Timeline for leaving postdoc I plan on leaving my current postdoc at the end of the first year to go to industry. My question is two fold:

Is 3 months a good length of notice to give?

When should I begin applying for positions in industry?

With regards to the first, there are already plenty of answers saying the more the notice the better, however I do not want to give too much in case I am replaced before the end of the year.
I would ideally like to begin a post in industry (computer science) at the beginning of 2020. It may be too early to begin applying now but I'm not sure about the interview timeline etc.

Thanks in advance.

You should always be applying.  Postdocs are short term positions.  It is understood.
Give notice after you get AND have accepted a firm written job offer.

You really don't owe any more than that.


In the United States, is associate professor a subset of professor, or a distinct category? In the USA, if someone writes that they are "professor" with no other specification, does this mean full professor, or can it also mean associate professor?  In other words, is associated professor a subset of professor, or is it a fully distinct category?

In the US, Assistant and Associate Professors are also titled Prof. X when being referred to formally. This is unlike in Europe and parts of Asia, where "Professor" is a title that can be used only if they're a full professor. Others are simply referred to as Dr. X (or Mr. or Ms. X, if they don't hold a doctorate).


Should I add a co-author? I am a Phd candidate. I'm writing a journal paper that is, in part, a review of the current regulatory landscape use of a particular technology.

Sarah is involved with an unconnected voluntary project which has been funded by a charity to use the technology, with a condition that the learning from the project is shared publicly. Sarah's correspondence with the regulator is very relevant to the paper I am writing, as they are charting new territory, but she is reluctant to share information as she is starting a consultancy business on the back of her experience with the project.

I think this information should be in the public realm (as did the charity who funded the project), so I want to find a pragmatic approach to getting it out there. Also, although the information would only make a small part of the content, my paper would be incomplete without it.

In other circumstances I would interview her for the information and acknowledge her contribution to the paper; there are others whose experiences I have written about in a simialar way and acknowledged in this way.

But in this case, I am considering offering Sarah a co-authorship on the paper in exchange for the information. I would be the lead author; Sarah would be added after my supervisors.

Is this an ethical / appropriate use of co-authorship?   Sarah's contribution to the paper would be small, and perhaps not normally worthy of a co-authors credit, but without it the paper would be incomplete.

As you wrote,

  Sarah's contribution to the paper would be small, and perhaps not normally worthy of a co-authors credit, but without it the paper would be incomplete.

The recommendation is to add her to the authors of the paper. I think that little things would be the gem of your work versus the similar works and you don't neglect the small valuable information with her experiences through working with the technology.

Moreover, adding Sarah as a co-author doesn't reduce the impact of the paper, but it also promotes the validity of your work.


What are paths that physics majors/PhDs can follow? I’m currently a high-school student that has been aspiring to be a physicist for quite some time. However, after much research I have found the following to be stakes in that path:

There are about twice as many physics PhDs as tenure-possible jobs in academia for them, and those who make it don’t usually get tenure.
Physics majors lack the skills in life that others do, like engineering majors or math majors. This makes it very difficult to find a job where they are competitive applicants.
Job prospects for future physicists is at 10 %, slightly below average, meaning that this situation won't get better in the next decade.

I’ve always been interested in the sciences, but this is rather depressing. With a physics major, and no PhD (which would otherwise put you in the above position), the best possibility seems to be a high-school teacher. That’s respectable, but I would like to know what other options there are for physics majors (BSc, or MSc). Be as creative as you’d like – include options like moving to another country with better job prospects for physicists (I checked and couldn’t find the job prospects of other countries).

Various AIP subsidiaries including the APS keep tabs on these things: check out the APS's 2011-2012 survey results.

Don't believe "Physics majors lack the skills in life that others do, like engineering majors or math majors", most engineering employers expect to teach a substantial set of specific skill they need in house even to engineering majors. And a physics major is well positioned to bone up on engineering subject.

But do be prepared to have a little trouble getting your foot in the door; you have to get past HR so that your paperwork is seen by a technical manager. That takes a well designed resume, and you if don't have a mentor with the right experience it might be worth paying a consultant.

General answers to the "What can I do question?"

BS Programming, engineering, business are the big three and lots of other jobs are represented in the surveys. With a JD there are specialized areas of the law available to people with a technical background. With a MBA, there are companies who want to hire people to lead the technical end of the business. Med school is an option too, and physicist actually pass the MCAT more often than any other major (they're only second in passing the LSAT as the mathematicians squeeze in front).
MS Minimum degree for some reasonable chance of doing science. All the usual suspects plus industry research work and some chance of teaching at the post-secondary level (but generally not tenure-track).
PhD Programming, engineering, business, teaching and research. The thing to understand here is that many Physics PhDs don't end up doing physics,1 but most do end up employed at a job that uses the traits that brought you to the major---curiosity, focus, detail orientation and the ability to construct and organize large and complicated models.

With a MS or PhD there are good jobs in the patent office.

The APS recently held a webinar on this very subject.

1 The percentage that end up doing some kind of physics is in the low 50s, and about half end up changing subfield from their dissertation work.


Will a recommendation letter such as that written for John F. Nash be convincing? I noticed in the book "A Beautiful Mind", by Sylvia Nasar, that a recommendation letter, for PhD applications, written for John F. Nash runs as follows: This man is a genius.

Then, out of curiosity, I wonder that if such reference letters for PhD applications work in the present days?

Image taken from the Graduate Alumni Records of Princeton University:

Even though the event that inspired this questions may or may not have actually happened, the question is still a valid one.

I suspect it greatly depends on who wrote the recommendation. If the person writing that recommendation is a great authority in this field and is known for not giving praise easily, then such a recommendation letter might help. On the other hand, if I were to write such a letter...


Sending a paper to a conference with indicating that it is a preliminary version I am a PhD student in economics and I try to finish and send a paper to an international conference but the version that I will send will be a very preliminary version.

I see sometimes in my field that there are papers in which people write under title a little note that the current version is a "Preliminary Version".
I know that most papers sent to conferences are always not complete but I wonder if it is  good to write "Preliminary Version" below the title of the paper.

I ask this question myself because it is sending directly a signal to reviewers and I can not expect how they will react to this note.

Two possibilities : 1) If they like the main idea of the paper, they would be more tolerant for accepting it.

2) They could be more harsh as the author has already wrote on the paper that it is a preliminary version, with thinking that author has not completed it yet.

PS. The papers sent to this conference are blind copies.

In my field (one of the social sciences), where conference papers are usually regarded as work in progress that at a later stage will be send to a journal (as opposed to computer science, where 'publication in a conference' often is the goal), it is not uncommon that people include a statement like "Work in progress, please request most recent version from the authors before citing". I've done that several times, in fact.


Should I copy a short a proof from another paper or just refer to it? I want to use a short (5 lines) mathematical proof from someone else's  machine learning paper in my master thesis. Should I provide it, to help comprehension and save readers the trouble of looking it up, or should I just refer to it? Is it OK to copy-paste the proof, as long as I make clear where it came from, or is that plagiarism?

A third option is to give your own proof.  Instead of copying it word-for-word, rewrite it in your own words and with notation that matches the rest of your paper, and include a citation of the original source.

Don't do this by taking the source text and just changing a few words.  Instead, study it until you feel you understand the key idea, then set it aside and write your own proof.  Resist the temptation to just recite the original proof from memory.

This solves all your problems and more:

it keeps the paper self-contained
it isn't plagiarism, since the source has been cited (to credit the idea) and the text hasn't been copied
it doesn't require quotation marks or other indication of verbatim quoting
it isn't copyright infringement, since the exact text wasn't used
it doesn't require explicit consent from the original author or publisher
you have gained a fuller understanding of how the proof works
your version of the proof will fit better in the context of your paper and your own writing style
you may be able to improve upon the original proof, or at least to make it better fit the way you think about the ideas involved
the reader now has two different proofs they can look at (yours and the original), which gives them some options in case they find something unclear in one of them.

At least in mathematics, it's most common to either do this, or else to  simply refer to the original.  It's very rare to actually copy a proof verbatim, and is usually only done when one wants to add critical or historical commentary on the proof itself.


When changing fields from undergrad to PhD, which department should recommendation letters come from? I am a physics undergrad who has worked with profs mostly on areas in Quantum field theory, string theory. However, my interests have changed slightly over the areas, and now I want to pursue a PhD in Pure Mathematics, perhaps in algebraic geometry or topology. Is it OK, if I apply for a math grad school with recommendation letters from physics profs, or would this diminish my chances to get selected? Should the recommendation letter be given by a prof working in the same area as that you want to apply to?

I agree with blackace that you should probably be OK, but let me sketch what some of the drawbacks are:

Ideally, an application to math grad school will have recommendations from mathematicians.  The further you get away from that, the less meaningful the letters are.  (For example, at least once per year I see a letter from an English professor, which is utterly unhelpful.)  The basic issue is that you need recommenders who really understand what it takes to succeed in math grad school and as a mathematician.  Fortunately, physics is close enough that physicists can do a pretty good job of judging this, so you should be OK.  In my experience, the admissions committee will worry about two things:

One is that physicists may not appreciate certain math-specific issues.  For example, the expected coursework and background.  A physicist may not fully understand the extent to which someone's background is nonstandard or deficient for the math program they are applying to.

