Awards that are open all-year-round (no deadline for call) I am considering applying for a research prize that is apparently given out as one award per year, up to a certain amount of money. Applications are accepted all-year-round (there is no deadline).

I don't really understand this model of research funding: if a funding body gives one such award per year, then surely it would want all candidate applications to be submitted by a certain day of the year (each year), so that they all be compared and the award given to the best one that was submitted within the chosen time frame (in that year).

If they receive an application in January, say, and decide to give it the award, then what do do they do if an even better application is submitted in June of the same year? They can't fund it even assuming their maximum amount wasn't all used up by the earlier application, because they claim to only give one award per year. And they can't reject it on grounds that they already funded a project that year, since there is no deadline that the authors of the second application exceeded.

Unfortunately in this case I am not able to enquire to the funding body itself. Also, my question is more general as it also concerns other research awards that use the same call/application model.

Very often foundations and private organizations have rules that are difficult to understand.  You should always go to them with your questions.  They will not be offended or tie the question to your application.  You are likely not the only one with these questions.  Application guides, FAQs, and even webinars are very common for foundations and should always be sought out before contacting a sponsor.

Even federal programs have rolling deadlines.  Typically this is tied to how their budgets function.  If they receive an incredible proposal, they want to fund it as early as possible into their budget period in order to make sure they expend the funds.  If they wait too long into their budget year and no proposal feels worth funding, they may not be able to use the money.  If the foundation receives this budget from another entity, they may have to send the money back to the main institution--it doesn't roll over to the next budget period.

You can ask them general questions, such as how many proposals they typically receive in a calendar year and if they convene review panels on a regular basis or as needed.  My hunch is that they are prioritizing funding any proposal that scores high enough, not necessarily the best project within a given year (perhaps you should ask if "year" = calendar year or if they have a different fiscal year).  In the event that they get multiple entries though, they would surely fund the best project.  Focus your questions such that you can learn about the intent of the program.  Rather than asking bluntly "why are you doing it this way", the questions should focus on how the competition for this award is framed, because that is what you are trying to consider--what your competition looks like and who the reviewers are.

Depending on the foundation, scientists may not even be the primary reviewers of the work--board members may make the first call based on what they are interested in.  Some foundations do not restrict topics, and so a proposal on robotics may be up against a proposal on climate change.  If the board is more interested in climate change, they may opt for this proposal and ask for a scientific review to ensure the project is sound.  These types of structures are more common when the proposal/research summary is very short (1-2 pages).  Some faculty refer to them as "beauty prizes" because the academic rigor is not as intense, and sometimes the goal of the program is just to give money to science and attach the foundation to prominent scientists.


Channeling bias in social science / epidemiological research? Has anyone seen "channeling bias" in the context of epidemiological research? I'm working on a manuscript describing analysis of a workplace-based, non-medical occupational health intervention using observational survey data. The intervention is treated as an exposure and is not randomly allocated. I recently discovered the pharmacological research term "channeling bias", where individuals most in need of treatment are more likely to receive it, usually in a trial setting. This could result in the treatment's observed effects being smaller than they actually are, since sicker individuals have a lower baseline. Participants may also be channeled if researchers think they will receive greater benefit, and thus inflate observed effects. With a workplace-based intervention, I suspect employers may be frugal and, the healthier the worker is, the less likely they are to provide the intervention (despite the intervention being mandatory), thus biasing the exposure group to be in worse shape than those without the exposure.

I think the term channeling bias would apply well to epidemiological research, but have not seen it used in this context. Are there any reasons why it would be inappropriate? Note, I only discovered the term when reviewing a doctoral student's thesis in pharmacology, in which the student used "healthy worker bias" to describe this phenomenon, which sounded the opposite of what they meant, and looked into what the term would actually be. Could its use only/primarily in pharmacological research just be the result of siloing across disciplines?

Channeling bias is a major concern in epidemiology/medical research.  An entire technique has been developed to combat this bias:  propensity scores.  An example of a paper on propensity scores that explicitly discusses channeling bias is "Addressing the issue of channeling bias in observational studies with propensity scores analysis".


How to ask someone (outside the department) to be on the thesis committee I have to request a faculty member outside of my department to be on my thesis committee and I was wondering how I should go about doing this. To be frank, I don't really see why someone would be willing to be on the thesis committee for someone outside their department and even field - apart from the altruism of wanting to help others in academia and all, but I assume professors are busy! Therefore, I imagine that it's hard to convince someone to do this?

In any case, I was wondering:

  what information about myself should I aim to include in an email request to a potential thesis committee member outside my department?

In addition, while I need to find someone to file my candidacy papers, but I have only a vague idea of what my final thesis will look like (I know the field, but not the particular question it will address.)

Some things I have come up with include:

a rough description of the subject area
'expected' graduation date and number of years spent in graduate school so far
if they have been on the thesis committee for someone else with a similar thesis (by looking at the thesis committees of former students who worked with my advisor)

From my experience, having cross-department committee members is very common, and can actually be very beneficial to the student, as you gain access to expertise and perspective you might otherwise miss. There's usually at least some connection between the research being done and the expertise of the faculty member. To use myself as an example, my research involved behavioral neuroscience, but I had both an electrical engineering faculty with signal processing experience and a psychology faculty on my committee, and they both gave very useful advice with my project. That being said, I had a committee member who was completely unrelated to my work (my focus shifted midway through my PhD career), and he requested to still stay on despite the lack of direct research connection; he was happy just to give advice and provide feedback.

You can find potential committee members by talking to other graduate students, and by looking at what theses professors have worked on (as you suggest above). I definitely recommend talking to other students; some professors are more difficult to work with than others, and you likely won't get that type of information from your advisor.

Regarding how to go about talking to the professor, I would just send a simple email asking for a meeting about this topic. If they're simply not interested, they'll say so, and you'll save yourself time. If they are, meet to discuss the following:

who you work for
what you're researching (both the ten-year research goal, if there is one, as well as your specific project)
why you think this faculty member can help you
why this person should be interested (this should be tacit; i.e., you shouldn't have to say it explicitly, he should understand it from the above items)


U.S. humanities professors: Can you get back into academia if you leave? I'm a tenured professor in a humanities department at a second-tier research university in the United States. My Ph.D. is from a top-ten program in my discipline. I have an above-average number of publications for my age.  I have about five years of undergraduate and graduate teaching experience post-Ph.D.

I have an opportunity to take a job as a writer/editor for a marketing company. I'm inclined to take it (for reasons I won't detail here) but am worried that if I don't end up liking my new job, it will be impossible to get back into academia after having left voluntarily.

I'm not expecting that I would get my current position back, or necessarily be rehired to a tenured position. I'm just wondering how hard it would be to go back on the job market and find a tenured or tenure-track position somewhere in maybe two or three years' time if I end up hating the new job.

I want to emphasize that I am in a humanities discipline. I gather that in the sciences, it is common for one to leave an academic position to go work in "industry," then later return to academia. I have never heard of anyone doing this in the humanities, however. Does it happen?

Speaking as humanistic social scientist at an R1 (but who has also taught at small liberal arts colleges), I would say it would be next to impossible.

There is an absolute surfeit of stellar recent PhDs in the humanities. Any position that opens up will get 200+ hungry applicants. Why hire at the associate or full level if you can get a stellar assistant at a quarter of the cost.

Furthermore, if a senior position did open up and a search committee were to look at your CV, I would think they might wonder whether you left academia because: 1) you were pushed out (sexual harassment? Title IX violation?); 2) were burnt out of teaching; or, 3) something else unmentionable. If you left because you hated academia, why are you trying to get back in? Academic hiring is risk adverse because of the stakes of tenure.

However, as an alternative, you might be a candidate for some peri-academic positions such as the director of an institute, dean of student affairs, etc.

tl;dr: Talk to your provost or dean or chair about taking an unpaid leave of absence that retains your tenured position.


I have found theses on a similar subject to my own, and want to use their references with my own text and a similar flow. Is this plagiarism? I'm writing my master thesis and found some master and PhD theses with the similar subject. They have lots of useful references at their introduction chapter, and I use those references and create my own text with a similar thought flow, would this be considered plagiarism?

There are actually two concerns here:

Is it plagiarism?

The authors of the theses you are reading have made an intellectual contribution: interpretation, summarization, organization and curation of references.

If you just paraphrase their work, the reader will assume that you carefully curated that list from the literature and that you came up with that "flow" yourself. If you don't tell the reader otherwise, it is plagiarism.

However, you can avoid concerns of plagiarism by citing the thesis from which you got got this, and making it clear to the reader what is your original work (the text) and what isn't (the reference list and the "thought flow").
Does it satisfy expectations for a masters thesis in your department?

Generally, a masters student is supposed to be able to read and curate the literature, and place their work in the context of the literature (the "thought flow") themself.

If you copy this from someone else, even if you cite them (so it isn't plagiarism), you may not be doing what's expected from you as a masters student.


