Advisor moving to Industry for a year, How should I reapply for PhD elsewhere? I am in my second year of PhD. A lot of the past 1.5 years was coursework and little research. I have been working with my current advisor for the past 5 months and have a publication in the pipeline.

However my advisor informed me that he is planning to take a year long break from academia to work in industry and plans to come back. Like most of the advisors he offered me the following choices:

Search for a new lab
Continue working with him; keeping in touch over email and occasional skype sessions

However he isn't yet tenured and I am skeptical that he might choose not to return to academia.

My department is a pretty small one and moving to a new lab doesn't seem feasible because I am not interested in other labs' research. In some cases the research is good, but I found the lab environment unsuitable when I rotated with these.

I would like to complete my PhD. Another option is to possibly quit with a Masters and then reapply to other graduate schools. However I have the following concerns:

If my advisor is against giving me a recommendation letter, should I still apply rather than looking for another lab in my current university?
My graduate school GPA is average and so was my undergraduate GPA, I have couple of publications since joining the graduate school. Will a low Graduate school GPA further reduces my chances of getting an admit again?
Should I mention my situation(about my GPA; quitting PhD because advisor moved) in my Statement of Purpose?

A third option would be to continue to work with your advisor when he moves to industry, but to have a second advisor in your institution. This second advisor's primary role could be to guide you through the PhD process, so he or she may not need to be in the same field as you. They can help you improve your academic writing skills, and your research skills, offer moral support, help you brainstorm, act as a sounding board for ideas, etc. As you go through your PhD, you may find that you need this kind of help at least as often as you need more technical help.

The company I work for has close ties to nearby academic institutions, so it is common enough that one of us will jointly supervise an MSc or PhD student when their project is somewhat relevant to our industry.

I am also a PhD student, and have two academic advisors. I find this quite useful, as they have different strengths.


Are there examples of classes with students publishing their reports instead of just turning them into TA & Professor? Am interested in learning more about student publishing. Is there a list of courses where students are publishing their work instead of just turning them into their TA and professor?

Disclaimer: As I've only been a graduate student at the university I'm currently attending (USA) I can only comment on my individual experience at this university in my particular field (computer science) and the classes that accompany it.

Experience: I have a publication currently accepted that is the direct result of a course I took.

Throughout my time as a graduate student I've observed several class formats as far as expected work goes, typically involving some combination of homework, exams, and projects. Those involving projects, particularly when greater emphasis is placed on the project, are those rife with opportunity for publication. An additional indication of this is if the faculty member is teaching the project-based course in his/her area of research.

If your intent is to take a class with the hope of turning your work into a publication I would recommend taking a course where the above align (project-emphasized course work being taught by a faculty member whose research area is the same as that of the topic being taught).  Additionally, I would recommend:

1) Choosing a class that aligns with your own interests and research.

2) Speak with the professor prior to the start of the class about your intention of turning the project into a publication. The professor should be able to comment on whether their project is a good opportunity for such an endeavor and perhaps be able to provide you with advice on how to be successful in completing the project and turning it into a publication.

3) In discussing with the class instructor, it would also be a good idea to discuss project expectations, particularly as they relate to (a) working with other class members and (b) the criteria that will be used to grade your work. Regarding (a), not all class members may be interested in going the extra mile to turn a project into a publication. Having this discussion with the professor up front will mitigate the chance of encountering "snags" related to this (e.g., you be given an exception to work on the project by yourself). Regarding (b), the criteria used to grade your project may be slightly different than what it takes to make a publication. Granted your intent, and what will almost certainly entail a greater amount of work, some leeway may be granted to you if tasks to create a publication and those needed to earn full marks on the project don't line up entirely. This, of course, depends on the instructor.

4) Getting [at least] some preliminary idea of the course material and ongoing research in the area of the topic of the course, prior to its start, will help. Furthermore, having some project idea (i.e., research idea) in mind, would be ideal. This can also be discussed with the professor.

I'm sure there are points and recommendation that could be made here, as well as other scenarios, which may vary by field and university, but for me, in my own unique experience, these were the highlights that led to my course-based publication. Best of luck!


How to cite and build on the work of another paper that is still under peer review? I've written a paper which I submitted to journal ~5 months ago and is still in peer review. I have a follow up piece of work that is similar, but uses a different formulation of a problem (so I can show the results are similar and draw attention to the positive/negatives of using one formulation or the other).

How can I cite this in my new paper? I have published the first paper on arXiv, but it hasn't even got to the first round of reviews. I also have a need to publish as soon as possible as my Ph.D. funding runs out in 6 months - so I'd like to complete before then!

Cite your arXiv preprint, just like you would cite any other prior work.  Peer review is not a prerequisite for something to be citeable.


In the US, if I cannot finish my PhD in 5 years, will I lose my stipend and have to pay for my own living costs? The contract says financial support is for 5 years. I am not able to support my own living cost.

You need to ask someone in your department (your advisor, or whoever is in charge of the graduate program).  Five years is pretty good, and it's unlikely they will guarantee more than that, but departments vary in how they handle students who outlast their funding:

Some departments simply cut people off.  At that point, you have to support yourself through loans, savings, or a job (which could be an outside job or extra teaching, depending on what's available).  This can be quite a burden, and it's an incentive to graduate in five years.
Some departments will offer an additional year of funding if they can afford it and think you will make good enough use of it.  It's not guaranteed, but it might happen if you need it.
There may be other sources of funding, such as your advisor's grants or a dissertation completion fellowship.  Whether this is feasible depends heavily on the field and your personal circumstances.

There's no generic answer, and nobody on the internet can tell you which of these cases might apply to you.


What should I do about a bad TA as another TA for the same professor? I have been a math TA since my freshman year, and this year as a junior I was made head department TA. One of the TAs under me is what I deem to be a poor fit.

He is incredibly sexist(at a liberal arts school, so a huge no-no, and he is especially so to me), he talks down to students instead of trying to correct them or nudge them in the right direction, and the smallest mistakes set him off. When we TA the same class, he acts as if I am always wrong, belittles me, then teaches students the incorrect way(i.e. , the students are just beginning to learn limits, and instead of giving them the basics, he's trying to teach them derivatives).

The biggest, in my opinion, is that this student is a known cheater, and didn't get the grades needed to TA the honest way, and I am worried he will encourage our shared students to follow in his footsteps(he was discovered cheating in every class he attended last semester, and a couple of them the semester prior to that).

Unfortunately, he is the department head's favorite so I am at a loss of what to do. I don't have control over who is hired or fired, I am just head TA in the way that I have been doing it the longest, and I answer the questions the others can't.

Should I bring my complaints to the department head or my adviser? Do I risk my position to help my students? I can't bring myself to work with him any more, and don't want to lose the job I love because of a sexist, cheating TA.

Write down everything that happened and when.
Tell your advisor about it.  It's their job to help you.
There's no excuse for sexist teaching.  It cannot be tolerated.  I suggest you limit your complaints to this main issue.  The other issues just complicate the situation unnecessarily.

It's unclear who supervises TAs in your situation, but your advisor should be able to figure that out.


Transfering between graduate programs at the same university I have just completed my first year of a 50/50 coursework/research masters program in physics. I have a supervisor, but have not yet started the research component, which is meant to run until the end of next year.

After a year of graduate study I've realised that a lot of the theoretical physics done at my university is still too applied and not mathematical enough for my taste. I also feel like I need significantly more mathematics to carry out research in the areas which interest me most. Also, after looking at the areas of active research in both departments, those of the maths faculty interest me much more.

Because of this I want to transfer from my physics program to the equivalent maths program (both at my current university). I dual majored in maths and physics as an undergraduate, so I meet all the requirements and have even completed three subjects that I should be able to use as partial credit in maths. My concern however, is with leaving my current supervisor. I haven't yet started on a research project with him, but I'm worried about leaving and really don't want to inconvenience or disappoint him.

Has anybody else had a similar experience, and is this at all common? How did you handle leaving your supervisor? How did they handle you leaving? Is this likely to effect me if I end up back in the physics department for a PhD (i.e. is it likely I'll be "blacklisted")?

Thanks in advance for any advice, I'm feeling quite lost and would really appreciate it.

Programme transfers are pretty common and most modern universities have established procedures in place to allow this to happen. At my university -- a research-intensive one in the UK -- this would only be allowed if you meet the following conditions. For the sake of clarity, I will call the programme from which you wish to transfer programme A and the programme into which you wish to transfer programme B.

You meet the entry criteria of programme B. In most cases in which programmes A and B are related, this is not a problem. The greater the difference, the smaller the likelihood that these criteria will be met. The most common cause of grief in our experience is potentially different English language thresholds. For example, programme A might have an IELTS requirement of 6.5 while programme B might require IELTS 7.0.
You have no outstanding incomplete requirements in programme B.
The programme director of programme B is willing to release you. This is relatively easy because most programme directors have no desire to keep anyone who doesn't want to be there.
The programme director of programme A is willing to accept you. The programme director will want to review your academic qualifications and performance. This review may involve an interview or skills demonstration. For example, you might need to demonstrate facility with a piece of lab instrumentation or software.

