When and why should you write numbers less than 10 in words? My current strategy in my thesis and in papers is to write numbers less than 10 in words. For example, if I need to write the number 6, I write 'six'. Recently though, I've been thinking this strategy adds unnecessary complications. Is there any particular reason why numbers less than 10 should be written in words?

Many style manuals will have specific requirements regarding when to express a number as numerals or in words.

APA Style

The APA version 6 style manual has an entire section starting from 4.31 on how to present numbers in text.

The manual does include a general rule that numbers 10 and above should be expressed as numerals, but there are a wide range of exceptions.

Should be expressed as numerals

Any number in an abstract
Any number immediately preceding a unit of measurement  (e.g. 3 kg)
Any number representing a statistical operation (e.g., 4 times as many people)
times, dates, ages, scores, and points, exact quantities of money, numerals as numerals
numbers that indicate a place in a series (e.g., page numbers, Table 1, Table 2, etc.)

There are also further exceptions for when numbers should be expressed in words

Numbers at the start of a sentence or heading
Common fractions
Where the usage is common

Why have the general rule to express numbers below 10 in words?

Compare the following:

I had 2 apples.
I had two apples.

and

I had one-hundred and thirty-two choices.
I had 132 choices

A few possible principles:

Numbers less than 10 are easy to read as words; Large numbers are difficult to read as words and easy to read as numerals.
In general, conventions make life easier for writer and reader.
There may be a slight disruption to the look of and reading of prose when interspersing numbers with words.
A few numbers, particularly "1" (which looks a bit like "I") might introduce slight ambiguities.


Do graduate admission committees include persons from outside the field? I am applying for a master's programme in Computer Science in the UK. In my application I am using the term "penetration tester".

Can I assume that everyone in the committee knows what that means? Computer Scientists should, but administrative staff probably won't. Should I explain what the term means?

You asked one question in the title, but asked a somewhat similar but not the same one in the subject.

Your original question: "Do graduate admission committees include persons from outside the field?"

I'm not really qualified to answer that one.

Your second question, however: "Can I assume that everyone in the committee knows what that means? Computer Scientists should, but administrative staff probably won't. Should I explain what the term means?"

You don't have to explain what it means, but you should explain what you did. I know what a penetration tester is, but I don't how much of a penetration tester you are or if you just sat at a keyboard trying to put in 1234 and other generic passwords at a log-in screen all day.

You can follow the who/what/when/where/why/how guidelines when discussing any role you have taken, even in or out of field. Being too clear, versus not being clear enough, have entirely different effects on your application.

The blurb probably should cover:

Who you are (your position)
What you did (your tasks/projects that you completed)
When you did it (month/year to month/year)
Where you did it (company, who your supervisor was, city, state)
How you did it (if you implemented technology, you can mention it)

The why is not quite objective, so I normally keep it out of the job blurb and in the personal statement or statement of purpose.

I've pulled up a snippet of my own resume (with non-important details removed) of my time as a clinical researcher as an example, so you can see it in action.

  University of Someplace Family Medicine, Someplace, SS

  Under auspices of Drs. John Doe, Jane Doe, and. John Doe, research mentors,
  as part of a clinical research study analyzing novel testing equipment for [disease] and [disease], June 2009 – June 2010
  Clinical Researcher

  Designed and maintained a secure, encrypted database
  Took a direct role in obtaining patient consent forms
  Evaluated and used novel testing equipment and obtained results
  Informed health care providers of procedures and the workings of the equipment
  Coordinated work between the clinical site and the research lab
  Was critical in determining the effectiveness of a rapid clinical test for [disease] during the [disease] outbreak


Applying for industry job after accepting postdoc offer It is clear that once one accepts an academic job, it is just not right to continue interviewing for the same type of academic job.

However I (and most others on both sides, I would imagine) think it is perfectly reasonable to continue applying and interviewing for permanent faculty jobs after accepting, say, a postdoc offer. Call this situation A.

However it is much less clear to me how the situation can be viewed from the new employers' perspective if after accepting an academic job --- whether postdoc or faculty --- the future employee applies for a (dream) industry job that just opened up. Call this situation B.

I fail to see how situation A is fundamentally different from situation B, unless I miss something.

After accepting a postdoc position, it is not necessarily appropriate to keep seeking a faculty position.  This might be appropriate if the faculty position was expected to start far in the future.  The fundamental difference between a faculty position and an industry position is that industry positions are usually intended to be filled in about a month, while faculty positions are filled after somewhere between a few months and a year.  This allows the faculty position to be accepted without conflict with the postdoc position.


Navigating collaborations as a postdoc I am a new postdoc (finished my PhD a few months ago) who started with a new group during COVID-19.
In my field collaboration is the norm and solo-author papers are rare. I need to start approaching people (both within the group and external) to collaborate on projects, but I am very nervous, and even after reading several existing questions on approaching collaborators I am not sure what to do.
There are two professors I might collaborate with. For each scenario I have also included some specific questions in bold to address the things I'm struggling to figure out.

Working with a professor in our group who has a very impressive track record in creating new methods/tools. I have an idea for a method that could build on some of his work to address a different problem (about 30% his existing code/method and 70% new things). He liked the idea when I met him a year ago during my postdoc interview, but I'm not sure if he knew that none of my prior experience involved developing new methods. I would probably need a lot of help/guidance on this.

He is friendly and approachable with PhD students, but I'm nervous because as a postdoc I'm not sure how much help/guidance I'm still allowed to need. How should I go about approaching him, and what should I say to define potential roles/how the collaboration would work?

A professor at another university I have previously exchanged a few emails with to ask question that fell within his area of expertise (my postdoc mentor introduced us). I am thinking of doing a paper that builds on my dissertation using a different type of data. He wouldn't be familiar with the method I'm using, but he is very familiar with the question and the literature, and I could use his advice on different ways to define/measure the outcome in the new data. The reason I want to invite him as a co-author (if there is a paper) is because his expertise would be helpful for the discussion section, and once there's a paper draft the whole thing could benefit from his input.

It may or may not be possible to do this paper - I can't check statistical power until I ask him more questions about defining/measuring the outcome. When and how would it be appropriate to transition from asking questions to inviting him as a co-author? And what should I say (and when) to discuss defining what his role as co-author would be?

Note: answered before recent edits. I'll clean it up after it settles down a bit. (minor edits made for temporary readability)
In all of these questions, don't try to settle all issues at the outset. Just start a dialog. In the first case, admit that you will need his help on "methods", but that you hope he is interested in moving forward with you on the topic.
In the (now removed) case of a student suggest that you are aware that there are issues about his ability to commit, but let him decide whether to spend the time and effort.
And in the second case of a remote professor, ask for his willingness to give you feedback and perhaps collaborate on a paper.
But the key is to open the conversation, not to write a contract. While the boundaries need to be made clear fairly early in any collaborative effort, it needn't be the initial concern. And, most important, don't make assumptions about what is possible before you ask.


How to cite a deck of powerpoint slides with two titles? I need to cite a deck of powerpoint slides (in APA style). However, the complication comes because the deck of slides which I found online is a compilation of two presentations - there are two titles, with two presenters on the title slide. Has anyone got any advice on citing this source?

This should be applicable for your problem in APA sytle.

  [Authors (if known)]. [Title of the matter]. Retrieved from [URL]. Slides [start]-[end].

Just keep in mind that the main purpose of citation is to facilitate the reader to be able to refer the materials you've referred. As long as you show clearly where to look and what to look for, your citation is considered valid. Citation formats are there for uniformity within the bibliography within the concerned journal.


When should one invite co-authors? To my understanding, there are pros and cons to inviting (well respected) researchers to co-author a paper.

Pros: Being a co-author with well-respected researchers puts one in a good light. They can make valuable contributions. You improve your chance of being invited to work on projects with them in future. All these points can advance one's academic career.

Cons: Too many cooks spoil the broth. There is more chance of conflicting idea and styles, which might lead to frustration and delayed publication. They might not contribute as much as you hoped. More authors means less credit for the work per author.

I would like to hear your views on this.

When you "invite" co-authors is when the project is still in the formation phase - as early as possible. Authors are people who contributed to the project, not people whose names might power a paper past reviewers. And the reasons for their invitation should be substantial and scientifically valid reasons.

One thing to note is that after the project starts is potentially a bad time, as presumably you don't necessarily have the budget to pay them, the potential for them to be genuinely engaged in a question they're interested in is a bit of luck, and you've lost out on the chance for their expertise to to actually influence the formation of the project (where it's probably most helpful).

It's absolutely not appropriate to invite them at the paper stage.

For reviews or commentaries, it might be acceptable to do this before the paper begins to be written, but for other papers, co-authors should not simply be added to a project at the writing stage. Indeed, doing so violates a large number of authorship guidelines.

I'd also like to contest one of your cons: "More authors means less credit for the work per author." This is highly field dependent. In my own, noone cares, or tries to divide credit by number of authors.


