Hiring Committee Conflict of Interest? If you are being interviewed for a job and find out afterwards that a member of the interview\hiring committee had a past romantic relationship with another candidate what should you do?

As a candidate, the best answer is probably: do nothing.

You don't know for sure that there is an impropriety.  It's not clear that anything unethical or against institutional policy is taking place.  At my institution, for example, those on a hiring committee are required to disclose any personal relationships with candidates, and make a declaration that this won't affect their decision.

There isn't an automatic policy of removing someone from a committee because of such conflict of interest.  This is often a good idea, but it's not always possible.  Some committee members may be essential for organizational reasons.  For example, the head of a research group that is hiring a new member would rightly insist on being integral to the hiring decision. They can't be removed because of an issue like this--nor can people with a personal relationship to committee members be stopped from applying for a job.

In the real world, this sort of thing happens, and it can't always be avoided.  It may be that everyone already knows of the relationship and has decided this is not a problem.

It's not clear that this would affect your chance of getting the job.  Sometimes a personal connection unfairly prejudices hiring decisions.  Sometimes people strive to avoid letting this prejudice their decision.  And for something like "previous romantic relationship", it's not even clear whether the prejudice would be positive or negative.

You don't really know whether or how this affects your chance of getting hired.

Reporting is more likely to hurt than help your candidacy.  To report it, would be to assume bad faith on the part of at least one person who is making a decision about hiring you.  Reporting it would likely give you a bad reputation in at least that person's eyes, and maybe others as well.

If everyone already knows about the issue, your reporting comes across as questioning the work of the whole committee--not a good thing!

You could report it and hope to remain anonymous, but there's no guarantee of that.

Really, there is nothing unusual about the situation.  Even though protections are put in place, hiring is almost never a level playing field.  Very often, internal candidates have a leg up on everyone else.  Advertised positions that are actually earmarked for a predetermined candidate are common.

This is unfortunate, but it's also reality.  And because hiring decisions are always largely subjective, there is only so much that can be done about it.  I don't think the information you discovered makes this situation unusual in any way, really.  Try not to worry about it, do your best, and move on if you don't get the job.


What to look for when doing research for an institution-specific statement of purpose I am applying for a taught MSc programme in software engineering.
I understand that my SoP should be specific to the programme/institution I am applying to.
However the guides I have read so far only told me that I should do some research. And not what I should look for.

So far I have researched the following: Academic interests of the professors, if there are famous professors (answer: no), rankings and content of the lectures.

I have also read the prospectus, but found that it didn't add anything new. I.e. it contained marketing nonsense, the list of lectures, administrative information and some pictures.

Now I am out ideas.

There is also the point that I, personally, don't care about famous professors, the academic interests of the professor or how my school is ranked. Of course that is because it's a taught course and only takes a year. In a research degree I would want to get a specific research topic.

I choose the programmes I am applying for to 70% on the module description, 20% on the location and 10% on if the title sounds impressive. And yes, I am serious about the last one. That title will be the first thing every HR person sees.

That means that this research does not reflect my personality very well.

The institution-specific parts of your statement are like the garnish on an already-existing delicious plate of food. Your statement of purpose needs to fulfil its basic reason for existing, which is to explain to the people in charge of admissions why you should be admitted. You can do this by describing why you want to take the course, why you are likely to do well in it, and what you hope to achieve once you have your diploma in hand.

When tailoring this statement to a specific university, look for opportunities to point out areas where your desires match what the institution provides. Examples would be things like the department being strong in an area which is important for your career, or having links with employers in a sector where you would like to work. You've read the module descriptions, and that apparently forms 70% of your decision, so I suggest you start from there.

In short, to write a statement of purpose, you first need to understand what your purpose is. Then you will be in a position to link your purpose to what the institution does.


What can I do if my paper doesn't fit any arXiv category? I have a paper (A) that has been submitted to a journal, but is as yet unreviewed, and another paper (B) that cites A.
(The citation is necessary because A includes details of the preparation of a dataset that is used in B. The preparation is not central to B, but it is relevant.)
I am about to submit B to another journal for review. I think it would be useful to have a preprint of A available (and cited in B) in case the reviewers of B want to see it. Posting a pre-print of A on ArXiv seems to be the ideal solution.
BUT, the paper does not fit any of the subject categories on ArXiv. It is in teh area of renewable energy engineering, while ArXiv is largely confined to Physics, Maths, Computer Science.

Should I submit the paper using a subject category that is only incidentally relevant (Physics and Society for instance, or Systems and Control), or is there an alternative pre-print archive with a borader range of categories?

The archive engrXiv is dedicated to engineering. Wikipedia has a list of preprint servers where you might find other possibilities, but the engrXiv is the only one dedicated to engineering, as far as I can see.

There are other solutions to publish preprints as well: your institutional repository or generic archives such as figshare or Zenodo. Both accept articles and will provide a DOI.


If I write an unsuccessful grant proposal with one PI, can I reuse those ideas on a different proposal with a different PI? I'm a PhD student in social science, currently preparing for grant or fellowship applications with two Principal Investigators (PIs, formally in charge of the project if the grant proposal is successful). Specifically, I'll apply for a postdoctoral fellowship with PI #1 and co-write a research grant with PI #2.
As there is no guarantee that I would be able to win the fellowship or grant, I'm working on this with two different PIs (Neither of them currently have a funding to support a postdoc. It's been only a week since I started communicating with each of them, so they don't know yet that I'll be working on two different proposals).
I'm going to suggest research ideas to PI #1, and suggests different, but pretty similar ideas to PI #2 (Let's call them Proposal #1 and Proposal #2). The thing is that I would like to pursue research ideas in BOTH proposals in the future even if I end up with only one PI.

There's an overlapping research question between Proposal #1 and #2. If I pursue this question with one of the PIs, would the other PI be upset about it? I'm concerned that the other PI might think that s/he contributed to the development of the idea (which hasn't happened yet, but likely to happen as we elaborate my initial idea for application).

Suppose the Proposal #1 is accepted, while Proposal #2 is rejected, and I end up working with PI #1. In this case, is it still okay for me to pursue or study research ideas from Proposal #2 without having PI #2 involved? Or should I bring PI #2 as a collaborator? If I must bring PI#2 to pursue research ideas from Proposal #2, I feel like I need to be cautious about which ideas to present to each PI because I don't want my research ideas to be bound to a specific PI.

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated!

Generally speaking, it is fine to seek multiple sources of funding for the same project.  However, you cannot accept multiple sources of funding to do the exact same thing without permission.
You should check with the program managers of the funding agencies.   Program
managers say they spend much of their time looking for duplicate submissions and rejecting them.  However, if one application is to a government agency and another application is to a private foundation, that might be fine.  Or if the applications are to governments of different countries, that might also be fine.
The PIs should understand that it is normal to seek multiple sources of funding.  But tell them what you are doing and ask them if they are okay with it.


Conferences as publication venues – black and white or is there a grey or third way? There are two ways of treating conferences that are commonly mentioned on this site:

Conferences are publication venues for papers (or similar). Submissions will be subjected to a serious peer review, are citable as evidence, and are a relevant achievement.
Submitting the same material to two different conferences or a journal and a conference would be considered self-plagiarism.

This applies to computer science and engineering (or at least some subfields thereof)
– for details, see: Is the status of conference publications in Computer Science really absolutely unique?
Conferences are not publication venues.
The material presented there is typically also published in journals, books, and similar – but this process is not tied to the conference; it may occur before the conference, later, or even not at all.
Submissions are only subjected to minimal review¹, are not citable as evidence, and not considered a big achievement.
Participating in conferences is still considered important though.
It is common that authors present the same material at different conferences.

This applies to the majority of fields.

¹ to weed out utter crap or to decide what should be a talk and what a poster

In light of this Meta question, I am interested whether the above two cases are the only two.
To me, it would not be surprising if this actually is the case, as the two categories have a self-preserving mechanisms.
For example, for a conference belonging to the first category, weakening the criteria for submission would usually be a bad move.
On the other hand, I am very well aware that I do not know every field’s customs.
Hence, I am asking: Are there conferences that hold a status not described by the two categories above?
Please answer only if you can name and describe such a conference – if this question remains unanswered, this would be an acceptable and meaningful outcome.

Note that this is only about what is submitted directly to the conference for the purpose of being presented there.
Whether articles corresponding to the presented material will be collected for a book, special issue of a journal, or other form of proceedings – be it with separate peer review or not – is irrelevant for the purposes of this question.

Yes, there's a third type where a single conference uses multiple submission categories, and submissions to one category are thoroughly reviewed and published as papers in the proceedings, whereas submissions to the other category only appear with short abstracts in the conference booklet or similar, and may also be restricted to specific sessions (such as poster sessions).

I know such conferences in mathematical oriented engineering fields. As just one example, I can mention the Vienna International Conference on Mathematical Modelling. If you look at their call for papers, they have a category "Full Contribution", where full papers are solicited, to be published in the formal proceedings after the review and presentation. But they also have categories "Discussion Contribution" and "Student Contribution", where only abstracts are submitted, and there's no formal publication associated with the submission.

