What is the purpose of an e-book with random verbatim abstracts pulled from journals? I just found an abstract of mine, copied from a Journal, in an online book titled "Issues in Ecological Research and Application." It looks like this is a free book to download that just has random abstracts from various ecology journals. However, it appears like it doesn't take every single abstract from these journals. This company appears to also do this for many fields.

Actually, it is a bit stranger than full abstracts, it's basically full abstracts broken up with phrases like "journalists obtained a quote from researchers at University '..."

So my questions are, how did my abstract get in such a book? And what is the purpose of such a book? Abstracts are freely available online everywhere. Back in the print days, I could, perhaps, see the purpose of a library owning such a thing, but I can't quite understand what this is used for. Also is this even legal and should I be concerned about such things?

I don't know if it's legal (it could depend on what counts as fair use, for example), but I wouldn't be concerned.  I don't see any likelihood that this will harm you.

It's possible that they asked the journal for permission to reprint the abstract, but I'd guess they just grabbed it from the web.  The "journalists obtained a quote" stuff may be intended to make it look like a press release or news article, rather than a reprinted abstract.  One positive side effect is that this makes it clear that the publisher is quoting you describing your work, rather than that you chose to publish an abstract in this venue.

I don't know why the publisher would compile these volumes.  They have no academic value whatsoever, but it's easy to speculate about motives:

If these volumes are assembled by programs scraping the web, then the publisher only needs to sell a handful of them to make a profit.  With thousands of volumes available, they can presumably find a few suckers who will pay for one, or perhaps even careless librarians they can sell subscriptions to.
Maybe the volumes are used for content farming, to try to mimic genuine content and thereby attract web searchers (so the publisher can sell ads or otherwise exploit these visits).
They might also be used to create the illusion of academic respectability for the publisher, by creating a big catalog full of books that look reasonable at first glance (but not at second glance).
It could be someone who is genuinely trying to perform a useful service and simply doesn't recognize how useless this is.

If this bothers you, you could bring it to the attention of your publisher.  If they didn't authorize the use of the abstract, then they'll decide whether they can or should do anything about it.


What does it mean if a professor does not answer your email in time? I recently joined a research group as a postdoc. I wrote the professor an email to ask quick but important questions including asking him when when he wanted me to start. It's been over a week and I haven't received get an answer. Other emails I've sent previously have also gone unanswered for long periods as well.

With that background, my question is: do professors sometimes (intentionally or otherwise) not respond to emails in a timely manner?

I wrote him an email to ask quick but important questions, like, when do you want me to start. I didn't get an answer even after a week. And similar things happened before as well.

Some professors are notoriously bad in answering emails. This does not necessarily mean anything. Don't fret about it.

  So I want to ask that as a professor, sometimes will you (on purpose) to NOT answer emails in time?

I'm not a professor, but, no, this is not how I would expect an adult person (in a management position, none the less) to behave. If the professor is indeed having second thoughts about you and decided to just not answer anymore, I would say you dodged a bullet there.

However, I really think that this is unlikely. Just send a polite reminder, or propose to have a quick chat e.g., over Skype, at a time of the professor's convenience.


Did my instructor somehow pass the buck to me? When I was TAing a course, some students came to meet me to talk about marking issues. Earlier, the instructor had said that if students cannot reach an agreement with TAs they should talk to the instructor. Thus when I saw some students disputing marks, I referred them to the instructor. However, the instructor later sent me an email saying he couldn't decide the marks as the TAs made the marking scheme. In my view, he somehow refused to fulfill his duty and passed the buck to me.

Generally, unless the mark is extremely, obviously wrong, the professor should support the decision made by the TA. However, this means that when there is a grading dispute you cannot resolve with the student, you need to refer the student to the professor, but also talk to the professor yourself, explaining your marking scheme and reasoning behind the grade. Then the professor is equipped to explain to the student why they got the mark they deserve. You cannot expect the professor to moderate a dispute unless they actually have the grading scheme and your side of the story.

Also, you shouldn't immediately pass the student on. Let them present their case to you first, and explain to them why you assigned the grade you did. Nine times out of ten, the student is happy with that. You should only refer the one out of ten who refuse to see reason to your professor.


When is reference for a definition needed and not needed? Does all definitions need a reference? Is there any rules to when you need one(or more) and when you don't?

You need to make crystal clear what is your contribution and what isn't. In general, all definitions that are not your contribution need the proper reference.

In practice that could get cumbersome, so you end up not citing what is considered common, basic knowledge. However, that line is somewhat blurry and one needs experience to do it right.

You can check good papers in your field to guess what is/isn't common knowledge. Another interesting tactic, that I often use, is to say:

  "Since we are using XXX, we will briefly review the involved concepts [X]".

That way it is clear that they are not your contribution and that reference [x] can be consulted for further details, without too many references and unnecessary text...


Can I publish my Master's Thesis that I've claimed copyright on? I graduated this past May with my master's in a physical science. Since then, my thesis has been uploaded online by my university, with my copyright on the thesis. I was interested in publishing the results from my thesis in a scientific journal, but with this copyright, is that even possible now? What are the rules when it comes to this sort of thing?

Generally, the agreement that you sign with a journal publisher is not just to allow publication, but rather to transfer ownership of the copyright to the publisher.  After that point you don't own the copyright and can't publish the material your self except under the terms of the copyright transfer agreement.  Some agreements are quite liberal while others are more strict.

However, most journal publishers specifically allow for the publication of papers that are substantially similar to parts of "published" MS theses and PhD dissertations- under this system you can still make copies of your thesis or dissertation freely available online.  Furthermore many publishers are OK with theses or dissertations that basically consist of chapters that were previously published as papers in their journals.  A few publishers (for example I believe that this was an issue with the American Chemical Society although they've updated their policy) have not allowed these practices.

In short, copyright is most likely not going to be an issue in publishing research papers based on your thesis.

Another issue that you didn't discuss in your question is rewriting the thesis material to fit into the short form of a journal article.  Thesis chapters usually need to be significantly shortened for journal publication.


I was invited to an unexpected and urgent second postdoc interview (in less than 24h) - Is this fair? I had postdoc at a top 10 university in the world. The email of the first interview said I should expect questions around the job description. The first interview was very smooth and I felt very good about it.
A few days later, I received an email in the afternoon, the email said I have a second interview tomorrow morning and I should expect questions around the job description (I think these are just automatic emails).
The second interview however, was a bit different. In order to decide between me and another candidate, they said they needed a technical interview which they presented a problem I needed to solve in 10 minutes, the problem required a lot of programming skills and classic concepts. I haven't programmed in a while now and nothing in the job description not in the email says "programming skills".
I gave okay answers and played it safe a lot in my problem solving approach. I couldn't solve the problem in the given time because I simply needed to refresh my memory and remember some concepts, but I did get a "thumbs up" from the potential PI when I was explaining some stuff. Unfortunately, I wasn't selected and I think the other candidate gave better answers.
Now days later, I can't stop thinking about that whole process. Normally, if the panel expects a presentation, they mention it in the invitation email. It's very weird and a bit unfair to do that to candidates they clearly liked in a very short amount of time. I truly believe that the interview could have been way better if they mentioned anything about a technical interview. Just because one candidate performed better (obviously, people are different), doesn't make the evaluation process fair. What do you think about the situation, is this a normal routine for postdoc interviews?
PS:
The postdoc was in the UK and I live in north Africa. I am saying this because perhaps it justifies why the HR send an email and didn't call (perhaps they can only call candidates within the UK). The field is Computer Science.

It's not respectful to applicants for the interview process to be unclear or changed at the last minute. However, for various reasons, many of them completely innocent (busy people, miscommunications), this may happen.
It's also not always transparent what an interviewer is looking for. If the interview has you attempt "Task A", it may not be performance on Task A that you are being evaluated on. Instead, you may be evaluated for how you handle an unexpected change in plans. Or you may be evaluated on how you ask for clarification around a task, how you manage time if a task cannot be completed within the window you are given, what you do when you find you are stuck on something (do you ask for help? Stop and admit you are stuck? Make something up that might work? Pretend you know what you're doing?), etc.
Judging "success" on this sort of task is entirely up to the interviewer's views and opinion. As far as whether it's "fair", well...the definition of "fair" is a moving target and various opinions would give various descriptions of "fair". In one sense, as long as the same information is communicated in the same time frame to all the candidates, and all candidates are judged by the same criteria, it is "fair" among those candidates.
As far as whether it's the process that selects the true best candidate for the job, well... if we had a better way of determining the best candidate than the clunky interview process, we'd use that method instead.

I'm not sure you can do much about this except for continuing to interview for positions that interest you. Positions at desirable universities are likely to attract many qualified applicants, and you aren't guaranteed a job just because you're qualified. Ultimately, they have to select someone, and it's not even really possible for the person doing the hiring to know that they've got the best one.
I'd recommend not spending more time thinking about the process of this one interview. Maybe their expectation is that programming is a bigger part of the role but didn't think it was necessary to mention it. Maybe they had a preferred candidate already but lacked the justification they needed and invented this task on the fly to create it. Maybe they're disorganized. The answer, whatever it is, won't help for your next interview. Maybe you even dodged a bullet and this is a bad work environment, and had you been hired your next Academia.SE question would be about being stuck in a post doc where you're just treated as a programmer and aren't making any progress on independent research projects. Move on and forget this one.


