How to find an academic mentor as a professional I'm a professional programmer with 15 years of experience, working in game development as a game and engine programmer, currently working at a prestigious game company on two well known games.

I've submitted a paper to a graphics journal (jcgt.org), and am waiting on the review process. (2.5 months into an expected 3 month process!)

In the meantime I'm working on a computer science paper which doesn't pertain to game development, but is more related to cryptography and metaprogramming.

That realm is a little bit more of a challenge for me since it isn't my area of expertise, so I don't know as many obscure things, proper terminology, or what people expect to see, etc.

How would someone like myself - who is a professional with no academic ties - find a more academic minded mentor who knows more about these areas, that I could ask questions to, bounce ideas off, etc?

Or is that even a likely possibility?

I think it this can be achieved. Here are some thoughts on how I would do it.

Many academics lack practical skills but require practical skills to evaluate and test their theories and get the publications they desire. These are the kind of academics who will be interested in working with you. To find them, you should first find areas of research that you are interested in where your skills are relevant. Find researchers in those areas who are looking for people with skills you possess (look for what they want for their funded PhD positions and Post-doc positions).  Based on this information prepare a clear value proposition - a set of things which you can offer the researchers, and what you would want in return.

Make contact. Ideally do this through a mutual connection who is well liked and respected. If that is not possible then you should try to talk with the academic face to face or on the phone so you can make it as easy as possible and create trust more quickly. Academics are often very busy and cautious of having their time wasted so this is important.

The suggestion above might seem like it involves too much commitment, but you will almost definitely need to show you can provide some sort of return for an academics time before they will work with you so unless you can show how working with you will get them publications or grants they probably won't be interested in helping you with your personal interests.

With that considered, if you are successful with your journal publication you will have a much better chance as the academics will be able to see that you have what it takes to write papers and thus infer that you will be likely to be able to get more publications with relatively little help from others.


Ethical GPA rounding I am applying for a master's program in the US and am not sure how I should present my GPA ethically when discussing it. I have an undergrad total GPA of 3.394 and when asked to put in my undergrad GPA it only gives room for 2 digits and nothing more. EX: 3.0. Can I round up my GPA since it's so close to 3.4, or would this be unethical and I should round down to 3.3?

To make this as general as possible: How should one round their GPA when only 2 digits are accepted, and they're less than .05 away from the next digit?

There are widely accepted standard rounding rules: any number greater than or equal to 3.35 should be rounded up to 3.4.  There is no reason to expect that an application would want non-conventional rules for rounding GPAs.


Order of author names in a textbook that is to be published I am currently working on a book with several fellow researchers, and there seems to be a disagreement of how the author names should be listed. The book will be published by a major university press and will be listed on its website as well, so the order of names of the authors has become a touchy subject and disagreements ensued. I will describe everything in third-person to objectively portray the situation.

Z is the lead researcher of the project. Z has done more than 90% of the work and everyone seems to see this. Z is a professor.

A and B are staff researchers and their jobs were mostly editing and proofreading. A and B are professors as well.

U, V, W are graduate student researchers and have done the remaining 9% of the work, which were mostly grunt work that do not have particular intellectual value.

Now here is where the situation becomes sticky. The book made its way to a major press and A and B suddenly want a piece of the action. The problem is, Z's last name is the last in alphabetical order and making A and B authors will push Z's name to the back of the author list. While Z is considering adding A and B as the authors, U, V, W feel that A and B did not add much value to the book and therefore strongly believe that Z's name should appear in the front. Some even think that they themselves did more work than A or B, and A's name and B's name should not be listed as the author just like them.

Is there are way to resolve such issue? Is there a way to distinguish between the lead author and supporting authors, possibly by forcing the lead author's name to appear in the front? Or is there a way to make everyone authors of the book but make only the lead author's name appear in the book cover rendering the other two merely authors in name?

First of all, I agree with @tonysdg that A and B don't sound like they deserve any form of authorship. The same may be true about U, V and W, but I feel less strongly about that. So Z can simply argue his/her case forcefully, and if necessary appeal to the department chair or other outside objective parties. The facts are on Z's side, so I expect he/she will win the argument, though possibly at the risk of alienating his/her colleagues.

Second of all, with regards to your comment that "The problem is, Z's last name is the last in alphabetical order and making A and B authors will push Z's name to the back of the author list", I don't see this as a problem at all. There is no rule that the list of author names on a book has to be in alphabetical order. So, it is perfectly acceptable and legitimate to list Z's name first, and indeed sounds like a very good idea (regardless of which other names end up being on the author list) considering that the project is overwhelmingly Z's intellectual offspring.

Third of all, one idea for an author byline that allows including minor authors but would still make clear the large disparity in contributions from the different authors is to use the "with contributions from" pattern, as in:

  The Great Book of Science

  By Z
  With contributions from U, V, W, [optionally:] A and B

See here for a real-life example.


Lack of supervision at end of PhD - how approach publishing? My PhD supervisor, who was from an external organisation, got my PhD started with initial ideas and guidance, but wasn't an expert in the topic, thus my PhD research has been mainly self directed. About a year ago my supervisor retired, and has justifiably been off travelling and working on other things.

I'm at the late stage where I am writing up the thesis and have two papers almost ready to submit. However, I would dearly like someone to read over the work and check it, as it has quite a bit of mathematics.

How should I approach publication?

Find another supervisor, even at this late stage, and collaborate with them.
Approach an expert in the specific area and ask if they will review the papers before submission. Is this an unusual request?
Submit the papers to journals and trust the review process will identify any errors.

Your university should have a policy in what happens if a supervisor retires or otherwise becomes unavailable. At this stage it may not produce the ideal outcome, but you should explore it. It sounds as though somebody, either your supervisor or your institution, is not doing their job.


Are there any specific teaching techniques to handle "virtual" classroom sessions? In the past, I have attended a few "virtual" classroom sessions as a trainee and I always found it a little boring.  I could notice the sincere effort that the trainer has put through but I couldn't control the feeling of boredom.

Are there any techniques specific to teaching in a "virtual environment" that can improve the pedagogical experience and keep students motivated?  I do have a list for a normal environment but it is of little help in this new medium!

Thanks for helping.

When I read this question, I immediately thought of this TED talk.
In it, Peter Norvig, who taught a huge online course on AI, shares what he learned about teaching to a large virtual audience.

His main points:

Mimic a one-on-one teaching style by positioning the camera overhead as you write and speaking as if it is a single student.
Alternately, use a livescribe pen (I've had experience with this for a math class; loved it)
Make short, <10 minute videos to retain attention
Ask questions to check understanding (they will pause+answer) and then go over them
Have due dates for watching the videos; students need motivation to watch them in a timely manner
Encourage online forums because peers are great tutors they "remember what it's like to not understand"


What can you do to supplement low grades for admission into masters programs that don't use GRE or GMAT? To study in the USA, low grades can be supplemented by GRE or GMAT.

What can you do to supplement low grades to study in Europe (UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia), Oceania and South Africa?

As far as I know, such programs will consider your GPA, GRE (general and/or subject test) or some equivalent tests, letters of recommendation, research experience and personal statement, or a subset of this list. Thus, it is really more precise to say that all of these factors supplement each other, rather than simply saying that only GRE and GPA supplement each other. Unless your GPA is lower than the cut-off line, which some programs impose, then it follows that good letters of recommendation, research experience and personal statement will help with your application. This will especially be true if you have exceptional academic achievement that is not reflected by the GPA, in which case the admission committee will likely overlook the low GPA.


The advantages of Latin when studying mathematics and logic? I'm starting university soon and I'm going to major in math, and minor, at least, in philosophy. I'm also going to start a new language (I'm Finnish and I'm fluent in English), and the languages I've been thinking are Latin and French. I know that if you study a lot of philosophy, it's good to know Latin so that you can read the classics in their original language, but if I'm going to mostly focus in logic (and philosophy of language, but mostly logic), how much good does learning Latin do? Of course learning a new language is never a bad thing, but does knowing Latin help at all when studying mathematics and logic? In mathematics and logic I'd imagine there isn't that much that can be lost in translation.

If you're interested in history of mathematics, then Latin would very likely be helpful; until the 18th century or so, most mathematics done in Europe was written in Latin.

For studying modern mathematics, Latin isn't so useful.  I'm a mathematician and have studied a little Latin, and it hasn't really been directly useful.  Sometimes it helps a little in understanding a word's roots, but not much beyond that.

On the other hand, I do fairly often need to read a paper in French; there's a signficant amount of current and recent mathematics research written in French.  However, this isn't too hard even though I've never formally studied French.  The vocabulary and language used in mathematical writing, while specialized, is quite limited.  And I know some Spanish, which is helpful in figuring out the grammar where needed.

