Doing a PhD at a famous football school: how can I ask for time off to attend games? Consider a famous football school in the U.S., for example Penn State, Michigan, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Auburn, and Ohio State.
I am doing a PhD in a STEM field at one of these schools, and on 6 or 7 Saturdays of the semester, there is a home game for the football team, and I'd like to attend the game and be a part of the tradition.  It's likely an all-day affair, pre-game, going to the game, and more festivities after the game.
My research advisor isn't into sports — at all.  And the expectation is that we're doing work on these Saturdays, while our football stadium nearby is filled with 80,000 or so fans cheering on our team.
Would it be reasonable to ask my advisor for Saturdays off, so that I can participate in our school's football tradition?
How could I go about saying this to him, without upsetting him, or coming off as "unfocused"?
Clarification: Plenty of communication takes place on weekends. My advisor is very intense, micromanages almost, but that style suits me well, and I find his dedication really admirable. But I don't want to miss out on football either; I'm not in graduate school for very long.

It’s a tricky situation and you will want to filter any advice given here (including mine offered below) through your own understanding of the details of the situation and the personalities involved.
That being said, my tentative guess as to the best strategy for handling it is to do two things:

Don’t mention to your advisor your football game attendance plans. It’s your private business what you do on weekends. Simply go about your private business as a normal person does. (And for heavens’ sake don’t “ask for Saturdays off”. You don’t ask for what is rightfully yours.*) Any work can wait until after game day festivities are over. You’re a grad student not an indentured servant.

Work hard and be productive and responsive to your advisor during normal work hours/days (including non-game weekend days if you feel like doing work on those days).

If you do the combination of those two things, I suspect (but cannot be certain) you’ll be fine and your advisor will be completely happy with you, perhaps after an initial adjustment period where you might have to deflect some questions from him about why you didn’t answer some email right away on a Saturday. If that happens you can just say you were busy, had an event to go to, or, if sufficient trust has had time to develop between the two of you, simply tell him the truth (but make sure to state this as a statement of fact, not a request for permission or validation, and not stated in an apologetic tone where you volunteer unnecessary details about why you want to attend football games as you sort of did here).
*
If this is a problem, I’m sorry to have to tell you but you’re in an abusive relationship and you likely should be expecting much bigger problems in your relationship with your advisor than a conflict over attending football games.


How do I response "accept (minor edits)" without suggestions? (IEEE ACCESS) I just received a decision letter from IEEE ACCESS. The recommendation of reviewer1 is "Accept (minor edits)" and the recommendation of reviewer2 is "Reject (update and resubmit encouraged)".

While reviewer1 did not give any suggestions need to be revised. Did I need to respond to him in the "response document"?

Thank you.

It is likely that the first reviewer was referring to minor issues of language and presentation, even spelling, typos, etc. Give the paper a careful read looking for issues and correct them. If you do this, it is unlikely that you really need a direct response to that reviewer, other than thanks. Many reviewers don't want to take on the role of "copy editors" and so will just point to that things can be improved without giving detail.

If your first language is other than the language of the paper, then it might be good to have a colleague make some comments on presentation - someone who is fluent in the language in question.

The other reviewer needs to be taken seriously, of course, and your acceptance will depend on how you respond, primarily in your edits of the paper. But that is the usual situation, of course.


Authorship for insightful suggestion during a talk? I gave a talk a few months ago, and one member of the audience made a particularly insightful suggestion. My advisor and I are still working on this topic, and it seems like our research is heading in a direction where his suggestion may end up being incorporated into our work in a fairly significant way. We haven't spoken to him about this work since, but how should we deal with this? Should he be an author, or only mentioned in the acknowledgments?

You should at least acknowledge the person who made the suggestion.

I would also ask this person if they would be interested in working with you to coauthor the paper.  If the person who made the suggestion is very senior or doesn't work in your area, then they'll likely be happy with the acknowledgement.

However, a suggestion like this, without any further involvement in the writing of the paper isn't by itself sufficient to merit coauthorship under guidelines such as the ICMJE guidelines for authorship.


International Medical student who wants to do a math phd I am a medical student at the number one ranked university in the MENA region (AUB). I have been interested in the mathematics of bio-imaging and a lot of my research deals with this field. I am keenly interested in applying for a mathematics PhD at a top research school in the US after I complete my MD. I am aware I may be an nontraditional applicant, especially that my undergrad preparation was in chemistry. I took all the calculus series courses, along with ODEs, real analysis, linear algebra, and abstract algebra. I scored above 90% in all of the classes, and our institution is known to have considerable grade deflation. Many of these courses I took while in medical school as well, so I had to juggle between a busy medical school curriculum and the additional coursework.

If I hopefully manage to do well on the math subject GRE, would this put me in a good position as an applicant to a PhD program (top 20)? My medical degree will obviously have no value in terms of assessing my readiness, but perhaps it speaks to my work ethic and ability to handle great volumes of work. I am also a US citizen if that makes any difference.

Much of this answer will depend on several variables that are currently not disclosed:

Where is your undergraduate degree from?

Have you taken classes in topology, analytic geometry, complex analysis, numerical analysis, computer programming, etc?

The rigor of the math classes you took during medical school.

A demonstrable capability to succeed in a U.S. top 20 math PhD program while having what would often constitute a minor in math at many universities in the U.S.

Why are you going to medical school, only to switch fields in a sense?

These are my thoughts on each of these points (as someone who has evaluated candidates for admission into graduate programs in mathematics):

If your degree is from a well regarded university in the U.S. or Europe, this will bode better in your favor. If your undergrad degree is from somewhere in the MENA region, your case will be harder. Right or wrong, many Top 20 programs in the U.S. would be hesitant to place great weight or significance on someone earning 90% in Calc II at a university in Morocco.  (I am perhaps overstating the situation here for emphasis).
I will be honest--when I get an application on my desk from the MENA region, especially if they do not have an undergrad degree in math, I tend to not place it on the top of my review stack. Applicants of this sort seem to rarely offer any reason for their attempt at admission beyond stating that they are "interested in math" and want to come to America to study it. (The MENA region is not the only area of the world that does this, mind you).

