Is it illegal to cite books that were illegally downloaded or accessed from a library? How illegal is it to cite books that were illegally downloaded?

If they aren't available in the university library, if you can't really afford the books (maybe you will make one reference in one article and the book costs $250+), if there isn't anything else you can use (published articles, reports, etc)... it's one more citation for the author. So in fact you might be helping the authors academic career (here I am considering only academic authors).

I do try my best to find other articles that I might be able to use in my work, but sometimes there is nothing else written, or not enough time to do the extra search.

What do you do?

ps1: I do buy books that are important to my research.

ps2: I do download books that can be important to my research.

The illegal act of course is the download, never the citation. @Federico Poloni answered that correctly.

However:

  If they aren't available in the university library, if you can't really afford the books

besides the possibilities @StasK mentioned:

In many countries there exist inter-library catalogues (e.g. GVK) that tell you which libraries have the book you're looking for. Once you know that (or your local librarian found out for you), you can ask your local librarian to either get the whole book via inter-library loan, or
to order a partial copy (e.g. the chapter or the exact pages you need).
There are also commercial document delivery services (see for an example: Subito). Which offer tracking down documents and again either loan of the book or partial copies.
Even the linked commercial service charges only 9 € per book inside Germany for non-commercial customers and 25 € worldwide for commercial customers but excluding UK and USA (I don't know why).
If you're talking about a thesis: university libraries usually have a copy at least of all PhD theses done at that university, for Bachelor or Master theses you'd often have to ask the institute (or supervisor) where the work was done.
In Germany, the national library has a copy of each book published in Germany or in German (or about Germany) from 1913 on. There are also field-specific large libraries, as for example the  TIB Hannover for technical literature.

So, are you sure "can't really afford" is a valid argument?

(Whether you nevertheless download pirate copies, or ask your neighbour to let you have a look into her book, or buy it despite the fact that the neigbour at the other desk owns it as well, stays entirely your own choice.)

If I have to get a book by inter-library loan, I try to make a copy of the vital chapter. This is legal here in Germany (single copies for personal use, reseach or teaching of not too large part of a book).


Writing multiple areas of interest in SOP So first let me introduce myself. I am planning to apply for masters in mathematics  in this year. I am student of bsc. 3rd year of Mathematics. Although my initial interest was to study about algebraic number theory, to know about algebraic number theory deeply, i think one should know about commutative algebra also. So I started a readership  on commutative algebra under a professor. But as the time passed I also stared to grow liking for commutative algebra. And now I want to explore more commutative algebra before diving deep into algebric number theory, so here comes the problem.

In the Sop while applying to foreign is it okay to write about having multiple subject of interest as one is prerequisite of other. Or should I specify one of them. I really want to study algaebric number theory but I also want to know more about commutative algebra.
Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

The Statement of Purpose should reflect your interest in your mathematics and give an impression of both you as a scholar and why the department you are applying to should think that you will be successful. As such, you have great freedom in explaining what you find exciting and interesting, and if that includes your desire to look into multiple areas, then that seems like a fine approach to writing a SoP.

In other words, I would not overthink this: Write why you want to go to grad school and why anyone should think that you will succeed there!

(As a comment on the side: I would suggest you spend more time proof reading what you write. There is a typo in the title of your question, and multiple language and grammar mistakes in the question itself. I don't know whether English is your first language, but at the very least typos are completely avoidable; not proofreading what you write just makes you look sloppy and unprofessional.)


A career focused on teaching I'm currently an undergraduate student at a university in Canada. Over the past couple of years, it has become very clear to me that I want to pursue teaching as a career. My issue is that the level I want to teach at is the university level, as I feel that I am more likely to encounter students who are interested in and passionate about the material they are learning, just as I have a passion for knowledge and sharing that knowledge with others.

I have been fortunate enough already to have had opportunities to teach and lead study groups ranging in size from one-on-one sessions to larger groups of 40+ individuals, and I have experienced firsthand the joy of helping someone come to a realization, of using a great illustrative analogy, and facilitating someone else's discovery of knowledge. I mention this in an attempt to illustrate the passion I have for sharing knowledge with others.

I have also been lucky enough to develop good relationships with faculty at my institution, including instructors who have a definite focus on teaching above research. However, my understanding is that these faculty are still required to dedicate a significant portion of their time to working on research, and generating output. I have discussed my ambitions with them, and they have been supportive, but I also worry that they are perhaps painting a more fanciful picture for me than reality would warrant.

I have not yet had an opportunity to take on undergraduate research projects, but I hopefully will be able to do so in the next year or two. I am pursuing a double major in biology and physics (with an emphasis on biophysics), and am hoping to be able to undertake research projects in both disciplines.

My concern is that the academic world is very competitive, and I am not certain that I will be well-suited to the networking and politicking that such a career would require. I am aware that it is possible to get contract positions as a sessional lecturer without a PhD, but these positions are inherently unstable, and perhaps not as rewarding.

The other area I have considered is attempting to find work as an educator in the public or private school systems. However, I worry that this work would not be as rewarding, being as many high school students do not have the passion for knowledge often found in higher-level undergraduate or graduate students.

As mentioned above, I am in Canada, but I am not adverse in concept to relocating, either for purposes of study or permanently. English is my first and only language.

So, at the end of it all, my question is: what advice would you give someone hoping to find a stable, secure job teaching in biology or biophysics at the university level?

This answer pertains to the United States

Given your interests, a possible avenue to consider is a college dedicated to teaching, such as Harvey Mudd and the other SoCal colleges, Haverford, Swarthmore, and the cluster of teaching colleges in western Massachusetts (Smith, Mt Holyoke and the like).

In all of these places, your primary job is to teach. You will also have a chance to do research, and your research productivity is valued, but the amount of research you need to do, and the amounts of grant money you pull in, have very different expectations from a typical R1 university.

You will still need a Ph.D. You will still have to do all the usual networking required to get a job. But you won't need to do battle for grants in the same way, and often teaching at an undergrad college can confer a slight advantage when it comes to asking for grant money.


Keys to a successful postdoc in mathematics I just finished a PhD in mathematics and am about to start a postdoc in the fall. My question is pretty straightforward (although the answer might not be), namely:

  What should one do to have a successful mathematics postdoc (apart from perhaps doing as much math as humanly possible, or more)?

I expect this will be different depending on one's goals post-postdoc, such as staying in academia vs leaving, research vs teaching focused jobs, etc.

Some possibly related questions:

What is expected of a postdoc?

Transitioning: PhD to Postdoc and Productivity

Aru,
Your question is phrased in rather general terms.  There are different kinds of postdoctoral positions in mathematics, and two mathematical postdocs hired side-by-side in the same department may have different career goals.  So advice which is guaranteed to be applicable must be rather general.  Here goes:

What is the point of a postdoc in mathematics?  I think it is this: the position of "tenure-track assistant professor" at a US math department is really much different from what it used to be.  It used to be an extended apprenticeship combined with an audition for a permanent job.  Now the job market is so competitive that institutions at all levels tenure the vast majority of the assistant professors they hire: I could easily name hundreds of people who have gotten tenure over the last ten years; I'm not sure I could name ten who were denied tenure.  The "apprenticeship" that used to take place at the beginning of these positions is now somewhere between immensely abbreviated and completely absent: in my own department (UGA) we have "graduate faculty" status, which must be conferred separately, but every tenure-track hire in last eight years has been given that status immediately upon arrival.  In my department you cannot tell the assistant professors from the associate professors (and from some of the full professors) without your scorecard: the job is really identical, including supervision of PhD students.

Even most brilliantly talented and competent PhDs need time to perform the laundering process from student to faculty.  In particular, 99% of the time it just doesn't work for your PhD advisor to have just gotten her own PhD a couple of years ago.  This laundering process is what the postdoc is for.

How does a postdoc work towards the goal of tenure-track readiness and marketability? In what follows I will assume that the desired tenure track job has substantial research expectations (keeping in mind that "substantial research expectations" is still a continuum).

To attain your goal of a tenure-track position, you need to concentrate on two things:
2a) Research.

Put out product -- accepted papers.  Both quality and quantity matters.