Graduate School outside of US/UK I'm currently studying mathematics in UK and am going to graduate in a 4-year undergraduate masters program.  I would like to know where else (other than UK and US) can I apply for PhD?  As almost all European PhD programs require a master degree and that European masters usually consist of 2 years rather than 1, would I be eligible to apply to those?  Are there other options?

Consider Canadian universities. If you're looking for the best, check out the Canadian U15 Research Universities.

If you only have a bachelor's degree or equivalent, you can apply for what are usually called a "direct-entry" PhD program. For example, on the University of Toronto graduate admissions page:

  Direct entry from the bachelor's to the Ph.D. is possible for some eminently qualified applicants.

By eminently qualified they likely mean a few things:

Grades: you will likely need to be near the top of your class.
Research Potential: you will likely need to have qualifications demonstrating your "research potential" such as journal articles to your name, research terms with professors during/after your undergrad. An honours thesis might also count. They will also gauge your potential by your application, which generally requires submission of an outline of proposed research.
Awards: you will likely need to have a history of getting awards and scholarships in your undergrad.

It would also help your cause if you contact potential supervisors before applying. It is common in Canada to establish who you'll be working with before you apply for a PhD. They can then help speed your application along and coach you on some of the details (like your outline of proposed research).

As a non-citizen you will need to get a study permit but considering that Canada is a Commonwealth country it shouldn't be much of a problem for a UK citizen.

If you can't qualify for "direct-entry" you'll have to slog it out like the rest of us in a Master's degree first. That being said, there are options to transfer from Master's to PhD after your first year at most Canadian universities, if you demonstrate the aptitude. It's easier to transfer than it is to get direct-entry. It will also give you time to gauge whether or not you are ready for the full four-to-five year commitment of a PhD.

Take a look at this international degree equivalency chart for the University of Toronto. It won't be exactly the same for all Canadian universities (UofT is pretty top notch) but it can give you a pretty good idea of how you stack up.


In reviewing papers for journals or conferences, what should one do if one is not fully knowledgeable in the specific area the paper addresses? This is a question from a newbie doing reviews for journals/conference papers.

What should one do if they are among the panel of reviewers for papers for a specific journal / conference, and you get a paper whose subject material you are not an expert in, or are not fully aware of, all the details around which the paper focuses on?

Is it the norm to state that you are not versed well enough in the particular area, thus you cannot make a qualified opinion, or should you just do as best as you can to review what you understand of the paper, and hope that the other reviewers will do a better job, compensating for your weakness? Are there any other options?

First off, "fully" is a very relative word, somewhere between expert and novice which makes a specific answer difficult at best. Editors try to identify persons they believe can provide a good constructive review of the manuscript in question. If that is the case, you are viewed as having that expertise. Note that it is not uncommon that an editor appoints experts with different specialities to cover different aspects of a manuscript. It is the responsibility of an editor to select reviewers with care to make sure a manuscript is scrutinized fairly and by peer "experts".

Now this system is not fool-proof and it is therefore the responsibility of a reviewer to decline to review if they think they are not in a position to take on such a review. There are of course many other reasons to decline but that is a different story. So in your case, you need to figure out based on the information you have received, if you have the background to provide input on all or significant parts of the manuscript in the request. When taking on the first reviews in a career, you may ask your advisor or peers about the task but remember, the fact that you have been asked is not necessarily something that is open information (in for example double-blind reviews where anonymity is requested).

So, think about how you can contribute. If you do not see that you can provide input, decline. Otherwise, take on the review. Reviewing is an integral part of academia and getting started is necessary at some point. It can also be quite rewarding since you can gain insights ito new science as well as ways to (or not to) disseminate science.


What are the benefits of getting a PhD in statistics over a MS in statistics? What are the benefits of getting a PhD in statistics over a MS in statistics (other than being a professor)? Do people with PhDs in statistics earn significantly more than people with MS degrees in statistics?

More generally, does a PhD in a quantitative field provide a salary advantage over a MS in a quantitative field?

Actually, this greatly depends on where you get your degree from. Sometimes people who have done just MS are able to get to the bottom of the thing and can use their knowledge of statistics on a practical level. It depends on how solid your concepts are. Once you are in some position earned through your sound academic record you can grow quite fast.

So, if you have good record (not just grades but grasp), you may be able to get to the same level of salary as a PhD would. This is because statistics is an applied branch and is in demand.


How should you approach your adviser and tell him that he has a communication problem (Not his actual hand writing)

I am currently working under an academic research adviser who is a very nice person and very knowledgeable but I think he has problem in communicating with others (myself included) that is hindering the research progress and outputs of his group.

This problem is demonstrated on three fronts:

1. Poor handwriting

His hand writing is very very messy, comparable to the figure above. I do not understand how anyone can understand him. Everyone else in the research group communicates using Latex or some other software to make the writing neat and understandable. Further, he never erases anything but just scratches things out. Can you imagine what scratches on messy hand writing look like? Even messier.

I'd like to think that messy hand writing is linked with unfettered intellectual creativity but I just cannot understand anything that he writes and neither can anybody else.

2. Unclear presentation or slides.

In my opinion slides should be made to the point, clear and concise. I found a random example not even related to my field of study to clarify what I mean: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2011/sargent-lecture_slides.pdf

But his slides are routinely overloaded with equations and unclear graphics obviously cropped and pasted with no regard to background, positioning or anything. Simply put, the slides do not capture the main idea. And because of this reason he routinely go over time or skip large chunk of complicated equations during presentation, this causes 1/2 of the people to stop following him and it is very noticeable.

3. Unclear notation

I think this one is quite serious because he routinely uses symbols that are a little ambiguous in their meanings. In fact his symbols seems to consistently go against whatever is currently in the literature. For example, people in my research field uses Greek alphabets for one thing but he uses it for something completely different. Also there are definitions he sort of made up on the spot that I thought were standard. I am honestly not sure whether I should just adopt his conventions or keep whatever other people have been using in this field.

I think part of the reason is because he is from an older generation who is used to the paper and pencil type of work and is not very adapt with technology. I think he is also a very busy person so he has to come up with ideas and notations on the spot which causes conflict with the rest of the world.

Is there a good way I can approach him to address these problems without offending him or hurt his feelings?

I would advise you to approach him on a different base than he has a communication problem, namely on the base that you have a problem with his way of communication. Note the slight shift.

Phrasing it that way eliminates the problem that you may accuse him of something or even offend him. For example, you would not say "your handwriting is poor" but "I have a hard time to read your handwriting and it costs me a lot of time to read it". Also, you would not say "your slides are unclear" but "I do not get the main idea from the slides and would find it helpful if [...]". Finally, instead of "your notation is unclear" you would say that "I consistently get confused since the book X uses the notation Y while you use Z".


How long should letters of recommendation for students be? I have recently (finally?) had some requests to write letters of recommendation for graduate students. However, it's not really clear to me how long a good letter of recommendation should be. I've seen statements that it should be one page, but many of the best letters I have seen have gone significantly longer than that (two or even two and a half pages).

Is there really a limit as far as admissions committees are concerned? Or is it "whatever is needed" to get the point across, within reason (nobody's going to read a ten-page letter, even if it's written by Albert Einstein or Thomas Edison!).

I'd guess that this depends on the field.  In mathematics in the U.S., one factor is your relationship with the student.  If you are the Ph.D. advisor or a close mentor, then the letter should be at least two pages long (maybe rounding up a little) or it risks looking unsupportive, and three or four pages is not uncommon.  For other letter writers, I'd recommend at least a page, and good letters are often two pages or longer.  Of course these aren't absolute rules, and it's possible to write a great letter that's shorter, but it's a little risky.

The reason for the length is to give a chance to discuss the student's work (you can explain what they did, what some of the background and context is, why it's exciting, why the student's contributions are impressive, etc.).  You can easily fill most of a page with generalities about other things - what your relationship with the student is, what your general opinion is, a paragraph about teaching and communication skills, etc.  It's hard to cover this and say much about the student's work within one page, so a one-page letter sometimes suggests that either the recommender doesn't know the student very well or they don't have much to say about the work.

Overall, I'd say that whatever is needed is OK.  The worst case scenario is that the committee will start skimming partway through, but that's not a disaster.


Racial discrimination at Duke University's Biostatistics department The director of graduate studies at Duke's Biostatistics department has stepped down after her racially discriminatory emails, targeted at their international Chinese master's students, went viral on the Internet.

How can an affected Chinese student in the program proceed with their semester safely, without facing retaliation?

They have been threatened with no research opportunities and other possible impediments to their job search, for speaking Chinese loudly in the student lounge and in other areas outside of class time; namely, while I can appreciate the support for the director and distinguishing between her good intentions and unintended discrimination in her email messages to the students, the threats of retaliation by a couple of professors are problematic, e.g. these professors asked the director for photos of the Chinese students and were subsequently targeting them with no research projects.

I believe that for the students the situation has resolved itself. But I expect that it was collective action on the student's part that brought it to the attention of higher powers. I might be wrong in all of this, of course, but I think that people have been made sensitive to the problem and will be less willing to engage in (blatant) discrimination.