If you meet all four criteria, then the question becomes about inter-programme credits. Depending on the coverage of the taught components of programme A and its overlap with programme B, you may be asked to take courses to make up the taught credit load for programme B.

Finally, you will be asked to choose an academic supervisor who will oversee the research component of your degree.

If you want to transfer out of a programme, I suggest that you do so now. Unlike PhD programmes, master's degrees are churn out students at a much faster pace. Thus, the academic supervisor you have in your original programme isn't likely to have developed a strong working relationship with you. I wouldn't overthink the issue that you are inconveniencing him or her much. This happens quite often and is the reason that policies are in place.

Finally, if you are professional about your reasons for departure and your approach to the process, there is no reason why you will be "blacklisted", should you then try for a PhD or post-doc position in your original programme.

Good luck to you.


How can I avoid inadvertently offending my female peers and getting into trouble for it? Attention has been drawn recently to an incident that occurred at a scientific conference and its sequelae described in this article:

The fuss started when [Prof. X] and [Prof. Y] ended up in the same crowded elevator during a conference at a Hilton in San Francisco last month. [Prof. Y] said she offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator, whom she described as mostly conference attendees and all, except one other woman, white middle-aged men. Instead of saying a floor, [Prof. X] smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department "and all his buddies laughed," [Prof. Y] wrote in a complaint, the details of which [Prof. X] disputed.
[Prof. Y] [...] then wrote to the association’s executive director, who forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that [Prof. X] had violated the conduct code.
[Prof. X] insists it never should have gotten to that point because he tried to resolve the problem informally, as the association’s conduct code recommends. After being informed that his conduct was under investigation, [Prof. X] wrote [Prof. Y] an email assuring her that "I certainly had no desire to insult women or to make you feel uncomfortable." He suggested that [Prof. Y], who was born in Romania and raised in Israel, might have misinterpreted his remark. When he was young, in the 1950s, he said, it was a "standard gag line" to ask the elevator operator for the hardware or lingerie floor as though one were in a department store.
"Like you, I am strongly opposed to the exploitation, coercion, or humiliation of women," [Prof. X] wrote. "As such evils continue, it seems to me to make sense to direct our attention to real offenses, not those that are imagined or marginal. By making a complaint to ISA that I consider frivolous — and I expect, will be judged this way by the ethics committee — you may be directing time and effort away from the real offenses that trouble us both."
[Prof. X] was told to write an "unequivocal apology" to [Prof. Y] and submit a written copy by May 15 to the association’s executive committee. The apology should focus on [Prof. X's] actions, rather than [Prof. Y's] perceptions of them, it said, adding that if he failed to comply, the executive committee would consider appropriate sanctions.

As a male member of academe, I am worried.  I feel bewildered and fear that I might also offend someone some day.
How can I avoid committing an equivalent faux pas in an academic environment, such as an international conference?

When I step on someone's foot in a crowded subway, I apologize, even if I didn't do it on purpose. I don't refuse to say I'm sorry, I don't imply in a sarcastic way that the other person should have gotten their foot out of the way, I don't suggest that it cannot have hurt all that much, and I don't tell them they should relax, it's just a prank.

If you read the full story, you will see that Prof X's problems really started when he reached out to Prof Y to tell her she was wrong and had no right to complain, and even further refused to formally apologize when asked to. When you read the organization's reasoning, you see that they also consider that it is not so much the intent of the actions that matters, but rather the consequences and hurt they caused.

So I would suggest apologizing if someone tells you that your actions hurt them, instead of telling them that they had no right to feel hurt. Showing that you are a human being capable of empathy helps, usually. I have never witnessed an attempt at going down the second route that worked out well.


How desperate is too desperate when it comes to contacting supervisor? I am trying to create a solid basis for applying for a highly competitive PhD position in the field of CS.
I am now getting as much research experience as I can by doing internships in academia and companies, I also do a lot of networking and get myself introduced to people in the field. I try to keep in touch with my former supervisor (MSc). For example, now as a result of my recent internship I am working on a paper, and he agreed to co-author it. Also, I am starting to work on another project on my topic, and I am planning to inform him as well. I regularly (once in a couple of months) write him telling him what I am doing and asking him whether my new step (application for a new internship etc.) is advisable.

He is always nice but I am wondering whether it is actually good practice to keep bothering your supervisor after you graduate from an MSc, even if potentially you want to apply for a PhD after his supervision. Doesn't it seem to desperate or pushy?

Keeping in touch with a former supervisor is hardly a negative, particularly since you are collaborating with him on a paper.

At a rate of an email every couple of months, this frequency of your communications doesn't make you appear desperate or pushy. Whether these qualities come across in what you write to your former supervisor, or how you express yourself, is impossible to determine.

Maintaining good links with your former supervisors and collaborators is excellent practice, so long as you remain pleasant, polite, and on topic.

Deciding what the best thing to do regarding internships and applications is always tricky. Gaining the advice of your past supervisors is a good idea, and most supervisors would see it as part of their ongoing pastoral care to provide their opinion on your career progress. Don't, however, expect anyone to make a decision for you.


Is publishing in open access journal a good impression? Is publishing in open access journal a good impression ? I mean publishing in such journals (where one has to pay money), will it be valuable compared to other journals ?

It depends entirely on the journal. There are good and bad open access journals, just as there are good and bad closed access journals.
For example, in biology Nature Communications, Cell Reports, eLife, PLoS Biology and Genome Biology are all open access journals with excellent reputations.
PLoS One, BMC genomics, PeerJ, Scientific Reports are open access journals that have a reputation (earned or not) of publishing work which is sound, but maybe less exciting.
And then there are various lower quality open access journals that people might be suspicious of.
This is no different from closed access journals.


Leaving a conference immediately after presenting a paper? I work as a full-time employee in industry. Recently, I've been invited to present at a conference in an area not closely related to my degree. My employer approved me being absent for two-three hours and I accepted the conference invitation.

However, I'm not sure how will this look in the eyes of the conference attendees and other presenters since I will have to leave immediately after my 20 minutes talk. Therefore, I will miss their talks.

Is there an etiquette regarding this? Should someone accept a presentation on a conference if they won't be able to be present for the whole duration?

Is there an etiquette regarding this? Should someone accept a presentation on a conference if they won't be able to be present for the whole duration?

There aren’t really any universally agreed-upon rules for such things, but as a general rule:

If the conference organizers are paying any expenses for your attendance (such as travel or accommodation), it is considered good manners to be present for at least a good chunk of the conference other than your own talk.
If the organizers are not paying your expenses, I don’t think they have either a moral claim or much of an expectation that you do anything other than show up and deliver the talk they invited you to deliver.

If you are in doubt about what the organizers are expecting from you, it is perfectly acceptable to let them know about your constraints and ask them if it’s okay to accept the invitation even though you won’t be able to stay after your talk. If it bothers them, I‘m sure they will have no trouble telling you.


PhD in Biology: how time consuming? I am currently pursuing my master's in bio-medicine. I am taking classes, doing research, and working as a graduate assistant at the same time. So far it has turned out to be very time consuming. I can do the work just fine, but I am having trouble finding any time to spend with my family. I was originally planning to continue with a PhD in bio-medicine after graduating with my master's.

Question
In your experience doing research in a bio-medical PhD program, were you required to spend all of your time working?
Is it possible/likely for me to enter a PhD program that allows me to treat it as a full-time or even overtime job?
Through undergraduate and now in my masters I spend pretty much all of my waking hours working, and I don't think I'm interested in another 4-5 years of this.

Edit: I am in the United States. My goal in getting a PhD is to teach at a university level, but I'm open to research or industry jobs as well.

The answer is, of course, that it depends. If you're in the US the first two years are functionally two jobs - classes & candidacy, and research. I think most people end up working a lot. If you're continuing in the same program as your masters degree it will be less time consuming because you've already knocked off your course load, but it's not going to be much better than what you've already experienced.
It's also very PI dependant. Some PIs will be fine with something close to a 9-5. Others will expect an 80 hour a week workload. You should be careful with who you choose to work for. I would advise looking for associate or recently promoted full professors with children under the age of 15. Labs which are entirely international students are a red flag. There's no replacement for talking to current students in an informal capacity about work life balance. Spending $20 and a night at the department happy hour is an investment that will pay off when you pump people for information.
FWIW I did 60 hours a week through my PhD but got much better at time management and got that down to 40 a week for my postdoc. It is doable.


Is it wise for an undergraduate to contact a professor they would like to work under for a PhD program Would it be wise to ask my current undergraduate research advisor to put me in contact with the people he knows within the math department at his former Ivy league school. I really need help to best navigate the academy.

What you suggest seems fine to me, but you could, and probably should, take it a step farther. Try to arrange a series of conversations with your advisor about how to approach graduate school in the long term and the admissions process in the short.

In particular, you will learn a bit about what life is like for a student at the institution you want to go to. It won't all be rosy and it will be hard.

He probably also knows a bunch of people other than at his alma mater and could make recommendations about them as well.