Many people get a PhD in mathematics before having a single accepted paper (I did), and if they have an eminent advisor who goes to bat for them, having no papers need not be much of a strike against them in the postdoctoral market.  Things change tremendously when you apply for tenure-track jobs: you need to show conversion of your research promise into research success.  With multiplicity.  Publication standards vary significantly among mathematical disciplines (topologists and algebraic geometers publish fewer papers; combinatorialists and applied mathematicians publish more) but I think that at least one publication per year is a reasonable lower bound for almost everyone.
Most math postdocs have not published all the work that appears in their thesis before graduation (my understanding is that this is almost the complete reverse of what happens in most other STEM fields).  There are good reasons for this: mathematics is such a technical, specialized field that you spend 90% of your time as a PhD student attaining mastery of one specific subfield, and the PhD is awarded within a very short time period of that attained mastery (in some cases, it is awarded when the advisor feels confident that such mastery lies in the student's near future).  So many if not most math postdocs spend the majority of their research time in their first year working on the papers that come from their PhD research.  Why does it take so long given that the thesis has already been written?  One reason is that they are usually not just transcribing the work but also significantly improving it: again, this goes in hand with the observation that as soon as you know what you're doing you're out the door with a PhD.  If you compare a PhD thesis and the paper that it results in, you often see stronger results, simpler and better proofs, and so forth.
Spending time in your postdoc working on publishing your thesis can be tricky: you are in a new environment with new distractions, and after you give a talk or two about your thesis work, many of your research conversations will be about the research interests of those around you, who will probably at least want to involve you in seminars and may in fact want to collaborate with you on further projects.  And it's good to do that...but not at the expense of getting your thesis work done.  There is even a bit of a trap here, since as a PhD student you get so much care and attention on every aspect of your work, including someone whose job it is at times to tell you to slow down and be more careful: that you haven't yet fully nailed down what you thought you had.  Most postdoctoral advisors don't work as closely with their postdocs as thesis advisors do with their students, and when they do it is probably not on the topic of their thesis (they may not even have enough expertise on that to work as closely as the thesis advisor did).  So the first priority of any postdoc is to make sure that they actually write up for publication all the work that was "promised" in their thesis, and the second priority is to figure out how to continue this thesis work in a meaningful way.

Acquire a research program -- distinct from your thesis advisor's program.

I think this is really the hardest part.  It is a well-known fact that the most common number of MathSciNet publications for any given author is one.  In some cases this just means that some bright young person passed through mathematics on the way to something else -- e.g. this one-hit wonder turned out fine -- but it is distressingly common to see one strong, cutting-edge publication followed by dead silence.  What this means is that the work was -- in some suitably high-level sense, at least -- really that of the advisor rather than the student.  A lot of postdocs follow the previous bullet point -- i.e., they get their thesis written up -- and then they just can't see their way to a continuing research program.  In some cases this means that they still publish some papers, but they have just switched from being one person's apprentice to a different person's apprentice.  This is still not good enough for a research-intensive academic job nor, increasingly, a job at a nationally reputable liberal arts college.
It is here that I must disagree with another answer to this question, which says:

In my opinion, you are best looking for a postdoc in an area that is as far removed from your PhD areas as you are willing to tolerate.

That really doesn't sound right to me.  It is a relatively easy path to give up on what you've already done and start fresh on something unrelated, for which you can get local supervision.  As above, this is not good enough.  You want your research program to be considerably deeper at the end of your postdoc than it was when you got your PhD.  Sometimes that involves a significant course correction, yes: in my case I spent less than 1/3 of my time as a postdoc working on the subject of my PhD thesis, but the other material that I worked on was material that I had already been interested in and even started writing up for publication as a student.  Moreover the two areas were related because I was interested in both of them, and that allowed me to work towards closer relations.  Finally, by the time I gave job talks I was able to talk about Hasse principle violations for Shimura curves (my thesis was on Shimura curves) alongside Hasse principle violations for torsors under abelian varieties (which is what I spent most of my postdoc working on).  Moving to something "as far removed from your PhD areas as you are willing to tolerate" would have moved me several orders of magnitude farther away, just as I was experiencing a rapid improvement in my understanding of the part of arithmetic geometry in which I did my thesis work.  (Eleven years after my thesis, I am now also exploring parts of mathematics that are considerably farther away but I still do some work on things closely related to my thesis.)
A research program has some breadth to it as well as depth.  But the ideal way to develop breadth is to expand outwards from your current position, not give up and move to a new position chosen for its substantial distance from your current one.

It is good to have done more than one thing, or at least to know more than one trick.

I want to reaffirm that after establishing depth, the next thing hirers look for in a research program is indeed breadth.  If you're working on what looks to all outsiders like exactly the same thing now as you were three years ago, that's less than exciting, and it creates concerns about your future trajectory: mathematics does move on, and long-term colleagues grow together in their research interests and expertise.  However, if you're working in a hot, technical area and doing well with it, then you probably don't want to diversify out of that area as a postdoc, but you do want to take steps to show that the potential for diversity is there.  Often digging deeper in exactly the same spot requires learning new tools, even basic things that early career graduate students in other fields learn.  I think it's important to continue that kind of learning as a postdoc (and beyond) and show that you're doing it: for instance, in any job talk you should showcase the variety of knowledge and techniques that go into your results, especially if the results themselves look narrow and specialized.
2b) Teaching Teaching is challenging for a postdoc because for a certain range of intended careers it is less important than research...but it is still important, and in fact increasingly so.  You have to crank up a different kind of professional vibe to be a successful teacher as a postdoc: whereas for research you are trying to burn the midnight oil to make the transition from excellent to outstanding, what a disaster it would be for you to vow to be the best calculus teacher ever and devote all your time and energy to that.  (Part of the disaster is that vowing to be the best calculus teacher ever and putting three times as much time in as your office-mate will not necessarily result in teaching evaluations that are any better than hers: unfortunately they might even be worse.)  Rather you need to set a more temperate teaching mark and learn to hit it while leaving plenty of time for your research.
Your specific teaching goals will depend upon what kind of tenure-track job you have.  On the other hand, you may be hoping for a job at an elite research institution but may have to settle for a job with higher teaching requirements.  A good all-around plan is to showcase at least competent teaching across a fairly broad range of levels, including: calculus courses / service courses for non-majors; courses for undergraduate math majors; and graduate-level courses.  If you can cover those bases by teaching fewer courses, that is probably better.  In three years of postdoctoral work I taught five semester courses: this was close to ideal, but if I magically had control of my own teaching load, I would have cut it down to four.  Because your overall teaching responsibilities are relatively limited, it is good to start thinking about where your teaching letter(s) will come from right away.  If you feel that a course is going especially well, by all means invite some faculty in to watch you teach it.  That together with good evaluations is sufficient for a strong teaching letter in many cases.

You've written a lot, but actually everything you've said is fully consistent with "doing as much math [including math teaching] as humanly possible".  So I still suspect that doing a tremendous amount of work -- of the right kind -- in a relatively short period is the key to a successful math postdoc.  Am I mistaken??

No, you're quite right.  Being a math postdoc should not stop you from having a satisfying personal life, but professionally speaking it is one of the most intense, work-intensive points of a mathematical career.  There's no secret remedy for that.
One could give a lot more advice for math postdocs, and this has been done.  The Young Mathematicians Network has lots of information on this.  Google searching reveals that several mathematicians have math-specific postdoctoral advice on their webpages, including Sara Billey and Terry Tao.  I tend to think that it is better to talk to people -- lots of people -- and get advice rather than just read about very generalized advice (including this answer, of course).  A lot of times you don't even need to explicitly ask for advice: look for young, successful mathematicians (that includes most people who have recently gotten tenure-track jobs nowadays) and talk to them about their experiences.  By comparing the backgrounds of multiple role-models you can get a sense of what the "market wants".


Suggestions for working effectively with international students from a non-western culture I am a Masters graduate student studying finance at a large public university located in a major city. Recently, I accepted a job as a teaching assistant. A significant number of students are from non-western cultures, with East Asia being especially heavily represented(China, S.Korea, etc). In leading discussion,I have found communication to be a problem and I strongly sense it has cultural roots.

Encouraging participation through questions does not seem to help and the students seem to be painfully shy. I attempt discussion that builds upon the text, but the students seem to have trouble expressing themselves and finding their voice.  I use mainly open ended questions with some close ended questions for clarification. At the very first session, I explained my expectations:

Respect is crucial. While attacks on ideas are encouraged, personal attacks are inappropriate.
Creativity of thought is encouraged
That I am open to feedback about the students opinions.
Acknowledge wish to speak by raising hand

I feel its important for students to have their own ideas and to actively engage in these smaller discussion sections as it applies the concepts taught in lecture. In addition, I want feedback regarding what I can do better and students' opinions are valuable.

Some relevant background

English proficiency: Understandable but mediocre with accent
Most present in the USA less than 1 year
No  family present in the US.

Coming from a western culture (USA), aside from leveraging the professor, what else can I do to improve the efficacy of these discussion groups?

I have found communication to be a problem and I strongly sense it has cultural roots.