There are other conferences in the same field which make this distinction as well within their submission categories.


Approaching a master's in humanities after STEM-focused undergrad I graduated this past year from an Ivy League university with a double major in a STEM field and Asian studies (with a focus in literature). Throughout university I felt the desire to eventually pursue a graduate degree in the humanities, but for various reasons ended up focusing much more on my STEM work. In my final year, I took some courses in religious studies that reignited my long-held interest in that field. Since graduating, I've been constantly reading books and papers on religion while working in tech. I think I'd like to pursue a master's in religious studies, both as a way to see if the field is really right for me and as a way to beef up my admittedly anemic experience in the area for the sake of a potential PhD.

But to be honest, I'm not sure of my prospects of getting into a good master's program. I feel like my lack of background will hurt my chances significantly. Although there is a little bit of overlap with my Asian studies degree (the language skills would help if I wanted to pursue Buddhist studies, for example), I'm not confident there's enough there to demonstrate adequate knowledge and interest. Furthermore, I took more than a few of my humanities classes in undergrad pass/fail since I was being pushed so heavily down the path of STEM. Should I be doing something else before applying to programs? Do I even have a shot of getting into a good program? What's the expectation for applicants coming out of undergrad? Any and all advice would be deeply appreciated!

There is no reason not to try to do this and many reasons why you should. But the only valid advice will come from an admissions committee or a professor in the field who will look at your qualifications and goals.

Be sure to present yourself in the most positive light relative to the new field, of course.

There may even be advantages of your STEM background. Mathematics and CS, for example have applications in the humanities and the background can lead to many fruitful collaborations if you speak the language of both fields.

But until you apply somewhere you have no idea of the possible outcome.


How important is it, exactly, to use a rubric for grading undergraduate lab reports? I'm a first year grad student, and I'm TAing for a freshman/sophomore level general science course. The professor who is in charge left it up to me whether I want to use a rubric to grade the students' lab reports, and whether I want to distribute it to them if I do. They already have a "suggested outline" that they can follow to write their reports, but it doesn't assign an actual point scale.

How important is it that I use a rubric, as opposed to simply grading based on my "feel" of how well they demonstrated understanding of the material and whether they turned in work that followed or is equivalent to the suggested outline that they were given? I feel like I can be reasonably fair in assigning grades, but I don't want to be inappropriately arbitrary. Is it very unusual for students to be graded in undergrad science labs without a rubric, whether or not they have access to it?

Having a rubric will make your own work grading fairly simpler, in particular if what you are grading are reports/essays. It breaks down your mental process of coming up with a grade. For example, if you don't have a rubrik, you may have to think about whether as a whole the report should be worth 70 or 75 points. There are many dimensions involved, and you will find that you are juggling too many balls when trying to assess how 3 or 4 reports compare to each other. It's easier if you only have to assess them on one dimension, e.g., spelling/grammar, use of examples, clarity of exposition, correctness of formulas used, adequacy of citations. You would then assign a grade for each report for each of the categories in your rubrik, and the task of computing an overall grade is only one of adding up the points.

A rubrik will also make your life easier when students (as they always do) come to your office hours and ask why they got this grade and not that. If you grade based on a holistic view, it's often difficult to articulate how you arrived at a particular grade. It's easier if you can break the grading down for the student into individual categories. You make your argument why you gave the student a 70 instead of a 75 a lot easier if you can explain why they only got a 10 out of 20 in grammar, etc.


Are results from CFD analysis enough to write and publish a paper? Some intro :

I am a student of BTech Aeronautical Engineering from India.
And I am going to publish something in a scientific journal.

 Dilemma :

My research is about CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and has been, mainly, taken into account by simulation, as developing a real model will be infeasible for me, in view of financial issues.

So, is it possible to publish the results only, with the data of the CFD analysis result backing up my thesis?

Possibly Yes

If you are using an already validated CFD code, then any unique or interesting results that you find would be candidate material for an article.

If you are writing your own CFD code, then you must validate/verify it before you publish your code's results.

[In code validation,]

  The overall objective is to demonstrate the accuracy of CFD codes so
  that they may be used with confidence for aerodynamic simulation and
  that the results be considered credible for decision making in design.
  ...
  Credibility is obtained by
  demonstrating acceptable levels of uncertainty and error. A discussion
  of the uncertainties and errors in CFD simulations is provided on the
  page entitled Uncertainty and Error in CFD Simulations. The levels of
  uncertainties and errors are determined through verification
  assessment and validation assessment.

There are several methods of validation but the two widely accepted methods are:

Simulate a configuration that you can test, then test that
configuration.  If your code's results matches the test results, that's
generally considered a good validation.
Simulate a configuration that you can model with an already
validated CFD code.  If their results agree, that's also considered
a good validation.

Of course you still need to perform a grid sizing analysis and other tests to ensure/prove you're using your code correctly.


Ethics of experimenting on students without telling them This question is prompted by two very similar examples reported online: this one (also on Twitter) and this one. In both, teachers introduce aspects of the political system described in the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to a classroom in which they are (or will shortly be) studying the novel, as an aid to understanding the issues it raises. Essentially, the teachers ask students to secretly or publicly report on the behaviour of other students, introduce points systems and punishments, etc.

In both cases, as far as I can tell, the students are unaware that the experiment is going on, and it's more of an exercise than an experiment; its purpose is not to gather any data or test a hypothesis.

My question is: from a legal and an ethical review standpoint, what would a lecturer typically need to do before introducing these sorts of activities into their class, in the way described above, as part of a learning exercise?

I am not asking for personal advice here, I'm just interested in how this sort of thing would be assessed by a typical ethical review panel. I work at a research institute where we do have a very well-defined ethical review process but only for animal studies; we don't do research involving human subjects. Furthermore, several of the steps we would normally be expected to provide (sample size, etc) do not actually apply here since the purpose is not actually research, it is teaching "pretending" to be research: the experiment does not need to generate any meaningful data to fulfil its purpose (unless you redesigned it as a study of the effectiveness of this method in raising understanding of certain issues).

Several of the comments on Twitter noted that this would probably be considered unethical as described; the participants have not consented to be involved, for example. Does the fact that the 'experiment' is not (scientifically) actually an experiment make any difference? Lastly, these experiments sound like they are high-school environments; does the answer change depending on whether the students concerned are above or below 18?

Somewhat related: Ethics of conducting research on a class.

Virtually every modern university has an ethics procedure for experiments conducted on human subjects.  If an academic wants to conduct an experiment on students (especially one that involves deception) they would generally need to put in a proposal to their university ethics board.  This would disclose the details of the proposed experiment, and the nature of any deception of subjects, and the university would make a decision as to whether or not to allow the experiment to proceed.

Experiments involving deception of subjects are often approved (many psychological experiments are of this kind), but it is usual to require that the subjects be "debriefed" after the experiment, to disclose to them the deception they were subjected to, and how the experiment worked.  In cases where the deception is likely to be distressing to the subjects, or the gains from the experiment are minor, the ethics board might decide not to allow the experiment to proceed, or might require it to be altered in some way.

Now, with regard to the particular situation described in the Atlantic article, this does not appear to be an academic experiment at all; it is an extended High School class exercise that uses some mild deception to illustrate the world of the book through mimicking aspects of it in the conduct of the classroom.  Students are subjected to some overbearing actions by the teacher to give them a small taste of totalitarianism.  Nothing described in the article would be unlawful, since at worst it involves cases of nasty looks, overbearing control, or dressing down a dissenter.

High Schools generally do not have formal ethics panels like the universities, since they do not conduct academic research.  It is likely that there is significant teacher discretion on how to conduct classes, but this would be subject to oversight by the school principal.  In this case I think it is unlikely that the exercise would have been subjected to any preliminary scrutiny of the kind that would occur in a university ethics application.  Obviously students would be free to object to this teaching exercise and take the matter up with the school principal, but this does not appear to be a case of experimentation that would go to an ethics board.

The basic ethical question at play here is: is it okay to be overbearing and mildly bullying to your students in order to give them a genuine taste of what totalitarianism is like.  Personally, I see no problem with the exercise, since the likely distress to students is mild in comparison to the value of the learning experience, and the students are made aware of the deception after the exercise is completed, so that they can discuss it in relation to the book.  Others may disagree, but to me it sounds like a very creative and useful teaching exercise, and the teacher doesn't take it too far.  I think it is quite brilliant, and I would happily enrol my own children in this class!


Why are there so few MOOCs for the core college curriculum for a BS in Math? I've noticed that there are very few Massive Online Open Course (MOOCs) that cover the core college math curriculum, for example

Basic integral and differential calculus
ODE
PDE
Linear Algebra
Abstract Algebra
Probability
Statistics
Combinatorics
Symbolic logic
Complex Variables
Real Analysis

Anyone care to speculate what are the factors involved that make these bread-and-butter topics so much harder to MOOC-size or less easier to motivate professors to produce than Introduction to Water and Climate or Cybersecurity Fundamentals?  I.e. it seems that specialized niche topics receive far more pedagogical energy than basic ones.  But I know as a student that I would very much appreciate having the core fundamental topics available in MOOC form.