So, it may be that in the short term, things will improve.

But in general, it is collective action that is needed to bring such things to the fore. Bad things can happen in dark alleys. The light of day is a good disinfectant. But when someone powerful is acting badly, individual action might only make it worse for the individual. There is power in numbers.

If the students are still threatened, it is good to stick together.

Individuals can, of course, seek reassurance from their professors. If it isn't forthcoming, more light is needed.


How to remove my name from the editorial board of a journal on Beall’s list? My name is listed on the editorial board of a journal on Beall's list against my will. I emailed them multiple times to ask them to remove my name from their website. They did not reply. How do I deal with this?

The best way to deal with this is to get legal help. Keep a copy of all your communications (email, etc.) with the journal, bring it to a lawyer and state your issue. Legal help can be expensive, but if you're seriously concerned about being listed and consider a high priority to get off the website, then I advise you to seek quality legal help as soon as possible.

In the mean time, you can also make a note on your personal website/blog/social media/profiles/wherever people access you and your work that you are not an editor of that journal.


If i am the first coauthor of the paper, is it possible to change the order of names on the paper in my resume? If i am the first coauthor of the paper, is it possible to change the order of names on the paper in my resume and show my name on the first place?

Since you write that you are co-first author, I assume you are from a discipline where authorship order matters (e.g. life sciences), and then the answer is NO. In fact, this may be seen as purposeful misleading.

The authorship order is essentially part of the paper and how it is indexed.

And if authorship order in your field does not matter, why would you want to do this?


How to efficiently get a mention of your just accepted paper in journals like Nature and Science We have made a very important scientific breakthrough in the field of biomedicine. We have filed the patented and the scientific publication (in a journal with impact factor around 9.0) was published three weeks ago. Now we would like to make a huge impact and broadcast this as much as possible. Therefore we would like to know your opinion about how can we do this. We have already used twitter, facebook and linkedin, and contacted editors from Science and Nature so that they can mention our paper in highlights-like section, but no reply until now. We think that getting a highlight in such journals would be the best but we can not reach them and do not now how to do it efficiently. It would be great if you can share your experience here and give advice.

If you think this discovery was big enough for Nature or Science then why didn't you send the article to either of these journals?

You can't tell people what to be excited about and if the work is good enough then it will make its own headlines.

In the mean time, speaking to your university press officer seems like a good start and they can put something out to local newspapers. If its big enough, then it'll be picked up by bigger outlets.


How do I overcome fear of rejection when writing academic papers? I don't know how to put it. I have never published before. Previously my one paper was rejected, that was because the experiments were not ready and my advisor asked me to still submit it just to have practice.

Now, 6 months later, I am writing another paper (on a similar topic). I have done some experiments, some are still going on. My advisor had advised me that "even if your experiments are not complete you should still start writing the paper".

But I'm doing a lot of procrastination and I think I am scared of writing and possible rejection. I have done a lot of writing in other forms before, like blogging etc. But the thought of writing an academic paper with all the stringent rules (everything has to be clearly written, cited, nice flow of thoughts) is scary.

Please let me know how should one's mindset be while in the process of writing a paper.

There are two points in your question: writing a good paper and the fear of being rejected. For the first point, there is no miracle recipe, although there are some clear guidelines of what is expected to be in a paper. You can find many useful resources on the Internet on "how to write an academic paper", and you will have to select what suits you the best. In general, a good way is to understand what you like in your favorite papers, and reproduce the same scheme.

As for the fear of rejection, well, it's a bit cliché, but you just have to get over it. People get papers rejected all the time, even the top professors, sometimes it is fair, sometimes it is not. If you plan to pursue in the academic world, you should expect to get papers rejected until you retire. It's normal not to like it, but somehow, you have to deal with it.

Most of the time, when a piece of work reaches a good level of maturity, I build a quick "submission tree", that is, I look at which conferences I could submit the work, and the overlap between the notification dates and the submission dates. At the end, I have something like: I could submit to Conf1, and if it's rejected, I have one week to make it better and to submit to Conf2, and if it's rejected, ..., or I could submit to Conf3, and if it's rejected, I have two weeks to work more and submit to Conf4, etc. So, basically, the possibility of rejection is directly included in the submission strategy.


Should I report a 48th percentile math GRE subject exam score for programs where it's optional? I recently received my Mathematics GRE subject test score of 650 ( 48%). I know this score is miserable but in my country, I have the option to retake the GRE next year October only.

Assuming otherwise I have a strong profile (with achievements in other examinations in my country and some research experience ) Should I be reporting this score to universities where it is not mandatory (but highly encouraged) to submit Math subject GRE scores? I mean will this score weaken my application?

Before this score, I was thinking of applying to universities like Upenn, Penn State etc but feel really nervous about my admission prospects now..

Since the admissions office receive applications in large numbers they would prefer to work the application that corresponds to the "required list", otherwise it would delay the process. Sending in documents, in your case a low subject score, could have an adverse effect on your application. If the application does not require a subject score, do not send a weak subject score as it will not make your application stronger.

There is a GRE general test and subject test. As far as i know, the general test is mandatory for most programs, but the subject test is optional.

General rule: do not send anything that is optional and does not strengthen your application.


How do I improve a paper if they haven't published any code? I am new in the field of research and am trying to publish my first paper.

I am working on improving a paper that involves Machine Learning. However, in order to make changes to it, wouldn't I need to implement it? Does this require that I implement the paper in my own way and not use their code at all? Do authors usually publish their code along with the paper?

Even though journals encourage authors to publish their code and make their research easily reproducible, in some fields most authors do not publish their code.

In many cases, publishing code is plenty of extra work with little immediate benefit, as one would have to comment it/improve readability and check all licensing requirements of possibly reused snippets. There is often little motivation to do all this extra work on code that is anyway evolving in the middle of a project. In addition, publishing your code takes away your head start and enables the whole world to beat you to your own "future work" plans, so people might tend to only publish code when a project is finished.

This unfortunately means that you often have to implement state-of-the-art algorithms to be able to improve them or prove that you can beat them. Ideally, the algorithm is completely and unambiguously explained in the paper, so you should be able to implement it. Practically, this is not always the case, but you can always contact the corresponding author of the paper and ask for clarification. There is a reason why most articles include contact information of the corresponding author.


What is appropriate length of supporting information? Due to pages ( characters ) constraints of a journal, I am forced to 70% of results and deeper description of methods, quality assurance and characterisation techniques submit as the additional information paper to the original. It will not be printed, but it is accessible for free on the website.
My advisor is telling me not to put so many, it is bad and I am risking to be denied by editors. Why?
Also I asked on some other forums, other people also tell me that if you refer a lot to SI your paper will likely be denied. Is this right?
Advice that I got is to wait until editors or reviewers demand to see them additionally after submission.

There's a difference between putting a lot in the SI and referring a lot to the SI.

If you have a lot of results (for example you created a lot of new compounds) your SI has to be big to fit all the characterization data. I'd say it's also good to put more detailed version of the experimental part in the SI. The version in the paper should make clear what and how you did something, the SI could contain a version that's actually usable as a protocol. Length shouldn't be an issue here.

Referring a lot to the SI is not that great. If you have to refer to the SI a lot, this shows that the paper is not streamlined, you're not focused on the main findings, and you're making people read two manuscripts at once if they want to go into any detail. The paper should stand on its own without the SI. Tthe SI should be something extra, not required reading.

In your case, it could be that you're needlessly referring to the SI in the text regarding characterization and quality control. Those references do not need to be there, you can put the summary of the SI at the end, stating that the SI contains all characterization and quality control data (and protocols).

As a good example you can look at one of the latest papers from the group of Phil Baran, active in natural product synthesis and new synthesis methods. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.6b13229 has a SI of more than 900 pages (not online until it's out of the "just released category), and there's not a single in-text reference to the SI. A slightly older example has a 127-page SI that is online at the moment: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.6b00250


The potential advisor suddenly stopped answering my emails. What should I do now? Sorry for yet another 'professor does not respond my email' question. I searched through other similar questions, however their context was slightly different from mine.

I am a M.Sc. graduated from Asia looking for a PhD position abroad (i.e. Canada).

About the 9th of December, I sent an email to a professor in one of the Canadian universities, asking to join his research group as PhD student. He initially found my CV and transcripts interesting and requested for some recommendations letters being sent to him.
It lasted until the 21th of December when all of my references finally sent their recommendation to the professor and then I notified him about it,  however I didn't receive any response from him.

Because of the new year holidays, I found the delay normal and I waited until 7th of January (a week ago) and still no response! Then, I sent another email to him, politely asked about the status of my application and recommendations which have been sent to him and he has not answered this email too.

The professor was really positive in our initial contact, so I don't know if I should consider this type of ignorance as a rejection and move on or I need to make other decisions. Actually, I am also interested in research of one of his colleagues and If I knew his final decision about my application I could start talking to the other faculties before the deadline pass.

P.S: In this university, the admission decision is completely based on finding an advisor willing to support your research through your graduate study.