Apply PhD with no recommendation Please allow me to ask for suggestion about no recommendation problem.
I graduated my master with distinction and my paper was published in nation wide journal, everything seems to be perfect. But after the graduation,  my thesis supervisor has a personal problem with me and we've never talked since then. So now I want to apply for PhD and when it comes to recommendation, I really don't know what to do and I don't think my supervisor will write a good thing about me since we are in personal conflict.

Do you have any suggestion for this situation?

If you can be open with your formal supervisor about the "personal problem" s/he has with you, you could simply ask, "I am interested in pursuing a PhD. I know that we have disagreed about XYZ and so I wanted to ask you if you believe you could write me a fair recommendation."

Note, that this is still risky - the supervisor can write a bland recommendation (which holds little weight) or agree to write it and write a bad one anyway.

What about the director of the program you attended? That could be weighed more favorably. Other faculty members? My PhD dissertation chair never wrote recommendations for anyone, so I never even asked him (we never had a falling out or anything, it was just his personal policy). It never hurt my chances of jobs or other things because I had other faculty and references write litters for me instead.

Good luck!


Do authors appreciate the work of peer reviewers? It’s International Peer Review Week, and this year’s theme is “Recognition for Review.” This makes me wonder whether authors feel a sense of appreciation for their reviewers. As an author, I have always felt intimidated or depressed by peer review. But on some reflection, I feel that reviewers have actually helped me improve my papers. Have you ever felt a sense of appreciation and gratitude for your reviewers? If you had the opportunity to write a note of thanks to your reviewers today, what would you write?

Contrary to the impression you may get reading this forum, mostly authors do appreciate the work of referees.

On a few occasions, when a referee provided valuable information, I have added it to the paper and thanked "an anonymous referee" for it in the paper.


Lecture Notes and Textbooks When teaching a course based a text book, is using the proofs of theorems and examples from a text book considered reproducing the material from the textbook, while providing the study lecture notes?

A textbook is produced as “here is a tool to teach students or a class”, while a paper is produced as “this is the state of play of our work”.
The author of the textbook expects lecturers and students to use the material but if they quote it in lecture notes or an essay they then expect it to be correctly referenced.


How could I become a mathematician with only a bachelor's degree in computer science? TL;DR My bachelor's degree didn't leave me with a solid education in mathematics and I'm not sure how to start a career in pure mathematics from there.

To start with, I'm 24 years old, living in Indonesia in Southeast Asia, and I just graduated from a low-ranking university (even for this country) with a bachelor's degree in computer science. I want to pursue a career in mathematics even though I've also enjoyed programming immensely (see all my posts on codegolf.SE) because I've loved mathematics for much longer and I feel like I wasted this first opportunity for education on a less-than-stellar degree. (Note: this less-than-stellar degree didn't even have a linear algebra course. Make of that what you will.)

I figure that a good path to a career in mathematics academia is to at least work towards getting a Master's and PhD in mathematics. The trouble is, is that even this is very broad. What topics/fields should I pursue (first) when looking for graduate programs? If I email professors, what do I tell them? "Hi, I'm looking for a graduate degree, but I don't even have an undergraduate's understanding of mathematics and I have no idea what path to pursue. Can you help me?"

Another hiccup is that I've just started a job as a software developer here in Indonesia to support my family, and I don't think I can leave that job to pursue academia for however many years, until I've worked there for a few years and saved up some money (especially if I pursue these degrees abroad). "Hi, I'd like to join your graduate program, but not till 2023." doesn't seem like a great thing to receive in your email.

This delay does give me time to give myself an informal refresher in undergraduate mathematics, but I have no idea where to even start. Read a textbook? Join an online course? Find a tutor here in Indonesia?

This is not to mention that I'm not sure how on earth I'll pay for everything, or that for most master's or PhD courses (or a combined degree) expect you, quite reasonably, to have a bachelor's degree in mathematics.

And lastly, my main mathematical interests are in number theory, algebra, and calculus, in approximately that order. I was thinking of applying to a North American university (maybe the University of Waterloo in Canada) before applying to Australian or European universities. I have US citizenship, which should help a lot.

In short, I have a myriad of choices and a bad starting position. I understand this is a very general question, so I thank you for any advice you can give or resources you pass along.

Undergraduate math has a wide variety of free or cheap resources online.  Youtube, udemy, and khan academy are your best friend. You will quickly learn how to spot a good teacher / course.  Some books are public and many are available at libraries or online. And of course stackexchange is an option when you feel stuck. As you said, you have a number of years before you would try to make this transition.

This is coming from someone who went from being a teacher to learning python and getting a job at more than double the pay with just 3 months of online learning (mostly udemy and youtube) and a 3 month internship after that

As you learn more and gain a stronger grasp on undergraduate mathematics, you will begin to answer your own question about what topic you really want to pursue.

Although, even now, it does not hurt to send out a few emails and ask professors about topics.  The worst that can happen is them ignoring you.  You might "waste" 3 minutes of 100 professors time but a single answer could inspire you or help you make a more informed choice about your future careers.  I think it is worth is.

If you are unsure the topics you should study on and the recommended order, find transcripts or graduation requirements for a mathematics degree in a school you respect. It might take a little digging, but finding exactly what you would need to take at x school for y degree is not impossible (heck, send emails to counselors there and just ask if you cant find it easily online)

for an undergraduate reference

https://webapp4.asu.edu/programs/t5/roadmaps/ASU00/LAMATBS/null/ALL/2018?init=false&nopassive=true

Even vague terms like "upper division depth course" can be clicked on there and it leads to a list with descriptions of what they are and what is taught.

I found this by just googling

course requirements for math degree ASU

similar searches should yield fairly similar hopefully helpful results


Does research require a certain kind of personal abilities or is it a matter of hard work? I've failed to finish my master thesis, I thought this was attributed to the minimal supervision of my adviser - he/she wasn't an expert in the domain of thesis and didn't give me any kind of insights or help - only general advice - and I was let to do all the work alone and I failed to finish a good thesis (Another reason I thought was the lack of my background courses and again I had to study everything from start without focus on the target which took too much time).

Now I have a chance of interning at a good research lab, the problem that I face now is that I'm afraid that I don't have the ability/skill to do a good research. Does research require a certain kind of personal abilities or is just a matter of hard work?

Although the question is vague, the implicit distinction in it is perhaps the whole point: being able to focus and genuinely work hard over long periods of time, in the face of fatigue, frustration, etc., is itself a particular talent.

To explain, consider Mozart in music: it's not that he could magically play and compose, but, rather, that he was able to practice a crazy amount starting at an early age, and acquired profiency... So, a significant part of the "talent" was the capacity to practice long-and-hard. Yes, one can argue that also the ability to benefit from long-and-hard practice is important. And, all the more resoundingly, long-and-hard work is necessary, although one may fail to benefit from it, even if one does manage it (or is forced by parents or other circumstances).

No, it is not normal to be able to focus on anything at all at an early age, and perhaps even later it would not be normal to be able to entertain a multi-year project. To be able to do so _at_all_ I think (upon some observation) is a talent. To be able to succeed to some degree is a further talent, and there is an element of luck involved in "high success". But the latter "test" is not often reached. An example of sufficient focus but lack of other necessities is "crackpots" or "cranks". Even so, in some cases they are eventually vindicated! :)


When submitting an extended version, is it mandatory to include all authors of the original paper? In my field, it's a common practice to publish a work at a conference first, then extend it (typically with 25%-40% more content) and submit it for publication in a journal.

Often the extension is driven by a subset of the original authors, for example, because the remaining authors lost interest or don't have time to develop the extension. In this situation, the question arises whether it's mandatory to include the non-contributing authors as authors of the extension.

Arguably, the authors have already received the credit for their contribution with authorship of the original paper. On the other hand, their contribution to the original work is still a contribution of the extended work.

Is there any official guideline of how such cases should be handled?

An extended version of a conference paper supersedes the conference paper. A priori, this means that every author of the conference paper is also an author of the journal paper. In same rare cases it could be appropriate to drop an author (if every part they contributed to gets removed), but as a matter of protocol, I would only consider this on request of the relevant author.

This is different from a subsequent paper building on a prior paper from the same project, where a citation to the previous paper suffices. In such a case, one would not copy over important text anyway.


Can my recommendation letters be repeated? For example, if I am going to apply to 3 REU programs that ask me for 2 recommendation letters each one.

Can my 2 professors who I asked the recommendation letters send the exact same letters to the 3 REU programs?

Yes, they can.  Sometimes letter writers make minor changes to the letters, for example to add information specific to a given program, but this sort of fine tuning is optional (and almost nobody makes major changes).  The default is to send the same letter.


