Where to find grad school acceptance rates? I've been searching (without luck) for the kind of information that was very easy to find when I was applying to undergrad; namely, information such as acceptance rates and median GRE scores of accepted applicants. I'm planning on applying to pure math grad school. Is there some online resource for finding this information?

Update: I found one resource for this information, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. After clicking on the colleges it had acceptance rates for most of them; search filters are on the left. http://www.petersons.com/graduate-schools/SearchResults.aspx?id=MTRkODRkYWEtODEwZC00OWU3LTk3NDUtYjliNDdhZTYxZDk5

This may not directly answers you question but I found it useful when applied to grad schools in the past. GradCafe results shows different applications results for institutes. Applicants usually put their GRE scores and GPA along with the decision.

Most importantly, some applicants communicate with their school and write something really useful as a note (like # of application received/accepted/rejected).


Submitting the same PhD proposal to multiple universities? I am currently doing my masters and applying to do my PhD. I have been accepted at my current university, but I am waiting on a decision regarding funding. However, if I am unsuccessful with funding, I will not be able to take up the offer.

I am, therefore, looking at applying to other universities with the aim of increasing my funding chances.

My question is, can I submit the exact same research proposal to multiple universities? Or are there any issues with this? Also, my potential supervisor at my current university helped me a lot with editing my proposal.. obviously I would let her know that I was applying for other universities but does this come across disrespectful? I would also be looking to ask her for a reference. I am unsure how to even ask this, as I am worried it seems like I am taking her helpful advice on my proposal, just using it to apply elsewhere, then asking her for a reference.

My current university would definitely be my first choice, however as I said this is entirely dependent on funding.

Any advice would be massively appreciated!

You should clearly tell this potential supervisor at your current university what you told us here: That your current university would be your first choice but, since funding is uncertain, you need to apply elsewhere also.  If this potential supervisor is a decent person (which most academics are), this should remove the difficulties that you are concerned about.  (If she's not a decent person, why do you want to work with her?)


Should I state my chronic illness as one of the reason I have few Extra curricular activities in my application for Masters Program? This is my First question, so correct me if I am going off topic.

I am an Indian male. My age is 20. I am pursuing my B.Tech Mechanical Engineering from India's premier institute. I am currently moving to my final year. After that, I wish to apply for Masters abroad. I have a good GPA of 9.12/10, and I would rank top 5 in my class.

I have been suffering from Crohn's disease for the last three years. Due to this illness, my energy is very much limited and I cannot afford to play sports or do any extra curricular activities or join any clubs. As I was filling up my application I have become aware of it. So the question is: "Is it okay if I justify that due to the above illness I could not do any other activities or will it have any negative impact on my application?"
I am aiming for top 10 Universities.

For those of you who don't know what Crohn's disease is, Please read in the following links. https://www.medicinenet.com/crohns_disease/article.htm#crohns_disease_definition_and_facts
https://www.everydayhealth.com/crohns-disease/living-with/staying-energized-with-crohns-disease/

For US universities, extra-curricular activities are considered important for undergraduate admissions.  But this is not the case for graduate admissions - decisions are made primarily based on your academic record, letters of recommendation, research accomplishments if any, and to a lesser extent, GRE scores.  Extra-curricular activities are not a factor, unless they are academically related (e.g. engineering clubs and competitions, outside  projects, etc).  So there's no need to mention those you have done, nor to make excuses for those you haven't.


Is there any evidence that students are more likely to watch a video over reading homework? As background, many of my students fall into the "un-prepared" for university category. This has introduced many challenges. Some challenges are easily handled when a student is sincerely interested in learning (they want to know what to read and I guide them appropriately).

More challenging is that these students are not native-speakers of English yet they are studying in English. Again, those who work hard do well. Those who do not work hard, do poorly.

I am looking for a way to encourage ALL students to spend more time outside of class studying. To this end, I am considering composing some videos (a significant time commitment on my part) which will teach material that I do not cover in class.

This question discusses how to identify the reason students are not doing home work and this questions discusses how to make best use of videos as homework. However, I am asking something different.

I have done some surveying of students and many of them say that they prefer watching videos over reading. What I really want to know is whether anyone has seen or has researched the increased likelihood that a student will actually follow the homework because it is a video as opposed to in a textual format.

I do not want to get into the issues of punishment here. The students generally know that less homework = lower scores but they think they can still pass and that is all they care about. Sadly, I care more about their education than they do.

It's been a while since I was a student, but I think it's still worth saying this:

I find it easier (as in less effort) to just sit through a video than read a book.

But: If I actually want to learn something or I have a specific task to solve, I find the linear format of videos extremely constraining, and I find them frustratingly slow.  Like most people, I read much faster than normal talking speed. I can also skim texts easily, and find the relevant part, or go back and check a formula again.  This is not possible with videos.  There's a reason for taking notes in class instead of just recording it: a recording is not going to be useful for preparing for the exam.

You mentioned that many of your students are not native speakers of English.  This is a big reason to avoid videos in favour of written material.  I am not a native speaker either, and even though for the past few years English was the language I used the most, I still prefer watching English-speaking films with English subtitles.  When watching videos there will always, always be at least a few words I can't catch or I can only comprehend with a few seconds' delay.  Listening is simply more work for my brain than reading, and makes it just a little bit harder to pay attention to the content.

My personal opinion on the matter (no more than an opinion!) is that some students are indeed more likely to watch videos than read texts.  But that's only because it feels like less effort to them.  In reality videos are going to be less efficient at communicating information.  They will require significantly more time commitment from you and they will require more time commitment from motivated students as well, who would be able to learn faster from written material.  But yes: I do think unmotivated students are more likely to watch a video than to read  a text.

Personally I find it very frustrating when the only material available is a video because it just slows me down and forces me to take notes I wouldn't need to take if I already had written material ...


Is it a bad idea to submit a paper merely to elicit reviewers' comments? Some days ago I was talking with a friend of mine, who is currently a post-doc at the illustrious Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) working on humanoid robotics.

He was quite disgruntled because he recently spent a lot of time testing his latest discoveries and writing a scientific paper to submit to an important artificial intelligence conference, but on the day of the deadline, his supervisor asked him not to submit the paper. Indeed, his supervisor felt the experiments were not good enough, or the results were not excellent.

Anyway, he did not want him to submit the paper, and so he did not do it.

We discussed about it and we both stated that, even if the paper and the discoveries were not excellent, they should have sent the paper anyway. The eventual rejection maybe would have come later, by the reviewers, together with the important review notes.
This way, they would have probably got a paper rejection, but they would have been able to treasure the reviewers' review notes.
Instead, with his supervisor initial rejection, they won't get anything except their opinions.

So we thought that his supervisor had a bad idea.

My question is: why did his supervisor suggest him not to submit the paper? Why did he not think about the possibility of getting at least the reviewers' comments?

Is a paper rejection so grave a fact?
Is it so dishonorable to get a paper rejection?

The other answers mention that submitting a paper only to get some feedback is a waste of time for the reviewers, and it can be particularly damageable for your reputation when the submission is not double-blind. Remember that academia is a small world, and reputation a very important aspect.

In addition, submitting a paper to a venue usually prevents to submit it to other venues, at least during the reviewing process. When you're pretty sure that the paper will be rejected, you might miss other opportunities.

Finally, there is another risk: the paper might be accepted! Of course, at first, you might think it's a good thing, but if the results are not good enough, it might hurt your reputation, and there is of course the possibility that you're wrong. Publishing wrong results (and I'm only talking about mistake, not fraud) is far worse than getting a paper rejected. On top of that, if the paper is published, it might be harder to publish only the improved results, as they might not consist a novel contribution on their own.


How do data protection laws apply to faculty applications? Last year I applied for an assistant professor position in Sweden and unsuccessful. This year I attended a conference there. In the informal discussions afterward, a professor told me that he works on a related topic and I can give him a visit if I will be in town. After the conference, I visited his office and we had a long and interesting conversation. He told me that my idea is very interesting and we should collaborate. As a joke, I told him that proposed this idea in my last year's application but you didn't like it. He said I am sure there was no such idea in the applications and told me to let's check. He found my application on his computer and we talked about it.

I didn't mind as there was nothing secret in my application. But it made me wonder. I thought (until that moment) that all applications should be treated confidentially within the search committee and all materials should be destroyed (not only at the individual level but also at the institutional level).

Isn't it illegal for the institution and the committee to keep the application materials when the search is completed? (I believe most countries have similar data protection laws, my question is not about Sweden only)?
Isn't it a breach of obligatory confidentiality if a committee member discusses an application outside the search committee? For example, tell a colleague or in another search committee that this person had applied for the other job too. (it was not my case, but I am curious)

When we apply for a faculty position, does the application die after the search or it lives on and on through documents and committee members?

