Should one apologize in response letters to reviewers? If not, why not? A student co-author drafted a response letter to the reviewers in which they apologize numerous times.  I found this strange, but I can't pinpoint why.

Question: Should one apologize in response letters to reviewers?  If not, why not?

I'm not sure if this is just my personal feeling, or if there are some underlying, tangible reasons for not apologizing.

My rule of thumb, generally in life as much as any specific aspect of it, don't apologize for something you haven't done wrong. This is of course highly debatable but an apology is a formal acceptance of a mistake made, not a figure of speech to be polite. So I'd say don't apologize for something if you don't believe you "f*ed something up".

It does have a cultural component however, as a British friend of mine once put it:

  buying a bag of crisps in England involves 4 "Excuse me"s, 7 "Sorry"s
  and numerous "thank you"s.

In this scenario specifically, I think it'd be an insincere apology, and might even be taken as mockery to apologize in response of a comment made by a reviewer. I'd rather advocate for a respectful and appreciative response, something like:

  Re: "[blah blah blah] should be discussed and evaluated."

  We would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out the lacking
  discussion on [blah blah blah], this has been added in the revised
  version of the manuscript, see page X, paragraph Y.

or, if you disagree with the reviewer about that particular comment because it's not missing

  Re: "[blah blah blah] should be discussed and evaluated."

  We would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out the lacking
  discussion on [blah blah blah], however this topic has been covered in page X, paragraph Y.

OR, if you disagree with the reviewer about that particular comment because it's not necessary

  Re: "[blah blah blah] should be discussed and evaluated."

  We would like to thank the reviewer for pointing out the lacking
  discussion on [blah blah blah], this topic has been omitted because reasons A,B and C.

Of course these examples are grossly simplified and generalized, usually a bit more context regarding the proposed changes would be appropriate to give in the response. Remember the response is aimed primarily at the editor, not the reviewer. If you can convince the editor, you might even bypass a second iteration to the reviewer.


Why do UK universities often have Classics and History MA courses separated? In many UK universities Classics courses (study/research of the history and culture of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations) are singled out and presented distinct from History courses. They even might be provided by a different department or college at the university - for instance, History courses might be provided by a Department of Social Studies whereas Classic courses by a Department of Arts.

I assume that Classics have their own set of study/research methods and practices but this could be applied with  fair amount of legibility to virtually any other historical subject (Ancient Middle East, Middle Ages, Early Modern period etc.)

I have seen that some universities also have distinct programs on Middle ages and perhaps also on other historical periods but Classics are almost always put into its own category. So what makes Classics to stand out that much?

The simple reason is that the study of Classics has been part of the UK education system for much longer than general "history". Oxford and Cambridge were both founded in the 11th century, a time period where Latin was the language used in the church and legal system in England. For that reason alone, its study would have been essential.

As to why the study of Classics as separate to history has continued, I expect the reason is twofold. One is simply tradition, and the fact that Classics departments are probably older than history departments. The same applies to why Cambridge teaches "Natural Sciences" rather than having explicit physics and chemistry degrees: the university and the course predate modern thinking on the division of those subjects.

As for the second reason, my gut feeling as an English person is that it's also very tied up with social class (as is everything else in the UK). Classics, Greats and PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) have long been the subjects of choice for wealthy, upper class men who are funnelled from private schools (i.e. those for which you have to pay a fee to attend, often exceeding £40,000 a year) to the upper echelons of government and business via Oxford and Cambridge. As long as these schools continue to teach the subjects, there will be a demand for classics courses in the UK's top universities.

The fact that these schools teach classics themselves is a hangover from 19th century attitudes to education, in which those subjects were considered an essential part of a boy's education. I can only speculate, but I think they were (and still are, by some) considered essential as they are a hallmark of wealth and social privilege, necessary currency for anyone wanting to get ahead in politics or business. Any schmuck can learn French or maths at school, but if you know Ancient Greek or Latin, that's a sign that you had an expensive education.

So, in summary, Classics departments in universities are a result of the age of the institutions coupled with the fact that these subjects were and still are taught in (private) schools as distinct subjects.


Is it okay to consider publishing in my first year of PhD? I'm PhD candidate in Applied linguistics, it's been almost 3 months since I've started but I'm seriously allowing for writing and publishing journal articles.

I have asked my supervisor about that, she said that I should devote my time to my thesis and wait until the second year and that writing other forms of papers generally interfere with the thesis.

However, I think I have enough time to simultaneously work on my thesis and also articles, also I have to indicate that the ideas that I'm willing to formulate in articles are not related my PhD focus.

What should I do? Should I wait until next year or just start working on articles and submit them as single author?

Whatever you do, you will want to cultivate a good working relationship with your supervisor, so I'd advise against doing something she dissuaded you from just because strangers on the internet told you to. Talk it out with her.

That said, not a single PhD student I've known wrote/writes a relevant portion of their thesis in their first year, and the advice I have constantly been getting from faculty is that early in the PhD is the time to think about publishing other things. There will most likely be a time when your thesis takes all your attention, and by then it's certainly too late to worry about publishing elsewhere.


How much code in a computer science thesis? I'm working in software development and plan to start a part-time masters degree.

I've read in some places that a thesis shouldn't have much code and should use pseudo-code instead. Then on other sites I see thesis that seem to center around a newly developed code base. Then other example thesis relating to mechanizations seem to include code, schematics, and 3d designs.

Are some of these examples I'm seeing project streams or can a thesis still include these?

For someone who's already enrolled, this is prime ‘ask your supervisor’ territory, since thesis requirements and expectations vary enormously between countries, universities, departments, and research groups.

If you’re not enrolled yet and want to gauge the code requirements at a particular department before deciding to do a Master’s there, you have a few options:

Many universities have a publicly accessible, online research repository where theses are deposited. Download some recent Master’s theses from your department of interest and see what they do.
If your department of interest is not too hard for you to reach physically, you can go to their library and peruse hard-copies of theses.
Just about every university should have a written handbook for theses, and these are often publicly available for download. You may find some guidance for code inclusion here.
Contact a professor at the department, or an alumnus of the department, to ask your question. It can be hard to get a reply to an out-of-the-blue email to an academic, but if you are seriously considering study there, and make this clear in your enquiry, your chances should improve :).

Visiting the department, looking at past theses, and making contact with professors are of course things you'll want to do anyway if you’re thinking of applying to that department, so checking the amount of code needed in a thesis is really just another item to add to your checklist when you’re finding out about the institution.


Submitting paper to arXiv as an undergrad I wrote a rather extensive research project for one of my courses, and would like to submit it to arXiv. But, I am not entirely sure about the copyright/other issues behind it. Is it acceptable for a student to submit their term papers online, and in doing so can I, as an undergrad, claim affiliation to my university?

I will leave the question of whether or not you should submit the paper to arXiv versus another venue for discussion elsewhere. However, I do agree with the comment that you should talk with the professor who gave you the assignment about your plans, as he or she may have constructive criticism for you.

In general, if your work represents an original contribution, and you feel comfortable with sharing it with the public, then yes, you can go ahead and submit it to arXiv. You should note, however, that in a number of fields, papers cannot be submitted until you have been endorsed—that is, recognized as a valid submitter by someone who has already themselves submitted a number of papers in that area. If the professor of the course is someone who can endorse you, then that should be sufficient.


How long is reasonable to wait for reply from an editor? About 5 months ago I submitted a paper to a journal. The editors assigned a reviewer. In the meantime I sent a couple of revised versions, which did not help matters, but the editor ultimately wrote back and asked me to complete my revisions and re-submit the document. I did that within a couple of weeks. The editors did not acknowledge receipt of this submission, but I did not want to ask for one since I felt I had already been pestering them too much. A couple of weeks later, I notified the editors that I wanted to post a couple of graphs from the submitted paper on a blog, although I hoped to make it clear that only a very small component of the whole paper was being posted on the blog. The editors did not respond to this notification. More than two months went by after the re-submission, and I sent a message to the editor asking for a status update, just to be sure that the paper was still being considered and under review. It seemed to me that a very simple "yes, it is still being reviewed", or "no, we have considered your paper withdrawn and it is not being reviewed" or something like that, would suffice. About 10 more days passed with no response, and I thought I would telephone the editor with my question, on the off-chance that my emails were not getting through.  I left a message for him, and another week has gone by with no response. At what point do I take the non-response from the editor as a message that my paper is no longer under review and that I should re-submit it elsewhere? The journal is otherwise a reputable journal, and I would like my paper published there, but there are many others that interest me too.  I feel like I made a mess of the whole process, and am to be blamed for over-communication and confusion, but am I not owed the courtesy of a response from the editor?

