts as the date of "official publication"? This could refer to:

date of acceptance
date first available online, or
date article first appeared in print

This may seem like a nitpicky question, but for some journals, publication online precedes publication in print by 6 months or more.

From Nature Neurology Reviews (bold is my emphasis):

What is the 'official' publication date?
Many journals, and most abstracting and indexing services (including Medline and Institute for Scientific Information) still cite the print date as the publication date. This is an evolving standard, however, and the trend now is for publishers to state both the 'Online Publication Date' and the 'Print Publication Date'. Nature Publishing Group currently publishes both dates for its own papers, and we hope that the scientific communities and abstracting and indexing services will recognize these dates.
For the time being, the reference lists in our papers will continue to follow the standard convention of citing by print publication details if they are available. We expect, however, to review this policy regularly as community standards evolve.
For legal purposes (e.g. establishing intellectual property rights), it is our assumption that online publication will constitute public disclosure. This status is, however, for the courts to decide; our role as a publisher is to provide clear documentation of the publication history, online and in print.

In summary, it seems like the print publication date was originally the standard, but now it is becoming more common to treat the online publication date as a form of official publication as well, as online publication becomes the norm. It's probably up to the journal how they exactly define official publication for purposes of repository deposits, however, and you will have to check with the journal for clarification if it is not already clear.
The US National Institutes of Health requires that NIH-funded research must be archived in their PubMedCentral database 12 months after "official publication." Their FAQ on the matter defines this as follows:

NIH determines the official date of publication for the public access policy based on information received from the publisher and the National Library of Medicine (NLM).  The official date of publication is listed in the PubMed citation display for a paper immediately after the journal title abbreviation.
NIH uses the official date of publication for determining the public access compliance status of a paper and calculating when a paper should be made public on PubMed Central. An "epub ahead of print" date for a citation in PubMed is not considered the official date of publication, and these papers are still considered in press.
Note that when only partial publication dates are available (e.g. Month and Year, Season and Year), NLM calculates the date as the first date of that time period (e.g. March 2013=March 1, 2013). See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/licensee/elements_article_source.html for additional information about NLM dates.

Based on these guidelines, it would suggest that it is the print publication date that is important, but it also seems like they leave it up to the publisher to some extent.


Paid publish fees two years late, can journal reject my paper? I submitted a paper to a journal. They finally accepted it and asked me to pay a fee. However, due to my economic condition, I was not able to pay the fee.

After 2 years, I finally payed the fee, but now they say the paper is two years old and they cannot publish it. Can they reject my paper after accepting it due to late fees?

It depends on what the terms and conditions are. If the terms specify that you need to pay the fee within a certain period of time, then they can. If the terms don't specify this but give the editor some discretion on certain issues, the they might also do this.

The question that you should ask yourself however is whether it matters whether they are allowed to do this. You might be in the right, but would you really be willing to go to court over this?

What you need to do is to convince them that they should publish your article. One way to do this is to apologize to the editor for not paying the fee sooner, and ask them whether it is possible to re-submit to this journal. Your personal circumstances are neither here nor there. You can at most mention that due to personal circumstances you did not pay the fee at the time and leave it at that. And if it is not possible, then submit the paper to another journal. What happened in the past is now in the past and is irrelevant for all practical purposes. You might have an in with this journal, but if not, then you're probably better off accepting it and moving on to a different journal.


Are there math graduate schools without stressful tests? I am one year from graduating and am starting to look for Graduate programs. I would like to know if there exist graduate programs where the focus is on research from the start (apparently this is the case in the UK).

I ask this because I have noticed I learn better when motivated by research than in regular courses. Additionally, because stressful long written exams frighten me and I would prefer to avoid them if it were a possibility. It would be nice at least to go somewhere where they are more flexible about exams, and place less value on them.

I ask this question, not seeking for a list of schools I might consider applying to, but to get a better idea of what graduate programs loook like. I would like to know if it’s worth it for me to focus on this, or if I should just look at the academics because focusing on this would be too restrictive. ( I cannot live by avoiding stress at all costs as mentioned in the comments).

No one gets a PhD in mathematics (or any other subject) without experiencing stress, period. But there are different kinds of stress. Exam stress and research stress are different, and some people respond better to one or the other. In particular, the time constraints in research are obviously much much more flexible.

As Nate Eldredge notes in the comments, pretty much all US programs have some form of qualifying exam. UChicago is a notable exception, but their first-year graduate courses are more difficult, to make up for this. (We might formulate this principle as "conservation of stress.") But the important thing is that even though students freak out over qualifying exams, these exams are merely a hoop to jump through, and are not the main focus of any PhD program. Don't get me wrong, they are a useful hoop, but once they're over...they're over. You will stop stressing over exams, and start stressing over your thesis. Typically, qualifying exams happen around year 2 of a 5+ year program--the remaining years are all about research.

To put it another way, avoiding a good PhD program because of exams would be like avoiding a good vacation because of a fear of flying: perhaps necessary if you have a true, diagnosable phobia, but otherwise, you should grit your teeth and get through it.


