What is the procedure with regard to unfinished thesis if I am terminated from the program? I am an international student and was enrolled in a PhD program for the last 4 years. My GPA is above 3.8.

I was recently given a termination letter(without any warnings) from my department regarding my PhD program. Apparently my termination is because I missed a deadline for an article submission. I am surprised as I was not given probation for even one semester before termination. It could be because in the last 6 months my progress on my thesis was slow because I was busy with a few personal commitments.
i was getting married and had a couple of unexpected deaths in the family.

EDIT: "The deadline I missed first was a mutually set one to review the final draft of an article to publish. I missed it by more than 10 days as I had a death in the family. I sent the final edition of the draft 5 days before actual submission date for the journal. But got no response. I missed the submission date as I had no feedback from him."

I am in the last year and finishing my data analysis. I was outside the US for my research and my I-20 expired last week and now I am stranded outside the US.
As it is the summer vacation, the staff and my adviser are unavailable on the phone.
I got a reply to my emails as follows:
For the i-20, since you are currently no longer in the program. I cannot complete a graduate student program extension form for you.
I wish it had turned out better for you. I am available at any time to talk.

But the office line is still under answered. I don't have any other number. I have emailed him asking for a time and number I can contact him.
Weirdly got an email today saying let's talk on 17th June. The other members havnt responded.
An old student of the my advisor told me something similar has happened before where a student was told to look for another advisor by my advisor. But she was in her first year. It was because he felt the performance wasn't up to the mark. It was also very unexpected as he was always very cordial with her too in team meetings and department meeting. The girl took up another professor and completed her PhD.

What options do I have?

Should I wait to get back in contact with my department or should I look for other universities and programs?

What happens to the data I have collected? As I was outside the USA during the data collection, I was not given any stipend while I collected the data. Do I have rights on my data or does my adviser or does the department? The data is in audio format collected by me using a set of guidelines created by me but approved by my adviser.

I might be getting ahead of myself, but I am, to say the least, feeling panicked right now.

UPDATE Jan 2020: The advisor never explained properly, but 5 years down the line I understand what happened. My advisor wanted to leave the institute. I believe his contract/commitment made it impossible to do so while I was a student there. He did write me glowing recommendation and helped me secure a good institute in my own country. Due to the setback and credits not transferring, I had to "sit" through some courses but I will be defending my PhD this year. In the mean time I have written chapters and articles with my new and my old advisor. The old advisor runs his own research institute. The data is mine to use without issue.

I do not like being in the dark and my life partner helped me live through those times. What I will say is that power dynamics for an international student make the advisor more powerful than should be. And without an option I had to spend more time than I should have to complete an already long PhD.

Thanks for all the responses. As you can tell I opened this account and have worded everything to ensure that there is anonymity for all involved. The advisor is highly regarded in my field and his willingness to work with me is a disincentive to reveal/smear his name. Now that he has a private research institute without any international students, I hope the same will not be repeated with others.

Departments generally do not terminate PhD students without letting the student's advisor know in advance. The fact that your advisor has not responded to you for 3 weeks, suggests the possibility that he/she is ignoring you. This is reasonable behaviour, if in fact your advisor was behind your termination.

As you are not currently in the US, you need to call your department chair and/or the chair of graduate studies and figure out what is going on. In my opinion, it is too soon to look for a new program or to start really worrying about your data.


How do I tell my PhD advisor that I'm about to start medications that impair my cognition? So I'm bipolar, and earlier this year my doctor put me on antipsychotics.  They made it really hard for me to think, and my advisor expressed frustration with me not doing calculations fast enough, and not being able to keep our entire project in my head at once.  (I didn't tell him about the medication.)

This summer my doctor switched me to antidepressants, and I instantly became smarter and more productive, and my advisor became a lot happier with me.  But it looks like I'm having a hypomanic episode, so my doctor will probably want me to restart antipsychotics when I see her this week.

How should I explain to my advisor that I'm about to become stupid again, possibly for the rest of my time in grad school?  I have a wonderful advisor who seems to genuinely care for my well-being, but I'm afraid he might fire me if he thinks I'll be permanently unproductive.

In the UK, disability legislation says an employer has to make 'reasonable accomodations' for long term health issues like yours. Mental health problems are (sadly) not uncommon in academia. It sounds like you get on well enough with your supervisor that you could just tell him what's up. If you're not comfortable with that, you might consider going through more official channels.


Math / physics conference with one week review period - reasonable? I recently received an invitation to review a mathematics paper for a conference called "International Conference on Physics, Mathematics and Statistics".  It's not one I'm familiar with, but their proceedings are to be published by what appears to be a reputable publisher (IOP; Journal of Physics: Conference Series).

The invitation said "The review period will be 1 week."  This seemed quite unusual based on my experience with math journals - reviewers are usually given at least 2-3 months and often more, as it is necessary to carefully check the proofs for logical correctness.  It made me wonder whether the conference was "real" or predatory.

I declined the invitation with a somewhat snappish comment about the review period being unreasonably short, but I wonder if I was out of line.  I don't have a lot of experience with conferences that publish proceedings.  Was their timeline at all normal or reasonable by prevailing standards?

I see a few different aspects in your question:

Reputation of a journal / conference.
Conference paper review vs Journal paper review.
Acceptable behaviour when responding.

1. Reputation

A sure red flag is a single "international" conference that covers multiple large specialized fields of study. Each one of Physics, Mathematics and Statistics usually have enough size to warrant their own conferences, and in this case typically super specialized conferences. A conference that is so broad is not really valuable to any specialist that attends it. Another red flag is that the website has a date agnostic URL, which means you cannot go back and see past conference outcomes and attendance. Red flag number 3 is that this is the first run of that conference, so no reputation or track record has been established. You mention IOP but the two other's in that same list are both from china, that has to date not been at the forefront or quality reputable research.

2. Conference vs Journal review

You are correct, usually for journals one gets multiple months to review a paper, from my experience conference review cycles are much shorter, but still in the order of 3-6 weeks. This is heavily dependent on the conference and journal. A 1 week review time should raise another red flag with point (1) above.

3. How to respond when you want to say no

Always be polite, but clearly state why you said no. Snappish was maybe not the best way, but since this conference has a high probability of being fake, no harm done. Remember to also indicate if you can be considered for future reviews for that journal even if you said no this time (e.g. when your reason was that you don't have the time right now or that the time available is too short).


Saying no to miscellaneous administrative tasks as a Grad student In my university, graduate students under scholarship have to perform certain tasks like tutoring and grading. I have no problem with that since it is part of the contract.

There are also some miscellaneous tasks like offering to help out for a departmental party (takes 10 hours over a few days), or volunteer to bring some visitors around the school, etc. These are theoretically on a voluntary basis, but when no one volunteers the admin staff starts to get very pushy and "hard sell" people to volunteer. To get a sense of how pushy the admin can get, I recently had to reject the same task thrice (via email), with the admin getting increasingly curt and rude in their email. (The administrators are not professors, they are in charge of departmental duties including paying our stipend.)

I plan to reject around 90% (edit: maybe 50-60% selectively, as there are some events that I am genuinely glad to help out) of such "voluntary tasks", and have already rejected a few, and accepted one. (I am a new graduate student) Will there be any negative repercussions if I do that (reject majority of the tasks)?

Most of the tasks require at most 10-20% of the students to help out (around 10 helpers out of 60 students). Some tasks just need a single or one or two volunteers.

(Edit: my personal background is that I used to be a "yes" person to the extent of burning out (previous experience not in school), hence I need to learn how to say no firmly to certain things. I have also discovered through the hard way that "yes" people get asked to volunteer more and more, few  actually takes into account that I am already volunteering for another event and may need a rest. )

Also are there any tips on how to say no, with respect to Academia? I may try a new strategy of ignoring such emails, the emails do "require" us to respond whether we can make it or not, not sure if ignoring such emails may be a better policy since I think that is what some students do.

Edit: I have found a personal solution is to read up on more self help books on assertiveness. Thanks for all the help (including sarcastic comments, which confirms my new belief that I should not care about what others think). Especially thanks to Professor Romik for restoring my faith in humanity. Hope this thread can help students facing similar predicaments.

Will there be any negative repercussions if I do that (reject majority of the tasks)?

Of course there is no way to say for sure whether there will be any negative repercussions if you keep rejecting those requests. However, frankly, it seems likely to me that:

You will come across as kind of an ass to the administrative staff, and that's not great at all. If your university is at all like mine, there will be a number of times when you need their support in, well, administrative matters, and you will be very low on their priorities list if you make it a point to never or rarely help them out.
You will come across as kind of an ass to the other students, who will surely notice that you never help out and they need to take on more of those duties as a consequence. You will invariably need their help at some point during your studies, and it's not unlikely that they will not be thrilled to help you out then either.
You may come across as kind of an ass to the faculty, which tends to notice if certain students are never volunteering for anything. The extent to which they care is another question, but it seems unlikely that they will consider this a positive attitude. In the worst case, somebody may remember this when the time for letters of recommendation comes up after graduation.