If you are interested in medical imaging, you will need to have a background in analytic geometry. My current area of research is in...yep...medical imaging from a mathematical standpoint. It is a field that requires abilities in graph theory, analytic geometry, statistics, computer programming (emphasis on computer programming). There would be absolutely no way that I would accept a student who could not program pretty well in an object oriented language (C++, Java, C#). Knowing some Python is usually not enough.

While I have not personally been to medical school, I have several associates who have. I must admit that I am rather dubious that one could take math courses while also succeeding in medical school. Maybe it is possible. I just know that there would have been no way that I could have pursued a second curriculum while I was working on a PhD.

One of my former institutions required (for admission) all of the classes you have listed, plus at least two other classes you have not. Exceptions were very rare. A minor in math was never enough for direct admission to the PhD program. A few exceptions were admitted provisionally (unfunded) to the master's program.

If I saw an applicant with a medical degree applying for a PhD program in mathematics, I would probably question the applicant's motivations (not how motivated they are, but WHY they are applying). A medical degree and a PhD in math are not usually seen in combination with one another (unlike an MBA/JD combo or something). I would question if the applicant had somehow been barred from practicing medicine or something. If you can explain your motivations clearly in an application, this would be wise.

I will say a few closing words on this subject.
Thinking math is "interesting" is likely never going to get you past the gates of a top 20 math program in the U.S. Nor will it be enough to sustain you through the 4 or 5 years it would take to obtain a PhD.
I have no idea what you finances are like, but it may be a wiser move to find actual employment in the medical imaging field with your medical degree itself. Obtaining a medical degree and then a PhD may complicate your ability to be placed in a residency as a physician.
Note that all of this is not to say that you cannot end up at a top 20 math program in the U.S. If you get a very high GRE score, maybe you can climb the wall and actually break in as a rather nontraditional student. Never say never I guess.
Best of luck.


Do two-column format journals publish one column for special cases? Sometimes a paper consists of lots of math equations which are too long so that they will look terrible in a two-column format. I was wondering:

  Is is possible or even reasonable to ask the editor of a two-column journal to publish the whole paper in one column format due to containing lots of long equations?

Yes, you can ask, but you will almost certainly be turned down for such a request, because journals do not normally keep separate templates for single-column layouts. Moreover, at the type used by journals, a two-column format is essential because long lines of text are difficult to process. (Readability studies show that about 65 to 70 characters per line works best.)

That said, many journals do have to deal with long equations, and in such cases they will have equations that cut across both columns, and indicate how the text "flows" around the equation. As Jon Custer's comments indicate, if there are enough such equations in a row, the page in question may be set in a single-column format, before reverting back to two-column format after the "run" of equations is broken up.

As an example of how this looks, here's a page from a paper published in Physical Review D:


Can we use the same picture across multiple chapters of a thesis? I am writing my thesis. In second chapter, I would like to propose a model with a figure. In third chapter, I want to propose a framework which is based on that model. It would be easy for a user to understand the framework if I can have the same figure in chapter three. Is this OK to copy the same figure? Or should I just add reference to the figure in second chapter?

The reason why we have figure numbers (or for that matter, equation numbers) is to ensure that calling these numbered objects becomes easier, you can identify these things with their labels. In fact, if you keep pasting the figure over and over again, whenever it is needed in the text, you will unnecessarily lengthen your thesis, and confuse the reader, who will scroll back to the earlier instance to see what is the difference from what he/she saw there.

Simply identify it by the figure number, and refer to it as Fig. 1.1 (or whatever it is, more generically,

  Fig. \ref{figure_label}

if you are using LaTeX), in all later instances when you feel the need to call it. This befits clarity, conciseness and convention - all three of them.


How do I/should I convince my advisor to let me transfer with her blessings? (I am going to be somewhat vague for identity reasons, but I'll try to include enough information to describe the situation - let me know if anything else is needed!)

I have a strong passion for X (an obscure area of computer science which is not well funded), and did an undergrad thesis on that topic.  I didn't think I would get into any graduate schools if I said I wanted to work on X, so I applied to machine learning since I used a fair bit in my undergrad work on X.  I realized now that this was a mistake, but it's not something I can change at this point.

I have been working for the last two years under my advisor (I started as a PhD in 2017).  So far I've gotten through my quals/coursework, published one paper in machine learning at a top conference with my advisor as my co-author, and published in two workshops on X, with no intersection of machine learning and without the help of my advisor.

Up until two months ago, my advisor was extremely reluctant to let me work on X, as she didn't think it was a good career move and it also wasn't something she personally wanted to work on.  However, I recently got an offer to work on X in industry, and simultaneously learned of two universities where people have funding to work on X and are interested in having me join.  Once I told my advisor about that, she changed her message and said "you can definitely work on X, but it should be through the lens of machine learning and you should only publish in machine learning journals, since that's the only way you'll be successful."

Here's the thing: as someone who has studied X fairly deeply, I am 99% convinced that the way to make progress with X is not through machine learning.  This is based on theoretical concerns, the reality of what methods are currently producing the best results in terms of future promise, and what I believe is a significantly better understanding of the potential value of X than my advisor (who never claimed to know anything about X in the first place).

Obviously there is some truth to her claim that I'd be better off professionally if I submitted to conferences in an area which is very popular; however, I feel like I care about X so much more than machine learning that I'd rather work as a humble programmer on X for industry or even freelance as a programmer and spend my own time on X than get a academic position in machine learning.

I really believe that I should transfer to one of the universities where I can approach X as a problem in its own right, and where I won't be forced to submit to machine learning conferences.  However, my advisor (who is a good person but also very blunt and biased at times) doesn't see why I should, since I can just do X through machine learning.  She hasn't explicitly said that she would deny me the opportunity to transfer, but she hinted that she wouldn't give a good recommendation if I was "unprofessional and left for no reason."  Both universities told me I needed her blessing in order to enroll.

What do I do?

Keep the trust of every party involved. Don't lie! Don't disappoint them. Assume all of them are normal and honest and adult persons.

Ask, if you have a written offer, permission to forward it. Then do it. That might trigger direct interaction between past and future advisors.

Your actual (and soon past) advisor will understand that it is not his/her interest to keep you against your will.

Your relation with your past advisor is not a slave -> master one. Both of you are adults.

From the point of view of your past advisor, you are quitting (or giving up your PhD). That happens many times.

Of course, do respect the usual prior notice.