Using "Smith et al" when another Smith is also referenced My name is John Smith and I'm writing a paper. In the discussion of the existing literature, I cite quite a few papers from another team, including many whose first author was a David Smith. I usually write this using heavily the “et al” style:

  Einstein et al. first established in 1976 a possible plan for eradicating world hunger by massive beet culture in Antartica,1 but it took 20 years before Wiles et al. clearly delineated the challenges of such a prospect.2 The earlier analyses, by Smith et al.,3–7 held the narrow view that climate3–5 and transportation issues6–7 would be the limiting factors, forgetting to address the marketing aspects and negative implications on consumer image of the brand. In this paper, we present …

(the journal style calls for superscript numbers for citations)

Now, it seems somewhat likely that the reader may think the Smith from “Smith et al.” may actually be me. How should I help avoid this?

Not worrying about it.
Use first name or initial, “David Smith et al.” or “D. Smith et al.”
Choosing another author, like the last author, as in “Professor et al.”?
Some other formulation?

If your references clearly can be traced to a unique paper then the name is not (or should not be) confusing. Yes, someone may mistake you for someone else or vice versa but then their checking of sources is out of sub-par. You can safely continue referencing the (standard) way you do it.

If two publications exist as Smith yyyy (Smith et al. yyyy) then it is common to use letters so that the references become Smith yyyya and Smith yyyyb (Smith et al. yyyya; Smith et al. yyyyb). So not even in this case is it necessary to add initials. You may find that initials are used in older puiblications but by introducing the letters to distinguish several similar references initials have become obsolete.

It is also possible to add indicators in the text that allows the reader to understand where your work is referenced by using "we" or "I" (as the case may be) when discussing a particular reference/result, that is use an active voice instead of passive.


What to expect from or discuss in a Skype call about the possibility of a research position? I'm going to have a skype call with a University Professor (Computer Science) to discuss the possibilities of working in his lab as a postdoc.

He already told me (via email) that he can not produce an open position easily. So, he wants to know me better and to discuss the possibilities and research perspectives. Honestly, I do not understand what he means by his first sentence about the difficulty of "producing an open position". Does he mean "the chances are low, but let's have a talk"?

Also, I like to discuss and find common grounds for doing prospective research. But what would be a happy ending for such a discussion? For instance, he/I suggesting to work on a proposal? or finding a research project/topic to discuss later in more detail? To be honest, I'm not sure how to lead such an (somehow) informal meeting to a more serious opportunity.

You need to answer two questions here:

What is it that you want out of this?
What can you offer this person?

In answer to question 1, if it's just that you want any post-doc, then this conversation will likely go poorly for you.

The professor "cannot produce an open position", meaning that he is uninterested in working with just another researcher to get more people in his lab.  He has an obvious interest in working with someone, but he isn't sure if it's you.  He'll want to know that you two share the same research interests, that your skills are up to the task, and that you can contribute positively to the field and your mutual reputation as researchers.

In response to question 2: The prof most likely wants to know if you want this specific post-doc position because this professor is a leader in the field that you are in and you will learn a lot from this person, and also that you will be able to make a significant contribution without him holding your hand, but that gets him some recognition.  You need to make sure to communicate that.


Photo requirement on CV? I came across an advertisement of an academic position (in Europe) that states explicitly:

  Application package should include:
   (1) a complete curriculum vitae (with a photo), (...)

I have never seen a photo on CV to be a requirement (although the fact that is included in parenthesis might implicitly mean that is optional?)

In any case I find it mildly strange.

Assuming that its is indeed a requirement, what is the rationale behind this? What are the benefits (for the person advertising the position) of doing so?

I am not asking what are the benefits for the applicant (for which there is a related question) but I am asking from the point of view of the person receiving the applications. Even though the position is located in Europe (Switzerland), feel free to answer for your own region!

I have never seen a photo on CV to be a requirement (although the fact that is included in parenthesis might implicitly mean that is optional?)

My interaction with colleagues in Europe (especially Germany) seems to suggest that this is a relatively common requirement, or at least a default expectation for what is a "complete" CV that they may feel the need to specify due to an international applicant base.

  Assuming that its is indeed a requirement, what is the rationale behind this? What are the benefits (for the person advertising the position) of doing so?

I imagine many of the rationales boil down to "This is how it's done". Every justification I've ever seen is about making a "personal connection" and evaluating some soft factors based on the photo.

Whether this is a good idea or not is left as an exercise to the reader.


If you are asked to participate in review, is your submission likely to be accepted? If you are asked to participate in review of a conference paper to which you have yourself submitted a paper, what is likelihood that your paper has been accepted?

Or is it possible that they would ask an author of the rejected work to participate in the review of remaining submissions?

It's unlikely that a decision has been made yet about your paper.  At least in the sorts of conferences I'm familiar with, no decisions are made before the program committee meeting (except possibly eliminating completely inappropriate submissions, such as crackpot or off-topic work).  This means all reviewers are recruited before any decisions are made, since all the reviews are needed at the meeting, so being asked to review supplies no information about whether your submission will be accepted.