Please ensure that you refer to Figure 3 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure I have submitted revisions to a journal. The editor asked that:

  Please ensure that you refer to Figure 3 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the figure.
  Please ensure that you refer to Table 9 in your text as, if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table.

What does the editor mean? The article contains 17 table and three figures, but he only raised issue with figure 3 and table 9.

Figure 3 and table 9 have been mentioned in the text already.

Did you mention the other figures and tables in your text? Usually, you should have a sentence like "as shown in fig. 3" or "in table 9, we see..." for each and every table and figure.

Maybe the editor just gave examples - you should do it for all of them.

Edit to incorporate the comment into the answer:

It might be a misunderstanding. Since you should address all reviewer's / editor's comments, you should write something like "fig. 3 and table 9 are mentioned on p.x line y. If this is not sufficient, I did not understand your remark, please elaborate on this issue"


Do you place endnotes (in vancouver reference style) after colons or before? I have some references I would like to tie to all the dot points I've written after my colon and hence I thought it would be a good idea to put the relevant references after the colon, in endnote form. Here is an extract from the text I am putting together that illustrates what I mean:

These acute attacks are typically triggered in genetically susceptible individuals by at least one of the following:2-4
•   Stress
•   Medications (especially sulfa-containing antibiotics, barbiturates, synthetic oestrogens, certain antiepileptic drugs and a few others. See http://www.drugs-porphyria.org/ for details regarding safe and unsafe drugs)
•   Dietary changes (high protein diets, low-carbohydrate diets and fasts are especially notable for causing acute attacks)
•   Endocrine factors (fluctuations in the levels of the different hormones present in the body; usually the sex hormones such as oestrogens and androgens [e.g. testosterone, dihydrotestosterone]. Acute attacks are often triggered by the hormonal changes that occur in the different stages of development, e.g. puberty, menopause, etc.)

This is a relatively minor point, but in standard American English usage, footnote and endnote numbers would go after a punctuation mark, not before one. Usage in British English might be different, and individual publishers may have their own guidelines.

However, one might also ask why you aren't citing each item in the list separately; it might be more informative to the user rather than doing an all-purpose citation at the top of the list!


Is it appropriate to informally address my supervisor in the thesis acknowledgements? All of the acknowledgment examples I have read online address the supervisor with formal title and full name (i.e. Prof WhatNot). In my case, I'd rather use the first name only ("nickname" actually), is that so uncommon? I should probably ask him, but I wanted to understand what is the general opinion.

This is going to vary a lot by the country and customs of your university, and your relationship with your advisor. But I'd say, if you relationship with your advisor is good, then in the UK it would not be seen as out of order to refer to your supervisor as informally as you like in the acknowledgements sections of your thesis. In the theses I've read, these things are often a lot like best man speeches - often written in a jovial and cheeky style, while staying just the right side of the appropriateness line, but also often cloyingly sentimental at the same time.


Suggestions for making the most out of a set graduate school program? I was recently admitted to a US graduate program in Pure Mathematics with an assistantship that requires teaching. I begin in the Fall.

The program is designed in such a way that Fall and Spring have Analysis/Algebra and their continuations, respectively, give or take optional seminars and a teaching supplement course. In the summer following the first academic year, Qualifying Exams in these topics are required that both allow one to continue into the second year of the MS program and/or pass on directly to PhD program. Both MS and PhD have dissertations at the end of the program.

My concern is the first academic year with the courses restricted to the two A's. While definitely necessary to prepare for the QE's, I wonder how much time that leaves me to study other topics, perhaps topics that would be part of an eventual dissertation. With time split between these intro courses and teaching, which will no doubt be time consuming, how much time does that leave for personal exploration? For branching out into other areas of mathematics?

The immediate conclusion I drew was to read other topics. But self-directed learning moves slow for me, I'm easily distracted and life gets in the way. The classroom environment is where I learn best, to be honest.

I guess I am looking for recommendations to make the most out of the graduate program's pace - how can I build the foundation required for my program while also exploring topics that will not have explicit instruction? To explore other areas is my ultimate goal for returning to school. Suggestions?

Answers both relevant and irrelevant to math are appreciated.

For graduate programs with this kind of structure, there is usually an expectation that your core courses (algebra and analysis) will be your main focus for the first year.  So you should not necessarily expect to have much extra time to spend on other topics during that year, nor will the program be expecting you to do so.

If you find that you are able to handle those courses pretty easily and have a significant amount of extra time and energy, then you could consider:

studying additional topics on your own
enrolling in other courses, if there are some that don't have the core courses as prerequisite
approaching an individual professor in an area of your interest about a reading course or independent study

But if not then don't worry about it.  There will be plenty of time after your first year to explore other areas of math, and having a thorough grounding in core areas will make that exploration much more productive.


Importance of degree and publication vs. degree alone I'm going to be starting graduate school next week with a major in Mathematics. I've started working on some research in mathematical biology this summer. It's applied mathematics linked with computational biology.

What is the tangible advantage of getting a research publication along with my masters degree vs. just getting a masters degree?

What are the benefits for a math major, for future job prospects?

Also, if I want to apply for another masters degree later, how much will getting a publication help me?

A tangible advantage can only be measured for an agreed upon measure (or "utility function" if you prefer).  This is a classic misstep in attempts at persuasion.  I can't convince you to do anything (or appreciate anything) if I don't know your core values and phrase my arguments in terms of those values.  Unfortunately, the phrase "future job prospects" is rather vague, so I will guess a bit at what you're hoping to pursue and accomplish.

First suppose that you're considering getting a PhD in the future.  This one is easy.  If you do go for a PhD, a large chunk of your time will be spent on research and publishing.  What exactly this looks like varies significantly even within math, depending on how applied your subfield is.  However, if you stick with the same subfield (or even one nearby), then publishing a paper during your masters will often give you a reasonable sense of what you'll be doing during your PhD.  This will help you to know whether you want to get a PhD or not.  Having published a paper during your masters will also help convince the admissions committee that you are likely to succeed in a PhD program, and improve your chance of being admitted to a PhD program.

Suppose instead that you plan to pursue a job that requires technical writing skills.  This one is pretty obvious too.  Writing (as with most things) is a skill that you acquire only by doing.  Many (most?) journals require a higher quality of writing than is typically needed in your masters thesis.  They also require you to write in a certain style, to a certain audience, etc.  Being forced to do this will make your writing better.

Finally, suppose that you want to convince someone that you take initiative or that you conceive a project and see it through.  In either case, having published a paper can serve as good evidence.  Like most things, after you've published multiple papers, the process will get faster (though not likely fast).
But the first time you do it, you'll invest a lot of time, and often not know quite what is needed.  This can be frustrating, but also rewarding when you succeed.  The ability to teach yourself new skills is far more marketable than anything you will learn in grad school.


Open Access Success Stories? A lot of academics like to complain about the academic publishing industry and its questionable practices (e.g. not paying reviewers for their work, overcharging universities for subscriptions, preventing public access to publicly funded research etc.). The answer seems to be moving to open access journals/non-profit publishers.

My question is: can anyone share the story of a reputable scientific community (of reasonable size) that has made a full switch to open access publication? What made it work?

The great success story of open access is arxiv.org.  Wikipedia claims that "in many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository."  There is no citation for this claim and I couldn't find a study, but certainly there are subfields where a very high fraction of papers go on arXiv.org.

It's also a fact that all serious journals in these fields allow authors to post preprints on arXiv.  I would say that "all authors can make all their papers freely available with minimal effort" is success.  This latter statement is backed up by data; just go to SHERPA/RoMEO and search for e.g. journals with "math" in the name.  The first page of 50 results doesn't show a single one that prohibits preprint archiving.

The dominant publisher (SIAM) in my field (applied math) allows authors to post the final published article on personal or institutional websites, for no charge.  When they adopted this policy, they also made it apply retroactively to all articles ever published by them.  I'd call that success.

I wouldn't necessarily consider a wholesale move to author-pay journals to be a similar success, since the author-pay model (as implemented by many for-profit publishers) siphons off just as much money that was intended for research as the (for-profit) subscription model does.


Is it good to finish a PhD fast? I am not going to give details about the situation (for obvious reasons) but here it is: I got accepted for PhD to a very good American university, in experimental particle physics and I met a famous professor here who is willing to be my mentor.

I talked to some of his old students and they all said good things about him (both personality related and research related).

The thing is that his students usually finish the PhD in about 3 years (this includes taking classes, written and oral exams), while the average here is about 6. I am not sure if I should go for it or not.

I really like the work that he is doing and a recommendation letter from him would definitely mean a lot and I am totally willing to put as much effort as necessary into the projects he gives me. I am just not sure if a 3 years PhD would be good for my future career.

Will I get to learn enough? Will the post-doc or professor positions I will apply to might view such a short PhD as a bad thing (the students I talked to graduated quite recently so I am not sure about the long term impact of this)?

One of the questions is why his students finish so fast. That's likely at the core of whether or not things are "Good" or "Bad".

