Should I apologize to my coauthors for being slow to finish a paper draft? I am first author on a paper about my research from last summer.  Due to a busy school year and a bout of severe depression, I have taken FAR longer to finish this paper than originally planned.

When I send the draft to my coauthors, should I apologize?  Thank them for their patience?  Promise to be better in the future?

As a very young researcher, my primary concern is seeming professional and reliable to my coauthors.

Delays on this sort of thing are extremely common.  So, unless there is some specific reason that this work is time sensitive, it's unlikely that anybody is going to be surprised or upset by this: don't worry too much about it.  Certainly, don't beat yourself up about it, especially when you had legitimate reasons for the delay.

That said, a brief apology is a good idea.  All you need is something like:

  Sorry for the delay with this; the last few months have been really hectic.

Don't make too much of it; just acknowledge the delay and move on.


Should I tutor a student who I know has cheated on their homework? I am a Ph.D. student and I do private tutoring on the side for extra income. Recently a new student contacted me for help with a class, and I met them for one session, which went well overall. They told me they liked my tutoring and want to meet again. This student admitted that they are behind on the course material and are trying to catch up before the final (which is just about two weeks away). However, I recently realized that this same student is in another class which I am TA'ing, and I was grading the homework today and realized they copied the solutions for the last assignment. I had suspected they may have copied solutions to the previous assignment as well but was unsure. This time the copying is blatant, word for word from the solutions from a past year. At this point I have no choice but to bring this to the course instructor (who is also my advisor), who I know will report this student for plagiarism. My question is, should I still meet this student and tutor them in other classes?

A few thoughts that come to mind:

I now know this student is in the course I am TA'ing. I feel tutoring them for this course would be a conflict of interest, and I would have to clear it with my advisor. Is it also a conflict of interest to tutor them for a different course, knowing I will be grading their exam/homework for this one?
I enjoy tutoring because I enjoy helping students learn, and I do like to help people succeed. In our previous session this student seemed interested in actually learning, but clearly has shown that they are willing to blatantly plagiarise homework solutions. While I do rely on my extra tutoring income, it feels unethical to tutor someone who cheats. At the same time, I would like them to be able to understand what they are doing so they don't feel any need to cheat. But this student also said they have not attended class in recent weeks (for what reason I do not know).
If I meet this student again, I will have to tell them that I have reported them for academic dishonesty. This isn't exactly an issue though, they can decide what they want to do from there.

Whether their cheating should impact your role as a tutor is not the primary issue here, so I'll set it aside.

You should not be tutoring a student for additional money when you are also grading that student as a TA, even if the grading and tutoring are for separate courses. That sets up a financial relationship between a grader and a student. That's a big problem.

I certainly don't believe you've done anything unethical here, but you should most likely report the inadvertent conflict and stop tutoring this student immediately (I'd also offer to your superiors that you return any payment for the one session, or just do it yourself anyways). It's not a big deal that you did this accidentally not realizing the connection. It could be a problem if you continued with it now that you know.


Suggesting an alternative to referee/reviewer recommendation The editor asks for substantial revisions, and sent me two reviews. One of the referees says that I should address issue X by means of approaches A and B.

In my revision, I plan to take on board this comment, but I think that approach C is a better way to address issue X. Therefore, I’ll do C instead of A and B.

In my reply to the referee, I will explain why I did C and why I think that approach C is better than A and B, and at the same time I want to add a sentence like this one:

“I am open to the possibility that the referee might still prefer approaches A and B. If that is the case, I will switch to these approaches in the eventuality of a further revision, should the referee request it.”

Is this correct? What is normally done in these situations?

In my reply to the referee, I will explain why I did C and why I think that approach C is better than A and B

This is essentially all you need to do. You don't need to follow reviewers' recommendations slavishly, but if you do decide to deviate from their recommendations, you should explain why. Which you plan on doing. In the end, it comes down to the editor's decision, so you should always strive to make his life easy, by explaining what you do and why.

  "I am open to the possibility that the referee might still prefer approaches A and B. If that is the case, I will switch to these approaches in the eventuality of a further revision, should the referee request it."

This adds a nice touch, without appearing subservient. I'll keep this in mind for the next time I decide not to follow a reviewer's recommendations ;-)

Bottom line: I'd say you are doing exactly the right thing.

EDIT: Bonus points if you can and do write something along these lines in your response to the reviewer:

  "In addition to C, which is described in the manuscript, I also did A and B, as suggested by the reviewer. The results, as measured by Y, are similar/inferior/whatever to the results of doing C, in the following way:..."

And I do see the point raised by @xLeitix in his comment. The "open to the possibility" should not come across as "I'll use an inferior approach just to get published", but rather as "if opinions about A/B vs. C can differ reasonably, I am open to..."


Can I receive both an NSF international postdoctoral award and salary from a foreign university? Recently I was offered a full salaried postdoctoral position (not a fellowship) in Australia (with a long lead time).

I am a US citizen, so can also apply for the NSF international postdoctoral fellowships.

Suppose, hypothetically, that I apply for and receive an NSF award.

Is it acceptable to increase my postdoctoral salary with the fellowship, or would it not make a difference?

Given that I already have an offer in hand, if the NSF fellowship wouldn't increase my salary, then it isn't worth it to me to apply (I realize there are other benefits, prestige, that go along with receiving a fellowship, but I'm time-strapped at the moment).

There will be rules that NSF sets for these fellowships. You need to look them up and/or talk to the program officer who administers the grant.

My best guess is that you can't double dip. So you will likely have to decline one salary or the other. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with still listing the grant on your CV -- it is a grant you won in a competitive solicitation, so it belongs on your CV.


Supervisor delays publication over style questions for years – can I remove him from the authors list? I did my PhD four years back. I was funded from my home country and I have done all the work. I started writing papers before submitting my thesis.

I am sending my supervisor drafts every year until now. Altogether I have now done 32 drafts. Since last year alone, I have rewritten my paper 12 times but he still is not happy to submit it and not willing to make any changes by himself. He is even not letting me to show it to the reviewers.

My supervisor is a lecturer and I was his first PhD student. I acquired the opinion of two professors (one of them is my 2nd supervisor and is a co-author) recently about the quaility of paper and they recommended to send it to a good journal (impact factor of 10 and above). After many years of struggle my supervisor wished to publish it in a journal with an impact factor less than 1. Above all he is not willing to pay publication costs and he is not allowing me to try for good journal. I am the one who did all the work, who paid for work, who wrote paper and who is paying for publication costs and i am not allowed to try any good journal.

One thing about his recomened changes: He did not ask repeating any experiments, redoing any analysis or revisiting any conclusions. It’s only text style that is being changed over last four years.
I contacted the university services and they told me that I don’t qualify for university help as they only cover two years post PhD duration.

What can I do now? Can I publish my work without him as co author. Can I just acknowlege him for hosting me and remove his name from the author list?

Can I just acknowledge him for hosting me and remove his name from the author list?

Probably not.  If he deserves to be an author based on his intellectual contributions to the paper, then it would be unethical to deny him authorship based on being difficult to work with.  He presumably thinks he deserves to be an author, or he wouldn't have spent years going over the drafts with you, and you apparently thought he deserved authorship at the beginning of the process.

Theoretically, you could declare that you have changed your mind and now think he never met the criteria for authorship.  That would be risky: he'll presumably be angry, and you'll need to have a very persuasive argument regarding authorship to avoid major damage to your career.  You should not try this unless you are certain that you are right and that the community will agree with you.  Would you make the same decision if your supervisor were cooperative and easy to work with?  If not, then you have no grounds for removing him as an author.

  I acquired the opinion of two professors (one of them is my 2nd supervisor and is a co-author) recently about the quality of paper and they recommended to send it to a good journal (impact factor of 10 and above). After many years of struggle my supervisor wished to publish it in a journal with an impact factor less than 1.

Why aren't all the coauthors discussing this matter together?  That sounds like how the issue of where to submit should be resolved.  You can start an e-mail discussion or schedule a phone call, everyone can make a case for where they'd like to submit the paper, and then you can debate the issue.  Hopefully you are all reasonable people and can come to some sort of agreement.

If this doesn't happen, then hopefully your other coauthor will decide that your supervisor is being unreasonable and will be willing to have a private discussion with him and try to get him to behave better.  On the other hand, if your other coauthor doesn't think your supervisor is being unreasonable, then you probably won't get anywhere with your complaints.


How to start a cover letter during submission? I'm submitting a paper to an Elsevier journal. One of the submission steps seems to be writing a cover letter to the journal office. They say that:

  Please enter any comments you would like to send to the Journal
  Office.

In order to start the cover letter, I wanted to write:

  Dear editor

but after googling the sample cover letters, I found out that I should write the editor's name. But the question is that which editor?

The journal has one editor-in-chief and multiple other editors. Which one's name should I mention? Will the editor-in-chief investigate the submission or who?

Should I use another terms instead of "dear ..."?

Don't obsess over it. Dear Editor is fine unless you have already corresponded with them. In fact, if you direct it to an individual by name it might well be handled by someone else - especially in a large organization.