A second reason is the belief that most people's standards go down a little when making recommendations for other fields.  If someone is applying to the top schools in your field, you know very well what the standards and competition are like, and you have something invested in the system and your own reputation as a recommender.  In practice, recommenders from other fields seem to be a little more cavalier about making strong recommendations based on a feeling that the applicant is smart, rather than a comparison with the rest of the applicant pool.  This means recommendations with be taken with a grain of salt.

So if you have equally good prospects for letters writers from math and physics, you should choose the mathematicians for math applications.  On the other hand, a physicist who knows you is still a good choice, much better than a mathematician who doesn't know you.  (But a mathematician who doesn't know you is a better choice than an English professor who does.)


What do I do about my lab head misattributing my grant proposal? The head of my lab and I wrote a grant proposal together. Last year we submitted it with me and them as chief investigators. This year I wasn't allowed to submit grants per the rules of my government funding body, so I agreed to let my lab head submit the grant while listing themselves as chief investigator and removing me. However, in addition to this, my lab head added one of my colleagues as a chief investigator despite them not having written any of the grant. This was done without my permission.

My lab head added the colleague because the lab head believes it will look bad if they are a sole chief investigator. They believe adding the second chief investigator will make it appear as if they are supporting an early career scientist and that there is someone who will be managing the project day to day.

I don't feel comfortable about my lab head misattributing my grant proposal, particularly without my permission. Is what they're doing ethical? What can I do if I don't like it?

Is what they're doing ethical?

Being a chief investigator on a grant does not necessarily imply that you are an author of the proposal.  Proposal a writing can even be outsourced to a third party.

In order to determine if the proposal is ethical, it would be necessary to read it and read the funding agency's rules, but if it's unethical it is probably not for a reason you have stated.

  What can I do if I don't like it?

Probably nothing, except ask the lab head to change their course of action (Is it too late?).  If the university paid you to write the proposal, it very likely belongs to the university.


Interview for pure math graduate program I will have an interview for my graduate school application in the coming days. I don't have much research experience but I am taking a few graduate courses which are related with the potential research field, so I think the main part of the interview will be on my coursework. The interviewer is my potential supervisor whose research field is theoretical PDE and applied analysis. The professor is very famous and has a real authority in this research area (at least in my region).

I have talked with the professor before, and he said he will ask me to talk about my "understanding of mathematics" in the interview. To be honest, I don't quite understand what the professor mean. What are the questions a professor will ask in an interview for a pure math program? Is it common to ask me to solve some exercises immediately? I think comparing with solving a specific exercise, "understanding of math" is more high-level, for example, the development of real analysis. Could you give me an example or share me your interview experience?

This is a short summary of the interview. The entire interview took around 1 hour. First the professor read my transcripts and found I had took a course about Fourier analysis. Hence he asked me what is the most useful technique I had learnt in that course and what were the most interesting materials of the course?  Then he asked me about my understanding of graduate-level real analysis. He asked me to state Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem, and asked me why this theorem is correct. I tried to prove the theorem using Fatou's lemma and he thought it's too technical. So after several attempts under his guidance, I finally found out what he wanted is an intuitive understanding of Lebesgue integrable function (what kinds of properties that a Lebesgue integrable  function has, but a riemann integral function does not necessarily have). Finally he asked me to prove some statements/ find some counterexamples related to Lebesgue differentiation theorem, which I thought were selected from PhD qualifying exam. I didn't know much about the differentiation theory at the time, so I just finished what I knew.

Basically the professor only asked me a few questions in the interview and he turned out to agree to take me as a student even though I didn't solve all the problems immediately.

My grad school interview for math was a bit different. It was more about determining whether I would accept an offer if they gave me one, because they didn't want to offer places to people who would not take them. I did however interview for my undergrad, and there the questions were on mathematical understanding. A question I was asked was "derive x^x". This is something that most high school students haven't seen, but should be able to figure out with some guidance. I would expect a grad school interview question to follow a similar pattern: ask about something you probably haven't seen before, but that you can figure out with some guidance from the interviewer. They will be looking for how you try to tackle problems you haven't seen and how you justify each step you take.


What am I expected to say about teaching plans in an interview (UK)? I got short-listed for an interview. I will have to give a 15 minutes presentation and I need to address 1) past and present research; 2) future research; 3) teaching plans.

About the position: I need to provide 6 hours of tutorials per week; organise lectures and practical classes in a specific module; produce lecture/class notes, course materials, reading lists, and reference guides; undertake advanced academic study; undertake academic research; identify sources of research income and make applications to secure it; write research articles.

The teaching component only lasts for 8 weeks for the entire year - the rest of the year is dedicated to the tutorials and research. What are they expecting me to present in 15 minutes regarding my teaching plan? Should I go in with the assumption that I have to design a full course all by myself (even though in reality this will be coordinated with other lecturers as well)?

For clarification, the position is being advertised for a particular module only. I'm not supposed to help with several different courses, just with the one that they are advertising.

You can always ask if they can give you any further guidance about what they are looking for in the 'teaching' part of the presentation. I imagine this is also somewhat field-dependent: what is expected in a humanities department may be rather different from what is expected in a lab-based science area. However, generally people:

Summarise what teaching they've done in the past, highlighting anything impressive (positive student outcomes, innovative approaches to teaching...);
Identify which aspects of the department's current courses they could contribute to, and particularly any areas where the department is currently lacking expertise (tactfully!);
Perhaps sketch an idea for a new course that they'd like to put together if they got the job.

In a 15-minute talk, one slide on each of the above is probably a reasonable starting point.

In response to OP's clarification that the advertised position is specific about the module to be taught: I think the same general points apply, but you should focus a bit more specifically on that module: Why is it important? How would you approach teaching it? What makes your version of that module better than the other candidates' versions? However, I don't think it ever hurts to show versatility: don't focus on that module to the exclusion of all others.


Is it ethical to reject an article after acceptance? I submitted a journal article to Forum: Qualitative Sozialforschung/ Forum: Qualitative Social Research back in September-October 2016. By February 2017, I received an R&R. April 2017, official acceptance. We were in the midst of the final edits, but I couldn't fully understand the editing requests of the editor. She threw the broad recommendations at me to "fix references" and to "improve readability". But even though I adhered and responded to all the specific queries/comments marked by reviewers throughout the paper and went through the paper multiple rounds after, the editor still wasn't satisfied. She snarked at me telling me she was "repeating herself now", and refused to read my paper in-depth until I'd made the appropriate changes. I apologized several times, but at this point, whatever responses/comments I'd written in the paper itself I now had to email directly to her or she wouldn't see them. I noticed in the edits she'd misunderstood some italicized words for a quote, so I kindly brought up that my italics were actually for emphasis and not quotation. I then asked her to simply identify which sections didn't look right or "readable", and I'd be most happy to edit it. Immediately after, she straight-out told me she decided not to publish my article, because she felt attacked by what I asked and because I had one reference that didn't conform to her guidelines (I wrote "trans." for translation rather than "transl by."). This happened this week in June 2017. I feel like I had a lot of my time wasted, and it feels unfair to have my article rejected AFTER acceptance. And even more so because the rejection wasn't for the quality of my paper nor the fit of my article, but because of a personal grievance of hers about something that I didn't even do, and a citation detail that doesn't really seem significant. Is recanting an acceptance this close to the finish line ethical? Can an editor decide this without consulting any of the reviewers or editorial board? I understand I made some mistakes, but they were just references and some issue with "readability" that I didn't understand, which is why I simply asked -- were these really so serious that an editor could justifiably do what she did? How should I respond?

Edit: I should add the readability issue is related to a language barrier, as the Editor was not a native English speaker. I've published a lot over my career in reputable journals, so I'm fairly confident my writing's fine.

The process is unusual for sure, but without seeing the reviews and what exactly the editor and you wrote to each other, I can't say that it is unethical. The acceptance of the article may, for example, have been conditional on improving language issues. This may or may not also have been stated in the reviews that suggested acceptance "subject to improving the presentation" or similar wording.

In the end, what you describe is an editor deciding that this improvement in presentation or language is apparently not forthcoming, and so the conditional acceptance was turned into a rejection. I'll note that you state: "And even more so because the rejection wasn't for the quality of my paper nor the fit of my article...", but that is exactly what it sounds like: the quality of a paper is not only a function of its scientific contribution and originality, but also its organization and ability to convey its meaning accurately. I have certainly rejected papers that may have had sufficient content for publication but were written in a way that made it impossible to understand or follow the arguments.

Obviously, I cannot say whether that is what happened. We lack the information for this. But in the end, I do believe that it is upon the author to present the material in such a way that it is understandable. Papers that fail to do so, even if their content is good, should be rejected.