For example, some potential good reasons:

His lab has stable funding, which means his students need to take fewer TA positions to fund themselves, and can work on research instead. Note that this might also be a bad thing if you want to accumulate teaching experience.
His lab has a productive experiment and data generation pipeline, meaning his students might have clear experimental setups, there's a lot of institutional knowledge, etc. that prevents them from going down unproductive rabbit holes.

In both cases, a "Good" lab might have removed some of the waste time from doing a PhD that many people experience, which will cut down on the time it takes, potentially by quite a bit.

Some potentially bad reasons:

The course of study for his students is expressly just what's useful for their work in his lab, discouraging picking up depth or exploring interests.
The projects are "gift wrapped" and don't involve much thought on the part of the student as to how to conduct them - all they have to do is pull the trigger. This seems like a good thing, but can leave you with a lack of skills in articulating an independent research agenda later.

Just knowing the time it takes can't tell you which of those things (and others) is actually in play.


Citing a paper whose title has received errata I recently stumbled upon a published article entitled "ANCOVA versus change from baseline had more power in randomized studies and more bias in nonrandomized studies," which has an errata stating the following:

  The publisher regrets that in the above-mentioned article the title was changed without the author's approval. The correct title should read:

  “ANCOVA versus change from baseline: More power in randomized studies, more bias in nonrandomized studies”

If I am to cite the paper, should I refer to it by its published title (as I did in the reference list below) or by its corrected title?

References

Van Breukelen, G.J.P. (2006). ANCOVA versus change from baseline had more power in randomized studies and more bias in nonrandomized studies. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 59(9): 920-925
Van Breukelen, G.J.P. (2006). Erratum to “ANCOVA versus change from baseline had more power in randomized studies and more bias in nonrandomized studies”. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 59(12): 1334

In this case I'd use the corrected title, and add make sure to note that the paper is corrected, e.g.

Van Breukelen, G.J.P. (2006). ANCOVA versus change from baseline: more power in randomized studies, more bias in nonrandomized studies [corrected]. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 59(9): 920-925

Note that this is also how the paper is listed in Pubmed. I also recommend citing the erratum next to the paper.


Withdrawing my application for a research fellowship when getting a job elsewhere While waiting for the outcome of my application for a research fellowship, I was offered a job at a university in another country. It turned out that my fellowship application passed the first stage, but after some consideration, I decided to accept the job offer and not to pursue my fellowship application any further. My question is, should I tell the secretariat immediately that I would like to withdraw my application or should I just let the deadline for the second stage of application pass without informing them anything? Also, what should I say to my potential collaborators?

It is customary to withdraw your application(s) as soon as you have accepted a post elsewhere. By doing so you increase the chances of fellow applicants to be shortlisted / admitted to the next stage.  Also, non-attendances and late withdrawals create a considerable mess at the interview stage, and it is better not to annoy your prospective colleagues, with some of which you may need to collaborate in future.

Actually, prompt communication is typically a win-win situation, and unnecessary delays in communication usually give nothing good to anyone (despite maybe some illusion of control).


Is it a standard practice of tenure and promotion committee to ask for review reports of some published papers of the one evaluated? Is it a standard practice for tenure and promotion committee to ask for referee reports of some published papers of the one evaluated?

My university (a private R1) does ask for referee/reader reports in the case of newly published material in tenure and promotion cases. This is done when the scholar has  recently published material that has not been cited elsewhere (thus, no bibliometric citation data) and the committee wants to ascertain the contribution to the field of study that the text may make.

Assuming your publication was accepted, you should view this as a good thing. Referee reports in those circumstances are positive, highlighting the contribution you are making to the field (otherwise, why would the journal publish it?). Folks on tenure and promotion committees also know to read through the negative cruft on reader's reports, so don't worry about that issue either.

p.s. I should note that at my university (as well as others), there is pushback against the use of pure bibliometric data (impact factors) as a way to ascertain a scholar's prominence in the field, but that is another question.


What are the ethical implications of lying to get into a course? I attend a small liberal arts college in the US. Through the cross-registration program, we are permitted to take classes at a large state university at no extra cost to us. However, we are only allowed to enroll in one course at a time; the system will not allow us to take two during the same semester.

Next semester, I am interested in taking two courses at the university. The will both be very small; certainly under 15 students each. Both professors have told me I cannot attend their class without being officially enrolled (I asked both individually). I have been considering attending both classes and asking both professors to fill out the cross-registration form that would allow me to enroll in their class, but only turning in one professor's form. From my previous experience at this university, the registration takes 4-6 weeks to come through, but professors, of course, let you attend class before that happens, so they may forget about awaiting the registration during that time. Even if they ended up finding out that I never turned it in, I would still have received a month of instruction before that happens, which I find valuable.

I am curious about the ethical concerns about this from the standpoint of the professors. Obviously by being there I am giving them more work, but they are not paid according to the number of students attending their classes. On the other hand, I know that class enrollment is really important to directors of departments and higher-ups in the university, so they are doing the work of teaching me without getting the benefit of one more student in their enrollment numbers. And from a personal standpoint, I would feel absolutely terrible about developing a good relationship with a professor and having them find out I lied to them.

I am not asking to be told what to do (it's probably not a very good idea), I would just like to know if there are any other concerns with lying to get into this course that I am not considering.

edit/update: Wow, I was not expecting to get so many responses. I'm not going to respond to comments and answers individually but I appreciate all your feedback, even though a few of you are a bit rude. I definitely will not be attempting to take both courses. Unfortunately, the program doesn't allow audits, so I am going to choose one of the two courses and stick with it. Thanks again for sharing all of your perspectives.

If I found out I was intentionally deceived by a student after telling them they could not take my class, I would alert my dean (I would go beyond the department chair) that said student was violating the rules and spirit of the exchange program. At a minimum I would expect that student to no longer be able to take advantage of the exchange and have their grade withheld from the other class. I would hope the home university would also punish this student for academic misconduct.


Should I include this information in a cover letter for a journal submission? I am in the process of making my first journal submission. Half-way through submission, I realise that I haven't considered the cover letter, which is an optional field in the submission process for this particular journal.
The history of my article is that the subject of the original paper is of tangential, but real, relevance to my PhD thesis. Having read the article, which is highly theoretical and technical and not in my area of expertise, I was pretty sure that I couldn't understand it properly—it seemed, if I followed it through correctly, to predict straightforwardly incorrect results. After struggling for several months in trying to get to grips with it, I swallowed my pride and reached out to a couple of the authors. It turned out that I wasn't misunderstanding after all, and the problems were real. They mentioned that if I could see a solution, they'd be happy to hear about it. I thought about it hard for a while and sent them my thoughts regarding a solution that they (people interested in this framework) might use, and they, surprisingly to me,  suggested I submit them to the journal in question.
I should point out that these problems only affect a very narrow area of the ground covered in the the original paper, albeit an important one.
So my question is, given that this is a response to another article, firstly, do I need to give my article a 'sell' as it were, or can I just say that I am submitting it? Secondly, if I do write a more detailed letter, should I mention that (some of) the original authors suggested that I  submit it, or that I have been in correspondence with them? Is it ok/wise to forego a cover letter completely?

The cover letter is indeed optional. In the cover letter you include:

What is done in the paper.
Why do you submit the paper to this journal (the journal published a paper to which your paper is related).
Possible referees.

Do not include info about who suggested what.


What to wear for invited talk in Canada I have been invited to give a talk at a university in Canada, with a view to getting a postdoc job there (although there won't be a formal job interview at this stage).  I'm female and in biomedical sciences.  I'm currently based in the UK, and based on the dress code I'm used to I would go for business-casual: blouse and jumper, smart black jeans, maybe a blazer as well.  Is this what would be expected in Canada?  In the UK I wouldn't dream of wearing a suit, but I'm not sure if there's a cultural difference in what is normal to wear for this kind of thing, so I would appreciate any tips!

Note: I am not Canadian, so this may be a bit off. However, I do hire post-docs fairly regularly into a research group at a US National Lab.

First - for an official post-doc interview your proposed attire seems appropriate. Dress slacks rather than jeans would be an upgrade, but probably not necessary. (Note that standards in the US can vary regionally, I'd assume similar in Canada. What is needed in Toronto might be different than Vancouver or Saskatchewan. An interview in New York City is different than Denver.)

As an added comment, you should treat this as a job interview because it definitely is one. While it may not be the formal interview, they have asked you are going out to give a talk. Any impressions from this visit will apply to a more formal interview. If it goes well, there may not even be a separate formal interview. Good luck.


How to learn commenting on graphs and tables the right way? I have attended many presentation where the presenter will show a graph/table in one of his/her slides, but they struggle to explain the semantics of the graph/table/results.

I think there is much more hidden in graphs/tables than young scientists can tell. Is there a way to improve this skill.

My adviser is also very strict on this, so I would like to know how to form sentences which really explain well what is being presented in the slide.

I believe a good point to start is explaining the axis and what they represent, and then comment on results. But how to improve this.