I think this is the first point to start with: Try to find out if your sense is right here and try to identify what kind of cultural difference may be the cause. In fact I am not sure if cultural differences are really the only (or most important) problem, but you may well be correct. However, there are very different cultures also in east Asia and also in the same country.

One thing that I have heard of is that in some Asian cultures it is impolite to ask questions to a professor (because it somehow shows that she did not explain things well). It may well be considered impolite to try answer questions for which the answer has not been well prepared in advance. (If this would be the case, you could, in principle, think about preparing questions in advance and hand them out a week early.)

If discussing of unprepared ideas is really important for the class, I am not sure what you could do. You may consider collecting different styles for the class such as

participants present prepared thoughts on homework questions in written form as a hand-out or orally (or both),
prepare handouts for some topics and distribute them in class, then let the participants work on them alone (or in groups), let them prepare statements and collect the statements,
have open discussion (prepared or non-prepared).

In any case, communicate the different modes clearly to the students, i.e. explain what they have to do, what you expect them to deliver and what (besides the actual content) they should learn in class. In this way you may get the message across, that "discussing" (and comparable skills) is really something that you expect the students to learn.


Why don't I see publications criticising other publications? This is about technology research specifically.

Often when reading a publication I'll be thinking to myself: "Yeah, you've got that thing, but what about this and that limitation you brush off and this and that assumption which seems pretty poorly justified?" After starting my PhD I got pretty shocked just how common that seems to be.

The only critiques of other publications I ever see are either in literature review sections of papers suggesting alternative methods, or mentioned in surveys. In either case those tend to be not very in-depth.

Why is this the case? It seems to me like something that would be pretty damaging to research in general, as then you see a lot of papers with built-in assumptions and limitations propagated by their predecessors.

Such criticisms are common in journals like Nature and PNAS. They're often not called "papers" -- PNAS calls them "Letters", Science calls them "Technical Comments", and Nature calls them "Brief Communications Arising" -- but they do get a significant degree of pre-publication scrutiny and often are peer reviewed. Some examples from the past few weeks:

Is “choline and geranate” an ionic liquid or deep eutectic solvent system? (PNAS)
Tagging the musical beat: Neural entrainment or event-related potentials? (PNAS)
Comment on “Predicting reaction performance in C–N cross-coupling using machine learning” (Science)
Comment on “The earliest modern humans outside Africa” (Science)
Assumptions for emergent constraints (Nature)
Emergent constraints on climate sensitivity (Nature)
Climate constraint reflects forced signal (Nature)

Other journals also have systems for responses, though most are not as organized about it.

So the premise is not quite right -- criticisms of high-profile papers are not unusual -- but it's true that the vast majority of papers don't get formal critiques like this -- even though the vast majority of papers probably do have something that could be criticized.

That's part of the reason. Very few papers are completely above reproach (except for my own, of course). If I was to send a critical letter about every issue I see in every paper I read, I'd spend my time doing nothing else, and the journals would be filled with my letters to the editor with no room for new articles.

And we're all adults here. It's expected that scientists read papers critically; that's part of our job. That means we all find things to criticize. Finding a problem in a published paper isn't a shocking, scandalous thing. It's like a toll collector breaking a $20 bill, a minor technical part of your job. It would be condescending of me to assume that I'm the only person who noticed the issues in question, and that it's up to me to save my colleagues from their stupidity and ignorance.

Finally, when I do respond to publications that need criticizing, I rarely phrase my responses that way. For example, several years ago I read an interesting paper in my field that, I thought, made a significant error in its assumptions. To show that, I repeated some of their experiments, adding in the missing controls, and then extended the work to show where the corrected observations led. I didn't publish as a criticism of the previous work (which was from researchers who I know and admire and who have done a lot of great stuff). I published it as a paper that can stand on its own, noting the previous work in passing but not making a big deal of the mistake. Hopefully, if I ever make a mistake (unlikely!) my colleagues will correct me in the same way. Science is hard, and it shouldn't be like a hockey goalie, where every time you make a mistake a buzzer goes off and thirty thousand people yell at you.


Should recruitment committee give lesser weight to Interdisciplinary Publications? I am a Computer Science graduate (presently, working towards Ph.D.). I have been working in the field of Computational Biology/Chemistry, Bioinformatics which involves many different computational approaches. I am rather working towards the development of new computational methods.

However, we report our results in interdisciplinary journals or pure biology/chemistry journals.

Question: I have often heard that -- in my country, many organizations are giving lesser weight to such interdisciplinary publications. But, while I started Ph.D., I used to think that it does not matter much. Even, the recruitment committee does ask questions like Why did you publish in J. Computational X or J. Theoretical X ? How one should respond to such questions being an applicant for a position in Computer Science department?

I did find it funny, though. Either the recruitment committee is not suitable or such candidates are not preferable.

I came a not-so-similar question on SE: When should I publish in interdisciplinary versus subject-specific scientific journals?

Your key statement is "Either the recruitment committee is not suitable or such candidates are not preferable." But this starts from the wrong point -- you complain that the recruitment committee is unqualified or has the wrong metrics, but this complaint will not help you get a job. You need to accept the fact that they have their criteria and that you won't be able to change them. It is an entirely irrelevant question (for your purposes) whether these criteria are useful in advancing the stature of that organization, the community of computer scientists, or the state of science altogether.

In other words, you need to dissociate yourself from your philosophical objections to the questions they ask, and just come up with a good, even-keeled answer that goes back to the core mission of computer science as understand by the hiring organization. For example, if they ask you why you published in the Journal of Computational X, then you should say "During our research, we did some fundamental development of algorithms and data structures and evaluated how best to map them to the currently existing programming languages. This was core computer science work, but we wanted to show that what we did was also applicable to a broader range of sciences, and so we took our work and mapped it to some problems in X. It was important to us to demonstrate our CS work to other disciplines, and so published it in JCompX."


Advisor suggests to change my research topic after unsuccessful start, unsure what to do I am a first-year doctoral student in Computer Vision, and have some confusion about my research direction recently. I hope I can get some help and advice there.

A couple of months ago, I was arranged to do research about optical flow, which is a kind of motion representation and can be used in many computer vision tasks. In these days, I read many papers and did lots of experiment about optical flow about its history, datasets and criterion. Therefore, I began to believe maybe I could make some contribution to that. Since some previous ideas are proved not working, the professor suggested me to give up the research on optical flow and change to another.

Now I am very hesitant about the next plan, there are two reasons. On the one hand, I am not content to give up just like that, and I think we could do more. On the other hand, I know very little other directions in computer vision, so I am not certain which direction I should choose. For computer vision, I want to try everything. Although optical flow is not my favorite one, I can insist on it. I really want to choose a research direction, and spend several years or the whole PhD stage to do some meaningful works.

What should I do? I hope experienced people can give me advice. Thank you!

You should be talking to your advisor(s) and you may have some good points to discuss.

If you think you have some relevant ideas, then you should discuss them with your advisor - one may be the "key" you are looking for.

If, after considering your points, the advisor still has good reason to think that there is no future, then you should accept that decision, clear in the knowledge that you put your points across.

So, discuss with your advisor and make an informed choice with them.


My former PhD supervisor has published conclusions from my thesis without citing my thesis. Is this ok? My former PhD supervisor has just published a paper on a scientific subject investigated by me in my thesis.  The subject (or question posed), was an idea that I came up solely during my PhD and which I chose to investigate as a sub topic - my conclusions were published in my thesis in 2015 and I assume (from a legal statement in the thesis), that I own the copyright.

The paper just published has taken my hypothesis and explored it in more depth.  Some of my studies have been repeated by other people in the lab.  Moreover, some of the key conclusions made by me in my thesis have been made again.  I have not been credited in any way.

Is this plagiarism and should I pursue this?  I’ve left academia so no longer publish anyway.

My former PhD supervisor has just published a paper on a scientific subject investigated by me in my thesis...The paper [takes] my hypothesis and explored it in more depth. Some of my studies have been repeated by other people in the lab. Moreover, some of the key conclusions made by me in my thesis have been made again. I have not been credited in any way.
Is this plagiarism and should I pursue this?

This is not plagiarism: As you have noted, the paper [takes your] hypothesis and explore[s] it in more depth (emphasis added), i.e., the paper goes beyond your results to provide something new. To determine whether plagiarism appears elsewhere probably requires more information than the OP has provided.

I have not been credited in any way.

A citation to your thesis or any of your other published works would be appropriate, perhaps even required, e.g., if the paper is entirely built upon your work.


Why is the concept of self plagiarism in coursework not manifestly absurd? You did very similar work on your own before, and now you happen to have stumbled upon a similar assignment. Why exactly would reusing your previous work be unethical?