Is getting certificate at PCEP important? I am a physics student and I almost finished my third year (I am in sixth semesters ). So I am trying to learn python. I still did not try to learn classes but other than that I know the other stuff in general. I am solving problems at CodeAbbey (currently 80) and at Project Euler (currently 83 problems in there). I am also reading "Learning Python" to improve my skills and learn more about the syntax classes etc.

Next semester I'll apply some places to do an internship. Also, I want to work as an astrophysicist in the future. And as we all know coding is an important skill in the area. Also I' ll go abroad for graduate school. (At least I 'll try)

In this case, is it important to get a PCEP Certificate to show my skills?

Or is it enough if I open a GitHub page and upload my projects/codes?

This is really a matter of opinion, but coding certificates are not widely respected. The problem is that they are generally multiple choice questions and easily crammed for. That is, you can study for a couple of weeks and pass the exams without writing very much code at all. Frankly I've been a Python programmer for well over a decade now and I'd never heard of PCEP. I would much rather see a GitHub repository or contributions to open source projects.

Save your money and spend your time writing more code.


Does one typically hand over their research work to their lab if they decide to leave academia? Let's say that I've been part of a research lab at a U.S. university for awhile but do not plan to continue on for my PhD.  What does one typically do with all of their research work, e.g. experimental write-ups, code files and email correspondence with researchers external to the lab?  Does one typically initiate some "handover process" and document all of the work carefully enough so that someone else in the lab gets to inherit the work and take over from that point on, or should one keep their own work theirs, without distributing it to the lab that they were a part of?

Ideally, all work would be carefully documented and discussed with co-workers in the group before someone leaves. Often times, though, departures are much more sloppily handled.

However, the research group obviously retains an interest the lab notebooks, data, and other work products created while someone is part of a research group. For data retention practices, I would say that "best practices" would include leaving the originals with the research group, while the person who created the data keeping a copy for their own personal records later down the line.


How should I handle a paper with incorrect experimental results? We found that a paper, published in an important CS conference, presents incorrect results in its experimental evaluation section.

Merely reading the paper is not sufficient to spot these mistakes, as the source of incorrectness lies within the the experimental evaluation and none of the algorithms/pseudo-code presented in the paper seems to be affected by it. That somehow explains how the error made it past the peer-review barrier.

We are currently in the process of circumscribing to what extent the results are incorrect. This is made difficult by the fact that the authors did not provide sufficient information to fully reproduce/verify their original experiment (not even upon gentle request), so we can only verify a limited portion of it (although it is substantial enough to draw our conclusions).

We tend to believe that the authors made a mistake in good faith and that they failed to spot it because they did not double-check the correctness of the results they obtained. We also don't have any reason to believe that the unreproducible portion of their results is incorrect as well.

We want to stress the fact that this problem only affects a subset of their results. The mistake they did somehow invalidates some of the conclusions of the experimental evaluation, although it does not seem to affect it as a whole nor to hinder the perceived worthiness of the algorithms presented in the paper.

We would like to ask what would be the best approach for disclosing this 'finding'.

It would seem the first, and most sensible step, is that to inform the authors about the issue. Then what? What should we expect them to do? Are there any other options?

In my opinion, the right thing to do is to publish a paper to clarify what could have been wrong in the previous work. This adds to the knowledge and invalidating previous results/beliefs is part of the science.

It is a good practice to inform the authors of your findings if you want to make sure as you said:

  We also don't have any reason to believe that the unreproducible
  portion of their results is incorrect as well

By informing the authors, they might provide you with more information that might invalidate your conclusions.

Assume good faith and accept that humans do mistakes.


What are the important issues to consider when using secondary data? Say you want to conduct a research study that observes people engaged in a generic activity. Rather than record this evidence oneself, would it be wise to try to gather recorded evidence that was part of other research studies? I am asking about gathering raw evidence, to re-analyze for the purposes of a new study, not leveraging/citing data/conclusions in other research studies. For example, if another research study recorded 1000 hours of people doing general enough activities, would I be able to ask the owner of that study to share their recorded evidence with me, so that I might use it for my own analysis?

In other words, what are some of the issues to consider when using secondary data?

If it isn't common, why not? What are the pitfalls of using evidence gathered from other studies, to drive my own research?

Reusing data gathered in previous research works save a lot of time, energy and may be money. However, there are some subtle details you need to keep in mind when using such practices.

Make sure the author providing the data knows what he is talking about.
Make sure the data are valid and genuine.

As I heard from one of my professors, citing results of another author does not mean that you would not be held responsible in case of false/inaccurate results.

Update: Following the comment about raw data I think such data can be trusted, unless proved otherwise. Also, it is better to go for raw data (data sets) used widely thus reducing the chance there would be something terribly wrong with the data.


Is it a good idea to ask my Master's supervisor to help me finding a PhD in other universities? I am in final stages of my Master degree in physics. I am looking for a PhD position in Europe. Is it a good idea to ask my supervisor to help in me finding a position for PhD?

Yes, it would be a very good idea to ask your supervisor. They know the field much better than you do. They likely have contacts in many places and also know which universities would be a good match for your interests. Many places will want a recommendation from your supervisor anyways, so it would be good to have them on board.

I would not phrase the request as "Please help me find a PhD position" but more casually, for example: "I am interested in doing a PhD, do you happen to know of any openings?".


Can I put my accepted paper on arXiv before it appears on the proceedings I have a paper accepted to appear in a CS conference proceedings,
Is it possible to put it on an on-line archive,
such as "arXiv" before the conference date?
Could I at least publish the pre-print?

EDIT:
The conference chair did not ask me to sign any copyrights form!

The conference did not claim any copyrights!

Are you sure about this? Moreover, even without a copyright transfer or similar, you could have agreed to not having submitted or published the paper elsewhere. If exceptions are being made for publishing preprints, they are often explicit exceptions to clauses that forbid you publishing the article elsewhere, so this is where you should start looking.

If the proceedings are part of a series by some publisher, you may find relevant information on preprint publishability on RoMEO.

If you are still uncertain, you have to ask the conference organisers. I have no experience with such CS conferences, but if journals allow the publication of preprints, this is intentional. Thus I do not see any risk in asking the organisers.


How can I proof-read my own work more effectively? After an article/book has finally reached the pre-publication stage, the authors have to check the proofs for errors (introduced by themselves or during type-setting). I find this one of the least enjoyable aspects of my work and also think I might not be particularly efficient. It varies with the length of the manuscript. A five-page article in conference proceedings is obviously less of a problem than a monograph.

When proof-reading my own contributions, it is the umpteenth time that I am reading the same text. I find it exceedingly boring, which might make me ineffective (taking a long time to read the text, and potentially overlooking errors).
The delay between the actual research and publication of the work can be quite extensive. After such a long time, I am less likely to recall all the details of the analysis, making me more likely to overlook errors in the manuscript.

Asking colleagues to help with this also seems ineffective. They might be less bored while reading the text, but (a) might not be very attentive because they have more pressing issues at hand and (b) can only spot clear inconsistencies, but not other errors you can only notice if you did the research yourself.

How can I make my proof-reading more effective and enjoyable/increase my motivation?

From Google:

Proof-read:

from hard-copy
backwards
aloud
a few days after the last revision
after revising the text for clarity and brevity
line by line, covering the remainder
double-checking small words ("if") and proper names
looking for one type of mistake at a time
looking for mistakes and idiosyncrasies to which you are prone (using the search function or even more sophisticated).

Helpful links:

Proofreading and editing tips
Top 10 Proofreading Tips
"Proofreading", from The Writer's Handbook

On motivation:

schedule enough time to divide the task into small chunks and take breaks
reward yourself after completion of each chunk
listen to music
have a nice cup of tea
you have the soon-to-be published result of your hard work in front of you. Indulge in some pride as you go through the paper.


Remove submission during review I submitted a paper to an Elsevier journal which is now in 'Submitted to Journal status'. Now I want to remove it to improve the write up, though the content is good. I don't want it to be rejected after waiting for 7 months which would be a lot of time wasted. I would rather remove it now and improve it  myself or with the help of editing services. Should I email editor to remove it?  I am worried because the reasons for withdrawals mentioned on their website are serious and I don't want to give that impression when my reasons is just to improve the manuscript.

When you feel your paper does not have high chances to get accepted, do you keep on working on it during the review and re-submit to a different journal when it gets rejected eventually? Or remove it immediately, work on it and submit again.

“When you feel your paper do not have high chances to get accepted”… then I suggest you don't submit it for publication in the first place!

It has happened that I have submitted a work which I continued to work on improving, but it was definitely in some very specific cases, where

the improvement in question was nice but absolutely not crucial to the paper,
had no impact an any of the conclusions of the paper,
I was not sure the improvement would actually work.

Basically, something like submitting the paper while continuing to tinker on Figure 2, thinking without adding or removing any data there might be a better way to present it, but it required getting a new software license and learning how to use it. Or submitting a paper while thinking that “hey, this is totally publishable, but if I continue running the simulation while the paper is submitted, maybe I can get the curve on Figure 3 with a little bit less noise”. But nothing as extensive as changing the text.