The personal touch never hurts, but with some admissions systems it may not help a great deal. The admissions process is often handled by a committee or even by administration rather than by individual professors. You will still need to make a good overall impression on the admissions people in any case.

On the other hand, don't necessarily close down your options to a single person. If that doesn't work you need the flexibility to go elsewhere.


Ethics of Accepting Unneeded Merit Based Scholarships I come from a fairly wealthy background, and am lucky enough to have parents who are both footing the bill for my tuition, as well as providing a very comfortable living stipend while I'm in school.

Without thinking much about it, I dropped a resume to be considered for one of several merit-based scholarships awarded each semester by my college. Short story short, I've been awarded a partial scholarship for next semester, but I've come to wonder whether it's ethical to accept it.

On the one hand, the criteria for the scholarship makes me as deserving is anyone, and that's of course why it was awarded to me.  But I can't help but wonder if that doesn't ring a bit hollow.  I don't even have to work while I'm in school, and am starting to feel as though I'd be taking the money out of the pocket of someone in a rougher spot.

It may be worth noting that my parents consider this money earned by me, and will simply pass any tuition savings directly to me in cash.

Is there a generally accepted view on this one?

Congratulations! It's your decision, but I think the most commonly accepted point of view is that it's totally fine to keep the money. One thing you could do with it, or with part of it, is to give back to a need-based scholarship fund or to any other worthy cause.

Also, at least in the US, it is common for universities to solicit donations from alumni, so if you so choose you will have an opportunity to 'pay it forward' after you graduate.

Again, congratulations!


Does translating an academic work in the humanities or social sciences improve your CV? I've been asked to collaborate in an edited book that will collect important contributions to the field X, in the humanities/Social Sciences. The volume will be published in French, so I was asked to translate the work (an article) of an authority in the field from English to French. Given that this takes time, I wonder whether there is any value in doing this? Will this look good on a CV? Or is it just a "service"?

Been there, done that. Didn't even get a print out of the translated chapter, nor a hard copy of the edited volume.

Make sure the article is at least of some interest to you personally, otherwise the whole process quickly becomes taxing.

The assumption is also that you will translate into a language that is your mother language, or that will be even harder, and actually you would be badly advised to even consider completing the task.

Translating does not improve an academic CV because translating an article is either a skill people assume you have to be able to carry your usual research, or translations are given to language professionals who can value the experience on their CV.

Unless you're able to bargain some sort of deal that is of interest to you with the people who ask for the translation, or the author of the article to translate, it will only be a "service", for glory.


Reply from prospective Ph.D advisor I sent an email to prospective Ph.D advisor asking for a scholarship in his university and position in his research group. His reply was only "please, apply mentioning my name", I didn't understand if he accepted me or not!

As far as I can tell, he has neither accepted you nor rejected you. Depending on your department's system, he will probably read only the applications that mention his name, so he wants you to mention his name so that he'll remember to read your files. If those are good compared to the other files, he might accept you. Otherwise he might not. It's too early to tell.


How to provide in-text citation for Appendix My master's dissertation has been sent back to me for copy edits before publication. One of the comments from the editors is "please provide in-text citation for Appendix". Now, I haven't actually referenced the appendix anywhere in the paper, it's more just extra information that relates to the topic and some of my interviewees who provided field data. How shall I go about doing this?

The easiest solution is to provide a reference to the Appendix (e.g., "for further details, see Appendix) wherever the additional information is relevant. If your Appendix contains several different types of content then subheadings would be helpful. Then, you can reference the specific Appendix sections in your text. Seeing as you're at the copyediting phase now, you likely don't have many other options.


Authorship allocation - is it common to grant equal credit to two last authors? I am working on a project in which I have a direct supervisor in addition to the head professor of the lab. The direct supervisor only agrees to being written first or last on the article we are writing. Needless to say, my professor won't agree to be anywhere but last. He also feels that I deserve to be written in the first place. Is it possible to write both of them in the last place as co-last authors?

Is it possible to write both of them in the last place as co-last authors?

No.

As expected, an author list is not a tree or a weighted graph, but a simple flat (one-dimensional) list.
There is exactly one last author. Possible solutions or mitigation of the issue include:

Alphabetical author list. This happens in some field, and is totally unheard of in some others (including chemistry and biology, which is your field, so this might not be a possibility).
Having two contact authors, or have the professor who is not last author to be the contact author. In the past I have used this as a way to “pacify” a co-author who wasn't happy with his spot on the author list. (Needless to say, it's a perversion of the system, and should only be done if the author can actually act as contact author.)
Have a statement indicating the contributions of each author (“X and Y contributed to this work equally”). Some journals require such statements, some will refuse to include them, so your mileage may vary. I doubt this will pacify your reluctant supervisor, though: people who are worried about their rank in the author list are most probably thinking about how it looks like on a publication list or CV.
Have the head professor take responsibility for the final decision (as senior professor and project instigator). That's the most sound solution, but it does not mean it's an easy one.

Good luck with your negotiation! And remember that they're not yours to handle (see my last point)!


How do I cite or reference code that has not been officially published? Let's say I go to someone's website, look up the source and use some of the JavaScript idea/pattern/code that is not a part of the wider framerwork/something similar, but a unique code that was written by the author of the website.

If it's not officially published in e.g. some coding tutorial, but I looked up the source of the website, is it appropriate to reference directly to the code on that website? (e.g. http://example.com/someonesscript.js)

Small edit #1: Just to mention, I have extensively edited the script, it is still similar, but not the same. It is about 100% longer, but there are similarities.

If it is part of the website or a webpage, simply refer to the webpage in your references. It clearly mentions that you are referring to a code which is published on a website.

Just look at this structure for a Chicago styled reference:

  Last Name, First Name. "Page Title." Website Title. Web Address
  (retrieved Date Accessed).

You can produce your citation like this:

  Code Producer's Last Name, Code Producer's First Name. "Sample computing source code for idea/pattern/code." Website Title. Web Address
  (retrieved Date Accessed).


Author order - seniority vs contribution I have a manuscript (in the field of biomedical research) close to submission with four authors: me (as first author) (ME), my ex-boss (as senior author) (EB) and two more authors of which one is a very senior professor (SP) and the other one is a junior professor (JP).

The SP contributed considerably more than the JP. My question is now which order of the authors would be more appropriate:

ME, SP, JP, EB (higher contribution of SP means further to the front)
ME, JP, SP, EB (SP is more senior therefore closer to the senior author position (which is already occupied by EB) and it is not going to be a shared senior authorship)

I will of course ask them directly but I would like go get some opinions first ...

--------- EDIT --------

All authors are professors and independent PIs without a hierarchy between them.

--------- EDIT --------

We discussed it and decided for the option:

ME, SP, JP, EB

Assuming you are a junior researcher like a PhD student, I would defer to the professors to sort this issue out themselves. Voicing any opinions about this matter could have a non-zero probability of stepping on someone's toes.

Given that, there is essentially no perceived difference between second and third author. And in the two possibilities you just described, all authors 'get their due', so there is no issue about fairness here either.


Could citing a database like libgen get one into trouble? Databases like libgen are considered illegal in most countries, I understand. So, if someone acknowledges libgen as the database from which a book has been retrieved on the Reference List, could he/she get into trouble?

This is in cases, where you have to cite the database, apart from the book. Suppose, you cite an e-book or an online article, you have to include the database too in certain referencing systems.

The databases are illegal in that they violate copyright law. The owner of the database is clearly in violation of the law, but users of the database are generally not. That said, I can imagine some authors would be upset to see a published link to a pirated version of their book. Why not just go to the library and confirm that the printed version matches the online version.


Is there any problem with giving lots of extra credit? In the past term, my teaching evaluations were full of complaints that I assign too much homework. To solve this, I've scaled back the assigned workload and threw several assignments into extra credit. This seems to make many student happy:

Students just passing through complete the basic coursework and meeting the course objectives, without feeling the course is harder than other courses.
Students who enter the course finding the material is too difficult can complete the extra work to offset their poor mid-term exam grade while getting additional practice for the final.
Students eager to learn the material are happy with the extra work and feel they can get more out of the course.

In the next term, I hope to offer much more extra credit, equal to 20-30 hours of work, to meet the needs of those top 20% eager learners.

All of the work aligns with the course objectives.
The point values are kept low, to discourage students from skipping regular work.

I have never seen a course instructor ever give more than a little amount of extra credit. Is there any reason why it would be a poor choice to offer a great deal?

I think the answer to your question is "No one knows, but you are about to find out."  The only thing that can be guaranteed is that there will be some unexpected consequences, because the nature of human interaction--and the diversity of things like motivation and preparation--is such that it's too complex a system for us to know what the introduction of a novel approach is going to do.

You are attempting to transfer power to the students which is traditionally vested almost exclusively in the instructor.  I feel that this is a good thing, but that it is difficult to predict what people will do when given power that they previously did not have.

