Abbreviating first names in the bibliography In my bibliography I use the names of the authors as they are given in the publication. Usually this will be the last name, the first name not abbreviated and second names abbreviated. However, I now have the following problems:

For some authors I only have publications with their first name abbreviated.
Some authors have their first name abbreviated in some publications and in others not. This leads to the strange result that I have them in the bibliography with their first name abbreviated only sometimes.

Should I try to get/use the not abbreviated first names for consistency or leave the names as they are given in the publications?

At the end of the day this all boils down to opinion and you already gave the most important argument yourself: Usually, the only way to obtain consistency is to abbreviate all first names. If you try to use unabbreviated names even when the journal doesn’t, you will eventually run into a case where you cannot find out an author’s full first name by any reasonable means.

All journals that I am aware of adhere to such a citation style, so you would be in good company abbreviating first names. Moreover, such a citation style would not arise if it would lead to any practical problems. In fact, knowing an author’s full first name rarely accelerates finding a cited publication, and if then only by a little. I cannot imagine a situation where the first name would actually be necessary to find or identify a properly cited paper – you always have page numbers or similar to resolve potential ambiguities.


How can I ask to not be assigned a seat near a particular person during exams? I'm going to write my exams next month, but since COVID-19 we have special rules on how exams should be carried out and one of them is that every student is assigned a place to sit in the examination hall in advance. I won't go into details, but there is one person next to whom I don't want to be sitting. My reason to not sit near him has nothing to do with the pandemic. And since our class is pretty small, it's very likely to get a place somewhere near him.
That's why I'm planning to write an email on Monday to the unit in my university, which is responsible for the organization of the exams (if necessary to my professors as well), explaining them that it doesn't matter to me where I'm going to sit, but I just want a seating place which is not directly next to him.
Do you think that's a good idea and is there anything else that you could maybe recommend me to do?

Yes, I think you can ask. You don't need to give a reason if things are handled justly. "Personal reasons" should be enough. If the person has harassed you in the past or is known to you to cheat you have adequate reason.
And, it might be important to do so if you think that it would affect your performance.
You will need to decide whether to give a reason if asked. But be honest without revealing more than necessary. You might not achieve your objective, of course. Be ready for that.


How do I talk about methodology mistakes In a scientific project report? I'm writing up my 3rd year engineering project (The equivalent of a dissertation in other subjects), and I'm struggling to write the chapter in which my method failed I couldn't get any results.

My project is on Neural Networks, and when I started my project I tried to program my own Neural Network from scratch, however this did not work properly (The feed forward part worked, but because of the convoluted way I had programmed it I couldn't implement the back propagation part). After I realized this I used an off-the-shelf program to create my neural network, which worked much better.

The problem is that I must have spent about a quarter of the year programming my own Neural Network from scratch, so I want to include it as a chapter in my report to show the marker that I have put over the recommended 300 hours work into my project, and that I understand the inner working of Neural Networks.

How should I write this chapter? So far I have started the chapter as if it is going to work, then I wrote about exactly what I have done and how it works, and then at the end where the results should be I want to explain that the custom implementation of the neural network meant that I couldn't implement back propagation, and therefore couldn't get results. But I can't do this without it looking like I have lazily given up on that chapter, and abruptly given an excuse to move on to the next chapter (The working version of the neural network).

You wrote:

  I want to include it as a chapter in my report to show the marker that I have put over the recommended 300 hours work into my project

Nooooooooo.

Don't do that. This is a postgraduate degree, and you're expected to take the research seriously. It's not a 9-5 grunt job or prison sentence where you turn up, serve your time, and get the reward at the end of your allotted time.

Show what you've learnt. That's what the markers are interested in. You say that you've learnt the inner workings of neural networks. That's great. So demonstrate and document what you've learnt.

And don't document the tortuous process you used. Don't describe how you went from A to B via C,D,E,...X,Y.

Just report that you started at A, ended at B, you've found that the shortest route between those points is {whatever it is}, and briefly document the dead ends and traps that future researchers should avoid.


Repository for Education What would be the most appropriate place for someone to upload their Master thesis in Education? (Their institution does not upload electronic versions of theses.) The thesis is original research and a paper version has already been accepted to a conference; the author just wants to share their thesis with the community independently of the paper.

I have come across this list but I don't know the culture of the field, so I cannot advise them on which one to use, if any. I also note that the thesis is not in English.

Thanks in advance.

As it seems unlikely at this point that this question will receive an appropriate answer soon, I'll answer my own question and give the best answer I came across.

Someone who is in Education research has told me that he and his colleagues use Academia.edu and ResearchGate. So, while there are certainly repositories out there, it would appear that they are not widely used. In the end, I recommended to the author of the thesis that they use these two sites.


MS in Physics after Bachelors in Mechanical engineering I am in the final semester of my mechanical engineering bachelors, though I could have finished my bachelors about  4 months ago, but I failed to clear 2 of my subjects, for which I would appear again in the December examination. Physics has always caught my attention, but then, everything I see catches my attention.I want to study physics now after I get my degree. The problem is my grades. I have scored an aggregate of 65% in my bachelors, but I can learn and understand things once I decide to do so. I am from India. How can I apply in foreign universities for MS, considering that they take engineering graduates for MS in physics, what kind of entrance/competitive exams would I have to give.
Thanks.

Changing fields from Engineering to Physics should not be a problem. I have several colleagues who have done this at various universities. Although, you would need to check with the specific universities you are interested in. If you are applying to universities in the United States you will likely need to take the GRE exam (some non-US universities will also consider GRE exam scores in the application process). As you are applying from India you may also need to take the TOEFL test.

Your grades may hold you back since most high-ranked universities require an average over 75% for graduate studies. These are the University of Toronto minimum entrance grade equivalents from Indian universities:

  Bachelor's Degree Equivalent: Completion of BOTH a Bachelor's
  (three-year) degree and a Master's OR A Bachelor's degree requiring
  four years of study (e.g. BPharm, MBBS, BDS, BTech, BEng, or BArch)

  Mid-B Equivalent: 1st Class or 1st Div.; 7.5/10 from Indian Institutes
  of Technology; 8.0/10 from other institutions

However, good exam scores, relevant research experience, and good reference letters may help make up for the difference. It is worth discussing with a potential supervisor at your intended university who may be willing to support your application, as this can often help.


Does still it matter to be the "first author" nowadays It used to be that the first author (meaning, the author whose name comes before the others) is thought to have contributed most to the publication.

But in the last couple of decades, it seems that the first author no longer matters AT ALL, instead the last person has become the most important.

I attribute my observation to two things,

The first author is typically a student, someone with no name recognition, or someone who is getting advised or funded by the last author.
The last author is typically the director or advisor of the project. In recent years many of these people have become ultra famous through things like TEDtalks and other media hype. It didn't use to be this way before the internet.

Nowadays whenever I evaluate how potentially interesting a paper is in my field (stem), before I even read it, I almost always look at the last author, especially if it is someone famous. If I don't recognize anyone, I am quick to assume that the paper is not interesting. I am trying to fight back against my bias.

Does being the "first author" still carry any weight in today's academic culture?

In fields that don't do alphabetical order being "first author" still matters most in early career stages.

As you correctly say the senior author is usually a professor (= group leader) while the first author is the person that did most of the work. In an early career stage (until you become group leader or assistant professor) first authorships are the most important thing. As soon as you start your own research group the senior authorships become more important (in rare cases some very senior postdocs might have one or the other senior authorship as well).

In many application guidelines you would find instructions like "attach separate lists of (a) all publications, (b) first authorships and (c) senior authorships". If you don't have a sufficient number of first authorships they will not even look at your application in more detail.


What are the benefits of organizing a conference? Organizing a conference is very difficult for a scientist, you have to have the right collaborators, to find the right venue, to spread the word, to advertise it, to send the call for papers, to receive the papers, to check them, to organize the lunchs and dinners, etc etc.

All these tasks are very time-consuming, and stressful, and they will steal precious time to your scientific research activity, and also to your family/friends time.

So, why do people decide to organize conferences?

What are the main benefits and advantages of running this complex and time-consuming activity?

If everyone refused to organize conferences, we would have no conferences.

Yes, it's that obvious.  The same goes for editing journals, refereeing papers, and most other service activities.

The main result of a research conference is that it helps attendees do better research, to find and understand new ideas, and to disseminate their own research, etc.  By organizing the conference, you are the facilitator of all that.  Furthermore, you get to influence the direction of the conference -- what it will focus on, who the invited speakers will be, how it will be run, and so forth.

Additionally, I would argue that academics are paid to organize conferences in the same way that we are paid to referee papers.

Finally, there are fringe benefits to you personally, including the prestige mentioned by @user3209815 -- you can list it on your CV under service activities.  Frankly, this is not going to make or break your career, and you probably shouldn't be doing it early in your career, since (as you point out) it takes time away from things that may be more essential.


Counting the the number of publications citing all of a given set of publications I would like to specify a list of publications and find out which articles cited the ones in my list.

Is there such tool?