Eventually you may get the name of someone who is responsible for managing your paper. Then you can be a bit more personal.


Can I ask a Master's student to have their text proofread? I am supervising a master student for his thesis in a technology field. His English is so-so and it takes quite a bit of work to correct it. I feel that correcting English is not my job, but to correct the technical aspects of the manuscript. Back when I was a student, I knew of students whose English wasn't that great and who would ask friends to correct their grammar, spelling, and wording. Can I ask my student to have his text corrected in this way—of course not the technical content! I would not consider it "somebody else's work," since it would also not count as contribution in the sense of authorship. However, I am also not sure whether it is rude to have him ask somebody else to proof-read. At my university we even have an official proofreading service (but only for PhD candidates), so I would expect it to be okay.

Edit: Good answers! Thanks. Just to clarify: The English (which is none of our's mother tongue) could be a lot worse and I had worse. With my last two students I did the mistake of correcting everything, which was a lot of work. Now I thought back and asked myself whether this is really my job. According to the answers - it actually isn't. Thanks!

As a supervisor it is not your job to proofread your student's work, but it is your job to help them produce good-quality work. Good communication skills are critical in research, therefore you should take some sort of action to improve your student's writing. When you communicate this to your student, make sure to present it in a constructive way, rather than as a criticism.

As to how you should proceed, you have a few options. One option is to ask another student in your department that has stronger English skills to help your student proofread their work. That only works if both you and your student know another student that you're both comfortable working with, and if that student has time to help. A second option is to ask your university's proofreading service if they can help your student. A third option, which may be the best bet if your student's writing needs a lot of work, is to suggest they enroll in a technical writing course to develop their skills.


Can you be a postdoc with funding from a private organization (vs. government funding)? Can you be a post-doc if you secured funding from a private organization to do research at a university in the social sciences/humanities, or do you have to have governmental funding to do a postdoc?

It is absolutely possible to have a postdoc funded by a private organization - there's nothing about a postdoc inherently tied to a particular type of funding. A couple ways this might happen:

As @Dexter mentions, there are private trusts and charitable organizations that fund research. This can occur either by funding a fellowship directly, or allowing funds from a grant to be used to hire a postdoc.
There are also commercial companies that have research grant programs in a number of fields. It's entirely possible to use the funding from one of these to pay for a postdoc.
A private university could directly pay for a postdoc - for example, as part of a professor's startup package.


Why do national laboratory presentations contain so much info per slide? I've seen many, many examples of scientific presentations from the National Laboratories in which virtually every slide is oversaturated with information.  If this were an isolated event, I wouldn't have given it any thought.  But I've noticed this pattern in presentations over many years from among presenters hailing from US national laboratories.  Though my field is computational science, I've seen talks from national laboratory scientists in other fields and their presentations also have this same characteristic.

In academia, I've been taught to keep slides as simple as possible, with as little info per slide as necessary.  My understanding is a presentation should be though of as an "advertisement" for the paper to be published.  Thus, presentation slides should be designed to preserve the audience's interest.  One method of keeping the audience interest is to not overwhelm them with too much information all at once (e.g., not too much text and not too many pictures in a single slide).  I presume this is universally true, regardless of discipline.

However, the overwhelming majority of national laboratory presentations that I've seen seem to fill up virtually every available space with as much information as possible.  Why do presentations from national laboratories tend to contain so much information per slide?  How does this meet the needs of their target audience?

Let me try to answer for the tendency in my own discipline (particle physics) where we have this problem across the board (i.e. universities too).

Much like questions and answers on a Stack Exchange site, those slides are expected to form a resource for future investigators. We know there is too much there for anyone to absorb in the meeting, but we also know that more people will dig these slides out of the archive over the next year and study them then actually attended the meeting in the first place.

Yes, in an ideal world there would be a technical report and a deck of slides, but in fact there are only the slides.

Personally I try pretty hard not to do this, and the result is a lot of backup slides and a lot of little URLs hanging around the bottom of the slides.

As an aside, I think that PowerPoint and similar polished slideware makes stuffing them (over-)full way too easy. I use a LaTeX base for mine (just the old slides class with my own library of macros for a long time, but I've started using Beamer) and these tools encourage a better style.

Alas, I know all the tricks to squeeze on just one more thing.


PhD in autonomous underwater robots I have finally found my true calling. I want to work on autonomous underwater vehicles trying to solve different problems from research to oil and gas industry.

The problem is that I am having issues finding the PhD positions for this:

If I search for marine sciences, I usually end up reading a PhD position about oceanography related to biology and physics.
If I search for computer science PhD, it is usually very broad as it includes creating algorithms for autonomous robots.
"PhD in Marine Robotics" does not bring many results.

I specifically want to work on making underwater robots as autonomous as possible.

The only PhD program that I found is in MIT, but the chance of getting in there is quite low. Can anyone hint me on how to search for this specific PhD position? Thank you!

This is a very applied field, I don't think there are PhD programs related to directly to underwater robots. I did my PhD in this exact field :) so most of this is my experience and knowledge of the field.

Generally you shouldn't worry much about what the PhD program says exactly, as this field is very application driven, so Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are usually designed and built in places where they are needed, close to shore or to oil and gas industries. This usually relates to PhD programs in marine or oceanographic sciences, but the most important thing is the advisor, who can guide and support you in your research.

In a University with "application" departments (like marine science) and "basic science" departments (like CS and Engineering), you can do a PhD in Science or Engineering of AUVs while working to solve some problem related to the application side.

A quick way is to go to Universities and Research Centers in Robotics, for which there are many and they usually cover application fields like underwater, space, rescue, etc. For example, Carnegie Mellon Uni has a Robotics PhD program, for which there should be Professors interested in Underwater Robotics. As you mentioned MIT also has a partnership with WHOI and they do a lot of Underwater Robotics.

But as you mentioned, not many Universities touch this subject. In general Research centers (not always affiliated to a University) usually have the lead in this topic.

In Europe, the leader is definitely the University of Girona with its CIRS research center. They design/build AUVs, and develop algorithms for autonomy. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Bremen branch (where I work) also builds AUVs and algorithms for autonomy.

In the UK there is also the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton which does a lot of Marine Science supported by AUVs, so they also design/build AUVs and related algorithms. In Norway's NTNU there is AMOS.

I know that there are AUV many researchers in Asia, like at the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology.

This list is not exhaustive, AUVs are developed all around the world. About PhD positions, that is something that depends on funding, time and topics, so its up to you to search these. Hope this information helps.


Upcoming dismissal as supervisor no longer wants to supervise me - should I just withdraw? Basically my PI dropped this on me last week and said that my work is not up to PhD standards. It's pretty frustrating because seemed like I was on track to graduate this year. That said, my PI has brought this up before - since then I had shown I was improving and had met his standards, or at least I thought so.
My school's official policy for my situation is that

A Student will be withdrawn from the University, if he or she obtains two unsatisfactory Graduate Student Research Progress Tracking Reports and the academic unit in which the student is registered recommends that he or she be withdrawn
The Student’s transcript will thereafter indicate that the student was withdrawn from the University.

Regardless I won't be able to work with him anymore. I've been looking for someone to finish under, but it is looking a bit hopeless right now. If I cannot find someone else to work under, should I just request to withdraw? If voluntarily withdrawing is an option, it seems better than being dismissed/kicked out.
In the future (specifically in interviews) I'd rather say "It wasn't working out for me so I withdrew" than "I was kicked out" to people.
I'm meeting with my department chair next week, but hopefully someone can give me an opinion based on their own experiences.

Does your university have a mentoring system? I think you need to sit down with a mediator and the PI to try and work out a solution where you can continue either under the PI's guidance or someone else. If you do not have a mentor, then you should talk to another Professor who you think will be sympathetic and be able to guide you. Something is terribly wrong if you are being kicked out and it is a surprise. You need to set-up a meeting and negotiate a solution, a meeting with the department chair sounds a bit abrupt, unless they can help find a solution somehow.

I cannot give an answer as to whether you should withdraw. But if you were under the impression you can graduate this year, then withdrawing does not seem necessary. You will have wasted at least three years (presumably).


Should I review the journal extended version of the same paper I reviewed for a conference? I acted as a referee for conference XXX where I reviewed a paper. It was decent and suitable for the conference, but I recall I thought it was too preliminary and lacking future projection for being selected for the special issue of journal YYY (which I was aware is prepared every year).

Now, I have been invited by journal YYY to review the extended version of the paper from conference XXX (at first, the title sounded familiar, but then the authors themselves declared it was an extended version).

So am I somehow biased against the paper?, or maybe am I the best suited to review the paper since the topic is already familiar?

As a practical answer, should I accept the review?, should I disclose the circumstance to the editor? (who I think would not even care)

Finally, as an hypothetical case, if my review at the conference had been deeply negative, is it still reasonable that I accept the journal review? (in this case being truly aware that I am strongly biased against the work).

I see no problem...