What should you do now? — Well, if you think reworking on the paper can in a significant way improve its chances of being accepted, I suggest you withdraw it from consideration. If you submitted not too long ago, the editor and referees might not even have wasted much time on it yet. So write to the editor, apologetically explaining that you've realized you made a mistake in submitting your paper too early, and would like to withdraw it. It's not a very nice thing to do, but I still believe it's in your interest.


How does a graduate program's admissions committee operate? How does a typical graduate program's admissions committee operate? (In the US --- I understand that in Europe admissions are often structured differently.)

My mental model at the moment is several professors sitting in a conference room with a stack of printed applications and a few piles: accept, maybe, and reject. Three or so professors will read an application and then make a decision. If the volume of applications is large enough, multiple meetings might be required. This is purely my imagination --- I don't know how accurate this model is.

Of course, I'm sure that how admissions are handled depends greatly on the school, program, and department. I'm interested in a few data points to get a rough idea of what the average is.

A few more specific related questions:

How much time does a typical committee spend on each application? I suspect there's a distribution. Obviously unqualified applicants will probably have their applications tossed into the reject pile pretty quickly. Qualified applicants' applications might receive more attention.
Do admissions committees look online for more information about an applicant? I've read some professors (in CS --- not my field) will look at a student's research/project website, but I have no idea how common this is.

I've been on the grad admissions committee at my university for 30 years, and have been Dir of Grad Studies in math on two different occasions, so I have a good sample of what goes on here.
First, in the last few years all our applications are electronic, so the admissions cte doesn't have to be in a little room with piles of paper any more. This also allows much more asynchronous appraisal of files, which allows not wasting time trying to figure out common meeting times.
Typically, a preliminary screening is done in a "distributed" sense, that is, obviously-not-qualified or misguided applicants are removed from the "active possibilities" queue. By this, I mean engineering or computer science students, or crackpots, who declare interest but have no documentable mathematics background, no letters of recommendation from mathematicians, no GRE subject test, no nothing. :)
Even after this initial filtering, we have many fewer (funded as TAs or RAs) spots than approximately-qualified candidates. Even though we expect maybe 50-percent accept rate of our offers, the number of approximately-qualified candidates is still too large by a factor of 2 or 3 or more.
Candidates from small colleges in the U.S. typically have a very thin background, whether or not they've done special summer programs, so are at some initial disadvantage in comparison to candidates from Europe or Asia who have seen much more coursework, if only due to the structure of "college" there. This also precipitates discrepancies in GRE subject test scores. Nevertheless, we have found that this discrepancy is often very temporary, and after two years, or less, success in our program is almost completely uncorrelated with such things. Thus, many of the pretend-objective measures of prior success are of very limited value.
Further, the import of letters of recommendation depends greatly on the author, and their prior experiences, basis for comparison.
So we are left trying to compare candidates from widely varying backgrounds...
To get to the "final list" of offers thus consists partly of winnowing out candidates who are perhaps vaguely qualified but indicate no genuine interest in anything about our program, while putting onto the "definite" list candidates who seem to be focused and have a particular interest in the research program(s) of our faculty.
Documentably strong background and prior success is good, obviously, but, again, undergrad work, summer REUs, and such are a different enterprise than genuine graduate work and long-term research. Success in a highly structured environment gives very ambiguous indication about success in an unstructured environment. Success when there are unambiguous answers to questions that can be answered in a few hours is different from success in situations where the program can take months, and one is not quite sure what the question is.
So there is considerable discussion and re-reading of personal statements and letters of recommendation, trying to project into the future and a new environment, based on our prior experience. Not easily turned into an algorithm.
As to the specific questions: an obviously implausible applicant could be appraised in 5-10 minutes. At the other end, the final decisions about the better obviously-qualified applicants may involve repeated appraisal, so that the total time spent might be 5-10 person-hours in the end.
As to whether we look at on-line manifestations of applicants: this is a potentially delicate issue. The default approach would be to absolutely not do so, certainly not look at Facebook or other social media. If the application gives a pointer to a "professional" web page, of course this is considered useful, and positive if that site gives evidence of good work of the applicant. But "snooping around" would be unethical, inappropriate. Even if there is a pointer to a site in the application, if the application is not otherwise plausible I don't think I'd look at the web site.
EDIT (29 Aug 2020): since this thread got bumped to the top anyway, I thought it'd be not too disruptive to update remarks about GRE subject tests: the ETS (Educational Testing Service), which creates and administers the GRE, have cancelled the subject tests for this autumn (in the northern hemisphere, I hasten to add, having someone recently note my hemisphere-ism! :)... As I've said in this thread and others, in fact my dept does definitely does not consider GRE subject test scores good predictors of future success. The only aspect of interest has always been whether or not students succeed in understanding that (in the past) many or most places did consider a subject test score essential to an application... so we here would wonder why a student wouldn't have that score, even if we didn't care what it was...
Now, the Dir Grad Studies office is composing a highly revised statement of our attitude about the GRE subject test, at least saying that we are not interested in it, do not require it, and do not want to see it. (Apparently my math dept does not want to make any remarks that might be interpreted as "snarky"...)


Name spelling problem in recommendation letter I have applied to several US universities for admission to the PhD program this fall, so I requested my professors to write recommendations for me.

One of the professor wrote my name incorrectly. My full name is: Md Rohan Hossain, but the professor wrote Md. Rahan Hussein. He already submitted the letter with that incorrect spelling. He completed the recommendation process online.

In this circumstances what can I do? Will it cause a big problem?

Do not worry about this. Just use the letter and ignore the spelling mistake (which most people will consider very minor).

As long as it is clear that this letter was meant for you (which is the case here), you are fine. People will care about the content of the letter, not about really minor spelling mistakes in your name, address, etc.


Undergrad grades in PhD For someone who has just finished his M.Sc. with extremely good grades, is it possible that their not so extremely good grades during undergrad might affect where they get their PhD?

Since you have not provided enough details in your question I will go with a generalised answer to this end. The answer to this question, however, is country- and organisation-specific. Further, it does also depends on the PhD advisor herself.
I am in academics for a few years now and I have seen some post-grads (not PhD) who do/did have bad grades during their corresponding undergraduate studies.
First, let's quantify what does a bad grade mean: On a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest), bad grade would be, according to me somewhere within 4. "Ok" grades would be the ones falling in the range: 5-7, and above 7 is just great. As I said, this can be argued; but lets for the moment accept these as axioms.
So, if your grades in the "bad" category, then you should have something additional to show to the PhD selection committee or the advisor you are applying under. This term "extra" would mean something like a voluntary project that you did, maybe a collaborative work you participated in, or an article that you wrote with some others. Again, this extra stuff that you show may not be well-accepted but would definitely provide a soft edge towards the decision-making process. Also, note that PhD application might require a few recommendation letters if those letters could mention these extras to compensate for your bad grades, then you are okay I think.
If you have nothing to show as an extra component, then this might not be a good sign to have "bad" grades in the CV. A PhD position would expect someone to be serious in studies and highly motivated to pursue research.


How long should you wait for a professor who's late for class? I've heard that you should wait 15 minutes for a professor who is late to a class, before leaving.
Some of my classmates have said that the 15 minute rule is only for professors without PhD's, and that you must wait at least 20 (and up to 30) minutes for professors that do have PhD's.
The PhD part seems silly, but after hearing some version of this "rule", or "myth", so many times, I wonder if it has some backing.
Is there any evidence that this was once an actual rule put in place by a university, or academic governing body? Was this ever anything more than a "rule" put it in place by impatient students?

Why wait?
Some classes will fail you after a certain number of absences and others will calculate 5% of your final grade from the percentage of lectures you attended. And it can be a good idea to attend as many classes as possible to show that you are putting forth effort. Professors are much more likely to bump a high D grade to a low C if they see that you have been to every lecture (at least in my experience).
So how long do you wait before the professor should no longer be able to show up and not give the daily "attendance credit" for absent students?
If a class was an hour long, and the professor didn't show up for 55 minutes, it would be common sense to leave by that point. But, at what point do you leave? An evil professor could always wait for 59 minutes before poking his head into the empty classroom and counting everyone as absent.

I'd suggest the following: wait 5 or 10 minutes, or whatever length of time seems to you to exceed an ordinary minor delay.  Then call the department office and tell them that the professor has not arrived, and ask what they suggest you should do.

First of all, they may have some information about the professor's whereabouts or his/her likelihood of getting there, or they may be able to try to contact the professor.  Otherwise, if they say you should leave, you have a pretty good defense if the professor should object.  And if they say you should stay, you know that the department will not be on your side if you leave.


Approach math prof with proof I received a master's in math a long time ago and now I am thinking I would like to get a Ph.D. Since I have not been in school, would it be ok to approach a professor I would like to work with by proving a small thing from one of his papers he says is "work to be done" and emailing to him? I already have a proof. Would this add value for him or would he be annoyed? Many people here say you need letters from professors but I have no way for that. This is in America.