The only correlation is that you shouldn't be asked to review something too close to your own submission, to avoid conflicts of interest.  If you are worried about that, you could always ask the program committee member who recruited you as a reviewer.  It's possible that they just screwed up, without realizing the potential conflict, but it's more likely that they think this paper is far enough from your submission to be safe.


Can students apply for Research Grants (US)? I know you can apply for fellowships for individual students, but I'm not talking about funding only for one's self. Let's say I noticed a grant that was solicited on grants.gov and I wanted to apply for it. Can I do that?
The nature of these grants is to supply the awardee with funding for experimental set-ups, student funding (undergrad/grad), and other various research supplies.

& As a follow up question, is it possible to apply, if your PI is applying for this funding as well. Basically, could I send in a proposal and my PI could as well? Are there some restrictions here? I've read through the solicitation's eligibility and couldn't find anything about multiple names being on different proposals, or if we were to apply separately, then having the funding go to the same group under different names.
Just curious if anyone knew.
I'll write back, if I find more info.

Technically, in the US, most grants are not normally submitted directly by the principal investigator, but are instead sent in via a "grants office" that acts as the interface between the principal investigator and the funding agency.

Consequently, in addition to the grant-specific funding rules you have from a specific funding agency, you also have to deal with whatever restrictions your university grant-office has. For instance, it's not likely that your grants office will accept a proposal submitted by a graduate student instead of by a faculty member or similar personnel (lecturer, research professor, etc.).

In general, though, you need to read the requirements of the individual granting agency, as well as ask your local grants office.


Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (AISC) template for Latex? While I am looking for Latex template of the AISC template (Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing), I could find only its word format in following link:

https://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/journal-author/word-template-zip-154-kb-/22044

Does it mean that there is no Latex template for AISC?

Meanwhile, after downloading the word template, it seems to be similar to LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). Could be they the same?

This kind of questions are not encouraged in this site. However, here is what I found.

There is LaTeX template for this here: https://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/conference-proceedings/conference-proceedings-guidelines


Can't decide which research project to work on as an undergraduate to prepare for graduate school? I'm an undergraduate engineering student at a top state university. I want to do high-quality research to build up my experience in preparation for graduate school (MS/Ph.D.). My research is out of pure interest, not volunteering or doing it for credit hours.

My goal is to go to a top 5 graduate school in my field. I have some experience in research since I worked on a research project last summer. I published a paper as a second author on that to a conference and it was accepted.

I found two research projects currently and they're equally as good but I'm having trouble deciding which one would help me the most due to my lack of experience. It would be super helpful if those of you who have been through this process can provide some advice.

Project 1

Professor went to a top 5 graduate engineering school.

He is currently in my engineering school but not in the same
department as I am.

Open-ended project. The project hasn't been worked on much in recent
years so I have full choice over the direction of the project.

Collaborate with one graduate researcher on this project.

Prof. said I have a chance to publish papers since it's open-ended
and I end up discovering something novel.

The project is directly related to my field and future research I
want to pursue.

Professor: h-index: 23, Citations: 2123

Project 2

The project is an application of my field, but the work is still
related to future research I want to pursue.

The professor is in the College of Science which is a difference
since I'm in engineering and he does not have specific knowledge
about my field.

I'm assuming this means not many connections in my field.

The project is interesting, a novel application of the research in my
field.

Work with 7 other undergraduate researchers from different majors,
and two graduate researchers.

It recently received a huge check from NSF.

Professor: h-index: 21, Citations: 1299

I am by no means an expert in the realms of academia, prestige, or research papers and am an M.S. student myself, but my logical evaluation of this situation is that you probably have more to gain by doing project 1, for the following reasons:

1) Professor 1 is probably a better connection to have in the long run, especially if the school they went to is one of your top two picks. He/she will probably be able to be more helpful with explanations and sticking points during your research than Professor 2 as well, if only because they share a more similar background to you and can understand your mindset better.

2) Project 1 seems (from your description) as though it is more likely to get your name on a published paper, which is always a perk when you put months of work into something.

3) Project 1 has fewer people involved. More collaborators is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does allow for more time lost to communication (or miscommunication), introduces more potential for error, and almost certainly requires some overhead in the form of proper project management in order to efficiently utilize everyone. A two person project, while it can certainly benefit from the same processes, would not need nearly the same amount of organizational structure. Another thing to mention here is that having a majority of undergrad researchers on the project may mean that it goes slower than you might like, due to the fact that they are less experienced than you

Keep in mind, though that bigger groups introduce more perspectives and usually better ideas. Additionally, the undergrads at your school could be brilliant and leave you behind, rather than the other way around

4) Project 1 is more directly aligned with your interests and should serve you well going forward. Especially since you have essentially been offered complete control of Project 1, you can shape it so that it directly feeds into the next project you want to take on after you complete this one.