So for mathematics, neither one is strictly needed, but given the choice I'd choose French.


How tightly enforced are open-access embargoes? Many academic journals have copyright policies which forbid authors (possibly for a finite embargo time) to make their papers (either preprints, accepted manuscripts, or camera-ready versions) freely available (either on their personal websites or on repositories such as the arXiv). How tightly enforced are these policies? Are there known cases of publishers pursuing legal action against an author for posting copyrighted academic papers? Or would such cases normally be dealt with private requests to cease-and-desist?

This answer seems to indicate such cases are rare, but there could be privately-dealt with cases that are not visible. Or is there a large body of public-repository-published papers that possibly / probably / demonstrably have been publicly posted in breach of a copyright policy?

One data point:

I am a mathematician, and I have never heard of this happening to anyone.

Many mathematicians post preprints on their website and to the arXiv, and it is somewhat common for mathematicians to also post scanned copies of the published journal versions of their older papers.

Ethical judgements may vary, but I am unaware of any authors who have suffered negative practical consequences for this, or even who have been asked to remove their papers.


How can I convince my students to speak louder? Freshers sometimes speak almost inaudibly, even after asking them to speak loudly. Now, with facemasks, it's even worse, I am not allowed to approach them too much, and it demands a lot of energy to be able to hear them sometimes. What strategies do you suggest?

If students do not speak loudly when directly asked to speak loudly, it probably means they do not know how to speak loudly.  This is not intuitive because most people think everyone knows how to speak loudly naturally, but I suspect many people misunderstand the mechanics of speaking loudly.  In particular, people think they speak loudly by moving their ribs, when actually the need to move their abdominal muscles.  Show your students where those muscles are and have them practice moving them to make a loud sound.  This will help students control their volume.
You might also ask the music or theater department for advice.


What is "double blind" reviewing? I have been visiting some journal websites and I found that
some of them state that they use a double blind review process.

What does it mean?

It means that, not only are the reviewers' identities unknown to the authors (as usual), but the authors' identities are unknown to the reviewers. Only the editor(s) know the identity of everyone involved. This supposedly makes for a less biased review. This also means that the authors need to exercise special care in preparing the submission, because they should avoid all instances of "we" when referring to past, cited papers, for example.


Is it common to include foreign terms in the title of a thesis? I'm writing a cross-language thesis. In other words, my thesis is about a foreign culture.

Is it common to include foreign terms in the title of a thesis?

If yes, should I include the translation of the term (in parentheses, for example)?

In anthropology, it's pretty common to use local terms in both the title and subtitle. Almost everyone romanizes the terms rather than using the native script. And they leave explanations and glosses to the body of the dissertation itself.

That being said, when it comes time to submit to a book publisher, they're more hesitant about local terms in titles. The issue is that they are legible only to people who already know the local language or culture, so you've automatically limited the appeal of your book. But there have been some notable exceptions:

Travesti : Sex, Gender, and Culture Among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes

Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand

The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story

In the examples above, the exceptions prove the rule by either being obvious to English speakers ("travesti" =? transvestite?), close to English ("Tom" is obvious, "Dee" adds an element of curiousity), or already a loan word in English ("anime").


How to ask new advisor about her "style" in a professional way? In the first meeting my new advisor, how should I ask her what her "style" is when supervising students, in a way that is straightforward but not cheeky?

Bonus question: what are good questions to ask to your new advisor on your first meeting?

I still don't know what you have in mind as regards "style" but here are the things I think it would be useful to ask at the beginning:

How often she would like to meet and for how long.
Would she like you to get started with research right off the bat, or would she prefer that you start by concentrating on coursework and preparation for qualifying exams?
Are there any organizational, office assistant-type chores you can do to make yourself useful?  (Or if she has a lab, include lab chores in this question.)
A propos lab (if she has one), is there a lab manager?  What tips does she have to help you be an asset to the lab?
What are her pet peeves?  (I once asked this of my soon-to-be supervisor and she said, "humming and getting to work late" -- good to know!)
Are there any particular courses she would suggest you take in the first year?  (Familiarize yourself with the offerings and descriptions prior to the meeting.)
Communication preferences (email vs. phone vs. stopping by her office).  What you're trying to find out is

what method works best when you need a quick answer
how she would prefer to get hold of you when she needs a quick answer
what phone hours she keeps, e.g. don't call after 9 pm, don't call before 10 on a Sunday, don't call during the dinner hour which is x - y pm or whatever they happen to be in her case
what turn-around time she expects from emails (e.g. 24 hours vs. there was a question here at Academia a little while back about a professor who would send an email and expect the student to pop up in his doorway within five minutes)
what she finds annoying (i.e. what to avoid)

(This would be a good time to let her know your communication preferences, for example, let her know about any chunks of time when you like to turn your phone off for your sanity.)
Any other tips?  (Here she might say something like, make sure to find one or two hobbies, try to attend all seminars and keep a seminar log....)

Note, I would not start out the meeting with a barrage of questions.  Many may be answered naturally during the flow of conversation.


Summary of contributions for reference letters Pretty much all the profs I'm asking for a letter from I've done a fair amount of research under. However, I haven't spoken to a couple of these profs for a few of months and considering how busy they are I wouldn't be surprised if they've mostly forgotten about the specifics of what I did. So I thought it might be a good idea to attach a document summarizing my work with them when I ask for a letter, and I found a couple of other sites that suggested doing the same thing.

For this document, I was wondering if it would be a better idea to give a detailed page or so long description of everything I did or 5-6 bullet points summarizing my main contributions. The obvious benefit of the former is that I get to remind them of the details of everything I did, but it comes at the risk of them not wanting to read so much and pretty much ignoring the document.

For people who have done this in the past/planning on doing this now, what does your summary's format look like and how long/detailed is it?

There is no reason, actually, not to do both. What you suggest is very likely a good thing and will save the writers a bit of time. But you can have a bullet pointed introduction followed by a longer description of the work. Make sure the second part is labelled as such. If the prof's memory is jogged by the first part they have no need to keep reading. Otherwise they may appreciate it.

You could even use wording that they might want to copy into a recommending letter. Make their life easy.


Would this be considered plagiarism? I'm currently about to finish my BA thesis, and my topic is bullying. I have read several books, studies, and such that can be connected to my topic. I finished the literature review, but haven't touched it since. However, when I recently re-read it and looked at the sources, I have found that a lot of my sub-chapters in my lit. review are really similar to those in the literature. For instance, in the work I read, the author mentions the consequences of bullying and I also have a sub-chapter dedicated to this. Or for example, I have read about strain theory in another one of the studies that I have also included and wrote about in one of my sub-chapters. I did not include every single aspect of these particular studies, just specific parts that I found relevant in my study.

My question is the following: Is this considered plagiarism?

Plagiarism is taking the work or ideas of others and presenting it as your own. If you have a sub chapter on topic X and somebody else has a sub chapter on that too, that doesn't make it plagiarism. E.g every 2nd grade math text probably has one chapter on addition and one chapter on multiplication. That doesn't mean they are plagiarizing each other, it's just the natural way to split up the material. What would be plagiarism is if you got the idea to have a sub chapter on topic X from reference Y but you did not cite reference Y and you made it sound like you personally came up with the idea of a sub chapter on X on your own. As long as you've cited your sources properly you should be fine.


What level of knowledge and expertise is usually expected from someone just entering a PhD in computer science? If someone has bad grades and limited programming experience, can they afford to rely on their first year of coursework to come up to speed with the field? Or is it a better idea to take some time off before starting your PhD and improve your skills?

This is phrased as a question about first-year coursework, but it's actually a question about admissions.  Specifically, a department won't offer admission to someone they feel has inadequate preparation, so this situation should not arise (assuming the admissions process works well).

From this perspective, the reformulated question is: if you have bad grades and limited programming experience, is admission to a CS PhD program still possible, or do you need to take some time off to improve your skills?

At this level of detail, there's no way to say for sure.  If your application shows nothing but bad grades and lack of programming experience, then admission is presumably out of the question.  On the other hand, why would you even want to enter a PhD program without some other background that indicates it's a good idea?  In which case the admissions decision comes down to what that background is and whether it outweighs the grades and programming experience.  It would take something impressive, but it's possible in principle.


In email applications should the text of the cover letter be stated directly in the email or be attached in a separate file? When applying for example to a postdoc position, is it appropriate to write the text of the cover letter directly into the email, or should it be attached as a seperate file?

One advantage of stating the content of the cover letter directly in the email I could see is that there are good changes that the potential future employer reads it before opening any other ducuments, such as the curriculum vitae, list of publications, etc that might be attached.

I would advise to make the email brief, and make sure that the motivation letter is the first attachment. Often, motivation letters are printed (at least the ones which wind up in the final round) and a properly formatted letter looks better than a printed email.