I'm not a lawyer, but in the US at a federal level there is no legal expectation that job applications will be destroyed at the end of a job search. In fact it's the opposite, there are some laws (such as the Americans With Disabilities Act) which require employers to retain hiring records, which includes application materials, for a period of time in order ensure such records are available if someone were to accuse them of discrimination.

Employers are free to retain such records for longer periods of time if they so choose. For example, it's very common for large corporations to retain job applications indefinitely so they have a permanent record in case you were to apply multiple times to the same place.

In practice, there is a general expectation that academic job searches are kept private, but probably not to the point where job applications are destroyed. My department is required to keep hiring records (application materials and any written materials we make about our applicants) and turn them over to our university HR department at the conclusion of our search. From there I assume the university may keep them indefinitely if they chose to do so. I don't think there's any law that makes it illegal for the department to disclose their potential list of applicants (or even their application materials), but doing so would be violating the social custom.

Academic departments tend to be very close-knit, with faculty serving together and depending on each other for many years. Announcing one's intention to leave a department is a sensitive issue that is seen as that person's prerogative to disclose in their own way and time. More importantly, faculty should be free to look at other institutions and entertain the idea of leaving for a different department without committing to that action or disclosing to their current department that intention, which could have major impacts on the way their current department advances/promotes/treats them in the future. For this reason it's a major faux pas to discuss potential applicants outside of the department, but there's no law against it.


How can I show which data I'm using in my paper? I've just started reading papers about speech recognition and algorithms on medium sized graphs (~800,000 nodes and 4,400,000 edges with some connected text data). I think a problem of these papers is quite often, that it is difficult to check the experimental results. It is difficult to check them because of two reasons:

The source code that was used to generate the results is not (publicly) available
The data is either not at all available or it is not clear which version of the data was used

When I start writing papers, I would like to make it easier to check the results.

The first problem is easy to solve: I can simply provide the source code (e.g. on GitHub or my personal web space).

The second problem seems to be much harder to solve. The data is often quite big (speech recognition: several GB; graphs: about 2GB). This is too much to upload it on my personal webspace / GitHub.

How can I show which data I'm using in my paper? (Currently I give a link to the data source and note the data when I've downloaded it. Additionally, I note the date/version of the source if possible.)

Are there projects that try to solve this issue? (e.g. by providing space for important / interesting projects like dblp, a version history and good download speeds)

Both the problems you state are significant, and (I think) very problematic to the further progression of computer science as an actual science. I work in services / software engineering, and quite honestly, reproducibility of results is very, very bad in my work as well as in the work of others.

I will comment on both of your issues, starting with the second one:

  The data is either not at all available or it is not clear which version of the data was used

In many cases, this is actually the easier-to-solve issue. I would assume your department has IT resources (e.g., a department web space) that you can use for such purposes. Additionally, there are other, more field-specific, repositories that you can upload data to (for instance, there is the UCI machine learning data set repository or the Grid workload traces archive). Making data available to the public is really only an issue if you are not allowed to do so because of commercial interests of your data provider. For instance, I have access to real traces of executions of business processes of a big german logistics provider, which I am not allowed to give out. This clearly limits the usefulness of these traces to me.

The second problem

  The source code that was used to generate the results is not (publicly) available

is sort of tricky in practice. Clearly, throwing your code to Github is easy, but this hardly solves the issue of reproducibility. You will still need to include pretty detailed usage instructions and documentation to make this code of any use to another researcher. This may seem trivial for a naive 1000 Lines-of-Code implementation of an algorithm, but, for instance, my current research prototype approaches 25.000 lines of Java code plus a bit of XML and Groovy. Just putting this up on a repository is not enough, if we consider that a paper can only be considered reproducible if it is possible to do so in reasonable time. An additional problem in my field is that often prototypes are built for a specific execution environment. For instance, my department has a small OpenStack based private cloud, and many demonstrators that our students build realistically only run in this environment without drastic modifications.

I am currently in the transition between a postdoc and a more independent research position, and one of my personal goals is to make all work that I and my students publish easier to reproduce. However, so far we are only making baby steps, but at least we are trying :D


I have a lot of extra room for classes. What should I take? I'm currently in my second semester of college at university in the United States, and am currently majoring in Computer Engineering. I passed a lot of AP tests in high school, all of which gave me college credit. Because of this, if I take only the bare-minimum of required classes for my major, I'll end up averaging ~10 hours per semester for the next 6 semesters. Due to the way pre-requisite classes are set up, it's impossible for me to graduate early. And besides, I have a full scholarship, so I don't want to graduate early.

My question is this: I can take as many credits outside of my major as I need inside my major. How can I make the most of this freedom? I plan to pursue a career in robotics (Ideally at NASA, but that's a long shot), so I want to use my next three years to help that dream. The way I see it, there's a few obvious options:

Dual Major. I could probably get a dual major with any other engineering major if I was determined enough, but Computer Science or Electrical Engineering have enough overlapping classes that they would make the most sense.
Triple major. This sounds pretty ridiculous, but it is an option. I could potentially major in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and still graduate in the normal 4 years while taking a maximum of 18 hours per semester. Of course, this would be pushing it a little. If I had one conflict of two different classes being taught at the same time, I wouldn't have room to fix it. And then there's the problem of stress: I'm taking 18 hours now, and have loads of free time, but half of those hours are freshman-level courses. I think I'd be able to handle 18 hours of junior- and senior-level classes, but I can't know until I try it.
Take interesting classes. There's a lot of classes that I'd like to take that aren't required by my major (artificial intelligence, digital image processing, intro to relativity). However, there's not really enough to fill the amount of space I have.
Take fewer hours and get a job or internship. This is not much of an option, because my scholarships require that I take at least 15 hours per semester, which still leaves a lot of empty space in my schedule.
Start a Master's degree. My university allows undergraduate seniors to begin working toward a graduate degree if they are taking few enough undergraduate credit hours. My goal is to attend a different school for a Master's degree, but that plan will probably change several times between now and when I graduate. (I'm a teenager. We make stupid decisions.)
Research. I go to a fairly large university, so there's plenty of research opportunities.
Study abroad. This is fairly low on my list of priorities, but who knows? That may change. It's always an option.

The idea of taking a lot of classes solely because I'm interested is very appealing, but I have a feeling that it wouldn't add as much to a resume as, say, a dual degree. And I am very interested in the material in my major, so it's not as if I'm going to have to suffer through my required classes.

So, in summary: I have room to take an entire second major's worth of classes in my next 6 semesters of college. What should I do to best further my dream of working as a NASA robotics engineer?

I am surprised not to see getting involved in research projects on your list. At many schools, you can get academic credit for research. It is often no good for satisfying requirements, but that sounds like that's not a problem for you.

Getting involved in research is an excellent way to further your dreams, especially in getting on the track for graduate school. It can also introduce you to lots of interesting material that you would never encounter in a class.


Which affiliation to put as a student in a different branch than the research paper? I am an undergrad student in a certain field. However, I am also interested in another, very different one in which I would like to submit a research paper to a journal.
Which affiliation should I put? That of my university even if the education I receive there is not related to the article?
At the moment I have indicated "Student in [irrelevant field] at the university [my university]".

For an undergraduate student, the affiliation is usually the same as the affiliation of your supervisor.  If you are unsure, ask them.
If you are writing the paper independently, typically the affiliation is in the format:

Department, University Name, Address

At some universities, undergraduates do not have a department, in which case that might be omitted.
It is perfectly fine if your affiliation is unrelated to your paper topic.


Should TA work be listed in a CV for an internship in the industry? Personally, I didn't teach but helped the professor conduct a laboratory course throughout the semester.

It was also not a paid work but I volunteered.

Should something like this be omitted from an industry CV?

Having little to zero working experience, could it be of any interest to a company?

Yes, if you had some actual duties, this counts as experience and should be listed, especially given that you say you don't have very much additional experience.  You should also ask this instructor if he could be a reference.


When do journal invitations for computer science conferences typically come out? In some computer science conferences, a few top papers are invited to be published in a special issue in a journal. I have a paper to be presented at a conference soon and am thinking of submitting it to a journal after that. Roughly how long should I wait to make sure that I don't miss the opportunity in case my paper gets invited to a journal?

In my experience, this varies widely, even for different iterations of the same confernence.  Sometimes invitations go out two months before the conference; other times they go out two months after the conference.

Write the PC chair and ask.  Unless you have good reason to believe your paper is likely to be invited (based on the reviews or other feedback, not just your own personal opinion), you should probably ask when and how papers will be selected, not whether your paper is being invited.