How can I find out how often my publications have been cited? Is there a special database somewhere where you can see how often other scholars have cited you or your publications in their scholarly works?

My professor is always saying, "No one has cited me on this..."

Is that just his general assessment or does he know this from a verified source?

Google scholar works pretty well, though with all of these things there are edges cases that cause problems (non unique names, random poster presentations showing up counting as citations, etc.)

I find that ResearchGate tends to be pretty good. People can comment, annotate, and more generally fix up the metadata issues on this site in a social media style, and so it tends to be pretty accurate. However, since it's still quite new most papers are missing from its databases (though it still tends to count citations correctly?).


Is a Graduate Performance Diploma considered an academic degree for purposes of PhD admissions or faculty job search? This question might be appropriate for music SE but I am looking for more academic views.

I know of Associate, bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees.  Inside of these are different fields.  I have also seen JD (law) and DM (music).  I have recently seen "Graduate Performance Diploma".  While I usually do not think of these in an academic sense, Johns Hopkins, which I consider a good school, offers this diploma.

What is the purpose of this degree?  Is it only to give more practice time for a musician in an academic setting, or would earning this diploma have some weight on acceptance to a doctoral or professorship?

I did my undergraduate in a large, prestigious music school, which also had (probably still has) a Diploma option.  Before I answer your question, let me tell you something about my degree requirements.

I had to take lots and lots of credits in my performance instrument, and ensembles, large and small.  Then there was lots of music theory, music history, music literature.  A tiny proportion was in other departments -- I took one English, one math, one history, one science, and one social science course, if I remember right.  That's not much for a 4-year degree!  But now, for the Diploma, take out everything except the performance instrument and the ensembles.  Well, apparently at Johns Hopkins, you also do some music theory-type courses as well.

The students that I saw doing the Diploma were typically from another country, were planning to go back after the Diploma, and were there just to further their study of their instrument with a particular teacher, usually a famous name.  It was kind of like a post-doc.  They were soaking up the great person's approach to technique, expanding their repertoire, getting more experience, polishing their performing.

Music schools offer the Diploma because they know there are students who only want to work on their performance instrument.  So they cut out all the extraneous stuff and give the person a Diploma.

This would be good preparation for a performance career (orchestra, chamber music, solo concertizing), and for teaching the instrument in a private studio.  However, it would NOT prepare one for teaching in a public school, community college, college, or university.  However, it would help one prepare for teaching in a conservatory (if the person were a strong enough player -- s/he would have to be extremely strong for this).

If you are from another country and are planning to go back, chances are you are going to do, or you did, some academic work in your home country, and that will fit better with the academic system you plan to seek a job in.

A lot of the Diploma students were astounding musicians, though, who did seem to have a shot at a well-paid performance career.  That I can't be sure of, though, because I don't know what the employment options for classical musicians are in Europe (which is where many of the Diploma students were from).


A professor accidentally sent me a copy of my letter of recommendation for grad school. What should I do? I am applying for Masters programs in the USA. Most programs require the applicant to waive their right to see their letters of recommendation, and the applicant is not supposed to ever see their LOR.

One of the profs who is writing letters for me accidentally sent me a copy of my LOR today. He was supposed to send me a copy of a letter granting me permission to use certain hardware in a lab, but accidentally sent me the wrong letter. I suspect that he had both saved in the same directory on his computer, and simply chose the wrong one.

The issue is that he has already sent this letter to some colleges. What is the correct thing to do in this situation?

You still need that hardware letter so I guess some uncomfortable situation may have to happen. Yet, I think some awkwardness can be avoided by focusing on the application. I'd suggest e-mailing him and tell him that it appears a wrong attachment was sent to you, and invite him to double check if the hardware approval letter was uploaded to the school application portal, follow by a polite ask for the actual approval document. End with a statement saying that you'll delete his previous e-mail and the attachment, and thank him for his help.

If you have not read it, then delete it. That'd be the best scenario. If you have read part of it by accident, notice that you have done nothing wrong. You simply waived the right to read it; you did not signed a contract to never read it. Yet, don't try to read all of it even it's not your fault, it isn't meant to be for you to read, and knowing the contents may affect you, even you think you can be completely objective.


What can be done about the problem of bullying in post-PhD academia? I recently wrote a piece of advice to a bullied postdoc that made me sad.

Abbreviated, original here,

  "It is unlikely you can fight this culture, and academic settings have
  practically no good ways to address bullying of this nature. If you
  find what seems to be one, look for evidence that it has worked for
  past students. Recently. Your best strategy? Leave. Keep your head
  down, and start planning your exit now."

I personally have seen no post PhD success stories that include bullies being stood up to and punished by the system, AND the individuals bullied subsuquently moving forward in their academic careers. I facilitated a conversation with a dozen colleges last night which kept that total. Zero. We all work with different highly ranked R1 universities in the northeast. Between us, we have worked within over 30 US universities.  We agreed that bullies inhabit different roles in academia than in industry and government settings. We also agreed that the topic of bullies is more taboo in post-doctoral academic settings than in upper echelon government and industry settings.

Two questions we think are key:

What unique aspects of post- PhD academic culture allow bullies to persist?

What can be done to end this?

I'm not sure that I accept your premise that "academia is paradise for bullies". There are bullies in academia, but also there are bullies elsewhere.

Nevertheless, we can meaningfully ask if there are any dynamics in academia which may help bullies prosper. I can think of two particular ones:

Some parts of academia have a culture of tolerating and in some cases venerating "the brilliant asshole", i.e. the arrogant academic who routinely belittles and harangues students and junior researchers but we all go along because they've done some really important work in their field. Your question hints at this and user104075's answer kind of exemplifies it. This attitude can lead people who should really be seeking to prevent bullying to shrug it off with a "but that's just who he is".
Strong disparity in job security between the people at the top and bottom of the ladder, perhaps more so than in other professions. Postdocs are constantly, painfully, aware, that their contract will be up soon, and you need to get some papers, and there are hundreds of applicants to every faculty position etc etc. This makes junior researchers wary of leaving a position, even if it is terrible, and extra nervous of not getting a good recommendation letter from their present supervisor. I have heard of academics boasting of keeping their postdocs on short contracts, so that they can use the threat of not renewing it to get their postdocs to work unreasonable hours.
On the other hand, in some places, a tenured professor is virtually unfireable, short of outright academic fraud or serious criminality. So while the person on the end of the bullying faces huge risks from making a fuss, the bully may not face much consequence even if it does come out.

What can be done to mitigate these?

Use the wellbeing of an academic's students and postdocs as a criterion on which to evaluate them for funding and tenure
Better job security for postdocs - i.e. work towards a norm of longer contracts where possible. If this means that there are fewer postdocs, but they work under better conditions, I think that would be reasonable. Others will disagree.
Universities can implement robust anti-bullying policies with meaningful sanctions against academics who violate them.


Is it fair to give zeros to students who missed early assignments because they added the class late? Last semester, I was teaching a class where
there is a small assignment (~2% of the total course assessment)
that students need to submit every week.
Unfortunately, some of the students joined the class late,
due to add/drop forms that needed to be signed manually,
or for other unknown reasons.

Is it fair to give zeros to students who missed early assignments
because they added the class late?
There were a few students who may have missed 3 or 4 weeks of assignments.

Response to comment

Q: Were the students not able to physically be present?
Were the students not able to predict that they would take your class?

They were physically able to be present.
Some students may not have been able to predict
that they were able to take my class.
For example, one student had to add the class after the add date deadline,
because he was admitted late to the university.

Edit

After thinking things through,
I checked that the last date for adding the course is the Monday of week 2,
and the first weekly assignment is also assigned and due in week 2.
I found in the data that there were several students
who did not attend in week 1,
but all of these students attended and submitted
the weekly assignment in week 2.

Consequently, all of the students in the course
were registered by week 2,
and would have been able to submit all the weekly assignments.
Thus any students who did not submit a weekly assignment
deserve to get zero for that assignment,
unless they have a reason to be excused.

At most institutions, the last day to add a course is set up by the institution, not the professor.  We have an obligation to honor that, which means allowing students to enroll, with full full privileges, up to the last day they're allowed to.

Giving 0's for assignments they've missed is inconsistent with that.  I prefer to simply ignore previous assignments of the sort you're describing - if their score for that part of the class would have been based on 13 weekly assignments, now it's based out of 11.  (Sadly, this can be a little hard to administer depending how you calculate grades.)  Alternatively, they can be asked to make up the work; it is the responsibility of students to keep up with the courses they've enrolled in, either by auditing them while deciding or making up what they missed, so it's reasonable to ask them to do the assignment on a reasonably short time scale (I usually like two weeks, which should be enough time to avoid excessive overlap with any other commitments, but one week would be appropriate if the assignments are short and it's not an exam-laden week).