There are good reasons to expect communication with an editor to be slower than many other e-mail exchanges. Editors are busy, especially since editing may be a minor but time consuming part of their job. And responding to questions from authors often involves contacting referees, who may in turn be unresponsive.

I'd say that it's reasonable to wait a couple of weeks for a response to a timely request for a status update (two months after a revision strikes me as a bit early---I'd expect it to take longer---but not unreasonably early to ask for a status update). If it gets lost (for instance, the editor is waiting for a response from the referee, and hasn't remembered to tell you that's what's happening), a polite reminder and a few days to another week or so of waiting might be appropriate.

After that, though, you can rightly begin to worry that you aren't hearing back. If there are other editors, especially a chief editor, you can contact, I'd start there. I'd be very reluctant to unilaterally withdraw the paper, since that might cause complications if the editor returns and feels you resubmitted while it was still under consideration.  Before resorting to that, I'd try to talk to one or two senior people in the field for advice about the specific paper.

(Just to emphasize, I'm talking about communication with an editor about the status of a paper. Of course the refereeing process as a whole can take a year or more.)


Evaluating red flags in potential advisors' scientific production and impact, past students, research interests and personality In the next few weeks I'll need to pick an advisor for my master's thesis (in a certain subfield of mathematics). I've narrowed down the choice to two (full) professors.

Prof. H I've known Prof H  for two years, took two courses with him, and got the top grade in both of them. He is a very good, peaceful, and punctual person; and he is clear and precise in explanations. He has much academic experience (being over 60 years old) and has supervised many students (at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level). However, I've noticed that his former PhD students (10, currently still assistant professors) are not  much productive (and mostly publish with him, working on his research program). I've a marked interest in a certain sub-subfield, but he works in a different (smaller and, in my opinion, less interesting) sub-subfield; he is quite productive and in the last 30 years he has covered an impressive (and well-organized) research program (in which I could easily find a thesis topic) and he has grown to be a household name in his area of specialization; but his research, although very solid and original, has not been exactly groundbreaking and his latest works (which are all of high quality and quite innovative) have not been very impactful (in terms of  citations yet).
Prof. K  Regardless of the choice of the advisor, I will take one course taught by Prof K. However, I don't known him personally yet and therefore I'm not familiar with his “style” (although I've been told that he is generally a good person). He also has many years of experience (being slightly under 60 years old) but has supervised fewer undergraduate and master's students (some of whom changed areas of research for their higher studies), no PhD students, and several Post-docs. He works exactly in the sub-subfield I'm most interested in and has produced many solid papers over the last 30 years; comparatively, I'd say that his work is less innovative and much less systematic than Prof H's but maybe broader; in fact, while Prof. H has expanded, organized, and generalized in an original way a couple of (small) research areas (also highlighting connections with other areas), Prof. K has mostly applied a vast sophisticate toolbox to solve several interesting problems and created only few novel "tools" slightly adapting the existing ones (although I must note that Prof. K's area is essentially much more “scattered”). Prof. K does not seem to be quite an household name, but has given substantial contributions, is quite active in the community (and his former advisor was the expert of the area).

Working with either of them has some pro's; however, there are some alarming red flags about both of them. I have a hunch that working with Prof. H may be smoother and simpler; however, Prof K research interests are much more appealing to me (and aligned to what I'd like to do during my PhD – for which I'll apply to another institution anyway).

  Assuming that both of them would accept me as a student, to which red
  flags should I pay most attention? What  factors (also other than the ones I've talked about) should I take into
  account the most when making the decision?

Well, first of all, this is a master's thesis. I would argue that it doesn't really matter that much, because you will at most be working with this person for a year or so and then leaving to go somewhere else.

Given what you've written here, I wonder why this is even a question for you. You know Prof H and have taken courses with him and done well. You know that he gives good mentorship and feedback. You know that his former students end up very successful. You know he's productive and well-known, which could be helpful for getting into a PhD program. The only question here is does he have enough subfield knowledge in your area to advise your thesis?

Also, if he has 30 years of research and is a household name, how is his work not impactful in terms of citations? You don't become a household name as a scientist unless you've written some papers with impact.

Prof K might not be a bad choice either. The fact that he has had no doctoral students is irrelevant because you're writing a master's thesis. But why go for an unknown if you already know Prof H and know that he's a great advisor?


Can you give an example in a formal definition? I would like to give an example in a formal definition. My concern is, by giving an example, I am implicitly demonstrating that the definition is not precise/clear enough.
Is it acceptable to give an example in a formal definition?

In the definition itself, no. It just should be that: A definition. You should add examples and/or motivations in the surrounding text, so your reader (a befuddled human being, not an automaton!) sees what is going on, and where you want to go.


How to overcome "No Research Experience" in CS Ph.D applications I am a 4th year computer engineering undergraduate student who will apply for Ph.D. programs this winter/spring, for the next fall semester. I have decided to become an academic 2 years ago, and head of department said "keep your gpa high and you will be fine". Well, I have increased my gpa, from 2.5 to 3.5 but now I see that I need research experience to be admitted to good programs. ( I can't afford masters program)

I thought I didn't need a research experience, yet while I was thinking that, I see that undergraduate students all over the world were doing research. I admit I was naive to think so but I was guided that way. So few months ago I am trying to learn about admission process and I see many people over the internet with tons of research experience and even papers waiting to be published, or already published. And the most important part of SOP is research experience.

And guess what? There is no lab at my university. And not a single instructor that does research in the field I want. It is a very small department (5 full time assistant professors).

So obviously, I cannot get into a top or very good program with these conditions, and they have every right to decline me. But I believe it is my right to get into a good valid program that matches my interests. I shouldn't take the whole responsiblity of non existent opportunities that other students had in other universities.

I would like to know, from experienced people, about what I should do to get into a Ph.D. program without direct proof of research capabilities. No lab work, no research, nada. Just reading many papers in the field I am interested in for last few months, and high motivation.

Or is it a point where I should say "That's life and never fair" and have plan B and plan C?

Thank you

If you need research experience for a program, then you need research experience and there's not much you can do about it besides gaining that experience. Even if you did gain entry into such a program, you will lack the research skills of your peers. You'll be starting off on the back foot.

A PhD is a long-term commitment to poorly paid slave labour. What if you find out you don't even like research, 1 year in? I would strongly advise the "try before you buy" approach. Get a Master's degree or a postgraduate diploma, that has a reasonable research component.

A good PhD program will want you to prove that you have the commitment and research skills to pull it off. Once you can do that, you have a good chance for admission. If research experience is a requirement, then you can't just shrug it off.


Do tenured professors work less or more than non-trenured professors? Is there any research/study/survey/... that looked at how much time tenured professors work in comparison with non-trenured professors?

I am especially interested in the field of computer science (machine learning) in the US.

So far I have only found a small-scale study (survey of 30 professors from the same university):

I'm looking for some more exhaustive surveys.

The National Center for Education Statistics in the United States surveys faculty of post-secondary institutions (see the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty page for information on methodology). The most recently available data is from their 2004 survey, with 26,110 respondents across the United States.

According to this survey, tenured faculty worked 53.3 hours a week on average, and tenure-track untenured faculty worked 53.7 hours a week:

The NCES allows you to create custom tables from this dataset using the PowerStats tool on their website. (You have to create an account to use the tool.) This is a valuable tool if you're interested in exploring these and other statistics.

For example, here's the same data broken down by rank, with the percentiles for average hours worked per week:


What is the difference between open access and open archive? In Elsevier ScienceDirect search, there are two types of access type filters; Open Access articles and Open Archive articles. What is the difference between these two? Is there a notable difference between the terms themselves?

As Elsevier uses these terms, "open access" means an article is free to access as soon as it is published. "Open archive" means an article is published in a journal that makes articles available for free after some embargo period (not immediately when it is published).

More on Open Archive:

  Elsevier enables subscribers and the general public to have free access to archived material in 98 Elsevier journals... Articles featured in the archives are free for everyone to read and download and are made available after an embargo period.


Is it ethical to use past years' final exams that the professor hasn't explicitly given, to study for a final in the same class? This happened to me in my 2nd year of grad school, in a STEM field. As many do, our professor gave the class the last year's final, to give us an idea of what areas to study and what to expect, etc, which he obviously isn't required to do and is very nice of him.

Now, the reason he gives us last year's one is because, at the end of the year, he returns your test, so he knows that most of the ones floating around are the ones from last year.