I feel that this is heavily driven by the job-market. Topics in academic mathematics do not possess the necessary buzzword status to make MOOCs profitable. Very few job postings ever ask for competency in abstract algebra, real and complex analysis, basic calculus, etc. Many job postings want machine learning, "big data," "artificial intelligence," virtual reality, etc.

When a MOOC advertises its wares, very few people are going to click on an ad that tells them they can learn abstract algebra and category theory. A MOOC teaching Python and "data science" intrigues a number of people who believe that if they can just learn a little Python, all of the sudden Facebook will pay them $150k a year to do data science.


Waiting time for editor's decision I resubmitted a manuscript to a journal (listed in political science as well as in International Relations and Economics journal rankings). The editor's decision was minor revisions. The email says that after resubmitting, the final decision will be made by the editor's team asap (asap=as soon as possible). My re-submission was more than 6 weeks ago.
I was wondering how long I should wait until I approach the editor and ask about the decision without being rude and impatient?
My question is also spurred by the fact that I am PhD student who writes a cumulative dissertation and thereby, accepted (or even published) manuscripts are important ;)
Any experiences, advices or recommendations are very welcome!

After six weeks you can probably ask, but don't ask repeatedly. Just explain that the paper is important to you as a component of your dissertation. You don't need a long explanation or a plea for exceptional treatment.

Depending on the journal, six weeks may be an instant in time. But it is long enough that it is reasonable to ask. If they are overly busy, however, your question may take a while to answer.


How to write a CV for a PhD application I am currently looking to apply for a PhD program in physics. I was wondering what sort of information I should include on my CV/how it should be formatted?

Given that the PhD is a research degree, I thought I should highlight research experience? I am currently working on a paper from a summer internship that will shortly be submitted for peer review. How do I draw attention to this? My Master's research project is still ongoing - how do I mention this at such at early stage in the project?

Any tips at all will be very helpful.

Thanks

Academic CVs vary quite a bit from a traditional CV in ways that will help you illuminate your research experience. While there are plenty of (conflicting) guidelines about how to structure or format an academic CV, the following sections are generally included (if you are at the stage of your career that they are relevant), not necessarily in the order below:

Basic demographic information (name, contact address, possibly birthdate and marital status and photograph, depending on the country)
Brief statement of your research area/interests/objectives
Degrees obtained/in-progress (institution, supervisor, thesis title, GPA)
Academia-relevant jobs (e.g., research assistantships, teaching assistantships, tenure-track appointments)
Publications (especially in the case of junior researchers, also papers that are under review/in submission)
Awards or honors or grants
Teaching experience (including in labs, if you are a junior researcher)
Supervisory experience (if you have helped co-supervise other students)
Service (reviewing duties, committees on which you've served, organization of workshops/conferences, editorial work)
Research project experience (where you can outline work that you have done in a research lab)
Presentations and seminars (especially if you have been to any conferences or workshops)
International network (if it is important to show that you have international collaborators)
References (presumably your previous supervisors)

In your case, specifically, the fact that you will have submitted the paper is quite important, because at that stage you can list it as a paper (under review) on your CV.

Regarding your masters thesis, you can indicate a working title for your thesis when you list your Masters under your education. This implies research experience and the area in which the experience has been acquired. You can furthermore describe under your research project experience what skills/roles you have had in the lab in which you have conducted your Masters research. (You can also indicate here your summer internship, since it sounds like it was research-focused.)

Furthermore, you can highlight the especially salient points again in your cover letter, especially if there are elements of your Masters experience that relate to the specific PhD programme to which you are applying.


Phd Professor as co-author I am an undergraduate student and while I was taking a class I happened to come up with some new concepts contrary to what my professor had told me regarding their possibility.

I have published in other journals but never in IEEE transactions, this could very well give a solid backing to any SOP I would write for my Phd studies. My professor is a Phd and he has various connections and stuff. He was impressed with the work and told me to publish it. However, I have heard that publishing in IEEE transactions is extremely hard: would including my professor as a co-author, with his doctoral degree, help in the review process? Not influence it or something, but would they at-least take me seriously? Normally, I don't fret about being published and stuff but to get a good school for Phd it's essential that I have this done. What are your thoughts?

Adding your professor as a co-author in name only won't help from the perspective of being taken more seriously in the review process.

Including your professor as a genuine co-author will almost certainly help in that your professor has a lot more experience in writing papers, knows how to write in a scientific way, how much background to include, what previous work by others is relevant, which results to highlight, how to format the paper so that it meets the requirements of the journal and is enjoyable for experts to read, and how to engage constructively with the review process. And don't under-estimate them: they might even have some scientific insights to add to your own.


Ideas to narrow down a master thesis topic within management scope I am choosing (by myself) a topic to research and write about for my master thesis. My criteria are simple:

I should have enough possibility to research the topic within a company where I work, or company where access to data is available.
The topic should be interesting to me.

Based on both, I have narrowed down the topic of managerial span of control and possibly related topics in corporate management, e.g. unity of control, matrixed organizations, etc.

I am having a difficulty, however, to go further and design the specific question(s) to explore, or hypothesis to build and test. I asking for your help here.

While I can have a fairly good data about the span of control within a given company (or several companies) that I can research, I will for certain have difficulty to obtain other HR related data...

I would suggest that you find a paper published within a good journal in your field and use it as a template. The paper should be (i) on a topic of interest to you, (ii) easy to understand (relative to the norm), and, (iii) using methods that you and your supervisor are familiar with, or can easily learn and use in your own research. To use this paper as a template, simply ensure that you are guided by the structures and logic of the paper in how you present your own. For example, if the paper is about how X causes Y explained through theory Z, you can simply reused some of the argument, while changing one of the variables.


Is it necessary to add mentions such as "Any opinion expressed in the paper does not necessarily reflect the view of the funder"? I sometimes read in papers that the opinions, findings, and conclusion or recommendations expressed in the paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the [funding agency name] in the acknowledgments section. E.g. in this paper:

  Stanford University gratefully acknowledges the support of the Defense
  Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Deep Exploration and
  Filtering of Text (DEFT) Program under Air Force Research Laboratory
  (AFRL) contract no. FA8750-13-2-0040 and the Defense Threat Reduction
  Agency (DTRA) under Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) contract no.
  FA8650- 10-C-7020. Any opinions, findings, and conclusion or
  recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors
  and do not necessarily reflect the view of the DARPA, AFRL, or the US
  government

Is it necessary to mention this? If the authors omit such statements, does this mean that the opinions, findings, and conclusion or recommendations expressed in the paper do reflect the view of the funding agency?

It depends on the grant that you receive to do your work. Most if not all grants require you to acknowledge the granting agency. Some grants give you very specific language that you must use in your acknowledgement (ranging from the request to include the grant number and use the full name of the agency to very pedantic requests for particular wording).
And some grants do require you to specifically disclaim the granting agency from your conclusions and opinions. For example, NSF requires the following:

An acknowledgment of NSF support and a disclaimer must appear in publications (including Web pages) of any material, whether copyrighted or not, based on or developed under NSF-supported projects:

“This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (grantee must enter NSF grant number).”

NSF support also must be orally acknowledged during all news media interviews, including popular media such as radio, television and news magazines.
Except for articles or papers published in scientific, technical or professional journals, the following disclaimer must be included:

“Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.”

The NSF example is interesting because you don't need the disclaimer for academic journals -- presumably because the readers aren't presumed to be idiots.
In any case, this is all part of the grant letter that you receive when you get a grant -- and part of the contract you sign when you agree to receive their money. There may be other terms inside the grant contract that are not visible (rights of first refusal in licensing technology, etc.) but by their very nature, acknowledgements are the most visible.


How does one teach problem solving? In teaching university level Computer Science, I find many students struggling because they lack basic problem solving skills. Having them do more practice problems does not help as they get stuck at those or somehow hack together a solution to some problems but cannot generalize to other problems. Walking them through some solutions does not help as they might understand that solution but are again unable to transfer that to another problem.

I thought math competence would ensure logical thinking and hence problem solving but I have seen enough counterexamples by now.

The conclusion I seem to be getting to is one that I do not like: problem solving is an innate skill - it cannot be taught.

How have others dealt with this problem?

I speak from experience teaching (and doing) mathematics, and supervising research students for some decades. First, as with nearly anything, of course there can be some degree of innate interest+capacity...

What I have observed is that ... seemingly inevitably... academic environments inadvertently train most students to worry as much about conformity to the teacher's expectations as they do about the subject itself. This tends to cause critical thinking to wither, and the whole thing spirals downward.