If the university has such overlapping courses and lets you take them, why should the student be punished for optimising his time/resources?

That's not that easy to answer because it really depends in my opinion on what is plagiarised and why and what's the impact.

For example we submitted a paper and the publisher found a plagiat in our introduction. Turned out we had written the same sentence in one of our other papers on a very similar topic. We had around 15 papers in that field and well, the introduction is always basically the same so sooner or later you will write down the same sentence. It's just stupid to forcefully rewrite the same introduction over and over again and it has nothing to do with the actual scientific work.

And while I feel it's unethical to use previous work in university courses the even more interesting question is: why? Why would I reuse my previous work for classes at university rather than learning something new/training my skills. Why would I study, if I'm not interested in the subject.

You really should take courses at university as an opportunity to learn something, rather than an annoying obstacle on your way to your degree, which you want to avoid/manage with the lowest effort possible


How to boost academic profile for Master's application I want to apply for a Master's degree program in Robotics at some top schools in Europe and America. However, I feel my current profile is not strong enough to get into a top school and I am looking for ways to boost my profile and increase my chances. More specifically, I graduated with a GPA of 4.06/5.00 (which is relatively low) and I have read that most top would not even consider one's application if one doesn't have a very high GPA to start with except one can show strength in other parts of the application like the GRE score, statement of purpose, letters of recommendation, research publications etc. For example at ETH (one of the schools I am considering), it is rumored that one has to be in the 99th percentile to get in.

Although I haven't written the GRE yet, I hope to score 330+ and I also hope to write a convincing purpose statement. However, for the recommendations, I have only two lecturers (yes, not professors) who know me very well and I am sure they would write good recommendations for me but they are not majorly in the field of Robotics so this may not be a huge plus (Not sure about this, any clarifications would help). Also, I do not have any research publications. To improve my profile, below are some of the steps I am taking/considering taking:

1. Online courses in robotics, machine learning algorithms etc.
2. Looking for a Professor at my local University who is active in the field of Robotics to work with
3. Looking for a job at a Robotics company to gain experience
4. Taking my undergraduate project (a UAV) a step further and publishing my work etc.

As for [1], there seems to be a slight difference of opinion in the answers I have gotten on this site as to how much impact this may have but the consensus is that the impact is minimal.

I included [2] because some schools ask for three recommendation letters and I currently have only two reccommenders. Additionally, I want to know, how eager are Professors to work with people who are no longer students of the University? Does anyone have experience with working with a Professor while maintaining an a full-time job? How tasking is it?

In [4], by a step further, I mean making the platform an autonomous one as it is currently remote piloted, and then publishing the work.

What I want to know is, with my list above, am I heading in the right direction? Which of these (or any others that I haven't listed) are likely to have the biggest impact on my profile?

Just a small consideration, I have a short time (about 5 months) between now and most schools' application deadlines, so I need to make this boost within that period.

If the master's degree you are pursuing is a technical degree (to enhance your technical skills to land a job in robotics), then a professional experience in a related area should greatly help your application. Is there a faculty member you could work with on a project or perhaps a firm where you could intern before the start of the academic program? Even if you can't complete the professional experience before submitting your application, it will likely be helpful to note the upcoming professional exposure on your resume and in your application. Securing a recommendation from an internship supervisor would be good as well. My vote would be to focus on professional exposure in the field.


Should I say "few literature" or "little literature"? I am currently writing an introduction section, which says "this is an important question but currently there is few (or little?) literature available".

Which one should I use, few or little?

Thank you!

Little literature is common. You could also say "there is a paucity of literature on this problem"; "the literature on this problem is
scarce,
sparse, or
still in its infancy!"; or as @AliJamali and @paulgarret suggested, limited or scant literature.


Is it appropriate to contact a journal editor when they have already decided to accept a paper you refereed? I had an unusual circumstance happen to me this week.  I had earlier refereed a paper for a top journal.  For the first draft, I recommended a fair number of changes, but I felt that if they were all made, publication would be appropriate.  There was also another referee, who opined that the subject matter of the article was not important enough for the journal.

The authors revised the manuscript and resubmitted it.  The associate editor sent it back to the same two referees.  The other referee basically did not budge, still saying that it was not worth publishing.  I, on the other hand, recommended moving forward with publication, provided the authors made one more change.  It was something that I had mentioned in my first report as well, and it represents a genuine error that really needs to be fixed.

At this point, faced with conflicting reviews (and possibly after a request from the authors), the associated editor sent the paper out to a third reviewer.  Just the other day, I got a communication from the editor that he had decided to accept the paper.  Included were the current manuscript version, the authors' responses to my second report, and the positive report from the third referee.

What struck me was that the authors had not fixed the mistake that I had pointed out in my first two reports.  The response in their resubmission letter to it seemed to have completely missed the point.  I was puzzled about what to do at this point.  Eventually, I decided to shoot off a letter to the associate editor, reminding him that the authors had not actually addressed my one remaining objection.

I'm still not sure whether this was an appropriate thing to do.  I apologized in advance and said it might be none of my business in the letter.  I do have a pretty good relationship with this associate editor; he sends me a lot of papers and had nominated me for a refereeing award.  I guess that, apart from what opinions I hear here, I will find out what he think of my writing to him.

As I have now heard back from the associate editor, I can give an answer to my own question.

The editor was quite appreciative of my note.  Here is what he wrote back to me:

  Thank you for your note. I am sorry that we did not realize that the authors have not satisfactorily answered to the criticism in your second report. If you can send us quickly a note that we can forward to the authors, we will have them take it into account before proceeding with publication.

I quickly put together a detailed explanation of what was still wrong with the manuscript and sent it back to the editor.  I'm not sure precisely how things will proceed from here, but I am gratified that I apparently did the right thing.


Is it plagiarism to closely mimic the structure of a table in a publication? I am writing a paper on a topic closely related to previous literature (but in a different study population). As such, the statistical analysis is very similar to a previous publication and I really like the way the previous authors (which I have cited in the literature review) have structured a particular table.

Would essentially copying this structure, but putting in my own results, be a form of plagiarism?

I doubt anyone would consider a table format as plagiarized when used to show new data. It would be akin to saying use of Tukey's box-and-whisker type plots would be plagiarism. The question is understandable, however, since someone could arguably claim some such structure as intellectual property. I think the key here lies in what is being copied. You are copying the structure but not the content. To protect the form would be quite pointless since no-one would buy the rights and it would be simple to make sufficient variations to argue it is not the same form. I am sure this could be discussed at length by lawyers.

Although, not within the scope of your question, most author's will be happy to see something they produce becoming reused and maybe even a standard. I had a figure in a paper that was picked up by IPCC and used to show something different than my original but still unequivocally based on my design.

So in the end, as suggested in comments to your question. you can pay homage to the original by acknowledging the idea of the table in your acknowledgement or by citing the paper and stating the table is based on their table. Which makes most sense, will depend on circumstances in your paper.


How to interview a candidate for a university teaching position? We are interviewing some candidates for a part-time teaching faculty position to teach 2 upper level undergraduate courses in mathematics.

Since it is my first time to be in such committee and since this is a teaching job on the university level, I wanted to know what are the criteria/questions that are teaching-related and that should be asked to the candidate in the interview?

You'll want to ask some standard questions that any experienced educator would ask a potential teacher:

Request to see a model lesson. It doesn't have to be a full lecture, just something to see their style. Ideally the entire committee should be there for this part.
Ask to see a university-level lesson plan of their creation.
Ask how they would approach creating a semester-long curriculum for an advanced "special topics" course. I suggest the "special topics" idea because this lets you see whether they can do it for themselves or whether they are only able to follow pre-set curricula.
Ask how they'll ensure that the top students are being adequately challenged while the weaker students aren't being left behind.
Ask how they handle unruly students. Even though this is fairly rare at the university level, they should have a ready answer.
Have them explain some concepts to you and make sure for yourself that you are comfortable with how they explain them. (Similar to model lesson, but for specific topics.)

You may also want to mention things like office hours requirements, whether they'll get a TA, and related administrative stuff.


What if a conference is not ranked but IEEE sponsored I am trying to find conference rank of International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS) but was not successful. On core, International Conference on Information and Communication Security is listed.Could not locate it on Google scholar. Does it mean this conference is not ranked and publication from this conference will not hold any importance !?

Checking on IEEE Xplore, it certainly appears to be a real conference, and if you search for it on plain Google Scholar (rather than Scholar metrics), you do find publications from it.  Scholar Metrics has a much tighter filter than general Scholar, and even some significant conferences don't show up in whatever arbitrary black-box algorithm Google uses to generate it.