5) Finally, I would like to recognize both of the original commenters for their contributions, because they are absolutely right (Sorry for omitting tags, fairly new to SE):
    - a) If the project is not interesting to you, don't do it! I only wrote this as a guide with the assumption that you were equally interested in both, because you said both were "equally as good"
    - b) Evaluate the professors based on their own merit and what you know about them personally. If you don't know them well, try to find students that have had their classes and ask them. Try to get a feel for their personality and ask yourself if you're comfortable working with them for a long(-ish) span of time.


Should I take a "positive, but not enthusiastically strong" letter of recommendation? I'm currently applying for a Masters degree in a competitive program, and most things on my application are going well.

The problem I'm having is with securing a letter of recommendation - I have already secured two strong letters, one from a workplace manager in the field that I am applying for and another from a professor in an unrelated field. Regarding the third letter, a professor that I spoke to said that he could write a "positive, but not enthusiastically strong" recommendation.

From reading up on answers here and on other sites, it seems that in most cases I should look elsewhere for a letter. However, in my case I do not yet have a letter from a professor in the field that I am applying for. There are a few other professors in the field that I will reach out to, but assuming that they reject my request, should I take this letter?

Another option that I have is to secure a strong third letter from another manager at my workplace. Would taking a third letter from a work manager be better? I am leaning towards this being the case, but I also do not want to jeopardize my application by not having a letter from a professor directly in the field I am applying to.

a professor that I spoke to said that he could write a "positive, but not enthusiastically strong" recommendation

This sounds like a polite way to tell you to ask somebody else.


How to deal with the tenure case of a colleague who has avoided teaching the classes they were hired to teach? I have a colleague who is coming up for tenure review shortly, and there is a problem with his teaching history.  He was hired to teach classes specifically in area X, although his research is in a slightly different area (Y).  I was on the committee that hired him, and the teaching was a major part of what we were looking for.

However, this person has not taught any classes in area X, at all.  I know from persona knowledge that he requested not to teach X in his first semester, and I have heard from others that he continued to not want to teach in that area.  (I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this hearsay, and his teaching assignment requests can be documented for the tenure and promotion committee.)  This has not turned out to be a serious problem in terms of covering classes.  Somebody else, also from area Y, started teaching some classes in area X, and we later hired a full time person working in Y.

Yet I am still concerned that the assistant professor coming up for tenure has flouted the requirements of the position for which he was hired (which were clearly set forth in his offer letter from the dean).  His research is fine, although not outstanding, and his teaching in other areas would normally be considered adequate.  He also does fine in other considerations (service, collegiality) as well.  However, I am not sure whether it is appropriate to vote in favor of his tenure case, and I was wondering whether what others might think to be appropriate in such a situation.

Based on the information you've provided (and certainly the part of it that is not based on unsubstantiated rumors, which I think it would be quite problematic to take into account), I do not see any cause for concern of a sort that would cast a serious shadow over your colleague's tenure case.

The reason is that individual faculty members do not decide what they teach, but instead the assignment is made by the department (the chair or a dedicated committee) based on its needs, and it is the duty of faculty to teach what they are assigned. It is completely fine if your colleague requested not to teach courses in area X - we all have preferences in such things; it would only not be fine if he were to be assigned such a course and refuse to teach it, and that does not seem to be what happened. If the department can meet its future teaching needs without this person ever teaching a course in area X, why would you or anyone else find fault with that? To summarize, your interpretation that the faculty member "flouted" the teaching requirements of the position seems quite questionable to me, at least in the absence of additional details you haven't provided.

I should add that I have seen cases of faculty members who actively resisted teaching courses they had been assigned. Such conflicts usually involve people with very difficult personalities, and unless the department chair is a total pushover, they will likely escalate quite rapidly to a higher level involving the dean and/or disciplinary action being threatened or pursued. And when this happens, you can be pretty sure that the miscreant is already tenured...


How to respond to "How much funding will you bring?" as an interview question for a faculty job? What are the possible answers for such interview question assuming a new graduate with no funds!
How much funding you will bring to the department?

This is an invitation to discuss your plans for obtaining external funding.  They want your answers to questions like the following:

What agencies fund research like yours?
What projects do you have that you think would be successful in gaining external funding?
Why do you think you would be successful?  Can you point to similar (but not too similar) projects that have been funded?  Why would a funding agency agree your work is worthy of support?  Why would they agree that you are a qualified person to carry out the work, and that your project is likely to actually produce useful results?  How would you convince them?  What supporting evidence would you use?
How large would those grants be likely to be?  How do you know?
When do you propose to begin applying for such grants?  Is there anything specific that needs to happen first?
Do you have collaborators in mind with whom you might co-apply?  Have you discussed this with them?


Tips for purchasing food and drink for a talk Can people who hosted talks at your university provide some tips on purchasing food and drink for the event?

We have a visitor from another American university and I am tasked with buying "food and drink" for about an audience of 30 - 50 people. We are located relatively close to Starbucks but far away from the nearest supermarket such as Walmart. The talk will last two hours.

From what I have seen, people usually purchase donuts and coffee for these events. I have seen these coffee "crates", "barrels", (I'm not sure what to call them).