Also, by this point it is really not clear to me that mathematical competence is strongly related to logical thinking, and, further, I don't think problem-solving facility is much related to logical thinking (of the highly linearized sort that mathematics is often caricaturized into). If anything, the standard mathematics style seems to me to not only squelch the kind of experimental, no-rules thinking that (genuine/serious) problem-solving requires, but to strongly disavow that experimentation is a legitimate methodology.

And, indeed, in many contexts, exams and such are structured with time limitations so that experimentation is infeasible. Other traits can be rewarded in timed exams, but not experimentation, and, I think, therefore, not problem-solving (unless of a fairly stylized sort).

To draw students into a better problem-solving attitude I think requires more iteration than most courses have time for. That is, a substantially dialected/Socratic process, in which weak solutions' weaknesses are illustrated by just-slightly-hard problems that thwart the weak approach. Repeat and repeat. But this takes a lot of time, since the psychological processing of such meta-issues is not "logical", but something subtler, from what I have seen. Changing one's viewpoint apparently cannot happen overnight.


In US universities, are the sport coaches typically considered tenured professors? The title says it all. In many universities you see coaches for a team in some popular sport hanging around for many decades. I was wondering if in general those people had  a status of tenured professor or equivalent, or if on the contrary they can be "fired at will", if for example the performance of the teams they are in charge of are considered disappointing?

If the answer is really "it depends, there is no rule", then let me say I would like to know what status the Basketball Coach of Brandeis University who has just been fired had (see this Boston Globe article).

No, athletic coaches are generally not considered faculty and do not have tenure.  I've never heard of any place where they are.

The conditions of their employment would be based on whatever contract they negotiate with the university.  Typically the university would have the right to fire them for any reason, including poor performance of the team, but the contract might call for a severance payment in some cases.

(There could be small schools where someone is a professor and also an athletic coach.  In such cases I'd expect they would have tenure protections in their capacity as professor, but could be removed from the position of athletic coach at the university's discretion.)


Should I include journalistic articles in my CV? I have written a couple of articles for two different daily newspapers. In them, I have discussed the issues of my academic field. Should I include these articles in my CV?

If so, under what title? Is press release appropriate? What is the most common and accepted term?

I have written a couple of articles for 2 different daily newspapers. In them, I have discussed the issues of my academic field. Should I include them in my CV?

Yes, certainly, as long as you clearly separate them from your academic publications.  Strictly speaking, they are form of publication, so it wouldn't be lying to list them together with your research papers under a vague enough title, but this would be a very bad idea.  It would come across like you are trying to make your publication list look longer by inflating it with non-academic publications.

[If the newspaper articles had nothing at all to do with your academic work, then mentioning them probably wouldn't make sense.  However, it sounds like they do.]

  If so, under what title? Is press release appropriate? What is the most common and accepted term?

Definitely not press release, since a press release is something else: it's a document given to journalists to inform them about a possible story they could write about.  Occasionally newspapers publish lightly edited versions of press releases, without gathering much more information, but this is considered bad reporting.

I don't think there's a clear standard for how to list this information.  You could list it in several ways: outreach, other publications (if you have a "scholarly publications" section, say), writing for the general public, etc.


Any ideas how I could get people to participate in my live Internet application experiment for my thesis? I have developed an Internet application that I need people to run across the Internet to collect statistics to see how well the program works.  So far, I have used LinkedIn to reach out to my friends from my university and I started an open group.  I also have a Git page where the program can be downloaded.

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Andrew-Stantons-WSU-Masters-Thesis-6518497?home=&gid=6518497&trk=groups_guest_most_popular-h-logo

https://github.com/acstanton515/ThesisLiveExperiment

I don't think the participation is going to be what I would like, so I need a way to find more users willing to run the program.

Any ideas on how to reach others in academia or elsewhere on a broader level?

First: If you intend to do research, you have to pay attention to how you pick the participants. If you just take everyone willing to participate, there could be age/gender/etc bias in your results.

Answer to actual question: Standard way to do this is to pay your participants (though not necessarily in cash). Try movie tickets etc.


What if you can't publish in very high impact journal or top conference during your PhD? I am a year 2 PhD student doing my research in the area of time series analysis. Since year 1, I'm always aiming to publish in high impact factor journal (Impact factor >= 7) or top conferences, maybe due to the fact that my university is not a top 10 university in the world and I do not want anyone to belittle what I have done for my PhD.

Not sure if its stress, I got to the point where I'm kinda paranoid thinking if I can't publish in such top venues then my PhD is practically a fail. I want to ask if this kind of thinking is correct? How will my PhD be valued if I cannot publish in top conferences or high impact factor journal?

Sorry for any grammar mistakes, and I really appreciate any advice given.

The goal of a Ph.D. is to learn to be an effective scientific researcher.  If you accomplish that during your Ph.D., then you will have been successful.

Moreover, early in one's career, high-rank publications don't actually correlate strongly with being an effective researcher.  They're much more about happening to be in the right research group at the right time with the right guidance.

Now, if things line up for you and it happens that your Ph.D. also generates some high-rank publications during that time, it will make your next stage easier, but it is by no means necessary.

Remember:

Most post-Ph.D. careers do not require high-rank publications.  Highly focused fields, industry, teaching-centric colleges, and many other areas will care about the solidity of your work much more than its glamour.
Interesting work often takes a long time to mature, and important work often shows up in high-rank venues only after it has been incubating in multiple publications in "bread and butter" venues over the course of years.
If you do want a career that will be boosted by high-rank publications, one or more postdocs are an excellent period to obtain such. They also let you demonstrate that you are the important factor, and that it's not just that you happened to get lucky in your Ph.D. subject and advisor.

In short: stop worrying and instead just focus on doing something interesting and worthwhile with the work you're doing now.


How to quote a definition from a paper which cites another paper for the definition I have to write the definition for a term in my Paper. I find the best definition for the term in a particular paper, say paper1. I would like to quote the definition as it is in my paper. I believe this is not wrong and is not plagiarism, as I am quoting the definition with proper references. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Now, the author of paper1 in her paper cites a paper for the definition, say paper2. But in  paper2 I cannot find the exact wordings which I would like to quote, or else I could have quoted from paper2.

Now how do I quote this term definition. Do I need to cite both the papers or shall I put the quote with citation of paper2 as it is from paper1, and then cite paper1.

Please advise me what is the proper convention that is followed.

In general, citing the original source is the way to go. As long as you cite correctly there is no need to worry about plagiarism.

Consequently, you should cite paper2. Since you cannot find the exact wording of the quote in paper1, I would suggest you paraphrase the quote and cite the original source with your own words.

This would be much better than citing the already referenced quote in paper1.


How to become a peer-reviewer? I am in an interesting situation, I have a masters degree in electrical engineering but have been working as a software engineer for about 10 years. I have a lot of interest in doing peer reviews and contributing to research part-time in computer science. But I find it very hard to convince anyone to let me review their work.

My question is, is it possible to do so while working in a day job? If so, how can one go about signing up to do peer reviews? All the journals seems to want to see credibility before you can peer-review any articles or papers.

How can one get started midway through their work career?

As an editor, when I need peer-reviewers, if I don't know someone with expertise in the topic at hand, I look to see who has published peer-reviewed work in a similar area recently. No-one signs up to do reviews, it's up to me to go out and find them. Which means, if you haven't published peer-reviewed work recently, you aren't likely to get any invitations.

So, in my case, if you want to do peer-reviews, the first step is publishing something in a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise, no one will know you're there.

This doesn't mean someone who isn't publishing is never qualified to provide a peer review. But if I don't know you, and you haven't published anything yourself, I have no way to evaluate if you are qualified to provide a good review.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the distinction between an interesting paper, and an interesting publishable paper, may not be clear to someone who isn't actively pursuing academic work in the area.


Is Google Docs an appropriate tool to write a PhD thesis? I am quite early in my PhD program, and am deciding on what tool to use to write my documentation, principally my thesis.  My prefered tool would be markdown / latex, but my primary supervisor really does not like it, to the point that collaboration with this involves printing the document, hand writing notes on it and me transcribing these notes to the original.  My supervisors prefered tool is microsoft word, but I use linux and running a virtual box just to do my writing is a significant drain on the resources of my computer, I am often writing while running computations.

We are currently preparing a paper on the initial work of my PhD, and this is being done successfully through google docs.  Would this be an appropriate tool to use for my whole thesis?

My prefered tool would be markdown / latex, but my primary supervisor really does not like it, to the point that collaboration with this involves printing the document, hand writing notes on it and me transcribing these notes to the original.

This is an excellent way to collaborate!

  We are currently preparing a paper on the initial work of my PhD, and this is being done successfully through google docs. Would this be an appropriate tool to use for my whole thesis?

Google Docs is as good as Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, etc. Personally I think they are all awful for academic writing.

Perhaps your supervisor can use Overleaf? You can then use LaTeX/git in the usual way.


Is it possible to submit a PhD thesis with two authors? We are two students working in the same field under the supervision of the same professor within his chair and all of our publications are done together.

Hence I am curious: Is it generally possible in academia to submit a PhD thesis with two authors?