People re-review the same content all the time.  This applies to resubmissions of rejected conference papers but also journal articles.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I have been asked to review some journal submissions in the past specifically because the editor (who might also have been the program chair for the conference where the earlier version appeared) knew I had already reviewed it.

In this case, if you felt it was preliminary at the time of the conference, that does not by itself mean the extended version is unsuitable.  You would have to read the extended version and decide.  But just because you didn't expect to see a version suitable for the journal doesn't IMHO mean you're so biased you can't review it objectively.

P.S.  I'm pretty sure I saw a question similar to this in the past few months, but I'm not finding it.


How to publish new results for a paper under review? I recently sent a paper for review to a conference whose results will be out in 4-5 months. In last few days to the deadline, I've been tuning one subsystem, which didn't work out by the deadline. I simplified that part and sent the papers explaining the older method for that subsystem which I had done few months ago, though I had lot of expectations from the new method.

Few days after the deadline, I got good preliminary results from the removed subsystem and I see good amount of possible improvement in next few weeks. There's a conference coming up in a month where I'm planning to send the results.

Now, this subsystem isn't great by itself but significantly improves the system. If I write a paper explaining it, I'll have to put in details that I've already sent for review last week. Now I'm confused about what all to write about.

The results for the paper I've sent will come in 4-5 months. I can't self-cite
If both of them are accepted, it might be called as self plagiarism (acc to rules of one of the conferences).
Just new subsystem isn't enough to be explained in a paper.

Now I'm confused about how and when to send my current results. Should I explain the whole system in the new paper again, though newer contribution is 1/4th of the whole system?

There are three basic routes that you can take for close incremental improvements of this sort, depending on timing and the complexity of the work to be described.  They are:

If the improvement is relatively simple (could be fit into the existing paper), and is completed before the camera-ready deadline of the conference, then the best thing to do is to incorporate it into the current paper when you revise for the camera-ready version.  This type of improvement is generally acceptable in conference publications.
If the improvement is complex and impactful enough to deserve its own paper, write that paper and reference the current paper as "submitted."  If both are accepted, then the timing is likely to be such that you can change the citation to the final venue and date for the camera-ready of the second paper.
If the improvement is both too late for the current camera-ready and too small for its own paper, you can either incorporate it into an extended version of the original paper to be sent to a journal (I've done this several times myself) or else can post a brief technical note in a non-peer-reviewed but respectable and archival venue (e.g., arXiv, a tech report at your institution).

For your particular case, it sounds like option #1 (incorporate into the camera-ready) is likely to apply, but #3 may also be a reasonable path.


How to cite ebooks that have no pagination in intext cittion in MLA7? I'm writing my dissertation and the novel I'm working on is an ebook.

I tried looking for the paperback, but the English version is not available in my country. I tried checking on the web but all versions I found are epub or pdfs without page number.

My problem is about the intext citation. I checked citation guides and all I could find is that I can use only the paragraph or the chapter number. I think it will be weird to analyse several emphasized text quotes from the novel without mentioning their exact location.

So I was wondering whether I can use the page number mentioned in the adobe reader?

If you're worried about what is "correct" for your dissertation, I think you will need to check with your adviser -- I think different people might have different perspectives, and you'll only know what those judging your work will expect if you ask them.

From a more utilitarian perspective, I'd say listing the chapter number is ideal. Only the most critical or curious readers will follow the citation; for such readers, it will not be a terrible inconvenience to flip through a few pages to find the exact passage. The chapter number should be enough to get them to what they need.

I would not list the page number that shows up in Adobe Reader, because it's going to be arbitrary, a function of the text size, page size, font, etc. that you have chosen. The function of a footnote is to help the reader find the text, but using arbitrary page numbers may have the effect of hindering them, as they may not immediately realize why the numbers they're looking at don't correspond to yours.


I did at least half of the work, I am not cited in the presentations For some context, I am enrolled in a PhD in applied mathematics.

There is a recent work where I, my thesis adviser and a friend of his in industry have worked together, with at least half of the work done by me, I even tutored the colleague to help him start at the beginning.

This work got presented by the two of them at different conferences. Each time I wasn't cited at the presentations (except just once when my adviser decided to put my name in the first slide, but the colleague then uploaded an identical version without my name). My adviser still gives me credit whenever he exchanges with attendants or other academics, and yes I got my name on the paper, but two things still bother me:

the colleague never mentions me, he remorselessly talks about the work as being his and my adviser's only (he can't easily get rid of my adviser since he's well known, but at least he can get rid of me and no one would notice), the damage is beyond just talk as he also writes that in his updates to his network;
being a PhD student or not, and even if my name is on the paper, removing it from the presentations is unfair and damaging and just feeds the idea that maybe my name is on the paper just because I did secondary work or scripting/plotting.

This kept happening for a few months now and will keep going if this issue is not addressed as my adviser and his colleague keep submitting the work to future conferences. Some might see me as overreacting but this is impacting me in a lot of ways and the feeling of betrayal is hitting hard, I even stopped working with my adviser's colleague altogether without notice and started pursuing some of my own research goals alone without notifying anyone of my progress.

I just started my PhD half a year ago, so surely I may be lacking experience with regards to these issues of authorship and citation, but is it common practice to assume that a PhD student should just be content with his name being in a paper, but not expect to be cited when the work is presented in conferences, even if he put more than half of all the combined work? What would be the motivation of keeping me out during conferences ? Better to split the cake in two rather than three ? Should I bring this up with my thesis adviser even though the one who is clearly dishonest here is a friend of his?

It definitely sucks when you feel like you're not getting credit for your work, and in applied math, it is certainly not standard practice to omit mention of PhD students' contributions.  In fact, I've seen many presentations where professors and industry leaders show group pictures of their entire lab, and they're proud of the team effort.

However, passive aggression is almost never effective at helping you achieve what you want.

You seem to be on better footing with your supervisor than with his colleague, so I would start there.  Once you've cooled off a bit, schedule a meeting with him and mention how you've noticed your name is absent from presentations on your work.  Be honest (and respectful) about how this hurts you, and leave room for your advisor to explain.  It could just be an honest oversight, it may be intentional-- the fact is, you don't have anything but speculation until he explains.  Mention that you've noticed the same happens with his colleague's presentations, and ask if he could talk to the guy about it.  Again, try not to assume the worst.  There isn't any real motivation for omitting someone's name when they've made serious contributions, especially in industry, where large author counts are the norm and papers don't matter nearly as much as they do in academia.


How often should my papers be rejected? When submitting papers to scientific journals, it makes sense to aim slightly above the paper's level - after all, if you submit too high, you get rejected and can resubmit, while if you submit too low you end up just publishing there. Or so it seems to me.

An extreme strategy (which is equally impractical and evil) would be to make a list of all journals ranked from best to worst, and keep submitting to the highest ranking one that you haven't tried yet, until one of them accepts. With a strategy like that, the chance that the paper gets accepted in any particular submission is close to zero. At the other end of the spectrum, if almost all of your submissions are accepted then it's very likely that you're selling yourself short.

Now, it's impossible to know with any level of precision what's the probability of acceptance of a given paper at any particular journal. But it is possible to observe a general trend, and try to adjust your confidence up or down. Hence, the question:

If one is reasonable in their choice of journals, how frequently should their papers be rejected?

In other words, at what point should I start making a conscious effort to submit to better journals? At which point should I start submitting to worse journals?

For instance, my current strategy is to try and figure out how good a paper is, and first submit to a journal that's about the best that could possibly accept it, and then go down from that by a small but noticable margin. In a small sample size, about half the time the paper was submitted on the first attempt, and about half the time on the second, and so far I haven't had to submit anything three times. Hence, my papers get rejected around 33% of the time. Is this a reasonable frequency, or should I be more modest (or possibly more aggressive) in my choice of journals?

My field is pure mathematics, but I'm also interested in perspectives from other fields.

You could use the
principle of maximum entropy.

Thus, the first submission should be accepted about 50% of the time. When the first is rejected, next the second submission should be accepted about 50% of the time and so on.

This way you "make every time count": you maximize the amount of information (in the sense of information theory) that you receive from each decision.


Whom to cite when describing an argument in another paper that builds upon yet another paper? There is a research Paper Y which presents some experimental result. The author has cited Paper X to justify and explain the reason of that result. I am writing a review paper and included the result of Paper Y.

Can I cite Paper X in the review paper to give the justification of the result by Paper Y as already done by the Paper Y itself? Or will it be somehow called mindless copying from Paper Y? And should I cite Paper Y also (along with X) while including the correlation between result (Y) and the reason (X) as the author of Y was the first to correlate the two?

I will use 'Johnson (2016)' and 'Smith (2015)' rather than 'Y' and 'X' in my examples:

Explicitly corroborating Smith's (2015) hypothesis that mice love cheese, Johnson (2016) demonstrated that mice ate cheese rather than carrots, when offered both.
Smith (2015) argued that mice love cheese. Johnson (2016), citing Smith, experimentally verified this hypothesis.
Johnson (2016) interpreted her experimental results using Smith's (2015) conjecture that mice love cheese.

