What makes a journal scientific? Question
What exactly is the definition of a scientific publication or journal?

Background
What fueled this question in particular is the current rise of predatory publishers. Jeffrey Beall had a list published online of suspected predatory publishers, but his blog has very recently been discontinued (cached copy, 11 Jan 2017). Speculations of this disappearance include threats and political motivations.

Anyway, predatory publishers are characterized by any or all of the following:

They appear suddenly and generate a host of new journals that cover a wide range of topics;
They are open access and charge high fees;
They have rudimentary, faked, or even no review process at all;
They spam about every researcher with a publication record asking them to publish in their journals;
They spam researchers to join their board of editors or become a reviewer.

For more backgrounds on predatory publishers see the wiki page.

Now still these predatory publishers profile themselves as being scientific publishers, e.g., Scientific Research and Austin Publishing Group.
 Access these links at your own risk. I would not call this class of journals scientific, as pretty much any author willing to pay a few grand can make it in there.

So what makes a scientific journal scientific? How exactly is this defined? I long thought a peer review process guarantees scientificness, but it can be faked or even absent, yet publishers claim to be scientific.

Where this question becomes particularly relevant is in the role of teaching - when I tell students only to use 'scientific literature' then what is it exactly? Would it be more a matter of what it is not?

There is no general definition for scientific journal. The Wikipedia definition is as vague as reality is. This is because there is no clear definition of scientific. It is a case-by-case distinction - not only for journals, but also for individual articles in a journal or one method described in an article. Additionally, scientific and predatory are not mutually exclusive.

Your instruction to your students to only use scientific literature is the key to the answer to your question: What is scientific and what is not depends on the concrete content of an article or the applied method. To distinguish between these two is the first step towards scientific thinking.

An answer on a list of predatory publishers can be found in this question here.


What are the strategies for getting feedback on articles? As an academic, one has to publish. Often, an article is drafted, and you need feedback of a colleague.  I see that quite often some perspective articles are often written by long-term collaborating pairs of authors.

What are some strategies people use to get feedback on their articles  (outside of immediate boss; and in the case that none of the friends in the field of work in the specific domain of the article, and one needs specific (not general) feedback)?

How do you approach a colleague to simply read your article. Or do you just mention it at a conference to the most suitable colleague - would you like to read an article and give me feedback? How do handle the co-authorship or acknowledgement? Do you establish the limits at the "approach time"?

What are some strategies to establish a "publishing" duos (buddies).

When I have a manuscript nearly ready to submit, I send it (by e-mail) to colleagues who I think would be interested in it.  I politely ask them to read it and send me any comments they have.  Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't; it's understood that there is not an obligation.  Of course, some of them send me their manuscripts too, and they're more likely to read mine if I have read and commented on theirs.

The colleagues I send the paper to (usually about 2-4 in number) may include:

Senior people who have mentored me
Past coauthors and collaborators
People I don't know but whose work is essential to that in my manuscript

People in the first two categories are usually willing to assist based on our existing relationship; those in the last category are generally pleased to see their work being cited and built on.

I don't usually need very specific feedback at this point in the process.  If I was concerned, say, about the correctness of some part of the work, I would have worried about that long before I wrote the article.  Occasionally I may have a specific question about, e.g., suitability of the manuscript for a particular journal.  In that case, I would send the article to one of the editors of the journal or to a colleague who often publishes in that journal, and ask specifically.

Any colleagues who provide substantial feedback will be acknowledged at the end of the paper.  Providing this kind of feedback certainly wouldn't qualify one for co-authorship.


Does "Science" encompass Mathematics? Inspired by the question Does the term “science” encompass humanities and the social sciences?, I would like to ask a question that has been in my mind for decades.

Does "Science" include Mathematics? Or, put in another way, is Mathematics part of Science?

What I understand about Math are: Math is not humanities.  Math is not natural science. Math is not social science. If Math is part of science, what kind of science is it?

When people say STEM, do they mean Math is separate from Science? Or they just say it for the sake of convenience?

This is a good question, but there is no consensus as to a good answer.  Some people think mathematics is obviously a science, some people think it obviously isn't, and some just aren't sure.

It's common to include mathematics as a special case of science in general discussions.  For example, universities usually classify mathematics under the sciences, and "scientific publishing" would generally be understood to include mathematics.  However, there are exceptions, and abstract discussions of science often don't apply very well to mathematics.

If this distinction matters in a given case, then you'll have to discuss it explicitly, since you can never assume everyone will agree by default.

  If Math is part of science, what kind of science is it?

The most compelling answer I've heard is that it is a formal science.  However, this terminology is somewhat obscure, and it is certainly not a consensus answer to your question.

  When people say STEM, do they mean Math is separate from Science?

I don't think the intention is to assert that they are definitely separate, but rather just to have an inclusive acronym we can all agree on.


To do another Master's, already holding a PhD If a STEM PhD holder applies for a Master's in another STEM major, would this be an advantage or disadvantage in the eye of the admission committee?

Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!

Sorry, but you walked into that joke. Actually, such an application would occur so infrequently that it might result in a few chuckles. But I don't think it would have a lot of effect. But certainly not a big advantage.

In fact, people, including myself, will wonder why a person would bother. After all, the applicant can study and learn effectively and evidenced by the doctorate, so what is the need of a formal program. It might be a disadvantage in some places where the available slots are limited and people would feel they should be given to someone who needs the training more.

On the other hand, if a lab needs particular skills that you have, they might be interested, just for that.

Thus, it is impossible to say in general as local needs/beliefs will dominate such a situation.


How can a researcher from a third-world country publish or otherwise disseminate an interesting result? Given I am from a third world country,

Can you tell me please what to do if i get an interesting result or develop a promising theory .

Do you think that contacting a mathematics professor and asking to be admitted to a seminar in order to present the result is a good idea?

If yes, can you recommend me a region in the world where there are lots of chances of an affirmative answer?

I guess that no one is going to invite you from overseas for a seminar unless they know you already. One of the best ways to disseminate your research is conference participation, but coming from a third-world country puts you at a disadvantage in terms of funding and travel possibilities. Sometimes conferences have travel grants for students and early career researchers (I don't know if you fit inside this category), which you can apply for. This can offset some of the costs (but not all, unfortunately). Watch out for this kind of opportunities.

Another thing that you should do is writing down your results in a preprint and trying to get it published. Once you have a preprint, you can send it to a (small) number of researchers working on the same area to try and get them interested. This could be a subset of the people you cite, for instance. Watch out for signs of feedback (positive and negative) from their part and don't overdo it -- you don't want to be considered a spammer.


Should you choose your committee members or should your advisor? The question of how to choose PhD committee members has already been asked and answered in general terms, but I have the following more specific questions regarding the choice:

Is it more important that your advisor already know your committee members or that you do (e.g., your advisor knows them but you've never met them before vs. you know the member but your advisor doesn't have a strong or pre-existing relationship with them).
Is it better to get someone in your discipline or someone doing more related work (e.g., if you're getting a computer science degree, you ask computer science faculty vs. you're getting a computer science degree but everyone except for your advisor is from the English department)?
Should you pick people who are already invested/interested in you succeeding or is the dissertation process supposed to be a chance for you to win people over to your side?

You first have to check to see what the university rules are for a Ph.D committee. Many universities have rules that limit the number of external members, the number of members not from the department, the number of members that are not "regular faculty" and so on.

Assuming that you've checked all those constraints, then you should definitely discuss this with your advisor, who will have more experience in constructing committees in your area.

Which brings up another issue: community norms. In your field of research, are there customary roles that committee members play ? that's something you need to discuss with your advisor.

Finally, after all of the above, to answer some of your questions:

  Should you already know them?

Not necessarily, although that helps with the first approach. It helps if they're familiar with your work even if you don't know them personally.

  Should they be doing research related to your dissertation topic?

Not necessarily, but they should have some connection to your work, otherwise they won't be able to provide any kind of useful feedback for you.

  Should they be in your discipline?

Definitely, unless your topic is interdisciplinary and you want the input from someone in the other discipline.

  Should they be selected more for how much they'll help you get a job?

That's definitely a factor. It's not a critical factor for all members of your committee, but it can be a factor when looking for an external member. Ideally, if you're able to do some research with members of the committee, they can write a letter for you.

Bottom line:

talk to your advisor and discuss all of this with him/her
Different members of the committee can play different roles. The mix is what's important


Figures in a results/discussion page My professors always point out that figures only serve as a supplement to the results. They should not be the main star of the results/discussion section. The writer must be able to articulate the main results and only point to the figures as a supplement.

Well, this is all good and clear until I found myself unable to articulate what I wanted to say. I am doing work on computer simulations and it is quite normal that figures should be part of the results/discussion part of the paper.

How should I make my results be the "star" of the paper, and not just point the readers to the figures and interpret them thoroughly?