Update: I sent another reminder email to him after a couple of weeks, politely requested for a feedback if he received my email. I used email tracker software and I found he opened my email and still no answer.

At some universities, there is a quiet period between the application submission deadline and the first round of interviews, during which faculty and applicant communication is discouraged.

As faculty, I've found such quiet periods annoying but understand the rationale which is to level the playing field by suppressing off-channel communications with a secondary purpose of limiting too much badgering on the part of applicants.

Or the professor could be skiing or preparing for the new semester. Either way, I'd hesitate to badger too much.

update: If I found a prospective student used an email tracking program on me, I'd drop them from consideration immediately. See: Is it rude to use tracking softwares for the emails that you send to potential advisors?


Can UK PhD studentships legally effectively bar EU applicants by stating that "all eligible applicants must also have been resident in the UK"? I am aware that many UK PhD studentships are only open to UK/EU applicants (question 1, question 2).  In my understanding, they cannot (pre-Brexit) legally discriminate between EU and UK applicants, but they can bar non-EU applicants.  But
my eyes fell upon eligibility requirements for this University of Newcastle PhD studentship, emphasis and link mine, which effectively bars EU applicants, too:

  This studentship is available to UK applicants and EU applicants with settled status in the UK, meaning they have no restrictions on how long they can stay. All eligible applicants must also have been ‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK for 3 years prior to the start of the studentship, and not been residing in the UK wholly or mainly for the purpose of full-time education.

Such an additional requirement effectively discriminates between UK and EU applicants.  The vast majority of EU applicants will not have been also resident in the UK for 3 years prior to the start of the studentship, or if they have, have been so for the purposes of education.  Even some UK citizens will be ineligible if they spent any time studying abroad.

Is such discrimination between UK and EU applicants legal under EU law?  It would appear to effectively amount to the same as stating "Europeans need not apply" by different means.

You have answered your own question in the question: states can (under EU law) put conditions on, e.g., funding, based on residence, but not based on citizenship. As UK citizens who are not ordinarily resident would not be eligible for this funding, this does not discriminate on citizenship, so this is legal (*).

Anecdotally, in my experience a low single-digit percentage of "UK" applicants fail the ordinarily resident test, and I have seen at my institution roughly 5 students over the past 10 years refused funding from similar sources for this reason.

(*) I am definitely not a lawyer: the case law around ordinarily resident status shows that this issue is not unique to universities.


To senior researchers, how would you view a student you wanted to work with, but who could not? I am a Ph.D. student and met this senior scientist in a local conference, let's call him Dr. XX. (He is working in a research institute like Bell Lab, not exactly in academia.) We took some interest in each other's work and my supervisor allowed me to work with him. We (me, Dr. XX and my supervisor) just got our paper accepted in a journal as well. I liked working with him and learnt from him.

He also raised some excellent idea about how to extend the work to another novel domain and has been pushing me to come up with some literature study and run some experiment etc. Unfortunately, my Ph.D. supervisor (who is the boss I answer to) is not exactly enthusiastic in that and pushing me in a different direction.

I have conveyed it to Dr. XX in somewhat evasive terms, telling I need some time to decide etc. but just realised it has been a few months. I am not sure how to deal with this. I love both of the topics for the later stage of my Ph.D. but how do I prioritise?

Also, I know it is a question of interpersonal dynamics, but if you were Dr. XX, how would you think of me for being evasive? For example, while applying for postdoc position, will you write a recommendation for me, with this somewhat awkward situation?

Personally, I am much happier when somebody tells me "I can't do this because XXX" than when they disappear on me.  If they tell me they can't, then I can adjust my plans and act accordingly; if they don't tell me, then they leave me hanging and I find it quite frustrating.

I strongly advise you to make a clear decision about whether you are going to work on the project right now, and then go and clearly tell the person, through a direct video/phone link rather via email if possible.  If the decision is no, because your current supervisor is pushing you to focus on something else, then that will be quite understandable and will make no prejudice against you for most people---it is a quite typical difficulty for many people in graduate school.

As for whether they will be willing to recommend you as a postdoc: personally, if I like and respect a student, that's not going to be changed if external circumstances disrupt our work together.  If would not be as strong, of course, as if we had done more good work together that I could talk about more, but it would still be positive.  Others, of course, may vary in their opinions, and you can only find out from your associate by asking.


Grad school admission after bad grade in research class for different discipline I have a predicament. I am about 4 weeks shy of graduating from a small Virginia (USA) school with a BA in English literature and I received a D in an upper-level research class in linguistics, which I do not intend to study in the future. I want to apply to a graduate program for English lit in the future, and I am otherwise qualified (otherwise great grades/GPA, great test scores and letters of recommendation, four conference presentations, and a highly prestigious award for an undergraduate research paper in literature). I am very nervous that this class will kill my chances of getting into a good masters/PhD program. I plan to explain that the class was in linguistics, which was very far out of my comfort zone and I had very little prior knowledge of the subject or research methods required to succeed in this class. I felt like my professor expected more from me than I was capable of because I won awards for my research in literature, and she assured me that I would be qualified to perform this research without realizing that my research had been exclusively literary until that point and that I would need extra help to succeed (which she was never willing to provide despite me practically begging for help). Do you think this situation would kill my chances of getting into a good school? Or do you think they would be willing to overlook the abnormal grade since it was not part of my area of study?

It might also be important to note that I failed a literature class and retook it and earned a B+. The "F" is still visible on my transcript but doesn't factor into my GPA. I received the grade because I could not turn in my final paper due to a one-time extenuating circumstance, but my performance was excellent in that course until that point.

This is a super long and complicated question, but I'm taking a gap year to figure myself out and gain professional experience, so I'm not looking at any urgent upcoming deadlines. I just don't want to set myself up for failure by applying to schools that wouldn't give me a chance. I'm more than willing to go into an MA program at a smaller school to work hard and prove myself to a big shot university. I just don't really know what to do and professors at my school are not being up front with me about my situation because they don't have the full story. Everyone I work with says I have a great chance, but I am having doubts.

Welcome! The gap year is a good idea. A lot of research in graduate school (and beyond) is (in my experience) similar to that linguistics class: confusing, unstructured, little guidance, figuring methods and new things out on your own, shaping your own experience. So the best way to set yourself up for success is to figure out what you could do differently in a similar situation to succeed. Where else could you find resources? How could you figure out direct questions your professor could answer? (Or that a different professor could answer for you?)

There are similar questions about recovering from a bad grade, such as this one: How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students? and this one: Does a bad grade in one course (with otherwise OK record) affect graduate admissions?

You may or may not need to explain what went wrong in that linguistics class as part of the graduate admissions process. But you should get it straight in your mind so that you have clearly learned from it, and so that you can deal with this better when you encounter similar situations in the future. That is, you can take charge of this story and it becomes less about that professor and more about a mistake or a problem that you've learned from and figured out how to overcome.  Good luck!


The feeling of inferiority entering a PhD program due to one's undergraduate school rank According to Stanford's Computer Science graduate admissions department this year:

  110 students were accepted. Nearly all accepted applicants were from Stanford (BS/MS), MIT, Berkeley, Princeton, Michigan, Texas, Washington, Tsinghua, and the other ivy leagues. About 10-20 were from non-top schools.

I am one of these 10-20. I go to a state college and our curriculum is imaginably not up to par with the elite schools.  I'm scared.  Did anyone experience the similar situation?  How would I prepare myself to hang with the smartest people in this Ph.D. process?

If you're a professor, how much does this affect you in choosing a Ph.D. student?

(Source: I am a math professor at Stanford, with connections to the CS department and many former students in the CS Master's program, and experience with graduate admissions.)

Nothing about this situation suggests that you are any less intelligent than your classmates. The admissions committee isn't running a charity: if they thought you weren't prepared to excel, they would have admitted another student from MIT instead of you. They invest a lot of effort into determining which students are positioned to be successful; it's not a perfect system by any means, but I think they know better than you do whether you're prepared.

I have never considered undergraduate institution or background when considering who to work with, and I haven't heard of any colleague doing so either. As a grad student you get better and better at learning, so it's easy to patch any holes in your background.

If you are concerned that you haven't had the opportunity to take all the classes that the CS undergrads at Stanford have: well good news, the majority of CS courses are online, including all the lectures, slides, and homeworks. And you have 7 months before you'll start grad school this fall -- that is plenty of time to complete all the courses you're worried you've missed, if you really feel that's the best use of your time.


Non competitive grading system I go to school at a University in the US.  We use a competitive grading system where teachers give grades based on how you do relative to other students.  This type of grading system doesn't encourage students to work together or help each other because we are all competing against one another.  I'm wondering if there is another non-competative grading system that major universities are using to eliminate this competition?

As a graduate student I had to grade exams for the courses my supervisor taught. We had a very intricate system of establishing what would be a passing grade:

Prepare a set of questions.
Let all the Teaching Assistants (TAs) solve the problems, keeping track of how long they took for each question.
Distribute an arbitrary number of points over the questions relative to how much time, on average, was spent on each question by the TAs.
Let the students take the exam.