In most math PhD programs in the US [I believe most turns to "all" as you approach the pure side of the mathematical spectrum] students are admitted and funded by an admissions committee representing the department as a whole, not primarily by the recommendations (or funding) of individual faculty members.

So if you are contemplating showing this work to a professor in the hope of getting admitted to that department's PhD program: that is not a very direct route.  If you are applying to that department anyway, then by all means contact all faculty members with whom you feel a connection and especially in the situation you described.  You should also mention this work in your application, e.g. in your statement of purpose.  That way it is likely that the admissions committee will contact the faculty member and ask about your case.  If you have correctly answered a question from one of their papers [and especially if this answer has not already appeared elsewhere in the literature; it would be a good idea to try to find that out], then they are certainly likely to put in a good word for your application.  However, you should understand that students are being judged mostly on the quality of their coursework, the present state of their mathematical knowledge and their potential for future achievements, and not very much on their own research achievements [e.g. because it is common for top candidates to have no research achievements].  So you should not expect this to offset any major weaknesses in your application.

By the way, having no letters of recommendation is a major weakness: in fact, it will cause your application not to be considered at most programs I know.  Maybe your idea is rather to get into a correspondence with this professor that will allow them (in time) to write a letter for you?  If so: yes, that could work.

By the way, I am currently the Graduate Coordinator [and ex officio chair of the graduate admissions committee] of the mathematics department at the University of Georgia.


How does Google Scholar rank search results? I am attempting to identify how Google Scholar chooses which publications to rank highly in search results.

I'm aware that Google Scholar uses metadata from academic websites, but therein my understanding of the process ends.

My query: What parts of Google Scholar's process for indexing and ranking search results is public, and where can that information be found?

Here is what the about page says:

Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Here is an academic article that attempted to deconstruct the ranking algorithm: Beel et al 2009, PDF
They suggest that two key factors were the citation count (more citations pushes the article higher up the search list) and the search term appearing in the title. They review a wide range of features.
Note that the article is 10 years old and the algorithm has presumably been updated over the years.
References

Beel, J., & Gipp, B. (2009, July). Google Scholar’s ranking algorithm: an introductory overview. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on scientometrics and informetrics (ISSI’09) (Vol. 1, pp. 230-241).


Do I need to embargo my dissertation if I submitted portions to journals? It seems that most math journals, including the one I'm submitting to, are very forgiving when it comes to preprints (ArXiv).  But what about dissertations? Will they consider it previously published material?

The general answer is: No, journals don't consider dissertations as previously published materials.

Some exceptions (that I don't know), may exist. If you want to be sure, here's a two things you can do:
1-Verify the instructions to authors.
2-In your letter to the editor that accompanies your submission, state clearly that this manuscript will be part of a dissertation.


Interview for a PhD position at a German university I am interviewing over Skype, for a research position at German university. So far my interviewer and I communicated via email, and he sounded formal but pleasant.

I have no clue how interviews are conducted at German universities. Is it subject-based or do they just want to know the student's skills and motivations?

Also, since i am interviewing for a position in machine learning, should i expect questions about the current trends and research?

I currently work in Germany, and have exactly the situation xLeitix mentions in his comments: I have positions which I am able to choose directly who I want to hire, independent of any admissions committee.

In such interviews, I want to have a sense of the student's technical prowess, as well as a sense of their motivation and interest in the position itself. Since such positions are usually directly associated with particular projects, I want to make sure that the candidate is reasonably qualified to tackle the specific project (rather than just being generally competent in the field).


Layout for a thesis chapter describing an undergraduate course I am writing a chapter in my degree thesis which describes a new undergraduate course I designed. I want to be as specific as possible with this course, like outlining what topic should be covered in each class. It is the main chapter of my thesis. Things that I am sure I must include are the learning objectives, the syllabus and a mention to the  instructional strategy (which in this case will be Flipped classroom).

How would you go about structuring this chapter? What things about the course should I include and in what order?

Can someone link me to a paper describing a new course in detail? It would be useful to have a reference.

The structure of theses depends very much on the standards of individual programs & institutions.  Your best bet would be to get a copy of a previous year's thesis in your program from your institution's library (they always keep them all).  Find one that has done something similar to what you are doing and use a similar structure (and, of course, if you refer to anything in it, cite & reference it appropriately).

For your reference, here's a general new course description that I developed for one of my courses.  Its format is heavily based on the standards of the university, so may not apply to your particular situation.


What questions to prepare for PhD defense? I will soon defend my PhD in social science in Sweden. I want to ask what questions the evaluation committee will ask me during the defense?
If they ask me some questions outside my thesis, what shall I do? Is it enough only know well my own research?
What quality I need to successfully defend my PhD?

Generally speaking, PhD defenses come in two flavors, and it is not possible to say a priori which one yours will fall into:

A real thesis "defense" focuses on the thesis, and all questions will relate to the scope of the research work. In this case, knowing your own work and its context well enough should be sufficient, but it is of course possible that somebody asks you why you used method A rather than B. In this case, saying that you don't know B may not fly as an answer. However, you should not get a completely disconnected question just to test your general subject area knowledge.
A "Rigorosum" (dict.leo translated this for me to "doctoral viva", no idea if this is a well-known term) is a general final exam for a doctoral candidate. Typically, this will also include questions about the disseration, but anybody in the exam commission is free to ask about other topics in the field as well. Typically, the questions are getting "easier" (more high-level) the farther they are away from the topic of the dissertation. The claim here is that a fresh PhD should have both, depth and breadth in her/his knowledge.

There are a number of ways to figure out which class your defense will fall into:

Attend other defenses. Typically, PhD defenses are public, and it is highly recommended that any PhD candidate should visit a few before her/his own, to get to know the procedure and get a feel for what the defense talk is supposed to look like.
Ask your advisor. The advisor should obviously know what the requirements of the defense are, exactly.
Look it up in the programme description. Usually, the programme description will contain exam regulations for the defense, and this should describe the exam procedure and who is supposed to ask what kind of questions. This approach has two dangers: (1) you may misunderstand what the exam regulations are saying - as they are more legalese text, you may misunderstand the gist of it, and (2) the actual exam may happen differently than specified - there is no telling whether the exam regulation exactly captures the real spirit of the defense. Hence, you should really also talk to your advisor and/or attend other defenses as well.


What are the consequences of mistakenly publishing existing research? **I'm asking this in the context of mathematical research if that changes the answer.
I've heard stories on Quora and from my professors about instances where researchers were banned from journals and, in some cases, thrown out of their universities for plagiarizing research. It did seem that their plagiarism was blatant, but the explanations weren't too specific.
I was wondering, with the number of papers that exist today and the number of journals they can be published to, it seems almost impossible to definitively know whether research already exists.
With all the work that's been published in any one field, is it the sole responsibility of the researcher to make sure their paper does not exist in any journal? And if they're unable to find prior proof of their work, will the consequences be so severe? It seems like two people stumbling across the same idea is not an uncommon occurrence. I think the most popular instance of this is between Leibniz and Newton. So, at second glance it doesn't seem feasible to discipline every researcher who manages to mistakingly publish existing work. But I'd like to know for sure. Am I right? And what would the consequences be?

I partially disagree with the answer given by astronat, since I think it does not reflect how common it is in mathematics to rediscover existing results (and to publish them without knowing that they already exist). So here is a somewhat different perspective:
Terminology.
What the OP calls mistakingly publishing existing research is, in my experience, more commonly and with a less negative connotation, referred to as rediscovery of existing research.
Distinction from plagiarism.
This point has already been explained in astronat's answer: independently rediscovering a result (and publishing it without knowing about its former existence) is something completely different from plagiarism.
Consequences.
What will happen if you publish a result which is already in the literature but you have not been aware of?
Nothing.
The math departments of this world would be empty halls if every mathematics professor who has unconsciously published a theorem or idea that already existed in the literature was banned from the university. (See the point "Prevalence" below.)
Of course, if this happens very often to you, this might have a negative impact on your reputation; but it happens to almost everybody now and then, so there is not much reason to worry in case that it does happen to you. (Unless in very, very obvious situations - if, for instance, I claimed to be a functional analyst and then published a "novel" result which turns out to simply be the Hahn-Banach theorem, chances are that I would have a much harder time to be taken seriously from now own. But this really refers to extreme cases only.)
Prevalence.
This is one of the points where I disagree with the assessment in astronat's answer. Experience shows that results are rediscovered and re-published (without the authors knowing or citing the earlier occurrance(s) of the result) all the time.
I could write a lengthy list of examples where this happened in papers I read or to people I know or to myself. But there are much better sources for this claim than my personal experience.
Just to get an impression, see for instance these two MathOverflow posts (post 1, post 2) or this blog post by Terry Tao.
Some reasons why this happens.

In earlier days, mathematical results could not be distributed as quickly as they are now (in particular, due to the internet).