Is it worth applying for PhD in the UK without the requested undergraduate average? I hold an Italian bachelor in Computer Science with an average of 80% which resulted in a graduation grade of 91/110, equivalent to a 2:2 in the UK system. I am currently attending a MSc in the UK which will terminate in January and until now I am holding an average of 70% even though I am confident I will manage to get a 1st class or a 2:1 at worse from my studies.

I would like to apply for PhDs, but almost every position requires a first class or an upper second, which I do not have for my bachelor. Is it worth applying anyway?

My master is still a branch of Computer Science but is not the field I would like to do research in, therefore I do not think an high grade would help me in anyway way. In addition, I will not receive the final mark before April and the project, which is worth 1/3 of my master, will not be publishable before then.

The short answer is you should apply.

Generally speaking, all your previous degrees and grades count towards your application for a PhD. But if you are having strong marks in your Masters, you should definitely try to submit your provisional scores to give an indication of your upward trajectory. Many PhD applicants would be in your similar situation. In many UK institutions, a provisional acceptance may be offered to somebody in your situation where the profile is strong, conditional on the completion of the Masters at a certain level. In other words, the final acceptance will not be offered until all the grades come in.


Writing a recommendation letter for PhD advisor I said yes to writing a letter for my advisor who is getting nominated for a mentorship award. Now I am stuck and not sure what to put into the letter or how to organize it. Might anyone have advice for me on what such a letter might contain? A search for samples to get me started has not yielded much since this letter goes in a direction opposite of the usual.

Because you're being asked for a letter of recommendation for an award given to a faculty member for good mentoring, this letter is going to look very different from the kinds of letters of recommendation written for students applying to graduate programs, faculty applicants, etc.

For your letter, the goal should be to show that this faculty member has been a good mentor to you and other students.  You can best make the case for this by describing in detail how the faculty member has mentored you.  How does he or she interact with you?  What do they say when you're struggling with something in your research?   Do they ask you to discuss your long term goals as well as your short term plans?


How negative to go in a statement of purpose? Okay yes I know another 'I'm a bad candidate help me' post sorry.

I was in grad school years ago but I quit because the program wasn't good for me. The exact program doesn't matter. It was a small one on the USA west coast though, and for MS not PhD.

The problem was the people in the program didn't like my concentration field (lie groups). All the profs thought their own fields were more interesting, wanted me to focus on those instead (like discrete geometry). No other students were really interested in my concentration so important classes got canceled, "low enrollment" they said.

Now I want to apply to a new school that I think does not have this problem. I want to know though, how can I talk about this in my statement of purpose? I have to address the reason I left a previous program but I do not want to sound whiny or vengeful or make the admissions committee think the problem was my fault.

Note I made up some of the details here because in case some admissions person at my future school reads this forum. But the general point is still right. Thanks!

In my opinion you should not "go negative" at all in a statement of purpose.  A vivid description of what turned you off to a previous program seems only to give those considering your admissions case something concrete to worry about, whereas just saying that you lost interest and have since regained it (and then talking extensively about the second part!) is not such a hard sell: by the way, most people lack the perspective to find graduate level mathematics (or whatever) interesting.  But a certain percentage of students who do an undergraduate degree in mathematics (or whatever) slowly but surely find their interest and passion in the subject increasing until the point where they are motivated to go back to school for further study.  As long as you sound interested and motivated now, how you felt in the past is not so relevant.

It may also be helpful to know that your specific story did have a mildly negative effect on me.

  The problem was the people in the program didn't like my concentration field (lie groups).

Having your heart set on one mathematical field while starting a master's degree is probably a mistake.  At best you know something about your initial interest; you can't possibly know whether you are interested in everything else (and even what other things relate to your interest).

  All the profs thought their own fields were more interesting, wanted me to focus on those instead (like discrete geometry).

You were surprised by the fact that faculty are interested in their...interests?!?  That surprises me.  If you have your heart set on Lie theory, why didn't you go somewhere in which Lie theory was a major research focus?

  No other students were really interested in my concentration so important classes got canceled, "low enrollment" they said.

Lack of sufficient interest is exactly what causes courses to be cancelled.  You didn't expect them to run classes for you and you alone which lie outside the research interests of the faculty, did you?

By the way, when I went to grad school I had my heart set on algebraic number theory...and ended up doing that (or one of many things that comes under that broad banner).  In order to do algebraic number theory I had to learn some Lie theory and some discrete geometry, and these remain of interest to me to this day.  Though I know relatively little in each of these areas, I know more than enough to know that they are fascinating fields, and that if I had studied them as a graduate student rather than algebraic number theory per se...well, that would have been fine.  And of course my point is not that these two subfields (which I gather are not the "real ones" occurring in your narrative) are so specifically great: rather, believe that if you have the temperament for graduate study in mathematics, then you may just as well study any subfield -- or any subfield of interest to the faculty and your peers in a strong graduate program.  So to me, your claim that you would have done well the first time if only you had been learning "the right mathematics" is a bit suspect.  It might be true, but it might equally well be true that you just weren't into your studies as much as you needed to be to continue...and now you are.  Again, I would go with the latter narrative.


Are academic questions (used in textbooks etc.) owned by the publisher, or is anyone able to use them in their own content? I am wondering whether mathematical and scientific questions (or any type of question to be honest) is considered to be owned by the publisher? For example, if I see a math question in a textbook, am I allowed to use that question on my website, or is that legally considered an infringement?

To write this in more detail, the text of the questions is clearly owned by the copyright holder. The ideas embodied in the questions are not protected by copyright. It's usually considered plagiarism to completely rephrase and rewrite a question without citing the original source, but plagiarism generally isn't illegal.

As noted in the downvoted answer, in some communities there is a broad acceptance of some kinds of copying when it comes to exercises, but I wouldn't want to endorse wholesale copying of homework exercises from one book to another. There are likely to be canonical problems that should be worked by every student in a particular discipline, and those would probably have the least claim to protection and the least interest in protection from the publisher. The more creativity going into the question, the more protection it has and the more enforcement you are likely to see.

Writing good exercises is challenging, but you should endeavor to do so for your website. You should cite to sources when you adapt an exercise from somewhere, and you should mention that an exercise is a classical example that all students should be able to do when you draw on something that Gauss or Euler proved as an exercise centuries ago.


How do I distinguish a Private college from a government one in India? Government universities in India endorse government and private degree colleges. How do I distinguish between them? By distinction I mean any particular information that will help me determine (from the website) if a college is a private one.

A little bit of searching online turns up many lists that others have compiled that can help you distinguish whether the nature of a university in India, including whether or not it is private.

A good starting point may be Wikipedia's "List of private universities in India"


To which point is a paper considered as a "student contribution"? I am a PhD student, in the process of submitting a paper and I was asked to check (or not check) a box to state if :

  This contribution was solely written by students and/or doctoral candidates.

This paper was solely written by me as first author, with my supervisors as co-authors for reviewing. It deals mostly with measurements and their interpretation, which were done by me exclusively, the only non-original content is a figure I'm citing from another paper. However, my supervisors reviewed this paper, and also gave me advice during the research.

Is this sentence to be interpreted drastically (meaning I should not check it since the work is done by a supervised student, and not student(s) exclusively). And in a more general way, to which point would a paper be no longer considered as "student contribution" ?

This may seem obvious but I'm not familiar with publications processes since it's the first time I submit something.

In my experience, such declarations are typically defined in terms of authorship.  Thus, you will see, for example, a prize to be awarded for papers with a student first author, or for papers with only students as authors.

I would therefore generally interpret "solely written by" as meaning "all co-authors are."

If you want to be certain, however, it should not be any problem to request clarification from the organizers.


How do I address research gaps in my Thesis (Research article)? I have gone through some papers and Ph.D theses in my field but haven't found an explicit discussion about the 'research gap' in their field.

Can anyone give me an example where the author discusses their research gap in detail?

For example: my working domain is 'Networking' and the gap I am addressing is about precise time synchronization requirements. How can I write this in a convincing way that raises it to an issue that should be addressed?

I have got a comment from a reviewer where the reviewer says,

  One thing I was wondering while reading: If the time synchronization
  is such a big issue as described in the paper, why is it rarely
  mentioned as an issue in other experimental papers.

So I need to address his comment by explicitly saying that, it is the 'research gap' I worked on to cover on that paper. Although the significance, benefits, and others are well mentioned in the paper. But somewhere in the paper, I have to demand that this is 'research/knowledge gap' where work needs to do.