Can anyone provide some suggestions as to where you can purchase cheap, and standard meal for these talks? I have asked people around me but they seen to have no idea, our group don't usually host visitors and the graduate students used to purchase for these talks have all graduated.

(Again, in a North America setting)

While cookies, donuts and chocolate are always a safe bet, I have seen that fruits and vegetables are highly appreciated as well. They are really cheap, but require some work, as apples, stem cabbages, peppers ... have to be cut into pieces of finger food size. Cutting and preparing plates for 50 people takes something between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on whether you just want to serve food or have a nice presentation as well.


Is this an acceptable paraphrasing? I need to cite different pages for the same source in Harvard style so here's an example of what I am doing (a hypothetical example):

  John (2010, p. 10) notes that marketing should not be confused with just the idea of selling people goods and services as it's misleading. The same author claims that marketing is really about value (p. 11) so he coined the term 'relationship marketing' (p. 12).

Is this an acceptable format? I need to find a way to cite specific pages (to pinpoint specific information) instead of simply mentioning all pages as in 'John (2010, pp. 10-12)' at the beginning.

To avoid reinstating the fact that the author is the one who made these statements, I would develop something in your first sentence that establishes that and makes it clear early on. For example, you could say that John (2010, p. 10) made a series of statements about marketing. That would set the platform to then elaborate on his ideas about marketing, rather than repeating in every sentence that he coined those ideas.
Instead of saying "the same author," I would suggest saying "the author" or "he". The reader should be able to pick up on the fact that unless you are mentioning a new author, you're talking about the same one.
You could also write it out raw, then go back and edit to make connections and develop a 'flow'....example "The same author claims that marketing is really about value..." you could maybe shorten this into "He mentions that it should be about value, leading him to coin the term..." See how this develops a 'flow'? It goes from describing what the author thinks marketing should NOT be, to what he thinks it SHOULD, and then into a term that he developed to explain that. Think of it as a conversation you had with the author. If you had to turn around and explain that to someone who's never heard of any of this news, how would you best explain it?
Paraphrasing, in my thoughts, should sound less like a listed bullet-note, and more of a concise explanation that would make sense to the reader in your own words. I hope this helps!!


Peer-reviewer asks the author for the manuscript to be reviewed by two other experts I have received a peer-reviewer's comment that states that my manuscript needs to be reviewed by experts on two different fields. Is it possible that I am being asked to find those two experts myself and ask them to review my manuscript, or is this probably a mistake/missunderstanding (that is, maybe that comment was not meant to be sent to the manuscript's author)?

Without seeing the actual text, I would guess you are mistaken or the review has a confusing grammatical mistake.  The peer reviewer normally addresses the review to the editor, not the author.  The reviewer is telling the editor that they should select other reviewers.  It is possible that the editor has already done this.  (Did you receive more than one review?)  Probably there is no need for you to do anything.


Awarding additional points to prevent too many students from failing course Is it acceptable, if too many students in the class would fail otherwise, to award additional points across the board (in the one class, in one semester)?
Would it require approval of the Division Dean? How could this be justified?

I would say, in nearly all cases*, it's unethical. Specifically, if a student's submitted work does not fulfill the requirements for a passing grade, then they do not deserve a passing grade. Arbitrarily adding points that do not reflect the quality of submitted work makes the grade partially or completely useless as an indicator of performance in the class, and if it's not good for that, what's the point?

However, unethical does not necessarily mean unacceptable. Don't get me wrong, I think it should, but I'm not going to impose my moral standards on your grading scheme. Ultimately nobody on this site can tell you whether it's acceptable to do this. Your superiors at your educational institution might be able to, since they'll at least know whether it would violate any of the institution's rules.

In any case, as a few people have mentioned in the comments, arbitrarily adding points to keep students from failing is a band-aid effect. The fact that too many students are failing indicates that there is some deeper problem. Perhaps your teaching is inadequate. Perhaps your grading standards are too harsh. Perhaps the students are not properly prepared for the class. Perhaps your idea of what constitutes "too many students failing" should be revised. And so on.

*Speaking of harsh grading standards, this is (the?) one case in which I think it is ethical to add points: to compensate for an overly difficult exam or assignment. This is a little tricky to get right, though. You have to have a preexisting standard to measure whether the exam is at an appropriate difficulty level. For example, in classes I've TA'd for, there has been a longstanding policy that any time the average grade on a test (across ~1000 students) is less than 70%, it will be taken as an indicator that the exam was too hard, and therefore enough points will be added to everyone's exam grade to bump the average up to 70%. Given the large class size, I think this is reasonable.

For smaller classes, you have to consider the possibility that you just have an underachieving group of students one particular year. In another (small) class that I took, each year the instructor would compute the distribution of all grades in the class over the previous ten years, compare that to a desired target distribution, and make the course material for the next year harder or easier as needed. From what he told me, it gave pretty consistent results. I think this is a good way to do it.

The key is that you have to have a preexisting criterion for when points will be added. If you look at the grades after the fact and decide, hey, too many students are failing, let me add some points so we all look better - then you're doing it wrong (IMO).