You could probably use Europe PMC API for that. It would be limited to biomedical publications though. Using this module you should be able to construct your query and find intersection programmatically. Alternatively you can combine the queries on the website using Boolean logic, e.g. here is a search for a paper citing three particular publications.

Disclaimer: I work for Europe PMC


Is it legal / ethical for a professor to monetize course content videos? I am a college student who is currently enrolled in a class where the professor posts lecture videos online with ads enabled. I was wondering if this is legal; the professor is being paid by the university to lecture, but is also making money from ads on his lecture videos.

Legal? Probably yes, depending on university policy.

Ethical? Universities and politics nowadays encourage academics to be business-savvy and profit-oriented (I guess, as long as the uni gets a cut). So, while the described constellation indeed carries a "smell", it may be perfectly in line what society wants academics to do.


Does using GPL material in a paper make it impossible to transfer copyright to the publisher? I am writing a paper, and would like to use some GPL-licensed material I found on the internet; for instance, an image. The GPL requires any work using GPL content to be GPL licensed itself. To my understanding, using GPL content would make it impossible to transfer the copyright to the publisher, and therefore unacceptable for most research papers. It is correct?

This would be a problem if you used GPL-licensed piece of software and decided to release your derived program in a GPL-incompatible way.

Other than this, you should be fine. The point of GPL is that if you improve the source code, then your improvements (in case you want to make them public) must also be licensed under GPL.

Certainly GPL does not "infect" your publications - you can e.g. cite a piece of code released under GPL, without any problems. (And you can write your paper on a Linux machine, thus running GPL'ed OS :-))


How to disagree about author order when my advisor has been dismissive of such concerns in the past? I'm being asked by my advisor to perform a specific scientific experiment that she conceived from start to finish  on our apparatus over the next two months (which could easily become 3-4 months or even longer).  There is a senior graduate student, but he is writing his dissertation.  The advisor has asked me to run the lab 45 hours per week to take data on this experiment.  The advisor has told me that the senior graduate student will provide some guidance and we will work together on a conceptual level, but that I will do all of the day-to-day setup and data taking.  So far, the senior graduate student has only acted as a buffer of communication between the advisor and myself, and he has simply passed on parameters for me to test that were suggested by the advisor.

The advisor has indicated that she wants the senior graduate student be the first author.  I believe that this is only because the senior graduate student has not published a satisfactory number of papers and must graduate this semester (he is a 7th year graduate student).

In the past when I've questioned the ethics of authorship on papers, particularly pertaining to this exact scenario, my questions have been brushed off and I've been told that this is how it has been done in the past in our research group: a junior graduate student will take a lot of experimental data for the senior graduate student.  To call myself a junior graduate student may be misleading, I am in the fifth year my PhD program and I have not yet started my independent research in the lab because I have been taking data for the previous graduate student for several years now.  I fully have the expertise to run this new experiment without any input from the senior graduate student.

It seems to me that, simply questioning my advisor's ethics with regard to how she assigns responsibility and authorship in the lab, has run into a brick wall.  It has made things awkward and has not changed anything.

I want to consult other professors but I fear that their conception of authorship is just as corrupt.  I would also like to speak to our dean but I fear that word will get out and it could come  back to hurt me a later point in time.

How have people dealt with this in past?  It seems that there are no definite guides for how to determine authorship in such specific cases, and I feel that my advisor is abusing the undefinitive nature of authorship ethics!

Depending on your field, it may be possible to submit your paper to a journal which allows for "co-equal first authors": that is, both the first and second are treated equally as first authors within the journal. You could then mention this in your CV. That way, I don't think there's much harm done; this would represent the path of least resistance.

Otherwise, you're going to have to be willing to involve someone to deal with this issue—whether it's your advisor, the dean, or other professors in the department. There's no way to resolve this issue without it. (I presume you mean the chair of your department, or other similar official, when you use the term "dean.") But the first step should be to talk with your advisor, before the paper is written. You may be able to clarify things at that stage. I'd involve the other members of your thesis committee (if you have one), and then finally work with the dean.


How to get a decent recommendation letter? I am trying to ask one of my professors to write a recommendation letter for me, but he did not say yes directly, instead, he said he would be willing to talk with me to hear more about my plans.

I did not interact with him too often when I took his course(a PhD-level pure math course). But I did get an A in that course(I did bad in the midterm, but pretty well in the final). I think he is still hesitant as to whether to write me a letter or not. When I go talk to him, how can I persuade him?

I am certainly not expecting a strong letter from him. I think my background is okay(8+Phd-level courses all A or A+, 1 REU), but the problem is that he probably did not know much about me. So my plan is to take my list of schools and abstracts of advanced courses with me when I go meet him. Is there anything else that I can do?

I do not interpret what he wrote as necessarily discouraging.  He may just want to get to know you better so he can write a better letter.

Just talk about yourself and your academic interests.  What has been your favorite course so far?  What did you like about it?  What would you like to do in the future?  Etc.


Review time after third submission We have submitted a manuscript in a Finance journal. Within 1.5 months, they gave us the comments of two reviewers. The Reviewers gave positive remarks but wanted some correction. We carefully scrutinized both reviewers suggestions and found that they have contradictory demand. Hence we follow the second reviewer's comments and made changes according to his suggestion. We also explained why we could not follow the first reviewer's suggestion. After resubmitting, within one-week editor again send us feedback ( or review) that since we did not follow the first reviewer's suggestion the first reviewer gave a suggestion to reject our paper. So the editor wants us to change our paper again. Again, we thoroughly explained why we fail to comply with the first reviewer's suggestion and resubmitted the manuscript (third time). After that, it has been 3 months there are no changes in status. Status shows "with review" Do you think taking three months after the third submission is natural? Should I mail the editor to speed up the process?

I do not see anything unusual or particularly alarming in this situation. Your first review arrived very quickly — compared to Mathematics, where a first review can take 15-18 months in some journals.

It is not unusual for reviewers to make remarks which appear contradictory. Sometimes it is possible to find a compromise to pacify both; sometimes (as in your case) it is necessary to rebut the criticism. Rebuttals are never easy and the suggestion of the first reviewer to reject a paper is not completely unexpected. Now the decision falls on the Editor, who has to either side with you (and potentially lose their Journal the Reviewer One) or side with Reviewer One and reject your paper. It is not an easy decision, and it requires for Editor to personally read the paper, or to invite another reviewer to join the fun. Whatever they are doing, three months does not seem overly long yet to me.

tl;dr: It's best to wait patiently.


How to get on my PhD supervisor's case without becoming a nuisance? So my PhD supervisor is very senior in the university. This has its advantages but unfortunately this also means he's very busy most of the time, especially now that it's summer and he's been away on holiday a few times. By and large this isn't a problem; I'm quite happy to get on with my work without much supervision.

The problem I'm now having is administrative. I have a progress evaluation report due and the deadline is nearing (I've already had the deadline extended once). I've completed my section and am awaiting his comments before I can submit (formal procedure). Further, I may need to be moving to another city in ~4 weeks time to work with a partner organisation for 6 months but I do not yet know for certain and my supervisor keeps putting the issue off (this has been the case for the last 4 months).

It's come to the point where these issues are critical, I fear missing the progress report deadline and I need to know where I'll be living at the end of next month so I can sort accommodation.

I've tried sending a reminder email but have received no response. Also, I walked past my supervisor and greeted him but he seemed not to notice me. To make things worse, I don't have the relationship where I can just turn up to his office without an appointment.

I don't really know who I can speak to about this as I work alongside very few people and I don't know what options are available to me save flooding his inbox with emails.

What can I do to press these matters and how can I do it so as not to become a nuisance to him?

As confirmed in a comment, the "very senior" supervisor does have a secretary. I suggest explaining the problem, and the reasons for urgency, to the secretary and asking them for help.

The secretary can go to the supervisor's office without an appointment, and is likely to understand that some university paperwork really does have to be done on schedule. Ideally, the secretary will put together a packet with the partially completed report and any other relevant paperwork, such as previous evaluations, that the supervisor has.

I would concentrate on the progress evaluation, because that has to be done, and has already been deferred once.

As far as the travel is concerned, make sure the supervisor, or at least the secretary, understands that you need some notice, and will assume you are not traveling next month unless there is a definite decision that you are traveling.


Is it acceptable to only use refererences from other universities? I am applying to mathematics tenure track positions after a postdoc. I have three research letters from professors at Research 1 universities, and each are AMS fellows. One is my PhD supervisor.

My postdoc department is a midrange mathematics department; its on the rise, but doesn't have a big reputation. My supervisor is only familiar with half of my work, while my other letter writers are familiar with all of my work.

Would it be appropriate to use those three letters from other departments, or would it be a warning sign to search committees if no letters come from my current department?

It is certainly acceptable to not have references from your current institution, but it could raise questions, implying that something went wrong in the current position. Having trustworthy, high-quality researchers, as you've indicated, can overcome this problem, though the question still will remain.

Your references do not necessarily need to be familiar with all of your work, just enough of it, and more importantly, how you are as a researcher and person. Having a more recent reference letter would give a better description of how you are performing now, in particular, after you left the safety of a PhD position. That is, how you are performing now that you've gone out into the world on your own.