One problem people often have when presenting data in graphs and tables is that they often include data that is not relevant. For talks (formal or informal) I really like the process of starting with an empty graph of just the axes and explaining what the axes are and the limits and what they mean. Sometimes I then like to show idealized data from competing hypotheses so people can know what to expect without the added difficulties associated with understanding real, and potentially noisy, data.

Once people understand what the axes mean, I add data to the plot. Ideally, I start with a single data point and explain exactly what the data point means. I then add additional data points from the same "condition", possibly one at a time if they are discrete or all at once if there is some meaningful function that describes them. Once the first set of data is presented, I add on the second set. Sometimes it is helpful to remove or grey out the first set of data while you are introducing the second set of data so people can focus on just what is new. Once the second set of data is explained, bring back the first set and talk about the relationship between the two sets. This should ideally be moved to a new figure or panel to highlight the differences and similarities you want the listener to focus on.

If there is more "hidden" in figures and tables, that means it is too complicated for a talk. In manuscripts space is at a premium and you often have to have figures that tell multiple stories. In these cases the text still needs to walk you through the figure step-by-step and introduce each piece of information in the order in which you want the reader to look at it.


Is it a good idea to cite paper from publisher listed in Beall’s list While writing the literature review for my paper, I found another paper which is closely related to my research. Unfortunately, the paper’s publisher is on Beall’s List. Hence, I wonder if citing the paper will have any negative impact on my paper.

Do not think about the journal where the paper comes from. Just forget about it for a while.

Now, read the paper. Even better, be a reviewer for that paper. Evaluate it. Is it a good related work for you? Is it a not-so-good related work, so that you can criticize it? Does it help you to build some hypotheses, etc.? Then, just cite it. Otherwise, don't.

This is what you are supposed to do as a researcher. Build on top of other's work.
Bad papers are in every kind of journal. Good papers are, as well.

Beall's list is useful up to a certain point but it has got limitations. One of which, it is a one-man's work. I do not want to criticize the list here because it does not even matter how good that list is. Be your own judge for the work you cite. Where the paper comes from is, in my opinion, the least of the issues you could ever encounter.


Does any country have free college & open admissions? Here's my rough understanding of differences in higher education in different countries:

In the U.S., college is paid for in general by the individual student, not the state. On the other hand, access is basically universal, as anyone can attend a community college, which is open admissions (no entry or admissions requirement) if they wish.
In other countries, such as those in Europe, college is generally provided for free by the national government. However, I assume that placements are competitive and have strict entrance and performance requirements.

Those would be my impressions. However, I find it extremely hard to confirm the latter point, because basically no one talks about the difference in admissions requirements in U.S. vs. Europe (possibly because people in the different environments take their own practices so much for granted that no one thinks to say them out loud in conversations?).

So: Am I correct that countries in Europe with free government-funded higher education have strict entrance requirements in all cases? Or, is there any nation that has both open admissions and universally free college education?

By "college", I mean adult education (age 18+), including community colleges, 4-year colleges, universities, and international equivalents.

For the purposes of "strict entrance requirements", answers should address the status of nationwide qualifying examinations such as the Abitur (in Germany, etc.) or Matura (in Switzerland, etc.), which are passed by less than half of secondary school students, and do not have any analog in the U.S. (And which, as a U.S. person, I didn't even know about until it came up in the comments.)

Here is an overview of the situation in Germany, where there are no tuition fees for Bachelor and Master programs at public universities (though student union fees and public transport fees totaling 60-130 EUR per semester still apply).

For Bachelor degrees, the general requirements for admission to any German university are (1) proof of knowledge of the language of the study program (German or English) and (2) university entrance qualification (Hochschulzugangsberechtigung).

"University entrance qualification" means proof that you are eligible to attend a university. In Germany, this is obtained by completing the Abitur examination. In the German education system, at the age of 10, students are already separated into different types of schools based on their performance, some of which have direct access to Abitur (and therefore to university), and others which have practically no access to university. About 50% of German students complete Abitur and have directly access to university.

For international students, this is the corresponding high school leaving certificate. Depending on the country, your school leaving certificate might directly qualify you to study in a German university, or you might be required to do a two-semester preparatory course (Studienkolleg) before being allowed into German university . In this database (only in German), you can search for your country and school leaving certificate to see how it is in your case.
For most Bachelor degrees, admission is unrestricted (Zulassungsfrei), which means that  any student that satisfies the above general requirements will be admitted, without going through a field-specific aptitude test. Switching programs after the first year is not difficult, but there is a somewhat strict requirement to pass the first-year courses in a limited amount of time, so the idea is to let students "test" their preferred program and switch to another one after the first year if they are not comfortable with it.

Note that not all Bachelor programs have unrestricted admissions: in some fields such as Medicine there is a limited number of admissions and students will be chosen according to their grades in previous stages. This is called Numerus Clausus (NC).
On the other hand, most Master programs do have an aptitude test and students are admitted based on qualification in their field (in addition to the general requirement of having a Bachelor's degree). At this stage, students are supposed to already know what they want to study. I would expect the level of "strictness" of the aptitude test to be in some way related to supply and demand (disclaimer: personal opinion here), so the requirements do not necessarily have to be stricter than in US universities.  The offer of Programs taught in English (which are mostly only Master programs) is more limited than for German programs, so the aptitude test for English programs might also be stricter.

As pointed out in the comments, many Master programs are the result of the splitting of old 5-year programs (Diplom) into a 3-year Bachelor and a 2-year Master. Students doing the Bachelor program that apply to continue with the corresponding Master program at the same university usually have very easy admission into the Master program.

In summary, the requirements for entrance to German university in general are somewhat strict, but once you are in, there are in most cases few additional requirements for choosing a specific university or field.


Department member writing reference letter for job applicant for a position in that dept The applicant has asked me for a reference letter for a position in my department. (I can give a positive recommendation.) The applicant is not related to me. Would it be appropriate for me to do so? If another applicant were to ask me for such for the same position after I've sent one for the first applicant, should I decline the 2nd person's request? (That would otherwise be a positive recommendation as well.)

I see no ethical or practical problem as long as you are not otherwise involved in the hiring decision. For your own future, I'd also advise agains any lobbying on the applicant's behalf other than the letter itself. If the applicant is rejected you don't want it to reflect back on you.

Just be honest, and otherwise keep your distance, just as if you were located in another institution.

Likewise, giving an honest appraisal of another (or again, another) applicant should be no problem as long as you have some idea of the individual capabilities of each.

And if you are later asked by your colleagues to rank the various people  you have recommended, avoid it, mentioning that it would be improper and is the job of the committee.

If I were a member of the hiring committee, I'd have to consider refusing to provide a recommendation, though there might be other solutions, such as recusal.


Students working on lab software I was wondering if any could give me some pointers on the issue of having students working on software that's being developed in the lab. What's the standard procedure on this issue? Is there some sort of agreement that's better for the student to sign before he/she starts contributing to this software? Are there any standard conditions that I can use to set up the agreement?

By and large, taught students (ie, ones who are not paid a stipend or salary) by default retain the copyright to their own work (in contrast to employees, who generally agree to assign it to whoever they are working for). Therefore, you should probably have then sign an agreement to assign the copyright to the lab or university, and you should certainly do this before they do any work. This will ensure you can continue to do what you want with the source code without having to ask permission from the students in question.

For research students, it varies from country to country, so the copyright on their work may be assigned to them, or it may be assigned to the university. If it is already assigned to the university, you don't need to do anything else.

You should probably speak to your university's legal department about this and especially if you do need to write up a contract to assign the university copyright. You may also find this question on programmers.se useful.


Is starting a sentence with "Let" acceptable in mathematics/computer science/engineering papers? I received a comment from a colleague that starting a sentence with "let" is not good practice. I know that starting a sentence with "let" is grammatically correct, so that is not the question. My question is if starting a sentence with "let" is good practice and acceptable in technical writing.
Here are a couple examples:

Let scalars be denoted by lower case letters.
Let x be a real number greater than zero.
Let the set of real numbers be denoted by R.

These are all acceptable. My personal preference would be to reserve "let" for statements that are (essentially) assignments, like the second one in the question. The other two establish notation conventions. I might say something like

We use lower case letters for scalar variables.

or

Lower case letters represent scalar variables.

and

We write R for the set of real numbers.


How to manage new ideas coming at late stages of PhD I have started writing my thesis, to be finished in the next coming months. Basically, I am revisiting my early papers and reviewing the problems that I solved three years ago to put in my paper. However, I come across some of new ideas, which I did not have before, because my knowledge was very limited. For instance, I recently solved a problem that I had struggled with for a few weeks, back in my first year. Is it wise to make an attempt to publish these ideas, while I am writing my thesis or I should just stop everything and focus on the thesis first?

The reason that I am thinking too much about it, is a particular alumni of our school, who was working on lots of different ideas while writing the thesis and ended up with rescheduling his thesis submission several times.