You want to be respected, and you should respect all others

BTW, notice that if you get (it is hard) some research funding, you can chose its topic. But that observation is even more relevant for your postdoc than for your PhD.

PS. The trivial point is that nobody is working well under constraint. You need passion to work on any PhD


I'm thinking of delaying my graduate school application, but how to tell my recommenders So I've spent the past two months working on my graduate school application essays, and I've recently started to study for the GRE, which I'll be taking on November 6th. In recent weeks I've been feeling as though my application is not a very strong one, especially when it comes to my resume. Because of this I've been thinking of delaying my application for a year so that I can boost my resume through another job or a study abroad type experience. Doing this would also give me ample time to study for the GRE. So instead of applying for the 2018-2019 cycle, I'm looking at 2019 to submit my application. Those are the bare details of it, but my problem is how I should let my recommenders know. I feel that it's wrong to ask them to wait a year, but then again they might appreciate having more time to write (I'm applying to two programs with deadlines in December and January). This isn't something that I've decided to do for sure; it's just something that I'm considering. I'd just rather let my recommenders know in the best way possible and without losing them somehow should I decide to do it.

I appreciate any advice.

Depending on your field, it's quite possible that delaying your application a year would significantly HARM your chances, not boost it as you seem to think. Rather than trying to guess whether your chances are good now, why not apply and see what happens? If you aren't offered any positions, you can always apply again next year, or decide that you prefer another career path.


Typical experiences of transgender people in academia? I've recently come to accept that I'm transgender (MtF, male-to-female).  I won't go into the exact details of this as it's personal, but I have a "girl mode" where I identify as a female.  I'm also a researcher/lecturer at a respectable university.  I'm yet to reveal this side of myself at work, but it's not impossible that my colleagues or students will run into me in girl mode e.g. at the mall.

  Question: What are typical experiences of openly transgender academics?

I'd be particularly interesting in examples of successful academics who are openly transgender.

I know there are both legal protections and university policies which prohibit discrimination based on being transgender, but no policy can make people like you.

(Update: As things developed, I gave an answer to my question below.)

(Original answer March 2015)

I guess it's time to answer my own question.  Not long after posting the original question I began living exclusively as a woman (barring some short family-related interruptions).

I'll list some themes that applied to me that I think would apply generally:

Work interruption: As much as I tried to avoid it, transitioning interrupted my work.  I spent a lot of time learning how to behave, e.g. to minimize the likelihood of being attacked, to know how to react when people ask intrusive questions, and so on.  Medically, you're sent to doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc., who make you jump through all sorts of hoops over a long period of time.  The various surgeries trans people get can take you out of action for weeks to months.
Comments at university: There were some "hiccups" transitioning at university (smart people can make some really dumb comments).  However, they were a drop in the ocean compared to the hate I received from elsewhere.
University accounts: IT were totally unprepared for my transition.  E.g. my request for a Rebecca Stones email was refused and a subsequent email about the matter was ignored.  So my students referred to me by name X but email me under name Y which I found humiliating.
Bathrooms: There were a few surprised looks initially when sharing the ladies room with my female students and other female academics.  I never heard any complaints about it, and it didn't seem to be a big deal.
Applying for jobs: I have noticed no significant difference when applying for academic jobs in my area.
Academic record: It takes time to get your academic history records updated, which makes applying for jobs beforehand awkward.  During this time, I took up an adjunct position where administration requested a record of my PhD; I refused to supply this but indicated that several professors at the university witnessed me obtaining my PhD.  They refused to accept this, which resulted in a prolonged exchange of emails.  Eventually, I cited the university's privacy policy, after which they backed off.
Prior publications: I had to come to terms with having publications under my dead name.  I absolutely hate hearing or seeing that word refer to me.  I had to decide whether or not to include those publications on my CV and cite them in my publications (which could out me as transgender).  For my CV, I include these publications, but I list only the author surnames (I still feel uncomfortable with the thought that whoever reads my CV will Google these publications).  I cite them in my publications, as citing them doesn't directly imply that that name belongs to me.  I'm hoping I can bury these publications in new publications over time.
Travel: As an academic, I travel a lot.  Consequently, I have to keep in mind (a) attitudes towards transgender people when going through immigration (you're not at your most "passable" after a long flight), and (b) local attitudes towards and laws regarding transgender people.  E.g. I want to go to a conference in Chile later in the year, so I Googled "transgender Chile" and upon reading things like "had her face disfigured with a blowtorch" was a bit unsettled.

(Update August 2015)

I attended the conference in Chile (SIGIR 2015) and I'm pleased that my face was not disfigured by a blowtorch.  Here's a photo of the women's support group (I'm in there somewhere):

I'd also like to add:

Travelling can also interfere with (a) access to medicine, (b) access to [non-prejudiced] medical help, (c) other procedures, e.g. hair removal, and (d) the ability to buy clothes that fit.
Sometimes conference accommodation will be organized by gender (with or without the participants' prior knowledge).  This opens the possibility of being humiliated in front of colleagues (e.g. if the accommodation staff have their own opinion on your gender), and the possibility of sharing accommodation with someone who is uncomfortable with you.

Reacquainting with colleagues: I have a lot of international contacts, many of whom are still unaware of my transition.  From my experience, it's much better to meet in person than email someone an explanation (when all sorts of weird ideas about who I am can arise).  This is hard to do when your contacts are spread globally.
Transgender students: Transgender students seem to significantly appreciate that someone employed by the university is transgender.  Having a transgender member of staff goes against the stereotype that it's just undergraduate activists out to cause trouble who are transgender.
Online university resources: From my experience, university LGBT webpages cater almost exclusively to LGB students, with no usable information for transgender people.