To give you an example (which I don't think will happen in your case, but there could be some analogous effect), I know of an instructor that tried dispensing with grade pressure altogether by announcing on the first day that everyone in the class had an A for the course [the highest rating possible, for those not familiar with common practice in the US].  The consequence that surprised him was that at the end of (or perhaps during as well, I don't remember) the course, students expressed resentment toward the policy.  The realities of time pressures put on them by other courses meant that they ended up spending little to no time on the gradeless class, because they knew ultimately that it would not affect their record.  The resentment came from the fact that they wanted to learn the material, but with nothing to force them to spend time on it, they ended up not giving it any time but instead allowing the other demands on their time to crowd it out completely.

In my opinion, I think you've covered your bases as well as you can (in particular, it's not a wild shot in the dark, but a further change to a previous, successful modification), and all there is for you to do is observe the effects and see what student feedback is.  The most interesting question in my mind is whether the most talented students will do as well (in terms of "total learning outcome") under this system as they did under your original one.  For similar reasons as the example I gave, they may just make a decision not to put as much effort in because of time pressures from other classes.


Is it too late for me to be pursuing a degree in medicine? I will be 26 years old soon. I did my bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and I worked in an investment bank for sometime. Then I joined a masters in Applications of Mathematics, but I dropped out without completing the degree. I have been working as a research assistant for the past six months.

I have no real exposure to biology or medicine. But of late I feel very interested in Medicine. I began with interests in mathematically modeling bio-processes. I am also interested in instrumentation for bio-medical purposes.

Given my current circumstances, I feel I can indeed pursue a Ph.D. that would allow me to get involved with some medicine, mathematics and engineering. And I seem content with that.

But I want to know:

If I too strongly feel like actually practicing Medicine (full-time with a license) after completing my Ph.D. will it be too late for me? Is it too late already?
At the moment I am not imagining myself to be seeing patients in the future. I imagine to be more invested in research, publishing and lab-work. Will pursuing a degree in medicine be the right decision for me? If I am not a MD, will I be able to run clinical trials? I have come across some MD-Ph.D. programs, but I wasn't too clear about them.

Thanks!

While I don't have experience within the specifics of your question I can give general advice based on other fields I studied and work in:

1). It's never too late to go back to school. When people say "is it too late" they generally mean "will people be willing to hire me?". So I'll answer it that way. Age doesn't matter, skill set does. If you can prove that you have potential and the skills needed to do a job then employers won't see age as a big factor. If you're worried that your age to experience will be off then stop worrying. When you're fresh out of school you'll be on the same playing field as others fresh out of school. Make your resume look better than theirs as someone who employs people with degrees I never factor age into my decisions because it's a bias that doesn't effect much until the person is 50-60 (depending on the field).

2). This is not my field so I won't answer this one, sorry but I'd like to convey information I'd stand behind.

3). When it comes to schools and programs that's a very broad question. Look into medicine programs in certain countries so you can see how countries compare to each other and how people in that country use their degree. Once you have a country in mind you'll need to locate all schools with medicine degrees (to rule out areas without any). Keep researching and narrowing until you have 2-4 schools in mind. Each school operates differently and different countries run their education systems very differently so until you have a country in mind you shouldn't look into specific programs because then you may end up needing to look at the education system of X amount of countries, the funded programs if any, etc.


How much time does it normally take to get certificate of participation in a conference? I participated in a conference (oral presentation), It is my first conference ever as I am in my first year of PhD. The conference ended 3 weeks agp now and they still did not send me any certificate of attendance/participation. How much time does it normally take to get certificate of participation in a conference?
Note : the conference was five days long (Monday to Friday, about 10 partcipants each day).

Not all conferences provide a certificate of participation. Some will provide such documents only by request. Many participants would not need such certificates at all, so it often makes sense not to provide them by default.
If you require a certificate of participation, write to conference organisers and ask for it.


What costs should be covered when inviting a university professor from another country to attend your university? What costs should be covered when inviting a university professor from another country to visit your university?

For example, imagine you wanted to invite a university professor from Harvard to a European university.

I don't think this question has any absolute answer. This depends on the professor (a "famous" speaker for a large public event will be a different issue than a "regular" professor that comes to give a talk for the students and faculty of the university), the host institution (a professor might be happy to go and give a talk at ETH Zurich, and maybe less so to travel to an unknown university), how long the trip is, and whether there are some pre-existing relations (i.e., whether the inviting professor is already friends with or at least an academic acquaintance of the speaker).

Minimally, it is standard that all costs of the speaker are covered, including (sometimes) business class airfare and a nice hotel for the duration of the trip. If the invited talk happens as part of a conference, the conference fee or entry should be waived for the speaker. Further, it is customary at least in my field to give the speaker a small (local) present, such as a bottle of good regional wine, as a sign of appreciation directly after the talk.

Whether the speaker asks for money on top of this depends on all the things above, but this seems to be relatively unusual in my field. The only persons that actually get paid in money to come and give a talk are well-known public figures, like Tim Berners-Lee. I have recently had the honour to listen to a talk of Don Knuth, and rumor has it that not even Knuth was asking for direct payment.


Corporate branding of chair professorship For obvious reasons I will not be too specific, but I am aware of a situation (at a private research university) where a company with a somewhat less-than-stellar public reputation has endowed a chair professorship.  The concerned department and dean want one of their current professors to accept the chair (though some of the faculty would much prefer a new search to fill the position).  There is some reluctance to accept this offer, in large part because the professor being offered the chair balks at becoming a "brand ambassador" for the company making the endowment while getting no explicit benefit (the chair would cover only the salary that is paid anyway).  This professor (who is evidently preferred as having the best research profile in the department) and some colleagues also claim that an endowment named after some individual(s) would have been more acceptable.

So my questions are:

Is it generally the norm that any academic offered a chair professorship will accept it, for collegiality?
Is it standard for such an endowment to cover only the professor's salary but not offer any grants, etc.?
Also, is there a real difference in perception between an endowment named after a person/family vs. one named after a company?

You are asking too many questions in one post and most ask for opinion! Brief responses to each:

Usually faculty accept named professorships because of the increase in prestige (named-professorships are a scarce commodity and operate as such) as well as the increase in salary or research funds that usually attaches to these. Cynical people would say the latter is more important.
Usually (almost always?) the endowment would carry an increased salary at the very least and typically additional research funds  but I have not found any statistics on the average and sd of this delta. One way to explore this is to look at the public salary data available at state-run universities in the United States and compare named vs. non-named professors at the same rank in the same department. This is left as an exercise for the reader and doesn’t account for research fund deltas.
Yes, in that most person-based named-professorships are named after a person who most people do not know  whereas corporate names are more familiar (for example:  Prof. Mark C. Elliott, the Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard versus Prof Sheldon Garon, the Nissan Professor in Japanese Studies at Princeton). And thus while neither Mark Schwartz nor Nissan Motors influence the work of either faculty person, the perception is worse in the second in that we've heard of Nissan and can attribute ulterior motives to it. And as dmckee notes in the comments, humans are mortal -- while corporations are immortal.
Note that there is a third category of alumn-class-named professorships: Cornel West, the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies. These are essentially crowdfunded by a class cohort. I should note that some named fellowships are also crowdfunded — they are named in honor of so-and-so. Often the benefactor is the spouse or children, but occasionally the departure of a very-loved professor motivates students to donate. There is also a fourth category where a named professorship is created by the trustees of the university (or by the state or national government) in honor of or recognition of someone or something.


Advice on acquiring letters of recommendation and from whom I am currently doing my Masters in Neuroscience and applying for a PhD in neuroscience and had a research project component (50%) but my supervisor is close to retirement and sort of unaware of the system of LORs and how strong they need to be/how they need to be written. I have a really good one from one of my academic professors and I have asked my supervisor and she said yes, but she's been sitting on it and hasn't done it yet. I do however have really good recommendations from my undergrad - college principal/head of department and a professor. Could I use those? Or should I submit an above average one from my supervisor (if she gives it to me, I know she'll just say that I did good work and finished the project - no personal references etc). Or should I try getting another academic one from one of my masters professors?

I doubt that your supervisor has managed to work through their entire academic career without developing knowledge of how to write a letter of recommendation. The best thing you can do is to get in touch with them again and re-iterate that you would like them to write you one. If they still hold off from doing it then definitely use your fallbacks.


Disappointed about workshop, are all like that? I submitted an article for an IEEE congress in the field of Software Engineering, the congress was categorized as a type B congress according to the Australian ranking (I do not remember the exact name).
I went to the workshop sessions because my article was accepted for one of those, but not the main conference, and it was pretty lame. The reasons were the following:

some people were given a presentation of topics not already finished it up, with a lot of holes in their respective research
some people were introducing their doctoral research proposals, which were in a a very initial developing point; I have been also a conference review and I would rejected those works straight ahead
people attending were no caring of what has being said there, also some of the people in charge were almost sleeping during some points of the presentations

I suppose that a workshop was for sharing ideas between the academic community, and not just for the sake of accepting some bad made papers to get money while other researchers want to do the things right.

Also I forget to mention that in one session, the chair of the workshop was the lecturer in charge of one of the lame papers; I do not want to think bad, but it seems like he influence the acceptance of that paper.