If you want to be critical rather than 'mindless' about Johnson's interpretation of the result, just offer alternative interpretations (with additional citations). However, if the original interpretation is plausible, and if the issue is not the focus of your paper, it's okay just to follow Johnson (and thereby Smith).


Creating a secure test environment for a programming lab practical I'm a senior TA helping out my instructor with restructuring the course in light of the coronavirus causing in-class cancellations at our university.  We have tools allowing our students to do their programming labs online, and therefore our class can still run, but we still have a lab practical that's a huge part of students' grades, and I personally would prefer that that not be replaced by some generic homework.

Would any of you happen to know of ways to make secure environments where a website (in this case, the tool allowing students to do their labs) could be loaded?  The student shouldn't be able to navigate to another tab or close full screen, and the website immediately submits code to the server when the time for the virtual "exam" is up.

I've tried searching for examples myself, but I'm not sure if I'm wording my problem correctly because I don't get any relevant results.  I'd really appreciate the examples you have.  Thank you in advance!

As already outlined in some of the comments, it is impossible to achieve what you want: You cannot control a computer to this extent without a severe invasion that would go far beyond anything that I would allow you to do on my computer due to privacy and security concerns. Unless you want to video-monitor students, you can also not prevent students from using a second computer, a virtual machine, or having somebody else working on their computer for them. And even then you need at least two cameras to see everything that the student is doing or that is happening to them and you would have to frequently check that they are working themselves, did not rig the video, etc.

On a more general level, controlling cheating on any exam that is based on limiting resources is already difficult if you do it in a setting that you can control (i.e., your room, your computers, your toilets, etc.).
By taking this battle to the “enemy’s territory” and limiting your knowledge, you can only lose.

I would thus suggest the following alternative.
This is how my programming practicals were done when I was a student.
I also successfully applied this to a programming “exam” in a course I co-organised.

The students do the programming practical with no restrictions except time.
For example, they may use the entire Internet, course material, etc.
After they submit the code, there is a short oral exam on the code.
Depending on the details of your course, you can very this exam in length and relevance, with the extreme examples being:

You grade the code and the oral exam only serves to ensure that the students didn’t cheat (and may be as short as five minutes).
You only check that the code is doing what it’s supposed to do, while the oral exam determines the grade and may also contain questions about other aspects of the course and deeper understanding.
Here, the oral exams may cost more time, but you also spend less time looking at their submissions.

If applicable, also perform plagiarism checks on the code.

Some pros and cons of this approach:

You somehow have to organise remote oral exams, but these could be just via the phone, if that suffices to establish the examinee’s identity for you. Also be prepared that this mode will amplify anxiety, language, and other issues for some students (while it reduces them for others).
You may need to modify your tasks to account for full Internet access and similar, for example it should not be anything to which a bazillion of solutions exists.
Depending on your topic, this may be very difficult.
The exam is more realistic: except for taking exams, your students will have Internet access for the rest of their career and using it properly is also a relevant skill.
The oral exam allows you to gauge actual understanding, whereas the purely written exam may be solved by rote-memorising algorithms, etc.
In case of group work, you do not need to worry much about some incompetent student benefiting from a stronger partner.
(I am aware that this point doesn’t apply to you; I mention it only for completeness.)


Is it acceptable to ask a question concerning a proof in a thesis? Is it against the "code of honor" to ask a question concerning the correctness of a mathematical argument in one's doctoral thesis?

I'm unsure about one argument in my thesis and I would like to discuss it. Would it be considered inappropriate? In which circumstances is it appropriate to talk about one's own work on the internet, i.e., when to be mindful of it?

Definitely appropriate.

A thesis is not a homework submission. You need to be the one writing the thesis (i.e., no ghostwriting or copypasting), but there is no requirement to work entirely on your own, as long as you cite the contributions of others.

A thesis may even contain no new results or ideas whatsoever, but just be a textbook-like treatise of a subject. In most cases (i.e., unless the treatise is really a lot more readable than existing literature and thus forwards science by making the subject significantly more accessible), such a thesis will probably be declined for lack of novelty if it's a PhD thesis (for a master's thesis, it's fine), but it does not constitute research misconduct.


Where does the budget surplus of a conference go? When a conference gathers more money (e.g., from sponsorships, registration fees, or public subsidies) than what was spent for organizing the conference, where does the conference budget surplus go?

Here are some models I am aware of; combinations of these also exist:

There is a sponsor (e.g. government, local university or some academic organization) that covers part of the expenses but their rules for sponsoring are such that you cannot make surplus. You will need to return some of the sponsor money back to them so that the bottom line is non-positive.
There is a contingency fund for the conference series. Surplus from one year is used to cover deficit in another year, or to support other conference-related activities in the future years (say, sponsoring student travel).
There is a scientific organization (e.g. ACM) that runs the conference series and takes any surplus (and promises to help if something goes wrong).
The local university that organizes the event will keep any surplus (and they will also be responsible for helping if something goes wrong).
The local organizers will figure out some way to avoid surplus. More free coffee, additional student travel grants, last-minute conference fee discounts, additional awards, free city tour, honorariums for keynote speakers.
Some part of the income can be flexible. For example, the registration fee for local participants may be fixed only after the conference, once all other income and expenses are known, so that the bottom line will be close to zero if possible.


Someone asked me for advice on their paper a few months ago. I pointed out an error. I received no reply. What should I do? A few months ago, a PhD student I had never met sent me an email asking me for advice about their paper. I have written papers on related topics and apparently I answered a question of theirs on the relevant SE site.
The paper was interesting and I was happy to give advice. However I found a mistake in a crucial lemma that puts several results in jeopardy. I wrote back with the advice and added an explanation about the error. I never received a response (not even thanks for the advice), and the preprint remains on the public preprint server untouched.
What should I do at this point? Do I write back asking for an update? Do I wait until the preprint is updated?
I guess what I am afraid of is that the paper contains results I am not unlikely to use in the future. But if the proof is wrong, that's a problem. I would like to avoid the public humiliation for the student to write in one of my papers that their proof is wrong and that I have a correct proof, or even worse for the paper in question to be published (because the student didn't care that I found an error) and then corrected/retracted once I inform the editor of the error. On the other hand I may be overthinking it as I am not responsible at all for these things: I don't know the student, they asked me for advice.

It's tempting to become emotionally involved here, but you need to resist that temptation. If the student (or their advisor) wanted to involve you more, they would have done so already.  If would be courteous to write back, and if they remember to thank you in a final version, that would be nice, but discourtesy is not a big deal.
If you did, indeed, find a significant error in their work, it may have been an easy fix (and they are just not courteous) or it may have been a serious problem that could have undermined the entire result. They might be scrambling to fix it, might have even decided it is unfixable and moved on to something entirely different. Moreover, the situation you describe may have other non-scientific factors in play, as a student would typically not reach out unsolicited to an outside expert without in some way involving their advisor (even if just as a cc on the email). All of which is a long way of saying that you have no idea what might be going on with the student right now.
So, what about the other reasons you express for involving yourself?

Should you be concerned about a manuscript with an error being publicly available on a preprint server?  No, you should not. Preprint servers are filled with unreviewed work that is, indeed, likely to contain errors, and anybody accessing them should assume as much.
Should you worry about an incorrect proof getting through peer review? No, you should not. They have your information, and if they choose to publish anyway and if then reviewers don't notice the problem, then that is not your responsibility. A correction or retraction would indeed be warranted and an unfortunately appropriate embarrassment to all involved.

All that said, if you are genuinely interested in making use of their results in your own work at this time, then you have an actual appropriate professional reason to contact them on that basis --- along with their advisor, who should be better versed in typical scientific practices. Say exactly your interest, and that you would like to know their progress for that reason. At that point, either an updated preprint or an offer for you to become more involved should be forthcoming --- and if not, I think it would be appropriate to consider yourself released to work in the area without constraint.


How to avoid being plagiarised when suggesting an idea to a potential collaborator? Say I have some idea about research and I want to suggest it to a potential collaborator (researcher).
Assume that I don’t know the researcher personally and have no any ties with him.
If I write my idea to him, there is a threat that he will steal it and proceed without me, right?
Is there a way to do this in a way that both me and the potential collaborator do not enter that risk?

You are correct that it MIGHT be the case that another researcher uses your idea without acknowledging you. However, the chances are much higher that your idea is not even good enough that the other researcher wants to collaborate with you. Keep in mind that the other researcher is probably an expert in his field and might either think this idea is trivial or is not realizable due to problems you are not aware of now. I do not want to demotivate you, but in my experience "That is the best idea ever. I am going to steal it and get famous" is the least probable reaction.

So to answer your question about how to continue: Your main task is to convince the researcher that your idea is worth the effort. It is much better if you already have something to show, some preliminary results or a simulation that shows your idea might work out. That is the best point in time where you can contact another researcher and ask if you can collaborate to refine the work and publish it. If you fear that the other researcher might steal your idea, you could also publish your preliminary work at arXiv. Think about why you want to collaborate and why you can not realize it on your own.