How do I credit someone who made the trajectory file used for my thesis? There's a trajectory file which I included a sample of in my Appendix. Here's a screenshot:

Aside from stating in the Appendix text the name of the creator of the file, is there anything more I could do (like what they do for borrowed code: they insert the name of the creator in the code itself) ?

You could ask the original author to put the data in a data repository (like Zeonodo or Figshare) and claim a doi for it. That makes the data object citeable in its own respect and you can give credit in a persistent way (as a bonus you get the author to think about licensing of their data).


Recently published paper does not cite my very relevant work Before I start my PhD I worked in a group that researched on the application of a particular area to a particular domain. No other research group published work in this area+domain. So I can safely say that my previous group is among the first if not the first to research in the application of that particular research area on that particular domain.

Now I find a paper published at an IEEE conference where a major part of its contribution is introducing a system that does something I did in a previously published paper, and it does it in the exact same way and even gives it the same name!

I know that some conferences could accept non-novel contributions. Also the paper talks about other aspects so I find it perfectly fine that this paper has been accepted and published. But what I find annoying is that they do not cite my relevant work which was published a year earlier and fairly visible online; A simple (unpersonalized) search on Google would show up at least three links to my work.

This is the second time I face this problem, but the first time this happened it was actually by the same group I worked with before; they published a related paper without citing the paper I co-authored with them.

I try to give the maximum possible exposure to my work by making it publicly available on my personal website, ResearchGate, making sure it appears on Google Scholar, etc..

I find it worrying that my work misses citations, I am keen on improving my h-index and citations count. So my questions are:

Is there anything I can do regarding that already-published paper?
Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening in the future?

That happens. Maybe they didn't do a thorough literature study before they published, or they did but before your work was available. This is more frequent than we would like to think. Note that it's generally expected from authors to have done a reasonable effort in searching for previous work, but it's not unethical per se not to reference every previous publication that could be relevant (it's also practically very hard).

  Is there anything I can do regarding that already-published paper?

No, missing a previous related work is not a valid motivation to complain to the authors or editors. Just forget about it and move on.

  Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening in the future?

Yes, become so influential in your field that reviewers will know your work enough to spot when someone else submit a related work without citing yours.

Side note:

  I am keen on improving my h-index and citations count.

Without going into how this might not be what you should focus on (while very good researchers tend to have a high citation count, the inverse relation is not always true), the best way to do that is to produce high-quality research, preferably on a hot research topic.


Why does the Statistics community publish in journals while the Machine Learning community presents at conferences? I got my Bachelor's degree in Statistics and I'm starting graduate school to study Computer Science (CS) with an emphasis on Data Mining. One of the big differences that I've noticed between the Statistics and the ML communities is that Statistics tends to publish in journals, while CS tend to publish at conferences.

I've heard people say that conference presentations are preferred to publishing in journals because "things move so fast" in Machine Learning research. However, if you actually look reputable statistics journals are published very frequently.

The American Statistical Association publishes Statistical Analysis and Data Mining every other month and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics is published quarterly. It looks like they both also have pretty quick turnaround times. The International Statistical Institute even has a journal that was started specifically as a "rapid communication research journal" that published papers monthly.

So, if presenting at conferences isn't actually faster than publishing in a credible statistics journal, how did this division between the two communities start?

This came up just the other day in a class - journal vs conference publications.

Background; pros and cons:

I came to CS from neuroscience, a field (like most?) in which journals were the primary currency and some of the larger conferences accepted posters / talks but with only a minor vetting process. Conferences were often used to present preliminary work and get feedback on methodology, journal articles were for the meat of the work. I had many conference posters (and one or two journal papers) on my CV when i applied to CS programs and was surprised at how professors were impressed by that - it seemed pretty common for people in neuro to have a good number of conference posters/talks.

Conference papers have low latency of acceptance/presentation. Typically deadlines are 4-7 months out from the conference, which tends to be quite a bit faster than journal article acceptances / publications. In my relatively short career, i've worked on papers (in neuroscience) that took 2+ years to publish, from intial submission to revision rounds to acceptance and publication. Conferences also tend to give your work more visibility - I recently presented my recent research at an SC15 workshop and had more feedback and potential collaborations come out of it than i ever did from my 1st-author journal article or from poster sessions in neuro conferences.

Journal articles allow for considerably greater depth and treatment of the topic at hand and are much more useful for reproducibility and understanding. Conference papers tend to have hard page limits and if the work is substantial enough, you can be forced to gloss over detail and have the potential to not ever publish follow up papers to explain the missing details.

A good issue around this, and this is what we discussed in class, was Google's Spanner paper, presented at OSDI. The paper is groundbreaking and incredibly impressive work, but due to the limitations of the format (short paper, again), much of the detail and nuance needed to understand the work is left out. The paper even mentions that a follow up paper would be forthcoming - three years later and it hasn't materialized. For such a huge piece of work that encompassed years of principle engineer time at an org like Google, it was probably better suited to a 30~ page journal article, but it may not have had the same impact as it did being presented at OSDI - one of the premier systems conferences.

your question

To answer the question at hand, (why is it like this), many people have written about it (at conferences and journals!). One longer discussion can be found here.

Perhaps it is as simple as "this is how it has been for a long time and change is hard" - not particularly satisfying, but might explain a great deal of the variance here.


Section for "main results" and use of "conclusion" in a math article I am planning to submit an article to a mathematically-oriented journal (namely: Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis).

I have quite a lot of results so I wrote a section "Main Results".

Question 1 In this section, the results are given as theorems, and each proof is given in another section. However, there is one simple theorem whose proof is only a few lines long. Can I provide the proof in the "Main Results" section, or is it not customary to include any proofs there?

Question 2 I am used to adding conclusions to my articles, but all the articles I read in this journal do not have any. Should I do the same and not add any conclusion (note that nothing is mentionned about this in the guidelines)?

Can I provide the proof in the "Main Results" section, or is it not
  customary to include any proofs there?

It is fine to include a proof of a few lines in a section titled Main Results, if you feel that that helps your narrative, if it adds some insight that is useful at this point in the paper, or if the proof is extremely elegant or interesting. It is also fine not to do so. Good writing cannot be summarized in a few rules, one needs to always think about what makes sense for the particular context one is thinking about.

  Should I do the same and not add any conclusion?

Pure math papers almost never have a Conclusion section. If the reader reads the introduction, the results and the proofs and still doesn't know what conclusions are to be drawn from the work, it is a bad paper and no final section will save it. For this reason, many if not most math papers simply end after the end of the last proof. Others will have a final section titled something like "Additional remarks", "Final remarks" or "Open problems". This section will usually be short and forward-looking, addressing possible extensions of the work, or containing some half-baked thoughts about aspects of the work or related questions that the authors still don't understand well.

Conclusion

I don't have any. :-)


Anthropology vs. Religious Studies graduate programs This is my first post here and I'm looking for advice on the outlook of the field I guess. My undergrad background is in Anthropology, but my research is in anthropology of religion and can easily fit into a religious studies department.

Right now I am in a dilemma weighing what path to take. I was offered admission to a Religious Studies program in the U.S. at a top university, and I was also offered admission to a small university's Anthropology PhD program. It's not very highly ranked at all, but the department is a pretty good fit...but so is the Religious Studies department.

I have visits coming up to both these schools and right now I think the deciding factor is the future job market. Religion vs. Anthropology. I've heard mixed things from various people in both fields, but there is some bias I think. Anthropologists tell me that anthropology is more versatile, while people in RS tell me that it's more marketable. I'm also trying to weigh if prestige matters on the job market as well. Would it look better to go to Excellent University for RS or Fairly Good University for Anthropology? The smaller university is in no way a bad one, and I am excited about the prospect of going to both.

These are of course things I will be discussing with my past mentors and grad students at both places, but could I enlist kind internet strangers for any new perspectives?

Think of anthropology as more scientific and religious studies as more historical. Or Hard science v humanities, if you find that distinction meaningful. The processes of each are a bit different.

I'll just guess that there are more opportunities in anthropology and if you are on the cusp of the two fields there are probably more things open to you with a credential in anthropology than if it were more religious studies based.

Being associated with a broader field is an advantage in that it gives you flexibility to choose, even if you choose a narrow part of it. Being associated with a narrow field is probably a disadvantage.

Graduating from a "top" institution is a benefit for your first job, most likely. Graduating with great recommendations from recognized experts in whatever field is a bigger initial advantage.

I suspect that you know that some "religious" studies folk are more interested in preconceived notions of how things work and more interested in proselytizing than in learning. Avoid those sorts of things and you should be fine.

Obviously this is not a real answer. That can only come from you. But discussions with people you know is a good way to explore it.