I believe that I strongly disagree with your professor.  I can barely imagine writing a results section that is not filled with figures, there to compactly present critical, graphically summarized information about the results. In fact, one of my key early triage steps in reviewing a paper is to flip to the results section and see if there are any figures: if there are no figures, then it is very likely to have insubstantial results. Now, this isn't always the case---some papers have only theorems as results (though figures often help explain such theorems), and some have only a few key numbers in a table (though is a table a figure?)---usually, however, no figures means not much in the way of results to present.

I think that it is also a mistake to divide figures from prose and try to decide which is the "star" of a results section.  In a well-written paper, they serve complementary purposes:

Figures are better for presenting numerical relationships, non-linear structures, and high-density data.
Prose is better for presentation of isolated or non-visual elements, directing the reader's attention to the most important aspects of the results, and explaining the significance and relationship of the results to one another and to the larger scientific investigation.

These two can and almost always must play together harmoniously in order to effectively present a scientific work.

For a lovely introduction to what makes an effective figure and a good source of inspiration for your own work, I would suggest reading Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information," a classic work on data visualization.


How to approach potential advisor who's going on sabbatical? I am a Math PhD student at a US university. I have made a decision on who I want to work with for my PhD, but I was made aware that the professor in question is going on a sabbatical next year, to be spent in a different university (not in close proximity). What is the best way to approach a potential advisor in such a situation? I have not yet asked the "question", but have met with the professor in question multiple times on research related issues.

I think the situation is volatile, depending on the communication skills/inclinations of the faculty person. I.e., do they do email often-and-effectively? If so, there's scant obstacle. But, on the opposite hand, if the only way they communicate effectively is face-to-face, then this would be a bad situation.

And it depends of course equally on your own capacity to communicate effectively by a medium where there're no facial expressions, no body language, and... many people seem to be slow to see this... committing questions or comments to email disallows remarks like "Oh, I don' get it" that seem ok in conversation. Thus, one must exert more effort to compose an email than to make a vague verbal remark in person. This is not at all a bad thing... unless the net effect is significant inhibition of communication, in which case one should re-consider one's mode of operation.

On the whole, some risk here, but, if both parties' communications chops are good, it could be as productive as any.


Graduate school admission advantage if offering instrument time Would you have an advantage when applying for some graduate school if you write in your forms that you own some useful equipment already from your independent research and you would offer free time to the institute to use it or for undergraduate teaching purposes. Something in the price range of 90'000$, like a bioluminescence microscope or a large telescope?

That might certainly catch my eye if I read your application, but I'm not sure how much weight it would carry. I would be a bit nervous offering it quid pro quo - that seems to get into a dangerous or at least gray area in the vicinity of a bribe for admission.

My suggestion, if you include such information, would be to limit your disclosure to a demonstration of your commitment to the topic of interest, or to talk about ways you have already used the equipment for outreach purposes to demonstrate your value to the community as an emerging scholar - and not as a condition on accepting your application.

The problem is the perception, and whether you offer it directly or not you could be perceived as trying to sway the admissions committee. For example, a police officer has some leeway in choosing whether to cite you or not; offering the officer $100 is going to get you in trouble, whether you say "I will give you $100 if you let me go" or if you say "Hey I just wanted to let you know how much I care about police officers in general, so I am going to put this $100 on your car, you can take it if you want."

Your situation is different because the legality is much less clear than the example I just gave, but I would be uncomfortable accepting a student who wouldn't normally meet the expectations of the university because they were offering the use of some equipment.


What is the purpose of dissertation embargo periods? I just heard about "dissertation embargoes".  My institution recommends that every graduating student place an embargo on their dissertation.

What is a dissertation embargo, and what is its purpose?

An embargo effectively withholds your dissertation from being placed on your institution's open-access dissertation archive (from which anyone can view/download your dissertation).

I have placed an embargo on my dissertation so that I may attempt to get a few more papers published without my dissertation being searchable on the web. It is a common practice in the department where I did my PhD (though, I wondered sometimes if it was really necessary).

For a more complete list of reasons why one would choose to place an embargo on their dissertation, I'm listing here an excerpt taken from a University of New Mexico page:

  Embargos may be appropriate for authors
  1) who are seeking patents,
  2) who want to publish their work through a traditional press that considers open access publication to be equivalent to prior publication,
  3) who have published material from their work with a publisher that does not allow open access release for a certain period of time, or
  4) who need to protect sensitive data or information.


How to greet when having a PhD panel interview? What is the most proper greeting for when you enter a panel of faculty members for a PhD Interview, and what for when you leave? I'm in the UK, in case that's relevant.

Assuming you're referring to the proper addresses of faculty members at UK institutions, the general form is "Doctor" for faculty members who are Lecturers (known as "assistant professor" in some other countries) or Senior Lecturers (known as "associate professor" in some other countries) and "Professor" for faculty members who are Readers (varies between "associate professor" and "full professor" in other countries) or Professors (known as "Chairs" in some other  countries.  In some UK institutions, the North American standards have been adopted, so it's not completely uniform.

If you're uncertain as to the academic rank of the person, defaulting to "Doctor" will not likely offend.  If someone is introduced as "Professor", then use "Professor" in such cases.

In terms of matters of greeting not related to the proper address of the members, there are no formalities upon entering or leaving that you should be concerned about.  A general "Hello" / "Thank you.  Goodbye" or any variant are perfectly fine.


What are some altruistic reasons for submitting to top-tier journals/conferences? It seems to me that there is a preoccupation within academia to getting published in venues which are highest-ranked in terms of some sort of metrics rather than venues most suited to one’s subject area albeit not high-ranked.

It occurred to me that any reason for this must be self-serving. I don’t feel comfortable with this idea. As opposed to self-interest as the actual motive, are there any better reasons for submitting to top-tier journals/conferences rather than low-tier ones?

Wrzlprmft's good answer hints at this, but I want to make it explicit:

If you are doing beneficial research, your self-interest and the interests of beneficiaries of your research are aligned.

If your work is important, then the visibility of your work and your own career success benefit others, since they maximize the impact of your research and ensure that you will have resources and freedom to do the best work going forward.

Ambition is neither good nor bad.  What matters is: to what end is your ambition directed?

I agree that simply getting recognition, as an end in itself, is not a worthy goal.  But if you are in your career in order to make a difference in the world with the research you conduct, then trying to advance your own career to achieve that goal is worthwhile (and necessary).

What about submission to top journals specifically?

There are pros and cons of aiming for the top, in terms of maximizing the impact of the work.  The pros are well covered in other answers, but in summary, the main ones are:

Wider visibility.
Better basis on which to build your own future work.
Higher review standards.

However, there are also downsides to aiming high:

Delay in publication.  If you aim for a top journal, and then try a sequence of high impact journals until you find one that accepts it, this can delay publication by many months.  Meanwhile, your work is not being read by anyone and not having an impact.  And you can't apply for further funding based on the work until it is out there.
Perhaps not the best use of your time.  Is it a good use of your time to endlessly revise a paper and tweak your analysis in response to reviewer suggestions?  Or would it be better to get on to the next research question?
Papers may be less accessible than if published as open access.  Some top journals are not open access, and publishing in a lower-impact (but open access) journal may increase the accessibility of your work.

Ultimately, you have to weight the costs versus the benefits, particularly in light of the likelihood that your work will be accepted at a top journal.  Personally, I don't like the all-too-frequent practice of starting at the top journal and working downward, even if the paper has little chance of success.  I think this is a big waste of time and resources.  But for a result that is really noteworthy, it may be worth submitting to high-impact journals (not just for your sake, but to maximize the benefit of the work).


What is the best way to solicit teaching feedback from students (before the class is over)? I sent my students a feedback form (I'm a TA) and I got three responses.  While they were helpful and informative responses, I am not sure how to interpret them, because there are only three of them and they all disagree with each other.

What is the best way to get feedback from students?  Should I enter them in a drawing for a $10 Amazon gift card?

A method which I learned quite recently is the Start-Stop-Continue. I think it is a great method, as it is quick, and it does not require much effort both on your part and your students. You will need to distribute three small pieces of paper (e.g. Post-it) to each student, ask them to label Start, Stop, and Continue, respectively, on the top of each paper, and then ask them to list on each paper, according to the label, what they think you should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. Ask them to submit their papers before they leave.


Can I write in my SOP that I want to join labs which aren't belonged to the department I apply? I want to work on a research which requires both field A and field B. On the school I want to pursue, both lab X and X' from department A work on A+B. If possible, I'd like to work in both lab because there is some niches in both lab X and X' will be needed on my proposed research.

However, I would like to apply to department B because I don't want to limit myself inside a field. I want to broaden my knowledge as much as I can, before concentrating on my thesis. I don't think that this approach is bad.

Being said that, is there anything that I should be aware of when writing the SOP to department B? Would mention about the labs which aren't belonged to the department harm me in some ways? Or should I just apply to department A? Is there any harm if in my SOP there is a paragraph saying that I want to learn more about B (than A)?