(Update August 2015)

Male-dominated area: I'm currently in computer science which is kind of a "boy's club".  Outside of academia, being in a male-dominated career is sometimes used to discredit transgender women (among other things).  This results in a tug towards more female-friendly career paths, both outside of academia (e.g. nursing) and inside of academia (e.g. biology).
Female role models: It has become important to me to see and interact with successful female academics, especially those in my area.  (I was very encouraged by the healthy female presence at the SIGIR conference.)  Interestingly, it seems that I'm meant to be a female role model nowadays.
Female co-authors: I'm not sure if this is just a co-incidence, but I've recently found myself with a rapidly growing number of female co-authors.
International lifestyle: I'm currently a postdoc in China.  While I speak enough Chinese to "get by", and while my colleagues here are friendly, I feel isolated and lonely, and this is exacerbated by the lack of access to a transgender community.  (See also this question: Is feeling lonely and uncomfortable in my (foreign) country of study a valid reason to drop out of a PhD?)
Unwelcome attention towards my gender: Generally, I don't mind if people know that I'm transgender, as long as (a) this is not the only thing about me they consider and (b) they are not mean to me or my friends and colleagues as a result.  Thus far, to my knowledge, unwelcome attention has been negligible at university.  However, it's unclear if this trend will continue (after all, we only need a one-in-a-thousand to cause trouble).  Things I'm concerned about:

Maybe some transgender person somewhere does something evil, making headlines.  How would a university react to the resultant anti-transgender backlash?
What if a student makes a complaint because of my gender?  What if the student is well-prepared, having extensively read online anti-transgender literature?  What if the student makes a religious objection?
If I become successful and notable, hate material will probably be written directly about me.  Here are some examples (and it doesn't take much Googling to provide more examples):

  Boylan, a member of the all-male, all-white, all-heterosexual, all-middle-aged transgender leadership... (ref.)

  "Lynn" Conway, computer geek and head honcho of the raging autogynephiliacs who tried to destroy Michael Bailey. (ref.)

  Deirdre McCloskey isn’t a woman: wishing can’t make it so, not even wishing and flashing scalpels. Neither is Joan Roughgarden. (ref.)

Unwelcome attention from men: After meals, I like to go for a walk to get some exercise.  Consequently, I have now had three four unwelcome sexual encounters within walking distance from my office, during the day, and with other people around at the time.  I also had a male staff member in another faculty ask for "random sex".  I'm afraid to tell others about these incidents, fearing they might think I encouraged them (esp. if they attribute it to being transgender).  I also simply don't have time to waste sobbing about each one; they're much too frequent.

(In today's encounter, an elderly gentleman approached me and asked for the time.  I found my phone and gave him the time.  I also discovered his penis was hanging out of his pants.  He indicated towards some nearby bushes and said "gēn wǒ péngyou wáer", which translates to "play with my friend".  I walked straight back to the office, nearly in tears.  It's thirty minutes after the incident now, and I need to discuss a paper with a student.)
Paper cited during talk: Recently, one of my co-authors referenced our joint paper at a conference talk while I was in the audience.  I was not impressed that my dead name initials were on display, forcing me to sit there with that on the screen for all to see, and I was quite fearful that someone might ask if there was a connection between the two names.  If I had known that was going to happen, I would not have attended the talk.

(Update February 2017)

Surgery: I'm not sure if I should say this, but I ended up having "bottom surgery" back at the end of 2015.  It was the most physically painful experience of my life, by a long way, and the pain didn't go away until about two and a half months later.  So much pain.  During this time, my spoons were limited.  E.g. I'd go to the office to prove I still work there (I mostly just stared at the walls), and I'd need to spend the next day recovering.  I would bleed a lot, and this resulted in some additional accommodation expenses.  I would not be able to stand for longer than around 5 minutes without it being too painful (requiring a wheelchair at the airport).

I managed to go to the 2015 CMS meeting shortly after surgery, where Yuval Filmus (who I knew through math.SE) sat next to me just after surgery, although I don't know if he realized any of this.  (And I remember being a bit snippy with David Pike.)

The painkillers caused hallucinations, e.g. I'd be walking and suddenly "There's no floor! I'm falling!! Oh wait, there is a floor."  I became afraid of stairs.  This was happening while I was at work, although I tried to conceal it.  I also sent out a few "interesting" emails.

More than a year later, I have no regrets about having surgery.  It has resulted in me having a lot more confidence.  If someone denies my gender, they are simply being unreasonable (although, nobody ever does).  I'm now far less afraid that someone is going to find out about my past.
Bodily maintenance (dilation) is both time-consuming and painful, particularly at the start.  It's embarrassing but it nevertheless must be done, including while sharing accommodation with other women.  I got used to making "chit chat" while doing this.  Airport security sometimes inspect your dilators (which need to be in carry-on baggage) which can be embarrassing and worrisome (esp. when travelling through non-transgender-friendly countries).
Conversion to Islam: Perhaps contrary to popular expectations, Islam is a relatively transgender-friendly religion.  Often the attitude is that someone's gender is innate and decided by God, and being transgender is considered along the lines of a birth defect.  Of course, being Muslim results in its own complications (e.g. hijab).  I haven't had any problems praying in the female prayer areas (including on-campus ones).
A publication about transgenderism: Perhaps this is not a typical experience, but I published a paper about transgender bathrooms usage (here), which was mentioned in the Washington Post.


Responding to reviewer comment One of my research articles was in review and the reviewer has given a comment which is as follows:

  "Thus this paper provides some useful information on the most appropriate approach to use when dealing with prediction, even if reported results are related to just one dataset, and the
  authors haven't provided any comment on the extension of the reported
  results to other similar cases."

A brief about my work is that I used a dataset from the industry that I am working and developed a model for a prediction problem. There is only a single dataset that the company has. In this work, multiple methods were tried including the conventional ones.
How do I respond to this comment? Can I tell that this is one of the possible future work that can be done?

You could try and mention, explicitly, that further applications are the subject of further research - but in a similar paper that I had published (with a similar comment from a reviewer), I provided a couple of specific examples of other similar applications where the model could be applied.

A colleague noted that this made it a bit more likely that the paper would be cited, due to other authors relating to the comment relating to potential further work.


How to improve the quality and visibility of research? This might sound like quite a basic question, but the answer has eluded me for the past couple of years. I'm from a computer science background, but the question is probably relevant outside this discipline.

Please forgive if my register for the rest of this question is quite frank. I'm coming to academia stack exchange instead of colleagues in order to talk about this matter candidly. I'm also sorry if the question is a bit long-winded, but I think it might be necessary to get past the stock answers.

The edict of "publish or perish" is a standard rejoinder, and beyond that the onus is for works published to be highly visibility, and of good quality. What this actually means is debatable though.