In this case, however, this conference appears to be rather low impact, and also has a major red flag: its call for papers is about everything and nothing. Thus: legit, but not a particularly good choice of venue unless you have some particular reason to want to talk to the people who go there.


Realized a co-author inserted plagiarism into our paper 8 years ago - what to do now? Recently, after the acceptance of a paper, the journal said some sentences were exactly copied in my manuscript. I was shocked as I was the first author. Later, we found that during the preparation of the revised manuscript, one of the co-authors exactly copied two sentences from a reference. This brought fear in my mind if I had ever been a co-author in an unintentionally plagiarized paper. I got access to the Turnitin from a friend at a different institute and checked all my previous papers.

I realized that 8-10 years ago, a visiting student in my lab had significant portions of the published papers plagiarized. The data and analysis were correctly done in my supervision, but significant parts of introduction, methods and some places discussion were plagiarized. I had read and edited the drafts of the papers, but I didn't realize that he had copied text from other papers. Generally, most sources are cited. The student already earned a PhD based on the work.

At that time, no-one in our country had access to the plagiarism detection software from institutions.

What should I do now?

Move on. In the abstract, of course, we should care about these things but, in reality, a paper that has been out there for 8-10 years has passed the statute of limitations. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will go back and check papers that old -- indeed, even if someone finds textual overlap with other sources, it will require quite a lot of work and human intervention to determine who copied from whom.

The point for you to take away is this: You learned a lesson to be more careful in the future. That's a good thing from your perspective, and it will make sure that you won't get into a potentially embarrassing situation again in the future. In the meantime, relax.


How to screen out candidates for faculty jobs who don't know the subject I teach physics at a community college and have been on a number of hiring committees for tenure-track jobs. Usually we interview about 6 people for such a position, and of those, usually something like 3 of them show a lack of knowledge of the subject in the interview. When I say a lack of knowledge, I mean that they can't do easy freshman stuff. We will ask them a question that is posed as a request for them to pretend we're a class of students and give a short explanation of something, so it's nominally a test of their ability to teach it, but in reality we find candidates who simply don't know it. These are people who have a PhD from an accredited school. (We hardly ever interview people who only have a master's.)

[EDIT] (To clarify, I'm talking about very basic knowledge, such as understanding what Newton's laws mean. We're not asking candidates to recall obscure trivia. Personally, I don't really care whether they know which is Newton's 1st law, 2nd, or 3rd. I'm talking about candidates who actually demonstrate elementary misunderstandings of Newton's laws. Since a lot of academia.SE users are in math, I think a good analogy would be if someone applied to teach math, and that person didn't know the chain rule -- which I have heard from colleagues in math departments at community colleges is also common. Continuing this analogy, the issue is not that they fail to remember the term "chain rule." The issue is that if they're asked to differentiate sin cos x, they can't do it. They do silly things like attempting to use the product rule, as if the sine was multiplied by the cosine. Or they throw up their hands and won't try, even if the committee tries to help them out.)

Are there good strategies for screening these people out at an earlier stage, without needlessly losing too many good candidates from our pool?
Here's what we're already doing:

We require applicants to submit undergraduate transcripts, and we are less likely to interview people who have poor undergraduate grades (such as Ds and Fs in math and physics).
We prefer applicants who have graduate degrees from more prestigious schools.
We prefer a candidate who has taught a wide variety of courses to one who has only, e.g., taught mechanics.

Undergraduate grades do seem to correlate with what we see in the interview, but it's also possible that someone started out their undergraduate education with a weak high school background and then overcame that disadvantage. There is also the difficulty of comparing different countries' grading standards. We require graduate transcripts, but I find those hard to extract useful information from.

We are currently only asking them to give the names of references, but not to supply letters of reference along with their applications. Would it help to make them send letters?

You would think that someone with really weak competence would never get into a good graduate program, and therefore we could just not interview people who have degrees from low-prestige programs. However, our pool doesn't usually include a ton of people who have degrees from the best graduate programs, and we have also seen people in the past with degrees from renowned universities who nevertheless displayed major gaps in their knowledge, as well as highly competent people who got their degrees from no-name schools.

Presumably your interview is doing a good job screening out the individuals who you feel "don't know the subject" and you are trying to screen them out prior to the interview. I think a reasonable screening tool could be a a phone interview. You should probably conduct between 10-15 phone interviews to find the 6 candidates you want to interview.

While I say "phone interview", it is most often now a "Skype" interview. These interviews could be as short as 30 minutes and should be no longer than 1 hour scheduled back-to-back such that they all get completed in two long days. The phone interviews I know about have had 3-6 people (presumably the majority of the committee) present, but I think depending on department politics that you could reduce it to a smaller group (maybe even just the committee chair).

While you could simply focus the phone interview on the questions that cause candidates the most trouble during on campus interviews, given 1/2 your candidates have difficulties recalling key concepts of "random" classes, you may want to help them out a little. If you require that applicants submit a sample syllabus for freshman physics and another for an upper level elective, then the phone interview should focus on the teaching statement and sample syllabus.

During the phone interview you should also mention some of the other key classes of you department that they might teach on. If a candidate is truly clueless, this will not matter, but good candidates will realize that they need to brush up on those classes for the on campus interview.

In summary, an inability to talk about a syllabus the candidate has written would be your screening tool and the hints during the phone interview will help you minimize throwing out potentially good candidates.


What is the equivalent of the laboratory notebook in the humanities? As a scientist, the idea of a "research notebook," or its functional equivalent, has been well ingrained into me. However, it's not clear to me if this is a universal phenomenon, or if it's limited to the sciences.

For students working in the humanities and other fields—such as literature, economics, or philosophy—what is the working equivalent of the laboratory notebook? If not, what is the preferred method of keeping records in those fields?

I asked my wife, which works in art history/egyptology. So first, "it depends of how the person works" ;).

However, it seems that many people are making a large number of thematic reading synthesis, research notes (as we do) and she also pointed out the importance of her personal database, where she stores archaeological artefacts, their descriptions, the related bibliography, personal notes about them, their relations, etc. According to her, this is THE most important thing for her work.


Studying a second undergraduate degree part-time while doing a PhD? I was wondering if it would be okay for a full-time PhD student (in biology) to pursue a part-time degree in an unrelated subject.
I had an undergrad experience that was pretty "focused", which was great in that it gave me decent training for graduate school, but also meant I never really got to experience certain subjects as much as I would've liked.
I came across a mostly-online degree programme in liberal arts from an accredited university and it got me thinking. Classes are mostly-online and I would be able to work at my own pace; I could spread the whole thing out across, say, 5 years. Any synchronous online sessions would take place in the evening/night, or during the weekend.
Do I absolutely have to enroll in a programme like this to fill out the "gaps" in my education? Admittedly no. I could just read books. But I feel like I want to. I would prefer the structure, engagement and feedback/advising that comes with formalized instruction, especially since I understand self-study is not exactly the best approach to subjects like Philosophy.
I do think the exposure to liberal arts subjects would develop me personally (different ways of thinking, better articulation). It's something I regret not having touched while an undergrad.
I don't mean to sound ungrateful or uninterested in my graduate study. I genuinely am. I just also genuinely want to enrich myself in this particular way, on the side. I know what little free time I have would become even less, but my heart is telling me it would be worth it. And I do have an interest in Philosophy I would like to explore. If things go south, I will pause or drop it.
If it doesn't interfere with my progress in my PhD, do you guys think it would be a good idea? I would have to tell my advisor, right (would I?)? I don't wish to upset him or give him a wrong idea.
Sorry for the long post, thank you for any advice.

If it does not interfere with your graduate studies, then no one could possibly object. People should have hobbies outside their PhDs, and if you a Physics student has an interest in Classic Philosophy, then so be it.
But you need to be sure it won't interfere. There is a world of difference between taking the odd evening class in something and enrolling in a degree, even part time. Think about how much time you have: Our full-time undergraduate degrees are designed to require 37 hours a week of study. Even doing such a degree over 5 years, rather than 3, you would still be talking about 23 hours a week. Are you going to manage to be working at peak performance if you are doing this on top of 40-50 hours a week of graduate study?


Should I consider my conference paper as published, if fee is paid but I didn't attend the conference? I submitted a conference paper some time ago to a trusted highly ranked conference. Strangely enough there's almost no communication from their part, no replies most of the time to my inquiries.

The paper got peer-reviewed and accepted, I paid the fee (around 500usd), I asked just a week before the conference if it's necessary to attend it because it was difficult to book a ticket given that I had only one month left in my old passport and I didn't have the new one, I provided a proof of that (scan of my old passport), but I got no reply and considered this as "ok" since this is what I wanted.