However, as many older professors (in my experience, but maybe younger ones too) do, he also reuses exams from previous years (not even concepts or the same problems with different parameters, just literal copies), since the material and curriculum of this course is very well established/so old that nothing needs to change. I don't blame him for this; if you teach the same course on and off over 20 years, coming up with good exam questions over and over again would be annoying.

Now, what my question regards is, I realized a student in my class had past tests from not just the last time the class was taught, but literally the past 5 years. I don't know how to say this part as diplomatically as possible, but this student came from a country that about nearly half our program comes from. The other half (aside a few outliers) is from the U.S. I don't mention this to demonize or stereotype anyone; I believe it's relevant because the students from this country (in my program) are almost uniformly very tight knit, and seem to often share resources between each other and across years more than is normal amongst everyone else. The relevance is that one group has resources that others don't.

So my question is, is this ethical (for the student to do, I mean) ?

Just to put some relevant ideas/arguments/details down:

Assume (and I believe it was the case) that in the scenario I've written, the rest of the students (the ones who don't have the past tests) don't know about the students that have the past tests, so they can't do something simple like ask them.
I think many will argue that if the professor didn't want this happening, he wouldn't reuse tests, or at least as exactly as he does. However, I don't think this changes the ethics of the situation: the point is, in this situation, you can get away with it, but is it right?
I imagine the professor would not approve of this (actually, recently, another professor said in regards to his final "I know there are past ones floating around, please don't look at them", so at least he disapproved), but an argument could also be made for the possibility of him approving: It's not as though having the previous tests just makes it a given that you'll ace it, it's still a lot of work to figure out all the problems such that you can reliably do them later (he doesn't give back the answers to the tests, only the tests themselves). I could imagine a professor being okay with students getting a better grade on the final if it meant they learned more and worked to get it.
This professor never actually said not to, so the student wasn't explicitly disobeying anyone.
This question really has two subquestions, but they're very similar: a) Would it be ethical if everyone had these pasts tests (that the professor did not know about/give)? And b), Is it ethical if only a subset of the class has these tests. Obviously if you say no to (a) you say no to (b), but you might feel as though the concept of using past tests isn't wrong, but some students having an unfair advantage is.

Perhaps this is a bit of a genuine ethical issue: should one use "game advantages" one might find, that one knows other "players" will not have? Of course, these questions completely ignore issues of the subject itself, learning, scholarship, etc. But, yes, there are advantages to "good test scores". That game is primarily (contrived) an adversarial one between "teacher" and "student", and any information obtained "legally" by the students is... "legal". It's a game!

In that model, other students may suffer "on the curve". Not nice, true, but, ...

I think the real answer is that, especially internet-wise, any policy that presumes secrecy of information is misguided. Sounds innocent, but, as this test case shows, there are "victims".

My sincere conclusion, and basis for my own actions for 15+ years, is that everything should be made public. If someone can assimilate good solutions to all the exams for the last 20 years, ... then why shouldn't they pass the current exam? :)

(So, the kids who cram from the last few exams are merely being rational, assuming they didn't have to break-and-enter.)

The unasked question about whether the behavior of the "teacher" is inadvertently unfair is the interesting one. That is, lacking intent, can one be unfair? Yes, it turns out, by negligence...


Assessing the relevance of textbooks I have accumulated a lot of textbooks, many of which I have yet to read, and I am wondering how to determine the relevance of those books for me based on my field of study, my interests, and academic relevance (which I suspect varies by field of study).

What are some techniques for determining the relevance of a textbook for future reading?

To determine the relevance of a textbook for future reading, you have to extrapolate your past field of study and interests, based upon which you bought the textbooks in the first place.

If you intend to remain in your current field, keep the books immediately pertinent for that discipline. Otherwise, keep mainly the textbooks on reusable skills, such as math and statistics, computer programming, foreign languages, etc.

You may also want to ask senior students/researchers what books they kept on their shelves.


What is the best way to decline an interview after applying for it? I have applied to 2 postdoc jobs in the same university and have been selected for a 2nd interview in one before doing the first interview in the other lab.

The interviews are set at different times and so I will not be able to attend both so I wish to cancel the one where I haven't been yet. Should I say to the professor the truth "I will be interviewing with another lab" or shall I just say that for some reason I have to cancel it without mentioning the other interview?

Title
Name
Address

Dear University B -

Thank you very much for notifying me that I am on the short list for position W at University B and for scheduling me for a first-round interview on February X, 2015.

I have recently been notified by University A that I am a finalist for a position at Lab A and they want to schedule a second-round interview, also on February X, 2015.

As the Lab A request is for a second-round interview, I feel that I must prioritize this against first-rounds, even though I am still very much interested in pursuing the position at your lab.

Would it be possible for us to reschedule my interview for Feb (X-7)?  I understand that this may raise logistical concerns and appreciate your consideration.

Sincerely,

User34154


What sources provide a list of all academic topics? I'm an STS student, so bear with me; I'm happy to provide clarification but I want to leave the specific application unspecified:

What sources would you consult if you were trying to generate a huge "list of all academic topics"?

I'm thinking it would include all the 'ologies', the 'isms', the 'X studies', all the historical "movements", all the 'subjects' of journals and papers, all the 'big questions' of any given "field".

What other sources, whether vague (like above) or specific (like a URL with some good list items), would you suggest in compiling this list?

You need to define topic first. At the macro level, all topics fall under "knowledge", or some such nonsense, and at the micro level, every published paper and book is on a different topic.

You could use the different doctoral degrees as pretty broad topics. This would give you a list like philosophy (PhD), medicine (MD), science (ScD), etc. A less coarse division would be "schools/College". This would give you a list like School/College of Arts, School/College of Humanities, School/College of Medicine, School/College of Science, etc. A finer division would be departments and institutes within a School/College. A still finer would be research groups within departments. This of course leads to individuals within groups and finally publications by individuals.

University websites would provide all the information you need, although not in a format that is easy to search and retrieve.


Statement of purpose book reference I am applying for graduate studies in the US and in my statement of purpose I mention the name of a book and it's author, as the book is very relevant to my previous research work and the author is working in the university I am applying too.

Is this okay, or should I not mention the book's name?

If it is okay should I quote the book's title or should I do any special formatting regarding this reference?

As mentioned in the comments by Anonymous Mathematician, there won't be a problem with mentioning a book that you read in your statement of purpose. If your statement of purpose has a list of references, you can include it there and just use the standard referencing style to cite it. If you don't need a list of references, then just cite the book in the text, e.g., "Reading the book 'A nice mathematics book' by , I found that...".

The difficult part will be to make citing the book really worth putting it in your statement of purpose. Which books someone read is probably not as important for computer science students as it is for students of literature. Think about the following questions, as examples:

How did reading this book influence your decision to apply for graduate studies?
In which way will your planned research build upon what you learnt in this book?
Does the book define research problems that you are planning to tackle?

If you cannot write something along these lines when referring to this book, then I am not sure that it would be worth writing that you read it.


How do I respond to papers that present the authors' views and opinions as scientific fact? Occasionally I encounter papers in which the authors expend significant effort to either:

prove an hypothesis that I know to be false;
promote a new theory that I know to be fundamentally flawed.

To do this, the authors use methods such as forging experimental results, misinterpreting results or misinterpreting cited references.

As I know that the views presented in the paper are false, I can deduce from the paper that the author must have favored promoting their views over correctness. However someone less educated in the topic might not be aware of this and base their work on this paper as they consider the presented views to be scientifically proven.

Is there a commonly accepted method to flag such a paper, so that future readers will be aware that the presented views are forged and false?

If you believe there are significant problems with an existing manuscript, then you should present these issues to the journal in which the "offending" articles appear. The format this response should take depends upon the nature of the problem.

If the issue is in fact "forging experimental results," then the paper deserves to be retracted. However, this is a difficult allegation to prove, and you would need to have strong justification (not evidence, per se) backing up your allegations.
However, if the issue is misinterpretations of results or previous literature, this does not quite rise to the level of "academic dishonesty" as forging results. It is not necessarily correct to have the paper retracted. Instead, you should consider writing a "comment" or "letter to the editor" or even a longer paper in response to the problems in the earlier work.

Note, however, that if the paper has appeared in a reputable journal, it has gone through some sort of peer review process. As a consequence of this, it will be necessary to present a more "airtight" argument than if the paper merely appears in a repository such as arXiv. In the latter case, however, then there's probably not much you can do beyond the aforementioned "response article," as the paper has not been published, and thus retraction depends on the author "self-retracting" the work.