Even today, access to many results is somewhat restricted, for instance if they are published in somewhat obscure journals (or, say, proceedings of small conferences) which are hardly accessible, or if they are published in languages which are not widely spoken.

While we have the internet and search engines available nowadays, the amount of published mathematical literature has also become much larger than only a few decades ago, which makes it literally impossible to know everything that could be relevant to your work.

Moreover, search engines are only useful if you know the right key words to search (which is often not the case due to varying terminological conventions).

There a many different ways to phrase or describe a mathematical result (and every more so for a mathematical idea). So even if our idea / argument / theorem is essentially present in a paper and even if we have a close look at this paper, it can sometimes be very hard to recognize it there. Since there are numerous papers which we ought to take a look at before we publish a result, there is simply no way to read all related papers in depth, and we will probably spend more time reading those papers which are obviously very closely related to our work. So if a similar idea occurs in a related, but not closely related paper, and if it is worded quite differently from how we would phrase it, there is a considerable chance that we just miss it.

Many ideas are so fundamental that they occur in many different fields of mathematics (and in many different forms). Our knowledge of a particular mathematical field will typically depend monotonically on how close the field is to our own field. So if a similar idea or result occurs in another area, it is quite likely that we are unaware of it. (The fact that different mathematical areas often use quite different terminology and notation for the same thing doesn't make it easier.)

In my experience, people tend to publish a lot of research work, while it is less common to write expository work (to some extent, this is certainly due to incentives imposed by typical career options in academia). For instance, I can think of various mathematical topics where, in my opinion, a comphrehensive survey article or an up-to-date monograph is missing. This is part of the problem since well-written surveys and books are an excellent aid in identifying relevant earlier results.

Some points to be aware of.

While results or arguments or ideas are often re-discovered, it happens more rarely that two papers have very similar content. Quite often, while some results in a paper might already be in the literature (but unknown to the author), there will be other results or insights in the paper that are still new. This is closely related to the point about novelty that user2768 made in their answer.

Even if some results in two papers are very similar, it will sometimes (though not always) happen that their proofs are quite different.

What to do?
That's a difficult question, and the answer that any particular mathematician gives to this might depend very much on their personality. Here are a few suggestions (biased by my own point of view, of course):

Obviously, we should carefully study the literature before we publish something. Citation databases (in mathematics these are, in particular MathSciNet und zbMATH) can be very helpful for this.

The more work we put into putting our results into context, the more we help potential readers of our paper to also become familiar with earlier research and results on the topic. For instance, there is a considerable difference between merely citing papers and explaining, if only briefly, the relevance of these papers. For instance, compare the following to ways to cite relevant literature:
-- "Recently, there has bee a lot of work on this topic [1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 15, 21, 23, 24, 25, 31, 36]"
-- "Interest in the topic abc originally stems from the study of xyz spaces, because their geometric properties can be classified by abc [9, 10, 36]. Later, abc has been extended to a more abstract setting in [1, 3, 21, 23] which made it possible to also classify the geometry of xyz' spaces [24, 25]. In the present paper, we build on the so-called fgh approach to abc recently developped in [12, 15]; combining it with the, at first glance unrelated, ijk technique from operator theory published in [4], we show that all major results in abc theory are actually independent of the foo assumption. This allows us to classify the geometric properties of very large classes of xyz* spaces. In addition, we obtain recent results from [31] as special cases of our general theory."

When writing a referee's report about a paper, we should take much care to point out missing references. In particular, I strongly support the idea that, as a referee, we should point to relevant articles by different authors, and not only to our own (obviously super-important but - heaven knows why - completely underappreciated) work which might not have been cited in the paper under review.

If we have made a preprint publicly available, and - before publication - we get aware you relevant literature that we have missed, we should, of course, make a serious effort to include it in the paper before publication.

If it is too late and you get aware of relevant references after publication, don't rack your brains over it. As explained above, this happens very often. Just make sure to properly include your newly gained knowledge when you write another article on a related topic (of course, this does not only mean to cite the references you now became aware of; it also means to take these references as a starting point for yet another literature search).

It is, in my experience, very uncommon to take any formal actions (such as notifying the journal, or even submitting an erratum) if you become aware of prior relevant work after publication. (But please note that I don't make any assessment as to whether I approve or disapprove of this practice; I'm just pointing out what is common practice.)


Are there instances of papers the first parts of whose colon-wise titles are questions? pre-colon-part: post-colon-part is a format which is often used in titles of papers. In all of the instances I have seen, the first part is an informative phrase, a (fictitious) example of which may be

Optimal consensus control of drone swarms: a game-theoretic approach.

But, I am wondering whether there are instances of papers# first parts of whose colon-wise titles are questions; as another fake example, something like:

Constructive or destructive?: Implications on the effectiveness of my
vaccine on the mutated coronavirus

I just tried to look up potential occurrences of the pattern pre-colon-part?: post-colon-part in Google Scholar by searching "?:". However, my query yields nothing. Has anyone already encountered such instances in the scientific literature?
# I am preferably interested in the potential instances which are composed by English native speakers, and/or published in prestigious journals.

There are plenty of articles that have a title in the format "Question? Answer/Suggestion", however, without colon.
I'm pretty sure that you cannot have a colon following a question mark, given a question mark indicates the end of a sentence (same as full stop and exclamation mark).
See also this question on english.se: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/51485/sentences-ending-with-both-a-colon-and-a-question-mark


Why are some non-thesis MS or MA programs just called M? I heard of some master's degrees that are just M instead of MS or MA like Master of Mathematics or Master of Psychology. Apparently, this is due to it being non-thesis.

However, I met people who choose non-thesis in MS or MA programs that have a choice between thesis and non-thesis. Their IDs say MS or MA. Is this because the program has a choice for thesis?

In general the formal name of a degree is a very bad guide to the contents of the degree; the name of the degree is heavily influenced by local history and traditions (some extreme examples: a Master of Arts degree from Oxford is automatically awarded 21 terms after matriculation to anyone with an Oxford BA; the degree that qualifies one to practice medicine in the USA is a Doctor of Medicine, while in the UK it's typically a combined Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery; a Bachelor of Philosophy degree at Oxford is a two-year philosophy degree aimed at those with a first degree).

In the UK there are increasingly degrees called 'integrated masters' (or sometimes 'undergraduate masters') whose names fit the pattern you mention. These are generally four-year degrees, generally in fields like mathematics, science and engineering, which one enters without a previous degree and which aim to leave students in a position to embark on doctoral study. See this example from Manchester Metropolitan University. Individual degrees may or may not include a mandatory or optional thesis requirement.


Is it okay/common/good to mention the submitted papers in my phd thesis? I have a couple of papers that I have submitted to some journals but no feedback is received yet. meanwhile i'm writing my phd thesis and the defense is in few months, surely before getting any feedback from the journals. I'm wondering if it is okay to mention those submitted journal papers in my thesis.

Yes. It is both OK and common to mention them as Articles Submitted, or as Manuscripts Under Review, or in case you have any (e.g. arXiv) preprint, Article Preprints (with the appropriate arXiv identifier).

It might be relevant for me to point out from personal experience, that the only instruction from my department in this regard was - "Everything mentioned in the list of publications in the thesis has to be either published, or submitted for publication. There shouldn't be anything in the articles to be submitted category, because that category could be inflated as much as a person desires". The last part may be field and institute-dependent, but I think this conveys the basic ideology. Articles submitted are safe in terms of inclusion.


3.1 GPA, but 2 Ds and a F on transcript I am graduated in computational physics and from south asian country. i got  F and D- grades for elective physics courses in my first and second year. but i didn't retake those classes. another D+ grade for non major course. Will that grades keep me from going to a  grad school in USA ?

Maybe, maybe not. One can not say for sure. This depends on the particular programs you apply, on your luck and also the rest of your application (publications, recommendation letters and so on).

However, if I understand this correctly, you already received the bad grades. So if you want to study in the USA, just apply - you can (probably) not change anything anymore. You will see if they accept you or not and this matters more than the opinions of the people in this forum.

Welcome, by the way.


boss asked me to draft them a letter of rec? A while ago I asked my boss to write me a letter for a specific school, and he responded asking me if I could draft it, and he showed me the edits and final draft before sending it out.
Now I asked him to send me letters for some other schools too and he agreed, I'm assuming he'll just use the same letter. But I just now realized that one of the schools explicitly states that I am to not be involved in the letter in any way. What should I do? Is this a common thing?
Should I just let it slide? How seriously do schools take this situation anyways? and from what I've seen from the letter I drafted it doesn't look like any sentences overlap with anything in my personal statement. I would also feel bad asking him to rewrite a letter thats already perfectly well written.
At the same time I just feel, well, kinda bad. Idk, not saying anything to my boss about the school letter guidelines doesn't sit right with me.