The expression that I have adopted so far:

  Until now, there has been little work [references]
  in specifying or detailing the importance of time synchronization and
  the stringent timing requirements for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. In
  its underline reason we believe, as the time, time quality and
  synchronization techniques in VANET have been adopted straightforward
  by following the WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) standards, it gets
  the impression of settling down with the achieved developments already
  in WLAN. But WLAN is an infrastructure centered asynchronous network
  where the Access Points (APs) are fixed infrastructures that enable
  and support routing and communication among low mobility wireless
  nodes. Such networks are not time critical; therefore, neither precise
  time synchronization is required nor be achieved due to the message
  transmission and various layer level delays of the system. Compared
  with that, VANET consists of both infrastructure based (V2I) and
  ad-hoc based (V2V) communication. This two sets of communication make
  the system more challenging. VANET is also exclusively time critical
  due to its unique characteristics such as high mobility, ad-hoc based
  dynamic topology, and bandwidth constraint. Road efficiency and life
  depend on the successful deployment of any such networks. Hence, the
  synchronization issues in VANET need to be explored in details are
  discussed in this section.

I have not written an expansive issue such as a Ph.D paper or article. But here is how I would approach the problem:

Identify the current literature on the topic in question, in effect a literature review. Is the gap even a gap? Was there discussion in the past, but not now? Depending on your findings then you can claim that

  Based on my findings, I believe that there is a gap based on the following...

How would you approach in measuring/defining/articulating this gap? Is this a conceptual gap that is not discussed in detail, therefore there is not sufficient interest in it, or it was stipulated as a closed-case?

  Based on John Smith, et.al, this [topic] was discussed in length and defined as the following... using these metrics I introduce an alternative means of measuring its effects and impact on the field...

What do you ultimately wish to do once you identified the problem? Procure more research funding, collaborate with experts?


Are reviewers impressed by a quick response to a request to revise and resubmit? My colleagues believe that if you submit your manuscript revisions quickly,  reviewers will be impressed by your confidence about the issues raised.

However, I think that a quick response  is not always the best option. If you consult with other people, you may submit better revisions which of course requires more time.

Are there any benefits in responding quickly to a request to revise and resubmit a manuscript?
Are reviewers impressed by a quick response to a request to revise and resubmit?

Opinions might differ, but here is mine: as a regular reviewer for a bunch of journals, what impresses me is a resubmission that addresses whatever points I raise in my review in a thorough and convincing way, irrespective of whether the authors take one week or six months to write it up. The more seriously you take my review, the more seriously I will take your resubmission.


What is the eligibility criteria for doing research in physics? I will be completing my MSc in mathematics, in India; and have before completed my PUC (11 & 12th classes) in PCMC (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science), and BSc in PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics). In the MSc Math here in India, the courses are pre-fixed, and involves uniform concentration of all the math.

If I want to switch to doing research in physics, how difficult would it be? Is it harder to change fields at the stage of a PhD or a postdoc (or later)?

What is the eligibility criteria for doing research in physics?

There are none.

If you want to get paid, again, there are no fixed criteria but you had best be more qualified than the other applicants for the job.

  If I want to switch to doing research in physics, how difficult would it be?

You already studied a lot of physics plus some extra math.  It should not be so hard.  If you apply for PhD programs, you should clearly articulate why you are switching.  Many people do PhDs in areas that include both physics and math - if you go that route it will be easier than if you try to so something purely experimental.


Comparing a career in medicine vs. medical research? My friend recently graduated with a bachelor degree in biology. He is thinking that he can help more people by studying a biomedical engineering Ph.D., rather than becoming a medical doctor.  He is wondering, however, about the differences between these two paths from a career perspective.  What the advantages and disadvantages of an academic career vs. a medical career?

As a person who faced a similar dilemma a few years ago, I think there are major practical differences:

The working environment. Every doctor will spend his early career in a hospital, whether he plans on practising in the community later or not. A hospital environment is really different than the research one. In the former you are constantly on your feet, working long hours, nights, etc. However, you are constantly working with the people to whom you're helping. In a "lucky" week (depends on the POV), you might save a life every day.
Taking work home. While a M.D works long and hard hours at his/er practice, when she goes home - she can rest. Her patients doesn't follow her home. As a researcher I can tell you that I'm even dreaming on my research.
Independence. The medical environment is a very hierarchical one. Starting out as a M.D, you can't even sign off your own orders (in first world countries, at least :) ), contrary to a graduate student who might be given an independent project very early in his or her study course.
Goals. As a researcher, you end up working for the sake of science. You might find yourself pursuing a direction which might take decades before it translates into helping people. As a practitioner - you're working for the people in front of you.
Demand for your skills. In general - there are hardly any M.Ds who go unemployed. Most healthcare systems are understaffed and there is always a demand for M.Ds. I wish we could say the same about positions in the academy, and the industry is never as stable (and here it's field specific and I can't say much about the specific field in question).


Is publishing a journal article covering failed attempts a good idea? I am currently doing some research on an algorithm that may (or may not) end up being slower than other similar algorithms. The idea behind it seems solid although it will probably not be as fast as other, already known and used solutions. Finishing and testing is of course part of the science, so the research will get carried out nevertheless.

So here is my question: is writing an article about conducted, but failed work a good thing?

My thoughts are that publishing such an article would help people conducting similar research, who would otherwise waste their own time, trying to do the same thing. Saving their time is crucial for the scientific community in my personal opinion, but I am unsure how others perceive the same problem and I do not want others to have negative opinion about my work.

There are many similar questions on this site, but none seem to duplicate this exact one. This question, for instance, covers confirming or denying others research carried out and described elsewhere, while I am talking strictly about inventing and disproving the idea myself. Many other talk about the rationale behind not posting negative results, but that's also a slightly different subject (although undoubtedly related).

In order to give your work sufficient rigour and novelty for publication, you might need to set out the theoretical basis for why you thought your new algorithm would be quicker; and an analysis of why, despite that theoretical underpinning, it was not quicker: i.e. how did reality interfere with the theory?

In theory, the test for whether or not it's a good idea to publish failed attempts, is: would it help other researchers advance? In practice, even if it did, you might struggle to find a journal that considered it of sufficient interest to be worth publishing.

Some fields do now have a journal of negative results, which could be a suitable venue. That seems, for now, to be mostly restricted to fields within the life sciences, which might not be your field.

So you might want to consider going to one of the new mega-journals, which select only on the basis of whether your work is methodologically sound and on-topic, and whether you've paid their publishing fee.

And now you can see one risk there: you've got to be careful to avoid predatory publishers.

Another, less obvious risk, is that given some megajournals have incredibly wide scope (e.g. "science"), they are not always able to get suitable peer-reviewers: so your work could appear alongside some really shoddy work, leaving readers doubting the quality of your work, even if the journal is widely held to be non-predatory.


How to choose a topic for a PhD in organisational behaviour? I want to do phd in organisational behaviour. However, I am confused about how to chose a topic.

Beyond general strategies for choosing a topic discussed here are there any specific strategies for choosing a PhD topic in organisational behaviour?

Find a supervisor

A supervisor will typically help you refine your PhD topic.
So the first step is to identify researchers in organisational behaviour in universities you are able to attend. It of course helps if you have an understanding of the area that you want to work in so that the supervisor can see the alignment with their research interests.

In general, organisational behaviour researchers go by a range of names and appear in a range of different departments.
Look beyond organisational behaviour to also examine areas like human resource management, management, and industrial/organisational psychology. You may find such people in management departments, business schools, I/O psychology programs, as well as a range other areas.

Get to know the literature

Read journal articles in the field to get a feel for what is current. Some of the highest impact journals related to organizational behaviour include:

Journal of Applied Psychology
Personnel Psychology
Academy of Management Journal
Academy of Management Review
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Administrative Science Quarterly
Journal of Management
Journal of Organizational Behavior
Organizational Research Methods
Journal of Vocational Behavior

Attend major conferences to network and get to know what are the current issues.
Some of the biggest conferences are SIOP and Academy of Management in the United States.
However, there are many other conferences depending on your specific interests and where you are in the world. For example, Australia has an I/O psychology conference every two years.

Learn about practical problems

Organisational behaviour is an applied field. It aims to improve the performance and well-being of workers and organisations. So, it helps to learn about the practical problems that people in organisations are experiencing.

You can gain this experience in a range of ways. But in general its helpful to actually work or consult related to your area of interest. Talk to practitioners such as consultants, managers, and so on.


Ph.D. in the space between two fields? I'm applying to PhD programs in two fields and I am interested in the space between two fields, where one is applied to the other.

In my particular case I'm interested in researching Software Engineering as applied to Robotics. I will use a similar but slightly different case as an illustrative example between the fields of Software Engineering and Machine Learning, which I am also interested in. Software Engineering applied to Machine Learning could incorporate better ways, such as new language syntax, to design and implement Machine Learning Algorithms. The opposite would be using machine learning to solve Software Engineering problems, such as automatically discovering database regularities in a data mining application.