I embarrassed myself at a conference by asking an irrelevant question. Does this happen regularly? I am a newcomer to conferences and have tried going to a few to get ready for graduate school. I attended an industry conference (the industry is known for its proportion of graduate-educated workers, and collaboration with academia) sponsored by a company I've been doing contract work for. As they paid for my registration, my badge had their name.

Long story short, there was a panel session about priorities in manufacturing in this industry. Since I heard about a material that has attracted interest in R&D of this specific community, I asked the panel what their thoughts were about this material. At the time, I felt it was a relevant question since the panelists were industry executives who I thought came across mention of the material. However, only the moderator answered my question, and the panelists just gave me a highly judgmental, silent glare. I felt really bad about it since. Doesn't help I said my affiliation, and the room contained nearly all of the conference attendees.

I looked online and saw people disapprove of questions that make it seem like the person asking is smart. I wasn't trying to do that; I was just wondering if the panelists had any thoughts about that research topic. I realize that discussion of that material was probably a highly academic, trivial topic.

Does this happen in conferences? Or did I just make me and the company sponsoring my attendance really bad?

Sorry if this doesn't belong here, I can move it if need be.

If the question is "do most conferences have a few bad questions", the answer is certainly yes. People are likely to forget bad questions, more difficult to recover from a bad talk. I've been in quite a few conferences where someone (often a student without adequate guidance) would give a bad talk and everyone would be talking about it for days. I've also been to conferences where most of the talks were thoroughly forgettable and you would have to light the podium on fire to attract negative attention. I don't ever remember hearing people complain so vehemently about a bad question, only a bad talk.

The main "bad question" is one that is too basic for the audience ("what do you mean by calculus"?) or reveal a basic lack of understanding ("could you address heat dissipation by using logarithms?"). Questions that are too technical are rarely a problem unless it's way off-topic or takes up too much time.


Quit PhD abroad vs job at home country I’ve just moved to Canada for PhD studies at one of its best universities.
One day during my master studies, I felt that I wanted to live the international student experience and decided to move to Canada which is far away from my home country (at least 16 hours by flight!). But before moving to Canada, I thought I needed to save some money as such I decided to work and save money. I worked at a good and well-known company with very good salary and benefits, my boss really liked me.
I left the job after a year and everyone there was shocked because I was so good at it.
I have to mention that during my work there, I also met my boyfriend whom I love very much!

Despite the fact that I met my significant other, had a great job and stable life, I went on my way and moved to Canada.
After only one month in Canada, I discovered a few things.

1) It feels bad to be away from my family and friends, although I used to live away from my family during the past few years, the increased distance makes it worse.

2) I've been thinking of going back to my home country since I arrived.

3) I miss my boyfriend very badly although we talk everyday.

4) I had a great job with very good salary and now I get less than half of my previous salary.

5) My social life here sucks, I’m working on it but things are moving very very slow!

6) The main concern: I joined a small research group; only 2 PhD students and 2 masters students and no Post docs. The supervisor is very busy (we booked a meeting and he has never showed up in time! In a best case scenario he is late by an hour), he doesn’t show any interest in guiding me or helping me define my PhD project, I thought he might be busy but after taking to the students it seems that he’s always like this. He never seems to have time and I need to chase him down to talk about research and ensure things move forward. Even one of his masters students said that if I wanna have a good PhD, I must find a co-supervisor because he’s not organized!
Besides, it seems that the supervisor does not have available projects as of now and he is currently away for the next two months.

I feel like I’m sinking and made the biggest mistake of my life! I'm no longer sure I want to continue my PhD studies! I only think about going back home. I don’t know what to do. Should I look for job back home? Stay? Ask the previous company to hire me back?

I’m afraid and nervous and have no one to consult!! Please help me cause I feel like I’m wasting time here while being unhappy and very far away from my loved ones :(
?

First and foremost your mental/physical health is the most important thing. I was in your situation as well, and did my studies away from home. Here are my thoughts hope it can help you:

Temporary break: It might be the case that you are just exhausted yourself. What about a short break? You could have a honest conversation with your supervisor and take a break.
PhD is not a silver bullet to all of your life problems: I see in your question that you are suggesting that "you are wasting time" or "bad social life". So is it the PhD or you? Are you organized and keep room for your social interactions? Or the PhD itself is stressing out to a point that you need to stick to your desk. You need to take control of your life, with or without PhD, we all have personal traits that might be good or bad; but this is what is life about. You need to learn and grow and create a life you want to be in.
Supervisor Issue: Based on your question, I doubt that it is your supervisor, but if you feel the need; you can always have a discussion with the head of your research group about your supervisor.
Schedule your Holidays: It seems your boyfriend is not with you and this is sad to you, so you could always schedule your holidays around the year.
Do Exercise: This is important, to keep you motivated; keep yourself in shape; go for a walk, go to your university gym. This will help you in physically and mentally.
Leaving PhD: After all these, if you still think you don't like research and/or PhD; then leave your PhD; it is your life and journey.


Are editorial management systems helpful to journal editors? In this amusing blog post, Scott Aaronson explains why he is unwilling to deal with editorial management systems as a referee. They make you log in to some complicated system, using a password you've probably forgotten, all to provide your expertise for free. They often don't give you the sense that you are corresponding with an actual human.

And they can go hilariously wrong. In March of this year (2017) I was informed that I was supposed to have finished a referee report by May 15, 2017, that my report was therefore "-51 days late", and that I should therefore finish it as soon as possible.

From my perspective simple e-mail correspondence works better as a referee. (Many math journals make do without these systems.) However, I have never been a journal editor, and so I wonder if I am missing the point. Do editors genuinely find these systems to be more convenient for managing their workloads? Or alternatively is it publishers that prefer to use them, and thus ask the editors to go along with them?

I served as editor-in-chief of an IEEE magazine for 4 years and have been an associate editor on various editorial boards for the past couple of decades.  For as long as I've been on edboards, I'd say they have used some flavor of online management system.  Pretty much everything I'm on now, not to mention everything I submit to, has coalesced on "manuscript central" from Scholar One.

I fully agree with @Nate Eldridge's comment about the "paper" trail.  That is definitely a plus, because I can look and see past correspondence -- was someone reminded at the right time, etc.  And to be honest I couldn't imagine managing this offline.

That being said, I find the system (and the others I've used) frequently painful.  Aside from the bug about being negative days late, my biggest problem is that the system tends not to remind anyone that a task is outstanding.  In particular, as an associate editor my job is to line up the actual reviewers.  In two cases recently, I discovered that I'd invited 3 people, and usually more (as people might decline), but in the end 2 from each of 2 papers had agreed to review and 1 in each case had never responded.  The system sent them a reminder or two, then from what I can tell, it neither reminded them nor told me it was time to find someone else!

There are other minor difficulties, such as finding reviewers within the system rather than creating duplicate accounts for them as new reviewers, that sort of thing.

Bottom line: they serve a purpose, but they can be improved.

Are they helpful to journal editors?

Absolutely.

Can they be improved, especially from the standpoint of reviewers?

Absolutely.

But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.


How to address an academic with a PhD in Spanish? A friend of mine is defending his PhD thesis in the Netherlands this week.

It is a custom to formally address them directly after the defense ceremony, where we use the Dutch term "welzeeredelgeleerde heer", which is something like 'very honourable well-learned gentleman' in Dutch and it very precisely corresponds to the title of PhD.

However, this friend was born and raised in Mexico, and I would like to also address him in Spanish. I have asked several native Spanish speakers (both inside and outside of academia), but nobody seems to know the correct translation of this terminology.

Does anyone happen to know this trivia?

I am a mexican, I dont think we use anything other than:

  "Doctor" + Lastname

or if you want to use "very honourable well-learned gentleman"

  Honorable y muy sabio caballero


If you have a few meetings with a professor to discuss a paper, but they do not do any actual writing, is this sufficient to justify authorship? Earlier this year I started writing my first article with a former professor of mine. The article is almost done, but until now he hasn't written a single sentence or provided any data. It has been all my work.  We have met about 10 times where each meeting lasted about 90 minutes to discuss the progress of the article, and I have to recognize that during these meetings his advice shaped some of my ideas , especially regarding the research question. I know he has spent his time in this work, but I don't think that qualifies as authorship on the article, and I'm not sure what to do about this. I appreciate any advice you can give me on how to act on this issue.

So in general:

If a professor meets with you a few times to assist you in writing a paper but does not do any actual writing, is this sufficient to justify him being an author?

The content of those meetings is largely going to be the answer to your question, and we can't really know the content of those meetings. There's a case to be made that those discussions helped form things, and he doesn't sound otherwise problematic, so I think it's likely worth just making him an author and moving on.