It’s best to behave honestly and ethically. It seems clear to me that you’ve been acting in good faith so far and cannot be faulted for the oversight of not noticing this one guideline among the many confusing hoops the grad schools tell you to jump through. And the transgression, such that it is, seems very minor to me — after all your boss took an active role in writing the final letter, presumably fully believes in its contents, and only showed it to you because he didn’t know it was forbidden.
Now, the key to handling the current situation is to keep the ethical bar high and not spoil things now with any shady or underhanded behavior. My suggestion is therefore that you send the guidelines to your boss and apologize for the oversight of not noticing this specific guideline before. Add that he should feel free to edit his letter again before submitting it and not show you the edits if he so desires. If you do that, you will be morally in the clear in my opinion, and would not have to worry about your boss developing a poor opinion of you if he were to discover these guidelines himself at some later point.
In theory you could also inform the school of what happened. If you do I am sure they will find the explanation satisfactory. And if so you will be going above and beyond what I’m guessing 95% of grad school applicants would go to the trouble of doing if they were in a similar situation.
Good luck!


Bad Recommendation from PhD Advisor I am in the final stages of my PhD and have been applying for postdocs for the last six months. Recently, I heard back from the job I applied for, we had a phone interview and he was very happy with my experience and skills. In fact he was looking for a new postdoc with the same experience what I did in my PhD. We communicated through emails in a very friendly way and he invited me to visit his lab. We scheduled the visit but he wanted to talk to my references before that. He sent an email to my present PhD supervisor and asked him what would be a good time to talk over the phone. My supervisor didn't reply to him for at least a couple of weeks. I know this because every week, I used to get an email from him to remind my PhD supervisor to reply to his email. Finally, my PhD supervisor replied and they talked over the phone. The potential postdoc mentor suddenly took a U-turn after that. He said i may not be a good fit and he will stop this right here.

I am really freaking out in this situation. I initially had problems with my PhD advisor because he is very aggressive and loves to make racist jokes. But I managed to handle his sense of humor and aggression. But I feel like he is racially prejudiced to me and will spoil my whole career.

I will share some information with you, based on two things you mentioned:

  a) You said your advisor is very aggressive and loves to make racist jokes

  b) You suspect your advisor soured your postdoc application through negative remarks to your prospective employer

This sounds like a situation which might be investigatable by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), if your PhD institution receives any federal funds.

If you decide you would like this investigated by OCR, you would need to file a complaint within 6 months of becoming aware of alleged discrimination.  A complaint of this kind can be filed by an individual working alone without a lawyer.

You might be able to find a lawyer would would help you with the complaint pro bono (free) or with a reduced cost.

It would be helpful to cite as much specific information about (a) as possible.  However, you can send the complaint letter quickly and then submit more specific information subsequently.  It can be helpful to file these complaints quickly rather than not quickly, because some regional OCR offices are extremely backed up.

If OCR feels that your complaint letter fits with their purview, and meets some other basic requirements, but your letter doesn't include specific information such as dates of incidents and descriptions of incidents, then you will be asked to provide specifics.

If you want to learn more about this: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/howto.html

The part I feel most unsure about is the employment aspect.  However, the How-To page I linked to mentions

  Some of the civil rights laws enforced by OCR also extend to employment.

Each university has an office that addresses discrimination issues, so you could in principle bring the issue to them.  However, many people have found it more effective to either go ahead and file with OCR, or draft an OCR complaint and share the draft with the institution (as a draft).

Alternatively, you could instead try an informal approach: make an appointment with a department administrator and share your concern.  The response you get could help you decide about next steps.  Here's a relatively gentle way of starting such a conversation:

  I had a job interview that seemed to be going great --until suddenly it wasn't going great any more.  I'd like to get some constructive feedback so that I can do better in subsequent interviews.  But it would be awkward for me to ask my advisor directly for feedback.  (Answer truthfully but with a very neutral tone if you're asked why.)  Can you help facilitate me getting some constructive feedback from Prof. So-and-So (your advisor)?

If you're part of a graduate student union, it might be helpful to bring the problem to them to see if they can provide support.

**11/25 additional notes 11/25:

Your university may have an all-purpose grievance procedure that can be used in general situations, even when there's no alleged racial discrimination.
In the answer I wrote yesterday I was only providing information.  Now I'll provide a couple of strategy notes.  If I were in your shoes I would probably start with the informal approach I outlined yesterday, and try to keep it in the department.  I'd avoid using any language that might alarm the department administration, and keep the tone very calm and neutral.  But at the same time, I'd be working quietly on collecting evidence and witnesses, and starting to draft a complaint.  Putting the facts down on paper can be an extremely useful exercise.
I recommend that you avoid escalating your concern beyond your department.  But if your university chooses to do so, I'd recommend you do one of the following, pretty quickly:

(a) find an ally or a lawyer

(b) submit a complaint to OCR

(c) submit a draft OCR complaint to your university

Reason: some universities play hard ball.  It would be safest to protect yourself in case your university turns out to be one of those.

If I had strong evidence for the racism allegations, and did not have an ally or a lawyer, I would likely go with (c).  A draft complaint could give you some useful leverage.  When OCR investigates, it requires that the university submit a lot of documentary evidence (both about your particular situation, and also about its policies and procedures), and it conducts interviews.  Institutions generally find this onerous and often would prefer to resolve the potential complainant's concerns pretty quickly, in order to prevent an OCR complaint from being filed.

Note that filing an OCR complaint provides protection against retaliation.

Note also that it can be a frustratingly slow process.  Therefore it would be good to try to get your goals clear before you talk to anyone.  I imagine your goals at this point are

Graduate
Get a post-doc

I hope you find a good administrator in your department.


Textbook copies for Outreach Programs I am a PhD Student doing outreach with High school Juniors and Seniors in STEM. There is a book on mathematical proofs, "How To Prove It" by Daniel Velleman, that I think most of the mathematically inclined students I am working with would love reading and doing problems from. These students though do not have the funds to purchase this book because they are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. What is the most ethical way for me to obtain large numbers of copies of this book, or textbooks in general, for these students?

Contact your local library and ask them to help, they may be able to access copies through inter-library loans. If you're located in the US or Turkey, it appears that this book is available via OverDrive (https://www.overdrive.com/media/96681/how-to-prove-it) , which is a commonly used eBook lending service. It's quite likely that you have a library nearby which offers OverDrive to their clients, in which case, you'd get free access with membership and so would your students. Good luck and keep up the good work :-)
ETA: I'm not affiliated with OverDrive in any way. Of course, there could be other eBook providers which have this book, just check with your library.


Am I not fit for grad school if I have a bad GRE score? Should I give up? I have taken the GRE four times and got 148 Verbal, 157 Quantitative, and 3 on Writing.

By the way, English is not my first language. I am a foreigner that works in his home country. I want to do a PhD in the USA, but I can not get a descent GRE score.

Does these results say I am not fit to do a PhD?

I can not get good reference letters. I graduated from a developing country university which has no graduate programs and Faculty works part time. I did electrical engineering.

As some answers for a similar question have pointed out regarding GRE scores, the answer could be maybe. Language too, is not necessarily a hard barrier to doing a PhD in the US, as long as the potential advisor can overlook it.

However, I would strongly urge you to find good reference letters as having both poor letters and poor scores is generally a pretty big red flag, or at the least significantly reduces the competitiveness of your application.

You may still have a chance by contacting faculty directly in less popular or lower ranked schools, which may have a shortage of applicants. This does vary on the field.


Is an author allowed to use the same figure in different papers without citation? Authors A, B and C published paper [1] in journal X.
Author B created a figure for paper [1]. The figure is not essential and does not contain any important data. It is just a geometric ilustration.
Authors C and B are writing a new paper [2] for journal Y.

Can the same figure be used in paper [2] without any mention to paper [1]? Is it ethical? Does it violate copyrights of X? Is it considered plagiarism by Y? How about the situation X=Y?

(Authors A, B and C are friends, so there is no problem for author A.)

Unfortunately there's no easy general answer to the copyright question, since it depends on the terms of the copyright assignment the authors signed with journal X, as well as the complexity and originality of the figure (you can't easily copyright an image of a triangle, you might have more difficultly with an image showing e.g. multiple stages of an algorithm). If the image was created programatically, then one possible solution might be to redraw it with slightly different data and new labelling.

It's also important to note that just citing the original source doesn't automatically make the copyright legal issues vanish. While the journal's home jurisdiction (or the authors') might grant you fair use rights/a fair trading defence, these each have their own restrictions, based on how much of the original the figure formed. Many academic publishers have a web portal allowing authors to request permissions to republish. These frequently (but not always) give reductions/waivers on fees to the original authors, or to articles submitted to their own journals.


How is it possible to get a masters in electrical engineering in one year? I was asked this question, and did not think it was possible. Is it possible without an integrated degree (i.e., after a bachelor's)? I do not really know. If so, how?

I mean for the US, but don't take that as limiting your answer (if from the UK or elsewhere).

How is it possible to get a masters in 1 year? Simple, sign up for a course which offers a masters degree in 1 year. Perhaps not so simple.

In the UK, we have something called an integrated masters degree offered on many engineering courses. This typically follows a 3 year bachelors degree. The theory being that if you have just spent the last 3 years studying the same subject, you can then simply continue on using that as the foundation to build on to get a masters.