What is the typical academic career path following a PhD in computer science? I have a MSc in Physics (computational physics); however, after finishing school I didn't move out of province so now I'm doing software development as a full time job. I miss the challenge of the harder tasks, which do not feel like assembling lego like the ones I currently work on.

I'm currently debating doing a PhD in Computer Science. Perhaps Numerical Analysis, High Performance Computing. I've also loosely been interested in Artificial Intelligence, but have nowhere near the experience as I would in the other two types.

In Physics I know you do your PhD followed by a bunch of 2 year post-docs then go into a professorship somewhere; but, I do not know how it works in the Computer Science field. I have a publication in the high performance world from a course I took during my masters, but that is the extent of my experience.

I'm also interested in moving to a more challenging area, but not sure where to be looking. Sifting through the mounds of job posts rarely yields anything that would be in the area I'm considering.

Any advice, thoughts, would be much appreciated.

From my experience, in the UK it tends to be one or two post doc positions and then on to a lectureship position. Comp Sci post docs here are usually between one and three years.

I get where you're coming from. After my Comp Sci PhD I went into an industry software developer role and 90% of the work just felt mundane. I'm now working for a startup company, which is much more challenging and interesting since the focus is on innovation and creation. That might be worth looking into as it's becoming quite common to find startups sprouting from universities seeking to turn their research into products.


How do I cite a screenshot from a paper? There is an image in a paper that I want to use in my master’s thesis. I have the PDF file of this paper and I cant save the image from the file. So I have to take a screen shot. How should I cite the image?

You don't cite the screenshot, you cite the paper. If your readers want to look up the source, they don't care how you technically copied the image into your word processor. They want to know where they can find the paper you copied the image from.


What is the usual dress code for academic workshops? I'm attending my first academic/industry workshop next week and was wondering what is the convention with regards to the dress code. It's a three-day affair where each participant is required to present a 3 minute introduction to their PhD. Other than that the event consists mostly of talks by other people.

Normally, I'd go with formal business wear if I were presenting as a named part of the programme. If I was just attending I'd go for 'academia-casual'. That being said, I've never been to a workshop so I probably don't know what I'm talking about, especially with the inclusion of the 3 minute 'introduce yourself' presentation.

The workshop takes place in the United Kingdom and the field is engineering/computer science.

Academia casual, as you put it, is perfectly fine.

Basically, imagine yourself doing a TA in front of students. I would say, a similar kind of attire would suffice.

I've seen people doing an academic presentation in a T-shirt and slippers, and that was a damn fine presentation, too! Even if you'd rather want to wear some more formal footware than slippers and some jeans and not shorts, I think that my point is clear:

No beachware.
No three-piece suit.

I've worn a shirt and formal trousers to multiple conferences without feeling overdressed, but that's probably the most formal thing you'd wear if you are not the conference chair.


I am a student of high potential but not great on paper, how should I go about transferring to a university more at my level? I am currently in my first year of a general mathematics PhD program at a state university that isn't rated particularly high. As far my classes go, I put in little to no effort towards them and instead dedicate my time to the research I've started, and still am at/near the top of my class. The students in my classes just seem to be at a much lower level of understanding than I am, and I am afraid I am stagnating myself by not being in a more competitive setting. I've begun working on a research project with a few other students who are soon to graduate, and thus far, everything we have done this semester has come from me, even though I haven't even finished the sequence of courses relevant to the material we are researching. Granted, there are a few professors who are well-respected in their field that I currently work under, and that is a great privilege,  but I do not feel that most the other students there are my academic peers.

I would like to look into transferring to a better university, but I have one main concern; my undergraduate transcript is not very good. Upon close inspection, one would find that I received very good grades in the advanced classes I took, but poor grades in the easier classes I took earlier in my academic career. I got a 4.0 the first semester of my grad program, and am confident that I will 4.0 this semester as well, but will this be enough to get into a highly ranked PhD program?(Edit: This is a rhetorical question, not the question I am trying to ask. It is obvious that this is not enough, so I am trying to find out what outside of this I can do?)

So my question is should I look into transferring?(and maybe risk offending the professors I have a good relationship right now?) and if so how can I prove that what they see on paper(my undergraduate transcript) is not reflective of my abilities as a mathematician?

EDIT: I should mention that my biggest concern right now is that my classes are being held back by the people who don't understand the material. I would love to be in a class where things were faster-paced so we could get into more detail and more subjects. I've been studying into more detail by myself, but I feel I would benefit from seeing this from my instructor as well(which is what I would imagine happens at a university with a better student body), which I don't get because too many people in my classes are struggling with the basics.

Many, many students who are at lower-ranked universities aspire to be at higher-ranked places instead.  (In fact, what is more surprising to me is that not all such students feel this way.)  The hard truth is that top-ranked universities by definition are very selective of their applicants, and in your case the "main round" of the selection process has already occurred.  It is not impossible to transfer to a much better place, but it is difficult, to the extent that it may or may not be a reasonable goal.  Growing where you are planted sounds like a smarter strategy to me, and in fact it is not fundamentally incompatible with the ambition to move elsewhere.

The one way I can think of to effectively demonstrate your potential is to realize it, i.e., to prove at least one theorem of a caliber beyond what most students in your program do as part of their PhD thesis work.  If you can do that, then you clearly deserve to be at a better place, and you should not have much trouble finding some place to take you on.  I don't think anything else is worth banking on: as others have said, grades in PhD-level mathematics courses in the US are not necessarily very meaningful.  This varies in its extent, but every program I know has enough courses where all students who do not do anything egregiously, ridiculously wrong get the highest possible grade that a 4.0 GPA at the graduate level is just not the same thing as it is at the undergraduate level. I would expect that a substantial proportion of the students in your program would have 4.0 GPAs.

Unfortunately I think the strategy of "gunning for an early research success" will either be a good one or (and in terms of the percentages, this is more likely) a very bad one.  Most early career math PhD students are not anywhere near equipped to do meaningful research, to an extent that other academic fields would have a hard time believing.  In my program (about the 50th best in the US) early career students neglecting their coursework in favor of their "research" is a big red flag for me: these students often fail to meet programmatic requirements and get in real trouble.

To be very honest: I think the big risk here is that you are not as exceptional as you think, that your lack of effort in your coursework will itself become a problem down the road, and that your superiority to those around you may only be a matter of opinion.  Of course I'm not saying that this is the case -- I couldn't know -- but it would be very smart to be concerned about this on your own behalf.  You need some reality checks.  Here are some checkpoints:

  Step 1: Can you pass all your generals / quals / required coursework rapidly and unusually well?

In most non-top math PhD programs I know of, there is an initial phase of 1-3 years where students spend time studying coursework and then passing exams.  A small number of students get through this portion much more quickly: within a single year, a single semester or even immediately upon arrival.  It is debatable whether such students are truly more talented than the others or simply arrived very well prepared and have their act together, but in any event such students are certainly doing exceptionally well in the program.

  Step 2: Can you get faculty on board with the plan of your having exceptional promise and ambition and get a very meaty project to work on?

Go to one of the faculty members you're working with and level with them: say that you feel understimulated by the program, are worried that your peers lack your intensity and ambition, and that you are really looking for a project to sink your teeth into.  Then step back and listen very carefully to what she has to say.  You will probably get some amount of corroboration/denial of the picture you have painted, though it may be subtle.  (I would not say: "No, I completely disagree: you're just average, maybe not even that" to a student, even if I felt that way!) More importantly you should get something to work on.  Do so.  If it is not what you wanted, or if you have your own ideas about what you want to work on, come back and say so, but I think it's good to spend some time on projects that other people give you at this stage.

  Step 3: Can you get some results?  Anything at first, then something nice, then maybe a real breakthrough?

If you can make it successfully through Step 3, then as above you're ready to go somewhere better.  Let me not even try to hide the following key point: the merit of this checklist is that it's what you're supposed to be doing anyway.  If by the time you successfully complete Step 3 you're ready to graduate, should you curse my trickery?  No, you should proudly write up your thesis and expect to get a postdoc at a much better place than you did your PhD, which is hard to do and puts you on a great trajectory for your later career.

Good luck.


What if your reviewer told you need to cite author A and Author A is you? It is common practice in my field to remove self-citations completely in a manuscript for consideration. Even if you use neutral language like: “Author A said XYZ” (with Author A being myself), it is frowned upon. One of my senior colleagues was telling us she got a review that said she needed to read more works of Author A and cite Author A more and her not mentioning her shows a distinct lack of the literature! (She is Author A.)