Is it wrong to unintentionally withhold information? I recently posted something related to this (If an assumption proves to be false, is the research then meaningless?), but it is still bothering me.

As I mentioned in that last post, I conducted my first research project in high school last year, and I am now having doubts about one of my assumptions (I was not used to making assumptions at the time). I actually learned that one of my assumptions were invalid from a judge at a science fair.

As a matter of fact, I had not even noticed that I had made that assumption until he brought it up (and penalized me for it). Despite all of the people that I had proofread and check my research, no one brought it up. Furthermore, I competed at science fairs prior to that one and none of those judge brought it up (I am not sure if they caught it or not). I was successful at those science fairs, but I am now feeling guilty. I feel as if me not mentioning that one assumption is the only reason I was as successful as I was (although I cannot justify it).

Is it wrong that I withheld this information, despite the fact that I was not even aware of it? Is that considered cheating? This question has been bothering me and I would appreciate any help. (I am now working on a different research project and I am being much more cognizant about my assumptions.)

If you were not aware, you did not "withhold" because that requires intention.

With time, you will practice insight about what implicit assumptions you make - this is part of the scientific development and even great scientists have not been free of that. Galilei transformation, for instance, was taken for granted for centuries, which was initially fine, but was sustained to the point where "ethereal" concept-bending had to be introduced to keep it alive.

As Einstein said: "The fish is last to discover water." Do not be too hard on yourself, as long as you put it firmly into your agenda to do your best to be fully aware of your assumptions and their validity. Discussion with friends/colleagues can help here.


Why and how do professors go for sabbatical? I read several questions about sabbatical leaves in this website. When checking a faculty list, it is common that some are on sabbatical leave and some are visiting professors. When emailing professors, it is not strange to receive a reply that he or she is on sabbatical leave.

However, the general picture of sabbatical visits is unclear to me. It is interesting to experience a new academic environment in a different country; but how do people handle it?

Cost of Living/Moving: When someone goes to another country, there are lots of unexpected expenses. High rent for a furnished house (for a year). They still have expenses in their home country (like mortgage). They will receive half of their salary from home the university and zero from the host university (not considering exceptions where getting paid for occasional tasks).
Research Output: The professor cannot plan for a long-term research. Probably co-supervise some graduate students.
Position: It is not clear to me what the place of a visiting professor is. In a research group, he is not a postdoc to follow the PI plans to get hand in experimental works, and he is not the boss to plan and conduct others. In a department, the head cannot force him to teach a course (it is not his duty), and the department has not offered him an official position, space and service for doing nothing. The vague point for me is that there is no official contract to define each party responsibility (as the host university is not paying).

How can one handle the expenses? And what is the professional motivation to do a temporary job (beside the fun part of going somewhere)?

Sorry for a series of questions, I could not separate them.

I think this will widely vary between professors, host institutions, and home institutions. I will try to address your questions, but always keep in mind that for each point there will be plenty of variations.

  When someone goes to another country, there are lots of unexpected expenses. High rent for a furnished house (for a year). They still have expenses in home country (like mortgage).

Sometimes the professor just foots a lot of it from his own pocket. Sometimes, especially if the host institution is not academic but a company research lab, the host institution will cover this through a stipend, or by providing housing. However, it should be noted that most professors eligible for sabbaticals are full professors, who are in an age and career phase where they are not anymore required to turn every penny twice.

  He will receive half of his salary from home university and zero from host university (not considering exceptions where getting paid for occasional tasks).

This isn't close to universal. In my institution, sabbaticals can be with close-to-full salary. Sometimes, the host institution pays the guest.

  Research Output: He cannot plan for a long-term research. Probably co-supervise some graduate students.

Generally speaking, the sabbatical is a phase of planning, and finding inspiration and future collaborations more than execution. For a senior professor, it may also be a rare chance to actually do some research her/himself again, precisely because one is not necessarily required to herd a dozen grad students to dissertations.

  It is not clear to me where is the place of a visiting professor. In a research group, he is not a postdoc to follow the PI plans to get hand in experimental works, and he is not the boss to plan and conduct others.

Well, the guest doesn't have a fixed place in the host lab as such. What the guest actually does all day will vary, depending on what the goals of the professor for the sabbatical and the plans of the host are. A few common ones that I have seen include:

The getting access to cool data sabbatical. Here, the prof. goes to a host institution (typically industrial in this case) with access to much more and better data. The guest uses his time there to validate (with the host professor and selected students) his theories on the data of the host institution.
The I wanna do this for real sabbatical. Here, he or she takes time off to actually apply his research in practice, either in an existing company or by creating a spin-off. He or she may or may not ever return from this sabbatical.
The setting up new projects sabbatical. Here, the guest ends up spending most of his time writing one or more project proposal(s) with the host professor and other academics in the area.
The marketing trip sabbatical. Here, the guest is primarily an ambassador of the home institution or lab, and spends a lot of time going through academic institutions in proximity of the host, giving talks and establishing connections.
The I really just needed a vacation sabbatical. Here, the guest ends up doing not much at all, except meeting up with some people and giving a talk here and there. The borders between this and the previous one are kind of blurry.
The entirely academia-unrelated sabbatical. And then there are of course the sabbaticals which are quite openly only on paper about anything academic. I have known professors that renovated their house during their sabbatical. I have known one who had medical issues and used the sabbatical to recuperate.


Do graduate schools in mathematics typically send out acceptance letters all at once? There have been a few grad programs that have sent out acceptances to many people - in particular, Ohio State, UCLA, and GA Tech.

I am wondering if this means that these schools are done accepting students (with the exception of wait-listed students).

The short answer is "no" or maybe "it depends what you mean by "wait list." "

Take a moment to think about how graduate admissions works: departments have a relatively fixed number of slots that they have money for, and it is a serious nuisance if you go much above or much below those numbers.  However, because of how the deadlines are structured (with everyone having April 15th), you essentially have to make all your admissions decisions having very little idea of how many people will turn you down (because it's rational for them to wait until April 15th).  In my experience, the admission committee will do one round of admission letters that they hope is enough to fill their class, but which is probably a little on the conservative side. Right now would seem a little early to me (many schools haven't even finished their winter break), so it's possible you're seeing people who are getting early ones for some reason.  Even after that, it's still quite possible that they will decide to admit more people if for whatever reason they decide that they are not likely to get enough from their initial round.  Those admissions could happen basically any time; I've seen it happen once on the morning of April 15th.

Whether the pool of people who might still get admitted actually receive a letter saying that they are on the waitlist is mostly up to random bureaucratic chance, but if you haven't received a rejection yet, and someone else has an acceptance, you should regard yourself as on the waitlist.


My hardware can't run the code I need for my research I have started doing a project and I promised to report my results every week to my professor. At the beginning, he told me you should have a reasonably good laptop.
I thought my laptop could support the project.

Yesterday,  I realized that my laptop has a 2G graphic card and the project needs a laptop with the at least 3G graphic card. I have written the code but my laptop can't run the code to see the results.

What should I tell my professor?
If I buy a new laptop it will take about 1-2 weeks, however my financial support from my family is poor.

It should really be the responsibility of your professor to secure the required equipment to successfully complete your project; it's not quite right on his part to demand that you pay for any part out of your own pocket. Typically, a laptop is cheap relative to the professor's grant whereas it is unrealistic to expect a student to pay 1k to 2k. After all, the work you do is probably for a project that your advisor has funding for, and it's as much to his benefit as yours to successfully complete it. If he requests you to pay, it seems like he's talking advantage of his students.


Can I reuse my published images I have written respectively co-written papers where we have added images to illustrate our contribution. The images are far from technical and show prototypes in the field of HCI. It is not uncommon to write follow-up papers, especially of latest braking publications.

A publisher has asked us if we had previously published any illustrations and if we had secured all copyrights for them. As we own the illustrations but have published them before in a copyrighted paper respectively article, would we be able to reuse them?

I have looked at some publisher's copyright statements but they mostly refer to the paper, not the images. Would the latter be considered part of the publication and, therefore, be implicitly also copyrighted by the publisher?

In the context of an academic publishing agreement, the "paper" almost certainly includes everything on the page including the images, but read the agreement carefully. If you handed over the copyright of your images, then you'll need to secure the right to reusing them from your original publisher. This is usually easy.


Grades in a PhD program I am a math grad student who has completed the qualifying exams within my first two years. Lately, I have been taking a few non-core courses, which allows me to put most of my time on my own research. In one of these non-core courses, I received a low grade: B-. I certainly have the a good Cumulative Grade Point Average: 3.9 -- well above what is required for "normal progress".

Question: How important/serious is getting a grade below 3.0 in this one course at this point in a PhD program? Any feedback is much appreciated.