  Also are there any tips on how to say no, with respect to Academia? I may try a new strategy of ignoring such emails, the emails do "require" us to respond whether we can make it or not, not sure if ignoring such emails may be a better policy since I think that is what some students do.

If you really think you should keep on saying "no" to those things, it seems fair to tell the administrators directly that you are not available for volunteer work. They will likely be annoyed, but they will also be annoyed if you keep turning them down. I don't think there is a way to turn them down without annoying them in any way.

(and please don't start stringing together increasingly less plausible excuses - that's just childish)


Are PhD "minimum admission requirements" flexible? I want to apply to do my PhD at Melbourne University, where they require an honours degree with a "substantial research component equivalent to at least 25% of your final year."

I'm about to finish with a first class honours (all A+), but my only research project is equivalent to 1/8th of my final year. I also will do a summer research project this December though.

Will I still have a chance at admission even though I fail to meet their minimum requirement? As far as grades and courses go I believe I'm a good candidate for the actual research area.

Easiest solution, contact the University's graduate admissions office. Admission criteria will depend on funding source, if you or your supervisor have direct funding for the PhD admissions is usually more flexible, but if you're applying for a competitive scholarship you might struggle to compete against peers with MRes/AU Honours/publications.

I'm assuming you're going through the UK honours system based on your question. The Aussie system is a bit different where and honours is more akin to an MRes in the UK (see here for more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honours_degree).


Professor expressed interest in working together, is not responding to emails? Recently I received contact info for a professor close to me, with similar interests (Professor B), from another professor I have a long-standing working relationship with (Professor A).

I spoke with her at the beginning of the month, and had what I thought to be a great call.  She expressed interest in having me work with her on an upcoming grant remotely, in preparation for applying to her graduate program in the upcoming application cycle.  We ended the call with the decision to have me touch base with her in a week, when she would know more about her grant.

The next week, I sent her an email to follow-up, and set up a call to talk more about the project and set up time to visit her lab (something we discussed on the call.  No response for one week.

I sent another email, and received a one sentence response: "Things are hectic now, please touch base in a few days".  I waited 4 days and sent another short message.  It has now been a few days and I still haven't gotten a response.

What are my best next steps?  Should I write this lead off, and not bother sending anymore emails if I don't hear back?

EDIT: That is to say, how long should I wait for a response before reaching out again?  I don't want to be bothersome, but I also don't want too much time to elapse and this project to possibly be scrapped or forgotten.

I also have the option of going to Professor A and starting some work on the project while Professor B is otherwise occupied.  But at the same time, I don't want to seem like I'm "going around" or otherwise excluding Professor B.

It's normal for professors to be extremely busy for an extended period, and not be able to respond to anything that requires significant thought or planning.  I would not say that she is "ignoring" your emails.

I would wait about a week from your last message, and then send one more message with a deadline.

  Dear Professor B,

  Just wanted to touch base again regarding my application and our discussion about working on Project X.  I am trying to make plans for the next few months, so if we are going to move ahead on this, I would need to know by date MM/DD.  I really hope it works out and look forward to hearing from you soon.

After that, do not send any further messages unless you get a substantive response from her.  If you don't get a response by the deadline, move on and look for other opportunities; either she isn't interested, or she hasn't been able to make time to evaluate your request, which would itself be an indication that she wouldn't be easy to work with.


Listing Awards on CV as a Group? I work in a field where a group of about 20 people all have a different role on a project.  When a project wins an award in this field, they typically do not list people individually.  How can I put awards like this on my CV?

Same as you would a normal in-line item, only you'd mention at the end that you were a member of a group name. You can also mention role.

John Doe Award of Excellence, Annual Competition of Cooking Tasty Foods in Somewhere, AA on 1 Jan 1999, as head chef of Team Mashed Potatoes


Academic Curriculum Vitae Template (possibly in LaTeX) It seems that I'll have to prepare my first academic curriculum vitae within few weeks. However, I lack a good template to use to organize it.

  Question: Could you suggest an easy to read yet somehow elegant,
  "professional" (according to current standard) template for an academic cv (possibly in LaTeX)?

I see that there are many cv templates available online, but very few are specifically academic and even less in LaTeX; plus, this is my very first time, so I'd really appreciate experts' suggestions and some guidance.

Thank you.

There are several packages/classes in LaTeX available and you can find a list of many on CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network). There is no preferred package since CVs can be constructed in many ways, some of which may be specific to fields or academic cultures. The moderncv class is quite popular and may be a good starting point but you need to figure out if any one format suits your particular needs best.


Can I simultaneously pursue separate masters and PhD degrees? Can I enroll in a masters degree program via correspondence at another university while simultaneously enrolled as PhD as a regular student from University of Delhi?

The answer to the question as stated is almost certainly "yes". A correspondence degree can be pursued by anyone, regardless of occupation, and your occupation as a PhD student shouldn't affect that. Note that your department may discourage this practice, as you would effectively be holding two full-time jobs (or one full-time and one part-time, depending on how quickly you pursue the correspondence degree).


Given a downloaded PDF of a publication, is there any way to detect if it's a journal or conference paper? I have some downloaded papers and I am going to store journals and conferences in separate folders. My problem is that by having a simple look at the PDF file, I cannot detect if that paper is journal or conference. Some papers mention it. However, how to detect the others?

Just search for the title of the paper as a phrase, online. That will almost always lead you either to the journal, or to the conference.

If that doesn't work, go through the list of authors one at a time, and find their university home pages, if they exist; from there, look for their list of publications: that will often have the full citation, and that will let you know whether they are journal or conference papers.

You could also try searching on one or more of the online reference compilers, such as CiteULike, Sparrho, Zotero, Mendeley, or even serial spammers ResearchGate

There are also existing tools such as Mendeley Desktop that will try to find a pdf's metadata for you, with varying degrees of success.


Tips for faculty members seeking administrative responsibilities How does a faculty member seek administrative responsibilities in a Department? Do such positions come in a cycle only? Or should the faculty member make his/her willingness known in advance to the Chair? Are there any politics/wrangling involved?

Moreover, for an assistant professor, is there anything that could be done during PhD so that the profile comes out as someone willing to take admin responsibilities?

Don't worry, administrative responsibilities will find you unless you flee them, and even then you probably won't avoid them.  At most universities, young faculty are expressly spared administrative responsibilities so that they can focus on research and get tenure.

If you're really looking for them, generally all you need to do is vocally speak your mind on every issue that comes up.  Most of your colleagues will feign apathy in order to avoid being assigned to a committee.


How to publish analysis work of an approach worse that state-of-the-art? I am currently working on an engineering problem for which I have developed a new and quite effective solution.  My research field is electronics (if that matters).

The problem is quite complex as it revolves about using a single circuit configuration for multiple voltage ranges (conversion of ac voltage to high dc voltage).  State-of-the-art circuits offer unacceptable performance for input voltage range A and reasonable performance for input voltage range B.

My solution offers reasonable performance for voltage range A but the performance for voltage range B is slightly worse than state-of-the-art.

Since the problem can be broken to two individual parts (low voltage range and high voltage range), I plan to publish the first part on its own (e.g., novel high voltage step-up converter). However, I am debating how to publish the second part that on its own does not offer better performance than state-of-the-art. I have spent half a year developing, evaluating, and optimizing the circuit and I believe the engineering society would benefit from this work.

I am thinking along the lines of "Analysis and optimization of ...".

Perhaps it would result in a paper that is too long to publish, but you might consider, at least, putting the two results into the same paper and giving an analysis of each case.

Show how and why it works for one range, but, in a later section, show why it fails to work for the other.

The overall suggestion here is that the analysis of the result and the possible insight it might bring to the general case is more important than each result individually. That is the perspective of a mathematician, anyway. The insight of the analysis/proof is more important than the theorem itself.


PhD with or without company partner What are advantages and drawbacks of starting a computer science PhD funded both by the university and a company, compared to a PhD fully funded by the university?

I can provide more details about the context pointing out some hypotheses that I have done so far.

A company:

will provide proprietary data;
will stimulate about solutions for current issues;
will impose constraints on PhD topic (it could be slightly modified, but no more);
will impose some constraints about publications, e.g. they would delay publications until new outcomes are started in the company production line.

On the other hand, without a company:

no proprietary data;
less stimulating scenario compared to issues coming from a real scenario (?);
free management of PhD topic (you could modify significantly during the 3-year research);
no problem about publications;
more "theoretical" research.

I will appreciate any experiences, especially computer science area.