I do not fully understand his work and I hope he can explain to me how my idea can be realized with his methods: Chances are very high that your idea does not work out. Try hard to understand his work first. If you have questions, you can try to ask, but do not expect that the other researcher will teach you all the basics just because you might have an idea.
I do not have the time to realize it and just want to share the idea: The other researcher probably has no time either. Sharing is great, but do not expect much from the collaboration.
I know how to realize it, but I do not have the equipment: That is a very reasonable cause, but then try to do some calculations or simulations that show that your idea might work.
I can only realize parts of the work. For example I can do the implementation of an algorithm, but I am not able to prove that it works for all corner cases: Very reasonable, nobody is an expert for everything. But then at least begin with your part and show how it works before contacting a potential collaborator.
I just want to have his name on my paper: Please don't!


Is it normal for a department not to specify where a PhD candidate's funding will come from before the candidate accepts the position? I've been accepted into a Philosophy PhD program, and they have told me that I will probably have a job as either a teaching assistant or research assistant for each of the next five years and that there's a decent chance I'll get some kind of summer fellowship for one year. However, they won't tell me which years I'll be a TA and which an RA, nor will they guarantee my funding for any time period.

I'm curious whether this is the norm, both in Philosophy and in PhD programs more generally.

It is certainly not unusual to not specify where funding will come from, even when funding is guaranteed. Often, funding sources aren't obtained until immediately before the funds are used.

Research assistantships are probably the most predictable, because they can come from grants that last for multiple years. However, even long-term grants may not perfectly overlap with the timing of a graduate career and can shift from year to year. Project assistantships are similar, though they may also have similarities to teaching assistantships.

Fellowships, traineeships and other types of scholarship are probably the least predictable. They are often competitive, short-term, and although some may be within a given department (so the department knows it has 2 fellowships to award, for example) they still cannot promise them for a specific student until the competitive process is complete. An exception would be a traineeship/fellowship that is offered to a student for their first year, but funding after that is less concrete.

Teaching assistantships are often a way to make up the difference and to fund students who can't be funded another way, although in some cases departments may require students to fill TAships to fill a need. In my experience, when a department guarantees funding they only mean that they promise you they will find you a TAship (or PAship) if they cannot fund you with other means or you cannot transfer to a different professor who has RA money.

For your situation, the most important information you have is that your funding is not guaranteed. In my experience at large R1 universities in the US, it is the norm to not have guaranteed funding in some disciplines (humanities, social science) and to have guaranteed funding in others (engineering, science) - it mostly depends on the availability of research funds. I would suggest that senior students in the program you are applying to may be your best source of information: if you have an in-person interview where you can meet students, you should ask them what their funding situations were like, or if you already interviewed, hopefully you met with some students that you can ask. The program may also have some statistics, but otherwise you have to base your decision on a fairly vague non-promise.


Asking for letters of recommendation for HS teaching positions I am in my first year of a PhD. The only thing I look forward to in the morning is grading/prepping lab/office hours for my twice a week TA assignment.
The nature of my program is very stressful, and I am not sure I will make it to the fun part (research). I am very likely to never pass my qualifying exams to get to the research part of the PhD. Which is a shame because I have loved my past research experience in undergrad and the Fulbright.
And so I'm looking into teaching residency programs for HS physics teachers.
Should I ask my TA supervisor for a letter of rec? He likes me and I'm sure would be able to supply a letter of rec with some nice "show don't tell" anecdotes.
The risk is that he is a part of the PhD program I would be leaving. Given the nature of STEM PhDs in the US (Im not paying tuition) leaving seems a slap in the face, like I stole their money by taking courses without paying.
However I have always been under the impression it's best to get recent letters of rec.
Should I just stick to undergrad letters of rec?

If the TA supervisor knows that you are leaving the program to find a (high school) teaching job, and can speak to your ability or potential as a teacher then their letter will be a plus.
As for feeling you cheated the program - better to leave now than after taking their support for a few more years and leaving then. Some fraction of students leave without a degree - it's expected and not shameful.
Finally, I suspect high school physics teachers are in demand.


How to intervene with a student struggling in the major? As a lecturer, at the start of each semester in all of my courses, I have students complete a first-day diagnostic quiz on topics from the prerequisite course. There are usually a few significant under-performers (say, 40-50% success where most students are in the 70-100% range).

I then follow up with those under-performers by looking at their prior total course history. I always find a few cases that look like seriously troubled fits for their academic major. For example: Failing core courses one or more times and then passing with a "D" before repeating at the next level (e.g.: Introductory Programming for a C.S. major, Precalculus or Calculus I for a math major, etc.). Failing 5, 10, or 15 core courses over several years in the major (so far).

I feel like I want to do something to counsel these students, reflect on their choice of major, find the most profitable use of their time and resources, and/or find how to support or remove roadblocks if appropriate. But as the instructor, I'm not sure how best to do that.

One option would be to have a meeting in the first week and ask, "What difficulties can we improve on?", etc., so as to get off on the right foot and make the most of the time in the current term. Another option might be to say nothing until they likely fail my first exam and then use that as a wake-up call in the course.

How should I, as an instructor, intervene or counsel students who are struggling greatly with their major over a number of years?

(This is at a large U.S. community college.)

I can tell for you from troubled student student perspective. I have some friends with such kind of problems here at Brazil in Usp and I think the our academic culture have similarities (including eventualy diagnostic tests), maybe my experience can help you to think the approach.

One or another of my troubled colleages have to work a part time job to pay the living on the city where the university resides, some have some psychologic problems triggered by pression of university or self induced pression by a lot of expectatives and a no neglegible number have the three causalities combined in diferent proportions. And I think the culture of my generation (near 22-28 years) agravates that scenario, where people - having growed up with video games, internet and shinny especial effects every where - think to live fast and expect constant and fast feedbacks , what make one guy or another throw things to the air when the progress looks like very slow, even when need to be because the situation - the expected reality and the experience don't match

There are educational sites, like coursera.org, duolingo.com , brilliant.org and even the stackexchange that have adapted for some expectations of new users with fast feedbacks. In the subject, maybe electing some 'landmarks' to people don't resign in the middle of the way can be helpfull if is this kind of problem that ocuring. This can be real, I know a lot of strange examples, but the most intriging for me is the case one friend of mine whom had completed all calculus courses in coursera.org and got stucked for 3 years in calculus 2 ( and now he works as data scientist in a good enterprise )

If the problem is triggered by some kind of anxiosity, I think that if the students can feel they can count on you for a little and sincere talk in the final of some lecture or another, without being harsly judged - because probably they had heard hints for changing the major or something like that , a kind of talk that could be uneasy and even kills the trust - I just can think a good outcome being constructed along the semester

Well, I hope this can help


Is the curse of knowledge a real effect? This post is inspired by this question discussing what is known as the curse of knowledge - the ostensible effect where having knowledge about something makes it hard to put yourself in the mental shoes of someone who doesn’t have it, and the corollary effect (which is of clear relevance to the academia setting) that teachers tend to become less good at explaining a subject the more their expertise on the subject grows.
Question: is this effect real? Please cite actual research that supports your claims.

It is worth considering at the outset, that both the extent of knowledge possessed and the ability to teach are subjective and difficult to directly quantify. Therefore, when examining research on the subject, we shouldn't forget that quantification is usually based on indicators loosely correlated to these qualities.
For instance, gauging the extent of knowledge possessed would require some sort of a test (I doubt many academics would subject themselves to the indignity!). Luckily, subject matter knowledge has been tested amongst school teachers, so we have something to go by. Unfortunately, there appears to be a weakly positive correlation, or none at all, between knowledge and ability to teach [1]. Of course, ability to teach is measured by student outcomes, which is also indirect and subject to other factors. A bunch of other markers for knowledge have been  examined in the past, with most exhibiting weak correlations [2].
It is interesting that none of these convey the negative correlation that the 'curse of knowledge' suggests.
Conversely, more recent studies show stronger positive correlations between teaching experience and teacher effectiveness [3,4]. It would then be a fair assumption that the more knowledgeable academics would in general be more senior and therefore have more experience, and thereby be more effective teachers.
Certainly, many of us have personally encountered counter-examples. These encounters probably reinforce the idea of the supposed negative correlation, but are quite clearly a case of confirmation bias. Since the question is about actual research, I think we should just treat the 'curse' as a bit of amusing anectodal folklore.
[1] Byrne, C.J. (1983). Teacher knowledge and teacher effectiveness: A literature review, theoretical analysis and discussion of research strategy. Paper presented at the meeting of the Northwestern Educational Research Association, Ellenville, NY.
[2] Linda Darling-Hammond (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement:
a review of state policy evidence. Volume 8   Number 1, Education Policy Analysis Archives.
[3] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/does-teaching-experience-increase-teacher-effectiveness-review-research
[4] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/new-studies-find-that-for-teachers-experience-really-does-matter/2015/03


Is it legit to change from one university to another? Currently am doing my first year in bcom (accounting). I enrolled with a certain university earlier this year did my first semester and wrote my first semester examinations, but because of financial problems my faculty administrator did not register me for my second semester modules.
Therefore I would like to know if I could get funding next year will I be able to register with a different university?