Most research cannot be reproduced, provides no code, and in practical terms is only useful for the purposes of citing (e.g. X et al. tried method B and got results F, but we don't have access to that data set, they don't say if they tried other, simpler methods, and what results they got, if they did indeed try these methods). Very often complexity seems to be pursued for the sake of complexity, whereby approaches are obfuscated with roughly annotated formulae written in Greek, standard methodologies that everyone knows are superfluously provided (and explained badly), and really convoluted approaches are adopted and are to taken as so, by the reader (an example would be a Bi-directional 5 layer CNN-LSTM-CNN-LSTM-LSTM for an NLP task with an explanation of "this obtained the best results"). Actually useful research material... blog posts, how-to guides, stack overflow answers, discussion group records, are all of zero academic merit.

I find myself trying to ape the aforementioned papers, but I am struggling to make them complex enough (certainly from a visual point of view). So the content itself is a challenge, because content has to be original, and the main way people appear to be guaranteeing their originality is by heaping one complex method upon another. Maybe if you are part of a big team this is feasible, but I'm just one person essentially working by myself.

Which brings me to the second aspect: visibility. There is such a baffling array of conferences and journals. Some of them are bogus, and one can filter those out. There are a couple of "top" conferences that everyone flocks to, which consequently makes acceptance a crap-shoot (if they accept 200, and 3,000 apply, you are likely going to have a lot of "good" material not make the cut simply due to the numbers game). All the rest (hundreds, if not thousands of peer reviewed conferences etc.) are really difficult to measure. Look up the ranking of a conference on one site and it's B1, and on another site, it's C. There is not only an opportunity cost here, but a temporal one - having anything submitted and accepted takes several months, and making the wrong decision can be costly on both fronts.

So the standard advise of "publish good work through peer-reviewed avenues" is only half the answer, but I'm unsure how to make my papers more liable to be the ones that are cited.

Sorry if this post comes off as cynical, it's simply trying to be both realistic and practical. I feel as if there's an approach that should be obvious to me to pursue, but at the moment it seems that I am missing out on the vital ingredient to turn from meh to Michelin.

How to improve the quality and visibility of research?

I think this is a very relevant question, but also a very broad one. Clearly there is no simple answer, so I will try to give a few general directions. Also I think it makes sense to distinguish between the field-specific aspects and the more general aspects across academic fields.

Reproducibility in Natural Language Processing (NLP)

I happen to work in this field as well and I can relate to the problems described by OP. The field has a quite serious problem with reproducibility: this is mostly due to NLP being a very experimental domain, where experiments often involve a lot of complex parameters and where data is extremely diverse by nature. Additionally there's no strong incentive for strict reproducibility protocols in NLP, as opposed to other domains where mistakes are not an option (e.g. health or security).

Still, the community is aware of the issue and has been trying to address it for some time:

There's now a well established tradition of "shared tasks", scientific competitions meant to (1) provide benchmark datasets and (2) compare different approaches in a uniform way.
While still not the general rule, it's becoming the norm to not only publish a paper but also the code and/or data used for the experiment. Conferences have been encouraging this for a few years now by allowing the submission of supplementary material.
Through various other initiatives: proposing a specific category for reproducibility papers, building a repository of language resources, etc.

Of course technical results ("new model X improves performance by Y%") are the bread and butter of conferences, but my impression is that the best papers acknowledged by the community (e.g. best papers awards at conferences) are rarely pure technical papers, original ideas and insights tend to be valued more (but this might be a subjective perception based on my limited experience).

Visibility and academic reputation

  blog posts, how-to guides, stack overflow answers, discussion group records, are all of zero academic merit.

This is not completely true, because:

Building a reputation through various means can help your research get cited
Outreach and communication towards non-academic publics is increasingly encouraged (see for instance the growing trend of citizen science projects)

However it's true that these activities (unless very successful) are usually less valued than the good old publication record. Unfortunately at many levels research and researchers are evaluated against simplified indicator (publications, citations, h-index...), despite the obvious biases in this. Note that most researchers are aware that publications are not necessarily synonymous for research quality, but funding bodies are happy to use this kind of performance indicators.

My personal publication strategy is along the following lines:

Target top conferences/journals for any (potentially) significant contribution.
Target reputable specialized workshops or small conferences for prospective ideas, work in progress and other kinds of moderately significant contributions. It adds a modest line to my publication record, but more importantly this way I can meet and see what the community is doing on a specific topic.

Caution: I don't have a particularly successful academic career myself, so don't assume that my advice is good ;)


Am I being taken advantage of by working on a committee member's research with no payoff? I am currently pursuing a Master's degree in Computer Science which requires me to have three members on my graduate committee.

Last August one of the committee members asked me to work on a project for him as part of my graduate work. However, the work was not enough for a thesis, I would need to switch from thesis-track to project-track, which I am not interested in doing, and the topic wasn't what I would like to work on full-time for my research.

My major professor suggested I work on the project for a shot at getting a publication under my belt for the work I will have done. Because of this I accepted the proposal and put a ton of time into the project on top of my research and course load. Recently, the research was funded and a poster was made to present the research. Lo and behold, I was not listed as an author on the poster with the professors despite my countless hours slaving away.

There have been no publications yet, so I don't know if I will be listed as an author on the actual paper but, being new to this, I would like to be sure I'm not being taken advantage of. I've got enough things to take care of outside of the project and was expecting some sort of payoff if the research had gotten this far.

Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the opportunity. I'm still assisting with the research and would like to continue to assist the professor with hopes of at least getting a good letter of recommendation for a PhD program but, if the general opinion is I'm being taken advantage of I would like to know to perhaps confront the faculty member.

Yes, you should discuss the issue of authorship. From this description, we can't tell you whether or not you are being taken advantage of. In general, whether authorship is appropriate depends on the intellectual content of your contribution.

To discuss the issue, start by saying "I'd like to discuss the issue of authorship on this project." If you'd like to be direct, you could then say, "I have committed a lot of time to this project. I am under the impression that my work is substantial enough that I might qualify as an author on papers arising out of this project. Under what circumstances would you consider including me as an author?"

If you'd like to be less direct, you could instead ask several questions about your committee members' philosophy on authorship. "What sort of contributions do you believe qualify for authorship on a project like the one we are working on together?"