As I was observing this in Academia it works like "get as much clear funding as you can work out"? With a decent funding, you can diminish all stated problems; inversed move is much harder. That concerns from a side looked like you're already at a peak with a solid financial foundation and choosing from a huge amount of options. Maybe, the situation differs, but recheck the reality, just for sure.


How does the US government shutdown affect academics? I hope this question does not offend our American fellows.

I've read in news that the US government is partially closed  and many agencies and services run by US federal government is no longer available, for example national parks, many websites, etc. I was wondering if this temporary government shutdown has any negative effects on academic life in US?

It definitely has. And by that, it has an impact even on academic life outside of the US. One of the most important data and literature resource in medical and life science is the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, running for example the literature database PubMed. Now it has a statement on its website saying

  Due to the lapse in government funding, the information on this web site may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the web site may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted.

Concerning the National Institute of Health, the website http://www.usa.gov/shutdown.shtml states that

  Research into life-threatening diseases and other areas will stop, and new patients won’t be accepted into clinical  trials at the National Institutes of Health

I'm not sure how to interpret this, but it could mean that the research personnel is on unpaid leave.


As a referee, is it okay to ask for references to be removed? Say I received a paper for review. Afterwards I discover that there are cited references that are not related to the discussed subject, or there are elements in the bibliography that are not referenced in the manuscript.

As a referee, is it ok to ask for the removal of such references?

I ask because I have never heard of someone suggesting the removal of references, but on the contrary, I have many times heard of researchers self citing or citing friends just to enhance their numbers.

Yes, the spurious references should be removed, as stated by @Solar Mike. There is a diplomatic way to accomplish this without making any assumptions or accusing anyone of anything. Write something along the lines of

  The current bibliography contains a number of references which are not explicitly cited in the main text. They are: (insert complete list of numbers). The main text should either be extended to include a discussion of these references or the references should be deleted.

You compile the list by ticking of all explicitly cited references as you read through the main text. Any entries left are spurious.

A tool like LaTeX typically has a command which is used to print the entire bibliography. Spurious references are often generated by forgetting to disable this command when the final draft is compiled. If you can identify the tool, then you can insert a helpful statement to that effect, i.e.

  As you are using LaTeX, please check if manuscript contains a \nocite{*} command.

EDIT: I just realized that my original text does not cover the case where the manuscript contains references which are cited in the main text, but appear to be irrelevant. A diplomatic approach can proceed along the lines of:

  The author(s) should extend the discussion of the following references: (insert complete list of dubious references). Currently, it is not clear to the reader how these references relate to the subject under discussion.

This allows the authors to either explain why the references are relevant or remove them if they are irrelevant.


Should I take consent before listing referee names? I am about to submit my research article in a Mathematics journal and the online system is asking to mention three Referee/Reviewer names.
Should I take the consent of a few experts in my topic before I enlist three expert names as referees, by individually mailing them?
I think, I should take.
Any suggestions and advice regarding the question, please?

No. You do not need consent from them. There is no convention to do that.
Usually, the whole peer review process is an anonymous one, with the selection of reviewers occuring at the editors' full discretion. The editors have various channels to find suitable reviewers, and they usually do not tell the reviewers (nor the authors) how they came across them.


5 credits/year is a full time undergrad course load - why would a full-time 2-year masters require the student to earn 5.0 credits to graduate? 5.0 credits/year describes a full-time undergraduate course load at my school.
5.0 credits/2 years describes a full-time graduate course load at my school.
Students may not enroll in more than 3 credits/term (6/year or 1 extra class/term).
400 level courses at my school can count as a 0.5 credit toward either an undergraduate degree or toward a master's degree.
An undergraduate student may take a full course load of 400 level courses.

My attempt to answer my question:

Perhaps graduate courses require twice the work that undergraduate courses do.
But if that were the case, then one could take mostly 400 level courses and do nearly half as much work as she would do if she took graduate courses.
Perhaps 400 level courses require the same amount of work (say twice as much) as lower level graduate courses require.
But if that were the case, then an undergraduate student who enrolled in a full course load of 400 level courses would have enrolled in a course load equivalent to 5 credits/term when the university calls 3 credits/term an overload and prohibits students from enrolling in more than 3 credits/term.

So why would a full-time master's program require a half-time course load?

It's not clear here if you think a 'half-load' of courses is too high, or too low for a Master's.

Here's a perspective from my university. Here, your course work serves two purposes in your masters:

Course work is there to rectify gaps in your background. As a school with a huge international student population, we have a huge amount of variance in skill-sets. As a result courses are there partially in order to help make up for missing background, or to get the students onto more common footing.
Introduction to topics. Here you're admitted without having to declare a supervisor or a topic. The first year of courses serves to introduce students to topics and professors-- possible supervisors.

After two semesters, most students have paired off with supervisors, and have started their research, which will dominate their time for the subsequent 16+ months, until they defend their thesis.


Is research experience or GPA more important when applying to MSCS programs It seems that for PhD programs the research is more important but, which is more important for masters programs?

The answer, here, is that it really depends strongly on the individual program, since Masters programs vary much more than Ph.D. programs in both their purpose and organization.

For some programs, you can essentially get automatic entry based on grades alone (my own Masters was that way, for example).  For others, research and recommendation letters may weigh in significantly, especially if students are funded rather than self-funding. Research does generally weigh much less than for a Ph.D., however, particularly since a Master is often expected to be a terminal and industrial-focused degree.

Thus, in general, GPA is significantly more important than research, but the degree to which this is true varies wildly by program.


Do I need to attach the letter of acceptance of an accepted paper along with the paper itself to my CV for applications to phd programs? In an application to a phd program, if I claim that some paper of mine is accepted and the paper has not yet been published, then should I attach the letter of acceptance along with the manuscript itself to my CV?

I assume logically the stuff should be done, but I am not sure if attaching a copyright-transferred manuscript is legal or ethical. So what is the best strategy with respect to a situation like this one?

The typical way to list such a paper is

  'author, author, and author. "Title", Journal of XYZ, to appear'

That should be enough with regards to your C.V.  Anyone in academia will be familiar with this notion, and is unlikely to be think that you might be lying.  After all, the truth will become obvious one way or another shortly.

If they want to see copies of your papers, it's OK to attach a preprint as well, as long as you clearly label it: "Preprint, do not distribute." Many journals will in preproduction have sent you a proof copy with exactly this as a watermark.
Sharing in this way clearly falls under fair use protection, even if you have transferred copyright, just as if you were showing it to them in person.


Using an image under Creative Commons license in PhD thesis I would like to use this image of a Star Trek tricorder in my PhD thesis as cover art for an "Outlook" style chapter. It is listed as being under CC-BY-SA. I believe this is fine, but I wanted to confirm. As attribution, I have an acknowledgements section at the end of the chapter which says

"Chapter cover art from Bobbie Johnson, used under CC BY-SA"

Is this an acceptable use/attribution of this image? More generally, does using Creative Commons licensed material in my thesis pose problems for the licensing of the thesis itself? If I am reading it correctly I do not need to license the thesis under CC as long as I don't modify the image at all, is this correct?

License version

Note that the author licensed it under CC BY-SA 2.0 (that’s what it says on the Flickr page), while the blog post that made use of this image specifies CC BY-SA 4.0 instead. It’s allowed to license contributions to this image under a newer BY-SA license, but not the original work (only the author may choose to do this). So unless the blog post author got the permission from the image author, their attribution is not correct, and you should assume that the image is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Attribution

Your attribution isn’t sufficient.

For CC BY-SA 2.0, a correct attribution (for using the original image) contains (if available):

name (or pseudonym) of the author
title of the work
URI of the work

and you must specify

the URI of the license (or include a copy of the license)

So it could look like this:

  Chapter cover art: tricorderunbox4 (https://www.flickr.com/photos/bojo/4078685614) from Bobbie Johnson, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

or like this if hyperlinks are possible:

  Chapter cover art: tricorderunbox4 from Bobbie Johnson,  licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

ShareAlike

The ShareAlike (SA) element of the license requires that derivative works have to be licensed under a compatible license, too.

Deciding whether or not a work becomes a derivative work isn’t always easy. And it’s not relevant if the image got modified:

A work could become a derivative even if the image is used unmodified.
If a work doesn’t become a derivative, you could still edit the image (it would only affect the license of that image, not your whole document).

In your case, I think that the thesis doesn’t become a derivative work, as the image doesn’t affect the rest of its content in any way. So it should be fine to not license your thesis, or to license it under a different license.


How long does it take to receive feedback for Junior Professorship (W1) in Germany after interview? I was invited for an interview in a German university in Ruhr area, for a Junior Professorship position.
In total three people (including me) were interviewed, so I guess it should not take so much for the committee to decide!
Does any one have any idea how long it will take for them to conclude the recruiting process? I have an offer for a postdoc and need to let them know if I would take the offer for the postdoc.
Thanks.