My inclination would be to include a local reference for these reasons.


To what extent similar remarks from the same author can appear in different papers? I came across this situation that seems not immediately obvious as regards the "line" for self-plagiarism.

Suppose I have two papers on two related problems such that merging the two papers is not an option. It seems important to draw some remarks, which may just be qualitative descriptions in a novel way but which may be helpful in clarifying concerned things in the nonempty intersection. By nature of the problems the intended remarks would be similar to a certain extent. In this case, do I have to deliberately make them look sufficiently different? Otherwise, do I have to cite the remarks I made? I would love to know the predecessors's wisdom about this matter. Thank you.

To some extent plagiarism isn't charged when there is essentially only one way to say something. But this rule mostly applies to things that are widely known, not research results. This may be the case here or not.

But it is better to cite the other (first) work in subsequent work (or cross cite if appropriate). One of the purposes of avoiding plagiarism is to allow readers to have access to the complete context of an idea. This might be especially useful in the case at hand, since the "similarity" itself may provide context that would be helpful.

When in doubt, cite it.


Does impact factor of journal you publish in matter when getting a post doc? I have heard from quite a number of PhD students, that one can get a good post-doc, if the summation of the impact factors of the journals published by a PhD student is nearing 10. Is this true? How does the impact factors that you earn before your post-doc have an effect on getting a good post-doc? I am talking about the field of computational biology...

[Note: my experience is from mathematics.  I guess most will still be applicable in other fields, but I don’t have first-hand experience.]

It probably doesn’t matter directly.

For any kind of job application, grant application, etc, you will be assessed on (among other things) the quality and notability of your research.

How exactly people assess that will depend on how close they are to your work.  Specialists in your own subfield will be able to judge your work on its own merits, regardless of where it’s published.  People in related fields will have to judge it indirectly, and may look at (among other things) the prestige of the journals you publish in — but they probably have a better idea of the journals’ reputation than just the impact factor.  The impact factor may matter most when the assessment is by people outside your subject — for instance, some government research agencies or university administrations have official criteria that include impact factors or similar metrics.

For post-docs (at least in my experience in maths), the main people judging your application will be your potential research group leaders, and their immediate colleagues.  So they will be able to judge your work directly — so impact factor probably is not too relevant there.

Long-term jobs and grant applications are much more likely to be assessed, in part, by people not in your own field, or according to fixed criteria.  So for these, impact factor and similar metrics are more likely to matter.  (How much they matter depends a lot on the specific country, institution, and field you are in.)  However, I’ve never heard of the criteria being as crude as “the sum of the impact factors of the journals you published in is close to 10”.


Supervisor complaining about research work is slow and not doing anything properly. Is it possible to continue with him for long? I am about to finish my first year of MS leading to Ph.D. Our team works on cable Robotics. At first, when I joined prof asked me to do a computer vision problem of tracking. I spent 5 months to do that job with my coursework as well, and then he asked me to do a human-robot interaction job. I did that as well within 2 months. I've written 2 conferences and 1 journal and about to start the 2nd journal. But my supervisor is not happy with me. He always complains to me about you are slow in learning and doing things. I've changed my major and working in a country where I have a language barrier as well. My prof is not helping me in my research work, he is working on a different field. I came here for the purpose of learning from the Prof. And he will assign me some material to learn as I've just an undergrad degree. What should I do? Should I ask him to split my degree into 2 parts, a Masters and a PhD? So that in a worst case scenario, I can leave with one degree.

Sometimes it's helpful to factorize this into two questions:

(1) Are you happy with the professor? You say he "is not helping" you in your research; yet, it sounds like you've made considerable progress in a short time. Assuming he never changes his ways, do you still want to work with him?

(2) Is your professor happy with you? You have said that he is critical of your slowness, but it's not clear [to me] whether he is definitely unhappy, or if maybe he is just awkward, or maybe there is some cultural/linguistic misunderstanding.

In either case, I think you should schedule a meeting with him -- actually send an e-mail and ask him to set aside 15-30 minutes to discuss your performance in the lab. Then you can ask him directly about his comments and ask whether he is still interested in having you do your PhD with him. You can also address your concerns about him (e.g., "I was hoping you'd be able to advise me more about X; do you think we'll be able to do that in the next few months?").


What does "shortlisting for this post is still in progress..." mean in the context of a UK job application? I am trying to understand a message for an application in the UK that I received today. Here is the message ;

  The shortlisting for this post is still in progress, we hope to be
  able to notify applicants of the final decision shortly.

This message is not clear to me. Does it mean that I am not shortlisted but longlisted? What should I understand from this message?

The message means what it says. The shortlist hasn’t been decided yet. Whoever wrote you the message does not have more information to provide you at this time, or if they do, then they are not at liberty to provide it.

Any additional layers of interpretation that you choose to add to this message, such as inferring that you are longlisted, you add at your own risk. Certainly no one here can tell you whether such an interpretation is valid or not.

Good luck!


What stops an assistant/associate professor with a strong publication record from being promoted? As far as I experienced, research is the most important factor for promotion, as it represents different features of an academician/scholar, which are needed by higher education institutions: teaching at graduate level, supervising academic projects of graduate students, attracting research fund, fame for the university, etc.

Publications is normally the main measure for research of a professor. Thus, one expects to see a proportional relationship between publications (both quality and quantity) and academic rank.

People can be promoted with less publications, probably because of other activities. But, I wonder why there are some academicians whose rank is far behind their publications. For example, I have seen people with 50 papers but are still assistant professor, or over 100 papers but still associate professor. I am referring to the US universities.

What keeps an assistant/associate professor with a strong publication record from appropriate promotion?

Remember, a promotion/tenure review package is just that: a package. While you are correct that a record of strong publications is the driving factor, there are still a number of items in the package that could lead to a tenure/promotion denial:

Weak letters of recommendation. You need to get your name out in more ways than just cranking out a lot of papers. This includes presenting talks at other institutions, sitting on program committees, and making sure that prominent people outside your institution write you good letters for your package.
Lots of publications ≠ good publications. You need to be published in reputable, peer-reviewed publications. Some of those professors may list a ton of publications that aren't particularly notable.
Poor record of graduate student supervision. A professor who never has any students, or who hasn't graduated a student in years isn't going to be competitive for promotion.
Poor fundraising. If you're not applying for and getting grants (in many fields), you aren't going to be able to sustain a good research lab. It's tough to keep publishing relevant work without money coming in, although over time you can still build up a fair number of publications (many of which may be mediocre).
Poor teaching record. At some institutions, good teaching is more than just something the admissions office declares in all of its trifolds. If you've had consistently poor teaching evaluations, or if students have complained multiple times to the Dean or department chair, this could hurt your chance at promotion.
Personality. Your department has to make a recommendation to the tenure/promotion committee, and if you're genuinely not liked around your department, they aren't likely to make that recommendation, regardless of how strong your publications are (within reason).

Bottom line: publications are a part of the larger promotion picture in academia.


Is it bad to start an introduction with a direct quote? I'm  a statistics student at the undergraduate level, writing an undergraduate thesis about genetics. I already have the objectives well defined and I will write the introduction lined with those objectives.

I found a text in a website with authors name and publication date that would be nice to put in my introduction. Is a bad thing start an introduction with a citation?

EDIT: Is a direct quote.

While I am not aware of any hard and fast rule against it, I would find it off-putting to read a scientific document that started its prose with a direct quote.  There are just so many ways to start with one's own words that it feels lazy and lacking in self-confidence to me to use another's words for the first impression of a reader.

Note, however, that I am speaking of using a quotation as the first piece of one's prose, as distinct from the practice of putting a separated "thematic" quotation at the start of a document of chapter. I see this somewhat more often, and though I find it a bit "cute" in scientific work, I don't have a problem with it the way I would if somebody starts their prose with a quotation.


What is the purpose of career objective in an Ph.D. admission form? I have a very basic doubt. What is the purpose of career objective in a Ph.D. admission form especially when the applicants are from a wide variety of a subject backgrounds? For example take the case of a PhD admissions in computational biology where students from even electronics background are allowed to apply. The prior knowledge from masters is not going to help them much.

There is no single answer for this question and must be determined on a case by case basis. I will rule out the career objective section of your CV since it's a matter of personal preference. Assuming you're asking about a section in an official application form, there are number of ways to address. In most cases, the career objective will indicate how your future research and/or potential research project relates to your long term career goals. It becomes significant when the application is for a funded PhD and/or the research project is related to industry. Most universities are interested in the publication of research in top journals, so you can address this issue by demonstrating the potential of your proposed research. In this way, you also implicitly address the question of becoming a future academic. Finally, if you are coming from industry to academia, then you can mention your transition from organizations to academia. The last point is somewhat trivial unless the proposed research is in industry as well.