I'm an advanced graduate student in Physics, and I've gotten a B- in a class. I have also gone through rigorous job application processes, and generally, nobody will care about your GPA.

In Academia, papers, references, and networking will determine your postdoc or faculty position, grades won't even be considered.

If you plan on going into industry, a completed PhD and the brand name of your institution might be very important to get an interview, and depending on the job your comfort with problem solving and advanced technical concepts might matter. Companies will generally only look at your transcript after they've hired you to confirm your enrollment and completion of the program.

One B- is nothing to worry about, especially for a PhD student!


Is graduating on the August a problem in admission for PhD programs in the U.S.? I'm studying at UCB through an off-campus program this year. My original school is University of Minnesota, and I'm applying for PhD programs in the U.S. which begin from the end of August. I found that there is a chance that I have to either take online courses during semester or spend the summer (until the beginning of August) to take liberal education courses of UMN in order to graduate. For the latter case, I will get my degree on the beginning of August, and this is much later than the norm. Is this going to be a problem in admission?

It never hurts to specifically check with your undergraduate advisor and the desired graduate school's admission office just to make sure. My understanding is that as long as your current university acknowledges your completion of the undergraduate program (regardless of whether you physically have the Bachelor degree certificate or not) prior to you officially beginning your graduate program, then there should be no problem. But like I said, you should check in with your undergrad advisor so that they can inform you of any lingering policies or concerns.


Is doing research alone and publishing solo frowned upon by colleagues and superiors in engineering sciences? Research has become more and more complex and difficult to be successfully conducted by a single person. However, there are fields (such as some branches of engineering) in which a researcher can conduct pretty high standard research without wasting anybody's time or resources (for example, using opensource software on his/her own laptop over a couple of months during the weekends). Nevertheless, single author papers are very rare. How is this possible? I am asking because I believe I have produced a pretty interesting manuscript with no sort of help from anyone, but I am afraid it will be frowned upon by my past close collaborators and the PI of the project I am currently working on if I try to publish it.

I think there is no universal answer. There are fields of pure mathematics where single author papers are quite frequent (the majority?) while there are other areas of the sciences (e.g., the biomedical field) that are so broad that nobody has the requisite knowledge and time to do everything themselves.

So it depends on the field you're in. But beyond that, every field has single-author papers, and a single paper isn't going to make others put you in a box: it is, after all, just a single paper. People will turn out to be surprised if you have been in a field (any field!) for ten years, written 30 papers, and 25 of those are single-authored. For a single paper, there really is no rule to go by: If you have a good idea that you've entirely developed yourself, go write it up and get it published!


Is it a risk working for a graduate advisor who has over 20 students in their lab? I recently contacted a professor whose field of study is something that I really want to work on. He replied, that frankly his lab was pretty full at the moment, but he'd love to hear about my plans for graduate school. Since I have already secured funding, I guess this does not automatically disqualify me from working in his lab. My only concern is that in such a large group of people, and not as a student working off of funds the professor secured, I would not get the kind of mentorship I would get in a smaller lab. Just looking for any insight that could help me in making some choices in the future.

Being part of a big lab has pluses and minuses, and whether it's a good thing for you is likely to depend much on your personality and circumstances.

Cons: you've put your finger on the key fact, that students in big labs are likely to receive much less attention that students in small labs.  You also might end up as a just small part of some big project, or even just a glorified lab tech.
Pros: in order to support so many students, a professor generally needs to have good funding and being doing research that lots of people find exciting.  This means that the projects you are working on are likely to have people paying attention to them, and that if you do well, you may have a powerful backer.

For somebody who thrives in a big, competitive environment, a big lab may be good.  For somebody who wants a more personal relationship with one-on-one tutorial, a small lab is probably better.  All sorts of labs and advisors can be routes to good careers, however, and it's a matter of figuring out what works best for you.


Are there any negative consequences associated with asking your former advisor about the status of a joint paper collaboration? I coauthored a paper with my former advisor and he sent it to an expert for review before submitting it to a journal. A couple of weeks have passed by and I would like to know the status, but I have not heard anything new from my former advisor about the paper.

I thus am wondering:

  Are there any negative consequences associated with asking my former advisor about the status of the paper?

Simply put, I am afraid that my former advisor would feel that I am being pushy or something similar.

Moreover, if there are no negative consequences, I would like to know how to properly formulate such an email.

I see no problem with such a question.  Just phrase it in a non-pushy way, like:

  Hi, XXX: I just wanted to check in on the status of our paper, since we sent it to YYY for input a couple of weeks ago.  Do you know if YYY has gotten a chance to review it yet?


When should an author retract their paper as a result of misinterpreted results? I'm curious when should an author make a call on retracting their paper vs. sending an errata or a correction. Many say it is when an error is involved that influences the interpretation of the paper.

I'm finding it hard to understand when a paper should or shouldn't be retracted, since there are plenty of papers out there with errors at every step of the process but they are still available. There are also several papers that have been outright wrong but they are still available. There are several papers that have been performed incorrectly, interpreted incorrectly, and still published in a high profile journal that haven't been retracted.

This is distinct from retractions due to fraud or other ethical issues.

Outside of ethical issues, I'd argue that the only time that retraction of a paper is warranted,  is when there is a methodological error that is so great that it completely invalidates all or almost all of the paper's key results. For example, if a paper is supposed to observe phenomena A, B, C, and D, I wouldn't retract the paper if the experiment that was supposed to measure D was done incorrectly, but the results of A, B, and C remain unchanged. A correction or erratum should suffice in such cases. However, if a paper was trying to derive X, Y, and Z, but faulty assumption Q invalidates all of the derived results, then that paper should be retracted.


Are journals biased towards more famous authors? Say you are an independent researcher, with no affiliation and no famous co-author. Assume that you have authored a paper, which you believe is decently written and reports a method that is at least comparable with state of the art. Some reviewers at a  reputable journal read it and acknowledge the merits of your work, suggesting only minor and addressable corrections. However the editors reject the paper. You attribute this to bad luck.
Then you submit to a few other journals with lower impacts, and the editors desk-reject it, providing a terse comment or two. You know the work you've done, so you don't find the terse editor comments fair and unbiased. They sound more like a made-up excuse to you.
Do all these rejections have anything to do with you being an independent researcher, not affiliated with any academic institution and above all, not having any famous co-author?
Is there another reason behind the curtain? Like the editors asking among themselves "who the heck is this guy?! Where'd he come from?! Who is he to have his work published by us?!"
Final edit: I voted to delete this post. It seems to have caused more mayhem than I intended. And I kinda got my answer anyway. My speculation was probably right. Many thanks to everyone who took part and apologies for any inconvenience.

Correct me if I am wrong, but your previous experiences with publishing are only the one paper you published before, together with your former advisor? Then, you might lack the experience necessary to know about the typical mistakes that lead to a (desk) rejection. Your results may be very good, but this alone does not make a good paper. Being proficient in scientific writing takes time and requires practice. Your former advisor is a few steps ahead and you might not even have noticed some small corrections from her/his side that made publishing of the previous paper much more likely. Famous researchers usually are particularly good when it comes to presenting/writing about their results. They make it easy for the reviewers to like their work. Beginners often make it easy for the reviewers not to like their work. This does not result from bias, but from scientific writing skills. And the editor also needs convincing, so pay attention to your cover letter.
If you decide to go on alone, you might have to learn the lessons the hard way by facing a few rejections. An experienced person might be able to help.
And please stop making the mistake of calling the replies you get after peer review "stupid". This is also a typical beginner's mistake. Sleep over the replies until you can look at them in a rational (not emotional) mood. In my experience, virtually all replies can be used to improve your work.


How does closing down a department affect a PhD student? How does closing down a department affect the value of a PhD and your later academic career?

If someone has joined a university for a PhD in transportation, and that department is closed down, and everyone is moved to / absorbed by management engineering , does this have any ill effect on the quality of education that you will recieve, possible research opportunities, publications and academic career in general?

I have read this related QA, but it's about an undergrad student. PhD students have very fewer and much more specialised courses. In addition, a PhD student is supposed to assist in teaching some courses, how is someone with completely unrelated background (transportation/rural/survey engineering) teach management courses? I'm guessing that this curriculum will have some engineering courses as well, but it sounds to me too generic to be of any use to a student (I have never heard of management engineering before today, pardon my complete ignorance).

Given that some of the faculty will either lose their jobs, or quit, I do not expect their courses to be available, thus the available courses for a PhD student will be much worse (irrelevant to the field of transportation). Given that undergrad students have more generic courses, it is possible for someone to teach those, in contrast with the very niche courses of a PhD curriculum.