It is definitely possible in the sense of "It has been done." However, the only example I know of is this thesis from linguistics: http://dare.uva.nl/search?arno.record.id=123669 (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984)

Whether it is possible in the sense of "You could do it." will depend on your university's regulations concerning these matters, as well as your advisors and committee's preferences. They are the people you should talk to about this.


Applying for second masters/Which GPA matters most? I have an MA in Education and I've been teaching for 9 years at a community college. I decided to continue teaching but obtain graduate credits in another discipline. I have wanted to change from developmental to another discipline for some time. Which GPA will admissions committee most likely consider, undergrad or grad? My undergrad isn't so great, but I have a 4.0 grad school gpa. No scores were required for program.

A masters admissions committee will be interested in your grades in the highest level coursework that prepared you for the master's program you are applying for.  You did not say what discipline you are seeking a degree in.  Your teaching experience should count for more than your past course work, if you are teaching in a related area.


Why does the APA style call it 'the footnotes page' even though the notes are not placed at the bottom of pages? The APA style recommends the use of either footnotes or endnotes.

The term 'endnotes' means notes are placed in a separate page in the back matter.

The term 'footnotes' means notes are placed at the bottom of relevant pages.

However, I have seen official sample APA papers with a page in the back matter entitled 'Footnotes.'

Why does the APA style call it 'the footnotes page' even though the notes are not placed at the bottom of pages?

The APA publication manual describes the way you should submit your manuscript, not the way the paper will ultimately be typeset. For APA journals, footnotes are grouped at the end in the manuscript but they appear at the bottom of the relevant page (actually at the bottom of the right column) in the final published version. Similarly, you would traditionally put tables and figures at the end of your manuscript, one-by-one on separate pages but once published in a journal, figures and tables will be embedded in the article.

If you are working on a student paper, you should first and foremost follow the instructions from your instructor but there is no reason to put footnotes at the end of the document. The APA publication manual provides useful guidance regarding language or statistical reporting but it's not a typography textbook. In fact, some publishers ask authors to follow (some) APA guidelines for the submission even if the final publication will have a different layout than APA journals.


How to apply to do a masters thesis in the US or Canada when departments don't post specific positions? I am enrolled in a Master's program (Computational Science and Engineering) in Germany and currently I am looking for a Master's Thesis abroad, preferably in the US or in Canada.
Unfortunately, I am not sure how to apply for a thesis and to be honest I am walking around in a vicious circle.

What I've done so far:
My first step was to visit the international office at our university. The lady there told me that I should have a look at some university/institute websites, look for specific research areas/topics of my interest and write application letters to the respective persons.

Additionally, I went to one of my professors who gave me a list of people that he has worked with in the past and which probably might have interesting topics available. However, after carefully working through the list and writing down what looked interesting to me he told me that there's a 99% chance that my application will be ignored or denied if I don't explicitly describe what work I want to do. So actually his attempt to help was not of much use to me.

My main concern is: How can I know what I want to do if I don't know what is being offered? Most departments do not explicitly offer positions, in particular I haven't found a single offer for a master thesis at US/Canada department sites.

My area of interests involves fields such as the numerical treatment of partial differential equations (e.g. finite elements, solvers for hyperbolic problems...), numerical linear algebra, etc.
However, if there is no disclosure of potential necessities for a master student I don't see a chance to describe my interests more specific than that. On the other hand, I am afraid that my applications will be interpreted as "bulk letters" if I just write down everything that I would like to work with.

I also thought of reading through some publications/papers of the respective persons, which would be very time consuming. But regarding the fact that I can have at most a slight insight into the respective topics and that I don't even know if there is any need for further work at a master student's level I don't think it is reasonable to spend too much time with that without a gleam of any success.

I would appreciate if someone could help me with some hints on how to come across that. It would be even better if someone who faced the same situation and succeeded could share her/his approach.

Master's have a different meaning in North-America than in Germany. While the Master's thesis typically closes the university studies in Germany, it is considered 'graduate studies' in North America (the Bachelor is considered the 'university degree' and the majority of students join the workforce with it). Masters are either specializations or given to graduate students who wish or have to stop graduate school before completing a PhD. That is the reason why you didn't find any offers for 'Master's theses' on institution websites there.

You approach of asking a local faculty for contacts is probably your best shot, don't give up. Narrow down to a few options and write them an email, explaining your skills, interests and field of study. Ask if they can think of a possible project for you. In your inquiries explain the requirements for a foreign Master thesis host at your university. Stress out the fact that you are merely asking for the right to use the local facilities and a co-supervision of your work. In my case, a professor told me about a project he had in mind, and I expanded it in a short proposal that was accepted by the local faculty and my program.

North-American professors have to worry about funding for their local Master students. You have to make clear that you want to be a visiting student and thus you will most likely be able to waive tuition fees (with some exceptions, like MIT). Along that line, explain that like Masters students in Germany, you will pay for your ramen noodles yourself and don't necessarily need a stipend if it can't be provided (on that note, Canada and the USA require that you prove you have sufficient means to support yourself while on their territory, so start a piggy bank).

With this in mind, there are few reasons for a group leader abroad not to consider your project, since you might contribute to their research while not costing anything. These few reasons include: too much supervision burden already.


Would you discourage your undergrad from taking a year off to work on a self-devised project? The student is in fourth semester and wants to learn about a certain technical field on his own and try out a more complex project on that knowledge.
The project idea is unique, but unlikely to be successfull, as similar projects in the past have not been. He would learn something, ideally.

Would you say it is injudicious to discourage him or would you actively discourage him? The project is an electronics project.

When I was an undergraduate, students in my peer group undertook serious summer research projects (up to 4 months), and worked on research part time during the year in their 3rd year, perhaps equivalent to the load of one or two courses. This seems about right, as all of coursework, graduating in a timely fashion, and research experience are important for grad school-bound students.

If the student wants to disrupt coursework for a project, it is absolutely your responsibility as an advisor to dissuade the student if you think the project will fail. You would do the same to a Ph.D. student about to delay his or her program for exactly the same reason.

If the student had a very compelling project, this would be a tougher call, and you might have to have a more complex discussion with the student about the risks and possible upshot. There's a real if not overglorified trend of students ditching college halfway through to become Silicon Valley rockstars, without their degree to prove themselves. The student might have something like this in mind, and your viewpoint based on years of experience seeing where undergrad careers go is probably useful.


How to acknowledge an "anonymous" referee who identified themselves I believe that I'm in a rather unusual situation and, as the title suggests, there is some uncertainty about how I should acknowledge a particular referee. This referee was supposed to be anonymous, but clearly (and deliberately) identified themselves in their report for historical context.

  Should I identify this person in the acknowledgements section, or is
  it rude to thank the referees collectively without identifying this
  person?

Thanks.

I agree with @Boris Bukh's comment: as a general rule, feel free to acknowledge whom you want...but if there is any real worry that your acknowledgment could be received unfavorably, ask the acknowledgee first.

I think yours is a "nondegenerate case" of that above principle.  In particular, by choosing your language carefully, you can acknowledge the non-anonymous referee without disclosing that they were a referee.  E.g. you could write "I would like to thank A. Professor for XX.  I would also like to thank the referees for YY."  As long as XX does not equal YY, you are not being dishonest or misleading; you are just choosing not to reveal certain information.  (If XX equals YY, it's not so clear why you need to acknowledge A. Professor by name.)  If you decide to do this, sending the proposed acknowledging text to A. Professor for their approval might be a good idea.


TV-L 13 contract before the official masters degree I am currently finishing my masters in Germany and I will start my PhD soon. I will be having a TV-L contract, however, I haven't acquired my official diploma yet. In case that the bureaucratic stuff are not finished before my starting day, would I still be able to sign the contract by proving I have submitted my thesis (or getting something like 4,0 bescheinigung)? Or do I have to wait until I am officially graduated?

I know some people who signed their contract with "4,0 Bescheinigung" and got the final mark afterwards. As far as I know submitting your thesis is not enough, you have to prove that you passed your masters.

But it would be better if you ask your supervisor or the people in the HR.


How common are interviews for Computer Science PhD programs? I am applying for admission to several CS PhD programs (in the US), and I am just wondering how common it is for schools to request interviews with the candidates. I will be out of the country for much of January which seems like a prime time for interviews to take place, so I am wondering if I should start making alternate plans. Thank you!

Extremely uncommon

I understand that interviews are fairly common in other fields and in other countries, but they are rare in computer science in the US. In my experience (student, postdoc, or faculty at five different American CS departments; multiple years on graduate admissions committees; dozens of recommendation letters for CS undergraduates applying to graduate school), very few (if any) American computer science departments include interviews as a standard part of the PhD application process.

There are rare exceptions, though, usually involving prospective advisors calling up applicants directly.  The most common reason for a phone interview in my department is to assess their English fluency, especially when the applicant's test scores are borderline, or there seems to be a discrepancy between their test scores and the fluency of their statements.  I'd be surprised if this happens more than 10 times a year, and we get 2000 grad applications each year.