Is it possible to publish without adviser? I participated in an exchange programme as a PhD student for 1 year in another country. The very moment I got in the new institution I signed a contract according to which I have no intellectual nor material rights over the results obtained on the territory of the lab I joined.
The subject of my study has changed on the go so after the first 4 months I started different analysis compared to the one written in my project (project funded by academic exchange program).
After going back to my home country my local adviser asked me for the results I have. I refused to submit because I am not the owner and because I found out my adviser is sharing my work with another student for money. Almost 3 years later and after repeating some of the results in my home country I managed to defend successfully.
However I would like to publish my research from my exchange programme. The issue is this:

My foreign adviser is not responding quick enough to my messages - it took him 4 years to revise part of the paper. And I am planning on writing another two!!!
My foreign  adviser retired.
Apparently my both advisers made some sort of a deal to hand over my work to the student I described above.

What is your advise in that situation?

The response to this depends to a degree on the type of institution you were studying at and the norms for that educational system.
In most countries now the norm would be for the Graduate School to have the final say on matters like this. Particularly if the advisor(s) involved are retired (or remaining as semi-retired adjuncts).
Given your OS research was on exchange, the Graduate School at the host institution would typically defer to that in the home country on matters like this.
If the agreement you signed appears to be binding they may discourage you from publishing. If not, I expect they would encourage you to publish. They may even recommend this irrespective of the opinion or the status of the advisor, but that would depend on the culture (and politics) of your home institution.
Graduate Schools often have expertise on these kinds of issues as IP issues are common in collaborative projects. Broadly speaking, most Graduate Schools want their PhD candidates and graduates to be publishing. It's a good look for them and its what they are there to support you to do.
My advice would also to be raise the apparent sharing of your work as a separate issue. Not that I'm saying don't raise it - but if your goal is to be able to publish the results of your research then aim to sort that out as a separate issue.
I would then consider if you think that the sharing of findings with other students looks like the kind of academic misconduct that is defined by your institution and if so consider raising this as a separate matter. I would handle the prospect of academic misconduct with care if you are thinking of raising this.


I failed to respond to a potential advisor I know that it's a horrible thing to do. It was a professor at a prestigious University who expressed interest in my ideas. I never responded because severe conflict broke out between me and my family regarding my career choice. And that was a year ago. Conflict is still there but I'm stronger, and I sent a sincere apology to the professor, but I still want to know how bad my situation is if I want to reapply to the same University for a Masters (i don't even dare to hope to work with the same professor).

If it is a coursework masters, then you would have minimal or no interaction with the previous professor, unless the professor is teaching a subject in the Masters.
If it is a research masters and you are in the same department, then you would be working or at least bumping into the prof at departmental meetings and events.

Seems unlikely that there would be great animosity. Your circumstances seems very reasonable and most people would not react adversely or take it too personally. I am sure if you are in the professor's department, then you can have a casual chat and smooth over any frustrations. The prof might be able to collaborate or support you in some way as they were previously interested.


Recommendation letters for assistant professor position (computer science and statistics) I am applying for (research) assistant professor positions in the computer science and statistics areas. I have seen advice on having at least one recommendation letter outside of my graduate school institution. I have two letters from inside my graduate school institution.

One letter is from my major professor, who can comment on my ability to obtain grants and conduct research. The other letter is from a professor who can comment on my ability to teach and conduct research.

I am currently deciding about my third letter, and have two options in mind. One idea is my manager at a software company from my summer internship in 2016. She can comment on my ability to get work done, work with team members, demonstrate software development skills, and make connections (she told me I was persistent in asking for the internship position). The other idea is a professor emeritus who I worked with back in 2009 during a postbac position. He is now in his early 80s but still publishes research. He was the founding chair of an academic department (not directly related to what I do now though within the sciences and maths), won several prestigious awards, and served most of his time in academia. He can comment on my research abilities and initiative (he was impressed that I developed my own research ideas to fruition during my postbac). He has written a recommendation letter for me back in 2012 to apply for graduate school.

I would be grateful to hear opinions on this topic. Do you think either of these third options appropriate? Is one more favorable than the other? Most applications require exactly 3 letters, but some allow 4 letters. Hence, I can include both for some applications. Thank you for sharing any of your wisdom!

Well, given that you are applying for a professorship position it makes much more sense the second third option. The recruiters do look for external recommendations, but external recommendations in the same area are more valuable as they give more interesting information on the candidate for that role.
However, if i may, i would suggest you to have the first recommendation for your ability to get grants, the second one for your ability to teach and the third one for your ability to research. In this way, the recommendations will be covering all the aspects of the job, without overlapping each other and without overwhelming the recruiters.
I hope my suggestions will help you.


I believe my PhD dissertation was unfairly graded too low (cum laude): what should I do? I recently completed my Ph.D. in Germany. I believe my dissertation was evaluated extremely unfairly. For my dissertation, I published seven papers in high-impact international medical journals (IF from 3 to 6). I used four of them as core papers and three of them as additional publications. I also have six conference papers. My seven papers have been cited about 34 times so far. The first one was published in Oct 2017.

For the written theses, I had two main reviewers and one of them suggested my grade to be “strong magna cum laude” and the other one said it should be cum laude¹. Then, I was very much prepared to change the second reviewer during my defense. I did an excellent presentation and defense (that is what everyone who was there told me). The second reviewer asked only four questions during the defense. I them properly although one was unrelated to my work.

After the defense was over, I was told to go out with the entire audience until the review committee decides my grade. They took a long time and I was sensing there must be something they didn’t agree with. Finally, I was called to go in and one of the reviewers said: “Congratulations, you passed. Unfortunately, your grade is cum laude. We are stuck in the middle.” This was extremely disappointing to me and I believe the whole process was totally unfair as everyone else also think so.

As I heard from the student members who sat with the committee, this reviewer said I didn’t include a reference for the animated graph that I have produced myself, and insisted that I don’t deserve more than cum laude. They were fighting for a long time until the first reviewer gave up. I, my wife who also has a Ph.D. many years ago, and the entire audience didn’t expect my grade would be like that. In fact, many believe that I am unfairly treated because of my skin color. This is the most difficult situation for me. I am very much stressed and I don’t know how much impact it will have on my career at least to get a postdoc position. What bugs me is that this reviewer doesn’t have a major point.

I am now considering to appeal to the university. But, I am scared.
I also wish to retract my thesis and submit it to another university in Germany and defend it again. Please advise me on what to do.

¹ There are usually four passing grade for a PhD in Germany: summa cum laude, magna cum laude, cum laude and rite (from best to worst).

Why it matters

In my field, cum laude or rite (the two worst German PhD grades) are rarely ever awarded and if they are, it’s usually a sign that there were major issues and a strong hint that the PhD should not consider any career aspirations in academia. Such PhDs often end in positions which mainly care about the title for its own sake (e.g., to impress customers). Your field may differ a bit, but even in law (which is known for using the entire spectrum of grades), such grades would not bode well on an academic career.

I would be careful with taking the position that the grade does not matter. As already said, the vast majority of PhDs that stay in academia have either summa cum laude or magna cum laude (the two best grades). Since getting a summa requires at least a bit of luck in many examination rules¹, many people do rightfully not care about the difference between the two. On the other hand, not having either is likely to raise some eyebrows and may prevent you from getting your desired position without you ever knowing why. Even if you find stories of people who had a successful academic career in your field with a cum laude, beware of survivor’s bias.

Moreover, many job offers in Germany (in particular at government agencies) explicitly require a very good PhD². This includes professorships to the extent that it is in the text of the respective laws (Landeshochschulgesetz), e.g., the one for Northrhine-Westphalia states (translation mine):

  Einstellungsvoraussetzungen für Hochschullehrerinnen und Hochschullehrer sind […]:
  […]
  besondere Befähigung zu wissenschaftlicher Arbeit, die in der Regel durch die Qualität einer Promotion nachgewiesen wird; […]

  Preconditions for being hired as a professor are […]:
  […]
  an outstanding qualification for scientific work, which usually is evidenced by the quality of the doctorate; […]

Now, this does say “usually”, which means it is technically not impossible to get a professorship with a bad PhD, only more difficult. But that already can be a severe disadvantage and may mean that you are ending up with a considerably worse position.

One function of such rules and phrases in job offers are things like avoiding nepotism or having to hire a bad candidate due to lack of better ones. Still if the criterion is phrased respectively, it may be legally impossible to hire you since you fail a hard criterion. If I found out that the successful candidate for a public job I failed to get only has a rite, I would certainly suspect foul play and consider legal action.

All in all, this grade may very well be career-ending.

¹ I know of cases where somebody did not get a summa only because they did not perform top-notch in a one-hour oral examination on their field of study that was unrelated to the topic of the PhD. Consider a theoretical cosmologist PhD being asked about lasers.
² Including your grades on your CV as well as providing a copy of the actual PhD certificate is the default in the hiring process, so you cannot really hide it.

What to be scared of

  I am now considering to appeal to the university. But, I am scared.

… of what?

It sounds like you have little left to lose here.
If your PhD gets re-evaluated from scratch, you are very unlikely to end up with a worse grade.
There is a small risk that you earn a reputation over making a fuss about this, but those who care about this will also likely care about your grade.
On the other hand, if I were to consider you for a position and asked you for the story behind your grade (and I probably would), I would rather be negatively surprised if you hadn’t made a fuss.