To be pragmatic, it is very unlikely that I get these results to appear in my thesis, as the whole process of experimenting, writing and peer-review process might take a while.

I would say based on my opinions and experience that no-one cares about the Thesis.

The Thesis is a set of publications that must be about the same topic. Your publications will be the ones cited, not the Thesis. The Thesis will be only found somewhere in the university archives, while the publications will the visible part of your work you are evaluated upon.

Thus I think that the Thesis should be pushed to the finish line.

EDIT: The form of Thesis may vary, so it is noteworthy that especially in arts and humanities, the Thesis may be a coherent piece of work. Then the Thesis can be evaluated as a whole.


What are the guidelines for using public datasets for publication? Data are available publicly on several websites e.g. icpsr, databank, UK Data Archive. I am seeking guidelines, references and examples about using these open data for research. In other words, I want to publish a paper based on analyzing some publicly available datasets. Do I need permission first or they are available actually for me to use them in my research ?

A public data set is just that: public.  They have been made available for the specific purpose of being used by other people.

Thus, you generally do not need permission, but you will need to appropriately cite the source of the dataset, thereby giving appropriate credit to its originators.  For a well-curated collection, you can find appropriate citation information embedded within either the "packaging" or metadata of the dataset or at the online source where you obtain it.


How to cite/credit a photograph using Turabian? I contacted some owner of some historical photographs and obtained permission to use them in my work.
They asked I put a line under the photograph to indicate simply author and photo number (they have assigned IDs to each photo). They said I'm free to decide precisely the wording of the credit.
My paper follows Turabian format. Does that specify the way to word the credit appearing under the photograph? In addition, should I also give a Turabian-style footnote, along with a bibliographic entry along with? The author didn't say the latter was needed, but I can't see how it doesn't get cited, when a photo conveys information just as text conveys information, just in a different way.
How do I cite and/or credit a photograph that I have permission to use, using Turabian?

Would the Turabian Tip Sheet on Figures & Captions be of help?
The pattern is:
Figure {Number}. {Description of the picture}. Photograph by {Name}, {Date}. {Source}. {ID}.
The example provided by the tip sheet is:

Figure 3.1. Helpers in a Georgia Cotton Mill. Photograph by Lewis W. Hine, January 19, 1909. The National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. LC-DIG-nclc-01581.

No footnote and no bibliographic entry is needed.


How much does college name matter for doctoral program application? I wanted to know how much weight the college someone got a master's from matters while applying for a doctoral program?
So for instance, if a person is enrolled in a college which is not well known and his application is great in terms of research projects, CPI score, TOEFL, GRE scores etc., then would that person's application be considered worse than a person who is doing master's from a very good college (well-known)?
In particular, I wanted to ask this because I have heard that those Indian students are preferred for PhD programs in Physics in good colleges in US who have done Master's from a top IITs like IIT Kanpur or IIT Madras and students who apply from a lower ranked IIT get frequently rejected.
P.S: Those who have no idea about IITs can take the question in a general context from my first paragraph.

This answer applies to doctoral admissions in the US, and, while not universal, is pretty regular.
First, your successful admission will depend on a weighting of many things. There won't be a standard, published, weighting, but only the general sensibility of the individual faculty members on the admissions committee. Note that most (not all) doctoral admissions is by committee, not by individual PIs/advisors.
The important factors, varying for every candidate and for every committee member, in a rough order of importance, are grades, especially in the field for which you seek admission, letters of recommendation from professors, standardized exams (some places), writing ability in English (some places), research experience (more important if you have a MS, than otherwise), and intangibles. A gap or two in your education can normally be made up as most degree programs are relatively open ended in time.
Among the intangibles might be the place(s) at which you studied, but letter of recommendation from people who know you well would be much more important. A good student from a mid range place might be greatly preferred over a mediocre student from a great institution.
If your previous education is at relatively unknown places then it is likely to be ignored except in a few exceptional cases. If a university already has some experience with others from your place, then their success might help to make a prediction about yours. But it is, I think, much more likely to be a favorable impression made by a good student than the opposite situation.
And note that some great and demanding professors can be found at quite unknown universities. You can learn a lot from them.
The committee needs to make a fairly accurate prediction of the likely success of a candidate. Grades and supportive letters, along with prior research experience are very important. It is much more important what you have done so far and what others think of you, than other things.
Wherever you study, work hard, make a good impression. Stay in contact with professors who support you. But also know that the competition is very fierce.
Also note that most students in the US enter doctoral studies immediately after their bachelors degree. A MS is seldom required and can often be earned along the way.


Does a department have any obligation to respond to a student petition against a teacher? If all students of a class sign a petition claiming that a professor of a course is disqualified to teach, does the department/faculty change that professor?

Do students have this right? and what is the procedure to do so?

When ALL students sign a letter that they do not learn in the class of a professor, what is the responsibility of the department/university?

Some mentioned the need for solid evidence. What evidence students can provide that they do not learn anything in a class?

Isn't it the university responsibility to satisfy students by offering high quality education?

Such a petition is something that a department head or dean would take seriously.  But at most universities, it would be their decision what action to take, if any; a petition wouldn't obligate them to make a change.

Consider that if such petitions were binding, it would give the students an undue amount of leverage over the professor; if they got a difficult homework assignment or something else they just didn't like, they could threaten to submit a petition to get the professor removed.

There is a principle of "academic freedom" that the administration will generally avoid interfering with how courses are taught, within reason, so it would probably take a pretty egregious deficiency for the administration to take the disruptive step of removing a professor in the  middle of a course.

It is likely to be more effective to start with one or two students having an informal discussion with the department head about the situation; a petition doesn't leave much opportunity for dialogue or compromise.

Note also that the department head's decision would likely be based less on the students' opinion of the course, and more on objective information about what the professor is actually doing.  So it would be more helpful to avoid phrases like "everyone hates this class" and prefer specific examples: "the professor did this and this, and here is why we think this is a problem".


By what main criteria does the mathematical community judge whether an open problem is important? By what main criteria does the mathematical community judge whether an open problem is important among many others open problems in mathematics? For example if we say that the Riemann Hypothesis is an important problem because it is related to the prime distributions, are all open problems related to prime distributions important?

An open problem is important if its resolution affects many, diverse areas (indeed, the farther flung the impact, the more significant the problem).
In the case of the Riemann hypothesis, there are many theorems that are conditional on it (see Consequences of Riemann hypothesis), though they are largely in the broader realm of number theory.
Other problems, like the P vs NP problem could have consequences beyond automata theory that include cryptography (and, by extension, our entire
e-commerce industry), computational biology, manufacturing and optimization, etc.


Should a "good" Ph.D. student still get some strong supervision? I am getting closer to the end of Ph.D. studies and in some months I expect to stop the research to seriously work on the thesis. My supervisor has two other students working on slightly different fields than mine. He is involved in many projects and loves to help other people.

I think he trust me deeply, sometimes he tells me about his issues with his other students/people he is following and when I have chance to attend their seminars I understand that they require much more supervision than I do.

We keep talking, off course, but in the last months he welcomed every my initiative without critics. I prepared three conference papers and he basically only corrected few typos, while other people gave me more constructive comments (together with compliments) that boosted the quality of the papers. Getting closer to my defense I would expect a bit "stronger" supervision, maybe some suggestions on how to polish my work. Overall, I am still a student, not an independent researcher. I am worried that at a certain point he may examine my work with more attention, spotting some bad holes and that this may happen too late to properly fill them.

This doubt is stressing me quite much and I think that is also starting to have some negative impact on my productivity. Should I somehow address this issue to him?

Some advisors have a style of viewing supervision the same way ER doctors look at treatment. The key word is triage. Where there's a need to make things okay, he/she will be there. My advisor had the same viewpoint as he was very busy with other work and saw our meetings more as a checking-in as a friend than supervision.  I thought that when all the other students graduated, he'd give me the same amount of time as they got, but that was untrue. He continued with the same amount.

I asked him about this at the end, and he just said there weren't many crises (there was exactly one, in which he met me within 8 hours to make a game plan with me). Rest assured that your advisor probably is allowing you to create your own research programme and become independent earlier than usually scheduled. This will help your letter from him. From having more of a mentoring friend instead of being strongly supervised, I had an easy transition to postdoc, which is basically how your advisor is treating you now. In my fourth year, I felt almost abandoned. A year into my postdoc, I see that my advisor was the best advisor I could have asked for.

Seems like you're doing great as an independent researcher and your advisor will give you his input if needed but is curious what you'll come up with on your own. A loose leash is a good thing if you're self-motivated.


Deciding between cursive and print handwriting I was taught cursive in elementary school but was discouraged from using cursive by an English teacher in in a non English speaking country. At least I took his/her comment that “not many people use cursive these days” as a sign not to use cursive. Later I practiced and adopted a “connected print” style, because I feared there might me legibility issues for standardized tests. In college, naturally I continued the use of connected print. However, this is slow and laborious, so if you use this in handwritten exams, your mind is distracted from thinking about the question.