This entirely depends on the university culture. Some universities and labs are very free in terms of the flow of faculty and students, others are much more siloed. It's impossible for us to give you a general answer.

You should instead talk to students and postdocs enrolled at that university and in those labs and ask them whether it's possible. They are the ones who are most likely able to tell you what the situation is there.


How do you get back into teaching after being overseas for 10 years and lacking good computer skills? This isn't about myself, so kindly bare with me. I'll try to make this question as generic as possible.
I already read U.S. humanities professors: Can you get back into academia if you leave? and Does taking an academic job in Asia or Africa make it difficult to get a job in the US or Europe later?  but they aren't a good match for my question.
A friend got a PhD in mechanical engineering at 2000 from a tier 1 university in US. Then he moved back to his home country and started teaching there. Now he is back in the US. His computer skills and knowledge of industry related softwares are limited. He just taught core mechanical engineering courses with 2-3 national papers published. His English is very good though. No problem there.
What are his best options of teaching? I initially thought that he would be able to teach in (community) colleges, but then most colleges are teaching CS, social sciences, economy, healthcare, math or at best chemistry. Most of them don't have anything related to engineering, let alone mechanical engineering
i.e. thermodynamics, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, etc.
Currently what I'm thinking is that his best option is to just teach math in colleges. Are there any better solutions?

Some community colleges have pre-engineering programs in which someone with a Ph.D. in engineering could be an instructor.  The engineering courses offered in these programs are typically very limited.  Courses like thermodynamics are not typically offered at the community college level.

Most community colleges have rules for the required academic background of instructors.  For example, a fairly common rule is that instructors are required to have 15 credit hours of graduate-level coursework in the subject that they are teaching.  These kinds of rules might well prevent your friend from getting a job teaching mathematics, chemistry, etc.

Your friend might also consider applying for a job as a full-time instructor at a four-year college that has an engineering program.


Should I try to re-invent the wheel while doing research? I’m a beginning PhD student in theoretical physics specializing in string theory. Unfortunately, my advisor doesn't have a good understanding of this subject; therefore, he provides me with very little guidance. The problem is that I have a very little understanding of how should I do research in string theory.

My style is that I try to work thing out from the first principles. For instance, when I try to understand the fundamentals of this subject (by which I mean graduate textbook material), I start with blank papers, write down a question I would like to understand, then try to find an answer mostly by reading parts of the textbook or by searching for research papers that deal with this question. Furthermore, I try to work things out on my own. Somehow, this feels somewhat unnatural to me (and it leads to very slow progress). Another approach would be to read the standard textbook thoroughly, then start reading papers more linearly.

I always feel that I’m trying to re-invent the wheel. I think that researchers take assumptions and conclusions from previous work and then build on it. On the other hand, I always try to start from scratch and to derive everything on my own. For instance, physics student learn quantum mechanics by starting with some axioms, then try to understand their consequences.  On the other hand, I try to deduce or rather, “find” these axioms by pure thought, which led me to spend a lot of time researching the original papers on quantum mechanics.

Am I doing it right? I think that part of my problem is that I’m trying to imitate top physicists such as, Richard Feynman. Do top physicists (or mathematicians) really do this?

I don’t think this approach is feasible for the following reason:

Theoretical research (and any other research for that matter) takes much more time to perform than to understand.
For example, if you have sufficient mathematical background knowledge, I am pretty confident that a few hours suffice for me to make you fully appreciate and understand the entire (theoretical) research I did in the last year, such that the only difference between you and me would be that I have more experience with thinking in these my terms.
I am not very familiar with the history of quantum mechanics, but I am pretty confident that writing down the axioms was the result of quite some hard thinking, conceptualising, and a considerable amount of experience.

If this weren’t the case, it would be impossible to advance a field beyond what can be done from scratch in a lifetime.
Rather, it is an ongoing challenge for science to improve didactics, programmes, etc. to bring new people to the forefront of a field within a reasonable amount of time, such that they can advance this front – standing on the shoulders of giants.
As a sidenote, take a look at some really old mathematics textbooks to feel how didactics has marched on and how important that is.

That being said, trying to do some things from scratch at times can be a helpful exercise that yields a deeper understanding of the matter and trains your field-specific problem-solving skills.
But mind that this should be only as an exercise – you do not want to do this all the time.

Finally note that (at least in the fields I am familiar with), most theoretical research is not about coming up with a new theory, new axioms, or similar, but working out the consequences of existing theories.
If you can come up with a new, useful theory, that’s great, but chances are that this will only happen after you gained a considerable amount of experience with the existing theories and doing theoretical work in general.

As a complete sidenote: Doing a PhD without a supervisor experienced in your respective subject is usually not a good idea.


In IEEE conferences is it necessary run the simulation in front of the members? My paper was accepted to an IEEE conference, but I am not getting the simulation results I obtained before.

In IEEE conferences will they tell you to run the simulation in front of them?

Since the other answers should properly address your question, I'll raise an issue that bothered me from the go: What do you mean you can't replicate your results?

One of the cornerstones of science is the replication of results (something that is almost never done in computer science...). If you can't replicate your results, how do you expect someone else to? If nobody can replicate/verify your results, sorry, you are not doing science :(

I'm not saying that you are doing it wrong, one would need more information than that, I'm saying that the phrase

  but I am not getting the simulation results I obtained before.

is very troubling and can indicate that you are, indeed, doing something wrong.


Citations needed when using textbooks to write lecture notes/slides? so basically I have recently started to teach my own course for the first time. In the past, I mainly taught professors in the department that were on leave etc and they normally supplied me with their teaching materials, so this is the first time I am completely writing my own notes/lecture slides.

Now, I am teaching a history survey course and when writing lecture notes/slides, I have mainly relied on the course textbook and a few secondary sources. The question now is whether I need to provide references at all if I use the work of others in this context? I do not copy anything verbatim of course and also dont claim anywhere that what is on the slides is my original work. However, while I normally rely on several sources for my lecture slides, at times several slides in a row more or less summarise a few pages from the textbook/another source. Would I be expected to give a reference for this? [I should add that I do provide references if I borrow a whole chart etc. from a book].

I have to say that at least in the humanities and in my own career as a student and teacher, I have never seen such references. In fact, a criticism of students about some of my former professors was that they basically just go through the textbook in lectures. So, unless I am missing something, my guess is that I dont have to provide references [I dont mean what would be ethically "perfect" but rather what is accepted practice in academia]. However, now that I am doing it myself, I thought I could ask here just to make sure.

You should certainly cite your sources. Not for each and every use, a general statement like "Based on textbook and others" on your first slide (or slide of each class) should be enough. Add references to slides/classes as needed for people who want to dig deeper.


Is there a known relation between course pass rate and student feedback? I analysed the relation between the feedback scores of my courses given by students against the average grades of the students in these courses. I found a moderate correlation (Pearson r) of 0.595. i.e. if the grades are better the students tend to give better evaluations of my teaching.

While I kind of expected something along these lines I then correlated the pass rate (= students with a positive final mark divided by the number of students) of the courses and mean student feedback and found a striking correlation of 0.898 (note that for Pearson r 0.0 would be no relation and 1.0 would be a perfect relation).

At the time I grade the exam I do not know the students’ feedback and at the time the students give the feedback they have not written their final exam yet but they have the results of the midterm exam and several marked assignments/papers (the combination of both usually being a pretty good predictor of the final exam and grade).

My analysis is based on a relatively low number of 10 courses (amounting to about 610 hours of class room presence).

Therefore my questions are:

Is there a known relation between pass rate and student feedback?
E.g. a publication that analysis this on a larger scale? Or are my
results just an odd outlier?
If this holds true would it not question the meaningfulness of
feedback scores as making a course easier gives better feedback
(tenure decisions etc)?

Yes, this has been rigorously probed in a 1998 study called DUET at Duke University. The study is described in chapters of Valen Johnson, Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education.

The correlations you describe had been observed for many decades, but they don't do a very good job of probing what's going on. The correlation could arise because teachers' effectiveness is correlated with students' performance, and therefore with grades; because students give higher ratings in return for lenient grading; or because students attribute success to their own efforts, and failure to the professor.

The DUET study got around these issues with a design that used a pretext to get students to fill out two different online evaluations of their teachers. (This was in the early days of the internet.) They gave evaluations both before and after seeing their final grades. The results showed a time-sequence consistent with a cause-and-effect relationship, with students tending to change their evaluations after seeing their grades.

There is other evidence that student evaluations lack validity, including a famous experiment called "Dr. Fox," in which a very energetic and persuasive lecturer gave a great lecture with total nonsense as the content.

Personally, when I'm on a tenure committee or evaluating an adjunct, the only thing I find useful about the evaluations is if the written comments show a pattern of something objective, e.g., lots of comments complaining that the instructor was often absent.