Is it ethical to blog about your publications to communicate your research without being restricted by the journal? I've always been interested in communicating research to the public. I also strongly believe that research publications should be in the public domain, especially if the work was funded with public money.
I found the responses to this question to be pretty interesting, and they got me thinking about scientific blogging as a solution.

So my question is -- can I put up my scientific findings on my blog or webspace that is not written exactly like my published article but contains essentially the same data and results?

Edit: I am not suggesting blogging as an alternative to publishing, but as an additional mode by which I can communicate my research and not be handcuffed by any publishing magnate.

I think the answer is yes, but you should aim higher: the line you're drawing in the sand is uncomfortably close to you and that's causing more work for you than is necessary.

Namely, trying to put the essential content of your papers on your own website for the purpose of freely disseminating your work seems wrongheaded: instead, you should be putting your own papers on your webpage and/or freely available preprint servers like the arxiv.  In order to do so fully legally (which is not necessarily the same as ethically: it is possible to feel that the law is unethical, in which case the ethical thing to do could be to break the law, but be willing to live with the consequences of that) you need to arrange this as a condition of the publication.  This is absolutely feasible with all of the major scientific publishing companies.  How common the deal is seems to depend on the individual journal and on the standards of the field.  In my field (mathematics), I do not know of a reputable journal which would not allow its authors to post on the arxiv.  (Once I dealt with a journal which initially asked me to remove the copy of the paper from my homepage.  After some back and forth, the editor in chief told me that it was absolutely okay for me to do that and he was surprised that the editorial assistant had said otherwise.  In retrospect, this was a clear warning that I was dealing with a shady journal.)

I gather that in some scientific fields, there are "popular" journals which do not allow authors to put papers on the arxiv (or, alas, there may not be an arxiv or clear equivalent) or -- gasp! -- on their own homepage.  I find this strange, because in my understanding in most scientific fields the majority of journals are owned by Elsevier, Springer, Science Direct... -- i.e., by enormous multinational, multibillion dollar publishing magnates which are not renowned for their generosity or enthusiasm for open access.  But when you publish a paper in (e.g.) mathematics in one of these journals, the copyright notice that you sign allows you to post the paper on the arxiv and your own webpage.  I find it hard to believe that the copyright notices for different journals by the same publisher would be so different on this point.  So the battle has already been won in these hardest places.  If there are trade journals specific to your field which are less generous to authors than the evil empires I've mentioned above: well, if you care about this sort of thing, don't publish there.

In terms of putting copies of published papers on the arxiv, in light of the comments above let me share my understanding.  What you publish should not include any journal-specific formatting: it should not look like a Journal X publication.  As a general practice, most authors upload to the arxiv before submission, and then only upload a new copy if some kind of significant, content-related change was made.  In particular, if an error was pointed out, then it would be good to correct that.  If the journal did copyediting for you -- which is not the same as directing you to do copyediting after acceptance -- then maybe it is best all around not to incorporate those changes in the freely available version: on the one hand, aside from formatting, this is the only place in which the journal itself is contributing to the paper; on the other hand, going back and manually incorporating the copyediting for an entire paper could take some time and effort.

To respond to what was said in the comments: in my opinion, whether your revisions were motivated by a referee report should not have any bearing on whether you want to change the freely available version.  If you are making changes in response to a referee report, then including that information in a "comments" section on the paper would be a classy move.  But as a frequent author and referee, I feel strongly that the changes you made in response to the referee report are not proprietary to the journal in any way (or in any other way from the rest of the content of the paper).

Added: The task of checking out policies of publishers and journals with regard to preprints is not something that an individual researcher needs to address from scratch: there are several online repositories of information about this.  Here is one.


When applying for a position, how do I best reply to a question asking for skills I don’t have? I am applying for a particular position where they have asked me if I have first-hand experience in protein crystallization and x-ray structure determination. I don’t have experience in any of those but I have mentioned my other experiences as asked. I lack only these.

How should I positively reply back so that it conforms my position there?

First of all, do not worry too much about whether this is a strict requirement for the position.
This is something they have to decide (based on your honest assessment of your prerequisites).
Also, if you made it past the first stage of the hiring process, it is likely that this is not a strict criterion.

Additionally note that (depending on country, field, and individuals) job ads that ask for more than they can possibly get are sadly common and in this case it is no problem if you only have a subset of the skills they ask for.
Whether this actually applies to your situation is something you have to judge yourself:
How likely is it that somebody already acquired all the mentioned skills at your stage?
In particular if we are talking about a PhD position here, acquiring relevant skills on the job should be the norm.

That being said, when faced with such a question:

Answer truthfully. You don’t want to do a job you cannot do and it almost certainly ruins your relationship with your advisor if they suspect you were dishonest about this.
Is there anything similar you have experience with or anything that may facilitate you learning these skills? If yes, talk briefly about this.
Do you find the methods in question interesting? If yes, state so and explain why. (If no, you probably should look for another position.) It may very well be that you were asked this question just to check that you do not shiver with disgust in light of these methods.
If it wouldn’t be uncommon to have these skills at your level, explain why you do not have them. For example, if your past universities did not offer a course on them, state this.


Will every PhD student from a reputed institute land a postdoc position? I have completed my master’s in pure mathematics in India.
Though I am passionate about mathematics and would really want to do a PhD in pure mathematics, one thing I am uncertain about is how would my life turn out after getting a PhD in pure mathematics.

I checked the departmental homepage of some reputed institutes and universities in our country to gather knowledge about their past PhD students.
I found that only a handful of them go to postdocs and a very few get recruited as assistant professors in other institutes.
There is no  information about the other students and I can't get any information about what they are doing.

My questions are:

Is there no guarantee to get a job after doing a PhD in pure mathematics?
Or it is that everyone will get a postdoc after getting a PhD in some institute?
Is a postdoc absolutely necessary after doing a PhD in mathematics?
Will I get a job after a postdoc in mathematics?

I am concerned because I don’t want to be among those who are without any work after doing a PhD.

There is a filter, surely.

Actually, at least in German system there are two filters: PhD → postdoc and postdoc → tenure/tenure-track.

But you are missing out one issue. Even if all people doing postdoc probably would like to get a tenure-track position (but do not), not all PhD students would like to get a postdoc. Heck, not all PhD students even finish their PhD! But the major point is: not all PhD holders want and do stay in academia.

Ok, you do want to stay in academia. There are three major issues:

Publications
Teaching experience
Funding acquisition.

The detailed answer is probably too long and too country-dependent, but typically you'd need these three major issues to be covered, if you want to land a tenure-track position.


Impact of book chapters In my PhD, i have 2 chapters published in book chapters published by springer and elsavir. To what extent do you think the importantance of book chapters regarding in the PhD student CV? Does these chapters have a good impact when applying for faculty positions ?
Hint: i have other journal and conference papers.

I would consider them important, but it would depend on the books in which they are contained and what your contribution is to the overall content. It could also indicate that you have a circle of collaborators already in place, which is a good thing for a new faculty member.

But, I'm not sure why you ask. Certainly they are something to include in your CV and they will be evaluated like everything else in your application materials.


How should I credit the advisor's help in my thesis? I am graduating soon and in the last minute my advisor found an issue in one major theorem in my thesis. In an hour, my advisor sent me a write up with a fix. The result is a little bit different than what I have, but it does the job.
I was not expecting him to fix this issue. We were supposed to meet and discuss this issue. Instead, my advisor just sent an email with this fix. Since this is the major result in my thesis and my advisor's contribution is more significant than mine, what is the appropriate way to acknowledge this in my thesis?

Clearly your advisor thinks well of you and thinks you are ready to move to the next level professionally. You both missed the issue at an earlier stage. Had he found it then he might well have pointed you to a fix rather than providing it.
He is probably as pleased as you are that a fix was possible.
So thank him for support and guidance (perhaps "particularly on Theorem X") and move on. Remember this incident when you advise your own students.


Publishing a tech report or other non-peer reviewed paper as an independent researcher I have got a paper in the queue which I would like to publish outside the realm of peer reviewed journals. The main reasons:

Money. I'm currently not affiliated to any academic institution which would reimburse my conference fees and publication costs. I would also like to provide open access, so other non-affiliated researchers can actually read my paper. This can be very costly.
The topic. It's an interdisciplinary thing I write about, which  doesn't really fall into the field of interest of the usual journals and their peer reviewers. It's a bit of an in-between-the-chairs thing.

It is a very technical paper with a focus on "open science" - akin to what is sometimes classified as a Technical Report.
So I thought about releasing it as a technical report on Zenodo. This way  it gets a DOI, gets archived, becomes publicly accessible and gets a clear citable form.

But there's a catch: a technical report usually needs an institution (at least in the latex/bibtex world). Are there any recommended alternatives? Are there any known "best practices" for my case?

It might be field dependent, but I have only seen technical reports published by companies (if similar to technical notes) and professional organizations (like TAPPI).

But nevertheless, peer-review aims at improving your work, giving it more credibility, as it has been reviewed by your peers and they concluded it is (in their opinion) valid, or rejecting it if it is performed poorly (not exclusive list).