How can I choose which style to use? Does it depend on the professor? Is there any evidence that professors prefer either style?

Most professors prefer handwriting that is legible.

I have seen some (asian weirdly, all other nationalities tend to a larger style and there are 90+ nationalities in the establishment) students with handwriting so small it is difficult to read but perfectly formed though.

Some write cursive others like small caps but all are fine when neat and legible.

The issue is always the “spider scrawl” that is not legible and so poor that even the author can’t read it later.


Can I still publish a paper in a journal after it has already been assigned a DOI through Zenodo or ResearchGate? Zenodo and ResearchGate can assign a DOI to an article. After publishing an article on Zenodo or ResearchGate with a DOI, if the article is good, will the article still be accepted for publication by peer-reviewed journals?  Assume that the journal in question allows green open access (i.e., posting of a preprint on a public site).

To "publish" something really just means "make it available to others". So, there are many ways to publish something: You can strive to get it accepted in the most prestigious journals of your field, or you can just put it on your website -- strictly speaking, both qualify as "publishing". Putting an article on Zenodo, ResearchGate, or arXiv is closer to the latter than the former; the fact that some of them can give you a DOI really just means that you make it easier for others to find and reference what you uploaded.

From a practical perspective, the difference between all of your options is how much vetting and endorsement the locations where you publish provide for your work. Academic journals review your article, and this provides a level of endorsement that lets others trust that what you published is useful and correct. On the other hand, putting an article on a web site or ResearchGate involves no vetting and, consequently, does not bestow on you the prestige that comes with the vetting. If you wanted to use your "publications" as part of a job application, it is this prestige you want, and consequently, putting your work on a website of your own will not be enough.


Whom should I send the email to? The Principal Investigator or the postdoc who have done the work? A postdoc has published some works that I am interested in. I have some questions about the work, and I would like to share some idea about the topic.

Is it considered polite to send the email to the postdoc and CC his PI? If I email the PI only, I might have to wait for a long time. However, the postdoc could not even be in the city. So I am not sure what is the best and politest practice.

If the paper lists a corresponding author, then that is the person to try.
Otherwise, I would just email all the authors and let them decide which one will respond. I don't think it's impolite and I'd rather email too many than too few authors (and risk getting no response).


How to write a thesis to transform into a book? I am starting to write my thesis by the start of August this year.
I want to write it in a format so that later I can publish a book out of it.
How is it possible? Any suggestions?

Also, does this account for self-plagiarism? What are the key points I should keep in mind before start writing?

I would just focus on writing the thesis. If it is good enough to be published as a book, you will know when it is done. Regardless of what you do now, getting it into publishable form is going to be a huge job, and the problems will only become apparent once your thesis is finished. So what you do now is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to publishing your thesis as a book.


Is it alright for the main body of my paper to not contain any references? I have been working on a few set of ideas, and while I can give references on the introduction, about the general idea, and the problems that my ideas can possibly solve in other fields, but unfortunately for me, the work is a little out of the box, and the main body cannot contain references.

I wanted to know if this is against norms or even considered unusual?

Also, some of the work is very old, for example, Descartes, and Tarski.
I was wondering how to get references for that work, and how it could work out, since I am not sure if they ever published papers or how discussion around very old topics tends to go.

The situation is a bit unusual for me, and I want to find the best way to be read and accepted in the community, following all the proper norms, rules and regulations regarding writing a proper academic paper.

The work is all application of informal logic to various other fields. Some of it is philosophical, some of it relates to maths and physics as well. I am just trying to get it read at the moment. I will try to submit it to a journal, but at this point, I am having a hard time finding such a journal.

Not having references in the main body of a paper isn't necessarily a problem, but it can be a major symptom of other factors that will cause you to have difficulty publishing a paper. You may be having trouble finding references because you haven't narrowed down what you are doing enough to find out which other people will be interested in it.

"Some of it is philosophical, some of it relates to maths and physics as well."
This sounds like you are writing about the philosophy of science, which is a field with a pretty active literature. Perhaps you can read more in that field, and see if any of it sounds like what you are doing?

"the problems that my ideas can possibly solve in other fields": if you think your work can solve important problems in other fields, then there are probably useful references where someone else has attempted to solve the same problem. Explaining how your work differs from these attempts, and where it can improve on them, would be a standard place to include references in the main body. If you cannot find this, you may not have that well-defined a problem yet.

Even if your work has wide applications, it is often useful to choose one specific problem and address that first - this forces you to be specific, address the questions of one field, and make sure that you deal with what other people have done before.


My revised paper was accepted surprisingly quickly; should I worry? In February I submitted a paper that was sent back asking for minor revisions. I revised and re-submitted the paper (with rather significant changes) much later, in October, and it was accepted for publication three days later.

Given the extent of my modifications I'm surprised that the process went that fast the second time around; should I be worried? Can I safely assume that someone from the journal's editorial office has re-read my paper?

Unless you have some reason to believe your revised paper has some serious additional problems, I don't think you should worry.  It may not be best practices for referees and editors to operate this way (just looking to see whether the changes requested in the first report have been adequately completed).  Ideally, the referee should check over carefully that none of the changes have introduced new problems, but that isn't always done.

The referee and editor may have felt that the revisions were not really that big a deal.  You may have been overthinking things when you made the changes; they might have intended some considerably less sweeping editing.  Or the referee may have seriously underestimated how much additional work and explication would be required to fix the problems the referee pointed out.  The referee might even have told the editors that another round of refereeing would not actually be necessary; if you made the changes, then the paper would be ready for publication.  (For several of the journals I have refereed for, this is one of the options in the recommendation menu of the reviewing software; however, I also know, as an author, that this part of the review is not shared with the authors.)


When does a statistical consultant become a co-author or collaborator? I am a graduate student in a small department and have become the go-to person for statistics advice among the other students.  I enjoy this but am wondering at what point I should expect, or request, becoming a collaborator on the project.  Pointing someone towards a method, a paper or a book is definitely not worthy of any recognition, neither would a short one-off 15 minute conversation in the hallway.  But what if I help them understand a difficult statistical method or fix some computer code that otherwise might have taken them days or even weeks to achieve on their own?  What if our conversations helps clarify the questions they are asking either statistically and scientifically.

I assume that if I became a co-author, I'd continue to contribute to the project, help write the statistical methods, comment on the full paper, etc.

I'm wondering if I should set up ground rules that I tell people, like, "the 1st 20 minutes are free, but after that, we'll have to talk about long-term collaboration."  Or I could come up with a list of services I can provide and what the expectations are.

This blog post comments on these issues from the perspective of a full-time statistician.  This StackExchange question addresses more general issues about co-authorship.

This is not an easy question, as are many other questions about coauthorship. To an extent, all answers will be opinion-based.

I am in a similar position. I work in industry but advise many of my wife's clinical & biological psychology students on statistical matters.

My personal cutoff point is somewhat later than yours seems to be. I'll happily invest three or four hours to help students clean up and understand their data, do some exploratory data analysis and plots and some simple models and release them into the wild with an initial R script. If that is the full extent of my engagement, I would be uncomfortable with coauthorship (but an acknowledgement would be appropriate).

Often, things go further than this. After this initial session, I'll code up more complex analyses, more sophisticated graphics, maybe research special models or approaches and/or read up on stuff. This usually involves some work on my own, multiple email exchanges and more personal meetings. At this point, we usually agree that I get coauthorship, and as you write, this means that I'll be a lot more involved in the rest of the manuscript's lifecycle.

I'll usually not write up the statistical methods section as you appear to do. My take is that the first author should have full ownership of the manuscript and should essentially understand everything in sufficient depth to describe even the statistics himself. After all, he will be the one to present it at conferences and/or thesis defenses. (It helps that psychologists get a lot of statistical training.) Of course, I'll go over and correct the methods sections, and I happily rarely find that the student fundamentally misunderstood the statistics.

If things have progressed far enough for me to be a coauthor, I'll usually be quite involved with the rest of the manuscript, too. I am rather anal-retentive and will happily nitpick the entire structure of the paper, the internal logic, grammer and punctuation. I don't know whether nitpickery is more generally a specific skill of statisticians, though... Of course, in maybe half of all submissions, reviewers ask about the statistics, and I often have to revisit the statistical analysis and/or at least its description.

Coauthorships arrived at in this way are actually pretty low-effort for me. Other people on the author list have spent weeks interviewing people in African refugee camps, juggling noxious chemicals in a lab and/or digging through prior publications. I, on the other hand, spend maybe one full work week altogether (sometimes more), sitting in a comfortable chair at my computer with a cup of coffee within reach. It's comparisons like these, and I'd guess that most statistical engagements are similar, that make me uncomfortable starting to discuss coauthorship after only one hour.

Laying down ground rules early on, as you suggest, is an excellent idea. Part of these should be how much time you can afford before thinking about coauthorship, whether this is 20 minutes or four hours.