Essentially, I see understanding, researching, and being able to apply software engineering to robotics as an area that will expand enormously in the next 10-15 years, much like how software engineering research has expanded as applied to mobile devices and data centers.

I am very interested in both fields, but ideally I would be studying how to apply software engineering to robotics.

How do I explain my interests to both Robotics and Software Engineering professors, respectively?
How do I communicate why this matters at all, and more importantly why it matters to them?
Should I focus primarily on Software Engineering programs, Robotics programs, or both to reach my goal?

Answers based on analogous situations from other fields are welcome.

I know little about either of these fields, but will try to give a generally applicable answer.

I think your best bet is to find an advisor who already has some appreciation for the intersection of these two topics.  Convincing someone who only works on one of them that they are important together -- and that he/she should supervise a thesis involving both -- may be difficult. However, since the fields you mention can often be found within the same university department (computer science), the latter approach is also possible.

To decide which type of programs you should look at, ask yourself in which field will I innovate?  If you will apply standard software engineering techniques to do something new in robotics, focus on robotics.  If you will devise novel software engineering ideas that are useful with respect to existing robotics applications, then focus on software engineering.  Of course, the answer is rarely clear cut.

Important: if you're not substantially innovating within either field, it may be difficult to convince a committee that you deserve a Ph.D. (even though the combination may be innovative).  You can't usually get away with work that is worth half of a Ph.D. in each field.


What happens when a closed form solution to a research problem is not possible? Say I discover an “interesting topic” (at least from my perspective), and I do all sort of work necessary to formulate and tackle the problem (it is an optimization problem), nearly a month of work, and now I suddenly come to realize that the close-form analytical solution to this problem is not possible (or that the solution is too complicated).

What should I do? Should I continue to solve the problem using a numerical method (using computer simulation tools from Matlab), or should I give up my topic?

Most real world problems don't have closed-form solutions. Somehow, we manage.

You write:

  the close-form analytical solution to this problem is not possible

If the impossibility of a closed-form analytic solution is in itself a new result, then that may well be a publishable result. If you can also find an efficient method to get a numerical (approximate) solution, that's either a heavier-weight first paper (combined with the proof of the non-existence of closed-form solution), or it's a second paper in its own right.

You then wrote:

  OR the solution is too complicated.

If there may be a closed-form analytical solution, but it's just too complicated for you to find, then that's an entirely different matter. In which case, you've got nothing to publish. Just a very hard problem that you can either persevere with, or you can stop working on it for a while, and go do something more promising. There's no harm in stopping working on it for a while. Just keep the problem in the back of your mind, along with a handful of other unsolved problems: and every time you learn a new heuristic, algorithm, or solution pattern (or an enhancement to an old one), then try to apply it to the unsolved problems you've been storing up (kudos to the late Richard Feynman for this).


How to confront possible theft of ideas? I sent a paper to a fellow PhD student in my department for feedback. In person, he gave me some comments and implied that he had already considered some of the ideas I had suggested. I recently learned that, about one week after our meeting, a blog post was published anonymously containing many of the ideas in my paper. The blog is clearly written by the student to whom I had sent the paper and contains no mention of me.

Part of why I'm concerned is that if I now try to publish these ideas (in a journal, not a blog), I'm afraid that someone will accuse me of stealing the ideas from that blog post (or dissertation or journal article, if the blog post gets developed further). And, in addition to the possibility of being scooped, there is also the possibility of him having stolen my ideas here. So I'm wondering what to do.

On the one hand, he said or at least implied that he had independently come up with these ideas, and I don't yet have any evidence to the contrary. And I suppose this person's behavior may be what you would expect if he did come up with the idea independently before reading my paper—perhaps he's trying to stake a claim to the ideas before I publish the idea myself. On the other hand, it seems to me extremely fishy that the post was published so quickly after I sent him the ideas. And it also seems wrong (even in a blog post) not to at least acknowledge that these ideas have been independently developed by someone else (namely, me).

Should I:

Email this person about it in some polite but non-confrontational
way? (But I won't really be satisfied unless he proves to me that he
came up with the ideas independently, by sending me a draft that was
clearly written before I sent him mine.)
Tell my or his advisor, or some other faculty member, about the situation and put it in their hands? (But I don't want to seem accusatory.)
Just ignore it and try to publish the idea as soon as possible?
Do something else?

I found myself in a similar situation once, also with a blog post, though in my case the poster fully admitted posting my ideas and appeared to see nothing wrong with it.  Fortunately, I later determined the specific idea wasn't as fruitful a line of inquiry as I initially imagined and happily moved on.

So, my suggestions to you:

It is fishy, and one clear lesson to learn is to not trust this person with your work in the future.
Hold on to records of your communication, in particular any emails where you discuss this idea and/or send him drafts.  As was pointed out in the comments, blog posts aren't publications, but it's still possible someone notices in the future and asks you about it.  Having the email where you sent your work to the poster for review from before they posted it is a solid defense.
Mention it to your advisor, but I would personally only do it as an aside, as something that annoyed you.  You can handle it!  If they, knowing you and the situation and the work itself, have other suggestions, they'll offer it at this point.
Don't bother bringing it up with that individual.  If they did steal the idea from you, they can just deny it and all you have is circumstantial evidence.  On the other hand, if they had indeed done similar work on their own already, then it seems they posted this in order to get their name on it before you (they can always claim their anonymous blog later), in which case you're competing to get this published.  Therefore,
Take it as motivation to push through and finish your work both well and promptly.

Good luck!


Is it okay to expect advisors to offer a word of condolence? I'm a third-year Ph.D. student. A few months ago, I lost my maternal grandfather and grandmother in quick succession. More recently, I lost my close friend in a bus accident and my paternal grandmother was wheeled into the emergency room. These incidents have affected me personally and I haven't been able to focus on my work as much. I emailed my advisors everytime an incident happened (to take a 2-3 days off) but both of them didn't bother to reply. Even after I met them face to face, they did not ask me how I'm doing or if I need any help?

This has led me to feel that my emotions are not valued and I'm being used just as a tool to get experiments done. Am I wrong to expect a word of condolence from my advisors or do they think that they might cross personal boundaries?

Expressions of emotional concern are a tricky balance for supervisors to find sometimes, and can also have a strong cultural or religious component to it. For example, some faiths have suggested that mourning should be confined to a very particular interval and not extend past that. (I’m aware of this in certain Muslim and Jewish denominations, for instance).

Also, the response of an individual to reminders of grief can be intense and unexpected, and advisors may not want to put you under any additional pressure or stress or cause an episode while you’re meeting that they can’t or don’t feel comfortable handling.

So it just might be that they don’t want to cross any boundaries that feel inappropriate.

All of that said, there does remain a finite possibility that they may view their advisees as labor input rather than complex human beings. Such advisors sadly do exist and are not particularly enjoyable to work for.

If it’s an important enough issue that you feel that it’s making you less interested in your work or the relationship with your advisors, you may want to consider having a discussion with them at the end of a meeting to discuss it.


How should I address a professor's inconsistencies? "How do I address the following incidents before the end of semester, without alienating the professor whose good graces I rely on to pass his class?"

I have a professor who is quite friendly, and obviously more knowledgeable on the topic he is teaching than I am. However, he consistently makes major errors, and is very inconsistent with his statements, assignments and testing. I have been tracking these inconsistencies, as they make it very difficult to keep up with the class. Copied and pasted from my notes:

  A list of Professor X’s major inconsistencies in Math 555, Complex
  Variables

  As a fellow student in my class commented, Dr. X's inconsistencies are
  “astounding”. So, I decided to keep track of them.

  Incident 1
  Professor X, in two class periods, could not prove the
  sufficient conditions for differentiability (i.e. converse of
  Cauchy-Riemann). he made errors so numerous while presenting the proof
  that he never finished it, and told us to just look at it in the book
  and practice it at home.

  Then, when asked about the proof in the book, he said that the proof
  was incorrect, but did not provide any suitable
  explanation on how the students might approach doing it correctly.

  So, he could not do the proof himself, could not explain why the one
  in the book was wrong, and yet he required us to complete the proof
  for homework…

  Incident 2
  Midterm #2 was held on a Monday. The Friday before the
  test, he explicitly told the entire class to bring a handwritten sheet
  listing all of the algebraic properties of the Logarithm and
  Exponential functions of complex numbers. Further, on Friday before
  the test, he told us that the test would cover all of chapter 2 and
  through section 31 of Chapter 3.

  When the class arrived to the test on Monday, we were all surprised to
  see written on the test, “Turn in homework for sections 34-36”. These
  sections covered trigonometric identities and hyperbolic functions of
  complex numbers not log(z) or exp(z).

  Instead of admitting his mistake, he gave zero credit for the
  properties we turned in. Further he said that we should have proved
  them, when he only asked us to list them.