This is quite an amusing situation but while it is under revise and resubmit still, she is considering withdrawing it and submitting elsewhere because saying “Hey, I am Author A and I think I know my own work quite well” wouldn’t really cut it, right? How would you respond to this largely negative review without compromising anonymity? Or would you just let the editors know?

If it's a wide practice in your field to remove self-citations at the submission stage, and a well-known practice, then reviewers should be aware that the conscious omission of author A should be a sign that author A might be an author of the work under consideration. This suggests that the reviewer may not be aware of the convention—perhaps it was written by someone relatively new to your field.

I would just proceed by incorporating the comments, and explaining to the editor why you broke with convention.


How to address the issues of not including technical contribution Recently I defended my thesis for a master's degree in computer engineering, and internal reviewers marked it satisfactory, however, they made some comments in my report and presentation, one of them was to include the technical contribution of my research in the thesis report and presentation.
I found this comment very serious, and I couldn't get any idea on how to work around on those issues.
My research was related to some intervention on online learning (here I have used the techniques that are available through literature review) and it is based upon the use of popular psychological theory.
I used statistical methods to analyze the results. I have collected the data through a self-reported survey questionnaire. Results obtained were also somehow satisfactory(findings somehow deviated from the existing findings).
I also develop a tool to visualize the activity of the student interaction in that online learning, and which I consider as one of the contributions.
With all these things done, I am still confused about the problem of identifying my "technical contribution".
My Questions are:
What should I report as my technical contribution? How should I approach myself to identify my technical contribution? Actually, what is considered a technical contribution?
I know I need to consult my supervisor for this, but he will definitely ask the same question to me, and I will not have any answer for that.
Any help would be appreciated and thanks in advance.

This is a late answer and possibly moot now, but I'll guess that whoever wrote that was concerned that your field is engineering but your contributions are more likely to be pedagogy. Perhaps they were looking for some engineering contribution and, not finding it (or finding in insufficient) made the comment. But it seems not to be a blocking comment as you were passed.
But a "technical contribution" can be to pedagogy as well. How does your thesis contribute to the learning of engineering or some such thing. In particular, since you used an existing model, how does what you did differ in the application from what was known in other domains?
It is just possible, of course, that your results could have been expected from what was known, in which case there is little technical contribution at all. If it was otherwise sufficient, then you have done well, but it is something to keep in mind for any future academic work that you might do. Editors and reviewers of scholarly papers may be more insistent on how "innovative" a contribution is than would be an MS defense committee.


How to add long lists in thesis We performed some bioinformatic work during thesis. Output of these analysis are more than 10 tables with 2000 rows each. We cannot add these in the printed version of the thesis, so we thought about:

link to the online version, since paper containing this data was published.
give a CD-ROM with the thesis, but for me this physical format is obsolete.

Maybe you have a better alternative or agree with the first one like me.

Output of these analysis are more than 10 tables with 2000 rows each. We cannot add these in the printed version of the thesis ...

Even if you could (say for instance you hate trees and you don't pay for your thesis), do you think anybody would want to have that kind of data in physical format?

Both alternatives are valid, but as you said optical media is becoming more and more obsolete. If you really want to provide the data in a physical form, you can distribute it as a usb-stick. As the capacity of sticks increase, smaller drives become dirt cheap. You should be able to get 1GB, 2GB or even 4GB for relatively small price in hundreds.

The other option, online availability, is the better alternative in general. However the maintenance of data is important as others have mentioned. Both in terms of availability and proper cataloging try to use well known and established repositories.

What I don't understand however, is why you feel the need to "republish" findings, if you have already deposited this data together with a prior publication. Just refer to the data as "Table/Supplementary Info X from Paper Y"


Advice on Letters of Recommendation I'm currently applying to the masters program at my undergraduate institution for a degree in mathematics.  Due to my rather ambitious nature and biting off much, much more than I could chew at times (sitting in on multiple graduate courses and doing the coursework for them as an undergraduate for example), my GPA is not ideal for applying to graduate school (3.13) with my in-major GPA being even lower (just below a 3.0 I believe).

That said, I have heard of people getting into graduate school here with less than a 3.0 and I believe I have a decent opportunity of getting in, but I'm struggling to decide who should write my letters of recommendation.

In high school my GPA was much, much higher, so I got good letters of recommendation from both my teachers as well as people who knew me in other areas of my life.  Of course now, I'm guessing that graduate schools are completely uninterested in letters of recommendation from anyone that isn't a professional in your field.  Because I haven't had any internships or done any summer programs or anything, this pretty much just leaves my undergraduate professors to write letters of recommendation for me.

Given how small my school's pure math dept is and that we are required to have 3 letters of recommendation this is very limiting.  There are very, very few professors I've had more than once, and those I have had I haven't necessarily done well in thier classes.  So I've given the question of who should write my letters of recommendation a lot of thought and see the following 3 options and am wondering what might be viewed as the best option:

3 letters of recommendation from professors of mathematics in the pure math dept of my university.  This would certainly conform to standards but they would not likely be glowing letters of recommendation due to my less than stellar undergraduate performance (the highest grade I would have gotten in any of these individuals classes is an A-...less in others)
Given that you ideally have letters of recommendation from professors whose courses you did very well in, I could get letters of recommendation from math professors whose classes I've gotten A's in.  The problem with this is that these classes are few in number and the professor's that taught them were in either applied mathematics or mathematics education (the 3 classes I got an A in were one in pure math taught by an applied mathematician, one in applied math taught by an applied mathematician, and one in math history taught by the dept head who's in math education).  I also do not know most of these professors very well at all.
3 letters of recommendation, from a more diverse pool of people, but would be closer to what you'd consider a "glowing letter of recommendation".  I'd of course have 1 from a math professor that knows me well, but then two others perhaps from a professor of physics (I'm very interested in mathematical physics, but I'm applying to the pure math program not the applied math program and this physics professor's research is in physics education), and then one from either an acquantince who knows me well who is in the graduate program now, or a lifelong mentor of sorts who can speak to my work ethic and who I am as a person, but is not at all in the field.

Sorry for such a long post, I don't often use the academia site, but I'd really like to know what my best option is.  Thank you!

Since this is an "internal" application, the recommendation letters are really a formality.  The department wants to know whether you're likely to succeed in their program.  Since they already know you, they have a good idea what sort of student you are.

In my opinion, your real problem is that they know that you're that type of student who bites off more than he can chew.  That sort of student is not likely to be successful.  (I don't know why, but that sort of student annoys me deeply.  It pushes some button deep in my psyche.)  You expend lots of effort but you don't master anything.  All these graduate profs have had you sitting in their classes, thereby soaking up some of their effort and for no results.  Meanwhile you dogged your undergrad classes, and wasted the efforts of those professors.

My advice, if you want to get into their program, is to go on a mission to convince the faculty that you've learned your lesson, that you know you need to focus and master today's learning today.  That you won't, in the future, be distracted by every shiny object that arises.  Yes, lots of different bits of mathematics are interesting to the point of being seductive, but you can't learn them all at once.  The moral of the story is that joke about the old bull and the young bull looking down the hill at a herd of cows.


What to do if one has had an unsuccessful PhD (because of others' fault)? I was talking to a friend of mine, and he just feel in a deep depression due to finishing his PhD.

He will be defending in the coming weeks, and there is a high likelihood he will pass.

In his words, he doesn't really feel he has learned anything PhD worthy, he only has one Journal paper and no conference papers (in his area conf papers are not worth much anyway). According to him, one of the postdocs kept his research at bay by denying him access to the machines he need to do experiments (something CMOS related, not really sure what). And in his own words, the same guy basically did the same experiments he was planning and wrote a couple of papers.

Of course he tried to tell his professor, but apparently he couldn't care less.

By now, he just feels that he lost 3 years of his life doing a PhD. And he mentioned that he might sue the Professor/University for this.

I take his word for all of this, and I have no real means to corroborate it to be truth. But it kept me thinking about one thing.

Is a student entitled to sue/demand a reimbursement/etc if he/she feels like the past years have been an utter waste of time?

Is there any mechanism in your universities to do this?