Let me be very explicit that until this point, no grading scale has been established!

Mark the exams. This just consisted of going through the questions and assigning points for correct solutions, partially correct solutions, etc... Every question was marked by a different TA and this TA was free to distribute points as he/she saw best. Usually we would go through a pile of 10-20 exams, see how the problems were solved, e.g. what pitfalls were encountered or how far most people got, and then establish a scheme we would use for the rest of the exams.
Every TA hands in an exact description of how they marked their question, i.e. how points were assigned.
With this list, go through the questions one by one and decide what constituted the minimum requirement in each question. This decision was signed-off by my supervisor.
Using the marking schemes written by the TAs, calculate how many points the minimum requirements would have given if they had been handed in as an exam.
The number of points for the minimum requirements constitute a passing grade. Anything below that fails, anything above that passes.

In my university, grades were on a scale from 1 (fail), over 4 (pass), to 6 (perfect) in steps of 0.25 grade points. This gives us three grades to map zero, the minimum requirement, and the maximum number of points to respectively. This can be fitted to a function $G(p) = ap^2 + bp + c$ which maps points $p$ to a grade $G(p)$.

The advantage of this approach is that it is, in principle, independent of the TAs specific style of marking, as the marking is taken into account when computing the minimum requirement points. It is also completely non-competitive in that it's independent of the students' actual performance during the exam. To make sure our decisions were sound, my supervisor and I would go through the 10 exams just below and just above the passing grade and see if they were all clear pass/fails. They usually all were. When not, it was usually just a matter of tweaking the rounding.

There is an open question regarding the amount of time given to the students, e.g. is it possible for them to solve all the questions, and thus is the mapping of maximum points to maximum grade justified? Here we played it safe by choosing only a few questions to make sure nobody would run out of time. The point is that if you do or don't know how to solve a problem, time won't be an issue. We also had two-hour exams, which gave the students ample time to show what they could, and what they couldn't do.

This system also works if you're the only person marking all the exams.

I would be very interested if anybody could suggest improvements or detect amendable flaws in this scheme, as it is what I plan to use myself, now that I'm a lecturer.


Is there an independent oversight body of Journal Impact Factors? I have read many questions on this site that relate to Journal impact factors, for example, in relation to how that may affect where to publish etc.

I am wondering is there an independent oversight body that regulates the area of impact factors?

I was thinking along the lines of something like the International Organization for Standardization that regulates the ISO standards across the world.

Specifically is there an independent body (either commercial or not for profit) that sets the standards for impact factors and audits them so as that one impact factor can be compared with another with the knowledge that they are calculated in the same way?

No.

Academic publishing is not regulated by any oversight body.  There is not even a universal standard for what constitutes a publication.


Criteria to evaluate consulting opportunity You're an academic researcher who has done some work in a particular topic.  You receive an email from a stranger, working at a small company, interested in your work and wanting to discuss possible consulting.  Sounds interesting, but you have research to perform, grant proposals to write, classes to teach...

What criteria should you use to evaluate whether or not this is worthwhile?  What are things you look for in possible consulting work? And what are turn-offs and things you want to avoid?

Balance is always tricky but basically the guidelines that I follow are:

If the consulting will help me learning something new, +1
If the consulting will pay me a lot of money, +1
If the consulting will improve my reputation, +1
If the consulting will allow me access to something I want (new data), +1

On the other hand,

If it takes a lot time, -1
If it offers little or no pay, -1
If it could damage my reputation, -5
If it would be a bit boring, -1

In the end, I just do the math.


Mathematics or software engineering? I am currently in a dilemma and could not decide where I am going in the future.

My undergraduate and master degree is in software engineering and I am currently doing a computer science PhD. I did well and I had participated in more than 5 projects with more than 100,000 lines of programming experience. About 5 years ago I started to grow interest in mathematics although I never had chance to spare much time to learn it.

Now my wife has got an offer in math PhD. In the summer I finally dedicate 3 months to learn graduate level mathematics. When I say "dedicated", I wrote a study note on Real Analysis with about 50,000 words in three months! I type in every word I learned from the textbook, made illustrations using Mathematica and wrote my understanding whenever it is possible.

Then I grew an idea to transfer to mathematics PhD. To achieve this goal I even participated in my wife's classes and did homework in order to get recommendation letters. I was planning to study probability, statistics and numerics that are more near to computer science if I got admitted.

However, this plan is strongly vetoed by my family members and my PhD adviser. None of them agree, including my wife. The main reason is that our universities are not top ones (the math dept. of my wife's math department is ranked about 80+ by Us News and 2nd tier by AMS) and we examined recent graduated PhD's jobs and got pretty shocked -- almost none of them get tenure, and most of them did 6 or 7 years in math but their current jobs get paid 30%~40% below software engineers (accroding to glassdoor) even considering tax and life cost differences.

There was only one exception who did another PhD in statistics in Wharton School of Business for additional 5 years and tenured at a top-10 statistics department. He did 10 years in PhD in total. This is also a possible path for us but it took a really long time and the future is of uncertainty.

I am currently 2nd year in CS. My current adviser told me in 3 years I am guaranteed to get a high pay in software companies. And under his sway even my wife told me she wants to enter software industry. My adviser's words to my wife is "you have learned advanced math pretty well and that proves you are smart. If in addition you learn computer things and then your will one of the best. ".

Yes most of these companies value more about programming and algorithm skills than your mathematics. Those mathematical stuff in CS like "machine learning", "pattern recognition" are not of daily use in software if you don't get a research position.

I am really in a confusion right now I need to decide and focus. Otherwise I would not be able to excel in either direction. So I post here hoping that someone can give some opinion. Thank you!

I understand your confusion to opt an interest or to go with skills which will yield you a corporate job. I had been in the same pass; I thought to leave my PhD in Electronics Engineering and join PhD programme in Biophotonics. I got full tuition waiver with a handsome scholarship from a top UK university but I considered the following points to reach a conclusion.

Firstly, there are many more industry jobs for electronics people when compared to a Biophotonics PhD. Secondly, I can always try for teaching positions with a PhD in electronics engineering i.e. I have two career paths to choose from. However, if I talk about Biophotonics PhD, chances to find a job in industry would be pretty less (given my undergrads in electronics engineering). Ultimately, I'll be forced to find a birth place in some university or college. Salaries in universities/college when compared to corporate world needs no introduction.

I would suggest you to carry on your PhD in Software Engineering and you can always work on Mathematics after your PhD (obviously not in the form of a PhD). Mathematical research doesn't needs lab as such so you can carry on your research after your office hours and do publish them.

Another important point, you will spend ages to gain a ninja level of mathematics knowledge which is essential to finish your PhD in Mathematics (if you enroll). That being said, where is the progression in the life? Personally, I am a strong follower of "Money is the ultimate motivation" and don't overlook your family anytime while taking a decision. (I continued my PhD in electronics engineering and after graduating I have a nicely paying job in industry.)


When should ideas be shared on stackexchange? I get exciting ideas about math a lot, and I was wondering if it is a bad idea to share them in question form to vet them, expand them, or show their lack of novelty. I know free exchange of ideas is good, but is it wise to exchange so broadly so early? If someone uses my idea from SE I know they are supposed to cite me, but could they take the career credit despite my having "The Idea"? Would I be a coauthor to the first paper from the idea?

There are several points that you should consider in this respect:

Most of the time our novel ideas are not as great as we think and there might be simple answers or counterexamples for what we have in mind. So it is better to think about a question in mathematics for a while and study some of the related literature, before sharing it with others. This has happened to me a lot, just see some of my questions in mathoverflow!
If you have an idea but you do not know how to tackle it, it is a sign that your idea is so raw and you don't own it yet. I experienced several times that a great idea is the one that comes with a clue for solution and extension. Otherwise, it is at most a spark in a well functioning brain of a hard working mathematician. I am being kind to mathematicians:-))
If your idea looks so great that can solve some big problems or answer some famous conjecture and you know how to pursue it, why do you want to share it? Just do it! And I believe such an idea deserves several years of works.
I suggest you ask related questions around your idea without giving a whole picture and what is your ultimate purpose. In this way not only you did not reveal it with every body, but you can also gather lots of valuable insights and knowledge to think about your main idea.
Read related questions and answers on mathoverflow or mathstackexchange. A great deal of wisdom are contained in these questions and answers and sometimes you get a clue about your idea.
Most mathematicians have bigger fish to fry. So, I do not worry to share some of my ideas with them, However, I do not think mathoverflow or mathstackexchange are good places for such interactions. Talking with mathematicians in conferences and/or even sending them emails look better procedures.


Expected size of search results for a meta-analysis? I'd like to perform a meta-analysis on the efficacy of web-based counsellor interventions across different modalities (text counselling, video counselling, etc.)