I should mention that I am posting this in behalf of someone else, who is only 3 months in that university. The person of interest, claims that it matters more to collaborate with a certain supervisor (who is a Computer Engineer, specialising in machine learning), as they had a great relationship and collaboration in the past; furthermore, since computational science courses are available, the lack of transportation courses seems acceptable to that person, but I am afraid about the fact that they are completely unrelated (computational science can be used in any field, from biology to sociology and statistics).

I will try to address some specific questions/concerns you pose. My comments are based on observations I made (and continue to make) as an MA and PhD student, and administrative staff member at a research center. I haven't seen this exact situation happen, but I've seen and contributed to many other restructuring events (advisor moving to another university, founding new department/lab/research center...).

In academia, the most important indicator of the value of your PhD is the quality and quantity of the research you do. While factors like your advisor, the team at your lab, the facilities available, etc. can affect this indicator, the name of the department you graduate from probably will not. In fact, it is not uncommon for researchers who have studied one field to be employed in a differently-named field. One example is Don Norman, who studied engineering and then psychology, and works in the field of design. The decision to close or merge departments most likely will have no bearing on the value of a PhD.

It is common for people doing work in a specific field (e.g. transportation) to have credentials or employment in a more general field (e.g. management, computational science), or vice versa. More generally, subject matter of your work and the discipline or methods you use to approach that subject can be different. It is normal for one's credentials or employment to relate to only one of these things. It is perfectly acceptable to be a researcher who deals with transportation (subject matter) using computational science (approach), while having credentials in management (general field).

In sum, the "person of interest" actually appears to have the right idea. While your concerns are valid, one's relationship with their advisor and lab/team is often a much more important factor, compared to the name of the deparment they belong to and the courses that are available.


The effect of a bad master's thesis on my future phd Can I do a master's thesis with exploratory work without any results? It's like assume some hypotheses about certain data and testing them. If yes, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Can such a work support me as a good Ph.D. student?

If I didn't publish anything in my master's level, and I graduated with such a thesis, would that support me or pointing a red flag against my research skills? Add to this, working as a research assistant during my master's studies. Would anyone appreciate my failed attempts and hard work yet not productive? I'm really a hard worker and I'm doing non-traditional approaches (because traditional techniques don't advance/"revolutionize" the field) in my research but I don't have any output. My advisor agrees that we need to do non-traditional approaches to advance our field, but he is pointing out that we need results and to do some baby steps based on a published research. Unfortunately, It's too late now to publish anything. I also feel that this RA job is something against me when I want to apply for a phd program (maybe in a much better school). Would a person who read my application make a statement like this; "2 years as an RA with a good advisor and no a single publication? furthermore a bad thesis? your application is in the trash dear..". I also feel that my advisor feels I'm not really a good RA, and if the time came back, he wouldn't have hired me. Which means that he won't give me a good recommendation letter and most importantly, I let him down. He was very generous to me and provided me a full scholarship and this RA job because he thought I'm really good, but now he thinks the opposite. For me personally, I do believe that I'm not productive, however, I'm learning a lot and I'm a hard worker.

What is the effect of such a situation on me when I want to apply for a Ph.D. program in one of the very good schools (one of the top 200 schools in the world maybe?)

I think the title and body of your post don't exactly match up.

You can have good research that does not produce results. You can have bad research that does produce results of some kind. You should not base the quality of your research, especially masters level, based on how much of an impact you are making on the field and how revolutionary your results are. A lot of master students don't conduct research and some of them still continue on towards a PhD. Many go straight to a PhD after getting their bachelors- none of them have had any research results.

I think the bigger issue here is your idea of productivity. There is no way for saying for certain, but it seems like you believe you are unproductive. Why is this the case? It could be founded on a false idea that you need to be constantly publishing (as a masters student) to be "productive" or to get a good recommendation letter. However this is not always the case.

My recommendation to you is to have a serious talk with your adviser about your thoughts of pursuing a PhD. Ask for advice he might have for you and whether or not he'd recommend you go down that path. You are making a lot of assumptions which are unhealthy- they will only bring your morale further down. PhD environment is much more stressful than a masters environment- my worry for you is that if you are freaking out about research now, it will only get worse in the future. Have a serious conversation with your adviser so you know how you are performing in the eyes of someone else- that should give you the best idea of your chances of getting accepted and then succeeding in a PhD program. Best of luck.


What behaviors (desirable or not) are encouraged by an incentive system based on publication throughput? What (researcher's) behaviors (desirable or not) are encouraged by an incentive system based on publication throughput?

Considering this as a research problem, I propose to list all the potential strategies that a researcher can apply to "game" various academic systems and to increase one's recognition by such systems, starting in this question with academic systems which evaluation is based on the number of academic publications. Later objectives could be to design mechanisms to detect and measure tendencies to follow such strategies, and to identify other set of strategies potentially used to maximize one's number of citations, or more interestingly one's h-index and i10-index, but those later objectives are not part of the discussion here.

To make the discussion cleaner, I propose to remove all moral judgments about the strategies, and to merely list all that could be applied by an academic sociopath in order to maximize his/her success. The  goal is not to encourage such behaviors (obviously?), nor to criticize institutions which embrace some of those strategies, but rather to identify clearly the consequences (desirable or not) of an incentive system based on publication throughput.

Feel free to add other strategies in your own answer below, or to edit my own  answer below, collaborative Q/A style.

This is a terrible question, because it presumes that publications are the goal of science, as opposed to an indicator of actual meaningful intellectual contribution.

Therefore, I will provide a solution that proves the metrics are meaningless per se:

Generate a sequence of N meaningless papers using Sci-Gen.
Have each of the meaningless papers cite K of the other meaningless papers in the sequence.
Identify a set of crap journals that do not perform meaningful peer review with the aid of Beall's list.
Publish the meaningless papers in series in the crap journals, thereby obtaining an i10-index of N and an H-index of K (assuming N>=K>=10).

If self-citations are excluded, then enlist (or fake) a colleague to do the same and cite each other's meaningless papers rather than one's own.  If Journal Impact Factor matters, then sequence the papers over three years.

Citation metrics are the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.


What does a Doctoral program mean: MS, PhD or both? If I understand it right, Graduate school means MS, PhD, or both, but a
Doctoral program means just PhD. Is this correct?

In general, a Doctoral program ends in a Ph.D ("doctor of philosophy"). If the program does not grant doctorate degrees, it cannot be doctoral. However, a doctoral program may end in a master's degree. For instance, if I chose not to finish my doctoral program, I could instead get a master's degree on the basis of the coursework and research I've done so far.


Why not design the proposed online survey using the actual survey tool? Question:
Assuming no school prohibitions on doing so, why would you not design the proposed survey in the proposed survey tool, and include screenshots of the survey in the proposal?

Background:
I edit dissertations and students are increasingly asking for formatting guidance for their proposed surveys. The handbooks from the schools of interest have no guidance other than that the design be approved.

Consequently, I am wondering why I've never seen a proposed survey presented from screenshots of the actual survey tool; but I've also never seen a prohibition on it. Instead, I always see a mock-up using Word or Excel.

My guess (and that's all it is) is that maybe no one mocks it up in the actual survey tool because--as part of the proposal process--the reviewer(s) might recommend another tool. So mocking it up in the actual tool could be a waste of time.

Note: I realize my question is rife for opinion rather than a black-and-white answer. But I couldn't think of any other way to ask it. To recap, assuming there are no school prohibitions on doing so, why would you not design the proposed survey in the proposed survey tool, and include screenshots of the survey in the proposal?

Students use the tools they are most comfortable with. If the excercise does not limit the tools, then that is only right. In my field (sociology)  most of them have put many many many more hours in Word or Excel then in some survey tool, so if this were an excercise for my students I would expect to see the pattern you report. If I wanted them to get experience in the survey tool, I would need to change the text of the exercise to require them to use that tool.


Should a bachelor’s or master’s thesis include acknowledgements? For Ph.D. theses, I think nobody would disagree with adding acknowledgements. But what is the stance in different places for a bachelor’s and/or master’s thesis?

When I was doing both, I strictly followed the guidelines laid out by the university which required me to include an abstract in both English and German, introduction, results, discussion, experimental details, a table of contents, a statement that it’s my own work and an appendix (which included literature, copies of the NMR spectra and Perl scripts) — acknowledgements weren’t mentioned anywhere. (The Ph.D. student whom I was working with during the bachelor’s thesis and the subgroup leader where I did my master’s were included in the statement that it’s my own work.)

Now, during my Ph.D. work at a different university, a lab colleague is finally completing his master’s thesis and has different samples from former master students. Most of these included acknowledgements (even though they often didn’t say much).