There is no way to be sure about this—but what is certain is that you would need to be apply for admission and be accepted at the second university if you want to enroll and attend classes at that university. Whether or not this is possible depends on the policies of the other university. Note that many universities will require you to provide transcripts from previously attended institutions as a condition of application and enrollment, while financial holds are often used to "block" the release of transcripts from universities. So you may find yourself in a bit of a catch-22 situation.


Why is my paper "under review" if it contains no results? I've recently submitted a paper for review for a reputed math journal. The main paper is just 2 pages (everything else being in appendix), where I setup a new problem, and the central result I had left unproven. (I said the proof is yet to be done). I did not send this paper in a hurry, I had spent a good amount of time and best of my abilities to prove it, but couldn't. The paper cleared editorial screening (after being there for a few weeks) and went to "Under Review". What could be the reason to go to "under review", when there is no proof that has to be reviewed. I'd like to understand, what are all the things that are "reviewed" for a math paper that is "under review"?

There's a good chance the journal is getting confirmation that it is indeed a new problem. The fact that it's new to you does not mean it's actually new - perhaps you've simply not seen the paper(s) that stated and maybe even solved the problem.

The journal could also be confirming if the problem is actually interesting. It's not so difficult to come up with a new problem, but coming up with an interesting new problem would be something else.


Do all versions of an arXiv paper appear in Google Scholar? I know that new arXiv papers usually appear in Google Scholar within a few days or weeks. My question is: if someone submits a replacement of his/her arXiv paper, does the new version of the paper also appear in Google Scholar?

Remember that the way the arxiv works, the default paper identifier goes to the most recent version that's been uploaded. So even if Google Scholar caches an older version, it's using the same URL. Now if you make changes like changing the title and/or material parts of the abstract, then it might take a while for the new title to percolate through the search indices.


What does the term POI mean in the context of graduate admissions? I hear the term POI used in graduate admissions. What does it mean?

POI stands for Professor of Interest -- i.e., the faculty member that is most likely to take the most interest in your application portfolio and is likely to be your advisor if you were to gain admission.


Writing a new book on known methods/algorithms I am quite young but embarked on a rather new challenge for me: writing a book. There aren't so many books on this specific topic in my field: maybe 2 or at most 3 good references, with the first two quite old. The trouble for me is that although there is some clear original stuff in each chapter/section, the main reason for writing the book, the methods (some algorithms and numerical stuff, many equations) are quite standard and all good lecture sets (not too many) draw from these two books.

My book would be clearly better organized than the previous ones. However, the methods are basically the same. I mention that this chapter draws from x and y source, and sometimes that the theoretical part of a certain section is according to z source.

Would citing my sources be enough in terms of not having issues with plagiarism?

Plagiarism is literally copying the text (or making only minor changes to pretend that you are not copying the text literally). Writing a book about something that is known is not plagiarism by itself, as long as you use your own words to explain the "standard methods".

If you do this, and if you do not copy figures and exercises (if there are any) it is not plagiarism. If you do need to copy a figure you usually need permission from the publisher (because of copyright, but that is a different issue than plagiarism).

So if your book has a different structure, is written in your own words, and cites the sources, it is probably not plagiarism. Your text simply needs to be clearly different from the original text(s).


Is qualitative method welcomed by editors/reviewers? I've written two papers, one using a qualitative method and the other one using a mixed method.
Although I think that every method is significant in its own area of research, however, based on my experiences, I find out that my paper with the mixed method is more appreciated by the editors or reviewers; and my other paper with the qualitative approach seems to get rejected more often.

my qualitative methodology includes these sections:

the swot analysis that I've been used.
details of several visits with the specified date.
qualitative interviews to better understand the case.
sources of secondary data.
and the process of the paper.

So my question is "Is qualitative method welcomed by the editors/reviewers"?
If the answer is yes and it is not the issue so what am I missing here? Should I include something more? should I use a new method or kind of model to attract reviewers' comments?

Every research method can be thought of much like a movie genre. What makes a good comedy doesn't necessarily make for a good drama, and anytime genres combine deciding what is good can be different (as with mixed methods). Judgements change over time, and vary between sets of critics as well. Research works like that - what makes for a good paper is devilishly hard to pin down, and what one community loves another community can hate.
People with more than 20 years of experience in this process have told me they are still surprised how some of their favorite papers end up poorly reviewed, while others they thought were marginal or unlikely to be accepted won awards. Sometimes they feel that what was unacceptable one year suddenly became hot the very next year. Reviewers are conducted by humans, and lets face it - humans are a wild and messy lot!

Everything I've been told and seen points to only one solution: develop your own tastes and judgement in research to use to guide your own work, try to learn what sort of things some people like and some don't, and write what you think will be good - but then get other people's opinions (formal reviewers or informal colleagues) and revise according to what you think makes sense, but taking into account what other people tell you. Try a lot, get rejected a lot, keep at it.

Some things people have in common - almost everyone wants to know why out of all the possible methods you could have taken, these are the ones that are appropriate the research topic, and that the conclusions you derive are supported and valid given the methods you used. Some people care about rigor more than others, but both quantitative and qualitative methods have their own standards and methods of being rigorous, so you have to know your method and learn to speak about it clearly and convincingly.

Try different styles, different techniques, different venues. Read what other people like, what people criticize, and what they praise. Accept that there is a heavy random factor in both the sampling of who you get as a reviewer as well as how the weather made them feel that particular day they reviewed your paper, and get use to a whole lot of rejection and noisy signals. Improve what you know to improve and try again.

In the words of a cartoon scientist, "Sometimes science is more art than science".


Is it ethical for a lecturer to mis-indicate exam study material? Scenario:

Lecturer tells students six sections of material to study for the exam, but the exam only covers two of those sections.
Practice exams are completely different to actual exam.
Answers to the exam are in the lecture notes, but not the notes pointed to by the lecturer.

Questions:

Is it ethical for a lecturer to mis-indicate exam study material by instructing students to study material which is not on the exam?
What are reasonable expectations regarding the relationship between what a lecturer says is assessable and exam content?

I will address the final question you ask—if it's fair for instructors to write an exam but point to other material to study.

The primary ethical issue here is the question of intent: why did the instructor tell you to review the particular material. If this was an intentional effort to mislead students, and to feed them "false" information in order to catch them unprepared, I would say that it is somewhat unethical. (In other words, if you were told you wouldn't be responsible for something on the exam when the instructor knew it would be, that's wrong.)

However, if the instructor gave "recommendations"—along the lines of "it might be good to know X, Y, and Z"—then there's really nothing wrong with that. Telling you exactly what to do defeats the purpose of a university education, which is to learn how to learn! Ultimately, the instructor should not be spoonfeeding you information which you then regurgitate on the final exam. And I would further argue that if all you're doing is memorizing information, as you suggest, then you're also not really accomplishing much, since such information is very likely to be "dumped" from memory once the semester is over.


Why are computer science related degrees at some good European universities not ABET accredited? I was wondering why some good European universities in the field of Computer Science and related careers, I mean:

Computer Science
Information Systems
Software Engineering

Their faculties do not really put information about if they are accredited by some entity like ABET for example. I know that these faculties rely more on research outcomes, quality of their staff and also to have a very dynamic curricular scheme that is not so fixed from time to time.

So is it that for these universities the accreditation is not important? and if one faculty has to choose an accreditation entity which one would be the best for the aforementioned careers?

I ask this because I found, for example, that some faculties are accredited by ACISCS or other entities, but according to what I found on the web there were a lot of rants against these accreditation types.

I have not found much value in accreditation; it may serve to identify poor-quality schools, but most decently ranked departments sail through accreditation without any of their real deficiencies being exposed.  The process is thus little more than a bureaucratic checkbox for government or company sponsors of students.

If you want to gauge the quality of a department ... look at where its
graduates go.  What companies hire them, what universities accept them for graduate school/academic positions, what are their successful graduates doing 10-15 years after graduation?