How to deal with people looking at their mobile phone during my presentation? I was invited to give a research seminar in another department, and two professors kept looking at their mobile phones while I was talking. They were doing this at the start of my talk, and they kept looking at their mobiles for a fairly long amount of time, maybe 15 minutes, without interruption.

My personal view on this is to be tolerant. I accept that nowadays “technology is in our pockets” and the web offers infinite opportunities for distraction. Moreover, people may look at their smartphones for scholarly reasons, for example they may be doing a quick search for literature related to the topic being presented. I do not know for sure what people are doing on their mobiles, and it’s not up to me to discipline their behaviour.

That being said, I think that the basic rules of politeness and consideration for each other’s’ feelings still have a role and place. For example, if I know that I am going to be distracted during a talk, then I sit at the back of the room and try to get unnoticed. If I can’t resist the lure of the smartphone, then I keep it under the table and I try to look at it only for a short time. And maybe add an apologetic smile.

But on that occasion, both professors were sitting in front of me on the first row, with their mobiles in full view, and acted as if my talk didn’t matter. I must add that both professors are much higher in status than me, also the university where I gave the talk is of much higher rank than my university.

I didn’t want a confrontation so I pushed all the unpleasant feelings aside, and I concentrated on my talk. However, I recently thought about this episode, and it occurred to me that maybe I needed to show more assertiveness. Not for the sake of my ego (I don’t care about these two and what they do in seminars), but because assertiveness shows that we care about our research and our value as scholars, regardless of our status.

How would you deal with people overtly and persistently looking at their mobile device (phone, laptop, etc.) during your talk?

My attitude to life is to spare my mental capacities to things I can affect and change. Yes, it is annoying to see people at a workshop not paying attention. No, there is nothing I can do in the moment that would (i) change their behavior, while (ii) not make me look petty.

So, disengage from these feelings. Focus on those members of your audience who pay attention and interact with you. Make a resolution to have a great first slide for your next talk that may sway one of the two (or maybe both!) to get pulled into the talk. These are the things I can affect.


How important is the choice of a guide/adviser for pursuing PhD in a topic I am really in a fix in my career.

I completed my Masters in 2014. I qualified in a PhD Scholarships Test in 2015 and in the same year joined in a University for research work.

My interest lies in Linear Algebra, Topology, Abstract Algebra. My guide offered  me to work in Spectral Graph Theory. As  I was not quite acquainted with the topic I took up this topic for research.

As I am reading on my own, I am getting stuck on many theorems and some problems.

My guide has said recently that he does not have much expertise on this topic  besides the preliminaries and hence he can't answer each and every problem of mine. He has said that the topic is new to him also. I have found now that also does not have any research papers to his name on Spectral Graph Theory as well. I was not aware of this before

My question is how important is the choice of a guide/adviser for pursuing PhD in a topic and what needs to be checked before joining him.

Is it wise  continuing to  work with him or should I look for some alternatives. Does getting a PhD depend a lot on your guide or I am  expecting a lot from my guide? Does pursuing a PhD mean you have to do all along yourself?

I know there are many in this site who have got a PhD or have served as guides/advisors for many students. Please help. Any suggestions will be helpful. I would be happy to give more inputs if required.

Working on a PhD in an area where your advisor appears to have little to no expertise in is fraught with danger. A PhD degree is in some sense an apprenticeship - while you need to do the heavy lifting, you also get/need to learn the tricks of the trade from an accomplished master. Every craft has subtler/finer aspects that are not acquired easily. Would you want to rely on someone who himself doesn't appear to know much, even at a high level? I wouldn't do a PhD with such an advisor for the same reasons I wouldn't learn painting from someone who doesn't know it himself/herself.

On a more important side note, it might not be very wise to jump into a doctorate in an area you have such little knowledge/interest in. You do appear to have the right background, but even with that, doctoral level research in Spectral Graph Theory (and applications, if you are interested in them) is not going to be easy to pick up, even with an expert advisor.


Would I have to conduct an experiment to write a scientific paper? I recently got a book named How to write and publish a Scientific Paper by Robert A. Day and Barbara Gastel. The book doesn't really explain the "background" of a scientific paper.  Would I have to conduct my own, original experiment in order to write a scientific paper, or could I just use the data from other experiments to make an orignal claim?

A scientific paper doesn't necessarily have to be based on an original experiment. You can write a paper that's a review (whether systematic or just comprehensive literature review) of the current body of literature for a specific topic or a meta analysis. You can also write papers that are derived from original experiments that you ran or secondary analyses of data from experiments run by others.

It depends on what the purpose of the paper is. If it's to introduce an entirely new phenomenon or theory, original experiments are pretty common. If it's to argue that current theories or concepts may be flawed in certain ways or you want to add something to existing literature, then meta analyses, original experiments, and secondary data analyses can all be relatively common and appropriate. If it's to introduce a new perspective to a theory or concept, then comprehensive literature reviews may suffice. This can also depend on what field you're in, so consider what the norms are in your field and whether the journal you want to publish in accepts the specific paper type.