How to improve chances of acceptance of a paper with an atypical structure? I am working on a manuscript for publication in a chemistry journal. I find that my approach to the problem is very different to previous work on the matter. I find very hard to fit its argumentative line into the common scheme: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, Acknowledgements, References.

I am scared that my paper will be automatically rejected if it doesn't follow conventional sectioning. Is this an issue?

What should I do to increase chances of acceptance of my paper?

I can only think of the following alternatives, but I am not experienced and I am unsure of which is the best way to go:

Force the standard sectioning at any cost of the argumentative line?
Use many paragraph in the introduction to describe the sectioning?
Just use my criteria and structure the paper in the way I think it is better?

My thesis is that previous work did not consider some peculiarities and because of that their results aren't reliable. I need to prove the existence of these peculiarities and argue that my approach is better in these cases. Only experts in method X itself know that method X fails in some cases, and most researchers just apply method X assuming that its results are very good, so I feel myself in the need to show believers in method X that the method fails in certain cases (I'm not an experienced published author, so maybe my ideas are wrong about the need to convince others).

Finally, as there is not a method Y that works for all cases, I used results of many methods for each case and made a deep analysis considering the strengths and weakness of each method. Due to this, and the particularities of each case, I used a different method for each case. Even if I list methods for each case, I would have trouble fitting this into a Methods section early in the paper.

Due to the peculiarities I mentioned, I analyzed secondary properties as well. This gave rise to a lot of methods and situations that are hard to describe. I performed many calculations with a variety of objectives (first showing the existence of the peculiarities, and then calculating a useful value), and as many of the readers are not experts in the method itself, I think I need to provide a lot of background information before describing the methods themselves.

Note: The reason I chose a journal in which I know that most readers aren't aware of these kinds of situations, is that the properties calculated are of their main/exclusive interest. In other fields these kinds of things are well known and this work does not provide any insight on them. I'm just trying to correct previous values reported in one field, by applying well known facts from another field.

I struggled with this very issue for my first couple of papers. I'll bet it's the middle part (Methods, Results, Discussion) that you feel doesn't fit the paper you're trying to write. That may because your view of the type of thing that goes into those sections is too narrow.

First, it may help to approach the writing a bit differently. Forget about the sectioning for the moment, and just write, in any order. Make the points you want to make. Add in the arguments or experimental results that you need to support those points. As you're writing, you realise that there are things your reader needs to know in order to understand your paper, so write that as well.

Now you can start to think about the order that the information should be presented in. So rearrange what you've written into logical paragraphs, and put them in a sensible order.

As you're doing this, a natural structure for your paper should emerge. There's stuff that the reader needs to know in order to understand your paper. That goes at the beginning, in the introduction. You'll also want a short summary of your main points. This will go in the conclusion. You might want to suggest areas for future research.

You may not need any acknowledgements in your paper. Ask your supervisor. You obviously need references.

The abstract is a summary of what the paper is about. I tend to write the abstract last, because it's only then that I know exactly what the "story" the paper is trying to tell is!

But it's the middle part (Methods, Results, Discussion) where the structure can be a bit confusing, especially if your paper isn't about a typical chemistry experiment. This seems to be the area where there's the most difference in structure between papers. For example, the results and discussion of those results might be combined into a single section, typically called "Results" or "Results and discussion".

So let's think of those sections a little more generally. You need to explain how you approached the problem. If your paper is an argument for something, then you need to explain your underlying assumptions, and how you reached the conclusions you reached. This is the sort of thing that goes into the "Methods" section -- although you may want to give this section a different title.

For an argument paper, it might be difficult to separate the "Results" from the "Discussion". So perhaps those sections could be combined into one section that presents your argument. Look for some papers that present arguments, you'll get ideas on structure.


How is it possible to switch careers from undergraduate to graduate level in the US? I have read about many astounding career paths of scientists in the US. E.g. someone had a BSc in education and switched to physics in graduate school.
How are such switches possible?

In Europe I guess it's mostly so that such diverse careers can't be pursued without having had a reasonable exposure to the subject in college. One would have too many courses that are missing without prior knowledge so that they can't be put all in a Master's curriculum; thus, having had a specific subject is necessary as a major or minor in college...at least in Switzerland.

How come that in the US such switches are possible?
Or is it just that all necessary courses are put into the graduate(+PhD) program lasting in total almost a decade, in which case I wouldn't wonder that it's possible?

My PhD was in neuroscience. When performing neuroscience research, there's a lot one needs to know:

Biology: Starting with the basics, almost any course in neuroscience will have both macro- and microbiology of the human/animal bodies being studies. This includes topics at the molecular, cellular, and systems level. There's a non-insignificant chunk of anatomy to be learned as well. A specific focus will be spent on the biochemistry of neural transmissions, which involves a lot of...
Physics: The principles of electromagnetism govern the firing of neurons. As such, a thorough understanding of both the chemistry and the physics leads to understanding neurons. To study these cells, people using implanted electrodes need to understand a fair chunk of circuitry, as the quality of their cellular recordings is dependent on them understanding impedance and amplification and such like that. People using surface monitoring (EEG/MEG) need to understand the basics of electromagnetism, which govern how the fields propagate and are measured. As an added bonus, they get to familiarize themselves with the signal processing of source localization as well. Wheee.
Psychology/Sociology Some people study how the brain controls complex behavior, such as motivation, learning, addiction, planning, visual abilities, motor abilities, bla bla and bla. This works for both animals and humans, so there can be a lot of literature to cover.

This doesn't begin to discuss the computational skills required to create and analyze experiments, or the statistical knowledge required to make sure you're not screwing up your analysis, or the writing (yes, that's a skill) knowledge required to write a paper that someone gives a poop about, or the public speaking skills required to give a conference talk.

And that's just neuroscience.

Long story short, successful researchers nowadays BECOME polyglot experts simply due to the highly cross-disciplinary nature of the fields themselves. Obviously, you don't need to be expert in all these fields, but you have to start somewhere. When it's all said and done, the person coming to neuroscience with a biology background is surprisingly not that far behind the person with a computational background, because they both have so much to learn.


Citing a collection of work (i.e. literature review) by 1 citation? There comes a time when one is reviewing a certain model of a certain author (let's call him X) who claims that his/her model was built upon the work of Author A, Author B, Author C, etc... with detailed investigation of such authors and their works.

If I want summarize and not repeat everything, can one simply say something like this:

  This conceptual model/scale was developed  by X in 2010 and was based on his review and analysis of the various available literature in the domain (X 2010, p. 2).

By 'available literature', I'd want to mean Author A, B, C, etc... Sometimes though and if the studies are really limited (2-5 studies), I'd be citing them all or mention a few such as in this way:

  This conceptual model/scale was developed  by X in 2010 and was based on his review and analysis of the various available literature (e.g. Author A, Author B) in the domain (X 2010, p. 2).

However, sometimes the reviewed literature is too large and so based on that, can I follow the first example?

Do not automatically cite everything X has cited. You should only cite a paper you've read, and it will be assumed that you have read everything you cite. Author X could have made a mistake, misunderstood something or deliberately misrepresented something.

Whether it's worth tracing back every reference cited in X's paper depends why you're referring to it. If your paper describes an alternative model and the differences can be traced back to, for example, the data sources you've used, then you should go back to them, read them and cite them; ditto if your paper is a critical review of X's model. If you're simply using X's model out-of-the-box you don't necessarily need to go back and pick over every source for every parameter estimate.


University reputation vs department reputation for industry jobs There are obviously many other factors that are going into choosing a graduate school including supervisors, research interests, etc. but I'd like to leave those out for a moment and focus on just one decision parameter.

I have to decide between two places A and B for my physics PhD. A is a big state school whose department is ranked very high (top 10 in the US) but the school itself is otherwise unremarkable. Most people outside my field would not have heard of it. B is a very prestigious private university with a decent but not spectacular department (top 30 ish). However, although B isn't great at physics, it consistently ranks among the top 10 schools in the US overall.

If I'm looking at industry jobs after graduation as my primary choice and academia as a secondary choice, which one should I pick?

This is a tricky question, mainly because of the large degree of uncertainty of what you are going to do next. Basically, if you plan to stay within your physics field, then you should be looking for the institution with the best physics department, as ultimately your next job will depend on the quality of your work, and the reputation of the physics faculty you have been working with; while the reputation of your school will matter only if your supervisors won't push you too strongly, or if you want to move across fields.

However, you are mainly concerned with finding a job in industry. In that regard, unless you expect the people in the physics department of choice to directly point you to someone in industry they personally know, then it will be the reputation of your institution - not the department - to be "pushing" you forward. Industry do not and cannot have a fine view of the academic world. The world outside academia is vast, and you will meet someone connected with your home institution only in very rare instances. They will most likely NOT understand what you have done in physics, nor be able to judge the quality of your work; but they will recognize that you were accepted by a prestigious institution, and completed a degree with them.