In any case I am really disappointed about this type of congresses, I cannot imagine how lame it could be a type C conference.

It is always like that?

I understand your frustration, but workshops are not for seminal research. It is usually for hosting / presenting papers that cannot make it to major conferences or provide a venue for very small and specialized areas of research. This is not a bad thing. Especially in CS, papers that are technically correct and well-written sometimes get rejected in major conferences, due to the high rejection rates. In this cases, workshops provide a alternative venue to patent those results and lower the authors' sense of rejection.

Also, many research projects (in EU but maybe this applies to USA as well) have the obligation to organize workshops during the duration of the project. In those cases, it is normal that most of the submissions are from project partners. This explains the little "inbreeding" you encountered. Also, since each workshop has a minimal number of papers that should be presented, in cases of low number of submissions, it is inevitable that some less-good papers get accepted. Also, although peer review is still formal (and not blind to bad papers depending on their authors, as you imply) on those workshops, the requirements for presentation are less strict than major conferences and marginal papers might actually make it.

Are all workshops bad? No they are not. It is actually easy to tell them apart (most of the cases).

Are they co-hosted with major conferences
Do they take place for many years
Who are the PC chairs (this year and previous years)
How good are the papers that got accepted in the previous years?

All these four criteria are a strong indication of the quality of the workshop.

A general advice. Many researchers (not excluding myself) tend to overvalue their research in comparison to others. Since your paper also got rejected for the major conference, that also implies that it was not that seminal or exceptional (which is of course OK). To someone else's eyes the comments you make about the "other" papers might also apply to yours as well. So, talking about lame papers and workshops (especially if you express those ideas publicly) will not make you a lot of friends and academia is really a very small world.


Do automatic tools to check thesis exist? I am currently writing my bachelor's thesis in Computer Science with LaTeX. The thesis is written in English. I use aspell for spell checking, but I think there is more that could automatically be checked:

Writing "style" (e.g. warnings for "I", "me", ...)
Grammar checking.
Wrong citations (I use bibtex)
Missing figures or tables
Duplicate lables

Is there a program that checks writing style for academic work?

I use a Academic Writing Check for most of my academic writing, including my thesis. It checks for:

passive voice: don't use the passive voice if you can help it.
duplicate words ("the the"): this has saved me many times.
wrong abbreviations: for example, i.e (no second period)
bad typography
and some others

To check missing or duplicate labels, I use pdflatex (with this very cool Makefile). It prints a warning message anytime some of the above occur.

I'm not sure how you would check for wrong citations, but pdflatex will tell you about undefined references. For certain words you don't ever want to occur, just use grep.

The last check I do is for overfull hboxes, you can visualize them in your document by setting this in your preamble:

\overfullrule=5pt

I found that on the LaTeX stack exchange, you will no doubt find the answers there a great resource as your write your document. Good luck!


Is it possible to know about the research quality of a professor from the number of citations of his/her papers in Google Scholar? I am in the process of advisor searching for a PhD in mathematics.
I came across this site called Google Scholar which lists nearly all the publications of a professor.
I found that many professors don’t have any citations of their papers in the first three years
If at all, it is two or three citations per paper.

Does this reflect that their publications are of poor quality?
If yes what are the parameters other than Google Scholar to know about research work of the professors?
Are there any alternatives to Google Scholar which serve the above purpose?

This would vary by field, of course. But there is more to selecting a good advisor than just their output, even the recognized quality of that output. In fact, having a superstar as an advisor can be a mixed blessing/curse. They may be so focused on their own research and career that they give you little direction in your own. If you are especially self motivated and can find and develop your own research this is less of an issue than if you are like most students, needing guidance in finding problems and developing solutions.

But the citation count of a person gives some, but not the final, measure of their quality as a researcher, not necessarily as an advisor. If you want an even better measure (IMO) get the citation count of the students that they have advised. Even just the number of "produced" students and where they wound up in their careers is a good, but not perfect, measure. It is more likely to be useful for a senior professor than a junior one, of course.

If you are already at the institution, student scuttlebutt is actually a pretty good indicator of an advisors "quality" as an advisor, if not as a scholar.


Dealing with competition from inside the lab I invited a coworker with shared expertise to collaborate on/coauthor a paper (both postdocs). The result was ultimately much better due to this input. He also had an idea for an alternative approach to 'my problem', and published a second paper with me as coauthor. While this is beneficial in the sense that it increases the quality and volume of both our output, I find the situation highly stressful. I am not aggressively competitive by nature and feel that his behaviour is arrogant and offensive. I understand that once you have published a result, any generalization thereof it is ‘up for grabs’. However, people with access to your unpublished work have an ‘unfair’ head start. Is there an unwritten understanding with respect to crossing the borders between the territory of your coworkers? How can I avoid this type of conflict/coworker in the future? Am I being overly sensitive and need to develop thicker skin/not cut out for this type of business?

Science is a collective endeavour to build and spread knowledge, improving our understanding of nature. Collaborating and building on each other's expertise with proper recognition is a must.

You collaborated with a colleague of yours, and not only did this joint effort  produce a better result, but it also produced a further result, unforeseen at the beginning (and which, for you, came almost for free).

Celebrate the successful moment, hope that all your future collaboration will work out smoothly and productive as this one, and if necessary rethink carefully at your motivation in doing science, to avoid being stressed by something that should be the normality (and that too frequently, alas, is not). That is, be competitive against yourself to improve yours and everyone's knowledge and not against someone else.


Acknowledging local government for quarantine measures It looks like I may completely write a paper while in coronavirus-related quarantine.  Would it be appropriate to thank my local government in the acknowledgements?  If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I would have been able to do this with such focus and efficiency if all other aspects of my life hadn't been suddenly shut down.

People often acknowledge visits to other institutions, which seem to serve a similar purpose, hence why I pose the question seriously.

Edit: I'm also in an at-risk group, and the government-mandated quarantine is kind of saving my life, so there's also that.

I decided to elevate my comment to an answer.

  When this is all over, and most of your readers will probably know multiple people who died during the crisis, this would not be a good [look].

This is a global crisis that is only just beginning. By the time the dust settles, millions may have died from the virus alone. It would be a rare reader who does not personally know someone affected. More will have died because of how overwhelmed the global healthcare system is.

Even more will be affected by the economic fallout.

Viral infections can have lifelong consequences, even if you live.

If you're in a medical field, many of  your readers will be caregivers who were worked to the bone for months, and had to make impossible triage decisions.

For your readers, researchers are forced to halt research, often at great expense. Many studies cannot be paused for three months and picked up at the same place.

And you're proposing to put in your acknowledgements "gee I got so much done while quarantined!" This is offensive at best, and obscene at worst. We in universities are extremely lucky that our pay will most likely not be stopped, and we can just pick up and work from home. That is not happening for most of the nation.

Frankly, I would be ashamed to be your co-author, and if you were in my field, put you on blast across every channel I knew how. Do not do this.


Pursuing integrated master’s and PhD in business My friend has a diploma (associate degree) in commerce. He has 35+ years of industry experience. He wants to do integrated master’s and PhD in business. How is it possible?

The typical college cycle
The typical college cycle works like this:

Start with a high-school diploma or equivalent.

Do 2-years of undergraduate education; some get an Associate's degree for it.

Do another 2-years of undergraduate education; most get a Bachelor's for it.

Do 2-years of graduate education; many get a Master's for it.

Do a few years of PhD work; successful students get a PhD for it.

It sounds like your friend's done Steps (1) and (2), and now they want to do Steps (4) and (5).
Your friend's atypical situation: rejoining the cycle & skipping a step
Your friend's situation is atypical in two ways:

They want to skip Step (3).

There's a significant gap between the earlier and later steps.

Skipping Step (3) is a tricky proposition.   Basically, they'd need to find a grad school that will accept their application despite not having done Step (3), which won't be something all would be willing to do.
Unfortunately, doing Step (3) would probably require repeating Step (2) as well.  It's probably unfair, but that's how the system currently works in most places; undergraduate continuation is lost after about 5 years.
Potential approaches to achieving this goal
This seems to leave them with four tactics that might work depending on the locality and a lot of happenstance:

Option 1:  Repeat Step (2) by enrolling as an undergraduate, then go through the process from there.

Option 2:  Re-enter the process at Step (3) by finding an undergraduate program that'll accept the prior Associate's.  This may be unlikely.

Option 3:  Skip ahead to Step (4) by finding a graduate program that'll overlook the absence of a Bachelor's, perhaps by arguing that 35-years of experience is a supplement.

Option 4:  Enroll in an MBA program instead, then try to re-enter the typical college cycle at Step (4) or Step (5) with an MBA in-hand.