I've heard of similar cases of professors abusing of students in the same way in some US Universities (big/fancy ones by the way)

There sure are cases, every now and then, of researchers (professors or other) abusing students in various ways. As everyone, I have heard stories, and I know at least a couple of people who have been put in dramatic situations during their PhD. However bad the behavior of the advisor is, it turns out that there are multiple venues one can try, during the PhD, when the alarm flag is raised. These depend on the institution and type of employment, but they include:

Going to see the PhD program director, explaining your situation (diplomatically) and asking for advice (read: help).
Finding a friendly researcher/professor in your department, and ask him for advice (and possibly help) with your issue. They know the people and local “politics”, and might have efficient advice.
Your employer's HR department
Going to your professor's hierarchy (department chair, dean, …). As a last recourse, file a formal complaint.
Get someone to speak for you: a union representative, a member of the local “PhD association”, etc. That can help if you are worried about the fallout of intervening directly.
Changing your plans to work on a more “independent” research. In your example, your friend was denied access to a given experiment. If the experiment had broken down beyond repair, he sure could reörient his research, so the same thing could be done in the case at hand (I'm not saying it's easy).
Walking out (or, as JeffE would surely say: don't walk, run!)

Regarding legal action: I don't think this avenue can lead anywhere, unless there is factual evidence of gross misconduct or unethical activity. The burden of proof relies on your friend, and I think it will actually be harder to complain after the fact if he did not raise his concerns formally during his PhD.


How to deal with a research internship manager with very bad English? I am a computer science student in a research internship. My superior is technically a professor, but I work with a PhD student. My goal is to help them run experiments to finish their thesis. They are not my manager, but I am still supposed to do what they want, and I could not find a better term, hence the title.

This PhD student's English is very bad, to the point that I sometimes cannot make sense of their messages and instructions, though I'm close to bilingual (neither of us is a native English speaker). It is slightly better in person, but I don't have many occasions to talk to them since they are working remotely for the time being.

Constantly asking them to repeat can get tiring for both of us, and I don't want to start a conflict. Pointing out that their English is simply unreadable is likely to come across as insulting too. Furthermore, I know that their experiments have a tight deadline, and I would like to help them meet it, but this constant miscommunication prevents me from working efficiently.

If it matters, the professor who oversees us agrees that it is difficult to communicate with this student. I worry that coming to the professor to complain about it could be seen as agressive by the student, and as an attempt to justify delays by the professor.

How can I deal with these unreadable messages and very unclear instructions?

It is the professor's responsibility to make sure that the instructions you are given are clear and understandable, and besides it's in their interest to make sure that you are able to do your job. So you should definitely talk to the professor about this issue, preferably giving a few examples and explaining clearly and objectively why it's a problem for your work. As you are clearly aware, it's not a matter of criticizing the person, it's matter of finding a way to work efficiently.

On a more diplomatic note, I assume that this PhD student has to write papers and will certainly have to write their PhD in English, right? So it's also crucial for them to improve their English level. Maybe you could suggest helping them at the same time: when their instructions or explanations are unclear, you would propose a better phrasing or point out why something is a mistake. The idea is to avoid that the PhD student feels bad about the whole thing, and this way they can appreciate that you're also doing some effort to make things work.


Can I ask a postdocter candidate to write a recommendation letter for applying to graduate school I'm working in a lab as an undergraduate worker. Can I ask one of my lab member who is a postdocter candidate for a recommendation letter?

Yes. Especially, a postdoc that has worked closely with you, and may have a different perspective than your professor. Whereas the professor may be involved in broader planning and thinking, the postdoc may have spent many hours with the student in the lab, analysing data, etc. Therefore, letters from professor and postdoc could complement each other and work very well.


To what extent should relevant background be discussed vs. just referenced? Is is perfectly appropriate to refer reviewers to other papers for understanding a concept or writer must include the concept in his paper too?
What should be done while keeping brevity, plagiarism and complexity of idea in mind?

It depends.

What do your readers need to know to appreciate the main result of your paper? If your paper builds on the ideas of others, these ideas must be stated (included explicitly) and accompanied by a citation. If you simply note in passing that there are other relevant ideas, reference may be enough. Having said that, as a reviewer, I will question and discourage an excessively long list of references [1-22]. Authors should do their work to identify and tell the reader what they can find in each paper separately, not dump the whole reading list on them.
How long is your paper? If you are writing a 100+ page manuscript, then brevity is not as important as if you were restricted to 1 or 2 pages for your extended abstract.
Whom are you writing for? If this is a highly specialised journal, you can expect your readers to already know some sacred texts by heart, and a reference is sufficient. For a more general readership, you need to support your reader and tell them more , i.e. explain the main ideas and then refer to the texts.


Admission and advisor selection I am an international student and I received admit from X university (USA) for PhD in computer science.
I reached out to all the professors who match my research interest and only one of them responded. Now when I am supposed to fly in a month he has notified me that he doesn’t want to commit to new students.
None of the other professors are replying to my mails. I have got my visa and I am left with no funding.
What should I do now? Should I drop my plan or should I simply go for a masters or anything else?

It sounds like you've been admitted to a US PhD program in computer science without guaranteed funding.
While you will have to decide for yourself what to do, to me this seems like an unusual circumstance. As Buffy's answer mentions, it's common for students to not have an advisor right away in US PhD programs. However, it is not common to be completely unfunded.
I don't know what led you to being in this position, maybe there was a miscommunication between you and the program you applied to. Did they think you would have some sort of funding from your home country? Did they think an advisor had already committed to taking you on (in my grad program this would have been referred to as a 'direct admit' student)? Did you not have any conversations about funding during the application process?
I would not recommend moving to another country for an unfunded PhD unless you are independently wealthy and the cost is no concern. If you can arrange for a TA or RA position before the semester starts then that's fine. It seems like you're out of luck for now on the RA front, so find out from your program what the steps are to get a TAship.


Should citations be as detailed as possible? While writing my thesis (computer science), I was wondering how detailed citations have to be.

Let's assume I want to cite an article of a conference and have full information on author, editor, title, year, booktitle, subtitle, eventtitle, volume, location, DOI, ISBN, arXiv ID, ... you get the point.

Do I actually provide every piece of information in the citation or are some left out? Does any style guide (like IEEE, APA, MLA) address this topic?

Similar questions [1] cover only URLs, but my question is more general.

[1] Should I include a DOI/website URL for a publication in dissertation bibliography?

Generally the citation styles for your field, and thus for your thesis, will dictate this. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) website is a nice and popular resource to refer to what the most possible information would be desired for APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian - but you ultimately should refer to the exact, up-to-date published version of the style guide itself.

As an example, for APA when citing a Journal or Conference paper/article, you would at most provide (formatting stripped):

  Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of
  article. Title of Periodical, volume number(issue number), pages.
  http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxx/yyyyy

If something doesn't have a DOI, the style guides say how to cite each type of resource. A book might be cited by ISBN, and if there is no DOI you might cite the arXiv in place of the DOI website - but you are never citing all of these things!

Cite only that which the style guide says you should, in keeping with the common tradition of papers in your field - no more, and no less.

When using reference management tools they often help do this for you, but they do not absolve the author of responsibility for ensuring that the citation matches the appropriate style of their field and that the data and style is followed accurately.

When You Don't Know Your Style

If you are unsure of what style applies to your field, a search for "{field name} style" can be helpful, but the Purdue OWL site linked above also provides further guidance on their Complete Discipline Listing. If you are unsure an adviser or your department office can provide further verification, and checking in with the department (whether that be the department office, chair, or secretary) is often a helpful technique.

Special Case: IEEE

I would note that the IEEE is somewhat of a special case (and is very common in computer, engineering, and various technology fields) in that there is a IEEE Citation Reference and IEEE Editorial Style Manual. However, they both specify that when the guides don't provide a specific answer to your question that you should consult the Chicago style guides. Thus the IEEE style may be considered a specialized version of Chicago style.

So in the case of this style you should first consult the IEEE guides, and if and only if they do not provide sufficient guidance you can consult the far more comprehensive Chicago guides.

Summation

So in conclusion: if you have 100 fields of information available, you don't include them all in the citation - just the ones that your field's style says you should. Any good style guide (all the ones I've had to read) gives rules of precedence and fall-back plans when certain information is unobtainable, with the information requested varying by the source being cited itself.


How should I refer to non-permanent Web Pages, via Web Pages saved in PDF format? This question is only concerning references to non-permanent (and even semi-permanent) information, for example, Web pages (but not limited to web pages).

I understand that some researches post the normal author, year, time, etc... and the URL of a referenced non-permanent Web Page.

I've heard that some readers or reviewers may object to reference any non-permanent source.  To eliminate these complaints, am I allowed to simply include the original web page, saved as a PDF file, as as an attachment, with the research paper? (to, for example, IEEE)?

Can I include the PDF referenced web pages, via arXiv?  (as part of the published research paper).

Can I reference the PDF referenced web pages, via PDF files I host on Google drive (or something similar)?

I'm aware that in certain situations, you should not reference a Web page. However, that is not my question (and in certain situations, it is OK to reference web pages; for example, if your study is showing how the web page changes over time :-)  ).