Personally, I worked in either good or exceptional physics departments, in good institutions. At the end, finding a job in industry was relatively easy because I happened to work on projects that hit worldwide news. I call that luck :)
If that would not have been the case, my choices would have be far more limited. On the other hand, I had colleagues working on obscure research projects in the world most prestigious institutions; I'd say they have similar or easier times than myself finding jobs.


How do I find research groups that do work in field X? What is the best way to go about to find a certain research group that do work in a specific field (e.g research groups doing empirical brain investigations but working from a dualistic perspective, or research groups doing eyetracker work on infants)?

Well, I find reasonable numbers for research groups focusing on eyetracking by using Google and search operators. Of course, you should add some redundant similar terms (eye-movement, baby,...)

Notice, there are some patterns:

american universities nearly always have edu (actually it's even a domain) in their URL, german univ. uni. So using inurl:edu in google filters out a lot. Non-university institutes like german Max-Planck often have URL patterns too.
further add  -filetype:pdf -filetype:doc -filetype:ppt -filetype:ps to filter out more useless results
add 2010..2012 to be sure the site/group is still active and the topic on their agenda.
add research | forschung (latter being german translation, but afaik nowadays most natural sciences groups in Germany have a english (& german) page)

Some research branches also have a online directory, there exist also internet directories like dmoz (not sure if this stuff is up to date, probably some dead links):

http://www.eurosys.org/directory/

http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Biology/Neurobiology/Research_Groups_and_Centers/

http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/actions/colloq/groups.html

At least I can say that most research groups in Germany will have a english home page and short summary/research topics/open positions on it. So there should be no general problem to find them by some "serious" googling. But don't use too specific keywords, "eyetracking on infants", "dualistic view" is too special imho, use keywords being specific rather to the topic than the exact methodology. They are probably mainly interested in how the visual recognition system adapts and learns over time, this is the bigger thematic picture. You attract master and phd students not by naming a special experimental method, so you will not find these type of keywords often on a group page, where they often try to put in a minimum of time.


How would I go about doing a PhD after an M.Eng in Biomedical Engineering? I have been accepted into Cornell for M.Eng in Biomedical Engineering. I had originally applied for an MS but since they've stopped enrolling students for MS I got into M.Eng which is an industry oriented course. I would like to get a PhD eventually in the field. Will going for an industry oriented course (M.Eng) over a research course end my hopes of getting a good PhD admit?

Generally speaking, the main difference between an M.Eng and an M.S. is in research. An M.Eng is usually a course-based degree and usually does not involve any research. There is often some sort of "project" course which students will be required to take for credit, but that is still far from research.
An M.S would usually involve a research project and thesis, and it would give you exposure to the type of work a PhD student would be doing. That being said, many schools also offer course-based M.S. programs, so the name of the degree does not really mean much.

I would not recommend enrolling in an M.Eng program if you wish to study for PhD. In the U.S. in many schools having a master's degree is not a requirement for getting into a PhD program. I would advise you to inquire whether it's possible to be admitted to the PhD program at Cornell instead of the M.Eng.

For schools, the advantage of admitting students without master's degrees to PhD programs is that they will be around longer and probably have more time to do good work. In the case that the student doesn't quite meet up to their expectations, the can arrange for the student to leave with a M.S. halfway through the program. This to some extent compensates for the risk involved in admitting an undergrad (since they will likely not have much research experience).

M.S. students on the other hand have research experience. They have also written a thesis and possibly some papers. This gives the admission committee better insight into the applicants capabilities. Furthermore, a student with an M.S. degree will likely need less time to get started on their research and will not need to take as many courses, so they will probably hit the ground running once they enter the graduate program.

A student with an M.Eng degree will have a shorter PhD than the students coming in with B.S. degrees but will not have the experience the students with M.S. degrees have. So they will be at a disadvantage compared to both groups. Because of this admission to a "top 10" school would be a bit more difficult with an M.Eng degree.

Another thing to consider is that if your goal is a top 10 school, many of them give priority for PhD admission to students already pursuing M.S. degrees at their school. These are typically the schools which require master's degrees for PhD admission (such as Stanford and MIT).


What is necessary for mathematics graduate school? I am an undergrad junior at a top 60 institution (big state school in the United States) majoring in Pure Math. Course selection for Spring 2020 is coming around, and I want to know which courses to take for the strongest graduate school applications.

I'm currently planning on going into either combinatorics, graph theory, or theoretical CS. I have done internships in Software Engineering and Data Science (Machine Learning). My GPA is a 3.75 and the courses I have taken/am planning on taken are the following:

Calculus I - III
Linear Algebra I and II
Differential Equations
Advanced Calculus I (Real Analysis)
Mathematical Statistics
Discrete Math I and II (II is graph theory)
Numerical Analysis I and II
Abstract Algebra I and II
Programming I, II, Data Structures, Computer Architecture,Theory of Computation, Analysis of Algorithms
Topology I
Complex Analysis

Classes I might take if they look better for graduate school:

Advanced Calc II
Number Theory
Mathematical Logic

Along with these courses, I have some interdisciplinary research in neuroscience under my belt, but I plan on doing research with a math professor next semester.

Will my chances of getting into a good graduate school (top 60) be affected heavily if I don't have a full year of Real Analysis? Also, would I be well suited for a PhD in computer science (TCS)?

It's hard to say.  Your background sounds strong.  Your interests are more to the applied side of pure or the pure side of applied.  Really, a bit more towards applied than pure from my impression (e.g. CS interest).

I don't think you could go wrong taking another stats class (applied or theoretical, time series, whatever) or an operations research class.  (Not on your list, but a guess.)

If you restrict to choosing from the list, consider number theory.  Kind of useless but a lot of fun. Don't grind something you don't like just to look good.  I would pass on the second semester of theoretical calculus.


How are TT candidates measured with different number of postdoc years? In my field (math), typically people get 3 year postdoctoral fellowships as the standard offer. Some afterwards do another postdoc and some go directly to tenure track. Some people, however, get shorter (1-2 year postdocs) and some get longer (4-5 year) postdocs.

The question is: when one is up on the tenure track market, how are the publication lists and CV's compared between candidates that have different number of postdoctoral years underneath their belt? Is it that the person with one or two years should be able at the same stage of his/her career with regards to publications, letters, conference invitations, etc., in order to be chosen above someone with a 4 year postdoc or two 3-year postdocs?

Thank you in advance.

In evaluating tenure track candidates in mathematics, everyone is paying very close attention to the year of the PhD.  This is because you are hiring candidates not primarily based on their current position but on their perceived trajectory: you want to hire the gal or guy who will be a research star five or ten years down the line.  (At Harvard, Princeton and a few other places, they want to hire the person who's a research superduperstar right now.  But they would only hire someone young if they truly thought that their present accomplishments were tops on a worldwide scale.  Anyway, this is quite an exceptional case...)

Beyond that, it's all arguable, and the arguments have a strange way of favoring the candidate in one's field, who one knows / wants to work with anyway....In all seriousness, it's really not clear.  When I evaluate tenure-track candidates I look at their productivity both in an absolute sense -- i.e., total output -- and in a relative sense -- i.e., rate of production.  The person who is two years out and has eight papers of course looks better to me than the person who is four years out and has eight papers.  They also look better to me than the person who is four years out and has ten papers (assuming that the papers and the fields are comparable, which they may not be).  But the person who is two years out, has three papers, two of which are amazing and joint with their PhD advisor and the other one is really strong too but seems roughly similar?  Ideally you'd like to see a few more data points, but if you really think you could grab them right now....At a certain point it becomes openly game-theoretic.

One thing I'll say is that a greater percentage of top candidates are slightly older than the "standard efficient route" would predict.  A lot of people get their PhD in math in their late 20's, and if you're especially sharp, went to the right places, and didn't mess around you could certainly get your PhD by 25 or so.  You might think that the belles of the ball are the candidates who got their PhDs at 25.  And some of them are, but for each of those there are a couple more who are really strong but somehow managed to get their PhD past the age of 30, either by transferring from a foreign country, doing military service, or simply spending six-seven years in grad school (and writing a very strong thesis).

Moreover, there are a very small number of postdoc (often called "X Assistant Professor") positions at very prestigious places that last for longer than three years.  If you can spend more than three years in one top postdoc, then you have received the advantage of an essentially ideal environment for maximizing your research productivity, and thus it should not be too surprising that a lot of these people go on to very good jobs.  But if instead of spending five years in one postdoc you spend five years in three postdocs, that's much less auspicious: though there are exceptions, most people can only spin the wheel so many times before they cash out with whatever they can get (and we hirers know that, having in many cases been there).