Christian Clason's comment is basically correct. The hiring process for W1 is the same as W2 and W3 and reports are collected after the interviews. So the time from interview to notification is not short. However, it don't need to be six month.

What usually happens after
the interviews is that the committee solicites reports and the referees get about six to ten weeks for their reports. Then the committee meets again and forms its recommendation. This is the first point at which you may be told your suggested listing, but this is unofficial and at some places even against the rules. The next steps are that a number of committees have to approve the list (can be something between two and four) and only after the head of the university has approved the list, the first place may be informed officially. This whole process may well take six months, but it can be less, but do not expect less than six weeks between interviews and unofficial notification and not less then three months between interview and official offer.


How to handle one doctoral supervisor being unhappy over a doctoral student's preference for the other supervisor? For my doctoral programme, I have 2 supervisors: 1 academic (i.e. a professor) and the other an industrial.
Over the past few years I've found that my industrial supervisor isn't really able to contribute to my research that much. It's not that he isn't smart or anything like that, its just that he doesn't seem interested in me producing actual research and would rather I just implement existing literature or settle for something that doesn't fulfill my research aims.
I don't really want to go into too much detail but essentially my industrial supervisor has a low opinion of me because from their perspective it seems like I just do whatever my academic supervisor tells me. This isn't true at all.
Before knowing this (he told me himself in no uncertain terms) I felt like I could respect my industrial supervisor and talk to him about my work but now I don't really want to talk to him unless I have to.
What is the best way to deal with my situation?
For context, the current contact arrangements are that I speak/video call my industrial supervisor every weekday. With my academic supervisor its a back and forth email chain with a video call when we can't express things in an email. Prior to COVID, I would work at my industrial supervisor's company everyday and have to arrange skype calls from the office to my academic supervisor. This was difficult to do, so I only really spoke to him once a month and saw him in person every other month (its a 600km round trip).

While there are lots of ways to go about this, one is to have your primary (academic) advisor intervene in some way with the other person. The industrial person needs to understand that your doctoral research comes first and shouldn't be compromised.
But, this assumes a few things that might not be true. First is that the industrial person can't put a veto on your work somehow. But better that the two "senior" people have a discussion about priorities than you fighting with a more senior person.
But analyze the situation before taking any advice, including this one. It is you that is at risk.
And, for what it's worth, your preference for the academic advisor is certainly appropriate.


Polite message for my supervisors who do unfair things that would totally leads me to lose my study I am currently working on finishing my PhD thesis. For about 3 years and 6 months of my study, I am suffering from the absence of my supervisors. She always travels for 6 months, sometimes two months without contact. My second supervisor takes only 20% as supervision.

Any help, please?

If things are as you describe there is likely no help for you on this site. Ultimately, you need to make your supervisor(s) happy with your work.

I can see elements of misfeasance (lack of doing the job properly) here, but we can't solve that. An email, even if polite, isn't going to solve your problems.

If you believe that your advisor hasn't properly guided you and is now abandoning you, then you need to deal with that locally. Either by working out a better (closer) relationship with the advisor or making an appropriate complaint to local authorities.

But even if you make a successful complaint, it won't get you any closer to a degree and might get you farther away.

The question I would want to ask of the advisor is about what you need to do to earn the doctorate. If you can get a plan, a written plan, and it is reasonable, then just do that and move on.

You attribute bad motives to both of your advisors. That may be true, but it may also be a problem. If the second advisor is just "devil's advocate" it can actually strengthen your work, as long as that is all it is. Saying that your advisor doesn't want a written record may be true, but if true is a serious allegation. If I were adjudicating your case, I would question that sort of statement.

Look first for a path to completion. If that is impossible, then an MS/MA may be all you can reasonably achieve in this situation. If it allows you to go on afterwards it may be good enough, though clearly not ideal. But find out, if you can, what it would take to make the advisors happy. Make sure it is clear and in writing.


Is it possible to get application fee refunded from PhD programs that miss admission decision deadlines? I'm sure I already know the answer to this question, but I feel compelled to ask.

With the passing of midnight a couple hours ago, the April 15 deadline used by many US graduate schools, by which applicants should accept/decline offers of admission (as decided by the Council of Graduate Schools) has passed. While I have made my choice, there is still at least one (pretty well-respected) school from which I never received a decision. Thus, in order to have waited out a decision from this program, I would have had to risk losing other offers (one of the conundrums that the April 15 resolution aims to avoid).

They were totally fine with taking my application fee back in November, but never seemed to get around to making a decision on my application (it's still pending online and there has been no response to emailed inquiries). I understand rolling admissions, but this is absurd. Is there any chance I will be able to get my application fee refunded, seeing as they did not keep their end of the deal? I guess I'm asking if anyone has ever successfully made this argument to a school.

You do not a have a leg to stand on, legally, morally or otherwise.  The thing you should actually indict them for is not responding to your emails. That is rude; I think you should probably accept that as an implicit rejection.  If they were still thinking of admitting you they would have checked on your status by this point.

The issue with your argument is that it doesn't actually follow the text of the resolution.  The binding part of resolution you cited says "Students are under no obligation to respond to offers of financial support prior to April 15."  So, schools have agreed not to withdraw an offer because you haven't accepted it before April 15th, and not to try to hold you to an offer you've accepted if you change your mind before April 15th.  The school in question has held to their end of the bargain perfectly, since they never made you an offer.

The resolution says nothing about the school having to make a decision before April 15th. Of course, schools are well aware that it will be much harder to get people after April 15th, so they make an effort to make offers earlier. However, this is not a deal, this is the department acting in their own self-interest.

Unfortunately, there's too much uncertainty in the process to guarantee you'll make all offers before April 15th.  After all, you have some plan for what your incoming class will be, you make offers to many more people than that, and you hope that you guessed the yield correctly.  If the people who've already been offered admission are waiting until April 15th to make up their minds, you're then left with a great deal of uncertainty as the deadline approaches, since it will be a big problem if your incoming class is such bigger or much smaller than you planned.  Thus, there often are people who you are not sure you want to reject, but not sure you have the money to fund.  In my department, we still have a number of people waitlisted, since we haven't filled our class yet.  Usually, such people will be formally notified they are on a waitlist; I think again, that's in the department's self-interest and helps clarify things for the student.  So, again, it's likely this is an implicit rejection, which for whatever reason they haven't bothered to formalize.


How can I finish my algorithms research project in 3 weeks? So I'm doing a research project on a problem in graph theory and my conference deadline is just 3 weeks away. I need to develop a novel approximation algorithm for this problem and test it on synthetic data. I've already read a bunch of papers and have done a bunch of experiments to discover certain properties of graphs, but I haven't started writing the algorithm nor the paper. The good news is  Is it possible for me to do this in 3 weeks (assuming I work a total of ~200 hours)? A deadline extension is completely out of the question. The good news is that I have an expert professor mentoring me and he'll help make the paper more mathematically rigorous. Does anyone have some advice as for how I can finish this in 3 weeks? Thanks!

You won’t know if you can do it until you give it your very best shot. All we can say is that what you are asking about doing is very difficult. Some people might be able to cobble something together in 3 weeks. It won’t be as good as it might have been if they had, say, 3 months, but some rare very talented and hardworking people might produce something halfway decent.

Other people won’t come up with something good even in 3 months, or 3 years. It depends. We don’t know you, and we don’t know how hard this goal is.

I suggest that you give it your best effort. Even if you “fail” (in the narrow sense of not producing a minimum viable paper by the deadline), I believe it will be an educational and very rewarding experience to work extremely hard for the next few weeks in an attempt to meet this deadline. It will both advance your research substantially, which will yield some useful benefits in the future regardless of whether you meet this particular deadline, and teach you a lot about yourself and what you’re capable of. In my opinion, most people (especially younger, less established ones) use maybe 15% of their true intellectual capacity. Learning how to make the most of your potential is an incredibly important life skill that separates almost all successful people from everyone else, and trying to meet a crazy, impossible-looking deadline is a fantastic way to get on the path to acquiring this skill.

Finally, I don’t want to be guilty of giving you any more reasons to procrastinate by giving you long psychology blogs to read, but here is something that might give you a bit of hope/inspiration. Good luck!


Major Career Change --> Grad School Help? I received a B.A degree in political science with a minor in natural resource conservation & management last year but after an internship in Washington D.C. and looking through job postings I have decided that I studied the wrong thing and would like to make a career change already. Ultimately i would like to do research in a lab with plants in regards to nutrition (which my internship opened me up to the possibility of) but since I got a B.A and not a B.S I am lacking in a strong science foundation that would help me get into a science graduate program. I would study Food Science and Nutrition now instead but ever school has such different course offerings I'm not sure what classes to take to help me get in to grad school. My GPA was average when I graduated but I am now really passionate about this new career field and need to go back to school I think I order to make this shift. Do I take a lot of random science prerequisites at a community college and then transfer them to the university I apply to to show I have taken the necessary steps? Too bad there is not a post-bacc program for non-medical majors. Any advice on what I need to do?? Thanks

First, do some research on graduate programs you're interested in, to see what the entrance requirements are. Since students come from different majors, programs want to make sure you have the right background. Anything you don't have, you'll want to take as a course, so it depends on how many holes you have to fix.