To do so I created the following search term:

(Internet OR Online OR Web-based) AND (Therapy OR Counselling OR Intervention) AND (RCT OR Randomized Controlled Trial) AND (Counsellor OR Therapist OR Psychologist OR Psychotherapist)

In Google Scholar this returns over 145 000 results, and still over 19 000 if I filter for 2013 and later.

This is my first attempt at a meta-analysis and I'm wondering if this is considered normal - if there are researchers who sift through tens of thousands of papers to find <100 relevant ones? It seems like other reviews have managed to tackle similar topics yet only returned ~1000 studies. For example: Guided Internet‐based vs. face‐to‐face cognitive behavior therapy for psychiatric and somatic disorders: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

The short answer to the last question is that yes, for some questions people do sift through tens of thousands of results to find a small yield of relevant studies. (And the pool becomes smaller when later screening for details like N and standard errors and adequate description of the population and intervention to allow for a technical meta-analysis.) But that may not be the ideal way for you to do this.

The Campbell Collaboration helps coordinate literature reviews and metaanalyses on many social issues, as the Cochrane Collaboration does for health. The Campbell Collaboration has a document on how to write a good protocol for such a review, including specifying your search strategy, and there's some longer guidance on search strategies and information retrieval here.

The latter document says:

  The decision as to how much to invest in the search process depends on the question a review addresses and the resources that are available. It should be noted, however, that article abstracts identified through a literature search can be ‘scan-read’ very quickly to ascertain potential relevance. The process can be facilitated by answering a few specific questions that relate to the inclusion criteria when scanning the abstracts, such as “Does this document report an empirical study?” or “Are children age 3-18 in the sample?”. If the answer to any question is No, then the reference is excluded. But any study that makes it through all of the questions answered either Yes or Can’t Tell, is retrieved. At an estimated reading rate of two abstracts per minute, the results of a database search can be ‘scan-read’ at the rate of 120 per hour (or approximately 1000 over an 8-hour period), so the high yield and low precision associated with systematic review searching is not as daunting as it might at first appear in comparison with the total time to be invested in the review. (p. 23)

Much of the work done by these collaborations involves large research groups and/or volunteer labor and/or automated screening. For your workflow, you would probably want to find a system that lets you view the title and full abstract without clicking through--easier in some databases, maybe a deep option somewhere in Google Scholar. This difference in the view may allow you to more efficiently screen the literature even if there are many potential results.

It seems to me that a good reason for using Google Scholar would be if you want to seek out "gray literature," technical reports, unpublished results, and results in multiple languages. However, Google Scholar will probably bring up more irrelevant studies than if you search databases. For your search terms, though, I'm not sure that you'll run into as many well-designed (RCT) studies on a novel technical infrastructure that would fall through the cracks like that.

Thus, I think your best bet might be doing your main search via PsycINFO or some other database, plus a dissertation database, and then look at Google Scholar a bit to see if anything was systematically missed.


Is my method of learning new mathematics efficient? I am a graduate student in mathematics and from time to time when I need to learn new concepts either in a research paper or just courses, I feel that just reading the words (and just writing the mathematics) does not help me to understand the new concepts properly. So to really understand the concepts, I usually take notes with a pen and paper and this method really helps me to understand the concepts. By this, I mean that I both write down words and mathematics. I feel that this is not efficient as I have to write a lot and it is slow and also my fingers hurt after a lot of writing.

I wonder if I am doing it completely wrong or if there is a more efficient and easier way to learn new material.

On a related note, what kind of pen is suitable for long handwriting? I use a Staedtler triplus fineliner pen and was wondering if my choice of pen is ok for long hand-writing?

Don't confuse efficient with effective. The method you have chosen is well known to be effective. But I don't know of any particularly efficient method of learning other than to do it.

There is research, actually, that shows that taking notes by hand engages the brain in a way that other things does not. This means writing by hand, not typing on a keyboard. See this answer to a possibly related question.

But mathematics is special. You not only want to learn existing mathematics, you want to learn, as a doctoral student, to be able to actually do it. This involves the creation of new mathematics. For that, you need to go a bit deeper, though it won't be especially efficient. As with most mental things, you need to practice the art so that you change the neural connections, the mental pathways. One way is to get some practice by trying to reconstruct proofs of theorems. Find a theorem new to you. You trust that the statement is true since someone proved it (though mistakes occur, of course). Try to prove it without reference to an existing proof. If that is too big of a step, initially, try, when reading an existing proof, to figure out the next steps that would lead to the final result.

Mathematics is more, of course. It is knowing what is likely to be worth exploring - what might be true, so that you can then try to develop a proof of it. But you have to start with smaller steps.

But back to note taking. If you want to remember things you have learned you can/should also summarize your previous notes after a period of leaving them untouched. Also do this with hand writing. The summarizations may actually be enough for you to save for later.

One additional advantage of writing notes is that they will have a long lifetime if you use decent materials (pen, paper). Notes taken on computers will almost certainly disappear with technological change unless you take periodic steps to update the media. Don't depend on the cloud to preserve your notes. Companies can change their business models and simply wipe out what you have saved. Only fire and flood will destroy your paper notes. We can still read things written by ancient Egyptians, since they used materials with a long life.


Writer's contact information in recommendation letter Should a recommendation letter for graduate school contain the writer's contact information?

Yes, probably.  In general when you communicate with someone it is good practice to make it easy for them to get in touch with you again.

Many recommendation letters (admittedly mostly at the higher levels) end with "Please contact me if you want further information."  And while doing graduate admissions in my department I have (occasionally) contacted a recommender for further information.

It is hard to see the downside of this.  The people who read these letters are conscientious, busy professionals: they're not going to start spamming you or calling you up for frivolous reasons.  The lack of including contact information might possibly be perceived negatively, but we well know that such letters are written quickly by busy people, so it is more likely to be perceived as an oversight.  Furthermore, increasingly many academics have a website which tells how to reach them, so if I can google the professor's name and find out their email address that way, no problem.  I would still feel free to contact them if I had a question to ask.


Waiting until MS thesis is Published before applying to PhD? I was wondering if it would be a good Idea for me to wait until after my MS program is completed and my thesis is published before applying to a PhD program. There is no chance of me publishing my thesis before the December/January deadline of the fall 2013-14 admissions cycle as I am only 2 semesters into my program and the project I am doing doesn't necessarily move as fast as other projects.

Its important to note that I have NO publications at this point, but I do have two presentations at international conferences. Also, my ugrad Gpa was slightly higher than a 3.0... and my Masters GPA is a 3.7. I'm also in the Geosciences, if that matters

So with all that in mind, would it be a good Idea to wait until that publication comes in before applying to PhD ?

No.

Why rob yourself of potential opportunities?  Your chances of admission might be less than if you had a publication, but they're certainly bigger than if you don't apply at all.  If you aren't admitted anywhere, you can always apply again next year, after your thesis is done.


Are there specific organizational processes or tools (not necessarily software) that can help in developing and structuring research ideas? I am doing research in computer Science as a PhD student. I have some research ideas and for months I've been continuously thinking about them, developing them and make them more specific. I mean, these ideas continually change until one day they are finalized. Over time they are more specific and complex.

I use Evernote to write down my ideas, and sometimes maybe also brainstorm mapping tools like Mindmeister. But I found these tools are not good enough, e.g. not easy to structurize my ideas, or modify, elaborate them, in a word, manage my ideas.

Do you have any good methods or tools for the organization/management of your developing research ideas? How do professors and professional scholars and researchers deal with this issue?

May I recommend Org mode? It's free software, and it was created by Carsten Dominik, an academic himself. Its focus is to help you maintain hierarchical notes and to-do lists, but it has a lot of other features that are useful for juggling large amounts of information, such as tags, links, many kinds of summary reports, and capture (a way to quickly add a note in the right place before you forget it), as well as many features useful for scientists in particular, like tables, spreadsheets, mathematical notation, export (as papers, slideshows, or websites), and support for source code and reproducible research. Perhaps best of all, Org documents are text files, so you can munge them with standard Unix tools at whim. I've moved more and more of my workflow to Org since I started using it in 2010, and I regret nothing.

Org has a steep learning curve, which gets steeper if you aren't already a disciple of the Church of Emacs. But as I see it, getting used to Emacs is worth it even without Org mode, especially if you do a lot of programming. I was an Emacs zealot for years before I took up Org.


What are the advantages and disadvantages of making the review content public? In websites such as publons, reviewers can declare that they reviewed papers for some journals. In addition, they are encouraged to upload the full text of their review.

On one hand, the review content might be useful for readers of the paper: it contains ideas and perspectivese that are often not visible in the final manuscript.

On the other hand, if the review content is made public, the author will know exactly who the reviewer is, which apparently harms the blind-review process.

Are there any other advantages/disadvantages to publishing review contents publicly?

I believe that there are many sides to this, but overall I think that the "sanctity" of blind review should be maintained. In either case, I think that at most, one can allow access to the review content, but not reveal the identities of the reviewers, nor the review scores.