One other thing, which the blog post you link to discusses, is that you as the statistician will need to understand the scientific context, so the researcher will have to spend some time explaining the situation to you. This time will need to come out of the initial "budget", since time does not grow on trees. Your client will usually try to handwave this away and insist that he only has "a little statistical question". This will usually not make much sense. If a client insists, you can always point him to CrossValidated for his "little question". If he gets a good answer there, great.


Can I mention that I want to pursue a PhD later, in my Statement of Purpose for a Master's course? I am an international student and a certain university that I'm applying to for a Masters in Media and communication has asked me to state my career objectives in my home country. Now, I wish to pursue a PhD and continue in the same discipline after finishing my masters preferably in the same university. Should I mention that instead? The gist is that I have just finished one masters degree in my home country and have some part-time work experience but my long-term career objective is to pursue a PhD.

Yes, you certainly can mention it. Moreover, this is in many cases, a good sign. When I was on an admissions committee for a masters program, we  in fact looked favorably on people who wanted to do our program and go on to a PhD. This seems to be a common attitude; if students from a program go on to PhD programs that makes our masters program look good.


PhD. in the US directly after European BSc., or is it better to go for a MSc. at first? I'm currently in the final year of my BSc. in physics and the second year of my BSc. in mathematics at a university in german-speaking Europe. I'll have my degrees finished in summer 2018.
Eventually, I'd like to end up in theoretical or mathematical physics research (most probably gravitational physics) and would love to experience some time at a foreign university. Firstly, since my university is stronger in the experimental field and has a relatively small theory group and secondly for the sake of broadening my horizon. The US (or generally Northern America) would be particularly interesting, because of the somewhat "more open" research culture, in comparison to a highly bureaucratic and kind of inert (and often poorly financed) apparatus in german-speaking part of Europe (and probably in the whole EU - at least that's my naive perception of it, or am I wrong in this?).
I read that the PhD. in the US is a bit different to the one in Europe, e.g.  that a MSc. is kind of integrated in the coursework-heavy first one or two years of a US PhD. Nevertheless, there are some interesting MSc. programs in Europe, e.g. in Edinburgh or at the ETH in Zurich.
So, my questions would be (from a rational/scientific-career point of view):

Is it reasonable to go for a PhD. directly after a BSc. in the US? Or would it be more sensible to pursue a MSc. in Europe first and only then head for a PhD. in the US?
Small side question for physicists since I'm just researching into this: Which universities in Northern America have a strong gravitational physics department (aside from Stanford and Princeton)?

In my opinion,

there will be many challenges in deciding to move to US.

First of all you will have to adapt to a society that despite having a western culture, is still very different from Europe. If you are not able to adjust culturally, it is highly possible that this will affect the progress of your studies. Cultural shock is something most international students experience and usually takes a semester or a year for its effects to wear off... However some people have more difficulty adapting to specific cultures from what I've observed.

Secondly there are many structural differences in US and European PhDs. For example, you will have to earn a Master's degree by attending classes while you do your PhD in US. At the same time though most professors will pressure you to make progress with research, which makes things really tough. Keep in mind that in order to maintain your visa status in most universities you will have to maintain a relatively high GPA. On the other hand you will also have to please your advisor with your research progress or he/she may convert you to Master's status, and you will loose the opportunity to earn a PhD.

The rationale behind taking classes, is that Americans want to guarantee that their graduate students have a certain amount of exposure on advanced scientific topics. Whether this is a better practice or not compared to the European programs that give much more emphasis on research, I believe is a matter of personal taste and preferences.

What is more if you earn a Masters from Europe and then move to US for a PhD, it is highly likely that not all the classes you had, will be transfered to the new program. You will also be older while you enter a commitment that may last many years. Some may argue that you will be more experienced to face the challanges that come. However I think that the younger you finish your PhD, the better...

Also keep in mind the following general things (some of which also apply for European PhD programs):

PhDs in US take longer to complete (Europe = 3-5 years, USA = 4-6 or
more years)
Before joining a lab make sure you can collaborate with the professor
that leads it. If you feel that you can not collaborate leave and
search for other opportunities that interest you. Although many departments allow grad students to change labs after joining the program, it may not be an easy process due to starting over with a new topic as well as politics between different labs.
Additionally, ask in a polite way the professor running the lab or other lab members what are the requirements to graduate from the lab (e.g number and types of published papers). If you don't get specific answers be careful before joining.
If you pay a visit to a lab for an interview make sure the testing
period lasts for at least two weeks and try to find out how other members of the lab feel about what they do. If the majority does not
seem satisfied leave and search for something else (pay attention to
people who exaggerate though...)
Depending on your field there might be more job and money related
opportunities in the US, but I believe the whole experience will be
more tough and you will have to decide whether this thing contributes
to your career or not, from early in order to not regret spending
5 years on something you did not like.
There is a high dropout rate in American PhDs. However, I think
that the fact that you will have international experience might make you
seem more valuable in the eyes of potential employers in the future, if you manage to complete the program.


What is the difference between hypothesis, thesis statement and research goal? Can someone explain the difference between hypothesis, thesis statement and research goal based on an example?

I had this same question recently and did some research on it. The definitions I found weren't consistent, but from them I derived the following.

Thesis statement -- A definitive statement about the way the world (or your system of interest) works, especially what is most important in causing or influencing the behavior of the system.

  "Family expectations has primary significance on the performance in college for Latino girls in the Western US" is an example of a thesis statement.

Research goal -- Expresses what you hope to learn or shed light on in your research.  Specifically, the goal should specify what type of results you are hoping to achieve. It contextualizes your work in relation to other research, especially theory.  It also feeds into your choice of method.

  "My research goal is to develop a theoretical model of cultural influence on college performance, contextualized by gender and ethnicity" is an example of a research goal.

Hypotheses -- What specific conditions or relations do you aim to test or evaluate in your research.  Any research that does not include a method for hypothesis testing should not claim to test hypotheses. A hypothesis statement must be specific enough that it is testable by the methods you choose, and also it should be falsifiable -- i.e. it is clear what evidence might prove the hypothesis false, and such evidence should be plausible and possible.

  "Low family expectations has a detrimental effect on the college completion rate and time-to-complete for high-achieving Latino girls" is an example of a hypothesis statement.

Notice how there are specific, testable conditions and metrics -- "college completion rates" and "time-to-complete".  These conditions should appear as metrics in your research methods -- i.e. instruments and analysis methods.


Why do "everyone suck at their first research interviews"? I needed to do some research interviews for my master thesis. I study software engineering and in the interviews I ask people about preferences and more regarding a piece of software.

When listening to the recordings it's obvious that I did a very poor job in so many different ways:

ehm, ehm, ehmmmmm, ehm, constantly
interrupting the interviewee
forgetting to acknowledge his answers
missing important questions, though they are in an interview guide
failing to formulate my questions clearly
elaborate on questions way too soon, because I find the silence uncomfortable
worried about the interviewee feeling that he is wasting his time, or that I am stupid or incompetent
sounding nervous, yes I was
not sounding interested in their answers, though I certainly was
my speech gets sluggish and less precise than normal, I really just sound stupid (more than I am)

...and much more.

I spoke with two different anthropologists that I happen to know. They said that they had the exact same experience, and for the first many interviews they tried. They say there is a consensus in their school about how it takes time to learn, as a craft. According to them one can prepare very well, which will help, but still the interviews will be quite bad, but that in time one will learn and get much better. Even the professors said this, that they should expect to do bad at first, but later they would learn, that this was almost inevitable.

This was nice to hear for me :)

I need to reflect on this in my thesis, that my performance was so bad. To do so, I need a source.

My questions is: If there is a consensus about this, are there some sources supporting this claim, or just sources dealing with this issue?

Well, this is not exactly an answer to your question, is something much more like a long comment.

My suggestion would be to try with some mock interviews before going to the real ones. The purpose is to make you feel comfortable with the interview process.

The first step is to create some checklists. What you should ask? What you shouldn't? What you should ask to the interviewee if he/she answers something specific to a specific question? What you should ask if he/she asks something different instead?

The first step would be to interview yourself in the front of a mirror (seriously!) What would you answer if somebody else interviewed you instead?

The second step would be to interview the devil's advocate. This role could be accomplished by yourself impersonating the devil's advocate or a trusted friend doing the job. The devil's advocate would be someone who would give answers that are:

strange
unexpected
trollish
useless
lying
confusing
unintelligible
contradicting
lunatic
irrelevant
incomplete
bizarre, surreal, alien-like
agressive, threating or unrespectful
simply refusing to answer at all
"sorry, I really don't know or don't remember..."
excessively verbose
trying to takeover the control of the interview process from you
etc.

The purpose of the devil's advocate is to make your interview process to be a failure. Repeat this type of mock interview some times if needed (possibly with some different friends filling the devil's advocate role). This way, you will be able to fix many holes in your interview process before going to the actual interviews and you will also get to be trained to handle unexpected situations.

The third step before going to the real actual interviews is to do some mock interviews with friends, teachers, your mother or something like that. Of course, you should record all your interviews (including the mock ones) and see where you are failing in order to improve your interview process and improve you checklist accordingly.