  He then proceeded to tell us that if we wanted to get credit back, we
  could prove them and turn them in again. I explicitly asked in front
  of the entire class “Do you want us to prove the properties of Log and
  Exponential functions, or do you want us to do Sections 34-36, as was
  written on the test, or both?” He responded that he wanted the proofs
  of the Logarithm and Exponential function identities. So that’s what I
  did.

  When turning them in, he did not accept them, because he wanted the
  trigonometric identities instead. So, after wasting hours of my time,
  again, I find myself in the library doing work that he did not assign
  instead of moving forward to reinforce topics that we are now
  covering.

  Incident 3
  When reviewing test problem 3 (determine the derivative of Log(z)) he told us
  that we should have used the polar
  form of the derivative: f ‘ (z) = exp(itheta)(u_r + iv_r) that we
  derived in problem 1.

  The problem is, he didn’t ask us to derive that formula in problem 1.
  When I pointed this out, he looked at me like I was crazy. So I went
  to his office hours and very politely showed him the test and asked
  “When did we derive the polar form of the derivative in problem 1”. So
  he proceeded to do problem 1, and sure enough the polar form did not
  come from it. It took the answer to problem 1, plus an extra page and
  a half of derivations to arrive at the required formula to solve
  problem 3.

So, I want to address this because it is driving me crazy, but I am unfortunately a fairly poor student when it comes to test taking (high levels of anxiety). I rely on the fact that my professors like me and see how hard I work in my classes, to get the extra few sympathy points that often are the difference between passing and failing.

This is an uncommon situation. It happens that a professor has a blackout in front of class or screws a proof - but this sounds much worse.

It is hard to tell from the distance, but to me it seems like the professor is having serious problems (maybe health issues, personal issues, ...) distracting him.

I would suggest talking to another trusted faculty member (if you don't know whom to adress: There are usually dedicated ombudspersons at every department / university) and tell them your observations.


Can't find research area in my master thesis topic I'm master computer science student. I would like to do my master thesis in a company. I got a topic from a company but the problem is when I show my topic to my professor he said he didn't find research in my topic. He said that this is normal when you take topic from a company.

I really want to do my master thesis with company because it will level up my career.

I read some papers I tell my idea about the research area but my professor tell me you are in root domain there a lot of branches.

How can I find a research area and how can I impress my prof?

Companies usually set the topics they offer for Master's thesis students, and you usually cannot come with your own topic. At least in Germany, companies pay Master's Thesis students (even though it is very much below the market rate), so they want to get something useful out of your thesis work. Sometimes (not always), they exaggerate this and make students do mostly implementation work, with very little research.
On the other hand, professors do research so they naturally prefer supervising Master's theses that are research-oriented. Some (again, not all) professors also feel that the student should learn something from the thesis, and see implementation-only theses as "providing cheap labor" to companies without the student actually learning much.
This means that, if you want to do your thesis at a company, you have two options:

Find another topic offered by the same or another company, which involves more research
This should be the preferred option if you are at all interested in doing research afterwards. There are companies that offer more research-oriented Master's theses. You can also consider a government research institution, which is more likely to offer suitable topics.

Find another professor that is willing to supervise your less-research-oriented topic
There are professors that are happy to supervise more implementation-oriented theses. You might want to look at other departments in your university that work on similar topics. This should be your preferred option if you do not want to do research afterwards or if you like the topic of the implementation-oriented thesis very much.


Acknowledgements and reviewer selection For some reason, I was always under the impression that people that are included in the acknowledgement section of paper are not contacted to review your paper because they would be predisposed to give a favourable review. However, after reading the discussion in this question it seems like it is standard to send papers out for review to people in the acknowledgements section if there is not another conflict in place (like being from the same institution, for example). Which is it?

Do editors send a paper out for review to people in the acknowledgements section? Can I suggest a person I acknowledge for helpful comments as a potential reviewer (assuming there aren't other conflicts of interest)? If the field matters then I am interested primarily in mathematics, theoretical computer science, and biology.

The acknowledgement is there to thank people for their help in the work. It is not a place to provide information to the editor on who may have conflicts of interest. You list such persons in a cover letter with an explanation for why there is a conflict. This will make the situation clear to the editor. Persons in the same department will pretty much be excluded by default but if an obvious connection is not present it should be pointed out in a letter. It seems a little odd to thank someone without there being any connection to the work so I would not recommend trying to suggest such a person as potential reviewer. At the same time a person who ha a conflict of interest should decline to review with the excuse that there exists such a conflict. I would say such behaviour is good etiquette and good ethics.

I know there have been instances where a person received a strong reject review on a crap paper by a high-ranking scientist and then used the name in the acknowledgement thanking for input on an earlier version of the manuscript. The manuscript was almost the same but the signal was the high-ranked scientist approved it and so reviewers were unwilling to reject it. Hence the acknowledgement is not a place where a seasoned editor would look for valuable information.


Can professors generally keep books paid for with university funds? I'll soon be leaving the faculty position I've held for over 20 years at a private college in the United States. Do departing faculty typically keep books that might have been purchased with university funds? After all of this time, it's hard to know which books I paid for, which were given to me, and which were paid for by grants or departmental funds. My department (which I head) is being shut down, so nobody will remain to whom the books would be useful.

There's the "legal ownership" element, but given the situation you've described, I'd attach even more importance to the moral/ethical element:

Who is most likely to use these books?

I suspect if your department is being shut down, no one will care about the legal ownership specifics unless you provoke them to. So you could consider triaging:

College library, for books which in your professional judgment students or faculty in other remaining departments could use.

Keep yourself, for specialized material or your favorite books that you expect to use in the next years or decades.

Gifted to colleagues elsewhere for other useful material in your field.

"Free" box outside your door, for the stuff you'd otherwise throw out.

I have fortunately not been in quite this situation in academia proper, but I did leave a private sector research institute that got effectively disbanded with my (and others') departure. This is the approach I followed.


Is it plagiarism if you combine different algorithms to form one algorithm? Im doing a paper where i use a system to combine rules and algorithms from different studies to form a complete program. The ideas were combined and i made a program from that combined idea, now th program itself was made by me and I used solutions which are not exactly the same such as using shortcuts and other functions in matlab. The original papers were all in 1980s, and i was wondering if it is plagiarism to use their algorithms. In my methodology i explained thoroughly their method.

Combining various things to form one new thing is valid research. If your algorithm is a hybrid of 2 others, you need of course to mention these 2 and their authors as well (which you seem to indicate that you are doing). Otherwise you risk your readers thinking that everything in the hybrid algorithm is new, especially since they were developed way back.
Long story short, if you're acknowledging the work you are basing your approach on, you're being a good student. No plagiarism there.


Existence of regional bias in peer review and how to deal with it Background information:
Field: Neuroscience;
Country: India

Premise:
I am a graduate student. I have not published many articles. Over the past 5 or so years, I have been hearing from colleagues, my advisor, and other professors from my University that it is really difficult to publish in respectable journals in the field as there is a lot of resistance in seeing a good paper from a developing country. Until recently, I was skeptical of such opinions.

Current situation:
The past couple of papers that we have submitted have come back with really sparse reviews. In fact for two of our papers, we only got one peer-review which had nothing much to say except for a brief summary of the paper and a small point here and there (in fact addressing those two points wouldn't even have required a major revision; really small points). However, the editors were prompt to reject the paper saying the review(s) were not enthusiastic. [Note: I am okay with the idea that our work may have had flaws and that it could be made better; the question is not really about the review that we have received]

Question: Looking at these couple of experiences along with hearing similar experiences from several other colleagues/faculties, I am wondering if there is any truth to some sort of racial/regional bias in the peer review process. Specifically:

Is there concrete evidence out there to suggest that such discrimination at peer-review happens?
How can we deal with this kind of problems (for example, potentially submitting to journals that follow double blind reviews, etc.)

Related questions/answers:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/105219/115072
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/629/115072
What prevents reviewers from providing biased and very negative reviews?

Is there concrete evidence out there to suggest that such discrimination at peer-review happens?

Yes, there is. This is the most famous example, having been cited (as of time of writing) 1167 times. The author took 12 already-published papers written by authors from prestigious and productive American institutions, changed the names, added fictitious institutions, and resubmitted them to the same journal. Three of the resubmitted papers were detected. Of the remaining nine, eight were rejected for serious methodological flaws.

There're a lot of possible explanations for this, of course. One could simply be that peer review is random. Another is that methods have improved since the original publication, so the claim of serious methodological flaws is justified. Or perhaps it's just bias. It's for you to interpret.

Here's another article that deals with bias in peer review explicitly. Three of the biases investigated are prestige bias, affiliation bias, and nationality bias. There is some sign of bias, but as is typical in the social sciences, nothing is clear-cut.