While it is true that one can sometimes guess a reviewer's identity from the content of the reviews, I think that this is not an issue because

It's still a guess, and more importantly
If your review potentially reveals your identity (say by you unnecessarily suggesting all of your papers as ones that should be cited), then it's a bad review, and the practice should be discouraged.

Review scores are often useful to weed out clear accepts and clear rejects, but become really hazy when talking about borderline cases (see further comments below).

Having gotten that out of the way -

Pros of publishing reviews:

It encourages more careful reviews: if I know that my reviews will be public I'm encouraged to make sure that they're more careful.
It discourages abusive and unprofessional language in reviews. Ad hominem attacks in reviews do happen, and are a bad practice.
It encourages editors/program chairs to select reviewers who do a good job. I've seen reviewers submitting a single paragraph; this is not ok.

Cons of publishing reviews:

It encourages reviewers hold back and not write scathing/overly gushing reviews even if they truly feel strongly about the paper.
It may render papers less readable, as authors would rely on the reviews to clarify what they should have (as Buffy mentions)
Reviewers will worry about their identity being compromised, and thus early career researchers may not want to review at all/write very positive reviews.
It may cause community dissent: interdisciplinary communities host several small sub-communities, each with its own publication norms and acceptance thresholds. This is already a major issue, that will be further exacerbated by revealing reviews (this may be a pro, not entirely decided!).

I think that one of the main reasons I'm against revealing reviews is because the review process, unfortunately, involves a lot of random luck. As the NIPS experiment shows, PCs can widely disagree on a lot of papers. It is important to note that there is general agreement on what are very bad papers and very good papers, but a significant chunk of them are borderline cases that could swing either way. I think that showing the reviews for borderline cases might be a bad idea, as it would cause a lot of dissent in the community ("why did my paper, with one weak reject, one weak accept and one accept, got rejected but my paper with better scores got accepted?"). I think that the "clear accept" papers can be easily listed with their reviews; the others? Not so sure...

Overall, I think that presenting reviews might be good in some cases and should involve the informed consent of both the authors and all reviewers. However, I worry about it becoming a norm. Paraphrasing a bit, review decisions are like sausages: it's better not to see how they're made.


Jobs in industry for mathematicians As a Ph.D graduated in mathematics (combinatorial algebra), I would like to apply for jobs in industry such as finance and/or Data science. I have some knowledge on programming but no real-world experience. Do I have any chance to get a job in industry? I looked for industry jobs, in most finance and data mining sector jobs, there exists

  mathematics

as one of the field of studies that students of them can apply for.  My question is about my chance for these types of jobs.

If you don't apply, you won't get the job.  So, apply!

Yes, it's possible to find a job in industry and many Ph.D. graduates in mathematics do this every year.  There are lots of things that you could have been doing earlier in your graduate career to help you prepare for a career outside of academia, but there are also many things that you can do starting right now to help you develop a non-academic career.

One very recent resource that you might find helpful is the book:

Rachel Levy, Richard Laugesen and Fadil Santosa, Big Jobs Guide: Business, Industry, and Government Careers for Mathematical Scientists, Statisticians, and Operations Researchers.  SIAM, 2018.


Asking for recommendation letter to a Prof on New Year, deadline in a week I am applying for graduate school. The deadline is in one week.

I need to ask for one more recommendation letter to a professor who I have not spoken to in a year.

The problem is that today is December Twenty-Eighth! I thought about asking her over Christmas but I chickened out because I knew for sure that she would be busy. Now we are only three days away from new year and the deadline follows shortly after. For sure, it would be impolite to delay this any further. The thought of having her spending the new years day writing a letter for me really doesn't sit very well!

I am afraid that giving such a sudden short notice over such a busy period would be received very poorly by the professor.

Should I do it? How do I do it politely? I really hope the prof do not react to this negatively.

Should you ask? Sure -- there's nothing to lose, and it doesn't seem like you have a choice. How to do it politely? Be very apologetic, state that you're aware of how annoying it is to ask for this so close to the deadline (and presumably during holidays), describe any reasons for asking so late, and note that you will understand if your professor is unable to write.

Personally, I'd refuse such a request unless (i) I knew the student well, (e.g. someone in my lab) or (ii) I had a letter already on-hand that I could easily tweak and submit. ("Easily" doesn't mean it isn't annoying, though -- all the web-based recommendation forms still have a lot of boxes to tick, etc.!)


Does presenting your work at conferences cause your related publications to be cited more? Does presenting at conferences increase the number of citations to the work presented at the conference?
I am limiting the scope of this question to disciplines where conference presentations are not publications and are not usually cited.
Statistics or evidence of some kind would be appreciated.

Yes, most definitely. The simple reason is that at conference it is relatively easy to pick up on the development of a certain field or ones own interest. And naturally, this leads to a bias towards those studies presented.


Publications in personal statement What is the best way to include publications in my statement-of-purpose which I want to submit to a university? Should I give a full description of my publications, or just list them?

This would depend a bit on whether the publications are relevant for your request. I would suggest a two-fold approach:

A list of all publications in your CV, in usual bibliographical style.
A list of relevant publications, with a short comment on each, the affiliation under which it was published, and the connection it has to the studies you now wish to undertake, within the statement of purpose.

This will help the people making the decision understand you have a focus on what you are doing. You are not only telling them what you want to do, but also how you came to want it.

Best luck!


Sharing my unpublished thesis with other students? The other day a former classmate asked to read my thesis and I don't know why but I got a little concerned about it and just told him honestly that, "I may do future work based on my thesis submission so I don't feel comfortable sharing it with you at the moment."

Am I right to feel this way?  Is it common to keep your thesis between you and your advisor - and potential researchers who may want to work with you? Or should I really "put my thesis out there" and share it with others who want to read it and that the more people who read my thesis the better?

I somehow viewed him as a competitor, when he asked me that, but he's a close friend.  He doesn't have any thesis / supervised research experience and said he wanted to see what I did.  And now he wants to do research also and try and join a research group, etc.

Of course you should share your thesis: the purpose of doing research is to increase and spread knowledge, not to keep it secret.

  Is it common to keep your thesis between you and your advisor - and potential researchers who may want to work with you?

No, it's not, and I suggest you to ask your advisor what he thinks of such an idea.

  And now he wants to do research also and try and join a research group, etc.

Well, this is a good thing, isn't it?


How to present (key) publications on personal website? I am a phd student in a STEM field and currently setting up a personal website. The website is intended to be simple and will basically contain contact details, research interests, a list of publications and links to other profiles in the web (I have a very common name).

Beside the pure list of publications I think it would be a good idea to highlight "key" publications in some way, so that visitors can detect at a glance what I consider my most relevant research. However, I am not sure how to approach this at best.

The only idea I have so far is to provide one picture (maybe animated) for each "key" presentation that gives an overview of the corresponding paper, like e.g. in http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/refereed-journal-publications.html

Any more/better ideas? Examples?

The most common solution which I usually see is having a section called "Selected Publications" or "Key Publications". Often people show the details only for these and you have to take some extra step (e.g. press some link or an "expand button") in order to get the full publication list.


Am I taking the Right steps at Switching from Geoinformatics Bsc to Information Technology Msc? I am a Bsc degree holder in Geoinformatics from Nigeria intending to apply for Msc in Information Technology program in Germany, looking at the prerequisite its entirely a different ball game. So I decided to take some training for IT certificate courses like Network+, Cyber Ethical Hacking (CEH) and hoping to do Cisco certified Network Association (CCNA) and even planing on learning German language soon.
My question is will these certification acquisition give me a boost for admission to study Information Technology in Germany or anywhere in the UK.

This heavily depends on the program you are applying for. Usually (in Germany) they require you to have an equivalent Bachelor to what they offer as Bachelor in the field, i.e., Information Technology in your case. Whether a Bachelor is equivalent is typically decided case by case. The whole procedure and detailed requirements are described in the Zugangsordnung of the faculty.

Since you are a student from a non-EU country there are most likely more requirements you need to fulfill, e.g., assessment of the German university entrance qualification, language requirements, visa, etc. You should get in contact with the international office of the university as soon as possible.


What is the reason of the disparity between single article price and yearly subscription in scientific journals? I'd like to understand scientific journals' pricing model.

For example, in the case of Nature, one single article bought as a unit costs $32.00. But a personal subscription is only $199.00 for 1 Year (51 issues, Print and Online). That is 6x digital articles cost slightly less than all articles in one year and 51 paper magazines.

What is the reason of the disparity between the article price and the yearly subscription? Wouldn't they obtain a better return rate if they priced the articles at a reasonable amount? (maybe $4-$5)

On the principle a subscription is always better than individual sales from the journal's point of view because it's a fixed income on which they can count. It's also well known to increase sales that explain why you always get a discount when you subscribe to a service.

As for the seemingly large difference you mention, my guess is that individual subscriptions for scientific articles are rare, and thus not very interesting financially. People needing frequent access to the content of these journals typically access them via institutional subscriptions.