Option (1) might not be interesting to your friend, since it'd involve doing an extra 4 years of full-time college work before starting with the Master's/PhD program that they want to do.
Option (2) would be tricky, primarily since it'd probably be hard to find an undergrad institution that'd accept an Associate's from that long ago.  Additionally, it'd still involve an additional 2 years of full-time college work before starting with the Master's/PhD program that they want to do.
Option (3) would probably be what your friend would like most.  However, the Master's-level classes might be a bit hard for someone who's been out of academia for so long, plus a lot of graduate programs might spurn their application in the absence of a Bachelor's.
Option (4) seems more plausible than some of the others because MBA programs tend to value work experience far more than typical Master's programs, so it'd probably be easier for them to get in.  However, MBA's are typically terminal degrees; I don't know if there're combined MBA/PhD programs.  That said, a Business PhD program might be inclined to accept an applicant with an MBA, or else an MBA might qualify them to enter a traditional Master's/PhD program.


What is the purpose of the presentations section in the CV? I do not understand what exactly I should bring in the presentations section of my CV? In fact, during my Ph.D., I presented my papers at the conferences/workshops and internal presentations in my graduate-school colloquiums. Do I have to mention them in the presentations section or it is mainly about other sorts of presentations?
BTW, I study CS.

The list of presentations in your CV is an indication of your direct, face-to-face engagement with your research community.  All else being equal, researchers who give more talks are more visible/known/familiar to the community, which means their research has more impact.

Further, a list of invited talks gives an indication of your reputation within the research community.  Again, all else being equal, researchers who are invited to give more talks are generally held in higher esteem, which means their research has (and will continue to have) more impact.

Giving lots of talks—especially invited talks—suggests strong communication skills, which correlate with well-written papers (which, all else being equal, have more impact), good teaching, successful grant applications, and effective public advocacy.

Finally, especially for younger researchers, a long list of presentations indicates that you know how "the game is played".  Departments only want to hire junior faculty who show strong potential for earning tenure, which requires not only high-quality research but highly visible research.  A list of talks in your CV signals that you know that your job is not just to sit in a cave and emit papers, but to sell your research and to make yourself a face in your research community.

Of course, these are all merely correlations and grace notes, and all else is never equal.  A stronger publication record almost always trumps a stronger presentation record, so your CV should include your publications first.

[I'm also in computer science.]


Git repo in shared folder or multiple cloned repos in each researcher individual folder for collaborative data analysis? We are four social scientists working on a dataset that is in a secure server accessible via remote desktop. We have a shared folder where we put our code and datasets:

root
-functions
-data
-documentation
-output

Right now all we have done is to:

git init
git add --a
git commit

At the root of our shared folder. We have also edited a .gitignore file to keep git from tracking images and non-plain text files.

This way, whenever one of us edits a file we go:

git add editedFile.r
git commit

Which can erase the changes if the previous person who edited the same file didn't stage and commit it. Not all of us are fully conversant in git and it is likely that the more skilled will have to periodically check the status of files, stage, and commit them for the ones who don't git yet.

Each of us also has our own private folder on the same servers. We potentially could have each our own local repository in our private folders, and treat the shared folder as a remote. Then we would:

git pull
git add editedFile.r
git commit
git push

As we go by our workday.

Which one would work better for the situation described: fork and pull (each one with our own repository and the shared as a remote) or all work on the same repo in the shared folder?

I pretty much agree that you've got two options:
Work as is, all in the same directory on the same system.
There are a lot of problems with this approach.

If multiple people are working at the same time modifying source files you'll step on each other's feet a lot. Two people can't edit the same file at the same time. You'll deal with annoying "that file is in use by another process" messages all the time.
Someone might make a change that affects the behavior of a function and it'll come as a surprise to someone else.

On the other hand, the issues you'll run into are fairly easy to recognize and plan around. If you all aren't familiar with Git, and expect to be making actual code changes fairly infrequently, the cons aren't too big of an issue.
I would avoid this at all costs. I've worked on projects before where multiple people were working on the same files in the same directory on a remote server and it's awful. Words almost cannot describe the frustration that it leads to.
Multiple versions of the repository
Set up the filesystem to look like:
user1/
--root/
----/functions
----/data
----/documentation
----/output
user2/
--root/
----/functions
----/data
----/documentation
----/output
user3/
--root/
----/functions
----/data
----/documentation
----/output
user4/
--root/
----/functions
----/data
----/documentation
----/output

Each user should have a directory that contains it's own clone of the repository. This lets you avoid stepping on each other's toes when working at the same time, and lets you emulate a "normal" git environment.
From there it's just business as normal, and as long as y'all can overcome the initial learning curve it'll work out much better than if you're all working in the same space.


I am (likely) being accused of cheating by my professor, what do I do? I took my final last Wednesday (it’s Monday) and on Friday I received an email from my professor asking to meet to discuss my performance on the final. I got a little stressed but was more worried about if I failed the exam and have to retake the course. There was one other person I knew that got this email and he had the meeting today. The professor basically just said that there is proof of him cheating and said that he was on Moodle looking at the other tests while taking the final exam. This person said he did not and the professor just said he will have to fill out a form saying he did or did not and has to attend a hearing about it.
I have my meeting with the professor tomorrow and am EXTREMELY worried now. Being upfront, I did not cheat, I had Moodle open on my laptop in a minimized window but was not actively looking at it. I also have a full ride that would definitely disappear if I had something like this. What do I do?
PS: the professor already said to my friend that even if Moodle was open on a minimized window, the site wouldn’t give the report of accessing materials during the final exam.
Edit: grammar in PS section.

First, don't assume that the concerns about one person are necessarily the same as concerns about another. It may just be coincidence.
Second, the history is what it is. If there is some "evidence" that you did something wrong you will just have to explain it as best you can and live with the consequences.
It may well be that the monitoring system gets a report of open windows/apps but can't distinguish what is visible to the user from what is not.
Explain your actions. I suggest honestly. If you didn't cheat, then insist on that and don't agree to "lesser penalties" if you admit to something you didn't do.

Also note that statements about what automated systems do or don't do can be checked experimentally and/or by contacting the vendor.


Can I use paragraphs from an already published article in a new article? Can I use paragraphs from an already published article in a new article?
I want to repeat some ideas as an introduction and there is no point in re-writing them when I already reached my desired precise expression. I have the copyright of the original article (but I guess the journal that published it has rights on its distribution).

No. That's self-plagiarism and most venues will not accept it. It is flagged by plagiarism-detecting software, and is likely to lead to desk rejection.


Is there an academic\ethical reason for omitting place names in environmental science papers? I hope this is the right SE site for this question. To be clear, I am not asking anything about the contents of the paper, but on the practice of omitting certain information that I thought should be included for completeness and clarity.

I have been reading a paper titled: "Spatial and temporal occurrence of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs in the aqueous environment and during wastewater treatment: New developments", which deals with measurements of drugs' concentrations in river water in the UK.

I was surprised to see no mention of the name of the river anywhere in the paper or the supplementary material. This seems on purpose, since the authors describe the river's properties that are relevant for the study, but neglect to mention which river was it.

Could it be related to some academic practice I am not aware of, or perhaps is it a safety measure to prevent mass panic among the residents of the area?

I can think of a few reasons for which it might be sensible for names to be withheld, usually relating to not attracting large numbers of the public to a place. For example, a rare bird's nesting site, an endangered seal's haul-out area, or other places of delicate ecology.

However, it would seem reasonable for the authors to make the location known to other researchers on request, as otherwise there is no way to verify or reproduce their findings.


Cover letter v/s statement of research interests I saw a postdoctoral position advertisement in engineering field, which has asked applicants to submit a cover letter  and a statement of research interest. If these two are not explicitly asked, then I usually prepare single document mostly containing my research interest along with a CV.

I would like to know what should be the content of the two different documents, means what should go where?

Thanks

Statement of research interest seems to deal specifically with you potential future research. Though, you can obviously base your future project describing your proved past record. The cover letter seems to be a general info, something that you are XYZ  who completer PhD in ABC university, has the following background and you are interested in this position. In the cover letter I would briefly mention your research interests and refer for more details to the  statement of research interest.

I think that there is nothing special about this two-letters format, but it is just some bureaucratic requirement of the university.  May be worth asking them  how long should be research statement - because you can potentially write one page or 15 pages like a full grant.


How unwise is it to change fields/advisors late in my PhD? I’m sorry for asking a dumb question I already know the answer to, but I’m asking it because I feel desperate and need someone to talk sense into me.

Some background:
I’m a fifth-year PhD student, with no real graduation in sight. I’m in one of the most packed and competitive subfields I know of (let’s call it field A), and I haven’t had much success, only a handful of small publications. To graduate my advisor tells me I need at least one or two major publications, but field A is so competitive at this point that many of these journals/conferences have nearly 10% acceptance rates.

But that’s not even the real issue. The real issue is I hate the research area I’m in. I’ve hated it since at least my third year. I thought maybe I would just push through it, but I’ve only hated it more and more and it’s come to the point where my hatred for it has become so visceral that I just don’t know how to keep pushing on. Not to mention a host of other problems - I feel like a complete outsider in my lab, and my advisor couldn’t care less if I come or go; he’s never provided any help and I’ve basically been left to fend for myself for the last 5 years.