What to do

Now, every faculty in Germany has its own PhD rules and therefore it is difficult to make any general statement here.
However, there are several aspects of your story where my PhD rules could have kicked in:

There would be two further members of the committee who can intervene in case of major disputes or grades being given with questionable reason or an accusation of academic misconduct (using material without a reference) against which you could not defend yourself.
The entire committee (four professors) grades the defense.
If the two main examiners differ by more than one grade, a third examiner would have to be consulted.
If your thesis is deemed to have major flaws, you have to be given the opportunity to amend it.
Grades for the thesis have to be given independently and cannot be changed afterwards. (It sounds like the “bad” examiner wanted to give a cum laude, so it cannot be the middle, unless he changed it to a worse grade later.)
There is a written record of committee’s decisions.
Nobody else would have been admitted to attend the committee making the decision. It is particularly weird that students can attend, but you cannot.

I recommend that you thoroughly read your faculty’s PhD rules and consult with whoever oversees the process (usually the dean). Also talk to the “good” examiner (your supervisor, I presume) to get a more detailed story of what happened.

Note that most PhD rules also forbid you to just submit your thesis to another university.

Caveats

Beware that you very likely did not get the full story so far.
For example, attendees of the committee’s decision tend to primarily report the most egregious aspects even though other points had been made.


What is a final undergraduate paper called in English? Here in Croatia, when students are finishing their 3rd year of undergraduate courses, they usually write a paper called "Završni rad" (eng. Final Work/Project). I'm trying to communicate some things with foreign colleagues and I'm wondering what that would be called in English

In my experience, in Mathematics, in the U.S., (where "senior year" is typically the last year of an undergraduate degree), things done beyond literal coursework can be called "senior project", "senior thesis", "honors thesis", "senior writing project", or nearly anything similar, with no precise sense from university to university or even from student to student. That is, sometimes "honors thesis" has some actual requirement beyond "senior thesis", but not reliably so...


What are the benefits of getting a PhD in statistics? I've been working as a statistician in the marketing world for two years, and I have an M.S. in applied math.  I want to change industries a bit (maybe epidemiology or engineering) and I also want to live overseas (ideally, a job where I'd live in one country for a few years and then move on to another).

So, my question is: to accomplish these life goals, does it make sense to get a PhD?  Or, is there some other route that would be more beneficial?

A doctoral degree is a credential signifying largely that you are capable of doing independent research at the highest possible level. It is not, in an of itself, a ticket to working in a particular industry or in a particular location any more than a bachelor's or a master's degree. In fact, PhD holders may have substantially more challenges in those aspects, because the additional qualifications make them unattractive for many positions in conventional businesses and industries. (You are unlikely to find a PhD working in a sales division of a multinational conglomerate, for instance.)

The reason to get a PhD is because you are interested in problem solving and doing original work. If this doesn't describe your motivation, I would recommend against pursuing a graduate degree, because it will be a very long few years of your life which are not guaranteed to achieve the objectives you've laid out.


Can self-funded international students be denied admission based on absence of scholarship/fellowship? Is having a scholarship/fellowship mandatory for graduate studies (MSc) for an international student?

I told my potential supervisor that I can fund my studies on my own through an education loan, but she didn't reply. Can I be denied admission, and what steps (if any) can I take to avoid this?

Can self-funded international students be denied admission based on absence of scholarship/fellowship?

Of course they can (and often are). Admission to graduate school also includes an evaluation whether the candidate is likely to graduate, and having funding outside of a scholarship does not change that evaluation. An added problem is that being admitted to the graduate school is only one side of the coin - you also need an advisor willing to work with you. If your application is considered too weak for regular acceptance with a scholarship, it is somewhat likely that you will also have troubles finding an advisor - and admitted students without advisor are often a bit of an administrative headache that admission committees would like to avoid.


Phd difficulties: waiting to finish, supervisor not reviewing thesis I am at the end of the fifth year of research. My thesis was written last year but my supervisor refused to take in any submissions stating that he is very busy. I followed up from time to time for feedback but that irritated him and he told me to wait till he called me on his own. I have now applied for an extension at the university for another year. In a recent face to face conversation on what is expected of me and how to move things forward, my supervisor says that it will take time for him to begin the review and that Phd depends on mostly my behaviour and not the research work that I have done.  I have sought the university's help informally but they say they cannot do anything to help. They say I need to sort it out myself. What should I do?

What should I do?

Talk to a departmental academic that you trust and ask for guidance. Hopefully, they'll help you proceed. Otherwise, contact your department head. (You may ask several academics before escalating to the department head.)


What should have capital cases in the title of works in the bibliography? According to this answer it is a feature that BibTeX converts all characters to lower case for titles in the bibliography. This is confusing for me. What characters in the titles I cite should be upper case?

Here is a screenshot were I marked all characters that I would have written uppercase:

(The first 'r' in recognition was a mistake)

So I think I should write everything in capital that I would write in capital in a normal English sentence. Is that correct?

It depends on the citation style. Basically there are two possibilities: title case, or normal English sentence style.

If you are writing for a journal, it surely has a citation style that you should adhere to. In practice, however, the style of citations won't really matter until the time your paper is accepted, so you do not need to worry about it when writing.
If you are writing for yourself, you are free to decide as you prefer, as long as you are consistent. If you are writing a thesis, be sure to inquire  because some OCD university committee might have imposed requirements.

Bibtex is essentially a program to abstract out citation styles and apply them programmatically, separating content (in the .bib file) from formatting. Using a properly formatted .bib file, you just need the command \bibliographystyle{} to change from a style to the other.

So, how should the title field be formatted in a properly-written .bib file? Like this:

title = {Handwriting Recognition with Hidden {M}arkov models and Grammatical Constraints}

Basically you use title case and embed into a pair of braces the characters that should stay in capital even if the text is converted to sentence case. Bibtex can convert automatically title case to sentence case (but not vice versa). Commands for diacritics and special characters (such as \"a or \c{c}) and dollar-delimited formulas should also go inside an extra pair of braces.

Incidentally, another tricky aspect of Bibtex syntax is author name formatting. Authors should be in the format

author = {von Lastname1, Firstname1 Middle and Lastname2 jr., Firstname2}

or, if full given names are not available,

author = {von Lastname1, F. M. and Lastname2 jr., F.}

Note that 90% of the bibtex files that you will find on the internet, even the ones from the publishers' websites, are badly formatted. Bibtex's syntax is quirky and complicated to get right.


Asking a professor about his advisor When searching for graduate schools, I've found Professor A of University X with whom I'm interested in working. I'm also interested in working with Professor A's advisor, Professor B, who is at University Y.

Is it considered socially acceptable or a conflict of interest if I ask Professor A about how it was like to be advised by Professor B?

I don't see how it would be socially unacceptable. You might have to weigh the response you get from Professor A if you think he or she is keen to have you as his/her student -- but that often happens. The conflict often arises: the desire to do the best by the student in terms of suggesting other supervisors or institutions against the desire to have a good student working on a shared topic.

Regardless of whether you get Professor A's advice, seek out students -- current and past -- of Professor B and ask them for their opinions.


Is it ethical to omit the PhD credential from my resume? I am applying for a Statistical Programmer position at a commercial research organization (CRO), and I am wondering if it is unethical to omit my PhD in Statistics from my resume?

All of my degrees (Bachelor's, Master's, PhD) are in Statistics, and I am just wondering if it would be ethical to just list my Bachelor's and Master's degree on my resume, and indicate my experience as a RA while I was a PhD student as my "work experience"? (Since this Statistical Programmer position only requires Master's degree plus some years of experience)

I am asking this question because I do not want to do anything unethical/cause me troubles later on.

Do you think that such a deception will help you significantly in landing the job? Several years of “work experience” at a university is going to look very suspicious and will probably raise some flags.

In general, you’re always better off stating the truth. There’s a smaller chance of things going sideways down the road if you do.


Does publishing greatly affect my chances of getting accepted and funded (TA/RA) in a PhD program? Short background:

I've got BSc's in both Mathematics and Computer Science and I've just started my Master's in Computer Science after which I hope to pursue a PhD in Mathematics at a university other than the one I'm currently studying at (no PhD in Math or Comp. Sci. offered as the department/school is rather small).

For what it's worth this is all happening in the U.S.

Question:

I've talked to two professors at my current university and one has told me if I want to get some funding I had better publish while the other sort of shrugged it off, making publishing seem like it's just another thing.

Well, which is it? Should I really push to publish as much as possible while working towards my Masters or should I not worry so much about having something in a journal somewhere if my goal is to get accepted to a PhD program with tuition paid and a living stipend?

It is not clear what you mean by publish. In the simplest form, with predatory publishers a check and some gibberish, and the gibberish might be optional, you can get published. Even respected publishers do not always peer review (e.g., ArXiv only moderates) meaning the quality does not need to be particularly high. To get published in a respected peer-reviewed journal, or conference proceedings, requires you, or the team you are working with, to produce novel and exciting research, write a clear description of the results, format the results to meet the journal's specifications, and address comments by reviewers.

Having been involved in the production of novel and exciting research is very helpful for admission to a PhD program. The ability to write up results is also important, but this can come across in your application and doesn't require a publication. Formatting to a journal's specification and dealing with reviewers is not something that admission committees really care about.