When I applied to Berkeley's PhD program, I was already a PhD student at UC Irvine. My future advisor and the director of grad admissions called me to ask why I wanted to move when I seemed to be succeeding in my current program (good advisor, good research progress, and so on).  I suspect they also wanted to understand the discrepancy betwen my grad school grades (good) and my undergrad grades (terrible).

In short, as long as there's nothing borderline or non-standard in your application, it's unlikely that you'd need to be available for an interview. And even if someone does want to interview you, they're much more likely to want to do it by phone or skype than in person.


How to deal with students who lose their digital work? In my courses, students work on large, on-going projects, but submit some parts each week, showing their progress. All of the work is done on a computer or table.

Mid-semester, I always get reports from students of technical failures, e.g.:

Deleted entire project folder.
Reformatted hard drive or upgraded system without backup.
Sent computer to be repaired, cannot work on project until it returns.
USB not unmounted, files broken.
Device containing project folder lost or stolen.

I want to create a policy which is not so harsh as to turn all of these students away. At the same time, I worry if I am a little lenient, students will start claiming problems every time they forget to do their homework. What is a good policy that is not too harsh, recognizing that technical problems do happen, yet which cannot be too easily abused?

You should deal with them in the same way that you deal with students who claim to have lost non-digital work.  Here are two reasons:

This is not really any different from when students complained that "the dog ate my homework."  Both paper and digital formats are susceptible to being damaged, lost, or destroyed.

They will not get any special exceptions from their boss when they lose important digital documents in a real job.

My students do most of their work in digital formats and I've never made special exceptions.  I suppose I would do so in some unusual circumstances (say, a university server where they were told to store their work had been hacked).
If you want to help them develop better digital work habits, introduce them to backups, Dropbox and/or version control.  But I don't think that is your job.


Can I ask for co-authorship if I share code and am willing to help applying code to the problem? Recently I have been asked to share some source code I have written
with another PhD student. I have developed and used the methods in
that source code for the purposes of my own research. The code will
save her approximately 2 months of development/testing. I'm prepared
also to offer additional help with data pre/post-processing & writing.

Given the above, am I entitled to ask for co-authorship?

You can discuss with her and her advisor whether your help warrants authorship, but it would be rather unhelpful to refuse her even if she or her advisor declines.  I would say, if this is true, (1) Sure!  I'd love for more good research to come from my work! and (2) Since my project isn't published yet, we'll need to include a good description in the methods and it probably makes sense for me to be a coauthor.

If the target journal particularly advocates open-data and open-access, you might have to release your work in order for them to get it published.  It's important to talk through first to make sure everyone's okay with that.  In general it's a fantastic idea since it means that work is not so difficult to replicate, and if you have a valuable tool maybe others will benefit from it.  But when you're laboring to finish your own work in time and worried about its perceived novelty, it can seem a little less appealing.

Just have the discussion (in a friendly manner) now so there aren't any unpleasant surprises later.


My supervisor avoiding me -- what to do? I'm doing a masters. My thesis supervisor made our relationship a bit more personal and friendly: added me on Facebook, invited me for couple of dinners and we used to hangout sometimes and talk on articles at bars. Now he's for some reason avoiding me, answers emails/messages after couple of days (he used to do it in less than a day tops) and very cold and short. A very big problem is that I'm taking a lot of credits with him this semester (individual research work) and not only I have this fear that he might give me bad grades (he can do that simply by calling my work low quality; there's no objective criteria for the kind of individual course that I'm taking), he might end up not writing me a reference letter for my PhD, which is bad because first, a lot of credits under the name of individual work will remain unexplained, and second, I suppose it's awful that the one that I have worked with a my supervisor doesn't write me a letter.

What should I do?

PS: He's not physically accessible until the end of summer, except that for a 2 days conference that we'll be meeting in a week.

=======================

UPDATE:
I messaged him just like @aparente001 had advised me, but shorter (with the question that @cag51 suggested to ask face-to-face). He answered me in a minute a sat up a meeting time for that day's tomorrow (we were supposed to have a meeting before, which didn't happen). Then I realized that he has been only super busy and there's nothing else that plays any role (at least that's what he said). So, asking him worked even before a face-to-face talk. Thank you for your help!

Professors are not always the people who would win a prize at interpersonal relationships.

Professors often have significant stressors in their lives.

So please don't assume this is about you.  For example, perhaps the professor will be up for tenure next year and is trying to crank out as much work as humanly possible, despite feeling almost crippling anxiety, and has decided that it's necessary to minimize non-productive interactions so as to maximize the hours in the day available for research.

If you yourself are feeling anxious, unsure whether you are cutting the mustard, then ask.  If it's difficult to ask this question in person, then you could send a preview of your question via email, a few days prior to your meeting, to give time to prepare.  Here is one way such a question could be broached:

  Dear Prof. X,
  I am enjoying working hard on my project!  But I would also like to find out how I am doing, objectively.  Could we check in briefly about this when we meet next week?  I am interested to know: What do you think is going well, what areas do you feel I need to improve in, do you have any suggestions for me, to get the most out of my time working with you, are there things you would rather I handle differently?  This is the sort of feedback I'm hoping to get when we meet.  I think that periodic constructive feedback will help me become an asset to your group.

Be prepared to take notes.  Don't argue or defend yourself.  Thank the professor for the feedback.  Don't get too frustrated if your professor doesn't know how to do this sort of feedback session smoothly.  Remember, the main purpose in asking this is so you won't have to rely entirely on your overactive imagination.


Is it necessary to discuss the reason of the algorithm choice in my paper? In my paper, I used a specific ML algorithm for modeling and I wonder if it necessary to discuss the reason why I chose this algorithm instead of the others?

If you considered others and chose one, then it would probably add to the value of your paper to explain the choice. If you rejected some for important reasons then others would benefit from that knowledge.
But if you just chose randomly, then people will wonder if your work has sufficient value. And if you say nothing, they might wonder why.
If you compared two or more algorithms and got different results, then people will want to know why.
So, I think it is probably a better idea to say something if you can.


Can one recommendation letter from professor and two from internships help in MS applications? The university applications for MS in Computer Science requires 3 recommendation letters. I am confused between choosing my professors or industry mentors.

Potential people:

Assistant professor
Mentor at a remote research related project from a prestigious university
CEO of an internet based company
Other professors/ head of department

I have a professor under whom I did several important research projects and have, also, taken his classes and labs. He is very pleased with my performance and he eager to provide a recommendation letter. He is an assistant professor at my university.

In case of other professors, I have never worked on any research projects so, the recommendation letter will be average in my opinion, as they will talk about classes and labs I took under them. This, also, applies for the head of the department. For this reason, I do not prefer to take one from them.

I did two remote internships. One person is from a very prestigious university. I am not sure as he prefers to keep the letter confidential. I did some research related work under him and basically, managed several teams.

Another person is the CEO of a company and is expected to provide a strong letter as he is pleased with my performance.

I am confused regarding whom should I approach for the letter? As this will be an important deciding factor, kindly share your opinions.

As a general rule, I would take recommendations from people who worked with me directly. Then, I would look for people who were pleased by my performance. Third, I would take the recommendations most relevant to the position I'm applying for.

It matters to some extent how famous is the person recommending you, but I think the graduate committee would be more interested in a letter coming from someone you worked with such as the assistant professor, the professor and CEO you did internships for. That letter is more likely to be more factual and tell the committee what you have actually done while working with those people. I would be happy to see in a student's application letter that they actually managed work teams.

In your case, you don't have to ask people you only took classes with. I remember when I had to write recommendations for students who did well in my class. I still didn't know what to say beyond what I knew from their course work. I think they might have deserved better than that, but I couldn't offer more.


How to diagnose problems in a paper rejected in pre-review? Two weeks after sending my manuscript to a journal, it was rejected in the pre-review stage and hence, there were no comments from reviewers about problems with the paper.

Can poor scientific writing be the reason for this fast rejection?
What do editors do in the pre-review stage?
How can I diagnose problems with a rejected paper?

  Thank you for submitting your article to AIDS.

  Unfortunately, your paper did not receive a high enough priority
  rating, and the Editors have decided that it should not be accepted
  for publication in AIDS.

  Decisions regarding acceptance of papers in AIDS are made in reference
  to the Editors pre-review and also in relation to the standard of
  other papers submitted. Our rejection rate is more than 70% and to
  save time the Editors of the Journal collectively evaluate submissions
  and consider whether a panel of other reviewers should review the
  article by determining if it would be of high enough interest to be
  selected for publication. On this occasion the Editors assessed your
  article without asking for formal reviews. There are therefore no
  reviewers' comments.

  Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. We
  regret that we cannot publish your paper at this time, but we hope
  that you will consider submitting future papers to AIDS.

The pre-review stage is generally a very quick assessment of the manuscript in which editors go through it to check primarily whether the article matches the scope of the journal, the level of novelty of the study, and how interesting it would be to the target audience. For a journal that has a 70 percent rejection rate, I don't think they would give enough time to a paper at the pre-review stage to reject it on the basis of the writing style, unless the style is really very bad. They would probably just read the cover letter, abstract, and results and discussion section carefully and skim through the rest of the paper.