Which brings me to the main reason for my question. This might sound strange, but since around my third year I found another research area (let’s say field B) that I’ve actually been very interested in, and on and off I’ve been reading a lot of results from this area - there were some stretches where I spent significantly more time reading results in B than in A. I know it didn’t get me closer to graduation, but field B was just so much more interesting to me. I’d have loved to do research in field B, but at the time there were good reasons why I didn’t really pursue trying to change or even contact the professor at our university who works in that area:

I had a decent career lined up in field A. I’ve had several internships in major industry labs, and I have an offer waiting for me if ever I graduate.
I may have an avenue to research that is essentially in field B. During one of these internships I met a researcher who told me if I get hired I could possibly do work related to field B on the side and maybe transfer entirely if things go well.
Location matters to me. There are fewer jobs in field B, but field A is booming. I’d be much more likely to find a job close to my family, and in fact, as I said in (1), I already have.
Timing. It was already 3 years into my PhD, I didn’t want to start over. Now it's been even more.
Maybe I would actually hate field B just as much when I got into it? I don't think so, but who knows?

With all that said, here’s my question: Knowing that all of these things are still just as true, and seeing as it’s my fifth year, how stupid would it be for me to try to change areas now? What barriers would I face?

I can’t imagine it would be anything other than idiotic to attempt it, assuming that I’d even be allowed to, but as I spend yet another day staring at my computer, unable to muster any willpower to work on my research, instead procrastinating with yet more papers in field B, I have to wonder if it’s all worth it? If I did switch, I’d still start from scratch and need mentorship, but I think I would have at least as much background by now as maybe a third-year PhD who had been researching field B from the beginning, maybe more.

Your profile does not say, where you are from. I suppose there are still areas on the globe, where academic titles matter. However, this is certainly not the case where I live. So, in order to provide useful answers, we need to obtain detailed informations.

I still don't understand your motivation!

If you don't like working in field A, why do you consider taking a job in this field?
And if you do it to pay the bills, start doing it now. If you're doing a great job in industry, nobody will ever let you go. However, if you underperform, no phd will safe you.

So I reckon the question you should ask yourself is, why do you believe you need a phd? What do you believe does a phd proof?


Skipping MEng to go straight to EngD or PhD from BEng Generally, the "standard" path of further educational progression in the UK is:

Bachelor's -> Master's -> Doctorate.

However, I've been doing a BEng part-time whilst working full time and as part of my work I also have to do a significant amount of research and have written many academic-style papers (albeit they have only been published internally).

Would it be generally considered acceptable to jump straight from a BEng to a doctorate or are there significant barriers that would be caused by this?

I'm not in UK, and it isn't my field, but the only real barrier is getting accepted into a program. You may be missing some technical background without an MS, but if you are accepted there will presumably be a way for you to fill in what you need.

Some places the rules may make it impossible for you to even apply, specifying a given degree, but otherwise, the only way to know is to make application and make it as positive as you can. Let the review committee know why you are a great candidate with a high likelihood of success. Of course that is the situation no matter what your formal background.

If an institution doesn't have a path from where you are, it is very likely to be obvious from their online materials.


Why would I want to register with ORCID? I've noticed that in the ACM article document class you can now list authors' "ORCID" registration key.

I've not heard anyone mention that to me before. They Orcid website says:

  ORCID provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. We provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations. We provide this service to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.

Whenever someone tells me they want to "enable trust" or that they're "trustworthy" I get suspicious...

So, is this about disambiguating researchers with the same first and last name without relying on their affiliation? Or is there something else to ORCID?

More specifically - if my name is rare and I don't expect there to be another academic with this same name in the foreseeable future - are there benefits for me in registering?

The advantages are:

Unique identifiability (as you noted, not everybody needs this).
Stability: There may be some other researcher with your name in ten year from now. Or you might change your name due to whatever reasons.
It's handy: Many editorial system allow you to log-in by just clicking "log in with ORCID". Some years ago I had zillions of log-in for different systems, often conflicting and I ended up requesting passwords frequently, delaying the submission of reviews. Now I use ORCID for everything and the problem is basically gone (sometimes I get invitations to review for journals I did not use before and they give a new log-in but I insist that they use my ORCID, and this works). For example several sites with the url editorialmanager.com allow you to sign in via ORCID. If you do so you do not a new log in and on top of that all your affiliation is already filled in after log in.
Your university library may be happy: When you use ORCID it is pretty easy for them to see how you publish with different journals/publishers and this may give them useful data for negotiations with publishers. You may have heard of the "Project Deal" where Germany is fighting with some publishers and it turned out that the data about the publications habits of German scholars is helpful in the negotiations (at least this is what our librarian told us).

Actually, I don't know of any competing standard and I do not see any downside in using ORCID. The organization behind ORCID is non-profit. I view ORCID as trustworthy and helpful as the arXiv (in case this means anything to somebody…).


Postdoc overwhelmed by incomplete work I take on more than I can handle and everything is left incomplete. Constant reminders from my previous supervisor, my current advisor, and colleagues, increases my anxiety level and sometimes I end up entirely avoiding work. I haven’t completed a paper as first author in the last two years, although I have two papers ready for submission for the last two months and two more I could complete with a week of uninterrupted work on each paper. These papers have been dragged so much that now I am losing interest in making any more changes. I will appreciate any suggestion for dealing with anxiety regarding works that I should have completed more than a year ago.

This is a well known problem - and depending on your personal situation you should consider getting professional help by a psychologist. It's not a shame and it might prevent further harm. They could assist as well in creating a step-by-step program.

If you are willing to handle the situation by yourself, you'll have to do "a few" things (which are a lot to do!):

Learn to say "no" to specific tasks. Do not accept any new assignments unless your papers are done.
Figure out, why you are procrastinating - your mind has a reason for it and you should figure out what it is.
If the overall workload is too high, cancel some things forever. Eg. decide not to submit one of the "old" papers. How does this thought feel? Better or worse then the actual situation?
Go on step-by-step. Focus on finishing one of the old papers. Submit it. Take a break! Choose the next step of work.
If needed, be disruptive.

Take a longer break (e.g. 4 weeks of vacation)
Move your whole inbox to a subfolder "old" and never ever look at it - important mails will be re-sent.
...

If you are having a good relation with your supervisor(s), involve them in the process.


Where to get statistics about papers mentioning specific keywords? I am currently gathering info about the state of the art of some topic.
What I want to do is to get statistics about how often the topic was mentioned in papers in combination with other keywords in the last couple of years.

Something like this:

Year   "topic keyword1"   "topic keyword2"   "topic keyword3"
2017    81                420                121
2016    76                391                101
2015    64                358                92
...     ...               ...                ...

Is there a place where i can get this kind of information in an "easy to process" format?
(I used ScienceDirect and other databases and copied the information by hand so far but that is not a good solution imho.)

Thanks in advance!

What about google scholar? You won't get such a nice formated output, but you will get number of hits for each keyword or combination of keywords


Mailing a relevant researcher before starting to think about the problem I am starting to think about a problem, inspired by a series of papers on similiar questions. Is it correct for me to e-mail the professors that wrote these papers, and ask them if they already thought about it? If they did, would it be fair to ask for the ideas they had, and what they tried (of course, assuming they are not currently working on it, and don't plan to publish on their own)?

I would not email people before thinking about a problem. People are busy, so you need to respect that. Instead I would do the thinking and if you have concrete questions, then you can contact others.

If you want to "brainstorm" with someone, you can try to attend a conference that that person also attends. You can sent an email before, and ask if (s)he wants to set half an hour aside for you to discuss this or that problem. Again it would help if you narrowed the problem down, such that it can be discussed in half and hour and the person can prepare a bit if (s)he wants to.


My coauthor's university address has a typo in our published paper. What should I do? I recently got a paper published. One of the affiliations (for the 4th author, more precisely) is right but it has a misspelling in the address of his university. The right address is "University X, Street y, no.1780" but we published as "University X, Street y, no.1879". Is it problematic enough to ask for a corrigendum if the other data about the affiliation (without the number) is right?

You should not do anything about this.  Nobody will use this information for anything.
Do not assume your coauthor was responsible.  It could be the journal.


When is it wrong for students to ask about previous exams known to change? Variation of When is it wrong to look at previous exams?

Suppose students are taking a certain subject and are divided into classes A and B at different times but under the same professor.

Say the students are assigned an exam that is said to be sometime in a certain week. Is it wrong for the students of the other class B to ask the students in class A about the exam if they know that the teacher will change the questions in the exam?

The ethical answer for students is easy in this case: if it's not clear, and remotely borderline, ask the professor.  Ideally, ask the professor publicly, so that everyone hears the answer.

That said, the real problem is that in this situation, the professor should be dealing with this publicly in one of two ways: either clearly instructing the first class not to discuss the exam until the second class has taken it, or making the exam available directly to the second class (so as not to benefit students who have friends in the first class over those who don't).


Will my supervisor also mark my MA dissertation? How will this be fair? I am wondering, because she is the only one in the department who is specialised in the area I worked in. But then also she worked with me, so she will recognise the things I've written - apart from that there is probably noone else who tackled exactly my topic.