Use 1st or 3rd person for university webpage description? I am in the process of updating my teaching and research descriptions the main website of my university. It seems many of the best descriptions are written in the 3rd person, but as far as I am aware, they were all written by the individual being described. Presumably those willing to talk about themselves in the 3rd person also put in the effort to have a good web presence. It seems disingenuous to write about myself in the 3rd person. My university has no guidance or policy on this issue (it must be an oversight given how much they love to manage everything). Is there a preferred style for official descriptions on the web? The webpage is dynamically from a CMS system so it is possible that some pages (either now or in the future) would present the content in a way that it is not obviously linked to an individual.

I think that it depends on whether the web site is written from a personal or an institutional perspective.

Personal perspective: On my own web page, I use first person because I have formatted it as a web page about me personally and about my personal work.
Institutional perspective: A close colleague of mine has formatted their page as "Name Laboratory", and it includes description of both themselves and of all of the students and postdocs in their group.  Their web page is written in the third person, including their self-description, because it is from outside perspective of the group as a collective, rather than their own perspective.

Just as in most questions of writing and tense, either can be correct, and I think the question is really about which you feel most comfortable doing.


Why is there so much need for hybrid journals which have the option to publish it for free or publish it with a fee This is in reference to my previous question Do the papers go through the same process when submitted through open access

The answer suggested that the papers go through the same process in both cases,whether it is open access or not.

But I still have a simple logical question:

Why would I/University/professor pay for the paper to get published when it can be done without providing the fee?
Why will the University pay such a sum however small it may sound to them to get my paper published when it could be done without paying for it?
Why would I care to write to the Editor to give me a waiver to publish my article when I know that there is an option to publish it for free?
Maybe I will use the money for some other purpose.
Last but not the least even if I have done a great research or path breaking work(which happens in rare cases) why would I take so much pain so that others can read my work for free?
Are there really so many people in this world who care about my papers?
If someone is really interested to read some paper or access something he can get a University affiliation.
Our University has some subscription of best journals and our University pays for it yearly.

In other words why is there so much need for hybrid journals which have the option to publish it for free or publish it with a fee?

Any wise student would opt for publishing for free?

Really I am confused.Any help.

Highly related question: Why pay a fee to have your article (in a subscription-based journal) made open access when you can just put the preprint on arXiv?

  Why would I/University/professor pay for the paper to get published when it can be done without providing the fee? Why will the University pay such a sum however small it may sound to them to get my paper published when it could be done without paying for it?

This can be for a multitude of reasons. Perhaps you/the university/professor thinks, for ideological reasons, that their work should be freely available to anyone who wants to read it. Perhaps they had, in the past, tried to access someone else's paper which is very relevant to their work, but could not because of a paywall. Perhaps the funding agency that is funding the work has a policy where any publication as a result of the grant must be published open access. There is some evidence that open access articles are more widely read, and more widely read is loosely correlated with more frequently cited. And so on.

Of course you can also publish subscription. But note that subscription articles are not exactly free. They're free for you, but not for your university library. If everyone in the world published open access, there would be no subscription journals and the library would not have to pay subscription fees.

  Why would I care to write to the Editor to give me a waiver to publish my article when I know that there is an option to publish it for free? Maybe I will use the money for some other purpose.

If you're using a grant for this, you don't have a choice, because you are obliged to use open access. Aside from that, if your funds are fungible, then you're free to do whatever you want with them. Just remember that if you do not publish open access, it's not freely available to readers. If you want to make your paper freely available, you have to publish open access (or ask for a waiver).

  Last but not the least even if I have done a great research or path breaking work(which happens in rare cases) why would I take so much pain so that others can read my work for free? Are there really so many people in this world who care about my papers?

If people can't read your work, they won't know about whatever contributions you're making then. Your work could be lost. You don't know if there're many people who care about your papers, but you can be sure that if nobody can read your papers, the number of people who care will be zero (or maybe one, i.e. you).

There's one thing more thing I want to say, given your series of questions. Remember that open access fees are not necessarily (and in fact usually not) paid by you. If you go to your university library and ask them if they offer support for open access, they might say yes. That might make actually happens when you publish open access clearer. The library is, in principle, moving some money out of its subscription budget to pay for your open access.


Efficient way to find conferences in related disciplines? I have been working on my research field (astrophysics) for very long and would like to explore some adjacent disciplines such as non-linear dynamics, machine learning, ...

My university is not that big, which means it is difficult to talk to local scientists, and a possible way to learn is through attending some related conferences.

In my field, there is one website where one can find all the conferences, which I find convenient. Is it the same for other disciplines, and has anybody compiled a comprehensive list?

I am not sure if it is allowed to post links so I will keep my answer more general. I would start by finding conferences...like "conference for machine learning" or something similiar. Try to find good conferences that way, look how often they took place, how many people attend etc. After that you can look at interesting individual papers, look what they have done...if it interests you, check their sources and find more conferences, repeat.

The best way for me works by looking at the proceedings of good conferences, especially the videos. Most of the time they explain it so that almost anyone can understand it, which is often not the case while reading paper only(rather complex papers you need to read more than once to understand what they are doing).

Additionally you can look at journals. For example "Journal for machine learning" or "journal non-linear aerodynamics"...journals will have have different names but google is good enough to switch some words for you. Check the impact factor and compare them. Pick the one you like the most and read all the titles...spiral your way down to papers that you actually find interesting.

There are several websites that let you filter conferences or journals by topics and also rank them via some score i.e. impact factor.

At least for machine learning I can tell you the most relevant publishers are IEEE, ACM, Springer...they all have their own websites where you can apply very good filters to find what you are looking for


Should a postdoc advisor be on a journal article published out of the postdoc's PhD Thesis? My friend is in a new postdoc position. Her PhD thesis is unpublished. Her new adviser hired her with the mandate that she get it published (or a paper based upon it) in a good journal, with his help. He also expects to be last author on that paper (she is first), something at which my friend has balked, and is now fighting.

To me, this sounds very reasonable. He stated it upfront, before she was hired, and she accepted. He has certainly put in time helping her to rewrite it and address reviewers.

As a related question, the current version of the paper has no other coauthors. Her committee is not included. To me this sounds odd.

The field is Engineering, and this is happening at an R1 in the USA.

Thoughts?  Should her postdoc advisor be on a journal article published out of the postdoc's PhD Thesis? Should her committee?

Update: She and I spoke this weekend, and she agreed to let me post this.She has removed him as an author mid-'revise and resubmit'. He was gracious, and has not contested this with the journal. The journal rejected shortly after the resubmit; she will need to find a new outlet. She further negotiated that she be sole author on all future pubs. The situation is certainly to the detriment of their relationship, but I think she feels much more comfortable with the situation going forward. A second and third piece planned are now shelved: she does not have a the statistical skillset to reanalyze the data for these pieces. She now looks toward one day hiring her own postdoc to do so. Her role has been changed to one more focused on writing proposals for funding and data acquisition, toward future projects with publication.  She does not believe her postdoc was threatened by this change beyond the inherent risks of a mid-position role change.

I certainly learned a few things.

No, not unless he made a significant scholarly contribution.  Your friend's institution almost certainly has a co-authorship policy that prohibits this type of honorary co-authorship, urge her to look it up.

However, she should be aware that this might permanently harm her relationship with her post-doctoral adviser.


Does every professor need to do research? I wonder if there are some professors only focusing on teaching or management but no research. I think this may be feasible.

In the Netherlands you can have a "buitengewoon hoogleraar", who has a professor position of typically one day a week and another position somewhere else. Often this is an external entity like a company, but this has also been used to give a professor title (but not the pay) to someone who does the managent of some institute.


Who should be excluded from reviewing My question may be a duplicate of: Sound reasons for excluding a reviewer, but it is motivated by What do you do when you are asked to perform an official review for a journal of a manuscript written by your supervisor?. Because there is an obvious conflict of interest between a supervisor and supervisee this answer claims the manuscript never should have been sent to the current student. The issue I see is how is the editor supposed to know if the potential reviewer has a conflict if they are not listed as a reviewer to exclude.

I essentially never list anyone in the excluded reviewer box. I would likely alert the editor if I was asked to review a manuscript from current and past collaborators, supervisors and advisees as well as colleagues in my current and past departments. This becomes a long list of people to include in the excluded reviewer box and it is not clear to me that it is helpful to the editor. Are there standard people that go in the excluded reviewer box?

You don't have to do the job of the editor and list every possible collaborator with whom you'd have a conflict of interest. If these people are asked to do the review, they should be the one to warn the editor. You can list people that you think wouldn't be obvious, but again you are under no obligation to do this.

As the first question you link to alludes, excluding reviewers is mostly because you think they'd be unfairly biased against your work.


Duplicate publication by the co-authors July 2015 : We four authors (Fabio, Alex, Haris and Mark) have submitted a paper in July 2015 and transfer of copyrights to the Journal A. Alex was corresponding author and I am Mark the 4th author.

October 2015: The paper got accepted and published also appeared online.

June 2016: I suddenly came to know through Google search that same article has also been published by three authors (Fabio, Haris and David) in December/January 2016 in Journal B. Fabio is corresponding author, I was not aware of this and also I am not an author in this duplicate publication.