  How can we deal with this kind of problems (for example, potentially submitting to journals that follow double blind reviews, etc.)

I don't think there's any good option unfortunately. Double-blind peer review simply isn't very common right now, and it's not easy to submit to one anyway (you will have to modify your paper, anonymizing any self-references). Triple-blind peer review would be even better, but there are even fewer journals that practice that. Unless and until these become more common, you'll probably have to put up with it.


How to deal with an inappropriate greeting in an email? I'm relatively new to teaching (I was just hired as a tenure-track English professor at a local community college and have been teaching for just about 2 years). I recently received an email from a male student (he is in his mid-50's), and he addressed me as follows:

  A great morning to you my dear lass,

Now, the email was complimentary. He thanked me for teaching a great course and said that he learned a lot in my class (all of these things are nice to hear). He has, at times, been difficult to teach (he questions academic conventions regarding basic essay structure, such as not beginning or ending a body paragraph with a quote), but he eventually concedes and makes the necessary adjustments (I am teaching a developmental writing course).

Usually.

I was just a little surprised by his choice of greeting. I am not overly familiar with my students, and I am not young (I am a divorced, 40-year-old woman). I like this student, and I am unsure of how to address this (or if I even should...) situation without causing offense. I feel certain he didn't mean to sound condescending and sexist, but... I also feel certain that if I was a 40-year-old male professor he would not have began his email with "A great morning to you my dear lad."

I would really appreciate any advice concerning how to address this issue. Additionally, I am teaching a combo course, and we just completed the first half, so he will continue to be my student for another 8 weeks.

Personally, I would address it in a friendly way, but one that makes it clear that you think it's a bit of an odd form of greeting. It doesn't sound like it was intended in an unfriendly or disrespectful way (and I definitely wouldn't characterise it as sexist), but it does sound inappropriately overfamiliar (it would be a bit like one of my students starting an email to me with "Dude! ...").

The easiest way to deal with it, to my mind, is just to send a fairly normal-sounding (but obviously more formal) email back, and mention it in passing in a friendly way at the end. For example:

  Dear <name>,

  Many thanks for your email - really glad to hear that you've been
  learning a lot from the course. It's been good to see the improvements
  in your essay structure since the start of the course - I'm hoping
  that you'll be able to solidify those improvements over the next 8
  weeks.

  Kind regards,

  <name>

  p.s. Just a friendly piece of advice - whilst I'm not generally too
  fussy about people addressing me formally, I think I should probably
  steer you away from things like "my dear lass", not least because some
  people if addressed that way might take it the wrong way and get
  offended. I'm fine with people calling me by my first name (if the OP
  actually is), but I think that's stretching things too far.


How to deal with potential data falsification? TL;DR

We cannot reproduce very good simulation results of our paper and the person who was responsible for writing the code and running the simulations does not have the code anymore and cannot explain how the results were obtained. How should we deal with potential data falsification?

Long version

I co-authored a paper that included some Monte Carlo simulations. One of the coauthors was responsible for the simulations, allegedly wrote the code and gave us the results of the simulations. Later on, I wanted to reuse the code for another project. He reluctantly sent me the code after a long delay. However, the code did not generate the results that we reported in the paper. He said that he lost the code that he used to generate the results of the paper. The code that he sent me is some code that he used at some point of writing the code for the paper, but might not be the final one. He could not explain how the results of the paper were obtained.

We were also working on another project with the same person. He was also responsible for simulations of that project. He again lost the code and could not explain how the results were obtained. The paper of the second project was rejected by the journal and we are going to be able to rerun the simulations and report the correct results.

I suspect that this person just falsified the results.

We are thinking about removing this person from the project and removing this person from the list of authors when we resubmit that paper. Even though the person cannot explain how the results were obtain, there is still a chance that he somehow made some mistake that led to very good results. However, I think it is unlikely. Removing this person from the list of the authors would probably affect his career in a bad way so I would not want to do that without enough evidence. However, I do not think that we can continue working with this person because he lost our trust.

What should we do? How should we deal with this potential data falsification by a coauthor?

In science, a lack of reproducibility leaves you all on the hook. But, I would probably recommend getting a third expert in Monte Carlo to review the code. I'll assume this is you.
First, it can be the case that a small change in code makes big differences, permutation testing for instance can do this. But, you can run the simulation lots of times, look at the results, and find what quintile the original results are in. This corresponds to a p value for falsification, or as I will call it: a possible mistake.
Nonetheless, Monte Carlo is not very complicated, and in the paper regardless you will have to explain how the answers were obtained. If you cannot do this, you cannot push paper into community. So, inspect, conclude, rework.
For their sake, I hope falsification is not the case. That's a very very ugly way to go about research, and it will crop up.


Advisable to visit other labs? Is it advisable to do a short (2-3months) visit to a different lab at a different university while doing a PhD? I would think that it would be good for setting up collaborations, but would a PhD supervisor be against this due to the time that would be lost doing so?

I am actually currently just preparing for such a collaboration/internship/exchange (leaving after summer). From day 1 of my PhD (both) my supervisors said that we should definitely look for such an opportunity during my second year.
Both of my supervisor think it is not a bad idea, moreover, they both think it is something very important given several restrictions:

that you do it around the middle of your PhD.
This is important because in the beginning, you're still new to the topic and trying to get a grip on everything important. You can not "give" almost anything back to the lab you are visiting, so it is not a fair exchange.

the project (3 months in my case), is something directly related to my PhD
Not just "has similarities", but maybe a sub-problem of the research direction I am currently on anyway due to my PhD. It is also important (mostly, for the grants), that it is something that the target laboratory is better suited for/equipped/has more experts than your own institution.

that it is around 3-4 months
The point is, much shorter than that, and it becomes a purely social / networking visit where you can possibly present your research in person and have other people present theirs, but not much more. On the other hand, more than 4 months will indeed be too long, as I am not expected to spend much more than that on a single idea even when I am working in my lab.

So, these were the restrictions. The benefits, however, are much more numerous:

obviously, networking. Especially if you plan to stay in academia, developing your own network of contacts as soon as possible is very important.
exchanging ideas. In addition to papers, presenting your own (and your labs) work in person is another way to disseminate ideas. Also, being exposed to different people, different approaches and different ideas might just jog some clogs that would otherwise take much longer to click in place.
strengthening the collaboration (between the participating laboratories): in a sense, you became an "ambassador" from your own institution to the host institution. A successful internship will be good for you, but it can also hold a lot of benefits for both institutions (that includes your supervisors) as if it goes well, they will be more likely to collaborate (more) in the future.
international experience. Where I am (France), people who plan to stay in academia and reach a permanent position are more than strongly encouraged to have an international experience. Basically, at least a few months internship abroad is a must for a permanent position, a year-long post-doc position or two abroad are much better. It is not a requirement, but always a person with international experience will get picked over the person with none.
both of these boil down to: post-doc. If is not unheard of that such an internship might actually be "vetting" the place for a post-doc. And this goes both ways: your host institution/professor sees if he likes working with you, and you see if you like it there.
specific benefit of the hosting lab. I have mentioned that there is many benefits of generally working in a different research environment and with different people for a while. But, specifically, there might be equipment, or test data, or an expert in the hosting lab that you just do not have in your institution.
diversity experience. If you have decided to stay in academia only on the basis of your PhD environment (as I have), you might not see the whole picture yet. Seeing different research labs, different environments, can only be a benefit.
publication While 3 months is not always enough to make a publication, you do want to get the most of the internship. Thus, most people get a publication out of it because they put a little bit extra effort (maybe not even consciously). And, your new publication will have a name of somebody other than your supervisor on it, which speaks to your ability to be able to work with different people successfully.

Now, of course, funding might be one obstacle. But other than that, if adequate funding is found, I see no reason for supervisors to object to such an idea.


Whom to suggest to publisher for endorsement of my book? I've submitted the final manuscript for a book with a reputed social science publisher. My publisher wants a list of people who might be willing to provide endorsement for the book.

Whom should I suggest? In particular, is it appropriate to suggest people I've been working with, for example my supervisors? On the one hand, they would not be neutral, but on the other hand, that seems to be precisely the point of an endorsement. Should I approach them myself before suggesting them to my publisher?

I'm not sure what exactly "endorsement" means, but I believe it's about writing one of these "blurbs" that you see on the back of some books. In any case, the purpose is for marketing, not for scientific review.

As publishing has also a commercial side, publishers do want to get their costs paid (and they hope for some profit). So, they want to ensure as good as possible that someone (libraries, institutes, ..) will buy the book. For that you need your endorsements.
There is no problem in taking you supervisors for endorsement. However, I would advise you to personally ask them for their support.
Furthermore, it would be helpful if you find some other people that may to the same - have you been to conferences, spoke with people - do you built up a personal network with other peers? If so, ask them. They should be well known people in the subject you are publishing, of course. Reputation sells.