Now I am running out of time to graduate my PhD and I need to know whether it's considered published or I can submit it somewhere else. Should I bring something stronger in my email to catch their attention like "legal fight, submit somewhere else,etc" or just wait longer (presentation was exactly 10 days ago)?
what I am missing in all of this?

conference link if that helps

If the proceedings have been published and your paper is included (and usually at this time it is included), your paper is published.

Check the proceedings.

Is this kind of link of the conference that you need: index of proceedings

I think it will be published later. At this point if nobody presented your paper at the conference, it has to be considered public after inclusion in the proceedings only, so you need to have evidence of such proceedings publication.


My Proposed PhD supervisor is ignoring my email I made a contact with a proposed PhD supervisor( Professor), everything went well and she forwarded the email between her and the department Research committee secretary that I have been shortlisted for studentship and recommended for Fellowship, in the email she sent to me, I observed a remark on my application file (my entrance requirement was indicated with FAILED) and I quickly asked her if it won't affect my admission, but she ignored it, a later found out that all applicant were initially categorized as a masters holder (I am a bsc holder) before screening that was the reason why for that). After, a couple of days, i asked her if I was later shortlisted for Fellowship but she ignored the message, though the admission offer will be released in March.

My questions are these;
Hope I have not create a doubt in her mind towards me as a result of my inquisitive nature?, hope this won't affect my admission offer and lastly, how can I build the relationship back because she used to reply my messaged often and appreciate my research proposal?

This is obviously an important decision for you, and it's understandably making you anxious. However, you have to accept that the decision won't be made until March. Repeatedly contacting the folks making the decision, asking if they've decided won't help. They have a process they have to follow, and they can't make promises before they've completed that process. Sending repeated emails asking about the status of their decision could be annoying them (it would annoy me), but if they're reasonable, professional people it probably won't affect their decision on the position. However, no one can guarantee that. You just have to live with the uncertainty for a couple of months.

As long as your application is complete and accurate you should just put this aside until March. Find something else to keep yourself busy, or seek professional assistance if the anxiety is overwhelming.


Master's Degree Admission with a different Bachelor's specialization I currently hold a bachelor's degree at Biomedical Engineering and I want to do a Master's Degree in Computer Science at California.

Would that be a problem?

Since I don't have a high GPA and the proper specialization, should I pursue a certificate of Computer Science first, increase my GPA and then apply for the Master's?

I have the same situation. I applied for a CS program after finishing a bachelor in Biomedical Engineering. I just gave an interview just because my bachelor was not relevant and then they accepted me. Depends on your field of interest and your background in that field.

My field was Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition sand I used to apply them to medical data/signal/images and I just continued the same as a master student in CS. As you see the huge overlap between these two made it easier for me so first think of what you are going to do next and some tips:

You need to know programming! in BME we used to use MATLAB but this is not enough for a computer scientist.
If you are going to do Analysis (algorithm based fields, data analysis and etc) you need to have a good impression of algorithms and math. Of course not professionally but you need an algorithmic & mathematical mind to work in analytics-based fields of CS.
If you are going to do something more related to software stuff or computer networks or information technology, you need to be comfortable with different softwares (depending on the field) and operating systems.
And finally the most important point: All what you read above was only my experience and point of view!

Hope I could help and good luck!


Is it ethical to put a surveillance camera inside a lab The Lab leader is putting a surveillance camera inside the lab to protect some precious devices bought recently. The viewpoint of the camera covers most of the lab and shows clearly the lab members 24h per day and 7 days a week. The camera is only accessed by the lab leader.

is it ethical to put such a camera inside the lab?

This largely depends on disclosure --- in cases where you record employees at work there are ethical and legal obligations relating to notification and disclosure.  The legal rules depend on your jurisdiction, but in most jurisdictions this situation is regulated by some kind of legislation on surveillance.  (E.g., in NSW in Australia this would be regulated by the Workplace Surveillance Act 2005.)  To check on the legality of this practice you should consult relevant surveillance legislation in your jurisdiction.  Regardless, your lab leader should certainly contact the university legal counsel before installing a surveillance camera.

As to the broader ethical question of surveillance (as opposed to its legality), there is a reasonable literature on this question in the business ethics journals (see e.g., Ottensmeyer and Heroux 1991, Fairweather 1999, Halpern, Reville and Grunewald 2008, and Hadjimatheou 2014).  I will not attempt to paraphrase this issue here since it is a large issue which is best understood by reference to the literature.


How to prevent desk rejection when trying to publish papers which are counter to the prevailing view (but still legitimate)? I wonder if there exists, at least in plans, a centralized system that examines editors' decisions in journals, a kind of "appellate court" in peer-review publishing.

Recently I have been trying to publish a paper which tends to support a hypothesis heavily counter to the prevailing view in the field. I had to try eight journals before it was accepted. In most of those trials the paper was rejected without going to peer-review, but editors didn't point out specific flaws. Instead, they used general statements like "your paper is certainly interesting, but we get so many even more interesting papers, so unfortunately we cannot publish yours". In one journal the editor simply replied that the paper is out of the journal's scope, which is plain-out false (the paper deals exactly with one of the major topics of the journal). In another journal the editor passed the paper to peer review. In two months it was rejected "in view of reviewers' comments". But - amazingly! - all reviewers recommended publication, with certain revisions. I tried to contact the editor, but he did not respond. Clearly, this is utterly unethical, with respect both to the author and reviewers (at least, the editors could reject it right away, why stealing two months?).

Now I am going to submit a follow-up paper, but I am sure I will face the same difficulties and lose a lot of time. Could anyone give any recommendations as to how to safeguard oneself against unethical situations like those described above?

UPD: I do not mean here any complaints or rants. If in one of those journals my paper had been rejected after peer-review in which reviewers did actually recommend rejection, there would be no this topic here.

I wonder if there exists, at least in plans, a centralized system that examines editors' decisions in journals, a kind of "appellate court" in peer-review publishing.

In cases of unethical behavior, professional societies can investigate a journal, but your description includes nothing that appears unethical.

  In most of those trials the paper was rejected without going to peer-review, but editors didn't point out specific flaws. Instead, they used general statements like "your paper is certainly interesting, but we get so many even more interesting papers, so unfortunately we cannot publish yours".

This may be frustrating and reflect genuine bias against your ideas, but it's a reasonable and standard way to run a journal.  Some sorts of bias are unethical (for example, discrimination based on the author's race, ethnicity, gender, etc.), but intellectual bias is almost unavoidable.  There are a few journals, like PLOS ONE, with the mission of publishing anything that's new and not clearly defective, but most journals try to filter based on interest and importance.  That necessarily involves judgment calls by the editors regarding what is likely to be satisfy these criteria.  In particular, part of running a prestigious journal is favoring some topics and approaches over others, and the community judges the editors based on how well they manage to select interesting and important papers.  To reject a paper without review, there's no need to identify a flaw.  Instead, the editors can simply decide that it's not interesting or promising enough to justify the effort of formal reviewing, or that the chances of acceptance are low enough that sending it out for review would just waste the reviewers' and authors' time.

  In one journal the editor simply replied that the paper is out of the journal's scope, which is plain-out false (the paper deals exactly with one of the major topics of the journal).

Scope can include both subject matter and approach.  Some journals like to publish controversial papers that may well turn out to be wrong or misleading but will at least lead to interesting discussion and follow-up work.  Other journals are more conservative and have no interest in going out on a limb with a risky theory that reexamines what the editors consider to be well-settled science.  I don't think the editor in your case was lying to you about the subject matter scope, but rather indicating that your paper is outside the scope of the type of work they want to publish.

  In another journal the editor passed the paper to peer review. In two months it was rejected "in view of reviewers' comments". But - amazingly! - all reviewers recommended publication, with certain revisions.

This is an awkward issue, and it would have been helpful if the editor had clarified.  (E.g., "While the reviewers' comments were largely positive, the editorial board felt that they did not make a strong enough case for publication in comparison with other recent submissions.")  But I can appreciate the editor's position.  Sometimes you get a submission that is unusual and unconventional, one you know a lot of the community won't like.  Who do you choose as reviewers?  You can predict many people's opinions in advance, which introduces an intrinsically political aspect (if you want to kill the paper, it's easy to choose conservative reviewers, and vice versa).  One approach is to ask sympathetic, open-minded reviewers but hold them to a high standard by seeing whether they can convince you to accept.  The question isn't whether they recommend acceptance, and in fact the editor may know in advance that they have a soft spot for this topic.  Instead, the question is how compelling and forceful a case they are able to make for this specific paper.

Of course I have no proof that this is what was going on here, but I'd bet it was.  If the editors were determined to kill the submission, they would have rejected it without review or deliberately assigned unsympathetic reviewers.  Instead, I think this journal gave you more of a chance than any of the other six.