Side projects and volunteering opportunity in your area, are great to gain experience and show interest, and ensures your passion is solid. Show you have a good work ethic -- since your GPA is average, find other examples to convince graduate admissions that you work hard. Look at what you've done during college and figure out how show you've developed soft skills (communication, leadership, presentation skills...), and so on.

The overriding theme is you need to convince the admissions representatives that you are as likely to succeed as students who took this as their undergraduate degree and did well. This means you will probably need to get a better foundation, as well as experience in the field to document interest.

You can read other related questions for related advice. For example, check here Is it possible to attend graduate school in pure math after undergrad in CSE?


Publisher didn't make change to paper and now the paper still has the error I recently published a paper with IEEE. During the publishing stage, I had to provide them the figures named [MyName]FigureX_a, [MyName]FigureX_b etc...

By accident, I got two figures wrong and they were named FigureX_b and FigureX_a instead of FigureX_a and FigureX_b. During publishing, I spotted this error and told them to fix the problem. They did fix it at the time and I approved the changes.

However, when I received the final complete PDF, the error was present once again. In the e-mail, it stated that "Please note this is not the final version of the article and corrections will not be reflected in this PDF". I thought that the change would be reflected in the final version so did not bother to e-mail.

I have just seen the final version on the web-site and the error is still present. This error should be pretty evident to anybody reading the paper. The figure is part of many other subfigures so the inconsistency is apparent. The overall message of the figure is not lost and the results are still the same apart from the order being wrong.

I am unsure what to do. On one hand, I want to contact IEEE and complain. I unfortunately do not have the proofs of the pdfs that were provided for review but I have my correspondence saved. On the other hand, I think the error is minor enough that any reader should understand what happened.

The file that will be on PubMed is correct though. I could in theory submit it to ArXiv with the correct ordering, copyright notices and other information required by IEEE(DOI,PMID etc.).

Does this require any drastic actions?

Send the publisher an email mentioning that an error that was detected and discussed during the revision period has crept into paper. Don't attribute blame. Ask politely that the error is fixed.

As noted by C26, errors are common. It doesn't matter if the mistake isn't fixed. But, it will probably bug you if you don't try to get it fixed. (Such issues probably won't bother you after you've published a few more mistakes ;-)


Should an applicant to an university mention that her spouse is currently a student in the same University, as part of her SOP? While writing one's Statement of Purpose for applying to a grad program, should one mention that her spouse is also a grad student in the same university? What are the pro's and con's of that approach - while on one hand, it shows that the candidate is very likely to accept an offer made by the dept, it might also imply that the presence of her spouse is the main reason the applicant wants to get admitted, which might not sit well with the Admissions Committee?

This really can be a two-edged sword.

Pros: You are likely to really come and stay since your spouse is there. You can argue that you know much (positive) about the place through your spouse which has made you select the place.

Cons: You may be seen as applying because your spouse is there and not because you think the place is exactly where you want to go and be. In other words, you make a choice out of practical and not academic reasons. (largely what you already stated)

So, first of all, it is no-ones business why you apply to go to a certain place. Of course the people who read your application will evaluate your interest and so anything that strengthens the application is good anything that doesn't can be left out. Although the location of one's spouse should not be grounds for admitting (or not) a person, it is possible people read things into the fact that you did not originally anticipate. If you want to state that you already know the place is good, you may do so by demoting your spouse to a friend. I have to confess I am not at all happy about writing this which seems so negative towards mentioning your relationship but it stems from knowing that you cannot predict how people interpret things and it is therefore better to be neutral and focus on the academic rather than putting up personal reasons for a choice.


Harvard citation style: Is it "...as mentioned in Author (year)..." or "...as mentioned in (Author, year)"? I know that you can distinguish two ways of referencing scientific work in the Harvard (or author-year) citation style:

You cite the idea or work in general:
"Recently, a new approach for SOME STUFF was demonstrated for the first time (Author, year)."

You cite the author:
"Recently, Author (year) demonstrated SOME STUFF for the first time."

However, what is the correct way, if you want to state that something was mentioned in a certain work?
"...as explained in Author (year)..." or "...as explained in (Author, year)..."?
My personal opinion would be the second option, because the idea is not located "in" the author, but "in" the work he published. But in our group opinions differ strongly on this one. Can anyone provide a reliable and authoritative resource?

In the second option you suggest, the sentence is not complete. If you would leave out the part between (),  the sentence would not make any sense.
You should, as also @Peter Jansson suggests, write sth. along the lines of "As author (2013) explained, ..."


Including publications on CV if none are peer-reviewed I'm updating my CV and need advice regarding publications.  I am formerly a Professor of Human Services and Counselor Education.  I am not currently in academia, but am a licensed counselor in private practice... just updating the CV to be prepared for possible future opportunities.

I have written articles for publication in magazines, newspapers, and online resources (blogs, etc.) for 13 years or more.  I've also been quoted as an "expert" in numerous articles that other folks have written... some are national publications for our profession.

I do not have any peer reviewed journal articles at all.

Should I list the articles for newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc. that I have written on my CV?  Assuming APA style if so. Under what heading shall I list them so it is not confused with academic publications?
How do I list articles in which I have been quoted by another author?  Under what heading shall I list them? I've not had any luck with my research on this one.

I would put all of the non-academic writing you've done under a heading like "Other Writing for a Popular Audience". Beware that such publications won't count for much in applying for faculty jobs, or at least, that they won't replace peer-reviewed academic research. However, they might be a "value-add" at some places.

You never list in the CV where you've been cited. (At least not that I've ever seen). Instead, what I see people do is mention their citations as a single line in the cover letter. "My work has been cited in prestigious venues like The Journal of X Studies and X Studies Review."


Should I round up or down my GPA on a resume? My current cumulative GPA is 3.875. When filling in my information on an online job-site, I can only choose between entering 3.9 or 3.8. In this case, should I round up to 3.9 or round down to 3.8?

There are no formal requirements on how GPA is calculated and reported in one's CV unless you are filing an application to a particular company that has articulated such rules (which I have not heard of). Such rules usually exist during the admission process to the universities (especially many caveats and intricacies are present for grades conversion in the case of international applications), some academic awards, and other legal matters (for example, immigration procedures).
Thus, the decision is on you. Rounding 3.875 to 3.9 seems to me fairer when the exact rules are not specified. So, in your particular case you need to round to an available value, and I suggest using "Round to the nearest standard value" without any "ups" and "downs".


Use of automated assessment of programming assignments (This is a reworking of Software for submitting and testing programming assignments.)

First, a bit of background. Many courses in applied mathematics have a programming component, where students are asked to implement algorithms (say, in Matlab) and possibly test them using a given set of interesting data. Although they are a valuable part of the education, these usually receive little love from the students (who, moreover, have rarely received a rigorous  training in programming). The result is -- with rare exceptions -- lazy hacks at best and "at least it looks like code" (often followed by my favorite, "it worked on my machine") at worst.

So I am thinking about having students submit their programming assignments via an automated assessment software. The idea is to give them instant feedback on their (repeated) submission with the goal of

saving the TAs from having to check every submission and (if they are generous) inserting all the missing semicola to make the code run, and
trying to increase the student's motivation to do more than the bare minimum by introducing some gamification elements (giving points for the fastest/most accurate code, for example, or a current ranking to encourage resubmitting improved solutions).

Hence my question (which is hopefully relevant to other disciplines as well): Has anybody tried such a thing? Did it actually lead to less work and/or more student involvement? Any hints on what to do, and what to avoid?

(I know there is the VPL module for Moodle, and we have an in-house system that can provide the necessary functionality, so I'm not asking for software recommendations here. That said, if some software provides a specific feature you've used successfully, by all means mention it -- bonus points if it's open source.)

TL;DR

We did something along this lines for Java-based programming assignments. Students and TAs generally like it. It was a lot of work for us.

(Very) Long Version

I used to teach software engineering at a large public university in Austria. We implemented a similar approach for two courses back there, for a 400+ students bachelor-level distributed systems course, and for a 150 students master-level course on middleware and enterprise application engineering. Both courses included large, time-consuming Java-based programming assignments, which students needed to solve individually three times per semester.