The reason a masters degree, which is not integrated, is usually (again from a UK perspective) 2 years, is that the first year is intended as almost a foundation year to get everyone up to speed with the more specialised skills that they may be missing. For example if you do a BSc in physics, you could then do an MSc in EE, but you wouldn't have the same electronics knowledge that somebody who was coming off a BEng in EE would have. In fact at the Uni I went to, during our third (final) bachelors year, we would frequently share modules with those doing the first year of their MSc for this very reason.

Now it may be possible if you have the relevant skills (e.g. if you have a good bachelors degree in the same subject) to be able to skip a year of a 2 year masters degree, and just do the final year. However this would be very much dependent on finding a Uni which would allow that, and probably also would require some form of aptitude test to ensure that you have the skills to do so. I doubt this would be a common offering though.

Again, this is a very UK centric answer. I'm not familiar with other countries systems. As far as I know, in the US, bachelors degrees are typically more like 4 years because the US education system ends high school at a level more equivalent to the GCSE (or possibly AS) level from a UK perspective. So the first year of Uni in the US is more like an A-level equivalent in the UK.


Including a segment of constructive criticism of another paper in my manuscript I'm currently investigating a subject that has theoretical and algorithmic aspects. I have my theoretical background that I think is novel enough.
As for the algorithmic aspect, I found paper X (not written by me or anyone I know personally) to be genuinely very good, but I think that using my theoretical advances I can improve it further, especially for my own application which slightly differs from the one the authors of X had in mind.

Now, after I analyzed and scrutinized X's algorithm in practice (i.e. obtained the source code and performed numerous experiments), I found that some of their assumptions and declarations are inaccurate. [E.g., if their algorithm consists of stages A->B->C->end, and they claim A makes a big difference and is their novelty, I find that it is in fact a good implementation of C that makes that difference.]

I certainly don't mean to undermine or criticize them because it is a good paper. However, I do find some discrepancies. So, in my paper, should I also include some subsection in which I specify these issues (with suitable justifications), or will it just look as nitpicking or otherwise negative behaviour on my part?

Thanks.

EDIT (clarification): even though it seems to be a specialized case, it's really about etiquette regarding criticism of other authors' papers.

If you make choices that only make sense if the article contains mistakes, then point out those mistakes to justify your choices. Then it becomes a matter of necessity to point out the mistakes, not one of nitpicking.
However as a matter of courtesy and due diligence, you could contact the original authors to ask them about the mistakes. Be sure to approach the subject gently. Along the lines of: "in the article you state that A was the cause of the performance gain, but in my tests I found the performance gain in C. As you see in these results.  Do you know what I did differently than you?"


How to indicate obscurity in a translated quotation? I'm writing a historical work about a German philosopher, in which I use some of his unpublished notes.

One quotation contains an almost untranslatable, hardly intelligible expression - it's not essential to the point I'm making with the citation (which is perfectly clear), but by cutting it out using [...] I mangle the quotation even more.

Can I translate it literally (which turns into nonsense) and write [sic] behind it? After all, it's not what was actually written but my translation, so I feel like this isn't really an option. Or should I chose one of the different possible interpretations that make some sense of it, but thereby pushing some particular reading, even though I don't need that to make my point?

After all, it's not what was actually written but my translation, so I feel like this isn't really an option.

You seem to have unconsciously ruled out what I would consider the best option: leave the phrase in question untranslated with a footnote which gives the literal translation and says that the phrase's meaning is unclear but irrelevant.


Suggestions for a non-traditional interview? I will have a post-doc interview in social sciences, warned to be a bit nontraditional in the sense that it will focus more on general logical capabilities and unique/creative thoughts instead of specific sets of skill or fit with a particular project. The reason is because this is a training grant I guess. Literally, they want to emphasize on "innovative" aspects of applicants, though I think that it's quite tempting and ambiguous.

So, I guess that I'd want to ask for questions you may have that can train the brain in this direction, some thing thought-intriguing like this:

What is the most significant finding in your field in the last couple of years and how does that mean to your specific work?

Any comments are welcome :) Btw, if you happen to be in social sciences, how would you answer the above question?

Without more information, I would not assume that they will not ask you about your research, publications, and dissertation.  Assume that they will.  My impression is that they want to go beyond this "CV stuff".

I suggest that you should spend more time to understand the motivations of the organization sponsoring the post-doc and why this is funded as a training grant rather than as something else.  Do they put special emphasis on making their research relevant to the real world (i.e. to policy makers, to the social groups being studied, to the general public)?  Do they aim to develop social scientists that go into non-traditional careers or interdisciplinary work?  What has this organization done in the past that they themselves call "innovative"?  Do they aim to redefine the boundaries and methods of social science?

Regarding how to prepare, there are plenty of books on creativity that have exercises that might stimulate this part of your brain.  But I'd guess that spending time on these books won't provide a good payoff for you.

A better strategy would be to organize a debating group with some peers.  They don't have to be at your university.  You could do it on-line via Skype or Google Hangout.  Arrange a meeting and specify an important+controversial topic in your field.  Focus the debate on how this topic could be researched in a new and different way, such that breakthrough results might be achieved.  For example:

Could the problem be reframed, rescoped, or redefined?
Could new methods be applied or existing methods be combined?
What new methods/approaches have already been tried but have failed? Why?
What methods or approaches from other disciplines might be adapted or applied to this topic?
What if this topic was researched at a much larger scale? much smaller scale? Over a long time period? At a single moment in time but in great detail?
How can research results become more compelling, rigorous, or widely applicable?

And so on.

Basically, your debating group will be exploring the space of possibilities just beyond what is being done today and assessing the prospects of improvement or innovation.

The value of doing this in a group rather than solo is that you will be engaging in the same modes of thinking and communication as the interview. You can and should challenge each other to clearly explain and justify your ideas, and to properly characterize them even if they are sketchy or "wacky".

You might find that this sort of preparation isn't for you.  If so, then maybe you might have to admit to yourself that you aren't an "innovator".  That's fine. There are many other good roles in social science that emphasize other traits and skills.


Supporting ESL Graduate Students I've had to support several ESL graduate students in the past. In general, they were smart and capable but really struggled with the reading and writing aspects of graduate work. They did complete the prerequisite ESL courses and passed one of the standard English test to enter university studies (IELTS, TOEFL, TOEIC, etc) but there seems to be a disconnect between their preparation and their performance

I would like to know what other educators have done to support graduate students with limited English proficiency?

I think you should let the students know that they need additional practice and should be prepared to read more papers, seek help from the university Writing Center, and get a native English-speaking buddy to discuss the field with in-depth for practice.  I know the last thing that any graduate student wants to do is more work, but it might help if you emphasize to them that you care about their long-term success in the field, and that reading and writing at a professional level in the field are crucial to that.

The foreign students and researchers I have worked with are primarily Chinese, so that colors my experience, I'm sure, but many of them were not educated with an eye to being good readers and writers.  They may have been trained to read for memorization, not comprehension, because they expect to be told what to do by senior researchers rather than critically respond to ideas and generate their own.  So it may not just be a language barrier you're dealing with here, but also a cultural barrier where research is conducted differently.  Your students may not understand that they will be expected to interpret, rather than passively absorb, the literature, and that they will have to kick their reading skills up a notch if for no other reason than that.

See if you can enlist some of the native English-speaking grad students to reach out and lend a hand to their ESL colleagues.  Again, I do understand that no grad student wants to do extra work (boy, DO I understand), but you can emphasize that it will benefit them, as well.  They will improve their own understanding of the readings tremendously by having to explain them in terms their classmate can understand, and they will also become better collaborators.  Make sure they know they can mention doing something like this in the "service" section of their CVs.


Are non-citizen Muslim professors and students going to be removed from US universities and subsequently deported by Trump's ban? Does anyone have any information on this?  Are academics somehow protected from Trump's ban on Muslims?

I know that some have the "alien of extraordinary ability" work visa, but what about for others that don't have such status?

The current ban applies only to people who are outside the US.  Nobody knows what Trump might do in the future, though.

Edit: The situation keeps changing, and I will not be updating this answer.  Stack Exchange is not a news service.


Can I contact graduate office regarding decision timeline (to know my application status)? I am an applicant of Graduate program in Biological sciences of X University, USA. My application deadline was Dec 15, 2015 and I submitted application with required documents on time (PhD application). For the past 4 months my application status in portal shows "In review". In the university website,no specific decision timeline is given. My question is can I contact through e-mail to graduate program coordinator to know the decision status? It is almost April 1st week, I fear my application might be rejected, but I want to know it from officials.

Is it normal to ask Graduate program coordinator to ask about decision timeline or my application status?

Thanks.

You will likely find out within the next few weeks. But asking them the date by which they'll let applicants know their decision status is a perfectly reasonable question. After all, you might have other offers that may require a time-sensitive answer.

I don't know if I'd ask directly about your application status, but asking for their review timeline is perfectly reasonable and appropriate.