  Could anyone give any recommendations as to how to safeguard oneself against unethical situations like those described above?

As I explained above, I don't think these situations are unethical, but they are still worth avoiding.  One factor to consider is how often a journal publishes unorthodox or unconventional work (even if it's not on your exact topic).  If they sometimes do, then they are likely to give your paper a fair hearing.  If they rarely or never do, then that's probably because they are reluctant to do so.


In Mathematics, what is the standing of the journal Proc. AMS? This is a question specific to mathematics.

  what is the status of the journal Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (Proc. AMS)?

It seems to be a generalist journal that only publishes short papers, and has a massive output (in 2018: 12 issues on 5485 pages). The blurb says :

  "To be published in the Proceedings, a paper must be correct, new, and
  significant. Further, it must be well written and of interest to a
  substantial number of mathematicians. Piecemeal results, such as an
  inconclusive step toward an unproved major theorem or a minor
  variation on a known result, are in general not acceptable for
  publication".

Yet on Scimago it is ranked below most of the journals I have heard about (in their math/stats ranking it is #256, edit: in the subranking that lists mostly pure math journals, it is still lower than most I know edit ends). Nevertheless, I see that very well established researchers sometimes publish there (I won't give names obviously).

So to be more specific :

  do you always submit somewhere else first, and it the paper is rejected then consider Proc. AMS ?
  or maybe is publishing there an act of "giving back to the community by promoting the AMS" ?
  or is it mostly a journal for anybody who needs a quick publication (as the workflow seems quite fast) ?

Scimago is a clearly false, possibly semi-fake ranking. It is very easy to check this: for instance when I clicked on your link I got the following amusing result:

Vital and health statistics. Series 2, Data evaluation and methods research   is considered of higher ranking for mathematicians (!) than the Annals of Mathematics.

There is no need to elaborate more.


First time opportunity to give a seminar Recently I had a talk about the topic of my master thesis with the professor I currently work for (he wasn't involved in the thesis). I mentioned that there are interesting results and that I would like to present them, if he'd agree. He proposed to not only give a presentation but a seminar.

I've just graduated from my Master's and never given any lecture, course or seminar before. I would be happy to take this opportunity as I enjoy teaching and I expect a good experience.

If I'm willing to do it the professor expects a scheme of the seminar and that's the point where I am stuck. For how long of a seminar time should I aim for? Introductory or deep into the matter? What exactly is the difference between a seminar and merely presenting my thesis again? In my understanding seminars include practical approaches. Should I focus more on practical issues or my own work?

The subject is quite technical in detail but this is not very obvious from the topic alone. I expect students to may have heard of the methodology but never employed it themselves.

I'm quite lost on how to tackle this task though excited to have this opportunity. I realise that my question isn't really well fleshed out but I'm happy to hear opinions nevertheless.

If you have presented your thesis before, the seminar could be something similar to it. However, a seminar is usually given to a wider range of audience, and thus you need to make it more accessible for someone in the audience who may not be familiar with the subject. Aim for an accessible introduction, and save the technical details to the second half of the talk.

As for how long the seminar should be, you need to ask the professor how much time you have to talk, and how much time you have for questions and answers.


Organization tips for a newcomer to academic learning I missed my chance to attend university when everyone else did and I'm out of school for seven years.

Now I'd like to get a degree (BA History & English) through the Open University.

I've never been good at organization, though and I do not have even the slightest idea how academic studies work. I'm looking for tips, experiences and opinions on how to organize my studies and engage in a workflow that works.

Also, if anyone here happened to attend the OU, I would much appreciate a rundown on what to expect and how learning there works, especially regarding the fact that modules do have dates to begin and end, but studies are said to be flexible for time-management. (I am aware that the OU offers contact options as well, and I will reach out to them, too)

The way to succeed doesn't depend a lot on which university you attend, nor does the field you want to study, though the specifics differ a lot. The key to it is to understand how the human brain works.

First, every learner is different and some things are easier and some are harder for different people. Hardly anyone, however, will actually learn anything by seeing or hearing or reading it just once. The brain works through repetition and requires actually physical changes. New synapses must be established between neurons and that takes reinforcement to have any chance of retaining new information and skills in long term memory. See The Art of Changing the Brain by James E Zull for the scientific explanation.

So, the key, in a field like language or history is to look at a lot of issues and write about them. It is the writing that provides the reinforcement, not the "looking". Write a lot of short papers, poems, speculations, whatever. In mathematics, you solve a lot of similar problems. In CS you write a lot of programs. But the learning has to be active - producing something - not just passively consuming it.

But, the brain can be misled. You can reinforce the wrong thing. You also need to avoid that. So, in addition to reinforcement to learn, you also need feedback. Someone has to look at whatever you produce and give you some idea about its correctness and, hopefully, its implications. This happens in most face-to-face courses, though sometimes ineffectively, if the prof focuses too much on grading rather than more effective feedback.

If my understanding of OU is still accurate, then note that it isn't just an online information broadcaster. In addition to extremely well produced material they depend (or did, at least) on students having contact with local tutors to ask questions and such. Thus, the system there is designed to give you good information, as well as to provide you a way to do the reinforcement (exercises) and get feedback (comments, questions, ...).

For a self learner who doesn't have a guide about both what and how to learn it is a bit harder. In a purely online "course" the information may be available, but there may be nothing that forces you into reinforcement mode and nothing at all to give you feedback. The self-learner has to organize those on their own. I think OU is pretty good about that, but it takes your own dedication to make it work.

Caveat. I'm not, and never was, associated with OU, but have worked with some faculty there on unrelated projects in the past. My information isn't especially current.


If I receive written permission to use content from a paper without citing, is it plagiarism? Let's say I find an article online. I contact the writer of this article and, without expecting anything in return, they agree to give me full, unrestricted rights to use any portion of their article, including directly using quotes from the article, without citing it. The agreement even allows me to claim the work as my own, even though it isn't.

Because I have all the rights to do this, would this be considered plagiarism?

It doesn't really matter that the author gave you "unrestricted rights to use any portion of their article" without the need of citing it. We, the readers, want to know that you're using it.

  Because I have all the rights to do this, would this be considered plagiarism?

Yes.


What are the super cool tricks to getting published in high impact journals? I am starting a post-doc in Cognitive Neuroscience and I am interested in publishing my work in high impact journals (e.g., Nature, Science, Behavioral and Brain Science). I have already published review articles in not-so-high impact journals, and I would like to know your thoughts and tips for publishing in high-impact journals. I will be responsible for submitting these papers to these journals and I will be seeing them through to the end. Ay helpful advice and tips would be greatly appreciated!

High impact journals, or in other word, top ranked journals (based on IF) are those publishing the state-of-the-art research works with high percentage of novelty and originality. In my own opinion following tips are very important in getting into the high impact journals:

Select a real challenging problem whose solution/amendment significantly impacts on the domain.
Formulate the problem (using mathematical modeling, visualization, or empirical experiment depending on the domain) and let peers/reviewers see the significance of the problem.
Propose a solution with high degree of novelty in a way that has not been undertaken before for the same problem.
Throughout the research try to follow the conventions of research in your domain in the highest possible level, especially when it comes to evaluation and validation of your work.
In data collection phase, try to follow the most appropriate approaches and use accurate tools to measure/quantify. Maybe looking at similar papers can help you in this.
Avoid silly mistakes. Usually reviewers do not expect to see silly mistakes in the work. If you make small obvious mistakes, how can reviewers ensure the rest of your work is error-free.
Show high level of confidence in understanding and expertise over the domain. If you need to review related works in your paper, try to select those closely related to your work; not any work.
Present your work nicely. Avoid English errors (no grammar and no spelling). Use professional drawing tools to draw high quality figures, draw nice tables, use proper sizing for objects in the paper, not too big, not to small.
There is an approach by some young authors that leave some works to be done in revisions stage, which is not correct to me. Don't send incomplete work to any high quality journal. There will hardly be any chance to correct mistakes. The review is more to evaluate the significance of the work, the novelty, relevance to the journal, and research practice presented in the paper. Reviewers are not English proof reader and their job is not to correct you.

There may be lot more tips that I will compile as I noticed. Hope it works.


Applying to a PhD with a weak masters thesis I am working on my masters thesis which is the first time that I have ever really taken part in research activities. Throughout the experience I have learned a lot and I think that I would like to pursue a PhD in the field that I am currently working in right now. However, I feel that when all is said and done with my masters thesis, the end product will not be that great. There are a number of factors that I think contribute to this - the first being that it's my first time doing original research and second I am the first student of my supervisor, so we are experiencing the student-supervisor relationship both for the first time. But given that, I think it is primarily a function of my introduction to research. A similar analogy would be a first year undergraduate student that doesn't do well, but finds their groove in the last couple years of the program.