In general, publishing is the end product of the research process. Admission committees don't generally care if you make it to the end of the process.


Why do some fields not use arXiv? My field is theoretical cosmology. I use the arXiv to find virtually every paper I read. Most preprints are updated with their peer-reviewed, published versions so I don't have concerns about their scientific legitimacy. However, when I've had to work on assignments or projects in other fields or subfields for courses at university I find myself constantly running into journal paywalls, which is very frustrating. For this reason I want to know why the arXiv's system of free access preprints is not more widely used.

In this answer it is stated that

  Compared with other fields, mathematics and physics are anomalous in making heavy use of the arXiv, with physics even more so than mathematics.

This tallies with my experience. The answer then goes on to say

  Things are trickier in other fields, because many of the advantages depend on network effects. If nobody in your field pays attention to a server, it's not conventional, and it counts for little or nothing regarding priority, then there's less reason to post to it (although it still has some value).

Is this the only reason that some fields don't post preprints on arXiv? Should we expect to see more fields publishing on arXiv in the future as the word gets around?

There are several reasons why a field might not use arXiv, or another pre-print service. Whether or not these are correct is left as an exercise to the reader:

It will interfere with publication. This is a little circular, but if a field doesn't use pre-prints, journals might not recognize a pre-print being put in a depository as not prior publication. Whatever merits there are in putting something in a pre-print repository are offset if you can't get it into a journal.
Pre-prints create version sprawl. If there's significant revision of pre-prints, there's now sort of two versions hanging out, the one on the pre-print server and the one that sees publication.
Priority is not necessarily as important (not that it isn't important). In biomedicine, the ideal is for multiple studies to all independently estimate an effect, so being first isn't as critical.
Pre-prints are not peer reviewed, but a pre-print of an RCT or something may still be used to influence medical decision-making etc.
Pre-prints and double-blind peer review are basically mutually exclusive. This one is, in my mind, the biggest downside of pre-prints.

When it comes down to it though, much of it is just field convention - if preprints aren't used, there's very little utility to being a "pioneer" in that regard - it's work, and explaining, and some risk for very little benefit.


How to effectively explain casual research assistance projects on CV Recently, alongside my day job (high school teacher), I have been taking up casual short-term research assistant jobs - these are not only paid, but also include me being a co-author of the paper(s) that result.

On my CV, I would like to have all this information, what would be an effective means to include all achievements of these projects?

I am hoping for specific examples if people have done this before.

In order to answer your question, you need to first understand who your CV is written for. If your CV is for you, and you are simply trying to document what you did, then you can simply list each research involvement as something like:

January 2014--July 2014 Research volunteer, Dr. Bigwig's lab. Collected samples from subjects and ran computer simulations. Contributed to 5 publications.

Ideally, you will also be able to list the publications to which you contribute.

If you are building the CV because you want to actually use it for something (getting a raise, getting another job, going back to school, etc.), then you should seek to formalize your relationship with the lab:

Do you have a title? If not, ask for one. Since you say you are being paid, you probably have one already. You should know the title and list it.
List the dates of the appointment. Typically they are for a year or a few years, even if you are only being paid for a small fraction of that.
Since you are currently a high school teacher, you may wish to list your research appointments in a different section of your CV than your teaching appointments.

Good luck.


How harshly will a potential project supervisor judge me for doing poorly in his course? I need to choose a supervisor for my upcoming term project. I asked one of my professors if he had any ideas for a project for a student with my skill set, and he offered to supervise me as he wasn't teaching during the project timeline.

Getting to the point, this was way early in the course, and my professor has witnessed me do terribly in the course so far. My interests lie in the subject matter of this course, and I really enjoy this prof and want to do well, but for some reason, the way we are tested really throws me off and I end up overthinking and eventually screwing up the answer.

I'm worried about bringing the topic of my term project up to him again, because I'm worried he will not be impressed with me and refuse to work with a student doing terribly in his course.

Should I bother talking to him about it, or should I disregard the possibility that he could be my supervisor?

Edit: I do want to clarify that the testing style has nothing to do with what my prof asks, it is more of the type of question that throws me off... Because this is somewhat of a computer science class (which I have never taken before) we are asked to come up with algorithms on the spot, and that's what I have trouble with. I can only imagine that this can be remedied by more practice with the software we use.

When in doubt, communicate.

That is a golden rule that I have learned that works well in virtually any scenario. If you explain what you think your issues are, the prof can try to help you. Not talking to him won't magically make this go away.

If anything, he would probably think higher of you for discussing this with him.


How to deal with a procrastinating (student) collaborator? I am just beginning a research project with a fellow student. She is always 10-20 minutes late to scheduled meetings and has a very hard time making any sort of deadline. She freely admits that she is a procrastinator, and acknowledges that chronically being late is a problem which she has never effectively dealt with.

We are going to be working together for several months, perhaps longer, and I know that her chronic lateness will eventually become irritating. (I am always at least 10 minutes early, and consistently complete tasks before the deadline.) I enjoy working with her in a more casual setting, but I am concerned that her procrastination may become an issue in an academic collaboration. How should I approach her about this? Are there any ways to work around it? The collaboration was her initiative, so I am hesitant to confront if there are more diplomatic options.

How should I deal with her procrastination and lateness?

There are a couple of options that you could consider:

You may have to put your foot down (in a nice way), and gently remind her that it was her idea to collaborate and that such collaboration is difficult unless you both adhere to the deadlines set.  If it still persists, tell her that the procrastination, particularly with the tasks are making the collaboration untenable.
If this is not a critical aspect of your work, take a more relaxed attitude yourself to it - in terms of punctuality and task-completion.  The rationale for this is that if she does not place the collaboration as a high priority, then why should you?  This second one you would need to be careful about, the approach would be to put your other work before it.


Using unpublished data from previous supervisor for thesis I'm considering a change of my PhD supervisor due to strained relationship with my supervisor and changed of thesis direction (from practical to theoretical based on same topic). However, my thesis is heavily based on a set of data collected by a collaborator, but is given to me as my thesis project by my current supervisor.

My question is, if I switched supervisor, would it be fine if I continue to use the data for my thesis? The data is unpublished, but I do not intend to use the data for any publication purpose.

Any advice is much appreciated.

You ask: "would it be fine..", and I am inclined to ask back: fine by whom? There are several people involved, and it seems you are in a situation where you, no matter what you do, cannot make everybody happy. Therefore you need to decide who you want to make happy.

1) Your collaborator. If you have received data from a collaborator under pretense that it should be used for an article together with your old supervisor and said collaborator, it is unethical (and possibly violating some policy) to use that data for another purpose without having cleared it with this person. You need to contact your collaborator, explain the situation, and ask for permission. Remember that the data will be semi-public after thesis publication, given that the thesis is public.

2) Your new supervisor. It would be a poor start with your relationship with a new supervisor, if you pull a stunt he/she considers unethical. Discuss the situation with you new supervisor, for your future relationship's sake. On the other hand, if your new supervisor is counting on you to bring an almost-done thesis, only to find out that you have no data, that would also strain the relationship.

3) Your old supervisor. Is this going to burn a bridge you would rather leave un-burned. Are there even any bridges left? Make up your mind about that for yourself, unless your situation is vastly different from most supervisor switch situations, a discussion will not give you much.


Is it wrong to start your abstract with a question? My abstracts starts with three specific questions that my proposed research will answer. But when my friend saw this, he said: "I will never start an abstract with questions, and I will never read this paper if it starts with questions."

Is it wrong to start your abstract with a question sentence?

Edit:

My friend and I are in the field of Information and CS (broadly speaking). He added that only some very prominent scholar dare to write such abstract.

As an author, you can choose different styles for abstracts. As far as I know, the most interesting and shortest abstract ever was written in this paper, Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement? by M V Berry, N Brunner, S Popescu and P Shukla.

  Abstract

  Probably not.


Rules for notifying co-authors about re-presenting a project at a conference I am a PhD student in molecular biology & bioinformatics in Australia. I have previously presented one of my projects as a poster at a conference. This was sent for review to all co-authors, changes made and presented.

A couple of months down the line, I was asked to present a poster at a local conference. I re-submitted the poster abstract, which was accepted. I did this without consulting my primary supervisor as I thought any dispersal of the work would be welcome. Since then, she has started to dislike the results of that project. When the conference was around the corner, and I told her I was presenting, she accused me of bad scientific conduct for presenting something in her name. I apologized, explained why I had not consulted her and retracted the poster.

She’s not dropping the matter though and seems to be using it as a target for some larger disagreements she has with me. What are the rules for re-presenting work or posters? Are there any guidelines and how serious was this accidental transgression?

From what you've said this sounds like a honest mistake made in good faith, and if I was your supervisor I'd accept your apology and move on. At your stage it's to be expected that you're still learning some of the norms of the culture, and they're not always clear.

That said, I do get particular about authorship. Let me tell you a story from my previous career...

I was a young PhD researcher, working in collaboration with several other staff and the head of my research institute. Let's call him Toby.