So publishing in any place other than a regular journal might affect your work's visibility (I'm not sure the power of Google can bypass this issue) and your work's credibility (as I'm not sure I would consciously cite a work that is available only as a pre-print and not peer-reviewed).

As for the problems you present:

  Money. I'm currently not affiliated to any academic institution which    would reimburse my conference fees and publication costs. I
  would also like to provide open access, so other non-affiliated
  researchers can actually read my paper. This can be very costly.

I understand the issue here, but when I was in institutions that had no money to cover the open-access publication, the non-open access option was the only alternative. Unfortunately, you probably can't have the pie and eat it too...

I can't comment on conference fees, as in my field, conferences don't count as publications.

A middle solution could be to choose the non-open access option of the journal you select and publish a pre-version or even the accepted version of your manuscript as a pre-print with a link to the official (but not open access) pdf (you could ask the journal policies on this matter). In this way, you provide all the information through the repositories you choose, the manuscript is peer-reviewed, and the article is indexed and available for those paying the paywall.

  The topic. It's an interdisciplinary thing I write about, which doesn't really    fall    into the field of interest of the usual journals and their
  peer    reviewers. It's a bit of an in-between-the-chairs thing.

Most works in my field are interdisciplinary. You can usually identify the main field of the article and find a respective journal. In most cases, you can propose reviewers, so you can select ones from the different disciplines your manuscript covers. Each then can concentrate on the part they are more confortable to review, covering eventually all aspects of your work.

Finally, if you insist for a technical report, you might be able to contact a relative association or company directly and discuss if they are interested in your work and a publication under their technical reports (but I admit that I have no experience on this and I might be completely out of subject).


How do you approach your professor if you do not understand or know how to do the homework at all? So, I am an undergraduate student taking partial differential equations. This class can be so stressful at times because I do not understand the lecture material, and thus it makes it hard to do homework. Moreover, we have a quiz every Friday based on the homework, and homework is due on Friday.

So far, we are going over 1D wave equations and I do not understand any of the lecture material at all. Moreover, If I do not understand the lecture material I can't do the homework that is due on Friday. Other students in that class are lost too. It just doesn't make sense that this course is required for undergraduate level in order to graduate.

What do I tell my professor in his office hours if I do not understand the homework at all? I am nervous because I do not know how he will react, and I did not put any solution down because I am clueless. How would you react if you were a professor and I went on Wednesdays to your office hours and homework and quiz is due on Friday?

To address the part of the question "what do I tell the Professor" to help with the problem "I do not understand the lecture material":

Clear your head
Start reading your notes, word by word
As soon as you get confused (even a little bit), stop reading. On a piece of paper, write down what you are confused about, and why.
If you can, skip over the confusing part and continue with step 2. If you have hit a brick wall and can't understand anything that follows, stop.

Take your piece of paper to the office hour and work through it with the Professor. This will give you both a better idea of precisely what you are confused about, and how to resolve it.
Hopefully, when confusion about the lecture material is resolved, the homework will start to make sense.


Contacting university for potential PhD collaboration without the presence of my supervisor The question might be misleading, so I will explain in more details:
The company in which I am employed offered me to do a PhD. The subject and everything else has been already approved and funded, the only thing missing is the university to make the collaboration with.

My supervisor already has some contacts and there seems to be a good feedback, my concern however is that, given the fact that in the company itself there is nobody with knowledge on the subject, I believe to be very important to have a strong academic support in order to have a reference if I stumble upon some issue.

Without going too much into details I found the main academic centers advanced in the subject, so I was thinking to contact them in order to see if they are interested in a collaboration. The problem is that my supervisor and the chief of the group are both on holidays, they are unreachable and they will be back in a month; waiting for both of them to come back would mean losing a month in which I could have arranged a communication with the potential academic partners and furthermore the objective is to set an agreement in september in order to begin the PhD in December at most.

I already spoke with my supervisor about this, and he said that eventually I could have looked for something independently, but this was a couple of months ago and before he found some of his contacts; my concern is that even though he is a really cool and relaxed guy I feel like overstepping him and making him seem that I do not trust him on this.

The question is therefore: should I contact the universities and see if they are interested without waiting for my supervisor to return in order to gain some time, or should I just let him take care about all this and eventually look for something together with him later?

Actually it seems wiser to go ahead and look for suitable programs and doctoral advisors. It shows initiative that would be valued in most places. You don't need to accept anything, of course. But if people are interested (or not) it is good to know that.

I find it hard to imagine a boss who would think it improper, though I've had some pretty bad ones.

You never know what you'll find until you look.

Moreover, once you are in a doctoral program your work supervisor will play little part. It is your doctoral supervisor who will be your guide.


Is it feasible/acceptable for me to convey my concerns to staff regarding performance of classmates on coursework reports? I am currently doing Physics undergrad at a first tier university. Due to my previous experience in Mathematics and slightly advanced age (five years my classmates' senior) I look at my classmates from a different perspective, and am honestly slightly disturbed.

Despite having received a class in LaTeX (with the express purpose of encouraging its usage) most students continue to use Word for reports (with sometimes shambolic results), most students neglect bibliographies, and I've witnessed students using only Wikipedia as a source, even when I pointed out that some of the information was inaccurate and referred them to a paper with correct information.

I've talked to one of the librarians, and he virtually pleaded for me to bring up such issues with the staff. Stating that he'd like to give a course on how to use the library, access online papers, write a report etc. to first years. Most students I've talked to were unaware they had free access to most scientific publications, and almost none seemed to have ever read a scientific paper.

I'm not quite sure what to do. On the one hand I feel it's not really my place, and I have other stuff to do, it's not my fault if other students are sub-par, and they are unlikely to go very far anyway.
However, in second year (approx half of students fail out after first year in physics), my partner in Experimental Physics performed so poorly I ended up doing almost everything myself in order to ensure my continued good grades.

I got special commendations from two of the three PhD students overseeing my three projects (the third didn't have the time to actually grade my report yet), though I personally feel my reports were simply on par.

Is it feasible, or even acceptable, for me to communicate concerns with staff, or to relay the request of the librarian with my own concerns added?

An undergraduate student is absolutely in no position to make any institutional changes in regards to the problems you've observed. In many cases, even the full professors have little ability to change the situation, due to departmental or administrative requirements for certain passing rates or median scores out of a class, etc. Possibly the faculty have seen this, and/or counseled concerned students about it, hundreds of times already.

You should take some amount of confidence that this is evidence you're ready for your next big step (which seems well-timed, in that your Master's starts next year). You know how to properly research, cite, support, and use LaTeX to write a paper; and you will doubtlessly be using those skills in your next position.

Frankly, the librarian was very much out of place to put the burden of responsibility for this on an undergraduate student. I call "foul" on that.


How do I ask a professor for a summer research project? I am a student of IT in India.  I'm in my fourth semester and want to work on some project during summer.  How should I write the email to the professor asking for the same?

I get many letters of this kind, and I now summarily delete them without replying. Let me explain why.

Money: it's never clear in these letters what kind of support the student wants/expects. The default assumption is that I would pay for them, and as an academic with limited resources, I have very little incentive to pay for an undergraduate to travel  from India to the US to work with me, especially when it's unlikely they'll be able to do much in three months. Which brings me to
Project timeline: most letters of this kind are of the form "I'm interested in BROAD TOPIC A and want to work with you because you're interested in NARROW TOPIC B". For a three month internship to work, a project has to be very focused, and set from day 1. There's no time to explore.
Self-interest: There's very little gain for me here, or at least none that's mentioned in the letters. If I want to hire an undergraduate, I can do it locally. I can even get financial support (sometimes) for doing that. I can't do that with a student from abroad, and I can't even vet them in advance.

So any successful letter needs to address these three issues very effectively and quickly (because I delete these emails without reading more than a few lines).

Having said that, I know of at least one example where a student came from India to work with a colleague and that summer project turned into an application to grad school. The student is now at my university.


ECTS time validity and expiration Hope this is the right place to ask this. I'm currently enrolled in a Master's Computer Science degree in Europe. I've completed most of my classes with the exception of 2 + my thesis (which would mean I'm missing about 30 ECTS from the required total of 120 ECTS for a 2 year Master program).

Due to various reasons, I was forced to keep a full time job for the past 2 years which prevented (and is still preventing me) from finishing my classes but I stayed officially enrolled in the hopes that I would find the time to finish. Next year I won't be able to re enroll with my current faculty once more due to their rules preventing students from staying too long in the same school year.

My question is: what happens to the ECTS I've accumulated thus far if I don't finish this year? I was taking into consideration further postponing school until my current job is less hectic especially since it's possible to be switching jobs at the end of the year with one in the US. This of course in the hopes that I won't be losing the 90 ECTS I have accumulated thus far.

Thank you for any information you might have on the matter.

I'm pretty sure that this depends less on the ECTS system, and much more on your specific university. That is to say, I assume there is no general answer to your question. You will need to get in touch with the university.