Research plan for a first-time faculty application I'm in my 3rd year of postdocs and started to apply for Lecturer positions in Computer Science the UK (the entry level permanent faculty positions). As part of my interview process, I am required to give a 15 minute presentation about my current research and my three year research plan, and am looking for some advice on how to do the latter. The focus of the research plan presentation is not only on the ideas you propose, but in major part about how you plan to obtain funding for it and how many research staff you can bring in from that funding to support your research.
I've looked through some other questions regarding UK faculty applications, research plan writing and content, which offer some good advice. However, I am looking for advice specifically targeting early-career researchers applying for their first faculty position.
The two specific aspects I am concerned about is the transition from postdoctoral positions where shorter-term career plans are the norm, as well as my relative inexperience with grant writing (I've recently been included in the late stages of grant writing by my advisor, but that's it).
Of course I am not planning to take the answers I get here my only source of information; I have an advisor happy to discuss this with me and give me specific tips, and have been looking up information about funding for new faculty members online as well as through chatting with fresh hires in my department (with some hinting they rely on the informal support and sharing of more junior research staff from within their team while applying for initial external funding).
So, considering that I've never held a faculty position, have limited experience with grant applications (but an understanding that it is an acquired skill as well as very competitive and thus uncertain), never independently proposed a research project (tho I am always active in proposing and typically independent in choosing which approaches I want to apply to problems), and never formally worked with a PhD or a postdoctoral researcher for full the duration of a project, the questions I have are:

How "confidently" am I supposed to write the research plan? Should I write it assuming I will have a student / research postdoc available to work with, or should I also present a plan for the situation where I do not have "my own staff" for a while?
One major consideration is that UK faculty typically has about 40% of their time dedicated to research (rest is teaching and admin), as opposed to research staff (PhD students and postdocs) with 90+% of their time dedicated to research. Therefore the amount of research that one realistically can conduct would depend substantially on how much funding one manages to secure.

How many backup grant options do I need to include? I understand there is some grant options specifically targeting fresh faculty in the UK, so should I demonstrate that I plan to ask the appropriate parties for funding, or also try to cover the case of no applications being successful?

To summarize: I am concerned and would like advice about the level of confidence in the tone of a 3-year research plan for a fresh faculty member.
I worry that, on the one hand, including many backup options could be seen as "setting myself up to fail", while, on the other hand, too confident a tone would make me come across as somebody not understanding the competitiveness and difficulties in obtaining funding due to my lack of experience.

The level of detail is clear from the format: it's a 15 minute presentation with some time for questions, so I won't have time to talk in much detail, but I might be asked to elaborate on any aspect of it. All in all, I am a fair deal nervous, and I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions here; any advice from the perspective of applying for a first-time faculty position would be great.

I see from comments that the interview is past, but here's still some thoughts on this that might be useful for someone else.

I would say that your results at a 3-years horizon don't depend that much on funding prospects, mainly because you're not starting with those funds from day 1, and as a new lecturer you're certainly not expected to have an army of postdocs working for you in the first couple of years.

You might spend a few months writing the grant proposal, then the process will take some more months, and then from decision to start date there's more time... so assuming success you might be able to hire someone to start in a year at best, more realistically two. Then would you start immediately with postdocs? Unless you're one of several investigators in a larger project, that doesn't sound realistic. Rather you'll probably be supervising MSc projects, and you might hope for one or two PhD students to start within those three years, and with any luck get their first paper or two. I think what you need to pitch is a set of ideas that could form a grant proposal and some realistic-sounding MSc and PhD topics.

The bottom line is that you're being asked for a 3-year plan to see whether you can actually prepare a plan that involves medium- to long-term goals, rather than just think of the next development of what you're doing at the moment.


Do non-Russian technical universities use Olympiad-style math/problem solving entrance exams? In the U.S., colleges typically don't use entrance exams to select students. For test results they rely instead on standardized tests like the SAT or ACT. I heard that the top technical math/science schools in Russia administer entrance exams which are similar to math Olympiads. I am wondering: is this a Russian thing or do universities in other countries use difficult problem-solving/Olympiad tests like this?

In Japan, many universities have their own entrance exams.  For the entrance exams for mathematics that I've seen, there are several challenging problems (maybe about 5) to be solved in about 2-3 hours.  For instance, here is a recent exam from Tokyo University (this is the math exam for science students--humanities students get a different exam).  If you're a bit rusty on your Japanese, it's 2.5 hours for 6 problems.

Entrance exams in other east Asian countries are reputedly difficult also, but I haven't seen those exams to compare.  Maybe someone else can comment on that.


Professor to whom I broke my promise is now a collaborator. What to say? 7 years ago, I got a PhD offer from professor X. Thinking that I would have no chance with other applications, I accepted it. I signed the offer, and the HR was helping me with the enrollment process.

But then I unexpectedly got another offer, and I broke my promise. I apologized in the most sincere way my poor English could express. X briefly said he understood. This is morally wrong, but not what I want to ask.

One of my collaborator just joined the department of X. He wants to involve X in our on going work. I have no problem with that, X is nice, and he can make a good contribution. But what should I say to X to break the ice?

Should I start by apologizing again?
Should I just pretend that I don't remember about him? This is good if he already forget about me. But if he still remembers about me because I caused him so much trouble, then I will appear as a horrible person to him.

What should I do?

I understand that this situation is somewhat awkward, but I think it is important not to overthink this. It was, after all, a fairly long time okay, and at the time the professor said he understands, so you may be taking this incident harder than he is.

  But what should I say to X to break the ice?

I probably wouldn't mention anything, at least not at the beginning and definitely not over e-mail. Bring it up at an opportune time, or not at all.

  Should I start by apologizing again?

No. See above. Even if he remembers you (which is not at all guaranteed), starting a collaboration with "remember how I reneged from our agreement last time?" seems supremely awkward.
Should the collaboration take off and you meet more often and personally, it might be nice to apologize again, optimally in a social setting. Alternatively, if he brings the topic up, you can and should apologize. However, don't make a big deal out of it if he doesn't.

  Should I just pretend that I don't remember about him? This is good if he already forget about me. But if he still remembers about me because I caused him so much trouble, then I will appear as a horrible person to him.

You don't need to pretend you don't remember him. Just interact with him normally - even if you don't start a conversation about your last interaction immediately  (and he remembers you), he will probably not assume that you forgot about him, but that you are trying to not make the situation awkward. He won't consider you a horrible person for this.


What should I write in the experience section of CV? I have recently graduated with a BSc degree in Physics. I haven't had any internship before. Well, all internships last summer were cancelled because of covid. Now, I am applying for few internships for the summer of 2021. What should I put in the experiences section of the CV? Or, should I remove the whole section?

In the experience section of the CV, there should be (relatively) relevant experience to the job/internship you are applying to.
It is not clear what you want to write in the experience section. Of course, you shouldn't have a section labelled "experience" and then nothing in it. I would also advise against putting irrelevant experience in this section (e.g. babysitting 5 years ago) which would have the same effect to me.
Writing "internship in [place] on [topic] cancelled because of coronavirus" would not feel right to me neither, especially if this is the only item in "experience".
Keep the CV short and simple and then address in your cover letter the fact that you didn't do an internship at the end of your Bsc degree because of the coronavirus.


Can dissertation be included in publication part in CV In my CV, I include my dissertation topic within my education part like this:

From start-time to end-time
Master of something, University at somewhere
Dissertation title: something

However, I also see some people include their dissertation in publication part even though it's not published publicly. So, I wonder if doing that is acceptable and advisable.

I think it is best to put your dissertation under its own heading "Dissertation". Even though this wastes a little space it makes the thesis easily identifiable. The value of a dissertation will diminish with time after the PhD so you can change its location later you want to conserve space. But, particularly in your early career many want to be able to clearly see what you wrote up for your thesis work.


I found a published paper that looks dodgy. What to do? I looked into an article published rather widely in the media, but on a fairly marginal topic (perceptions of grammar use), so noone will die or ever bother to replicate or correct it.

The contents of the paper looked dodgy in analysis and setup, but more than anything else, the statistics look very suspicious and possibly erronous or at least probably mistaken in assumptions. I contacted the corresponding author for their data, and their editor for an overview of their data sharing policies. No answer from either for more than a month.

What can I do? Is there maybe an online web-environment, where I could flag potentially dodgy studies for further discussion? If the contents are as dodgy, what leverage is usually in process for a retraction to happen? Thanks!

The question is about this particular paper, but this kind of thing can come up a lot. If this was a paper in my own specific area of interest, I would maybe write a public answer, but as this is not, I'd just point it out to other interested parties.

A good way of posting comments, anonymously or not, with a good chance that other people will read them and react is Pubpeer. Although not all fields are covered, you can post your criticism on many articles. Sometimes authors react, sometimes publishers take action, sometimes nothing happens.

  what leverage is usually in process for a retraction to happen?

A good list of the cases where Pubpeer comments lead to retraction can be found on the Retraction Watch website:

http://retractionwatch.com/?s=pubpeer


Why aren't B.Th., B.Ed., Mus.B., B.Chir. or M.B. degree holders members of Cambridge's Senate? I don't understand the goal or reason behind B II 2 Degrees | Student Registry, but I'm even more addled by the boldened sentence below. Why aren't these undergraduate degree-holders members of the Senate? I know medicine (MB,BChir) is an undergraduate degree in the British Isles.

Holders of Postgraduate Certificates or the B.Th., B.Ed., Mus.B., B.Chir. or M.B. degrees are not thereby members of the Senate, so may still be able to receive a degree under Statute B II 2 if they are otherwise eligible and do not hold any Cambridge Masters degree or Doctorate. Holders of the LL.B. degree may become members of the Senate by having it formally re-designated as an LL.M., however, and all holders of the B.A. are entitled to the M.A. once they have held the B.A. for the required period.