Traditionally, students would submit their solutions for both courses as Maven projects via our university-wide Moodle system. After the deadline, TAs would download and execute the submissions, and grade manually based on extensive check lists that we provided. There was usually a bit of huffing and puffing among students about this grading. Sometimes, TAs would not understand correct solutions (after looking at dozens of similar programs, your mind tends to get sloppy). Sometimes, different TAs would grade similar programs differently (the sheer size required some parallelization of grading and the tasks were complex, hence it was impossible to do check lists that covered all possible cases). Sometimes, the assignments were actually under-specified or unclear, and students lost points for simple misunderstandings. Sometimes, applications that actually worked on the student's machine failed on the TA's machine. Generally, it was hard for students to estimate in advance how many points their submissions would be worth. Given that those two courses are amongst the most difficult / most time-consuming courses in the entire SE curriculum, this was all but optimal.

Hence, we decided to move to a more automated solution. Basically, we codified our various check lists into a set of hundreds of JUnit test cases, which we gave to our students in source code. Additionally, we kept back a smaller set of tests, which were similar but used different test data. The tests would also serve as reference implementation - if the assignment text did not specify how e.g., a given component should behave in a given borderline case, what the tests expected was the expected behavior. Our promise to the students was that, if all the tests for a given task pass, and the student did not game our test system (more on this below), not much can go wrong anymore with the grading (it was possible to get minor point losses anyway for things impossible to test automatically, but those things could not amount for more than a small percentage of all points).

EDIT after comments
Note that I was saying more automated, not fully automated. Human TAs still look at the code. There is no grading Web service or something like that (this usually does not work, as keshlam correctly notes). On a high level, what we did is that we provided the requirements for students not only in written text anymore, but also in form of formal executable unit tests. The new process is roughly like that:

TA downloads submission from Moodle and starts tests (takes about 10 minutes).
While tests are running, TA browses over the code, does some spot checking of code, and checks a few things not covered by the tests.
When the tests are done, the TA notes down the results of the tests and his own observations.
If something severe happens (e.g., compile error), the TA sighs, takes a deep breath, and falls back to manually grading (and, likely, complaining a bit in our mailing list).

Advantages:

Students now have a good feeling about how many points they will get in the end. No nasty surprises anymore.
The TA effort for grading is now much, much lower, maybe 1/3 of the previous time. Hence, they have more time to look at problematic solutions and help students actually produce assignments.
The tests, good or bad (more on this later), are the same for everybody. Lenient and strict TAs are much less of a problem.
Working solutions now work no matter if the grading TA understands the solution or not.
Students get rapid feedback on the quality of their solution, but not so rapid that it makes sense to just program against the tests without thinking. One good side effect of the way we built our tests is that simply executing the tests for many tasks takes  10+ minutes (starting an application server, deploying code, ...). Students need to think before starting tests, just like they would if they would test against, e.g., a real staging server.
Students do not need to waste time writing test applications / test data. Before, one problem that made the student effort in these courses skyrocket was that students did not only have to program the assignments themselves, but also needed to write various demo programs / test data sets to test and showcase their solutions. This has become entirely obsolete with the automated test framework, significantly reducing the amount of boilerplate code that students need to write. In the end, we can now focus more on the actual content of the labs, and not on writing stupid test code.
All in all, our personal impression as well as student evaluations have shown that the majority of students appreciates the automated test system.

Problems:

The initial effort for us was certainly non-trivial. Coming up with the first version of the tests required a concerted effort of 6 or more TAs and 2 junior faculty over multiple months during the summer (not full-time of course, but still). Note that this was even though we utilize a widely used, standard testing framework - the effort was just in codifying our grading rules, finding and defining all corner cases, and writing everything down in useful tests. Further, as the assignments are complex distributed systems, so were the tests - we had to start application servers in-memory, hot-deploy and undeploy code, and make sure that all of this works out of the box on all major OS versions. All in all, writing the tests was an actual project, that required a lot of leadership and time commitment.
While, overall, our total time spent arguing about grading has decreased, it is not zero. Most importantly, as students can now see the grading guidelines clearly written down in source code, they seem to feel more compelled to question requirements and grading decisions than before. Hence, we now get a lot of But why should I do it like that? Doing it in X-Y-Other-Way would be much better! questions and complaints (incidentally, in practically all cases, the "much better" way is also much less work / much easier for the student).
While we were able to cover most of our original assignments, some things are impossible to cover in tests. In these cases, TAs still need to grade manually. In addition, in order to make our test framework technically work, students are now a bit more restricted in how they can solve the assignments than before.
Some students feel compelled to try to game our grading system. They spend significant efforts into finding solutions that do not actually solve the assignments but still get full points. In general, these efforts fail (as we actually have pretty sophisticated backend tests that do not only check whether the behavior is correct on interface level, but also look "under the hood"). Occasionally, they succeed, leading us to improve our tests.
Initially, we received some flack from a few students for a small number of bugs in our tests. The bugs were easy to fix and mostly not particularly severe, and most students understand that if you roll out a couple thousand lines of Java code for the first time, bugs will happen. However, some will take the opportunity to complain. A lot.
We had the impression that the number of copied solutions (plagiarism) was up the first time we rolled out the automated tests. Note that we had automated plagiarism checks long before, and nothing had changed in this regard, but apparently students assumed that cheating would go unnoticed with the automated testing.


How much background material should a mathematical research paper include? I've just written my first mathematical research paper. It proves some new results, which while not ground-breaking are (according to an expert in the field) at least somewhat interesting and surprising. At the moment however, I spend more of the paper developing the background material (giving standard definitions and constructions, proving standard lemmas) than proving the main theorems.

Is this a problem? The way I see it, there are several arguments for and against:

For:

The background material is "standard" in the sense that anyone who works on this class of problems would know the definitions or results in some form. However, this is at most a few hundred people, while if I include the background material my paper should be comprehensible to an advanced undergraduate.
Some of the background results are part of the folklore of the field, and I've never been able to find a proof of them in literature. While they are believable and not hard to prove, I feel someone should bother doing it. More selfishly, this is one more reason for people to cite my paper.
I don't know of any one reference which states all the background material I need, so if I don't include it my readers have to chase down multiple sources and I have to use conflicting notations.

Against:

It may be annoying to an expert in the field, although they could skip much of it and mainly refer to the background section for notation.
It makes the paper longer, although even with the background the paper is not long (13 pages).
From what I've heard, it is generally considered bad practice to restate definitions and constructions states elsewhere and to reprove theorems available in literature. In part this is because it gives the impression that I haven't read the literature. This is exacerbated by the fact that I only cite ~5 previous works, mostly for further reading or alternative presentations of some of the background.

I'd like advice on this from someone with experience writing such papers.

I'd recommend putting in as much explanation, context, and background as you reasonably can.  In principle you could certainly put in too much, but in practice I don't think I've ever seen a mathematics paper I thought actually did have too much.  If you structure your writing so experts can easily skim things they already know, then I don't see why extra explanation should trouble anyone.  Tradition requires being concise, but that tradition was based on the economics of publishing.  Space in printed journals used to be a scarce resource, and if you spent it on unnecessary exposition you were keeping someone else from publishing at all.  Publishing still isn't free (and readers have only so much patience, as well), so you shouldn't include enormous amounts of unnecessary background, but traditional writing styles should be adjusted to account for the greater availability of space.

It's possible that a referee or editor will object that they don't like your style.  You may be able to resist making any changes (it depends on how exciting your paper is and how high your own status is within the community), and if you do make changes you can still keep a lot of explanation.

If necessary, it's worth having two versions as Paul Garrett suggests.  If you do, then you should make it very clear which is which and what the differences are, to avoid serious confusion if someone refers to the paper without realizing they need to specify which version.

  The background material is "standard" in the sense that anyone who works on this class of problems would know the definitions or results in some form. However, this is at most a few hundred people, while if I include the background material my paper should be comprehensible to an advanced undergraduate.

One reason to be generous with explanation is that it's easy to overestimate how much people know.  Aiming at advanced undergrads is a good way to make sure grad students really can read the paper.  If you aim at experts, you may write a paper only your own collaborators can comfortably read.

  Some of the background results are part of the folklore of the field, and I've never been able to find a proof of them in literature. While they are believable and not hard to prove, I feel someone should bother doing it.

This is a great reason to include a proof, although it's important to consult with experts to confirm that there really isn't an accessible proof in the literature.

  It makes the paper longer, although even with the background the paper is not long (13 pages).

You should make sure it doesn't look like padding, say with just a few pages of original content among the 13 pages.

  From what I've heard, it is generally considered bad practice to restate definitions and constructions states elsewhere and to reprove theorems available in literature. In part this is because it gives the impression that I haven't read the literature.  This is exacerbated by the fact that I only cite ~5 previous works, mostly for further reading or alternative presentations of some of the background.

This does seem like a worry, and five references is not very many, even for a 13-page paper.  You might not strictly need any more, but I'd recommend tracking down additional references for background.  As a general rule it's best to cite generously, giving plenty of credit to other authors and offering many resources to readers.