That being said, it sounds like you want to transfer to a university in the US ("it's possible to be switching jobs at the end of the year with one in the US"). In that case the much larger problem will be transferring your european credits to the US institution, even if they are not expired.


Can one blow the whistle on a professor who excludes students on the basis of their personal life? This post is an attempt to reformulate this misunderstood question. I (and others) did add clarifying information, taken from the OP's comments, to the question, but I believe the whole Q&A&discussion sequence got so muddied that a fresh start would be the best way to get good answers to what the OP was actually trying to find out.

There is a professor in OP's department who only takes students who are willing to commit to spending all their waking time studying.  He manages to effectively excludes students who have families or close personal relationships.  He wants only students who will dedicate any free time left (after doing their required work) on related reading in their field.

The professor doesn't come right out and say, "Only single people who are driven to spend every waking moment on their studies are welcome in my group," but effectively, that is his policy.  Quoting from OP's comments:

  One way I hear about how he "weeds" out the normal people is by telling them how much work it takes to succeed, and gives examples of previous "successful" students, and what their lifestyles were. I suppose he says something like: "this is how much you know from being an undergrad, this is how much you need to know to succeed in this field, here is a humongous list of topics you should know before you can competently do research with me, come back to me when you're ready." But I don't think that's all he does.... I think he intimidates prospective advisees with his demeanor, and so this fact along with his reputation leads to him select students who work day and night everyday.

This professor is in the United States.  He is very good in his field and manages to get students who fit his requirements; but it doesn't seem right to OP (or to me), and we would like to know:

Is there any way of blowing the whistle on such a professor?

Along with several commenters, I think that first we have to understand and agree on at least one unambiguously unethical or illegal practice is being committed before we can discuss whistle-blowing.  I find myself having to stretch rather far to see such a practice here.

We are asked to consider a professor "who only takes students who are willing to commit to spending all their waking time studying." I think this could be an exaggeration, because

  This professor is in the United States. He is very good in his field and manages to get students who fit his requirements;

Devoting all your waking time to studying is highly unwise and unhealthy.  Even in the short term it does not lead to increases in productivity, and it will lead to burnout in the (not so terribly) long-term.  Such an advisor would likely burn through his students faster than he can get them, and if too many students burn out, the professor's work will be affected and also other students will notice and not want to sign on with him.

However, let us assume for the sake of argument that a professor is only willing to take students who devote, say, 100 hours a week to work for him (not so far from "all their waking time").  Although thoroughly unadvisable, I don't know what rule would be broken by setting this ridiculously high bar for student workload.  A student and an advisor must both choose to work together in order for this to take place.  (For students who have not already been admitted to the program, the department and university has some role to play, at least in vetting the process.)  In this choice there are competitive aspects on both sides: given that throughout the academic world the vast majority of advisors would (sanely) require much less of their students, it is not clear why a student would choose to work with an advisor under these conditions unless they foresee an amazing long-term benefit to their career.

The only legal angle I see is that if an advisor terminates a student for failing to do more than 40 hours per week of work in a lab or other environment where specific duties are being done and can be timed: that would probably be actionable.  But it seems to me that an employer can ask an employee to complete tasks that would take that employee (or most, or all employees) more than 40 hours a week and can terminate the employee if they fail to complete those tasks.

The idea that advisors specifically require students to have no "personal life" just sounds a little silly to me: an advisor has no right to know a student's marital or relationship status, and in academic environments I'm familiar with there is no natural path for an advisor to find out this information if the student does not want to reveal it.  Hinting that a student should not or will not have time for dating, family life, other hobbies or whatever is much as above: obviously highly unadvisable on the professor's part but probably not really actionable.  If a professor saw a student's wedding ring on Monday, made a point of asking about it, responded disapprovingly and then terminated the student on Tuesday for no compelling reason, then whistle-blowing would be in order.  In the absence of such egregious behavior it's hard to see what can be done.

Graduate students often feel that "they don't have a choice" and must put up with poor behavior or poor deals on the part of their advisor.  I think the best thing that we can tell students is that they do have a choice.  Healthy academic programs should engineer and foster mechanisms for students to stand up for themselves and switch out of bad situations.  Students should not assume in advance that they are enrolling in a healthy academic program.  They should be very hesitant to work with an advisor whose current and/or former students are unsatisfied.


Are there any positives/negatives in this rejection email ? or, it is just a desk rejection? I received the following rejection email today :

Dear Prof. XXX,
This message concerns the manuscript
XXXX by XXX
submitted to XXXXX journal.
Informal consultations with possible reviewers have persuaded me that
your article is too specialized for our journal, and therefore I am
sorry to say we cannot accept it for publication.  We have elected not
to review it fully so as not to cause undue delays in its eventual
publication.
I advise you to submit it to a journal more narrowly focused on number
theory, and I do wish you success in publishing it elsewhere.

Now, my question is:
Are there any positives/negatives that can be taken from this email ? or, it is just a desk rejection ?
Note that I received this email 20 days after the submission.

This is a desk rejection. There's not much more to say about it - I suppose you could say that they haven't outright said your paper is incorrect, which is a positive; on the other hand they did also say that they are not considering your paper and you should submit elsewhere, which is effectively the same as rejection and certainly a negative thing.
There's nothing to do but submit elsewhere.


Is it ethical to post an exam question and answer to the internet? I am a private tutor for (mostly) high school maths and physics students.

Recently a student came to me with an elegant little problem that he had been given on an exam. The problem was very short, and easy for him to remember, but he and others had found it difficult to solve. It required synthesizing the material he had studied in a way that required some creativity. (At least, at the high school level.)

I worked through the solution with him.

I create content (videos and papers) that I publish on the internet. I would like to share this intruiging application of high school precalculus.

Here's the concern: Does the teacher or whoever else who created the problem own the problem? Am I unethically making the problem useless for other exams or homework by publishing it? What if I alter it so that the process is the same, but the numeric solution is different? Do I need the permission of the problem's author to use it at all?

To be clear, it's not a "word" problem, but simply a "solve this interesting equation" problem.

There is an alternative that avoids the question asked here entirely and would even be more valuable to your readers.

Think about what it is about that equation (or other question) that makes it interesting. Abstract from that to a more general question that also covers the specific case.

Then present a way of thinking about that class of problems that will lead someone to a successful solution. Explain the thinking process. Explain any connections to similar things. Etc.

Then, you can publish that freely.

Note that words, but not ideas, can be bound by copyright. Take the idea and expand it. Anyone is free to do that.


Can I change my recommendation letter provider? I wrote a few weeks ago about a conundrum I had with a professor regarding my recommendation letter for graduate studies in UIUC. I'm very grateful for everyone's responses, but I still have not received an LOR from this professor. My advisor has asked me to speak to him again (my advisor has spoken on my behalf as well), but I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it.

Things may not just be uncomfortable with this professor due to our previous interaction, but he also seems to be caught in some private matters, and has had to travel on short notice to his hometown. On top of that, UIUC is a competitive school, so should I just change my recommendation provider? Is it advisable to do so? The professor I have in mind is fantastic, and I've enjoyed her courses and stayed in touch with her, but her field is non-technical. I already have recommendations from great professors in my field, though, and wouldn't it reflect well on my application to be recommended by a professor outside my field as well?

Any advice is welcome. I'm not sure if I'm overthinking this, but I've never heard of anyone changing their recommendation provider AFTER the application has been submitted.

Contact the admissions department, explain that the professor is "caught in some private matters" and hasn't been able to do the letter as a result.  Ask to switch the reference to a different prof.

In my experience, you're much better off being certain that you don't miss the admissions timelines due to a delayed reference letter than the source of the letter mattering very much.  That being said, I'm not familiar with the specifics of UIUC, so my experience may not be relevant.


Professor uploaded a recommendation meant for university 'A' to a different university 'B' There are 2 universities that I was applying to for a PhD program. Lets call them 'A' and 'B'.
The professor, who was writing a recommendation for me, uploaded the recommendation, meant for university 'A', to university 'B' and the one meant for university 'B' to university 'A'.

This error was realized by the professor after I had already submitted the entire application, so I cannot remove the recommendation from my application and request a new one.

So my queries are:

Can I/Should I drop a mail to the graduate program stating such as happened and request a new link(or something along those lines)?
If the situation is not rectified, how does that reflect onto my application?

How it affects you is impossible to say, not knowing nearly enough.

But it is really the professor's job to make the correction if it is needed as s/he made the error. You can send mail to the program(s) informing them of the error, of course, and they may, individually have some suggestions. But if the mail comes from the professor it would have more weight. The prof can include the proper letter in the mail, of course.

But if radically different things were said about you (unlikely) it might have an effect.

But ask your professor to provide the remedy.


I am really interested in doing phd, need help for title/topic, please help me Me having master in communication engineering and degree in computer science, i am really interested in persuing phd to follow my father footstep.

I am interested in:

1) networking

2) image processing

4) Data mining and automization

5) Information technology

Or relevant

What i am good:

1) strong in math
2) strong in computer literature
3) fundamental of programming
4) strong in networking
5) strong in IT

Unfortunately, it is very unlikely for you to finish a PhD if you persue it to follow your father's footsteps.