Can I apply for a post-doc in theoretical physics without publications? I am a theoretical physics PhD student from France. I have no papers after 5 years of my PhD. The problem I am working on has hit many road blocks and even my supervisor has no clue how to proceed. The results I have obtained are valid only for some aspects of my problem. So I could probably publish a paper, but if I do, it will not be a high impact factor journal.

My question is: can I apply for a post-doc without publishing any paper from my PhD?

I would like to apply in North America/Europe etc.

You could apply to a post-doc without a high-school degree -- an application only involves sending in the application package. No one is going to stop you from mailing it in.

That says nothing about whether or not you will get the post-doc, let alone if the secretary will just toss it in the recycling bin before it even gets seen by the faculty.

The real questions are:

What are the eligibility requirements of a post-doc?
How competitive is the post-doc?

For the first question, most post-docs require a PhD in hand or late-ABD status. Most do not require publications and if they do, they will state that clearly on the application page.

The second question is the real question. Post-docs are usually extremely competitive. In order to be a finalist, you have to be n+1 of whatever quality and quantity the faculty is looking for.

If your peer group has no publications (0) and you have 1 publication, you will stand out as the +1. Since it's not possible to have -1 publications, it's hard to stand out from a group  with 0 publications to your name. If your peers have 10 publications, you need to have either more in number or more in quality, or something else that your competitors don't have.

For example, some post-docs in some fields value other things than research publications. I occasionally read for post-docs in the humanities and there the quality of your dissertation and proposal is more important as most post-docs in those fields apparently have zero or near zero publications at the ABD stage.

And finally, there are some post-docs that just aren't very competitive -- either because of geography or topic or paucity of funding or other reasons.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the social/human factor. Many people get post-docs on the strength of their recommendation letters, as Pete Clark mentions. Strong recommendations attesting to your brilliance and to the problems you faced with your current project would go far in convincing a postdoc committee to take a chance with you. You could also try to ask your supervisor to use some of her/his social capital to try to persuade a colleague at another university to take you on.

Your mileage may vary.


Phrasing for one current fellowship and one previous fellowship I'm receiving support from Fellowship X, and previously I received support from Fellowship Y. I want to write on my website

  I am fortunate to be supported by Fellowship X. Previously, I was supported by Fellowship Y.

But it might seem that I'm not grateful for Y. If I write

  I am fortunate to be supported by Fellowship X and Y.

it is not accurate, because I'm no longer supported by Y. Is there an elegant way to phrase this?

You don't need to wax about how grateful you are if you're just providing information---note that that can also come across as bragging.

Just keep it simple and to the facts:

  I am currently supported by X (20XX-present), and was also previously supported by Y (20YY-20ZZ).


What is a good ratio of "What I want to research" vs. "My experience that shows I can research" in a Statement of purpose? I am composing my statement of purpose for U.S. Graduate schools in Mathematics and am struggling to determine the proper balance of what my research plans are, and giving background in terms of independent studies, seminars, circumstances, etc. Currently, I have three paragraphs of background not available elsewhere in my application, and one explaining my plans for the future. Is this a good ratio? Should I focus more on expanding my research goals? Or do I need to have less background (One paragraph is explaining a major change)?

A Statement of Purpose isn't a money-back contract stating exactly what you're going to do.  It's okay if you end up doing something different from what you imagine and write about in your admission essay.

Background information about yourself should be included as needed, so the reader can understand your account of what has been especially meaningful to you so far, and your personal motivation to go to the next level with your studies.  You don't need to write a complete catalog of everything you've done.  But do include relevant bits so that your essay hangs together as a projective story.

The admission essay is a place where you can show some inspiration.


Should a translated thesis get a new DOI? Assuming the original thesis received a DOI to begin with, would it make sense to obtain a new DOI for your own translation of your own thesis, otherwise leaving the content as is, if you published the translation on a preprint server?

A translation of a book gets another ISBN than the original one:

  Each different language edition of a book will need its own ISBN.

Source

The same holds true for electronic books.

Regarding your thesis, you should follow this rule for the assignment of DOIs as well. A translation is always a new publication, especially if you publish the translation seperately/delayed on a pre-print server.

Think about it this way: Another translator might also produce a translation of your work. That one would differ from yours because translations depend on the translators. Each translation should have its own DOI to differenciate between them.

You should refer on the title page of the translation or on an extra page the original thesis (DOI) and mention that this ist a translation where you are the translator.

Additionally, Crossref, a DOI registration agency, explicitely states how to relate the DOI of the translation to the DOI of the original work in the metadata deposited along with the DOI:

  isTranslationOf

Source


Published paper not showing up on google scholar I have a paper that I uploaded to arXiv and google scholar listed it as a publication.

Since then the paper has been published in a nature journal several months ago.

The nature publication still hasn't showed up on my scholar profile, which still lists the arXiv version.

Is there any way to resolve this conflict?

In a blog post, Claus Wilke describes a bug with Google Scholar where it does not update pre-prints once the article has been publsheed. He notes that:

  The bug exists
  The Scholar team is aware of it
  They don’t know how to fix it
  They don’t think it’s a particularly pressing problem
  For any given paper, the problem will go away eventually, after several months or more

The other answer by cirne recommends that you upload your own citation. This will update your Scholar Profile but not Google Scholar. Thus, your profile will be correct, but others cannot search Google Scholar to find your papers.


Should I invest more time on old problems or new problems? I am PhD works in theory of computational maths. I am currently after my mid stage. I have written and submitted two papers ( one paper per year) and currently working on one and these days I am full of ideas, but the problem is to publish a high quality research. Please note that I don't work in a team due lack of people which I am the only who is working most of the time. Here are few questions

If the submitted paper gets rejected, should I work on them more or should just publish them in some low tier journal? Now I am more mature to picking new research problem which seems to me more significant then previous one, so to me it appears that I should invest more time in new problems
If I publish ( low tier) the submitted paper with one more than I can claim my PhD, but that work seems to me less significant. So I will get my PhD early but less quality research. I am not even sure with a longer PhD I will be surely able to publish in top conferences.

The one more problem is I have now problems as well as ideas but energy is low and also workforce is not there. What to do?

My Bayesian advice is to go with the lower prestige journals and move on. Quantity has a quality of its own.  Plus you learn more as you go on.  Don't get snarled up in reviewer, editor debates.  Keep publishing, keep producing.  The quality will come.
BUT also, I would work on your clarity in written communication (using this question as evidence).  That often holds back a borderline paper or allows one to move through.


Does pure math have an application in communications engineering? I am a communications engineering undergraduate, and I was thinking of studying pure math courses will this help me later on in graduate school, and if it will help what courses of pure math will be related to my major?

I'm in a similar situation to you. I'm finishing my masters in digital communications and doing my thesis right now. Math is an issue for me definitely.

In my experience, a bit more complicated math is helpful if you're going to be developing systems that do statistical signal processing (which seems to be very popular now) and anything that has "smart" in its name.

What exactly do you need depends on what you want to study in detail. It might be a good idea to first dip your toes in the fields you want to be working with first and the pick math courses you want to take. You could try looking at some books or papers about say adaptive filters or modern receivers or estimation theory. This should give you an idea what's usually needed. If you're lucky enough to have approchable professors, do ask them about what will be useful to you.


Will a masters degree from Japan be seen as less valuable? I'm a canadian engineering  undergraduate student in the field of robotics and I'm considering doing a masters degree in Japan when I finish my bachelors.

I've talked about this with my internship supervisor (a well known professor in my subfield) and he claimed that research in Japan is usually seen as less relevant because (his words) :

  they tend to stay isolated from the worldwide community and ignore
  new developpements from other researchers.

I'd really like to study in Japan as I have a great interest in their culture and also because popular culture suggests that Japan is one of the leading countries in the field of robotics (This might be wrong).

However, I would also like my future masters degree to not be seen as second rate.

Will a masters degree in Japan be seen as less valuable? and if so, how would it impact my future career?

I think your decision should be based on future aspirations. Specifically, you need to decide if you are heading into industry or academia when you complete your studies. If you are going into industry, companies want people who know their stuff and can actually do something. It is the application of theory through making it tangible and not necessarily the knowledge of theory that is most valued. Studying in Japan should not injury you in this regard. Having overseas experience is yet another benefit to many companies seeking employees, especially in a country that is a leader in this field.

If you decide to go into academia the advice of your professor is probably wisest to abide by. Exceptions to this would be if you choose to stay in Japan, which would not hurt with a Japanese degree or if you complete a PhD somewhere, which would help to overcome a master degree that some may see as "second rate."Explaining your reason for going to Japan in the admission process should mollify many PhD admission committees