To some extent, the answer is "because the statutes and ordinances say so". However: these are not 'standard' Cambridge undergraduate degrees. If you go to Cambridge and study a 3-year undergraduate programme in theology, education, music or medicine, you will graduate with a BA degree. The listed degrees are/were awarded for specific, somewhat vocational, courses - for example, the BTh is a special two-year programme for people training for ordination.


Can I still ask my prospective advisor (guide) for a confirmation letter in the middle of Covid-19 I am a masters of mathematics student in Asia and I wrote to some professors for PH D position in number theory. One of the professors in France said yes to me but he said that I should look for other sources of funding as his university didn't had PhD funding at that time. There is one scholarship Foundation in my country where I was thinking of applying as a potential candidate. But the Conditions are that I should have a written appropval from my prospective guide.

In between I began preparing for my mid term exams and then appearing for them and masters dissertation viva . As I got spare time, the covid-19  outbreak spread. It's not to worry about here but I came to know through news that it's very serious in France and whole Europe. Also, last date for applying to scholarship portal is 31 March and it will not be extended.

  So , should I ask to my prospective guide to write a confirmation letter in the middle of Covid-19 in his country. Doesn't this show that I am an emotionless person with no etiquette at all who doesn't even care about in what situation my prospective guide, his family and his colleagues are?

It is fine to ask. Life goes on as best we can manage. The situation is worldwide, of course, and we don't yet see the end of it.

In a letter, you could, if you wish, say you are sorry if the request is coming at a bad time and that you understand the global situation.

You may not be able to get a reply in time, of course, or at all. But there is no problem asking. There is only a week left.

And note that people will want to start up as normal again as soon as the situation allows. Things may be delayed.


How should one present research done in a CV to a graduate program in mathematics? This is a question about how to best convey research done to an admissions committee for graduate school.

I have basically two combating philosophies, both may be wrong:

state the "official name" of a paper that is either in preparation, published, or on the arXiv. Follow this with collaborators and perhaps the year you worked on the project.
State the field " Number Theory," state collaborators, and give a brief description of what we accomplished: "We classified classically integral quadratic forms that fail to represent at most two positive integers." Then give where the article was published and its name.

I guess for communication purposes, I like the latter, but I've never seen this done. That being said, I also have some research that is niche enough that the title will not be well-understood by a general audience of mathematicians.

Secondly, I don't like the first since it creates an asymmetry if I want to mention that I am currently doing research on my CV. I guess I can expand on my research experiences in a personal statement, but I figured that a brief description here is helpful.

I guess I want to convey the type of research I've done, since it is a bit diverse (not that much, but pretty broad) so I just wanted to know if there is a good way to proceed.

I think that option (1) is more professional, but also not helpful as it might as well say "I did X number of research projects, and this is their status."

There are some general ideas about what is "standard" to include in CVs, but they only go so far: you still have some leeway on what to include and how to include it.

It is fine to give a brief description (e.g. the abstract) of your works on your CV.  You should certainly also include all of your collaborators!  Either way, you should take some space in your "personal statement" (a bit of a misnomer -- it should be a "professional statement," not e.g. a narrative about how you came to love mathematics) to describe this work.

Finally, for what it's worth -- I was familiar with your paper on quadratic forms, and I just looked back at it again.  I wouldn't quite describe it as "analytic number theory."  It has some analytic number theory, some computational number theory and some, well, quadratic form theory (that's on the algebraic side of number theory but I wouldn't quite describe it as "algebraic number theory").


How to get a university to make an admission decision more quickly I received an admit from University A with an acceptance deadline of March 22nd. But my top choice is University B, which—according to their website—won't get back to me until the end of March. I definitely want to join B if possible, but the timing on A means I may not even have heard back from B before A's deadline passes. Is there anything I can do to speed up B's getting back to me?

Universities are aware of this problem. I suggest you either email or call the admissions office at both universities and tell them exactly what you said above, without naming the other university. For the first, ask for an extension for acceptance. For the second, ask whether they can inform you ahead of time about your application. They may or may not be sympathetic to your problem, but at least you'll have tried everything. Do note that if both universities simply say, "sorry to hear that, but we cannot do anything different," you will simply have to make a decision with limited information. Best of luck!


Is the idea of "boarding university" still a formal policy? In the past, most education centers were boarding schools in which students live full time. Still there are boarding school at high school or college level. However, for universities, students just tend to attend the class and leave the campus. Even, dormitories are just like rental projects rather than keeping the students to live in the campus.

Old-fashioned universities like Cambridge still have the so-called colleges which are responsible for student life (to live in the academic community). In this classic model, the university is investing in colleges to build an academic community outside formal education, which is conducted by technical departments.

Is it a formal policy for modern universities to keep students within the campus beside the formal education? OR they prefer if the students attend classes and leave the campus?

The reason that I ask this question is that social activities are conducted by student clubs. If students do not join clubs or somehow live in the campus, it is not responsibility of the university administration (and they normally do not care). In classical universities like Cambridge, keeping the colleges active is still responsibility of the university administration.

In the United States, it tends to depend strongly on the particular university and the population that it aims to serve.  In general, the more local and "non-traditional" that students are expected to be, the less that a university will feel obligated to assist in the arrangement of housing and board.

Thus, for example, a place like Williams College, where the students are mostly "traditional" undergraduates coming from far away to a small isolated town in the mountains, expects to house, board, and provide a full campus life for essentially all of its students.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there are places like Suffolk University, which is in the middle of a big city (Boston) and historically focused strongly on professional postgraduate education and on students enhancing their education later in life.  Suffolk doesn't even have a campus per se---it just has about a dozen buildings scattered around the center of Boston, and until quite recently did not have any dormitories at all.

Across the whole spectrum, most administrations will consider it their responsibility to provide a rich intellectual environment for students both inside and outside of the classroom, e.g., by supporting student groups.  The degree to which this happens "on campus" and with direct university investment varies greatly depending on circumstance.  No university in America, however, will attempt to confine students to a campus---some merely recognize that geography makes it more difficult for their students to leave.


How to improve myself as a lecturer? I am a new lecturer in the field of Computer Science. I got my MSc and I would like to go for a PhD. However, I would like to improve my teaching methods and way of thinking before I pursue this goal. Any recommended books or articles?

It may work very differently depending on the group size, their skills and engagement. My only experience (when it comes to lecturing, not - giving a talk) is with teaching gifted high-school students, for other cases (less skilled or less motivated students, or stricter plan) it may not hold.
Never assume that students follow you, just because they are silent, nodding agreeably, saying that they follow you or even (especially?) repeating your phrases. By interaction see if they get the idea, sort of get the idea, or don't get it at all.
(And "make it slower" is not an universal remedy, because either they may be totally lost at this point, or they may not follow because it is already to slow to keep them awake.)
After giving a course ask a few students is person to name 3 strongest and 3 weakest points of it. (It's important to do it, i.e. to force to give 3 weak points, because otherwise they may be not that willing to do so. All courses have >=3 flaws. The questions is if they are minor or serious. And beware that a mean grade of a course (e.g. student gave you on average 7.6/10) is almost meaningless, even if split into categories; only text based comments make sense.)
Be inviting so they ask questions (compare: "exams are a sick thing, when the more knowledgeable person asks question the less knowledgeable one". ) Don't kill the natural curiosity. And remember, if they knew everything, then it would be not point fort them to attend your course.
(BTW: One of my friend was giving a candy for every student asking a valid question, regardless if simple or hard.)
If the material goes slower that you want, never (once again: never):

cut breaks (without a break many could leave the other part, learning not less),
just run faster (it makes it even more incomprehensible).

Just plan better the next one, given you have some feedback. Writing a lot of stuff on a whiteboard may trick you into believing that you explained them, but in fact you did a chaotic, unpleasant lesson. Compare (excuse me for an entropy joke):

Efficiency of teaching is measured by mutual information between you and your audience.
Not by entropy of your blackboard nor entropy your created in their minds.
Both are poor upper bounds.

Other things:

watch others giving a lecture,
record yourself giving a lecture.


Summer school not answering my e-mail I've been accepted to Scuola Matematica Interuniversitaria, Perugia, a summer school for graduate students in mathematics (received the acceptance email on the 5th of July).
I've sent them an email (on the 5th of July) asking about the financial details and the arrival date in order to be able to give my home university an estimate of the costs (they are partiality funding me).
I have received no answer from them. I cannot send the enrolment fee and buy my ticket until I am sure I will receive enough financial aid from my home university to afford attending the summer school and my home university can't tell me if they will be able to help if they don't know the costs.
I've asked the summer school about the costs immediately after sending my application and I've been answered that my e-mail has been forwarded to someone who can answer my questions but they never did. After getting accepted I asked again and now I am waiting.
Is there anything else I could do?

I want to add that I would really like to attend the summer school. I understand that is a good learning opportunity for graduate students (I am a second year undergraduate student).

No answer after 2 days in not unusual. Dont forget that they most likely don't have all the staff working full time on the summer school and questions like financial compensation may have to go by the responsible in the inviting institution, and not the company paid for handling the practical issues