Is it unusual to get an informal offer before any recommendation letters have arrived? A person I know applied for a time-limited position (i.e. a post-doc) somewhere in western Europe.  Xe gets invited for an interview.  The next day, xe receives an informal e-mail, We will recommend HR to send you a formal offer.

However, we are still waiting to receive recommendation letters from your references before we can do so.

And I thought the content of recommendation letters were essential.  In this case they are apparently a formality.  Is this indeed very unusual, or is it more common than I think?

Hiring for a limited-term position like a postdoc is a much lighter decision than making a tenure-track offer.  Often, there is an urgency to the hiring as well, as many postdocs are tied to specific contracts with specific tasks that need to be executed on a fast time-frame.  As a result, "ordinary" postdoc hiring can sometimes run a lot more like corporate hiring than academic hiring: a fast process where it's more about the person's ability to fill defined responsibilities and less about their long-term potential as a researcher.  In a case like this, references are still important, but are more like a corporate hire, where they are confirming the candidate is what they appear to be, rather than causing them to be noticed in the first place.

It sounds like this is the case for your acquaintance.  That's great, if the position is one that they want.  Nothing is certain, however, until the offer is in hand: just as easily as an informal offer can be extended, so can it be retracted if the circumstances change.


Tasteful way to indicate large funding in job application I am a PhD student in one of the social sciences going on the market. A large organization funded part of my dissertation research, as part of a research partnership. I wrote a report for them with some of the data in return. The total funding was a couple hundred thousand dollars, which is a lot in my field.

I was hoping to list the funder and the amount in my CV and cover letter to demonstrate my record of linking my research with funding.

The organization however insists that specific funding figures are confidential and I cannot use the precise number of the total funding.

Without the ability to put the specific number, what is a tasteful way to indicate in my job application that I received this large amount of research support?

The (main) reason you can't just blurt that out in your CV is that it's not necessarily relevant:

  Company X partnered with my university in a Billion-dollar-funded research project and I'm one of the Ph.D. candidates in it.

Suppose I said that. Well, so what if it was a Billion-dollar collaboration? Did I broker the deal? Did I propose the project? Was I in charge of coordination? If not then it really doesn't matter.

In your case, if you actually had a contribution to the collaboration other than being selected to do a Ph.D. - write a few sentences about what you actually did. Those sentences could at the same time illustrate the large scale (inn terms of people, organizational commitment, impact, time etc.) of the project and why you deserve some credit for it.


Tools to help retain knowledge from coursework? As second year undergraduate student, I've realized that I sometimes have a hard time recalling the core concepts from coursework in previous semesters. I imagine this would only gets worse as any student progresses through their academic career, so I want to take action early.

I'm wondering what tools exist to help students keep studying a course topic after the semester is over. This way students would constantly be applying knowledge they're interested in retaining, but without diving deep into a subject. For example, this could be something like a software solution that regularly quizzes me on course topics I've already covered.

Does something like this exist?

Unless your own university provides you with such software, it would probably be too hard for the software to know what topics you have studied exactly, and in how much detail. But you are right: if you do not work with your knowledge on a daily basis you will forget things. But this is not a problem. The "magic" solution you are looking for is called a job :).

Inevitably you will forget some of the things you do not work with every day. But your education will provide you with enough knowledge to look up the answers you need, and quickly be up to speed again.

The way I see one of the main goals of an MSc is to be able to read the scientific books and papers in your own field, and the fields close to it. This is how you will refresh and update your knowledge constantly when you start working in science.


Is there data or research on the tradeoffs associated with allowing anonymous posting on forums like Piazza? A large amount of research from the EdTech world finds that forums that encourage social learning, if used right, can significantly improve learning outcomes. Of course, there are downsides.

One of the main platforms that I've seen across universities here in the US, is Piazza.

Piazza can be configured to allow students to post questions, answers and comments completely anonymously. There are classes where this works very well, participation rates are high and spam is rare. However, many faculty members, some because of unpleasant interactions in the past, often disallow anonymous posting.

Is there any research/anecdotal evidence that suggests anonymity hinders / helps learning? In the latter case, are there specific steps used on anonymous fora that are required to maintain quality? We're planning on building a large QA-system within our EdTech platform, and on the fence about investing thousands of dollars to build "anonymous posting" within our system.

I have used Piazza in many mathematics courses. I can say, anecdotally but confidently, that students LOVE the anonymity option. Not everyone uses it, but I have had plenty of them tell me, either in person or (anonymously!) on course evaluations, that they appreciate the option since they can ask a seemingly "dumb" question without fear of appearing ignorant or uninformed. Perhaps this is particularly relevant in mathematics, where anxiety and performance-based fear is, alas, quite normal, but I'd imagine students in other disciplines would make similar comments.


How do you politely ask someone to be on your committee? I'm a graduate student finishing up my first year, and I'm currently in the Master's program but am planning on switching to the PhD program at my university (which is located in the U.S.). I've chosen people I'm interested in asking and my adviser's okayed my selection, but I was wondering how to go about asking these individuals.