How is fairness ensured here? It does not seem possible to mark this anonymously really?

On the topic of anonymous marking.  Dissertations/theses are rarely, if ever anonymised, because students and their topics are easily visible.

What you are asking is really a matter of Quality Assurance, which will depend on the assessment policy relating to Master's theses at your department/institution.

It is worth saying that the bias you mention (of a supervisor's familiarity with your work and writing influencing their assessment of it) is recognized.

In my experience, to mitigate bias one of two actions are taken:

The assessment is double-marked, once by the supervisor and once by a second marker.  Any difference in marks are then discussed and agreed.
The assessment would be marked by someone not related to your project at all, and it may also be double-marked by someone else.

For Master's theses, at least from what I have seen, the subject specialism and expertise of the assessor is less essential than it would be in doctoral study, so I would expect an assessor with good familiarity with the subject to be able to satisfactorily mark it.

Also, in the UK, all assessments are ratified by a Board of Examiners who have the power to alter marks at their judgement.  The External Examiner in this Board would also have the power to read your dissertation and agree/disagree with the mark awarded - they, and the rest of the Board, won't necessarily be experts in the subject to the degree that your supervisor is.


Does "scut work" contribution to a paper as a math undergrad carry weight in grad school application? I got an opportunity to collaborate writing a mathematics paper with some professor at my university, but I'm suspecting my role won't be much more significant except doing menial work in the form of writing dozens of lines of code using Mathematica and helping my professor computing things. I can probably get in my name as a possible collaborator, but I am wondering is it really worth putting in the effort into it to do so?
While I'm aware that research experience is taken into account while considering grad school applications, I am also aware that putting into papers in which I had menial contribution into my CV might even carry negative weight, in the sense they might suspect I'm trying to game the system without really doing anything substantial.
Is it worth pursuing this project instead of, say, learning some new math by myself (not under the supervision of someone)? Even if I do, what are some ``red-flags" to notice for, which can indicate this might not be a great idea?
[PS: I don't want to go into details regarding the subject matter of the paper, but it's a relatively advanced topic that requires a fairly good mastery of the core undergrad curriculum to understand. I believe I have such an understanding, but I'm not sure if my role in writing the paper would reflect that/I would have the opportunity to use my understanding, especially if I'm not considering the professor as my main recommenders for grad schools].

writing dozens of lines of code using Mathematica and helping my professor computing things

That sounds like normal undergraduate research to me.  It's probably not a menial contribution.  Very few people can write a dozen lines of Mathematica code.
If you do a good job, this could be a big help to your graduate school applications and even later career.


Having a retired professor write my letter of recommendation, One of my math professors (in a U.S. university) retired this semester.  He was one person that I had planned on asking to write my letters of recommendation this coming fall semester, when I send out PhD applications in math / applied math.

He is very old and he seems anti-social and seems to not communicate with our math department very much.  I am just basing this on some stuff that he says, which scares me, e.g., "tell them (our math dept.) that I said this..."

So, I wonder whether anyone external to our own math department would even know who he is - or whether admissions committees even value his opinions about grad students, at this point in his career.

Would it be best to find someone else to replace him as one of my letter writers?  Someone who is younger and currently active in research?  I do have replacements in mind, but I am somewhat attached to this particular professor, since I feel that I got my start in rigorous mathematics with him.

Edit:  To add a bit more context, he is a full professor and has served on admissions / doctoral committees at our department numerous times.  So, he's very much qualified, of course.  My main concern is that perhaps he no longer communicates actively with people internal and external to our department, but that is only my best guess.

Thanks,

So, I wonder whether anyone external to our own math department would even know who he is - or whether admissions committees even value his opinions about grad students, at this point in his career.

First, it's not necessary or even expected that admissions committees will know (of) all or even any of your letter writers.  Second, you will be getting several letters, so they do not all need to come from "research active" professors.  Third, there's no reason to undervalue someone's opinion because they've retired.

Yes, it's a plus if you can get letters from people who are well known, but the most important thing is to get letters from people who know you best, so I don't see a serious concern from what you've told us.  (Though now that he's retired, it's possible he is harder to contact or less inclined to write letters.)


Editor has requested major revisions to manuscript. Should I give up? Three months ago, I submitted a manuscript to one of the most respected journals in my field. Today, I received comments from reviewers stating that my paper is not worth publishing in the journal. However, the editor decided to give it a major revision instead of outright rejection. Should I proceed to address all the questions posed by reviewers or should I just withdraw the paper and submit it elsewhere to save time?

EDIT:
Right now it seems impossible for me to pull off some of the outrageous suggestions from reviewers. They asked me to prove my theory by applying more expensive method that unfortunately cannot be afforded by my supervisor as her grant has already ran out and we lack of funding now. Another reviewer also ridiculed my experimental method and claimed that my method had lots of flaws.

Based on the description, I would advise you to sleep on it, suck it up, respond to the reviewers, revise the paper, and submit your revision to the journal.

Yes, reviewers can be absolutely, disgustingly, and unnecessarily rude and mean. Read their review, filter their non-technical rants, keep whatever helpful criticism you can extract from their comments, and address them nicely and respectfully. It may actually be that the techniques you used were adequate but you failed to point out why and how it would be unnecessary to use more expensive methods. Always assume that they are right. If they are mistaken, respectfully point out in your response why you are right and edit the original manuscript to make the issue clearer to future readers.

For instance, if the reviewer wrote:

  The methods used in the paper are abysmal. The authors use an outdated
  and archaic method, which is also very uncertain, to measure the mass
  of the frogs, which is by weighting them on a scale. The atomic mass
  interferometer, which uses gravitational waves and is able to
  precisely infer mass with an uncertainty of one atomic mass unit per kilogram,
  is the state of the art in weighting.

You can write as a response:

  The reviewer is absolutely correct that atomic mass interferometry
  (AMI) is the state of the art in weighting. However, we opted to use
  analytical scales to measure the mass of the frogs because the mass
  variations that we expected to measure are of at least 1 g, a quantity
  signficantly higher than the uncertainty of even the most rudimentary
  analytical scales. We do, however, agree, that the quantum mechanical
  analysis of the molecular buildup in neural entangled channels in
  during frog electrophoresis, which is suggested as an interesting
  prospective investigation, will benefit from the low uncertainty
  provided by AMI.

  In order to make it clear that the methods used in our study were
  adequate, we have modified the original manuscript to include the
  following sentence in the second paragraph of page 5:

  While there are more precise methods to infer mass, such as atomic
  mass interferometry, analytical scales offer accuracies that are
  compatible with the 1 g mass variations that were found in this study
  (see Table 3, for instance).


Possibility of acceptance when the editor clearly states that another revision will likely lead to a rejection I received reviewers' feedback after the first round of major revision. One reviewer recommended acceptance, but the other is still not satisfied. The unsatisfied reviewer discounted what I have revised and pointed out specific questions that were not asked in the 1st round.

I feel his/her comments are quite biased and subjective. Unfortunately, the editor agrees with him/her and invited a major revision. However, the editor clearly stated that the chance of getting accepted after a 2nd revision is very low. I am not sure whether I should proceed with a revision or a just withdraw. I personally think my work might have been misjudged.

I understood from the question that you are asking whether to do the second major revision or not since the chance of acceptance is low.

I think it's better to go through with the second major revision and see what will happen. If you think the other referee's notes (aside from the one you think is biased) are valid, and doing those revisions will enrich your paper, then do it.

Your relationship with the editor do not end with publishing this paper or refusing to publish it. You may probably deal with the editor later in your professional life, and you might submit another paper to the same journal despite how this paper will end. So you wanna maintain a relationship with the journal editor. Stopping the communication about this paper without providing a valid reason is not good idea.

Good Luck!


Paper has been rejected for being published in conference proceedings, but accepted for oral presentation. What does this mean? I am a senior undergrad. My paper has been accepted in a conference for presentation but rejected from being published in conference proceedings.
I had a few questions regarding this:

What does this imply?
Can I put this on my resume, and if yes, how do I mention it?
Is it a good look when I apply for grad schools?
Should I withdraw the paper and publish it elsewhere?

If your paper isn't in the proceedings it will be difficult for people to cite your work, or even to know the details unless they happen to be among the few that attend your presentation. As to your questions:

What it means should be explored with the conference committee. Probably it means that only the title will appear.

Yes you can put it in your CV as long as you list it properly as one that was "presented at ..."

Yes, it won't hurt you in grad school applications and will probably help, though a paper that is formally published would be better. People will be looking for evidence that you will be successful in academia and this is a positive thing, even if it doesn't appear.

Maybe it would be better to try another venue, but there is risk in that. It might not be accepted and even if it is, it might not be accepted in time to show up in your grad school applications.

You might ask a trusted advisor for advice, and should certainly explore it a bit with the conference committee. Perhaps you can present it here and publish a complete version elsewhere. It would be very odd if they expect you to give up rights under these circumstances. If they do ask for copyright it would seem to me to be a red flag.
Also, at the point you are in your career the effect will be small overall. Any research line in your CV is a good line when you are an undergraduate.