And persuing a PhD is not buying a car. You cannot just list your interests and your budget, and wait someone to advise you a programme. You must already have a research topic in mind by the time you finish your MSc thesis. Or, you must be able to say that you will not pursue a PhD.

All that being said, I prefer you to pick computer networking.


How to organize digital documents for administrative work? As professor I have to organize a lot of digital documents. I have working systems to do this for research and teaching and I am quite happy with these. Moreover, questions on such topics have already been asked, e.g.,  here or here.
However, for administrative work I regularly find myself thinking about where to store and how to name different documents like official minutes, my own notes, agendas, invitations, accompanying presentation pdfs, study regulations, law gazettes,... I have not set up a working system that I am happy with and one reason may be that, when I start to be in some committee, I do not really know in advance what kind of documents will come in. Should I arrange them by type? Should I only keep links to the place where the newest version is? Should I organize everything that is related to a certain meeting? I may add that I have a system to organize documents for hiring committees as I already know what kinds of documents are involved but that is basically it.
So my question is:

How do you organize your digital documents related to a certain administrative job?

You may answer with general guidelines but I am also interested in solutions for specific cases.
I'll upvote anything that I find reasonable and check the answer as correct that helps me best.

The lovely thing about organizing things electronically is that it's much easier to re-organize than physical paper.  The problematic thing is that you can let things accumulate for a lot longer before noticing there's a giant pile forming.

My own personal solution is thus to start each new commitment as its own single folder.  For example, if I'm serving on a committee, that committee gets a folder and everything about it goes in that folder.  Likewise, I have a folder where documents about required trainings go.

If only a few documents show up, one folder is enough.  For example, for the journal where I'm an assistant editor, I've got only one folder with just a handful of files, since almost everything I need to remember about that responsibility is in its online system.  When more than a dozen or so documents appear, however, I'll create at least one subfolder that can hold a cluster of documents that I don't want to have staring me in the face every time I think about the project.  As things further accumulate, swelling the contents of the top-level folder or the subfolders I've developed, I'll continue developing structure and substructure reactively.

Thus, by deferring organization until there's a quorum of things to organize, I give myself time enough to learn about the organization of information that I need to do.  By beginning organizing when there's a dozen or so items in a location, I deal with organization at an early enough stage that it's not a daunting and time-consuming task.


Sending students for conference presentation with no additional funding Me with my two students got a paper accepted at a high-ranked CS conference. We have to register for the conference along with travel for presentation and other formalities.

I instructed my students to finish the formalities such as register, book for air tickets etc.

However, I find that I don't have fund presently to book for air tickets and do the registration. Although, they agreed for the process, I am not feeling relaxed on this situation.

Did I do justice for this situation?

However, I told them that we can look for some travel grants after the tickets are booked.

It may be possible to make some of the conference cheaper overall. To give an example some IEEE conferences registration fees are very expensive, this can't be avoided. The last one I attended was also in an expensive hotel. It may be possible to get other accommodation further away and travel in. They may ask for student helpers as well, which could add extra discounts. Early booking may give early bird registration fees as well. The flights, which I assume are required equally might be cheaper in advance.


Finding area of research and people that offer PhD's in this area I'm currently in the first year of my MSc in an European university and as time goes on I'm thinking of what to do afterwards. One of the options is continuing on to a PhD and so I find myself from time to time browsing arXiv or some other journals in my field of interest, hoping to see a professor/group at a university doing something that interests me. While doing this I came to the realization, that in almost all cases, I have absolutely no idea what the papers are about. This isn't really surprising to me (I checked with my peers and they feel the same way), but it leaves me wondering how exactly I'm supposed to find out what topics in my field could interest me.

To hopefully explain the problem a bit better I'll take myself as an example, but I'm pretty sure this applies to a lot of other disciplines as well: I'm studying physics, most of my subjects focusing on theoretical aspects of physics. There are obviously several sub-fields in theoretical physics, but all of them are really broad and today's research seems really far away from what is thought in university classes. Most of the classes are only introductions to theories that have been refined for the last 50 years or more, leaving a huge gap between what I may be working on in a couple of years and what I know of today. So how exactly am I supposed to asses how interesting, challenging, etc. a direction in a particular sub-field is, when I almost know nothing of what is relevant in that field today? And, maybe even more importantly, even if I exactly knew what I wanted to do, how do I exactly single out the people who work in that area?

Some remarks about things that I've tried so far and the situation at my university:

There are almost no research opportunities at my university for students in the BSc and even in the MSc category (at least in my field of study).
The contact between the students and faculty is almost non-existent. I maybe have spoken to like three professors in the past 4 years for about 5 minutes (not counting the exams). I speak to PhD's a lot more regularly, but to no-one who has more experience in the academic world. I asked them more or less the same question, but the answers range from "you just kinda slip into a PhD program" to "I already knew in year one of my studies that I wanted to do XYZ, so I can't realate."
I talked to the "Students-Help-Office" of my university, which is basically a senior researcher from my university. His comment on the question was that he doesn't think that planning that far ahead is useful... Is this true, is one to two years of planning ahead to much in this context?
I've also seen this question here, but the top answer reads kind of like it's searching for the "best" place to do your PhD and less for the "best-fit". I'm not so much concerned about going to one of the best places in the world as much as I'd like to find a topic and adviser that actually fit me (obviously the other way around as well).

If you read random papers on arXiv without having research experience or knowing how to choose, your chance to find something that awakens your interest is very little. Normally, this problem is solved by doing some research during your Master's program. You say that there are very few research opportunities for students at your university, so become active and try to get one of those few. Depending on your study program, there might also be the possibility to do a research internship for credit at a company or research center.

Even if you do not manage to find one, there should (hopefully) be a Master's Thesis at the end of the program. That should include enough research.

At Master's level, you will do research under a supervisor that will point you to literature and guide you on how to find more. You will get a feeling of whether you actually like research, and whether you want to spend 3-5 years doing it as a doctoral candidate. You should also hopefully get a feeling of which topics you like to work on.

I am actually quite surprised at the comments from your professors: I have never heard anything along the lines of "you just kinda slip into a PhD program", and this does not look like the kind of advice a senior academic should be giving to a student. They are probably right when they say that planning two years ahead is too early, especially if you have no experience with research.


When transferring credits do I need permission from the "leaving" university? I did three years of my four year undergraduate degree in the UK. I want to do my final year at another university in another country (still in Europe). I contacted the university that I am interested in and after sending my academic transcript they confirmed that they would be willing to accept my credits and that I can start in a higher year.

My question is: Do I need anything from the University I am leaving? Do I need permission from them to transfer my credits?

You should not take the term "transferring credits" so literally -- nothing is taken away from the (at that time) previous university. Instead, you are convincing the new university that you already obtained some parts of the education they are offering (so that it would be a waste of your and their time to do that again), and have the credits to prove it. The new university then awards you the appropriate credits according to their regulations (which might be more or less than the corresponding ones at your old university) based on their trust that you could in principle pass the modules again. The credits at your old university remain (at least for some time), should you decide to switch back.


Submitting paper to IEEE journal using the standard `article`/`proc` LaTeX class Do IEEE Journals accept LaTeX-formatted manuscripts using the standard article or proc class provided by LaTeX?

It is not made clear to me, if I should stick with the IEEETrans class IEEE has provided me with or I can just use the standard article classes - pre-installed with LaTeX - and submit my manuscript this way.

Thanks in advance

I disagree with Bill Barth's answer: I strongly believe that you should use the LaTeX classes that IEEE has provided you with.  The reasons are two-fold:

The reviewers will be used to almost always seeing IEEE submissions in IEEE standard formats.  If you submit in another format, it will likely prejudice the reviewers against you, as it will appear "amateurish."  Whether or not this is fair, it is a risk you are taking with your paper that there is no need to take.
Many IEEE journals have length constraints, and some are quite adamant about them.  If you submit in a non-standard format, it will be difficult to tell whether you are actually complying with the length constraints or not.  This may annoy the editor, again unnecessarily.

IEEE formats are pretty easy to use, and have really good instructions.  Since that is the case, I simply see no up-side to avoiding the standard formatting, and plenty of down-side.


I'm writing a personal statement for a Master's degree. The length requirement is about 1000 words. I have written 2000. Shall I shorten it? Currently I am applying for a LLM programme at SOAS and am having certain difficulties while writing the required personal statement. According to their guidance, the statement should be "describing your ambitions, suitability and interest for the programme you have chosen. This should be around 1,000 words in length", but I simply can't even fall under 2,000 words.

So my question is should I post the longer version that describes me better and for which I believe gives me a greater chance to be accepted, or should I simply delete half the text so I could manage their quota?