I don't think there is any way to learn more about the reasons for rejection from the journal. However, don't get upset or think that the quality of your paper is not good. Since this journal has such a high rejection rate, it is natural that only the very best or the most path breaking studies will find their way to this journal. This journal might not consider your study novel enough or interesting enough, but there are many other journals that will find it interesting. At this stage, there isn't much that you can do to improve your paper, as you haven't received any reviewer comments. You will have to just submit it to the next journal and hope that the paper goes through peer review.


How can I do a literature review efficiently? For a new project I want to compile a literature review to determine the state of the art and possible approaches to start with.

Last time I adhered to the following scheme, but it felt very inefficient.

Search scholar.google with relevant keywords. (3-20 papers)
Read this first set of papers and look for main publications most of these papers link to.
Use scholar and webofknowledge to collect all papers, which cite the main publications. (30-200 papers)
Go through all the papers ordered by assumed importance or newness and note used methods, results, strengths and weaknesses in a spreadsheet till running out of time or motivation.

What system do you have to do literature review and what would you recommend me?

[update]

After posting my question I found Am I reading enough of the scientific literature? Should I read for breadth or depth? which talks, as I see it, more about how to read scientific publications.

I am more interested in advice on how to make sure one has found all the important publications and how to prioritize one's reading list. One advice I got some time ago was to start with new publications fist and then to work yourself back in time. Is this a good advice? How do you do it?

If you know that the relevant literature is mostly in one community, then the approach you've described works fairly well. It may be "inefficient" if there are lots of related papers, but (to use computer science jargon), it's efficient in the size of the output :)

I have found that finding a recent survey helps a lot, because it taxonomizes the literature and provides many backward pointers (as well as forward pointers via papers that cite it).

But ultimately, the best test is if you start coming across the same papers in references over and over again. At that point you can feel a little more confident that you're converging.

Some specific tips:

Look carefully at how papers are cited. That provides clues on how to prioritize your searching.
Learn how to skim a paper really quickly to see its main contribution, which will indicate whether it merits further interest.
If certain researchers keep popping up, go to their websites to see if other papers might be relevant (or if they have a review article that Google search didn't reveal)
Look at venues where papers are typically getting published, and look at recent issues of those journals/conferences to see if you've missed something.

Apart from that, going across communities is trickier, and often requires some luck, or the right keywords. Again, some knowledge of the researchers in the area helps: odds are that if the topic spans disciplines, at least some of the researchers involved also span disciplines and can point (via their work) to new paths to explore (see the above note about conferences)


Is it appropriate to reuse the same illustration in multiple papers? I am a referee on a paper. I am concerned with the reuse in this paper of illustrations that appeared a year ago in a different article by the same authors in the same journal.

In the earlier article the illustration was found in the body of the paper and in the later article it appears in the Introduction section.

The illustration is of reasonable quality and it provides a concise metaphor of the framework the authors are working in, but the details of the illustration are not discussed below. I am concerned that the exact same look of the illustration might cause confusion to the readers who may come across  the two papers.

On this site I have found an excellent discussion regarding the reuse of text. The accepted answer points to COPE Text recycling guidelines where a comment suggests that the practice regarding illustrations might be different.

  In my field (Pathology), and probably in others as well, a much bigger
  problem than recycled text (probably not so bad in an invited review
  article, in which the authors are specifically invited to discuss
  their previous publication/s, obviously with appropriate citation) is
  recycled photographs, diagrams/drawings, Tables and the like. Again,
  the rule we usually follow is to require permissions from the original
  publisher/s and, obviously, citations. I must say, however, as an
  author as well as an editor, that it has always annoyed me to have to
  get permission from a publisher to reuse my own original
  illustrations.

Should I suggest the authors remove the illustration in question?

No, there is no need to suggest removing the illustration. Why would you be concerned about it being reused? There is nothing wrong with re-using an illustration, especially if it "provides a concise metaphor of the framework the authors are working in".

Of course, the authors should state that the figure was previously published and refer to the original paper, as well as obtain permission from the journal it was published in. Given that it is their own paper in the same journal it will probably be no problem to arrange that.


Changing graduate schools after a semester I am stuck in a somewhat unusual situation. I am enrolled in a graduate program (masters) in my country in the field of my choice. My college has a good undergraduate program but, as I've come to discover over the roughly two months I've been here, the graduate program fails in comparison.

Basically, the professors teaching graduates seem disinterested, there is no visible scope for research and they are only concerned about grades and getting a well-paying job after I get my degree. I wish to have a career in academia (I particularly enjoy teaching) and my current graduate education experience has left me dissatisfied.

I am in my first semester and I am considering applying fresh to graduate schools outside of my country for the next academic year. I am planning to drop out after I complete this semester.

My questions are:

Does it make sense to start afresh? Should I stay and try to work things out? (I've been talking to professors and it doesn't look good so far).
Should I mention my current college in my graduate school application statement? Does it hurt my chances if it appears that I have dropped out of a graduate program before?

As an alternative, you could finish the semester and take some credits with you. Changing graduate schools isn't all that unusual, particularly if you are leaving your alma mater in favor of a different school.


My advisor asked me to co-author a paper, but I have no interest in an academic career I recently finished an undergraduate program and obtained an engineer’s degree. I am working as a software engineer at an automotive company and I can only imagine myself having a career in “production”, meaning working for a private company for a while and eventually starting a company of my own or working as a freelancer. This is to say I have no interest in pursuing a career in academia.
In my country it is very common that people start a master’s degree immediately after finishing their bachelor’s degree. I did not enlist for a master’s program and I am still debating whether I find it worth doing several years from now or not.
However, recently the professor that acted as my advisor for my diploma project asked me whether I want to co-author a paper that would be presented at a conference and later submitted for publishing in a journal. The paper’s topic encompasses the topic of my diploma project and the professor said he would like to use parts of my project for this paper.
I like the idea of being a co-author on a published paper, but I suspect this will mean a lot of work and I wouldn’t want to do it if the only thing I got out of it was the achievement alone. Would there be anything to gain from doing this if I don’t intend to pursue a career in academia? If there is no good reason to do it, would it be appropriate to give the professor permission to use my project for his paper without asking to be listed as co-author?
EDIT: Thank you very much for all your answers and encouragement! I emailed the professor back telling him I was interested, but that the time I could invest was limited and he told me it would not be a problem since he will write the paper, my previous work being enough of a contribution already.

Congratulations! In my opinion, it is perfectly polite to write back and say that you are interested, but can't afford to make a significant time commitment to the project. Ideally, the professor will be happy to do the work himself, and your role would largely be to look over the finished product, sign off on it, and make suggestions or comments.
It's fine to invite the professor to write this paper without you as a coauthor. That said, since you did much of the work already, the professor might prefer that you be listed as an author.
If you are thinking of possibly applying to graduate school in the future, it would probably be a good thing to have a publication under your belt.


Second Masters (Art therapy and then educational psychology) Im doing a masters in Art therapy. Im not sure how the job scenario would be for it moving forward. However, is it ok to do a second masters in educational psychology?

It is certainly ok to get any degree for which you are qualified. I don't know why you might question that. Whether there is a better path to your life/career goals no one can say. To me, who knows little of either field, they would seem to complement each other for some kinds of professionals, actually. But you can also get a doctorate in clinical psychology, I know. You might look at that.

But what it takes is to apply to some programs and get accepted. Write a good Statement of Purpose for any proposed degree, explaining why you want the second degree, no matter what it is.

I suspect you can have a career in either field as a private practitioner, though you may need a license from some government to do so.


How important is it for a professor to direct a thesis? How important is it for a professor to direct a thesis?

I mean, what can the professor get from it? I know it will help for his/her curriculum, but is it too much?

Is the merit equivalent to the publication of an article?

or is it not so important?

or is it more important than the publication of any article?

I am just curious about it.

Thank you.

Advising a bachelor or master's thesis is just part of my teaching obligation. Most of the time it is an enjoyable obligation: now I get to accompany someone on their first steps in doing independent research. However, that is pretty much all I get out of it. Advising a PhD thesis is a bit more prestigious, but the added value drops quickly. However, with a PhD project the advisor may get one or two co-authored papers out of it, and in some disciplines the PhD students are an important source of cheap labor.


Late letter of recommendation for grad schools One of my recommenders has not yet submitted recommendation letter for my PhD application. Unfortunately, he lost his brother and has not been able to "take care of his professional duties for some days". The application was due on Dec 15 (today is Dec 28). What should I do?

I have submitted my application for PhD programs at UIUC (CS), CMU (RI), GaTech (ECE), TAMU (CS), UMich (CSE), and McGill (CS). Do any of these programs even consider PhD applications (or admit students) with 2 recommendation letters?

I'm sorry about this situation. I suggest that you find someone else who is willing to write you a letter within a short timespan.