At the time of submission in July 2015, as per my knowledge this paper was not submitted/or being published anywhere else.

This duplicate publication was accepted in December 2015 and appeared online on January 2016 in Journal B

In this whole situation being the 4th author in the first publication (Published in Oct 2015 in Journal A) where do I stand ? Are authors of duplicate publication guilty of plagiarism or copyrights violation ?

What are suggestions for me ? What should I do ? Does it all effect my authorship ?

If the article is an exact duplicate

Journal B has published text which is owned by Journal A without Journal A's knowledge or permission. In that case, write to the editors of Journal A and Journal B, purely to make them aware of the situation.

It is up to the editors of the journals to decide what steps to take. Journal B has claimed that what it has published is the original work of the three authors, and this is not true so it needs to un-deceive its readers.

Do not recommend any course of action to either editor. This kind of dispute can get nasty, complicated and damaging very quickly. And people detected in fraud (if it is fraud) will want to punish their victim. That is human nature.

But do write. If, believing that Journal B has published a fraudulent paper, you remain silent, you become part of the fraud.

Never accuse your co-authors of anything. Not to their face; not to the editors; not to your friends. If asked, report the facts only. Do not express judgements of those acts or those people. If asked to do so, refuse.


How do I convince my professor to allow me to go to a conference? I am an international PhD student of 2nd year (my PhD is supposed to be for 3 years). When I just came to this lab, my professor mentioned a possibility to go to an international conference or visit some other lab. Later when I asked him, he said that I don't have any result (I have done a lot of work but didn't get the result which he was expecting) and why then go to a conference. I explained that I would like to a) discuss my work with other people and possibly get some new ideas and b) I want to get a postdoc later and need to do some networking, if possible, at an international level. My professor responded that a conference is not necessary for getting a PhD degree, and as I don't socialize much in lab (I am rather shy), he doesn't understand how I can discuss with others at a conference (he thought it is a very funny joke).

In my PhD 1 year progress report presentation, one of the opponents said that it could be beneficial for me to go to another (specific) lab for a couple of weeks, but my professor ignored it and when I tried to remind him later, he changed the subject. This opponent is from another institute, unfamiliar to me and I can't just contact him and ask for assistance.

I am concerned because I am new in this domain and thus without going anywhere I am unlikely to meet people for possible collaboration in future.

All other students here (around 10) have already participated in 2-3 conferences minimum (and in some cases, research visit for several weeks), including two other students of my professor (but they both have a second supervisor, so my professor doesn't have as much control there as in my case). Many have found the funding through the lab, so I don't think that the lack of funding is the reason.

What should I do? How I can convince him that it is really important for me? Any idea is appreciated.

Tight question and hard to answer without knowing the details. It may be that your advisor is right in that your results are not good enough to publish and that other colleagues you ask are just polite and it may be that your advisor is wrong…

From the perspective of your supervisor it looks like this: Sending you to a conference will cost money from his budget or grants and it can contribute to his reputation if good results are presented from his work group and it could harm is reputation if bad/shaky/unfinished work is presented. On top of that, your advisor has genuine interest to promote his students appropriately. However, many supervisors do not send students to conferences without own contributions - maybe a rationale behind this is that you have to earn this privilege.

Let me comment a bit on the things you wrote. You say your arguments have been

  a) discuss my work with other people and possibly get some new ideas and
  b) I want to get a postdoc later and need to do some networking, if possible, at an international level.

I can relate a little bit to the response of your supervisor. Conferences are great for sharing ideas and for networking but it actually easy to go to a conference and fail in  both respects. Often there are tons of people, many knowing each other, other actively networking and for somebody new (especially if a bit shy) it is not straightforward to get involved. In fact, it is harder to network at conferences that to share ideas within your workgroup. Also, a talk at a conference is a great way to start networking and without a contribution, networking gets even harder.

You got the advice to try more local conferences in a comment and responded

  There were some local conferences, but only the people from our (small) community presented. I mean that if you go and see only your colleagues' talks, it will not really help you in networking...

In view of the above, this sounds like a strange response. You say you don't think networking on the local level is beneficial but only international networking is helpful? That doesn't make sense. Start small, practice networking with locals and then go for more. Also "local" does not necessarily mean you workgroup or university, but could mean "within your region or country". Actually, networking within the own region and community is very important (and a bit different than international networking).

In conclusion, the conflict between you and your supervisor seems to be, that he thinks that your contributions are not good enough for the conferences you proposed and you disagree on this.

So here is a suggestion: You should get qualified external feedback on your work, probably even anonymous:

Submission to a journal. Does not seem like a good idea. The feedback will take a long time, higher chances of rejection (even with mildly positive feedback). On the positive side, the feedback can be quite detailed.
Submission to a mid prestige conference with peer review. On the positive side, there is a fixed time frame for the feedback. Depending on your field, the feedback may be very brief.
Find a double blind refereed venue (so a bad feedback would not harm your supervisor reputation). Pro and cons for conferences and journals are the same as above.

Then there was this piece:

  one of the opponents said that it could be beneficial for me to go to another (specific) lab for a couple of weeks

To go from here, contact that very person and if you can manage to get an invitation from that lab, your supervisor should be happy to let you go (if the person is not from this lab, you may ask him to introduce you to the people from that lab). Even more so, if the lab could even contribute to the costs of the visit.


How good to publish a paper in an E-Journal compared to printed journals? I am wondering the qualitative difference between a printed journal publication and E-journal? Whether both have same impacts. I understand that impact varies from journal to journal and publisher to publisher. But I am talking about the reputed publishers only e.g. Springers, Elsevier etc. I would also like to mention that the said printed journals here are elecronically availalbe first while e-journals have no printed version.

So how good to publish a paper in an e-journal? Whether papers published in e-journals give same impression as in printed journals?

You appear to be confusing together two different issues: open-access vs. paywalled and printed vs. electronic.

Let us start with printed vs. electronic: the difference between a article available electronically vs. an article available only in print is that the article available electronically will be read and a paper article generally will not.  With a very small number of exceptions, for the most part electronic access is the means by which scientists access journal articles these days.  If they journal is not open access, then the researcher will be using an institutional subscription.

Now, as for open access vs. paywalled: some studies have shown that open access articles tend to be read and cited more than paywalled articles in similar quality journals.  For both open access and paywalled articles, however, the primary determinant in how they are viewed is the quality of the journal in which they are published, and in both cases there are excellent journals and terrible journals.


Presented a paper in a conference, but my paper did not get published in proceeding I presented a paper in a conference, but my paper did not get published in the proceedings. The authority said my paper was submitted late and could not be reviewed and therefore it was not published in the proceedings. However I was called to present my research paper and got a certificate also saying that I presented the paper in that conference.
But the issue is my paper did not get indexed/published.
I am worried about the fate of my paper now. What should I do ?
Can I give it for publication at some better place?

If I were you - and if I could publish that research in a peer review magazine, in your situation - I would do so. If your research didn't make it to proceedings (for whatever reason), it is open for subsequent submissions. It is practically same situation when your paper is rejected in a journal - you can re-submit it elsewhere.

Now - is it justified to submit that same talk for some other conference where it has not been published (in a journal)? - thats dubious and might be frowned upon depending on the size and praxis of your field, but I believe submitting it to a journal is pretty much ok.


Why are all authors credited equally with authorship regardless of level of contribution? Normally, the credit of a scientific paper is equally distributed among authors. In the real world, it is almost impossible to write a paper with equal contributions of all authors. Usually, one author is the main one who is the idea maker or discoverer by subtle analysis of data.

In most cases, contributions of some authors are trivial, e.g., consultation on a specialized area, analysis of a part of data, etc. With this system, there are many famous professors who are co-authors for tens of hundreds of papers.

Why when judging the research records of a researchers, only the quantity and quality of papers are considered, and no one cares about how much s/he has contributed to those papers?

My opinion is that, contrary to what you say about "one main contributor", in most cases, it is absolutely impossible to judge "the level of contribution" from any objective standpoint. Let's consider a (not hypothetical, just missing real names!) example.

A and B spent about a year thinking of a problem and devising a scheme for solution they could not make work.

A discussed the question with C.

C, who wasn't much interested in trying it yourself, passed it to his collaborator on a different project D.

D found an approach that gives fairly good result but not quite what was wanted and told it to C.

C passed it to A and B and during the two week visit of D arranged that A,C,D have a few discussions about it that resulted in some extra ideas but not a full solution yet.

Meanwhile B tried to combine what he knew himself and what he was told by C and obtained an even slightly better result than D (though still short of the exact statement wanted) but under more restrictive assumptions. He sent it to D.

D, upon reading B's draft, realized that the initial scheme of A and B could be made to work after all (what he was missing was in that note from B and what B was missing was a part of D's "general knowledge"), finished it off, and sent the solution to A,B,C, who have read and verified it.