If you don't like the answer (the person refuses to make you an author), then you need to set some boundaries in a professional manner. "I'd like to continue to contribute to this project. However, since there is not a possibility of authorship here, I am sure that you understand I need to prioritize my other work. Going forward, I can commit to X. If you need more help than this, I think we should revisit ways I could be compensated or qualify as an author."


Weird changes to status of paper Last november I submitted a paper to a journal. I have been tracking the status of the review rather regularly (quite obsessively actually) and I have noticed that 3 weeks ago it went from awaiting AE decision back to reviewer assignment. After a couple of days, it went to reviewer selection. Now, it has gone back to reviewer assignment yet again.

I find this quite curious and if anyone has any idea what could be going on, please share it here! I suspect there's a conflict of opinion initially and then the third reviewer rejected reviewing so now they are back to finding a third reviewer? Any help is appreciated.

Nobody except the editor in charge of the paper can possibly know. We can all -- and you can -- speculate what the editor may have been doing, but none of us will actually know. If you must know what is going on, write to the editor. If you are only curious but do not need to know, then practice patience and wait for the outcome.


"1 year with possibility of extension" - what does this mean? When looking at adverts for postdoc positions, I often see examples from the US that say something like "the position is for one year, with the possibility of extension for another 1-2 years".

Literally, and contractually, the meaning of this is obvious, but I am interested in guidance as to whether it consistently means anything in practice.

For example, I can imagine that it could mean "I only have funding for one year, and I'm hoping the successful applicant will find themselves funding to stay longer". But I can equally imagine that it is "I have funding for three years of a postdoc, but I want to see if I like them before committing".

Is there a "usual" subtext? Or is it not possible to read anything into this?

When considering an intercontinental relocation, it would be helpful to have some idea of how likely the longer duration is!

It's in a scientific field, in case that's relevant.

I'd probably read it this way:

  I have funding for one year for sure, and hopefully for additional years, but it might depend on the success of future grant proposals, so I can't make any promises.  But assuming that my funding is successful, and the postdoc is continuing to do a good job, I'd be happy to keep them for 2-3 years.

In some cases, postdocs might be funded by "hard money" coming from within the university; this is common in math, and such positions often have names like "Famous Person Assistant Professor".  In this case, funding can be assumed to continue (barring a financial catastrophe for the university) and it means more like "2-3 years assuming you do a good job".


Self-plagiarism and citation when working on 2 papers simultaneously Say you're working on two papers A and B simultaneously, and the content and topic of the papers partially overlap such that normally you would be required to cite paper A in paper B. But since both papers are being written simultaneously how do prevent self-plagiarism?

Should you cite paper B in paper A and vice versa, even though neither is published yet?

Yes, I would cite paper A in paper B, and I would cite paper B in paper A. Initially the citation would be something like “in submission” with a URL for the referees. As both papers work through the pipeline, that citation would evolve into either a refereed publication venue if possible, or a preprint server if not, to ensure that future readers can follow the link.

On the other hand, I would also write both papers from scratch, without sharing text between them, because (in my experience) that leads to better-written papers. So self-plagiarism isn’t an issue.


Manuscript review decision I had submitted a Manuscript in a good journal which has given me the reviews as " Accepted for publication pending revisions"? What does this review actually mean? Is it accepted?

FYI, I have created a response letter in which I have given justification for some concerns and also made the changes that were asked to be made in the figures.

Can anybody please help?

It means exactly what it says:

"Accepted for publication pending revisions".

It's accepted...pending the requested revisions. Essentially, they are going to ask for some changes (usually pretty minor and straightforward) and once those are done to the editor's satisfaction, the paper is accepted.


Is it appropriate to discussed a proposed method in the literature review or in methodology chapter? I need some clarifications on where to put the proposed usability-evaluation method in my thesis. I have tried to improved upon the existing methods and came up with a new one, which will be validated alongside with the existing methods. Is it appropriate to discuss it in literature-review chapter or in research methodology chapter of my PhD thesis?

First of all: There are no global rules or even guidelines as to how theses should be structured and how chapters should be titled. Whatever works in terms of intelligibility is allowed. The only thing that can happen is that your supervisor (or in rare cases, your department) has become fixated on a certain structure and insists on it. But we can hardly answer on this here.

Thus, in your situation, you have several options. The following come to mind:

Include your method in the literature-review chapter, but name that chapter “Methods for X” or similar, not “Literature review”. If the literature review contains things not fitting under that title, think of a better title or make a separate chapter for those things.
Include your method in a new chapter called “A new method for X”.
If your methodology chapter is strictly about how you compare methods, do not include your method there (and give it a better name like “Benchmarks for methods for X”). If it does however cover several different aspects, your method may fit there.

As I already said, whatever works is allowed. Thus the most important things to consider are things like what prior knowledge the reader needs to understand your description of your method, as this should obviously described beforehand. And those are things only somebody very familiar with your thesis can decide.


Can auditing students attend consultation hours? Assume a university allows students to audit classes informally, so they're not enrolled and don't pay, but they attend classes anyway. Obviously, no one has obligation to allow these students to attend anything and therefore doesn't even have the obligation to check their exams and such.

In case this is relevant, my intention is for math classes.

(12 hours ago, I was rejected for a math PhD program, and the professor told me I could audit. I told the professor that 6 months ago I asked the math department if I could, but it said no. The professor told me "Don't ask; just go!" The professor suggested I audit some classes and try to do some of the classwork. I didn't think of many questions about this, but I think I won't go since the commute is 4 hours by train or 70 us dollars by taxi, and I can ask all my questions on stackexchange anyway. Thank God for the Internet)

I don't think students really learn from just attending the classes even if they ask questions in class. Exams of course are great ways to learn, but what I had in mind is asking further questions either during the professor's consultation hours or in further auditing the teaching assistant's tutorial classes.

It sounds like the questions of auditing students in class, tutorial or consultations is taking up time that could instead be used for the registered students, but I think anyone who speaks up is making a contribution by asking something anyone could wonder. Therefore, the professor or teaching assistant could clarify to the rest of the class before anyone else would ask, which actually saves time.

(I don't want to first ask the professor because it might be disrespectful if the answer is a definite no anywhere in the world. If the answer here is maybe/yes/double check with the university/go ahead and ask the professor/"Don't go; just ask", then I will be inclined to ask the professor)

The easiest answer to this would be to simply ask the lecturer. A simple "Hi, I'm auditing this class, is it ok if I drop by your office to ask a few questions during office hours, if you have time?" would probably suffice. If the lecturer doesn't mind, then you're good to go.