I think that there are three main cases to consider here:

The web pages are aggregated data, e.g., in your example of a study that quantifies change over time.  Collecting web pages as data is routinely done in scientific studies, such as complexity studies that track a lot of pages.  In this case, the pages are not generally cited (and any data from them is likely to be at least partially abstracted and de-identified, to deal with a variety of legal issues).
An individual web page is a subject of study, e.g., for literary or intellectual criticism.  In this case, the standard references to the URL with time accessed is appropriate, along with block quoting of critical passages as part of your analysis.  You should save full copies yourself, and share them upon request, but likely cannot publish them unless you obtain permission or unless the source has explicitly adopted a copyright that allows republication (e.g., Wikipedia).
The web page is being cited as a scientific work (some overlap with the last case).  In this case also, the standard reference of URL with time accessed is appropriate.  This is unusual, since most scientific works go into archival papers of some form, but does happen---I've certainly done so, when that is actually the right document to cite.  This should still be a document with some expectation of longevity, e.g., a blog post on a scientist's established site, the archives of a mailing list or discussion group, a manual from a piece of software's distribution site.


Does this imply that I am ineligible to apply for this grant? Comment of grant reviewer in the field of chemistry:

  order to be eligible, your study must involve an inferential statistical test, and it appears your study will instead quantify the conditions required to [chemistry term]

Why would a grant in chemistry require such statistical test? Nowhere in the announcement of the grant was this pointed out. Am I understanding chemistry wrong?

It’s hard to say for sure, but at larger granting agencies, different review panels may focus on different areas and have quite stringent guidelines for what is considered on-topic. It may be that you need to have a statistical test as part of the guidelines for the area under which you asked your proposal to be judged. The reviewer’s response may be suggesting your submission falls out of their purview.


Why is it acceptable that publishers sell papers they didn’t pay for? I am curious about the worldwide accepted ethics in publishing. I have never seen any other economic sector in which someone legally sold someone else's product for their own profit, apparently without paying for it in any way. I don’t intend to accuse any publisher, I just want to know how this works and why is this acceptable. Is it expected to be changed in the future? Do scientists want to change it, or is this accepted by more or less the whole community?

I admit, this question might seem to be off topic or opinion based but I don’t know where could I ask it.

History.

In the dark ages (i.e., before the internet), publishers provided a valuable service. If an author has a great idea, they want the whole world to read about it and the best way to do that is to get someone to publish their work. The publisher arranges for reviews, copyedits your work, and, most importantly, prints thousands of copies and sends them to libraries and archives around the world. (Note that, legally, they need to have the rights to distribute the work, and they claim ownership of the copyediting work.) Doing all this printing, mailing, and copyediting costs a lot money and thus publishers have to charge for their services. They also make a small profit from all of this.

Fast forward to the 21st century and the picture has changed considerably. Since the arrival of personal computers and software like LaTeX and Microsoft Word, copyediting is now mostly done by authors. (Reviewers and editors are rarely paid.) And, due to the internet, it is very easy to distribute papers using websites like arXiv. Going to the library to find a print journal is now a thing of the past, as journals these days just have websites.
Of course, publishers are still doing something, but it's a fraction of what it used to be.

Publishers made a lot of sense 50 years ago, but these days their model doesn't make a lot of sense; they still collect a lot of money, even though the services could be provided much more cheaply. So why does this model persist? Firstly, publishers still own the copyrights to lots of old work that is still relevant. More importantly, publishers own the "prestige" of their journals, which means academics keep sending them their work.


What is standard record-keeping like for a journal editor? I'm developing an in-department certification process, with multiple faculty members assigned to assess each new certification, and it occurred to me to model the overall process on the (familiar) cycle of submitting articles to editorial review at a journal.
Not having been on the backend of that, it's dawning on me that I don't know what the usual record-keeping looks like for a normal journal editor. Is there some standard software platform to keep track of who is assigned to reviews, deliverable dates, status, feedback, etc.? Can it be put in a simple spreadsheet or database? Is it usually accessible by multiple people at the journal, or private to the one editor?
I've searched online and not found anything in this vein. Any advice or examples of "best practices" in record-keeping for the editorial process would be helpful.

These days editors don't do much paperwork because the editorial management system (EMS) does it for them. The EMS logs all actions, sends automated reminders to reviewers, informs the editor when a review is submitted, and so on. It is usable by multiple people, and an editor with sufficiently advanced permissions can see what other editors are doing or even override them.
There's a list of free & open source EMSes here, don't know if it's applicable for your situation.


Where to find easy research topics any student could write about? I teach a writing course designed to prepare international students for graduate school, mostly social science majors. The students have no experience writing academic papers. I have found that lists of sample TOEFL and GRE writing topics, such as this list of sample writing topics found at ETS, serve as good essay topics for these students so that they can practice organizing their ideas in writing. These topics are: (1) simple; (2) can be addressed by students from any major or culture; (3) and can be supported by the students' opinions, not research.

Next term, the course will focus on introducing research methods. Were can I find topics that are: (1) similarly simple; (2) can be handled by students from any major; but that (3) will require students to rely on academic journals for support? I need students to practice gathering information, evaluating the credibility of sources, and assembling their ideas and evidence without getting bogged down in the complexity of the subject.

When I have taught research methods for undergraduate work, I find that it is best to give the students a lot of freedom while still requiring acceptance for the topics. I do not think giving a list of acceptable topics is the way to pique the interest of students.

It is better in my experience to guide them and let them know that they know their field better than anyone outside of that field, so they are capable of finding a suitable topic by themselves.

I have had students who choose "I want to study the effect of someone smiling at you." It could be an interesting topic but, since my students are all business majors, I give them the restriction is that it must be related to business. When they submit this topic, I hand it back and ask them "How does this relate to business as I said all research in this module must?"

I guess I could provide them a list but I really think that will just end up limiting them. Better to coax them out of their shell and get them to really start thinking and choosing and living with the consequences of their decisions.


Should a paper of exactly 15 pages be submitted to Transactions or Proceedings of the AMS? I would like to submit a paper which is exactly 15 pages. The journal overview of Transactions of the AMS says:

  Papers of less than 15 printed pages that meet the above criteria should be submitted to the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.

It seems that my paper can be submitted to Transactions, since it is exactly 15 pages. However, Initial Submission for Peer Review of Transactions of the AMS says:

  Papers submitted to Transactions of the AMS (to be published in either Transactions of the AMS or Transactions of the AMS, Series B) should exceed 15 printed pages in length."

So it seems that my paper cannot be submitted to Transactions (since it is exactly 15 pages), and should be submitted to Proceedings. So I am confused. Does anyone have information/similar experience which could possibly let me know to which journal I should submit?

You should submit your paper to Proceedings.

The overview page for Proceedings of the AMS clarifies this:

  This journal is devoted to shorter research articles (not to exceed 15 printed pages) in all areas of pure and applied mathematics.

If your article is exactly 15 pages long (or less), then its length does not exceed 15 pages, and so it is suitable for submission to Proceedings.  By that same token, it is not suitable for submission to Transactions.  The intention is clearly that the criteria should be mutually exclusive.

Information on a journal's own web page should be considered more authoritative than information about that journal on a different journal's web page.


Myth or Reality: Employers will contact your academic supervisor and past collaborators to acquire information about you Recently in a presentation about networking the presenter mentioned that it is important to maintain a good relationship with your past academic supervisors and collaborates (teammates) because employers (industry employer, not academic employers) will go contact these people to gain information about you, especially you are a recent grad with net zero industry experience.

Is this a common practice? Does anyone know if employers will actually go out of their way to contact your supervisors even your teammates?

In general, your supervisor will more likely be contacted if your graduate fellowship is listed as employment experience.  Background checkers will likely interpret your supervisor as a "boss" and contact them accordingly,  not to tease out the minutia of your research but to ensure such qualities as dependability, integrity, and punctuality.


What are the best tips for developing a framework to write a (systematic) review paper? Perhaps, this is a meta-level question. Most review papers narrate the story of the field/problem or summarize a large but focused body of literature. The authors are usually senior level faculties with years of experience in the field. How these papers are being reviewed and what is the formalism behind accepting or rejecting them? Many such papers fail to present a framework/criteria/dimension for the field (maybe due to complexity), but is there any effort targeted to develop reviewing skills for young researchers to follow?

I too find it frustrating that so many literature reviews are so unsystematic.

There are efforts underway to improve the quality of reviews, and to develop these skills in early-career researchers. We like our students, where possible, to write a review article as a early part of their PhD. The medical field has for many years been honing the quality of reviews, and there's much that other fields can learn from it.