Now, I suggest you try to tell the "level of contribution" of each person keeping in mind that

1) If not for C, D would most likely not hear of the problem at all and it is doubtful that he would come into direct contact with A,B.

2) It is possible that A and B would make their approach work eventually without D.

3) What was a "general knowledge" for D and allowed him to finish the problem off, would hardly come into the mind of A,B,C at all.

4) Without B's draft, D would, most likely, stop at the "partial result" he obtained first.

5) Both A and C participated in the discussion during D's visit and, while everybody remembers all the ideas that surfaced, nobody remembers (or cares much about) who said what.

6) A,B,C,D all argue that the rest 3 could surely do the problem without him, just in longer time, so the current idea of "author credit" C and D have is to publish the whole thing under the name AB CoD.


How to deal with leftover work after changing employer? In the academic world, how is work generally handled that has not been finished when an official contract ends? This is, I imagine, more the rule than the exception, for example when papers were submitted shortly before the end of the contract.

Is it common practice to "bill" (i.e. work within the work hours of) the new employer? That seemed ridiculous to me until I thought that the same situation of unfinished work will likely arise with the current employer also. Quite a number of academics, including me, are on short term contracts (< 1 year). Recently I had to sink about 1 week of work time into such a former unfinished work which of course delays my current project.

Is it expected that I work on it in my free time as a commitment to my former employer and see it as a personal mission to finish this work? Should I request a compensation for it?

This is maybe handled differently in different fields, but in any case you should inform you new advisor that you have to finish work from your previous position and discuss how this should be handled. Here are some models that I know:

Often it is expected, that postdoc do some independent work, so using this time to finish work with another workgroup is totally fine is this case.
In case your new position does not allocate time to do such work, you should inform your previous advisor. You may offer to work in your free (i.e. "non-work") time and ask for compensation (e.g. using a special contract - in German this could be a "Werkvertrag" but I don't know an English translation).
Your new advisor may get "on board" of your started project, so that your work on the project also falls under your new contract.


Are letterhead and signatures necessary in the LOR? My manager (one of the recommenders) said that he is working from home for several months due to coronavirus. It will not be possible for him to give the recommendation letter on the letterhead.
Instead, he said that he would submit it via email.
My question is, will this letter count towards my application?

In this era of networked printers, few people ever actually load letterhead paper into a printer any more.  Instead, most organizations have electronic "identity" or "branding" collections that include templates for letterhead, business cards, etc.
As such, in my experience, most recipients (in the US and Europe at least) expect letters to arrive in PDF format. Many will not even allow a letter to be sent physically any more.
For most recommenders, then, using "letterhead" just means taking care to use the fancy formatting to make a good impression, just like one might wear formal clothing to make a good impression at a fancy event.  In dealing with academics, however, eccentricity is to be expected, and variation from norms is often tolerated.
Bottom line: your recommender should probably be able to use letterhead electronically. If for some strange reason they can't, it shouldn't be a big deal, as long as it's still easy to tell they are a real and respectable person (e.g., emailing from an institutional address).


Supervisor wants me to support a diploma-thesis software tool after I graduated During my last year of MSc. studies, I was part-time employed on the university project. The project was related to my diploma thesis, and my task was to create a data-mining software and run experiments using this software.

I've finished the software, run the experiments in it, successfully graduated, and finished the studies. It was a huge success for me and for the university as the diploma thesis was awarded in a student's competitions, being top 10 among 2000 diploma theses.

Despite this success, the software I developed is not production-ready, rather just a prototype. For my experiments I considered only happy-case scenarios and if there are some unexpected inputs from the user/from connected systems/uploaded CSV files do not match specification, etc., the software crashes and cannot be used.

My supervisor wants to use the software usually twice a year. When he runs into some troubles with it, he emails me to deploy fixes so that he can run the experiments. In the first year and a half after I finished the project and the software, I did it three times. Now he is asking again to debug the problems in the software and fix them. I do not want to do it, because:

I have no time for it because of very time-consuming projects in my current job.
I am working in a different industry now and during two years I forgot many things from the software development and specific solutions I used.
I already lost accesses to the production environment at the university, so I am not able to deploy fixes.
I feel stressed out by the requests. As this was a prototype I did not set up logging, and I usually struggle to find and fix the error cause. I sometimes even cannot reproduce the errors locally and then I really do not know how to fix it.

I wrote these reasons to him, but he insists that I should still help them with it. He offered me they will pay me again some hour rate to support the software, get production accesses again, etc. But the money is no matter for me; I just do not want to continue with supporting the tool.

I feel there was some misunderstanding from their side about what are difference between diploma-thesis prototype and production-ready software. We never agreed officially that I would support it. We just once talked about that I would support it "for some time if some problems occurs", which I believe I did (three bugfixes and approximately three months of work during a year and a half after I graduated).

Is there a way how to politely refuse while still keeping good relationship with the supervisor as he is always very nice and polite?

I was thinking to offer him a one- or two-day workshop for some of the current university employees where we could go through the code on GitHub, and I would officially hand it over to the current employee. But it would not be a solution for him, as there are only a handful of postgraduate students in their group, and they are not programmers, so they cannot take the software over.

And I feel bad about writing to him: “I do not have a solution, I do not want to continue with that, and I do not care that you cannot use the software any more...”

I think you are being generous and, given what you say, should be able to step away from the project with a clear conscience.

If he needs the software he should be willing to find a way to pay for support, maybe not you, I think, but some support person.

I would see him if possible or send an email giving much of the information you've given here. The fact that you are doing very different things now and that support is disruptive to your main goals should be definitive.

But I agree that it is good to find a way to keep a good relationship with him if you can also achieve your main goal.


Not publishing an author photo on Elsevier journals This is related to Co-author does not want biography+photo in paper submission but specific to Elsevier journals. In the mentioned question, answers showed that for IEEE they have a policy where a biography/photo could be omitted.

Can a paper be published with Elsevier, in journals which ask for an author bio/photo, without the author photo?
You can find several journals which ask for this on https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:elsevier.com+passport-like+photo

ASK THE EDITOR prior to submission.

In practice, some Elsevier editors do accept the absense of a photo.

(That's all, folks; there is not much more to be said about it.)


What is a "splinter meeting"? Like this one link.

It seems nobody describes it in detail.

A splinter meeting is a relatively small meeting that takes place at a larger event, such as a conference. It is likely organised by someone besides the conference organisers, and while it's typically related to the topic of the conference it may be much more specific in focus. For example, I've been at psychology conferences where splinter meetings have been held for users, or potential users, of pieces of technology that are used in research.

A similar idea is that of satellite meetings/conferences/workshops which are smaller, more specific events held in association with a much larger, more general event. They take place before or after the larger event (not during, like a splinter meeting might). Often in different locations and usually with different organisers. They are, however, often promoted to some extent by the larger event.


Is it okay to email the general/conference chairs if I feel the reviews are biased and unprofessional? In a conference with an author rebuttal phase, I received a review from a reviewer (who gave a strong reject) asking to compare my work to a paper which is not even on the same problem as my paper. I firmly believe that this review is biased and the reviewer is either the author of the paper, which he/she is asking me to compare or was planning  to putting a similar paper.
Is it okay to email the chairs to look into my paper and reviews?

This situation happens many times in conferences. At least, I have experienced once.

  I firmly believe that these reviews are biased and the reviewer is either the author of the paper, which he/she is asking me to compare or was planning to put a similar paper.

This is a straight-forward assumption. And, I think you are misinterpreting in this aspect. Though it could be true, you are thinking too much about the rejection.

  Is it okay to email the chairs to look into my paper and reviews?

Since this is rebuttal phase, this might not sound okay to email at this point. Just write the rebuttal and/or do the revision.

I feel you are too much emotionally attached to the paper and that is how you are assessing the situation. Take a break from this paper. Look at the review after few days, and think positive.

"Rejections are good times of research, in which we learn to accept the truth."


Find papers authored by a specific number of authors For some concrete study, I need to find for some keywords, papers that have just one author. I used PubMed, Scopus and ISI Web of Science, but in any case, I could not find a way to filter bibliographic search results by a specific number of authors, or a number less than some exact number of authors. Anybody knows how to do this with mentioned tools (PubMed, Scopus and ISI Web of Science) or others?

PubMed has an interface which you can call from a script. The intend to develop it is exactly your class of problem, which cannot be solved from the provided user interface.

This is the main page of NCBI Entrez API:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25501/

What you need to do is to query PubMed by keyword(s), for example this is a search by "concrete":

https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&retmode=json&retmax=100&sort=relevance&term=concrete

Do multiple queries, to cover your field, for example you can also consider "brick" or "cement".

It returns a list of publications. For each publication, you would have to check the number of authors and keep ones with a single author. For each publication, you shall call:

https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esummary.fcgi?db=pubmed&id=29510510&retmode=json

Determine the size of the vector "authors", and only keep the ones of size one.