I would probably not agree to auditing students attending office hours/tutorials, especially in large classes. Generally speaking, auditing classes is fine, as long as you do not put additional strain on the lecturer/course apparatus. If I start accepting office hours from one auditing student, I'll have to do so from all of them. If my guest students start attending tutorials and take up other students' time from actual registered students, I would probably intervene.

This is me, and other lecturers can have different attitudes towards their auditing students. The best thing to do is to ask.


What would be a good approach to make sure my advisor goes through all the report? As the question suggests, is it ethical for me to check if my supervisor is reading my whole report/paper? If yes, then can I add a line somewhere in the middle of the report to test whether or not he reads it? For example,

  Please highlight this line if you read it.

I know that this may irritate him, but I want to verify that he's reading my work.

I tried to add a deliberate error, a very specific and big error just to check if he would catch it or not and the response I got was: "Seems fine just fix the typos and you are not good at explaining this specific thing..." The major errors were never found, which bothers me, as it proves he hasn't read the entire thing.

What would be a good approach to make sure he goes through all the report?

[UPDATE]

Thanks for all the comments, however most of the answers and comments are actually suggestions for me to write proper English, and does not answer the question originally asked that How should a student make his supervisor go through the whole documents?

Also my scientific writing possess all the quality writing, flow, punctuation and style that a good report should have. I have published in good journals, so i do not think that my report writing skill is bad.

I would strongly recommend against putting a "trick" sentence into a report, because it looks immature and unprofessional. Remember that your advisor is someone who may be writing recommendation letters for you in the future, or helping you find a job. You want to leave a positive impression on him, and you do not want to appear ungrateful for the time and energy he has invested in you so far (even if you wish he would invest more). That can only backfire on you.

You wrote in a comment that your major concern is,

  his all focus is on writing and he never gives me feedback on the main content, which is the primary thing to validate

As a general rule, a good way to get more useful feedback from someone who is very busy is to focus their attention on the specific points you are uncertain about.

For example, when giving your advisor something to read, you can ask him specifically:

I'm not sure about the way I motivated the problem. Can you suggest any changes to that section?
Do you think the assumptions I make at the beginning of Section II are reasonable? Did I do a good job of justifying them?
I'm not completely sure if the results strictly support what I wrote in last paragraph of the Discussion section, what do you think?

By directing your advisor towards your specific questions, you are likely to get much better feedback. (Almost certainly much better than you would get with a passive aggressive approach like putting "trick" sentences into your draft.)

This approach also means that you are taking responsibility for identifying and trying to correct your own weaknesses, which is a very good quality in a student.

Also: if he suggests corrections to the writing of the paper, fix the writing of the paper. Then come back and ask him to read it again, and offer feedback on the contents. Sometimes when the quality of writing in a paper is poor, it becomes very difficult to extract the technical content. It's reasonable for an advisor to ask a student to make a paper readable (by fixing writing issues) before the advisor reads it more thoroughly.


Struggling with Lab Dynamics and Mental Health I am currently pursuing a master's degree and I am one of two students working on one project. This project takes a team science approach to answering a question, which normally one would find invaluable. However, this dynamic has proven to be more of a strain than a benefit. Rather than a healthy partnership, this feels like a competition and I am constantly walking on eggshells around this other person. In theory, we have two separate theses with differing questions and paths, but it is not turning out that way in practice at all. Sometimes she asks questions about topics related to my thesis in her committee meetings (without asking me about it) and she has creative input over parts of the project I am working on while I am excluded from other facets of the work. It is to the point where the faculty see us as a unit. Presentations I have made for class have been skipped over because this other person did a similar things and work I do is often dismissed by partners. It makes me feel like I am not worth the time, to be honest.
Furthermore, due to unfortunate circumstances beyond anyone's control, I was the only out of the two of us capable of doing field work and other tasks this past summer (during a pandemic to boot). This put a huge strain on me in general. I am starting to feel like this other student is getting a free pass (is this feeling even justified?!) They present the work others have done at meetings and get acknowledgements for it. It seems highly inequitable, but all of this is disguised under 'team science'.
Trying to accomodate this other person is putting a huge strain on my mental health. I feel like I can't do anything right, have no creative liberty or ownership, but also no guidance at the same time.
I have not brought up all of these things with my advisor. I don't want to be the one to cause drama, but I am at the end of my rope. I have thought about leaving the program multiple times over the last few months. So with that in mind, some questions:

Am I being overly sensitive? Is this a normal part of graduate studies?

Should I just let this all go and move on enough to get that diploma in hand and call this a wash? How can I deal with the mental load?

Are there any helpful resources for dealing with this kind of thing?

Thank you so much!

Is this a normal part of graduate studies?

No.  Good research management would clearly delineate each person's responsibilities and assign appropriate credit.
However, nothing is normal this year.

Should I just let this all go and move on enough to get that diploma in hand?

The purpose of a masters degree is for you to learn.  Focus on that.  You are not in a competition with other students.

How can I deal with the mental load?

Consult a licensed mental health professional if you feel distressed.


Is it a good idea to dedicate a page to thank people on a personal website? I wondered if it is a good idea to dedicate a whole page on a personal website to thank some people who have been useful/important through an academic career.

It would be something similar to what we can see in the "Acknowledgments section" of a PhD thesis or a book for instance but more general.

That seems like a strange idea. People will wonder why you have made a page like this when nobody else does. And they might think you are just trying to show what a wonderful and grateful person you are.

If I was you, I would just thank people privately or in the acknowledgements sections of publications. Journal articles can have acknowledgements sections as well.

If you really want to express these thanks in a public and long-lasting way, just write one sentence, or a short paragraph, and put that at the bottom of a page on your website that has your academic biography or some paragraphs about your research interests. Then it won't be in the way, and people will easily be able to ignore it. Make it as short as possible, and write it so that it is interesting (or as interesting as possible) even to people who don't know you or the people you are thanking.


Undergrad students grading other undergrads: ethical, professional, or even legal? As an undergraduate, I've been working as a TA in an electronics lab for a while. Recently I have been asked to grade other students' lab reports. I have also done some oral examination, but I guess that's relatively fine, since there you can indeed see if he knows what he's supposed to know.