We have had a Q&A about systematic reviews earlier, and there I listed three relevant books. The most significant of these, as far as your question is concerned, is Doing a Systematic Review: A Student's Guide - Angela Boland et al - it's primarily aimed at Masters students, and also makes for an easy-to-read introduction to the field for anyone.


Publishing working paper before submission to peer-reviewed journal Could the fact that I publish a working paper in a WP-series at the institution where I am doing my PhD jeopardise my chance to have it accepted in a peer-review journal? Since I know it might depend on editor/journal, I specify I was leaning towards Energy Policy (Elsevier).

The 'Guide for Authors' states the following:

  [...] Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract, a published lecture or academic thesis, see 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' for more information) [...]

  [...] Please note that preprints can be shared anywhere at any time, in line with Elsevier's sharing policy. Sharing your preprints e.g. on a preprint server will not count as prior publication (see 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' for more information). [...]

Source

Additionally, the page 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' states:

  [...] Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication: An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Elsevier does not view the following uses of a work as prior publication: publication in the form of an abstract; publication as an academic thesis; publication as an electronic preprint. [...]

Source

To answer your question, you should clearly define what the WP-series really is. Is it just a collection of pre-prints or is it a primary publication? That's how you will get the answer you need.

In case of doubt, contact the Editor in advance.


Why are CS researchers reluctant to share code and what techniques can I use to encourage sharing? While researching a topic area I have come across a number of papers that claim to improve on the state of the art and have been published at respected outlets (e.g. CVPR, ICIP). These papers are often written in a way that obscures some of the details and their methods can be lacking in detail. Upon contacting these authors for more information and asking if they would kindly make their source code available they stop replying or decline the offer.

Why are computer science researchers reluctant to share their code?

I would have expected that disseminating your source code would have positive effects for the author, e.g., greater recognition and visibility within the community and more citations.  What am I missing?

For the future, what are some better ways to approach fellow researchers that will result in greater success at getting a copy of their source code?

Why researchers might be reluctant to share their code: In my experience, there are two common reasons why some/many researchers do not share their code.

First, the code may give the researchers an important advantage for follow-on work.  It may help them get a step ahead of other researchers and publish follow-on research faster.  If the researchers have plans to do follow-on research, keeping their code secret gives them a competitive advantage and helps them avoid getting scooped by someone else.  (This may be good, or it may be bad; I'm not taking a position on that.)

Second, a lot of research code is, well, research-quality.  The researchers probably thought it was good enough to test the paper's hypotheses, but that's all.  It may have many known problems; it may not have any documentation; it might be tricky to use; it might compile on only one platform; and so forth.  All of these may make it hard for someone else to use.  Or, it may take a bunch of work to explain how to someone else how to use the code.  Also, the code might be a prototype, but not production-quality.  It's not unusual to take shortcuts while coding: shortcuts that don't affect the research results and are fine in the context of a research paper, but that would be unacceptable for deployed production-quality code.  Some people are perfectionists, and don't like the idea of sharing code with known weaknesses or where they took shortcuts; they don't want to be embarrassed when others see the code.

The second reason is probably the more important one; it is very common.

How to approach researchers: My suggestion is to re-focus your interactions with those researchers.  What are your real goals?  Your real goals are to understand their algorithms better.  So, start from that perspective, and act accordingly.  If there are some parts in the paper that are hard to follow or ambiguous, start by reading and re-reading their paper, to see if there are some details you might have missed.  Think hard about how to fill in any missing gaps.  Make a serious effort on your own, first.

If you are at a research level, and you've put in a serious effort to understand, and you still don't understand ... email the authors and ask them for clarification on the specific point(s) that you think are unclear.  Don't bother authors unnecessarily -- but if you show interest in their work and have a good question, many authors are happy to respond. They're just grateful that someone is reading their papers and interested enough in their work to study their work carefully and ask insightful questions.

But do make sure you are asking good questions.  Don't be lazy and ask the authors to clear up something that you could have figured out on your own with more thought.  Authors can sense that, and will write you off as a pest, not a valued colleague.

Very important: Please understand that my answer explaining why researchers might not share their code is intended as a descriptive answer, not a prescriptive answer.  I am emphatically not making any judgements about whether their reasons are good ones, or whether researchers are right (or wrong) to think this way.  I'm not taking a position on whether researchers should share their code or not; I'm just describing how some researchers do behave.  What they ought to do is an entirely different ball of wax.

The original poster asked for help understanding why many researchers do not share their code, and that's what I'm responding to.  Arguments about whether these reasons are good ones are subjective and off-topic for this question; if you want to have that debate, post a separate question.

And please, I urge you to use some empathy here.  Regardless of whether you think researchers are in right or wrong not to share their code in these circumstances, please understand that many researchers do have reasons that feel valid and appropriate to them.  Try to understand their mindset before reflexively criticizing them.  I'm not trying to say that their reasons are necessarily right and good for the field.  I'm just saying that, if you want to persuade people to change their practices, it's important to first understand the motivations and structural forces that have influenced their current actions, before you launch into trying to browbeat them into acting differently.

Appendix: I definitely second Jan Gorzny's recommendation to read the article in SIAM News that he cites.  It is informative.


If Thomson Reuters says it indexes a journal but it's not mentioned on the journal's web site, who should I trust? On the Thomson Reuters Master Journal list is stated that the given journal is indexed in Science Citation Index and Current Contents. However, on the official journal's web page, there is no such information.

In addition, the journal has Impact Factor. I also checked on the Thomson Journal Citation Report to be sure.

Who should I trust in this case?

Trust Thomson Reuters, of course. It has all its JCR impact factors up to date.

Beware that there are many journals that print impact factors on their own site with their own definitions making a facade impression to prospective readers and authors. Do not confuse them with JCR impact factors.


Should I bring up minor writing errors that I noticed after submitting revised version? I have received a decision letter on my paper from editor "I am prepared to accept this manuscript for publication provided that the authors perform some editing to improve the grammar throughout the paper" After submitting revised version, I have noticed a couple of minor corrections that need to be made with regard to writing errors after revision (One sentence was written twice and some punctuation mistakes). Should I bring these up now or just wait for the copy editing phase?

You should ask the editor who approved your paper about what to do. Resubmitting a new version might speed up their process or might make no matter. And, not all journals/conferences will have a copy editing phase in any case.

But leaving it unstated is just sloppy work and if it is recognized you might actually face rejection since the acceptance seems to have been conditional. Make your best effort.


Is there a stigma of assigning the title TA to an undergraduate? I am entering my senior year of undergraduate study in Computer Science at a small, primarily undergraduate institution. I plan to attend graduate school and pursue a PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics, my main goal to teach. The school I attend is quite small, and is all but unknown outside our geographic region. As such, I've attempted to add as many positive bullets to my CV as possible, mainly because I feel I will have to fight harder than my colleagues at larger universities to get into a great program.

One of the things I have attempted to add to my vita is teaching experience. I have had the opportunity to tutor in our Mathematics Tutoring Center for a couple years now, and have fallen in love. I have also had the pleasure of assisting a professor in her Freshmen CS labs. Last fall I spoke with her about increasing my duties to more than just fielding questions as the students type their programs. I wanted to start grading lab submissions, and perhaps even hold office hours. She was delighted that I wanted the increased responsibility, but sharply objected to calling it a "TA" position.

Is there a stigma of assigning the title TA to an undergraduate?

A teaching assistantship (TA) is a formal job category at most universities, which implies that you are being paid a specific wage for teaching duties while a graduate student. Consequently, you would be misrepresenting your work on the CV if you called yourself a teaching assistant, because you are not formally a graduate student.

At the university level, another issue may be that while many undergraduates do participate in teaching responsibilities at many schools, this is often in the form of tutoring programs and informal arrangements. Part of the reason for this is that many universities want to be able to claim a higher percentage of teaching duties are done by faculty than is really the case. Calling undergraduates graders and tutors helps to shift off the balance, since they are not officially "teaching staff," and therefore wouldn't be included in such time accounting.


No Letterhead or official email id for Letter of recommendation I worked with a professor on my final year project who has now left the college to finish his Ph.D. He is currently working as an assistant professor at some other college. As I worked closely with that professor, I thought of asking LOR from him. But, as he left my college, his official email ID is of the other college. I will not be able to ask for a letterhead from my college for the LOR written by the professor from another college. Does a LOR taken from such a professor affect my admission process?

It's fine for the professor to use an email address and letterhead from the college where the professor works now.