After you are convinced that no more mock interviews are needed, you could start the actual ones.


Code plagiarism by teacher at renowned university As a post-graduate student at a renowned university, I am supposed to make an assignment (see attached images) which is obviously inspired on this licensed scikit tutorial.

Since the assignment (code) instructions are identical to the licensed code, I have two questions:

Is the scientific integrity of the teacher challenged by posing this question?
Should I report this at the university's fraud office?

In the assignment is no reference or citation included.

Before you step into a potential minefield of accusations and possible blowback, I'd suggest that you just discuss it with the professor, raising your concerns about citation. A fraud accusation would be very serious and possibly unwarranted. You don't know whether the professor has discussed this with the team that created it. Also their own materials only ask for citation if you "use it in a scientific publication". The funding agencies (INRIA, for example), may require fairly loose restrictions on use. I didn't investigate the BSD license, so it may be restrictive or not.

But delay serious steps from which it would be difficult to extract yourself until you know more.

I'm sure many people have turned some of my work into student exercises (not published outside the course material). I would, myself, never object to that.


Are there guidelines for choosing colors in figures? Are there guidelines how to choose colors for figures in papers? I know that about 5-10% of the population see colors differently. How do I create a figure that has to have at least 4-5 different colors in it and make sure everyone will be able to see it and distinguish between the components.

The problem of different color perception (at least with respect to climate science) was pointed out 2004 by Light and Bartlein in EOS. With a strong emphasis on climate science the blog "Climate Lab Book" discusses the problem of the so called "rainbow color scale". As mentioned in the comments they recommend "Color brewer 2" to create color palettes. (There are packages for MATLAB, Python and R. The link to R includes some more advice.) Already pre-defined palettes (again with a strong emphasis on climate science) are presented by the Department of Geography of the University of Oregon. This palettes include color-blind safe ones, as well as palettes useful for specific associations.

For example when displaying temperatures blue is often associated with "cold", while red is associated with "hot". Diverting from similar common associations may prevent an more intuitive understanding of your figures.

Another reason for caution regarding color palettes: "Rainbow" (and similar ones) may distort your perception of boundaries.

To conclude: There appears no easy way to select an appropriate color palette for your figures, but there is plenty of advice.


Are there "gig economy" resources in academic research? Are they fundable? In many fields of research, there are some tasks that are self-contained and could be done effectively by someone who is not a full time member of a research group, but has the required skill and background. The task may be time-sensitive but often everyone is already fully tasked.

One might call them part-time or contract or temporary post-docs.

There are plenty of situations I can think of where this might not work, or would be a bad idea, but perhaps there are cases where the benefits outweigh any potential academic risks. They might involve a side-project, or an early foray into a potentially interesting area where there is no current expertise or time for someone to start from zero even though things might not pan out.

Because this would not be an employee situation, work would have to be done off-site. It might involve reading, writing, searching, programming, thinking, checking for errors (grammatical, logical, arithmetic...), or other tasks that could be exchanged electronically, and where the results could be checked and confirmed afterward. (You wouldn't want you primary data analysis done for example by "someone on the internet"!)

However I've never really heard of such a thing except in special circumstances where the individual has a previous relationship with the research group, and even then it can be difficult to work out the proper monetary mechanisms with the university administration, or funding agencies. "Consultant fees" are not a common line-item in research proposals.

Are there situations where this is changing? Are there any examples of micro-grants to get small jobs done in non-standard ways such as this? Is there even some better vocabulary to use to describe this kind of arrangement than "gig-egonomy" jobs?

edit: Seeing some the comments below it struck me that this might not be a very popular concept among regular post-docs. I don't think this type of resource will ever put normal post-doc positions at significant risk. But here I'm just asking if it happens, how might it be funded, and what it might be called, not if it's a good idea.

I've seen this happen in a sort of temporary 'research assistant/intern' role. Normally there's data that needs to be crunched or transcriptions done and it works to have someone come in to do it whilst the main researchers are doing the actual analysis/research. These can be paid, but usually tend to be from a local university or similar.

For bigger projects, there are transcription and data services available online which can do large volumes of that sort of work for you, normally on a per page/per data set model.

I know you have explicitly said you don't want opinions on if it's a good idea, however I can't ever imagine many people wanting to farm parts of their research out to unknown people on the internet. The vast majority of research is sensitive either in terms of the raw data or in terms of the research goal. It would be too easy for someone to copy your work and beat you to the punch if you were working on something of interest. Therefore I can't really say how it might be funded or what it might be  called, because I can't imagine it actually coming into fruition


Do the author's name and/or affiliation affect the visibility of a paper? Suppose two papers were published by fledgling researchers, perhaps PhD students, who are yet unknown in their field. One is Asian, has a surname which is long and difficult to pronounce, and perhaps also comes from a relatively unknown university. The other has an English name, and comes from a well-known university. But otherwise, the two papers are similar in content and on par in terms of quality.

Ideally, there should not be any preference with regards to citing either of the two papers. That means, in the long run, the expected citation counts of the two papers should be about the same. However, I am interested to know whether this is the case in reality. From my limited experience, I seem to have seen papers that referenced only other papers whose authors are European. Has there been any study that suggests whether the name and/or affiliation of an author affect the visibility and hence the citation count of his/her paper? I am aware that the answer might be different for different fields.

To ask the question in another way, is our perception of a paper influenced by the authors' names and/or affiliations? Do we not tend to infer the quality of a paper by these factors?

The short answer (from the view of an economist) is: Probably not. At least not in the way you suggest.

However, for most (i.e., not the most influential papers/journals) papers most of the citations (especially for PhD students) are "generated" by feedback from conferences, referees, supervisors, ... .
Therefore, someone from Europe is more likely to encounter someone who knows the European paper and therefore only cites the paper from Europe. In addition, researchers from well-known universities have more visibility and are more likely to know the topic of papers from PhD students at their department.

So, even if there is is no discrimination with regards to the name and the affiliation we could observe the effect you described.

I do not know of any study covering your question, and I do not think there is a way to do such a study.

  To ask the question in another way, is our perception of a paper
  influenced by the authors' names and/or affiliations? Do we not tend
  to infer the quality of a paper by these factors?

I guess that depends on the person. I (and most people I know) are heavily influenced by the journal it is published in, not at all by the authors' name (to clarify: We are influenced by the fact if we know the person or not, but not by how the origin of the name / how the name looks like.) and maybe a little bit by the affiliation of the author if it is a top 5 or top 10 institution in the specific field of research.


Should scholarship/fellowship monetary amount be listed in CV? I know there are similar questions but here I would like to focus on scholarships and fellowships that pay tuition and/or a stipend. This is for a CV for PhD or scholarship/fellowship applications, so early career stage and whatever that my imply on the length of the CV.

Given a candidate with 3-5 of these ranging from $1000 to $15,000. Should the amount and what the amount covers be listed? Or just list the institution and award name?

In general, I would leave out the financial amounts of scholarships and fellowships from CV's. If it's a small dollar amount, putting it on diminishes the amount of the award. If it's a well-known award (such as an NSF fellowship), or at least well-known in your field (for example, a fellowship or scholarship by your field's professional society), the details are already sufficiently well-known that they don't need to be mentioned.

I might only list them if they were (a) rather substantial in value and (b) not well-known enough to be on most people's radar screens (at least in your field). At the same time, listing just a few sort of calls attention to the fact that the other awards might not be so large. So again, I'd lean towards not including them at all.


Part time industrial work during a mathematics PhD I am in the second year of my PhD in mathematics and I have recently decided I want to go into industry after I'm finished.  I feel like a lot of what I'm learning in the program does not have direct, real-world applications, and I'd like to remedy this problem by getting some work experience while I'm still in graduate school.

I have some programming background (but not as much as a CS grad) and a couple years experience doing simple data analysis programming.  I also have a BS in physics.  It seems like there should be a place in industry for me somewhere, but I don't know how to go about finding it.

I would like to work part-time, or as a consultant, so that the job won't greatly hinder my progress towards my degree.  (Of course, some time will be lost that could have gone to my dissertation, but this is made up for by gaining marketable skills.)  I'd like to work in science or in software.  I am aware of internships, but it seems like most are either for undergraduate students or engineers.

  Can a math grad student work part-time in industry during his PhD?  If so, how would one go about finding jobs?

I think it would be very challenging and unusual to work part-time at a job and be taking graduate classes or doing thesis research.

But it's quite common for graduate students to work full-time (as interns) at government laboratories or in industry during the summer (or at another time of year) for perhaps 3 months.  Mathematics students I have known have worked at

Google
Microsoft
US Dept. of Energy labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge, Argonne, etc.)
Oil companies (Schlumberger, Total)
US NSA contractors (cryptography)
US Geological Survey
NOAA

and many other places that I've forgotten.  Talk to your advisor and to other faculty in the program.  Your university may also have someone who coordinates these things.