Regarding giving the impression that you haven't read the literature, it's important to be clear about what's background from the literature (with a citation), what's folklore, and what's your own contribution.  If you reprove something you say is known but don't give a citation for, it can look like you were too lazy to track it down.


Personal web page vs Academia.edu vs ResearchGate I will soon finish my PhD and start searching for a post-doc position and I was wondering which web-based solution is the best suited to present myself and my work (I work in plant biology).

I see two main options: social network type, such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate or a personal page (using  for instance Wordpress).

My concern is that social networking solution does not offer a lot of flexibility (attaching documents, presenting my current research more in depth), but I do not want to seem too pretentious by having my own webpage while I am just a PhD student.

My question is then:

  Isn't it too soon to have a personal web page at this stage of my career (I am still a PhD student) to present my work or is the pre-made solution more adequate?

As soon as you have even a single preprint, people will begin searching online to find out who you are and what else you have done, so you must have a web page.  It doesn't have to be elaborate, and it's enough to start with a few lines of professional contact information and a list of links to papers, but you have to have something.

I think a generic web page looks more professional than one created using a social networking site, but perhaps that's because I'm old.  However, there is one absolutely critical issue: the page must allow visitors to download any content without logging in.  At least one of the social sites lets visitors view papers on the site, but insists that you create an account if you want to download anything.  This is terrible!  In my experience, nobody's going to create an account unless they really, really want that paper, and either way they are going to be unhappy at the imposition.  Offering access to papers and then harassing anyone who tries to download them leaves a very bad impression.


Is it OK to have a significant drop in grades when moving from the Middle East to the EU? I did my Bachelor's Degree in physics in the Middle East, graduating with the highest honors and an academic transcript full of A's. I was accepted to pursue my graduate studies in one of the best universities in Germany. I was able to score above the minimum required score to be admitted to the final exams. My performance was awful in the exams, even though I studied very hard.
I try not to compare myself with my colleagues but they are much better than me, or at least I believe this is what my professors might be thinking. Is this something normal because I am studying in a different country now? Or because graduate school is meant to be that hard? Does it get better? Does anyone have any advice to survive graduate school?
Clarifications:

Language was not a problem (the course is taught in English, which I understand perfectly, though it is not my first language)
Due to the pandemic, the teaching was suboptimal, and the material was so dense that I did not have time to prove every equation and apply every concept.

Background: Some time ago, I've been working at a German university as an assistant in electrical engineering, and we had some students from Arab countries.
Generally, they were much better than the Germans in reproducing content they had learned, but had more difficulties than their colleages in applying that knowledge to the problems at hand. And the university valued knowledge application much higher than knowledge reproduction. So they had a hard time adopting to that different learning style.
Coming back to your question:
It might be that from a different cultural/educational background, you're used to a different style of learning than what the German university expects from you.
My best recommendation would be to seek contact to your professors and your colleage students, to find out what the professors expect / what the other students do differently. Try to find some colleages to form a learning group.
Your colleages are surely not brighter than you, they only have better adopted the learning style that the university expects (they grew up in the same educational system where they are studying now). Most probably, they'd have comparable problems when going to a Middle East university.


"Looking for a postdoc" ad inside a conference talk? I got my PhD one year ago; I am looking for a position (e.g., postdoc).
I am going to a fairly attended conference, and was pondering about how to make audience aware that I am on the market.

An explicit, dedicated slide (maybe at the end)?
A verbal statement?
A caption on my T-shirt? :)

Would you find any of this appropriate?
What would you advice me to do?

EDIT
In case you think it's not a good idea, I'd be interested in knowing why.
Otherwise, I'd be interested in any additional implementation advice (how to formulate that, or whatever comes to mind).

Don't be shy about advertising. As you and Dave suggest, place it at the end, but you don't need to be very subtle about it. I've seen a number of talks where people advertise the fact that they're on the market, and everyone understands the need to do this. Presumably you're worried about it seeming desperate, but it isn't.


(How) Do journals keep kook papers from clogging up the review system? I have written two papers and submitted them to two different journals, and in both instances the process was as simple as registering an account and uploading the paper. While this system was quite convenient and in the spirit of open sharing of knowledge, I can't help but notice that any kook could stick their paper into the publication pipeline.

I looked at this answer, which tells me how the kook publication would be caught by the peer review process. However, this means that some time and resources have been allotted to finding the reviewers and the reviewers have at least looked at the paper, and maybe even taken the time to replicate the experiment.

So, my question is: what sort of safeguards, if any, are usually in place to keep kook papers from tying up resources?


How to deal with bogus and unethical journals?how to stop unethical journals? In research and publications there are database maintains good quality list of journals, Maintaining a reliable good impact factor too. But on the other side there are list of journals who publish anything for money. They give misleading information about their indexing and even some unbelievable Impact factors.

We find difficulty in publishing one quality paper in a quality journal .while the other hand there are people publishing plagriazed text and repetitive papers in regular way and just dumping the research papers in databases with such unethical journals. Its annoying for me to see these kind of habits been followed.

HOw could you handle such thing. Give our suggestions?

Avoiding is always better but you cant avoid when you see a man publishing 10's of papers for year with these kind of journals and you publishing papers in single digit but its a quality research.

comment name of such unethical journal

This is a problem you should simply don't care about. Do good research and sooner or later it will be recognized.

People taking shortcuts will always exist and you cannot do anything against. Just ignore and go straight.


What counts as a "project" when a potential employer asks a graduate about recent projects they have completed? I recently graduated with a BS degree in Physics and I am looking for a job in the tech industry. A common question I get is talking about recent projects, so in general, what kind of assignments in academia counts as useful projects in industry? I've had the pleasure of going to a private institution with one of best science programs in the country, I managed to get coursework and research work in Physics, E.E, Economics, Computer Science, and Computational Biology.

Speaking as somebody on the other side of that table, what industry is generally looking for is evidence that you can actually put the knowledge that you've acquired to use.  The sorts of skills that industry are looking for include the abilities to:

prioritize in order to achieve a larger goal, rather than getting bogged down in subproblems along the way.
work well with others as part of a team
follow through a complex piece of work to completion, rather than giving up after the "interesting bits" are complete
understand how your work fits into a larger whole and goals beyond "I was told this was what we were supposed to do"
synthesize together multiple different types of skills
estimate task difficulty, set a schedule, and manage unexpected problems as they arise
ability to understand the needs of the people who will put your work to use (sometimes jargonized as "customer focus")
determine when you need new knowledge or skills and take appropriate self-motivated steps to acquire these

All of these things are important ingredients in somebody who will be a good contributor to a larger organization, especially an R&D organization where you can't afford to be micromanaging a bunch of poor performers.  Somebody who is strong in these abilities but lacks particular technical skills is often much preferable to somebody who has the technical skills but lacks the bigger picture "meta-skills."  That's because technical skills are a rapidly moving target, and a motivated self-starter can generally acquire new technical skills much more easily than a technically skilled person can become a motivated self-starter.

Research projects are often good places to find this, as are large personal hobby projects.  If you don't have any of these, class projects are a reasonable fall-back, though they will often be viewed with more skepticism, since they tend to be small in scope, have no "customers," and are often somewhat "spoon-fed."


After received my PhD, can I publish a sole-author paper for some extended results? After receiving my Ph.D., I then became self-employed and as a job-seeker. So I use my spare time to continue doing research in the field of my dissertation on my own and came up with some results that I view as an extension of the results which are not included in my thesis nor published anywhere.  Here is my question

  Is it ethical to submit these results as a sole-author paper and perhaps list my advisor name in acknowledgment section for thanking him to bring me into the field ? or should I contact my advisor and asking his permission for publication?

p.s. I do theoretical research, so there are no experiment issues or budget concerns.

You don't need to ask permission for your ongoing work. It is entirely appropriate to extend what you have done and publish it. You should be sure to cite the older work as needed to avoid questions of self-plagiarism, of course.

An acknowledgement of your advisor for their past help is a good and appropriate thing to do, but not necessarily required. I would do it unless there were some specific reason not to do so.

Asking them if they want to participate can also be good, but not at all necessary. It is good simply because having collaborative relationships is good. If you decide to do that, then co-authorship would be a consideration, of course.  But sole-authorship is also proper and is eventually the place (nearly) every researcher will wind up.


Listed school on interview but not on application During application process to a graduate school in the US, I was asked to submit transcripts from all schools I attended. At the time of application, I was recently accepted to another unknown (by many-many orders of magnitude less known than the program I am applying to) PhD program in my home country. I was not given a transcript from this school, because at the time of application I was enrolled for only two months, and was not taking courses, so I did not upload a transcript on their site. I mentioned that I will be working at the school in my SoP, but never underlined in my application that it will be doctoral studies. When I was invited for an interview, I forwarded on my CV where I mentioned that I was a PhD student at the school. Now I've been accepted to the new school. I may be worrying too much, but could there be any problems in the future because I did not upload much info about that school in my online application? What should I do (if anything) in my case?