If the writing style in your statement matches the writing style in your question, you should just do some creative revising. Cut the fluff and write more concisely; for example:

Currently I am applying for a LLM programme at SOAS and am having certain difficulties while writing the required personal statement. According to their guidance, the statement should be "describing your ambitions, suitability and interest for the programme you have chosen. This should be around 1,000 words in length", but I simply can't even fall under 2,000 words.
So my question is should I post the longer version that describes me better and for which I believe gives me a greater chance to be accepted, or should I simply delete half the text so I could manage their quota?

Much of that is extraneous and overly wordy:
Currently I am applying for a LLM programme at SOAS and am having certain difficulties while writing the required my personal statement. According to their guidance, the statement should be "describing your describe your "ambitions, suitability and interest" for the chosen programme you have chosen. This should be in "around 1,000 words in length", but I simply can't even fall under I'm over 2,000 words.
So my question is should I post the longer version that describes me better and for which I believe gives me a greater chance to be accepted, or should I simply delete half the text so I could manage and meet their quota?
yields:

I am applying for a programme and am having difficulties writing my personal statement. The statement should describe "ambitions, suitability and interest" for the chosen programme in "around 1,000 words in length", but I'm over 2,000 words.
Should I post the longer version that describes me better, or should I delete half the text and meet their quota?

Original version: 99 words. Revised version: 58 words. I've cut your word count almost in half but I believe there is minimal loss in content.
Maybe you've done this already, but I thought this was worth mentioning, in case you haven't. By the way, in the past, when I've had to meet word count ceilings, I've usually been able to do it without eliminating core information.


To what extent is it acceptable to copy definitions from reference materials? I'm working on my master's thesis and am thinking of writing parts of a chapter as an introductory segment of a sub chapter within my work.

Is this acceptable if I include a portion of introductory matter of a source text if the source material is referenced?

I'm using only the well accepted definitions to set a basis for the reader to build on for the main topic described later.

Is this acceptable if I include a portion of introductory matter of a source text if the source material is referenced?

There are two issues here.  One is whether you can be accused of plagiarism.  That's simple: you're safe if you cite the source and clearly indicate what was copied with quotation marks or a block quote, but you could be in trouble if you don't make it clear what was copied, even if you cite the source.  (Occasionally you can avoid quotation marks by saying something like "The following definition is taken verbatim from reference [3]:", but it's risky to try that with longer quotations.)  If you are not copying any text, then you still need to cite the source but you don't have to worry about plagiarism.

There's also the issue of whether extensive quotations are acceptable to your advisor, regardless of whether they are plagiarism.  Even if you cite appropriately and use quotation marks, your advisor might think you are quoting too much and ask you to rewrite it in your own words.  (But this isn't a matter of academic honesty, just of what constitutes a good thesis.  Relying on lots of lengthy quotations is honest but lazy.)

Students sometimes worry about how much text is appropriate to copy from a definition without quotation marks.  This is a little tricky, since there are certain standard phrases that get used repeatedly.  For example, the definition of a group in mathematics might start "A group is a set equipped with a binary operation".  I just wrote that myself, but a web search reveals that half a dozen people have used exactly the same wording (because it's a pretty standard way to express things).  If you read a definition that starts this way and later use this phrasing when defining a group, that's not a problem.  However, you shouldn't be copying elaborate definitions verbatim without attribution.

In particular, if a standard phrase sticks in your head and gets repeated when you write the definition, that's fine.  One test is whether you need to copy from a book.  If you can write a clear, correct definition without copying or looking at any materials while writing it, then you should do so (and you won't have to worry about plagiarism).  If you can't write a clear, correct definition without copying from a reference book, then you need to cite the book and indicate that the definition is copied (since this is clearly a complicated or subtle enough definition that formulating it well deserves credit).


Sending non-fully translated academic transcripts for US PhD admissions I am currently applying to PhD programs in the US and got my undergraduate degree from a German university. My university issues English transcripts of records, yet for special (graduate) lectures, the description is often still in German. Instead, a generic english name is used for the name of the lecture. For example, a generic entry might look as follows:

Course Name: Mathematics V
Description: Statistische Inferenz für Netzwerke
Grade: ...

Of course, I would much rather the transcript said "Statistical Inference for Networks". What is the etiquette in such cases? Do I take my German transcript and receive a certified translation, even though technically my institution issues "English" transcripts?

Some universities have an additional upload section, where I can describe the most important courses in more detail (including their content). In such cases, it would not be a problem. Yet, other universities only ask for a pdf of the transcript. Would it be OK to include my own descriptions at the end of the transcript pdf file, so that the committee can take these into account? Or would this rather upset the admissions committee?

Many university departments have officers for the internationalization of the department. Talk to this person. If she/he is willing to sign a letter stating what these course names translate to and she/he puts an official stamp on it, this should be a good solution. You would add this official letter as an addition to your application.

Suggest to this person that you will prepare the letter. If your offer is accepted, this saves a lot of work for this person, and she/he is more likely to accept. If the internationalization officer wants to rather perform the translation herself/himself, then....well, less work for you!


Which methodology of a research paper around a proposed software system Part of a systematic literature review, I'm looking to the methodologies of the papers I review, and many papers doesn't explain the methodology used. My questions is : Can I assume that a paper which talks about creating a system or a software is a Case Study? Please note that some researches do some exploratory steps to gain insights like from StackExchange for example, in this case I also assume that mixed methods used. Please help if you have ways to identify methodologies if they are not explicitly given or shown.

What you've described is called design science or design science research; it is most certainly not a case study. In a comment on your original post, @XLeitix nailed it as the pattern:

  problem -> proposed solution -> evaluation [rinse and repeat until results are ok]

In conducting a broad-based literature review of research on Wikipedia, my colleagues and I had to come up with a list of different research designs. Design science is in a category of its own, because it is quite different from the methods in social sciences. Design science is the default approach to research in computer science and software engineering, and so no one is going to explain the "research method" when they follow this pattern. It arises from the engineering paradigm where the goal of research is not to discover what exists or how or why things work, but rather to create something that is useful to people and prove that it is useful (usually by comparing its usefulness to some specified benchmark).

Ironically, the name "design science" does not come from computer science or software engineering, but rather from information systems (IS) research. IS research is primarily social science research, and so IS researchers had to come up with a name or a way to describe this type of research that is so different from social science, and yet scientifically rigorous. There are at least two major articles that describe its scientific characteristics in depth:

von Alan, R. Hevner, et al. "Design science in information systems research." MIS quarterly 28.1 (2004): 75-105.
Gregor, Shirley, and David Jones. "The anatomy of a design theory." Journal of the Association for Information Systems 8.5 (2007): 312.


Importance of grades as a graduate student in math I'm in my first year as a grad student in math at a large university in the US.  For the moment I'm just taking classes, all of which have weekly problem sets which take a ton of time to complete in full.  I have carried over the mentality from undergrad where I try to complete all the problems in the problem sets, and at least put in a significant amount of effort on each problem.  However, this is taking up enough time that I haven't had much of an opportunity to do math things outside of the class (stuff like attending seminars, trying to read papers, pursuing interesting subjects brought up briefly in class in more depth, etc).  Because of this, I've been contemplating taking less time on my problem sets, but I have a few questions about potentially receiving lower grades:

First, is it common for math programs in the US to kick out students for getting low (but not failing) grades?  I can't find any official policy from my program and I don't feel comfortable asking anyone.  A friend in a different subject said that his program regularly kicks out students in the first couple years even if they pass or are on track to pass their qualifying exams in time, but I'm not sure if this is done in math.

Also, aside from getting kicked out, what are the negative consequences to receiving a low grade?  (in a class which is not particularly close to the area I think I want to do research in)

In many (US, mathematics) graduate programs, there is quite significant grade inflation.  A grade of B would raise significant concern about your progress (and maybe cause advisors to think twice about working with you), and a grade of C would create grave doubts about your ability to continue in the program.  You may have a better sense if this is true in your program, but if so, it would be a really bad idea to reduce your efforts to the extent that your grades drop.

On the flip side, it is entirely possible that you could work a little less hard and still get A's (the standards for an A may be lower than you think).  I hesitate to recommend this, though.  The better you know this material, the easier your qualifying exams will be, and failing exams definitely gets students kicked out.  Solving all the problems on all the problem sets is a really good idea in that direction - rather than worrying about how much time it takes you, you should perhaps rather be glad that you can do it at all (I bet many of your classmates cannot).

Mathematics is unlike some other fields in that (US, PhD) graduate programs place a strong emphasis on coursework for the first couple of years.  A transition to research comes afterwards.  In many cases you cannot meaningfully discuss a research topic with a potential advisor until you have mastered the material from a course.  So it probably is in your long-term interest to prioritize your coursework now, even if some of your deeper mathematical interests are temporarily pushed to the back burner.  (Don't worry, they'll still be there after you pass your exams.)

It is good to spend at least a little time on pursuits outside coursework, and you can probably find some combination giving maximum payoff for minimum commitment.  For instance, attending seminars is good exposure to current research areas, and may require only an hour or two of your time per week.  (Protip: try to go to dinner with the speaker.  It's good networking, and your department may well pay for your meal (free food)).