Should I prepare for the GRE if my gpa isn't yet high enough for Epidemiology graduate school? I'm going to be a senior college student in the fall. My gpa is close but not high enough for the bare minimum graduate school admission criteria (gpa=3.0). I am wondering whether I should wait until I finish senior year and see whether I get a cumulative gpa of 3.0 before I study for GRE/apply for graduate school or whether I should study for GRE now. The disadvantage of studying for GRE without the GPA criteria fulfilled is that I might end up studying for a useless test.

I went through graduate school in Epidemiology at a major school of Public Health, and am now the epidemiologist on a number of multidisciplinary admission committees.

Improve Your GPA First

There's no subject-specific test for the GRE for Epidemiology (which isn't surprising, as it's not really a discipline with good undergraduate representation), and the general feeling in the field is the GRE is a supplemental piece of information - a way to maybe push an edge case into "Admit", or to provide context for schools where it's known that the GPA doesn't mean much. My program has gone so far as to seriously consider phasing it out entirely.

GPA cutoffs are also often a function of the Graduate School, or another administrative group where there isn't much room for nuance. If you don't meet the GPA requirements, you're sitting squarely in the "Do Not Pass Go" category. I wouldn't bother investing any time or money studying for the GRE until you're past that line.


Our instructor threw together freely available YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles instead of lectures. What should I do? I'm currently attending university online (at a notable public institution, not a crappy school—I feel compelled to mention this because one typically expects quality from good institutions). Unfortunately, my instructor didn't put much effort into designing the course.

Essentially, though there are a few YouTube videos made by him and his colleagues, the rest of the course basically consists of:

1) The e-book that we read weekly

2) Other YouTube videos that he's linked

3) Wikipedia articles

I've already brought this to his attention in a professional manner (he didn't get upset), but things obviously won't change during this academic semester, as he's also busy teaching other courses. His reasoning is that in the digital age, since information is so freely available, his job is essentially to help guide us in finding the right information.

I disagree. What's frustrating is the fact that students are paying tuition to have an instructor tell them "Hey, here are some free videos literally anyone can find online, and some Wikipedia articles any competent student can read on their own. Go nuts." Because when you're paying tuition, the implication is that you're gaining special privilege and access to resources and knowledge that are otherwise unavailable to ordinary people/students. A student makes a choice when deciding what school he wishes to attend. In doing so, he gives up the opportunity to attend another school. If all schools just offered the same quality and degree of education, there wouldn't be any competition or a means of qualifying how good one school is compared to another.

I find it unprofessional of an instructor to do something like this. I don't want to strain my relationship with this instructor, but I also don't feel like I can let this go because the course is quite fundamental to the major I'm pursuing, and it's really upsetting that it's in this condition.

What should I do? Should I just let it pass and move on, or should I bring this to the attention of someone else? He also happens to be high up in the corresponding department, so there aren't many people above his status. I don't want to go over his head, but I feel like if I email him again about this, it'll seem like I'm just pestering him.

As a student, you are paying for the tuition (teaching). Teaching is an activity designed to help you learn and acquire new skills.
Teaching materials (books, slides, video lectures) can be good, bad or ugly, but they are only a (smaller) part of the whole picture. They are not an activity. Arguably, they matter less.

What matters more, in my opinion, is the opportunity to obtain constructive feedback from your tutors. Not the grade for your submissions, but actual analysis of your work, explaining its strength and weaknesses and providing you with some ideas on how to improve and what to work on. Not a general piece of information, but something unique and produced specifically for you.

I have rarely seen online courses where students have enough personal attention and receive more than just a few lines of personal feedback. Honestly, the situation with many traditionally run courses is largely the same. Being massively oversubscribed and under-staffed, many Departments are not able to provide students with sensible feedback on their work. As a (pathetic) attempt to compensate, they sometimes claim that they provide exclusive teaching materials, which, however, tend often to not really be any better than standard textbooks.

My suggestion is: don't be obsessed with materials you are provided with, but look at whether you're receiving enough attention and personal guidance from your tutors. If you're not getting enough feedback - it is probably time to raise your concerns or maybe even look elsewhere.


The status of my paper is "Ready for Decision (30 days)". Should I write an email and ask? I submitted my paper in Elsevier, the status of my paper is "Ready for Decision (30 days). Should I write an email and ask why does it takes so long?
Thanks

Yes. 30 days is well past the normal range to make a decision after all reviews have been received.


How important is to maintain an online/digital presence for a graduate student? I am a graduate student in the physical sciences working towards my Ph.D and planning to finish in less than two years from now. In this age, where data mining/collection/analysis and then selling/using it for profit has become ubiquitous and quite easy because of the internet and the ever increasing plethora of electronic devices, I have become a little paranoid and worked quite hard over the past decade to keep myself anonymous and to stop anyone from piecing info about me as much as possible. I do regularly google myself and see what I can learn about myself.

So the thing is, I don't have a webpage of any kind. No blogs! Certainly no social sites. No professional/connection profiles like on LinkedIn. Even the university provided webpage/space is unused and I try to control where my university email is published. Only the people who know me and have met me face to face (personally and professionally like at a conference) have my info to get in touch with me. It would be quite difficult for someone who I don't know to get in touch with me even if it is research related. A potential employer will have a very hard time trying to find anything about me on the internet.

So my question is how detrimental is this behavior to my professional future? Just how bad is it really, assuming it is bad? Do I really need it? Will this hurt my chances in the future when I try to get a postdoc or a job in the industry? I haven't published anything yet but I will very soon and then I expect to have at least another paper before I graduate. Furthermore, I really don't know what will I be doing after graduation. I might do a postdoc at a lab but then after that I don't plan on staying in academia. I might just stay at a lab or go to the industry working for a R&D somewhere. I am also toying with the idea of just starting my own small business. It could be something completely unrelated to my degree like a bakery or a bookstore.

But let's stay that even if I decide to stay in the field like working at a national lab and publishing regularly, can this be done without a public online presence?

BTW, I am in the USA and I don't plan on ever moving out of the States so the postdoc/lab stuff will be here in the States if I decide to do it.

Yes, it hurts your chances. It does not make you unemployable, far from it (I have recruited post-docs without web presence): when you apply for a position, your application file will include all the information that should be necessary for the hiring committee to decide, so they do not strictly need to see your webpage. As long as you appear on the departmental or group-level web listing of researchers… (otherwise it just looks weird)

However, look at the bigger picture: you're trying to make yourself a name in academia, so why do something that prevents it to some extent? There are good reasons for people to look up your webpage:

They saw you name, and wondered who you are, where you are, what you do.
They want to see what you have recently published, and find it easier to have it grouped on your web page that through a citation database (where your name may not be unique)
They know you, and thought about you for an open (or soon-to-be-open) position, and they want to check out if you have moved, if you recently accepted a position, etc.

So, there are two things that are absolutely needed:

People need to find that minimum amount of information about you when they search your name, and possibly some research-related keywords. A personal webpage, even a terse one, may be better for that than your departmental web page.
Your list of publications

As for myself, I maintained a webpage composed of exactly 1 HTML file, including:

my name
status (“PhD student at South Laponia U.”)
research keywords, link to my publication list (ResearcherID)
link to my CV (so I lied, I have a second file on that website: my CV in PDF format)
email address
link to my departmental website.

That's it. (It used to host my Master's thesis, but it is now hosted on an open archive, with a link from my publications list.) No picture of me or my pets, no blog/tumblr/twitter, no social websites.


A number of students requesting a number of reference letters. What to do? I teach two medium size groups (~100 each), supervise BSc and MSc dissertations, and have ~35 tutees. When applications to postgraduate programmes open, I tend to receive a number of requests for reference letters due to a combination of several students asking me to write letters for them, and them applying to a number of places (usually 30+ students × 5+ programmes), so I need to spend quite some time writing and submitting reference letters.
Are there any guidelines in terms of how many reference letters lecturers in UK should write per year?

Your director says "As many as you can" - in my philosophy these would be those where I think the letter would easily help and, as such, easily written.

Create a spreadsheet with comments, and evaluations, possibly link collections if that's easier than to search through mail.

Use automated template generation for the reference letter outline, possibly electronically added signature, and write short, crisp paragraphs on what impressed you about the student. One, at most two paragraphs are perfectly enough if you have something good to say. It's like feedback for an essay. "This student performed well because they ..., were able to ... and showed skilful handling of ... Whatever is relevant, give facts and a brief evaluation, this is perfectly fine.

Any awards, just mention them.

End on a standardized positive note. This is not a tenure reference. If you have to write many references, you cannot spend much time on refined formulations.

Group the references together for the same website/uni and fire them off.

For very strong students, usually it is possible (and pleasurable) to write more, as you will know more about what they have done. They can be treated in a more individualized fashion.

References for weak students, on the other hand, are very difficult to write, and so they will burn a lot more of your time if you want them to help at all; this will be like squeezing blood from a stone. I do not recommend doing that, unless you have some simple and strong thing to say about them and you wish to do so.
Although it's not up to you to decide whether they should proceed with a graduate education or not, if you yourself do not think they should continue, it is in your right to choose not to be part of the process in that case.