It sounds that you knowingly, and intentionally, deceived the school you were applying to by mentioning that you were working at a university, but leaving out that you were a PhD student in your statement of purpose. The fact that you mentioned that you were currently a PhD student during your interview makes the behavior a little less atrocious. That said, I have never heard of a graduate program punishing a student for omitting information from their statement of purpose.

As far as the transcripts are concerned,

  at the time of application I was enrolled for only two months, and was not taking courses, so I did not upload a transcript on their site.

again, you were not fully honest, but it is not obvious to me that all universities can generate a transcript for a student during their first semester when they are not taking any classes.

Again, nothing bad is likely to come of your behavior, that said, in the future, you should just be honest and forth coming about your situation.


How much can you share unpublished forum articles? There are some journals, such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, that publish a single target article per issue, followed by 20 to 30 commentaries on that article, and then a rebuttal/synthesis from the target article authors. Their rough workflow seems to be:

Authors submit a target article.
Target article is peer-reviewed as in a normal journal, with a focus on if it is of sufficient interest to warrant discussion in such a forum setting.
If accepted, the editors send a massive number of invitations to associates of the journal, soliciting commentary proposals on the target article. A dark-net link to the final version of the target article is included.
Authors submit commentary proposals, and the editors review them, selecting a subset that would make a good discussion.
Selected commentators write their articles and submit them to the editors
Editors do a quick review of commentaries and pass them on to the target article authors for a rebuttal.
Target article authors write a rebuttal.
Everything is published at the same time (this is the stage that BBS makes anything directly publicly available from their site).

At stage [3], the number of commentators contacted is significantly in excess of what you would for soliciting peer review. A link to the post-review paper that is accessible without any logins is also distributed, but this link is on the 'dark net' -- nothing on the main site links directly to it. The contacted associates are encouraged to share the article with their colleagues and bring non-contacted collaborators on board if they want to write a commentary.

My question is: to what extent can the sharing in step [3] be taken?

Can you share the article privately as much as you want? I.e. can a non-associate that was sent the article by an associate (but not the editor) then forward it to another non-associate?
Can you contact the authors of the target article with questions or comments that make it obvious that you've read the article? (Note, that you wouldn't be able to do this for an article you are peer-reviewing)
Can you write a blog post about the article before it comes out, making a summary of it, and referencing it as (to appear)?
Can you share the link that was emailed to you publicly (say on your blog)?

Note that the target authors often have a preprint of the target article linked from their website, kind of like a white paper (although it isn't always exactly the same version as is sent out by BBS). I am interested in answers to the above questions in both cases: when a preprint is available from the authors and when only the BBS dark-net link exists.

If you are unclear on the matter, I would ask the person who sent you the article. Asking the editor or authors may get the person who sent it to you in trouble. In most cases, the first answer is probably no. However, it may be true in some cases where there are no provisions on the confidentiality of the article. When sent out to be peer reviewed, they usually stamp the title page of the article with the confidentiality clauses. I don't think you should contact the authors until the peer-reviewing process is over, but that doesn't mean you can't. They might just refuse to comment. The last two questions you have posted... You most definitely cannot do that. You could get in major trouble for early distribution of research, especially if the project is not finished. You may face academic dis-accreditation which would make it very difficult for you to ever be involved in the academic community. This would be especially true if you wanted to peer review articles for that journal in the future or if you wish to publish articles with them. You would likely also face difficulties publishing in related journals, which may be problematic if you choose to work in an academic setting. If the author has a link to the article on their webpage, I would suggest you contact them and ask for their permission to post it on your blog. Doing so without their permission is an infringement on their property.


Combinatorics or Linear Algebra for Computer Science/Applied Mathematics Degree? I'm looking to graduate in the upcoming Spring with a BS in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and was curious on which of the two courses would be most applicable moving forward. I'm only able to take one of either "Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory" or "Combinatorics and Graph Theory" next semester, given that I'll be entering the field of Software Engineering following graduation.

Certainly, one class won't make or break one's education in the grand scheme of things, but I wanted to know which would serve best moving forward in engineering, or at the least to round out an applied mathematics degree.

Either way, thanks for your consideration with this dilemma of mine.

I'd go for "Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory" as you'll need that if you ever need to do any machine learning or computer graphics, both of which are increasingly common "tools" for modern software systems.

Learning a bit about graphs too wouldn't hurt.


What factors to consider when choosing between similar tenure-track offers? When one is fortunate enough to have multiple tenure-track offers that are roughly similar (research-focused institutions, similar levels of prestige, salary offered and teaching load), what factors should one consider?

Naturally, the weight of different factors can be subjective, so I am more interested in what types of things to consider and why, rather than what is the final choice that should be made.

You might want to check into details about "tenure track." At some institutions this means they won't automatically fire you at the end of your appointment period, but your chances of actually getting tenure are very low. At others, tenure-track faculty who do a reasonably good job are almost sure to get tenure. And of course, there's a whole spectrum of meanings for "tenure track" between these two extremes.  (My own department's official policy is to make tenure-track offers only when we think there's at least a 50-50 chance of the person's getting tenure; in fact, our promotion record in recent times has been way better than 50-50.)  I'd suggest you find out, from each of the departments that offered you a tenure-track position, what percentage of the people hired into such positions in, say, the last 15 years got tenure.  (You might also ask what happened to the others. Were they denied tenure? Did they leave voluntarily for other jobs before coming up for tenure? Did they leave "voluntarily" because they realized they were unlikely to get tenure?)


Sources of information about postdoctoral/PhD grants and funding We are a research group in Spain. For first year postdocs and PhDs from other european countries that want to come to our lab, there is no support for spanish ministry of science. Therefore we wonder where can we find information about such funding from any other country in the world.

As a PhD student trying to find a good postdoc position it's in my interest to help you find funding for places. These links may help as they all currently have open calls for projects/fellowship funding:

Google Awards http://research.google.com/university/relations/research_awards.html
Marie-Curie Actions http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/
ERCIM https://fellowship.ercim.eu/

Please let me know if you manage to get some funding ;)


Difference between Thesis and Research paper? My query is about whats the main difference between thesis and research paper, and as i am undergrad, which is more easy for an undergrad to do!!

An undergraduate thesis (or dissertation) is: a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree, which presents the author's findings.

By comparison, a research paper (when differentiated from undergraduate life) is: an academic work containing original research results or a review of existing results, which are typically published after a peer-review process successfully checks suitability.

For an undergraduate, I suspect an undergraduate thesis is easier, since I believe the bar for acceptance is generally lower than the bar for acceptance of peer-review.


My experiment supports a theory. Shall I contact the theorist attaching with my drafts? We did an experiment and the results unexpectedly support a famous theory. I am not entirely sure how to write the full paper or sell the results because I am not too familiar with that theory. And I don't know which journals welcome that theory. I think chatting with that theorist will surely help.
Shall I directly send our results and drafts to that professor, or shall I send a short cover letter first, which concisely describes our results and shows how his theory is supported, and then send the paper only if the theorist agrees?

I talked to my advisor and they agree I could contact this person, but I'm not sure how to start. The theory is famous for its philosophical and mathematical elegancy but one of its important implications is hard to test.

This is a complicated topic and you should definitely ask your advisor. There could be all sorts of potential pitfalls, e.g. perhaps there are caveats/loopholes to your experiment, perhaps you only supported a restricted form of the theory, perhaps the theory had unknown parameters that your experiment helped fix, and so on.
Given the dangers, don't try to navigate this yourself. If it comes to contacting the theorist, your advisor is likely to know more about what to write, as well.


Starting a PhD in Europe around March? I'm going to graduate with a physics degree at the end of next year (around December). I want to do my PhD in Europe, but I know that the academic year starts in September, and I don't think I can finish before that.

Is it uncommon to begin work at the start of the year (February, March) rather than the usual date? Does that lower my chances of getting in to most universities? I mean, I'd have to tell them that I won't be able to go until the next year, and that seems pretty unorthodox. Maybe there's some people that won't have a problem with that, but I imagine they'll be in the minority. I'd probably lose the spot to someone that can start in August/September, wouldn't I?

What should I do? I don't think taking 6 months off is a good idea, and I definitely won't have any more courses or finals by that time.

The answer to your question really depends on which country in Europe you want to go. In Italy all the open PhD positions are assigned in the fall, while in the Netherlands every professor that has own grant can create a PhD position and hire you any time of the year. I guess this reflect also the different status that a PhD student has in these two countries: in Italy you are a student with a scholarship, in the Netherlands you are an employee of the university with a temporary contract.