I found one site with a non-representative poll which was in favour of not including them, the reason being the duration of the work just being too short; but that’s merely anecdotical, not representative.

So outside of universities where either version is required, should a master’s or a bachelor’s thesis include acknowledgements? Is there any kind of general practice?

Acknowledgments are almost always an optional part of a document that you can choose to include but don't have to. This is true for PhD theses as well as MSc, Diploma theses, or any other kind of document.

The guiding line is: If there are people or institutions who you feel you want to thank or acknowledge their support, then do so. If you think that everyone in your life and your university has let you down, then don't.


How to know whether a journal accepts concurrent submission to the journal and arXiv? I am considering submitting my paper to both a computer science journal and arXiv. No version of the paper has been published in any conference or anything at this point.

Is this going to be an issue with the journal?
Should I hold off submitting to arXiv?
If this is journal dependent, how do I find out about the journal policy?

The answer is field dependent, in particular some fields in the humanities tend to consider "already published" what appeared even on a web page. Also, Glam magazines such as Nature and Science want to be able to keep the papers secret until they release them, possibly with communication toward the press. In mathematics, the most theoretical parts of computer science, and some of physics you can definitely put a preprint on the arXiv before submitting to a journal (there might be journals who don't enable this, but they would be a small minority). There is an excellent resource to determine the policy of a journal or publisher.

All of this could be gathered from previous comments. Now, the reason why I write this answer is to stress that for Elsevier, the default policy is that you can put your preprint on the arXiv and later update it according to referee's comment ("postprint" version), but you do not have the right to put the postprint on the arXiv between acceptance and 12 months after publication if the preprint was not there before. To avoid trouble you should thus put your preprint on the arXiv before acceptance (before submission being the easiest way).


Can you decide to not publish your research at the present stage as the first author? I have a three-part question:
First, if I am the first author of a research manuscript, as previously discussed with, and agreed by, both the second author and corresponding author(s), then due to some concerns about the paper content, am I legally allowed to unilaterally decide to delay publication (to edit the results presented in the paper), or in the worst case scenario, to not publish if I am not satisfied with the new results obtained?
This question arises when both the second author and the principal investigator hope to rush with the publication, despite my objection to the current manuscript. For this specific paper, my contribution is in running simulations and obtaining the data, while the second author's contribution lies in part of the paper-writing, including explaining the graphs and data I've obtained. This essentially means the research cannot be split in half, where the second author publishes his/her part and I publish mine separately.
Secondly, in response to my attempt to delay the publication until the manuscript is edited to a satisfactory standard, the principal investigator, my professor, asked/threatened to have me removed from the position of the first author, and instead make me the second author, if I delay publication. In doing so, both my professor and second author plan to bypass me in the publication process. Is this legally allowed? My professor's official reasoning is that, after a thorough examination, he found my contribution to be insufficient to be the first author. My problem with this explanation is that three months ago, I still hold the position of the first author, but three months later, when the second author presses for publication, somehow my work is deemed insufficient.
Lastly, any suggestions on my course of action when both aforementioned situations arise?
Update/further questions:
My principal investigator has tried to remove me from the position of the first author (as previously agreed to) to simply "acknowledging" my effort. Is this allowed, and just research malpractice? My guess is the PI really wants to have the paper published, and if I get to veto as an author, then I can't be an author anymore. What should I do in this case?

All authors must agree to publication; any co-author may delay publication, or withdraw, if they aren't satisfied by the results. (Intellectual property law prohibits publication without consent of all authors, in many jurisdictions.)
Author ordering should be agreed early to avoid disputes. Renegotiation is possible, especially when circumstances change.
No author may strip another of authorship. Any author may push for renegotiation of author ordering. Although an author delaying publication isn't reasonable grounds for reordering, it may be reasonable for reordering if delay is being introduced so that author duties change, e.g., when an author is going to do more work than initially considered.


Removing a grant number from a published paper How can I remove a grant number from the acknowledgment of a published paper? since my institution refused to pay the reward for publishing this paper.

Depends on the policies of the venue at which you published the paper. Ask them.


Eligibility for PhD in the USA (Note: For international students)
If someone has a gap of more than 5 years after obtaining a masters degree, are they eligible for a PhD in the USA?

There is no restriction that a PhD should be done right after a Master's degree.

For instance, I knew a returning PhD student of age >50 at a major US university.

Depending on what the candidate did in the three years in between, snatching a precious place in a PhD program may be either more difficult or easier.


What should be done about a professor who treats foreign students worse than domestic students? My school and my department has a lot of undergraduate students from China. When I took this instructor's class, he routinely

pressured the foreign students to answer questions about their home country that they weren't comfortable answering. (This is a math department; his questions weren't relevant to the course.)
pressured the foreign students to quickly answer when they struggled to either understand him or respond in English.
sneered when they answered one his questions wrong, no matter how strange the question was.
didn't accept "I don't know" from Chinese students.

He never did this to any of the domestic students. This was a topic of discussion among the American students before his class—we all noticed it. Several Chinese students dropped his class because of the way he treated them, but they didn't complain because that isn't considered kosher in China. (He actually said, "I don't understand why 'A' students are dropping," after a very talented Chinese student withdrew from this class.)

I can't point to any one thing he said or did that clearly crosses the line—I would have reported him to the dean's office and the department chair if he had—but he came up to it too many times for me to be comfortable with his behavior. I liked the guy in the beginning of the course, but I was sick of the way he treated my Chinese friends by the end.

To summarize: I feel this adjunct's behavior towards Chinese students borders on harassment, but isn't obviously harassment. Should I do anything? What?

To clarify—this class already ended, but I'm told he still keeps up this crappy behavior. And the Chinese students actually come from mainland China.

Your university almost certainly has an office devoted to considering situations of racial harassment and discrimination. If the behavior is in general towards international students rather than just Chinese ones, this is usually also explicitly prohibited as "national origin" rather than race. You should Google your university name along with the phrases "civil rights office" or "discrimination." Usually you can make a report to them, often anonymously, and in theory you ought to be protected from retaliation.

Note that from what you've said here, I would be surprised if serious action was taken against the professor -- his actions were bad but no single action crosses the line, you say, and behavior like this is sadly common. However, it may result in a reprimand (which can, after all, change behavior if he feels pressured). In addition, I would encourage you to make this report so that, if his behavior ever escalates, there will be a case history. So often I read stories about harassment cases in academia where the defense is something like "well this was just one offense" and it seems it almost never is in reality; just the first one reported. If you say something, then the next person who says something (and may have a more serious complaint) is more likely to be believed.


Can I submit a review paper to a journal without being invited? I am currently in the process of waiting for PhD verdict. I have submitted the thesis last 2 weeks for examination and I am thinking while waiting for PhD verdict, I want to write a review paper on my subject. The reason is because I have ran out results from my PhD study for publication and I reckon why not try on reviewing the subject I am studying. My area of research is biological science. My question is whether it is possible to write a review to journal without being invited to do so.

Yes, it is absolutely possible to write a review paper without being invited to do so.

How do I know this?

I've done it, several times, in the biological sciences.

The key is to recognize that the review needs to be invited at some point, but that point need not be "before you've written anything down*. If you have a target journal, and you think it is a decent fit for the review paper, I would suggest that you find the email for the appropriate section editor (or the Editor-in-Chief if there is none) and write them a polite email inquiring as to whether or not they would be interested in inviting a review on X topic, a draft of which is attached. Articulate why you think this is useful and interesting to their readership, and hope for the best.

And before we get on the "A PhD isn't enough clout to write a review", my first review was published with an undergraduate as the primary author.


How should PhD Students/Researchers take notes? When taking notes while studying papers or concepts I'm always torn between

classic pen & paper approach, which I personally find more productive;
digital approach, will make it easier to find/sort/filter information later

I'm going to be a Computer Science Ph.D student, so I have to be quite productive (solution 1), but also, to work on the long term, so building my own "knowledge database" (sol. 2) makes sense.

I am currently thinking about developing my own tool based on markdown notes, git version & a query tools to find information, to tag/link items as well a generate bibliography etc.

What is considered the most useful way of taking notes, particularly for non-class settings?

In this article, "The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard," the researchers tested this very issue.  They found that taking notes with pen and paper is more effective... but, that was because students who typed their notes were copying lectures verbatim whereas students who took notes by hand were taking in the information and then writing it in their own words (thus processing the info at a deeper level).

So, the key is the way you process the information, not necessarily the method you use to take notes. But, at the same time, it is noteworthy (no pun intended) that longhand notes tends to lead to that deeper level of processing more so than does taking notes digitally.

Personally, I'm all about taking notes longhand, and I print out articles that are important to me/my work.