I came to feel that Toby had a significant conflict of interest related to our work, one which was not being properly handled. I felt that my boss was trying to pressure me to accept methods and interpretations that weren't scientifically justifiable, but which just happened to lead to results that were favourable to our institute's funding. Another co-worker felt the same way.

We refused to accept these methods, and soon after we were both fired. While we were serving out our four weeks' notice, we learned that Toby had gone to an international conference and presented these results in a talk and poster, and that he had listed us both as co-authors in this work.

If he'd attempted to do this in a journal publication, we would've been asked for consent to be listed as authors (and would've declined). But because talks and posters don't have quite as rigorous processes, he was able to slip this through. We ended up having to contact the organising body and request that our co-author credits be removed from the published proceedings.

(Toby was furious. Toby also had right of veto over any reference that anybody in the organisation might write for us as we looked for new jobs. It was not a very enjoyable time in my life.)

As my experience illustrates, crediting somebody as a co-author isn't automatically a positive. When my name appears on a paper, I share responsibility for the contents of that paper, so it's very important that I have the opportunity to give or withhold consent for that to happen.

Two important things about consent: it's conditional, and it can be revoked. If your supervisor only agreed to the first poster, then you didn't have her consent for the second. You might think it's almost certain that she'll agree to the second one, but you still have to ask.

(I know my friend will happily lend me $20 if I ask, but it's still not okay to borrow it from his wallet without asking!)

There are reasons why somebody might say "yes" to one request and "no" to another. It might be that they have issues with the conference or its sponsors, or that in the time between one request and another their thinking has evolved and they no longer want to endorse material that previously seemed okay. Regardless of why... it's best to ask.

Moving forwards, my advice would be to say something along the lines of:

  As I've said previously, I'm sorry for resubmitting this presentation
  without your consent - I misunderstood expectations for how this sort
  of thing should be handled. I've withdrawn the poster, but I get the
  impression that you still have concerns about this issue. Is there
  anything else that you'd like me to do to remedy this?


Can I report my math GPA instead of major (CS and math) GPA when applying to graduate school? So I'm a combined Math/CS major wanting to do grad school for pure math. My GPA my first 3 semesters was terrible, and I got my shit together after that.

While I have all A's in math courses, my major GPA would include CS courses as well, and those are my worst grades. I estimate I can't raise it above 3.5 by next December.

I would like to know if I have any flexibility in how I report my GPA, i.e. if I can report a math GPA instead of a major GPA.

Report the GPA they ask for. Anything else is basically fraud.

If you're unclear what GPA they require, look up their requirements, and contact them if necessary to ask. They may allow you to do your major GPA, or they may require your overall GPA. They may allow just your Math GPA.

At some point they're going to see your whole transcript, so there's no way to "hide" your past. But, many applications have a section for you to explain extenuating circumstances, where you could explain that you had difficulty with the CS materials and excelled at math.


How can teaching assistants deal with grade disputes? From the answers to this question, it is clear that TAs in the US are usually responsible for grading students' work.
In my country, most of the TAs face the following challenges:

Students confront TAs and attempt to negotiate for extra marks in order to pass, or to improve a grade;

Students confront TAs and attempt to negotiate for extra marks by using a friend's answers as evidence to support their case;

Students inquire about the subtle methods used in grading: the amount of marks awarded for each step, the reason for a decrease of even 0.5 marks, or they ask to see the solution manual, etc.,

And then these conflicts evolve into personal enmities, which may eventually cause the TA serious consequences (a heated confrontation, loss of students' respect, etc.).
The issue is worst if the assignment's answers are quantitative or mathematical. There is no solution manual and sometimes no way to guarantee consistent and fair marking over a great number of student assignments (even for a single particular question).
So I want to know how TAs in the US—or in other countries—avoid these complications. What are the key techniques?
Note: Some say it's a minor issue. No. It is a major issue and often arises with TAs in my country, where the professor is not involved in the distribution or evaluation of grades.

In the United States, the professor responsible for the course should take responsibility for resolving disputes (but not requests for corrections and clarifications).  There is an expectation that they will be heavily involved in grading, even if the bulk of it is done by teaching assistants.
In some cases, the professor may choose not to involve themselves in grading at all, and leave it up to teaching assistants to resolve disputes.  I do not agree with this practice, but if you are stuck with it, you can handle disputes by:

Using a rubric to grade.
Resolving all disputes using the rubric.
Refusing to compare the work of different students.  In the USA, comparing students' papers runs a risk of violating privacy laws.

Ultimately a portion of students will never agree with you about how you grade (they want to learn something different from what you are expected to teach) and this simply must be tolerated.


How to cite musical score in Turabian given the following options? I am trying to cite a hard copy of a musical score, using Microsoft Word's References feature.

Word gives me several options. I have narrowed it down to a few but none of them explicitly say "Musical score".

Book
Book Section
Journal Article
Report
Art
Sound Recording
Performance
Film

There's also a "miscellaneous", but I'm not sure if I should categorize musical score under that.

Any ideas?

A musical score is cited like a book in this style.

Here's an example from Depauw University Libraries -

The footnote is in the form

  Composer First Name Last, Name of Musical Work
  (City, State: Publisher, Year).

e.g.,

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Eine kleine Nachthmusik, K. 525
  (Bryn Mawr, PA:  Theodore Presser, 1960).

The bibliography is in the form

  Composer Last Name, First.  Name of Musical Work.
                  City, State (if city isn't well known): Publisher, Year.

e.g.,

  Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus.  Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525.
                  Bryn Mawr, PA:  Theodore Presser, 1960.

(The Depauw site has additional information on various special cases.)


How to apply for a new PhD while being enrolled in one? What to provide as motivation letter, CV and references? The background story

I  am a PhD student where I have been all by myself without much chance of being able to sit face to face with my advisor and get some help as my advisor does not have time for me. I should also note that my advisor is pretty upset with my performance as I was not able to have publication so far.
I understand that every advisor has her/his way of supervision. However, from my understanding, a PhD should be a way of learning how to become a researcher and hence at least 2-3 times a month meetings should be standard.

Motivation

I like what I do, and I want to learn new things. Therefore I have been thinking about being able to apply for a new PhD. Maybe this time I will be able to find an advisor who is more willing to show me the path and make suggestions on my work so I can improve it.

The question

Being able to apply for a new PhD requires documents such as CV, motivation letter and references. How should I prepare these administration files to have a higher chance of being accepted?

Should I provide the information about me being a PhD student?

Is it better not to provide information about my PhD studies? If so, how would I write a cover letter? Because hiding what I have done so far will make my cover letter quite weak.

First, your situation isn't as rare as you might think. It is also moderately common to want to change programs, or at least advisors. Changing because you aren't getting the supervision that you want and need is also not that unusual.

It may be a bit less usual, however, if you want to change, but don't want to change "what you do" as well.

I would prepare an application package, including CV and SOP just as if you weren't already in a doctoral program. What have you done, what are your goals. Then, modify the package "just enough" so that the CV shows the current program, and the SOP indicates you are looking for a "more compatible" position that "better fits your needs". This should represent a small part of your application, not the major focus. In interviews it is enough to say that your advisor "isn't sufficiently helpful."

But I wouldn't hide the fact that you are already in a program or that you and your advisor aren't especially compatible. If it were later learned you might suffer for it. My general opinion is that you can and should be honest in all things - when possible.

You seem to be on a search for an advisor who can help you become successful. That is a worthy goal. Focus on that and don't think of the past as a failure, but just as a difficult situation.

And, before you choose another advisor, make sure that you get some information, somewhere, possible from him/her, about expectations on both sides. Sometimes other students are willing to share their perceptions, but you can also just explore it like any other thing with the person. If they aren't comfortable with this, they may not be the best choice.

But expect that any new advisor that otherwise meets your needs will want to steer you in a (slightly?) different direction. In your case it might be best to agree.


The paper I reviewed got worse in parts, due to poor advice from another reviewer I reviewing a paper and now getting the revised paper for the next round.  Although it has improved overall, in some parts, the paper has become worse when the authors followed (in my opinion) poor advice from another reviewer (I can see the other peer review).  Is it appropriate to advice the authors to ignore the advice from the other reviewer and revert this particular change?  It concerns a minor point.

Ask yourself whether it is worth it for a "minor point". But you can ask the editor for advice. And, as you suggest, you can also just give your best advice for the fix. You don't need to speak badly of the other reviewer to do so. Just say what you think the authors should do to make the paper better.

Conflicting reviews are common enough.


How to draft a SOP when one wants to work on a sub-domain they have never worked on before? (CS PhD USA) Background: CS Undergrad applying to CS PhD Programs (USA)
I have experience in a certain domain X. Within X, there are multiple application based sub-domains.
Example Domain: Deep Learning
Example Sub Domains: Deep Learning for Healthcare, Deep Learning for Computational Imaging
I have good experience in the main domain but no experience in the sub-domain. I am quite interested to work in the sub domain for my graduate studies.
Question: How should one frame the SOP in such a case?
I have asked a similar question before: Is it okay to talk about a topic you want to research in but haven't done anything beforehand in your sop?
But I want to understand how to frame the SOP in this case.