What format is appropriate to ask people to be on your committee? Should I email each person, or should I set up a physical meeting to discuss my goals and 'pop the question'?

What should I say in the email/meeting? Most of the potential committee members I'm planning on asking don't know me very well, but they at least know my name (I think). Do I need to discuss why I want them on my committee? How much do I tell them about my project (which is still in the beginning stages)?

I suggest an in-person meeting with each of them, which you can initiate with a brief but explanatory email: "I would like to meet with you for an hour in your office to discuss the possibility of you joining my dissertation committee.  Based on your work and experience in X, Y, and Z, I think you might be a valuable committee member. ".

When you meet in person, you can treat it as a two-way interview.  They should be interviewing you to determine if this is a good match and if they believe in your research topic and approach.  Likewise, you should be interviewing them to determine that they will perform well on your particular committee.  Do they have enough time?  Do they get along with other committee members? How do they evaluate dissertations and the process of writing dissertations?  What sort of feedback or support are they capable of giving you outside of the official meetings? What do they dislike or seek to avoid in the process of evaluating dissertations or being on the dissertation committee?  And so on.  You should also ask questions regarding their future plans, including sabbaticals, possible changes in job or employer (esp. for non-tenured professors), or possible retirement.

These questions that you ask a prospective committee member can help you avoid many committee problems later on.


When to give up and ask the research community? While reflecting on my last research paper (currently in the hands of a referee) I discovered a closely related pair of problems that, as far as I can tell from published record, nobody else has considered.

  For those interested in topology, the problems concern a property of
  first-category continuous images of the half-open interval of reals.
  The property has previously only been of interest in compact spaces,
  but I want investigate for other classes of spaces.

A solution to one or both would make for a nice paper I think.  I've been thinking about them for a couple of weeks with basically no progress.

Should I just tack the problems at the end of my research paper (give up?), or keep them to myself and hope to eventually solve one?

This is a type of question that you could ask on MathOverflow.

In my experience, one of the best uses of MO is if you have a "research level" question that (i) you want answered, and you're not particular about how and (ii) you think "Probably[/maybe/I wonder if] someone with the right expertise could solve this almost immediately."

If both of the above apply, I would encourage you to ask on MO.  On the other hand, if you want to keep maximal control over your involvement with the question and its solution, less wide disbursement is probably best.  (Most of my own MO questions have been things that come up in my research but are not exactly the questions I am trying to solve in order to write my next paper.) If you really see yourself getting a paper out of these questions, I would vote for spending more than two weeks thinking them over.


LaTeX itemize options: are they allowed to use in a master thesis? In my Master thesis, I used this:

\begin{itemize}[label=\ding{167}]
\item Access Windows XM from Ubuntu Server
\item List the directories contents of Windows XP
\end{itemize}

The output is:

My question: must I avoid the use of  such beautiful things when writing my thesis or is it a normal thing to do ?

Are they allowed to use in a master thesis?

I would think it improbable that such things are specifically disallowed, because it's just not something that people typically try to do. Overall, the effect is unattractive and does not follow good typographical practice. If your university policy does not object, your supervisor probably would (and should).

One or two unobtrusive ornamental flourishes may be appropriate on the title page, but certainly not in the main text.

If you are struggling for ideas on the typographical style of your thesis, I would highly recommend looking at the classicthesis and memoir packages. Of course you still must obey any official policy on the formatting, but these styles can at least provide a good start that's a little less sterile looking than vanilla LaTeX.


What should I ask my potential Ph.D advisor in advance, before actually signing a contract? I'm currently applying for a Ph.D in Germany. Next week I'm sitting down with my potential Ph.D advisor to have a talk about the program.

Currently I'm collecting questions about things like

teaching duties included?
working hours
what's the salary?
vacation?
budget for conferences?

I think I'm missing some important stuff.

My real question is: What should I ask my potential Ph.D advisor in advance, before actually signing a contract / starting?

(The question What questions should one ask to the former/current students of a professor before deciding whether to do PhD under him/her? is related, but I feel it doesn't fit my situation)

I would add:

What the average time-to-PhD is, and how many percent roughly drop out (although this is a question that is much better asked to other PhD students, as you may easily hear somewhat "tuned" numbers here)
Paper authorship policy (via mhwombat's comment) - however, note that theory and practice may diverge quite strongly in this topic. This is again something better asked the colleagues.
Grant / project duties - if you are e.g., paid by an FP7 or H2020 project, your project work may cost you much more time than teaching duties
Administrative duties
How free you will be in choosing whom to collaborate with, and what topics to collaborate on
Whether you will be required to work on other projects on the side (e.g., consulting work, paid research, etc.)
Whether you will be expected to help with writing grant proposals (time sink number one if yes)
Whether there is a culture for working from home
What office / lab space you will get, how many other students you share it with
Whether it will be possible for you to do an internship, e.g., over the summer.

There may be more. I will extend the list once I remember more important things.