Talk to the programs to which you have applied to understand how they will consider a late letter of recommendation. Many programs are very lax as to when a letter of recommendation arrives, but will begin sorting and analyzing candidates the day after the deadline (some even before!). Tell the programs, either by phone or by e-mail, that your reference has just recently informed you that something personal has occurred and that it is unlikely they will be able to provide you with a letter, but that you have already arranged with another person to submit it. Ask about how and if your late recommendation will be considered, and whether your application will suffer from it. Also ask how you can include an additional reference in the system if it is not directly available through the system.

I know that some programs will look into candidates even if their file is incomplete. However, they will only officially admit you once all documents are in place. Some will reach to you to let you know that you are missing a document, but the best way to know is to ask them directly.

If you don't ask someone else to submit a letter, the worst case scenario is that your application won't be considered at all. If someone else submits a letter, the worst case scenario is that you may be competing with a lukewarm letter, which is still better than not competing at all. If the original reference submits their letter, you will have four letters, which is better than two strong and one lukewarm, but not much worse than three strong, and significantly better than just the two.


How should I cite a website which includes institutional information I would like to cite a webpage which I am accessing with credentials through my academic institution. In this case (and I've seen this often) my institution is indicated in the url. For example:

http://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/...

Given that this url seems dynamic and will not be effective for others attempting to access the page, what is the best way to cite this page? In this particular case, the page gives no option for permanent link or link to this page or anything like that.

I think your intention of not citing an URL like that is correct, since it won't be useful to anybody outside your institution (and maybe not even within, if the URL is session specific). It doesn't make sense to give information in the bibliography which is not useful to the general reader.

First, check whether there are other means to cite the content. If it is a journal publication, you may not need an URL: generally, the standard bibliographic information including the journal name, volume, and page numbers is sufficient. Also check whether the content has a DOI. Then you should always be able to link to it via http://dx.doi.org/<DOI>.

If there is no way to refer to this content such that the general public can access it, then it is just not citable. You can only cite publicly available material, and not everything on the internet is publicly available (think about a Google Mailbox in the extreme case).


Pessimistic with direction of academia-industry project I am a recent fresh graduate who came from math and physics. Recently (< 4 weeks), I've taken on a junior research role in a research institute within a University.
This particularly university - and those in this country - have extremely strong collaborations with industry partners so work in Universities in this country is divided into pure/ fundamental research and industry-driven research. The University houses corporate research labs.

The project I am working on right now is in the area of air traffic. I report to a fellow (academic title) who comes from industry who is only focused on research in operations/ convincing stakeholders and sponsors.
Research because everything he proposes and investigates are qualitative and conceptual without any justifications with mathematics in an area which presumably requires mathematical models to validate ideas.

Granted that I have been in this role for <4 weeks, I am miserable and I believe I will continue to feel so.

1)
I believed I was overpromised.
I was promised that I would be working alongside professors to develop new mathematical models for air traffic.
It turns out I am the only person from math and physics. The rest are from engineering or industrial design field.

2)
Much of my time would be involved with producing white papers and policy recommendations for management of future air traffic

3) I am pushed to pursue a PhD (comes with scholarship) which, with internal discussion, would allow me to move into a PhD program even with an average BSc grades since the director of the research institute is the PI for the PhD program.
However, my thesis would have to be in the area of air traffic.
My interest is in Abstract Algebra, Topology and Quantum mechanics and I'll like to pursue this in a year or two time when I return back to University.

4) The fellow I report too is really a project manager in disguise. Every discussions with him mainly revolves around stakeholder expectations and  targeted objectives.

A good case scenario is this: He engages a visiting scholar who has done a PhD thesis in air traffic modelling, look to see how the idea in the thesis could be extended to specific circumstances (without much modification to the mathematical model in the thesis) for national interest before suggesting a feasibility write up on why this works.
From here, it is already obvious that nothing of substance could be published in respectable journals.

I am afraid that my current research role will not provide me with a stronger exposure to math or physics in the fundamental sense.

What is the best course of action?

My answer is rather a statement about what not to do rather what to do:

Do not do a PhD in a field you are not interested in. And do not choose a field of research for your degree just because of convenience (offer/opportunity). I cannot emphasise that enough.

In addition, switching topics drastically after a PhD is very difficult. It is possible, but I have seen it rarely succeed.

Usually, people start with a related topic and then drift away in the direction they are interested in. However, drifting from ATC to Topology/QM does not look obvious; Quantum airplanes? Topological path planning? Braid groups for flight patterns? Perhaps...


Second master's degree in another field without bachelors Question: Can I study master's degree in another field (or adjacent field) if I have a master's degree already without a bachelor degree?

Explanation: At the moment I am studying master's degree in computer science while skipping bachelor degree based on work experience. And I was wondering if is is possible to study for example Math's or Physic's master (probably direction a bit more connected with CS) directly ? Maybe some extra courses would be needed as well?

Short answer is: Probably ok, so long as you demonstrate graduate-level competency and have good undergraduate grades in the adjacent field.

Long answer: Graduate work (at the Master's level) looks very different from undergraduate, so the key is demonstrating, via your application to the program (support from a faculty member in that area goes a long way too--so contacting such a person and discussing it with them before your application is important), that you are capable of self-learning and can pick up the introductory principles of the adjacent field as you go.


How to write a Cover Letter for applying to a PhD programme I am applying for a PhD programme in Europe. For that I need to write a cover letter. It will be more like a SOP (technical but shorter version, as it's one page) or it can be more general stuff, as in why I want to do a PhD, what I like about this particular field, what background I have. Any suggestions welcome.

There's plenty of examples on the Web of the basic format a cover letter should take. There's a good template here on page 23 from Harvard. (Make sure to do it in TeX if applying for a math or comp. sci. PhD.)

Otherwise, my own personal advice ...

What not to do

The most common mistake I have found in cover letters is that they are too generic. Either they could have been written by anyone ("I have a keen interest in science. I was always curious as a ...") or could have been written for any programme ("I want to do a PhD as I believe I would be well-suited to a career in academia ..."). Keep such generic sentences to a minimum: the more of these a cover letter has, the more impersonal and unremarkable it is, and the more it leaves the suspicion that the same cover letter has been recycled for multiple applications and/or by multiple students.

Also, avoid hyperbole ("I am the best candidate for this position because ..."). You cannot know that you are the best candidate. This is an academic application, not an industrial one.

What to do

Make your cover letter personal, remarkable (i.e., stands out from other cover letters), specific to you and specific to the position at hand. Be enthusiastic. Be specific. Show that you've put thought into the position and why you are applying.

Relate your specific skill sets and previous experience to the programme you are applying for. Relate the content of specific aspects of your CV to the programme:

"During my masters, I enjoyed working on the topic of A, which relates to your programme [in this way]"

"I worked three summers at company B, where I gained experience in topic C ..."

"I visited your university in March last year and was impressed by ..."

"I read paper entitled 'D' published by your group at 'E' and was interested in ..."

"I recently published a paper 'F', which I believe compliments work by 'G' in your department on 'H' ..."

... and so forth.


Who deserves to be first and second author? PhD student who collected data, research associate who wrote the paper or supervisor? I am composing a manuscript using data collected by a PhD student over two years. She doesn't have enough statistical or analytical skill to publish her work. On top of that, language is also a huge issue for her.

I redid the analyses, created the graphs and started writing with my own flow and conclusion. I am also receiving supervision from a post-doc who got his PhD in the relevant field as the topic of the paper while I don't have much experience on the area.

I am quite confident I have the right to claim as the first author but when I allocate the second authorship to the post-doc, the student was acting up with me. Without me writing and the post-doc supervising, she will never be able to publish her work. So, who really deserves which?

Updated : Let me clear a few things here. I understand the conventionality of assigning authorship here in the US or other advanced countries. PhD student is from a country where even young faculty doesn't know what peer-review publication is. Post-doc(the supervisor) and I (research associate) are based in the US. PhD student collected the data 3 years ago and she and her adviser came up to me to collaborate on research projects and she handed the dataset to me to write. She has no interest in taking part in the writing process (no phone call, email or no showing of desire to learn anything from the process). When post-doc and I started writing, there is not even a promise of her data and research design can produce anything. We had to recraft research questions, redid analyses, graphs and everything. It was much like you download the someone esle collected data from public website, you write analyze and write a paper on it. During my Master year, my US adviser used the 10 years dataset from a peer who collected the data but didn't express interest in writing it. The guy offered us with the data, we wrote it and his name came as 3rd author. Seriously, we don't even know this paper can even be publishable and we are just making the best out of it.

Put yourself in the shoes of the PhD student. She spent 2 years of her life conducting a study and collecting data. She needs help with statistics and writing (this is very common). The person helping with this claims first authorship (in my field this is already questionable) and on top of this even wants to give the second authorship to their supervisor. I can't see how this is supposed to be fair to the PhD student. The post-doc at most deserves third or fourth author. Where is the advisor of this PhD student? You are doing their job (and in my field the advisor would be last author).