My concern, however, is that if I produce a low quality thesis that I might actually be disadvantaged compared to a recently graduated undergraduate student. For example, my undergrad/grad GPA's were (3.5/3.8) and assume that the undergraduate also had a GPA of 3.5-3.8, but I can foresee that a committee might view my weak thesis as an inability to do research in contrast to the undergraduate does not have any published research either, but doesn't show signs of being a "weak researcher" by nature of not having done any.

So the question really becomes whether or not somebodies MSc experience is a good predictor of how they would fair out as a PhD student, and whether somebody applying to a program with an MSc can actually be disadvantaged.

Edit: Perhaps mentioning my perspective on the MSc experience in my SOP might be of benefit? Unless, all of this might be moot if entrance committees might not even read your MSc thesis.

First, you may be judging your own work more harshly than is warranted. It may not be as weak as you think. It is fairly common for problem to appear easier after it is solved than before you began.

Second, no one is likely to read your master's thesis as part of a doctoral application. They will take note of it, and any grade you got, and the general field. At most a few people will read the abstract. They are too busy to read it, frankly.

Third, an application for doctoral study is normally judged on a wide range of criteria with different candidates scoring higher or lower on the various elements. But the overall picture is what is important. "Does this candidate have the necessary background?" "Does this candidate have a good chance of success now and hereafter?" And since most programs are competitive, "How does this candidate compare with others in the pool?".

But, if you are accepted then you still have two hurdles. The first is passing comprehensive qualifying exams. Some advanced coursework may still be needed to get you to that point. The other is writing an acceptable thesis under the direction of an advisor, along with whatever research enables that.

In the US a lot of doctoral students enter the program with no research experience at all. You already have an advantage there, no matter how your recent thesis turned out. And, even at the doctoral level, not every dissertation has the same impact. It represents early work, not the person's best career work.

Make sure your CV is solid with your background accomplishments. Don't negatively characterize your thesis. Make sure your SoP explains your goals, short and long term, along with how your background supports that.

And, though you name a specific school, don't cast a narrow net for a doctoral program. Give yourself more than one chance.


collaboration with a professor from other school Is it acceptable/advisable to seek to collaborate with a former professor (e.g. from undergrad school) while doing research with ones adviser at grad school (the two schools being different)? Of course, under the assumption that a conflict of interest is avoided (the process being transparent with both professors in agreement with it, the narrow research subjects don't overlap, etc.).

The main benefit of this over-hour endeavor is co-authorship in published papers and an additional recommendation source, along with satisfying ones desire to work on that specific problem.

Do it. It can only be good for you. And it is generally acceptable.

Make sure that your supervisor knows what's going on and approves, though if you are using your own time, there should be no reason not to approve.


What are the efficient ways of keeping track of research literature? I am about to start a research career in physics. I am trying to read plenty of research papers. Is/are there a smart way/ways (a software or something else) to keep track of the papers I have already read, partially read, wish to read, my favourites and so on? I am sorry to ask such a dumb question. I am being thoroughly overwhelmed by the unmanagable research literature that exists in my field of interest. Do researchers maintain a 'research diary' like stuff?

Here are two suggestions, but only the first relates to your question.
A simple way to keep track of things is with something as simple as a word processing document, though you can also use spreadsheets or databases in the same way. Simply enter the title and author(s) of the things you read along with a bunch of keywords that are meaningful to you and will let you find documents by keyword. You can also write your own short abstract of each paper, which will help keep the information in your head, not just in the document. This document will let you find them easily in the future. This should be an electronic document so that you can easily search it for keywords and such. Don't forget to do backups, of course.
Entries in this list should be numbered as well. And each paper can have a list of the numbers of other, related, papers. (also see below)
But, the other idea is to keep a research diary that has your own ideas for future papers or research threads that you don't have time for at the moment. Often when working on something and idea will come to you that you might want to work on later. Enter the idea in the diary along with the date and the numbers of any papers (from the list above) that seem to relate to the idea.
If you keep a research diary, keep different ideas on different pages so that you can add to it in the future. Review the diary periodically - especially when you want a new project.
If you are doing patentable work then the research diary should be bound (not loose leaf) hard copy and each page dated. You also want to have the ideas witnessed by someone who signs and dates your pages. This diary can provide evidence of "first use". It is (or was) typical practice at IBM Research for example.


How can a PhD holder safely negotiate the salary level for a TVL E13 position? Unlike the question Safely negotiate a salary for a PhD offer - Germany where the goal was to negotiate the % of the salary of a PhD position, my post instead focuses on the specific level (Stufe) of a 100% TVL E13 position offered to a PhD holder.
Additional details:

The field is CS. So, AFAIK first-year PhD students usually start at Stufe 1 of a 100% TVL E13. So, it seems unfair to let a postdoc start at that level too.
My PhD has not been obtained in Germany, but I spent slightly more than three years working on very similar topics/responsibilities as the ones envisioned in the new position.
I have no competing offers with a higher level.

How can I safely negotiate a higher level/Stufe if the human resources put me on the first level? Do I need support from the new professor? Or the PhD advisor (though not in Germany)?
I have read here that this is likely to depend on HR, but if some of you have some tips, they would be more than welcome.
PS: I have also checked this, this and this. But they do not answer the question of how to negotiate, especially if one's PhD is not from Germany.

First, talk to your future supervisor. If they do not support it, chances are slim. Or, if they say it is impossible, equally so.
If they support it: Find out what the rules are - well, probably your supervisor knows.
Generally, there are two options, depending on the place: Either, the administration decides on their own.  Still, they might not proactively put you  in a higher level, but wait for you to ask for it and supply documents proving that you have previous experience.  In that case, the support of your supervisor will certainly help the process. And it is not unlikely that the administration would ask them if they judge the qualification equivalent.
Second, it could be that your supervisor has to write a justification why you should get a higher level, and then the administration decides.  Certainly, in that case the support of your supervisor is essential.
Finally, it could be that the administration has very rigid rules on this, and the supervisor has no influence on that. In particular, they could have the rigid rule that they don't recognize anything which was not in German public service (that would be the most conservative option, since they don't have to vouch for anything).
Good luck!
(In any case, I would say that level 2 is realistic, since, it only requires >1 year of experience. Level 3 is more ambitious, since it requires >3 years of experience.  In any case, also check the salaries for the different levels - the steps are not uniform.)


What is an online publication? While using a search engine for student theses I noticed a footnote at the bottom of page saying

After a thesis is published on the HSE website, it obtains the status
of an online publication.

So what is precisely an online publication and how it differs from a "real" publication or a preprint? Can you include it in your CV? Is it going to be treated seriously?

While of recent vintage, HSE seems to be very reputable. "Online publication" means that the paper appears on a web site, rather than in print. Whether the site will be maintained in perpetuity or not is a possible issue, but probably not a problem in this case. Online Publication might also mean not yet in print rather than never in print.
But yes, you can include such a thing in a CV and from a reputable publisher, such as HSE, it will be taken seriously.
A "preprint" might be something published by its authors, rather than by a publisher, though some publishers also provide preprints. But having the mark of a publisher, and perhaps its reviewers, makes the validity of the publication clearer.

At the suggestion of Paul Garrett, let me add. Normal publication (both print and online) involves the review of the paper by a few experienced professionals in the field. They normally make suggestions for improvement for the paper and it is only after some revision, small or large, that the editor/journal will "publish" the paper.
"Preprints" are normally done either without or prior to this review. If the author "publishes" the paper, then likely there was no review. The intent of preprints from reputable publishers is to give early access to ideas while the review process proceeds.
When done by authors, as is typical in math, while there is no "imprimatur" of a publisher and its reviewers, the nature of the subject tends to make it a bit risky for an author to put up junk as a preprint. This might be different in other fields that have different standards of truth and value.
But it is the review itself, along with the reputation of the publisher that gives "lasting value" to a publication. I'm assuming here that HSE uses a typical review process prior to "online publication". If not, then it would be full of "junk economics" lowering their own reputation.


Best countries for PhD with good funding I am interested in applying for Ph.D. in the Molecular biology field. However, I'm not sure which countries offer the best Ph.D. programs. I'm looking for good funding and a reasonable cost of living (in that particular country).  Can anyone guide me, please? Thank you.

Try one of the Nordic countries, Netherlands, or Switzerland. All PhD students are employed full-time as essentially research assistants, get a reasonable salary (close to national median salary), and all those countries have high quality research, good universities, and excellent employment prospects.