A person with a bachelors degree entering into doctoral studies directly in the US has a long road ahead. First there will be (mostly or entirely) coursework in advanced topics that will give you the background necessary to pass comprehensive exams and assure you have a broad knowledge. Specialization and research only comes later in most programs.
Given that structure, there is nothing unusual in naming a research area that interests you before you have direct experience in it, provided you have the general background knowledge to begin to explore that area.
My advice, then, is just to say what your goals are and the direction you see yourself following. It will show that you have given thought to the options and have a plan. And, no one will hold you to that plan once you are accepted. Your initial advisor might be in the desired area or not, and may be more likely to be if you state the goal, but it is possible to change advisors when you get closer to choosing a research topic.
And, even stating what you now think of as a "narrow" area of focus, it will become much narrower once you start to choose a research question.
So, just say it and don't worry that you don't yet have background in it. That will come and is the purpose of advanced study.


Concerns about the value of the research domain I am a PhD student in applied computer science methods, halfway through the program, and the question that is in the title is what have occupied my mind almost from the beginning of my study. I can't find much help from my supervisors, and this is putting the whole pursuit of my degree under question.

I have read some literature in the domain of my research, and most of the time my critical thinking is not satisfied with what the authors have achieved in the end of their work. Somehow, the conclusions do not seem convincing to me. In my understanding, the idea of a scientific article is to be useful, but what I see in my field of applicational studies is that the articles suggest no real applications, rather some dull scientific examples, saying that it demonstrates its usefullness. Applicational studies should have real applications, not examples in a vacuum.

And it is the same thing, if not worse, in almost all the articles. It gets worse if they start to overcomplicate things, adding one method on top of another to achieve no evident benefit at the end. For me, such research seems like they cannot find a good problem.

Is it just an impression of a sceptic, or could it be that my subfield of research has reached the point where it has closed on itself? I mean, producing papers not to investigate real problems, but just to keep the field afloat, although it has no potential for anything innovative.

I am just starting to doubt that research itself has some special value, as it seemed to me in my idealistic view when I just started my PhD. At this point, I am overwhelmed with the thought that the years that I am spending on my PhD eventually will result with a similar contribution: It will have no use or value. Maybe except to support my supervisor's career and add to the mess of the literature of my domain, where I already have sunk.

So my question for you is: What does motivate you or give you certitude that the things that you work on do have impact, and the work is worth working on?

I cannot possibly agree with the currently most upvoted answer by Pete L. Clark. I clearly cannot comment on the particular subfield that OP is asking about since I know nothing about it.

However, daily I see stillborn research papers --- they were conceived not to dispel the ignorance, but to be added to a CV. There are definitely research communities that are mired in posturing, complexity and obscurantism.

On a personal level, it does not matter whether the field in question is one such area, or whether the OP lacks the background to see how this field adds to our knowledge. It is impossible to do good research without seeing the goal. So, action is necessary.

I suggest talking to the advisor, and gently asking these questions. If the answers are not enlightening, change field/advisor. Doing otherwise is a waste of OP's time.


How to write a white paper for a non-academic? I am an apprentice employed to do mechanical engineering but my real passion has always been computing.

I recently came up with IMHO a good idea to help mitigate DDoS attacks on web servers. I would like to do a write-up of my idea to help contribute to some personal portfolio perhaps so it would help me get into a career in computing if/when I decide to take that path.

I have no exposure to University resources etc but feel a white paper on this topic is probably the best way to present it. So how should I go about writing an academic paper as an outsider to academia?

There are basically no restriction on who can write a paper, so, clearly you can. If you have no affiliation, it might be hard to go publish a "free" paper (e.g., a technical report or a pre-print on arxiv), but you can always consider submitting your idea to a workshop/conference. However, you might have to pay the conferences/travel fees (although some conferences might help you, if you can't afford it). You can also submit your idea to a journal, as many don't charge anything to publish. You can of course also just write a PDF and put it on your website, or even do a long blog post.

There is one thing you might need to be careful of, since you might not be used to write academic paper: a good paper is not just a good idea, this idea needs to be validated. In other words, you can't just write: "here is a cool idea I had", you also need to describe how it differs from existing approaches (perhaps your idea has been already published), and you need to describe why it's a good idea. There are many approaches to do so, for instance by presenting your idea in a formal setting and prove that you can mitigate DDoS attacks (probably under some assumptions). You can also run some experiments, and show that your approach mitigated x% more attacks than some known approaches.

If you're interested in eventually pursuing a career in academia, showing that you can explain and validate your work might be as important as having a good idea (because not only you have a good idea, but you can convince others that it's a good one!).

Note that another approach in your situation could be to implement your idea as an open-source software, and if it's adopted by the community, then it's another form of validation.


In fields that alphabetize authors, which author to contact For papers in disciplines where the authors are alphabetized, how does one decide which author of a paper to contact for more information? Suppose for the sake of argument that one doesn't know any of the authors even by reputation, so it's impossible to decide that way.

Purely alphabetical author-list conventions and no designated contact author tends to show up in theoretical fields that usually have fairly short author lists.

As such, if you're going to contact the authors and don't know which to contact, why not put them all in the "To" line of your email?


What is a post-print of an article or research paper, and what is it used for? Today I ran across the wording "post-print version" of an article (on ResearchGate). I'm aware of terms pre-print, in preparation, under review, published, etc., but I have never seen the term "post-print" before. What does it mean and what else should we know about it (i.e., when to use it)?

A postprint is the final version that is given to the journal for copy editing and typesetting.  It includes changes made in the refereeing process, but not the journal's typesetting.  It is often referred to also by the phrase "author's final version".

In contrast, a preprint most specifically refers to a manuscript as it was before peer review.  However, the term preprint is often used more generally (for instance, when referring to a preprint server) to refer to any version of the manuscript besides the journal's final typeset copy.  Thus it is common to find postprints on arxiv.org, which is commonly referred to as a preprint server.

Postprints are mainly used as a way to provide green open access. Many publishers allow authors to distribute postprints through their own website, an institutional website, or a preprint server.  Many institutions (e.g. Harvard) assert a non-exclusive right to distribute postprints written by their employees, regardless of publishing agreements.


Software to help planning a course I’m teaching a few classes next semester and feel scattered. Can you recommend some software to help me plan out a course so on each day I can see what topic I’m teaching, activities planned, homework to assign etc? Would be great to have a nice overview though I could just use excel too if need be. Thanks!

There are a bunch of software to do this. First, check with your institution because they might already have one. This can totally depend on where you are but in the US, Canvas is very popular, but I believe you need institution or individual subscription for that. Google classroom is another cool solution which is free of cost. Both these are good and kind of widespread. Other than these there are countless number of software that you can find, and they all have their pros and cons.


How to represent a tensor/matrix/vector/array in blackboard? While teaching in the blackboard, I find it difficult to represent a vector/matrix/tensor. In latex, we represent $\mathbf{x}$. But, how do we represent it while writing in chalk? Is it okay to write an underlined variable $\underline{x}$ instead? What is the usual practice?

I think, avoiding the bold text might confuse the students.

The following are the notations I've seen most along the years (I don't think there's a winner).

Vectors:

Matrices:

In my experience, unadorned symbols are preferred by mathematicians; the arrow is preferred by physicists; and bar and underbar (and double underbar for matrices) are preferred by engineers.

Even though I don't have to write many vectors and matrices (in my classes I deal mainly with scalar quantities), I usually employ underbarred symbols for four reasons:

Of course, I'm an engineer!
A bar is faster to draw then an arrow.
My handwriting is awful, and I think that simpler symbols improve readability; at the same time, though, I don't want to abandon the categorization of quantities through different symbols.
The interpretation of underbar is frequently that of bold, and I prefer bold symbols for vectors over symbols with an arrow.


Is it possible to do a literature review in the IMRaD format? The IMRaD format (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion) seems to be the gold standard in publishable scholarly articles in certain fields. I am wondering if I could get my literature review published if I modified it to fit this format. It’s not a systematic review and uses a lot of grey literature (unpublished project reports and presentations, newspaper articles, working papers) as it is on a topic which has very little research.

Introduction

People sometimes wonder what they can or should write in the IMRaD format (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion).  For example, should a literature review be written this way?  In this answer, we will examine a toy model for this question, namely stackexchange  answers, to produce evidence that although anything can be written in IMRaD format, it is not necessarily helpful.

Method

We prepared an answer on academia.stackexchange.com, wrote it up in the IMRaD format, and submitted it to the website.

Results

The answer appeared on the site, but the IMRaD format yielded no apparent benefits in organizing the answer and it looked eccentric.

Discussion

Stackexchange answers are not a perfect model for literature reviews, but they share one key similarity: they could be written in IMRaD format but usually are not.  Our experiment suggests a mechanism to explain this observation.  Genuine experimental results fit the "method, results, discussion" paradigm, but most other academic contributions do not.  Unless you are carrying out a formal meta analysis for which you can document a precise method, I see no good reason to use the IMRaD format for a literature review (and it would be actively harmful if you had to distort your account to make it fit this organization).