However, when it comes to grading reports, they may be to some extent copied from other reports, may have data tampered with after the lab so they look correct, and in general are made to look correct through collaboration and some Google copy-paste, it becomes very hard to tell who deserves the grade and who doesn't.

Also, I myself wasn't getting good grades at those reports, and I never could understand what those correcting were expecting from me, so I would be grading on a different basis than they are. In fact, I really can't find much wrong with the reports, so I feel like I'm doing a lousy job (even though any time I express doubt about my judgement I am assured that stuff can't go wrong).

One final detail is that it's a hardware lab, and while I'm not bad at it, I'm headed straight to software, so I probably look at things from a different perspective, not to mention that what's important for me may be quite different.

Considering the above worries, does it seem fair that undergrad students grade the reports of younger undergrads, does it seem professional for those in charge of those groups assign such work to undergrad TAs, and finally, is it even legal for an undergrad to affect another undergraduate's grade by handling grading processes?

It's a fairly common practice at some universities for older undergraduate TAs to grade younger undergraduates' work. My undergrad institution relied heavily on this - it's perfectly legal and ethical SO LONG AS you, the TA, do not discuss one student's grades/work with another student. More generally, a TA in the United States is bound by FERPA as to what is legal or not.

If you're concerned about not knowing what to mark as wrong, consider asking the professor you are grading for for an answer key or an example solution set. They may be unwilling to give this to you outright, but hopefully they will at least walk through an example with you and point out what they're looking for in a fully correct answer.


Alphabetical author list in non-alphabetical journal (A followup for this question)

Say your field's convention is to have alphabetical-ordered author list. What should you do when your work is accepted to a (multidisciplinary) journal in which the convention is to order the author by contribution (e.g. Nature)?

If it's a well-known journal like Nature, then I would follow their convention. Everybody who reads the article will assume that you do.


Is it useful to add excerpts from teaching evaluations in a teaching statement? Is it useful to add excerpts from teaching evaluations in a teaching statement included in a faculty application?

A fair amount of teaching statements seem to contain some, but since excerpts are  typically cherry picked I wonder whether the admission committee cares about them.

Here is an article that surveys how teaching is evaluated in a mathematics faculty search (YMMV in different fields). Based on this, in general, teaching evaluations are valued, even if they are not asked for. This leads me to think that including information from evaluations (e.g. comments but also summarized numerical ratings) is a good practice.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200710/tx071001308p.pdf


Supervisor wants me to add my name on someone else's paper to be published I have a particularly unusual problem that puts me in a bind. I am a first year Masters student at my faculty, and recently my supervisor have pushed me to "update" her previous student's unpublished paper (few years old, so need to find newer papers to cite inside and format it properly for submission), add my name onto it as co-author and publish it to IET. I feel it's unethical, although my supervisor has assured me permission will be obtained from the original author. Feeling uncomfortable with this practice, I delayed doing that paper.

What are the implications if I proceed with it? Would it pose any problems to me in the future? I'm inclined towards not doing it, though, but I want to hear expert opinions on this kind of practice. Thanks.

Publish it. As you mentioned that your supervisor obtained permission from the original author and you will be working/editing it, then I assume its 100% ethical to put your name as coauthor and will be no negative sequences. Indeed, this kind of preparation that your supervisor follows is beneficial for you. At the level of PhD, I got the same task. I converted 3 years old master thesis to conference work and I put my name at second coauthor and the original author was mentioned before the name of the professor in the affiliation! since your supervisor is involved in this task, I assume that he knows what he is doing.


Restart a degree program with a fresh GPA There is a hypothetical situation I've wondered about. When an undergraduate student receives an undesirable class grade, that grade is typically left on their transcript (with the exception of sparing "grade forgiveness" allowances) for the rest of their academic endeavors. Naturally, this allows the student's Grade Point Average to be viewed as a decent reflection of the student's academic aptitude.

It is my understanding that if an undergraduate student leaves a university for some years before finishing their degree program, but returns at a later date, the old class grades will still be on the student's transcript and factored in with the new grades to derive the new GPA for the student. However, this new GPA does not appear to reflect the student's current academic aptitude to me; the student may now have far more experience and skill now than the years before when those old grades were given.

Although I understand that universities typically do not remove select class grades from a transcript, is it common for a university to allow an undergraduate student to simply restart a degree program tabula rasa, with a new blank GPA and no previous class credits?

I'm not sure whether it's common, but my university has a policy like this, called Fresh Start.  A student who returns after an absence of at least five years can have their GPA recalculated, omitting all classes with grades of C− or lower.

As far as I know, they still get to keep credits earned for those classes, and those grades still appear on their transcript; they just aren't included in the GPA calculation.


Writing a journal paper based on work already published in conference paper Im in the Applied Computer Science field (deploying technologies in different areas of society). I published a conference paper last year on one such case study and wanted to reuse this data to create a longer, journal paper about the socio-political realities and broader societal reflections on this work (which was not appropriate for the conference audience).

Im wary of self-plagiarism, so the question is: is it possible to take this same idea and publish it in the journal, if the quotes and participant comments are carried across, does it invalidate my claim to this being unpublished work? (Both SAGE Journals and Elsevier have a journal submission policy that only unpublished writing such as thesis, conference posters etc. can be used for journal writing:
Prior Publication: SAGE Journals

  If a substantial portion of your manuscript has been previously published, your manuscript will generally not be acceptable for publication in a SAGE journal. However, subject to each journal’s policy, there are certain circumstances where material that has been publicly distributed may be considered for publication.

Does rewriting relevant sections that I will be re-using from the conference publication count as a portion from previously published piece?

Similar answers from Academia SO cover some elements of this question, but my question is about the Findings (Participant Interview quotes) being carried over and the other aspects being fresh.

Does conference presentation of preliminary findings conflict with publication?
Using my published work on another paper

Any help with this, or links to resources that help appreciated!

From the SAGE link you provide:

Conference abstracts, posters and presentations
Subject to the journal's policy, manuscripts based on papers that have been presented at conferences may be considered for publication as long as they have not been published and provided that you still retain the rights to the manuscript. The journal editor may review whether the version of your article considered for publication is materially different from the work you presented at a conference and/or whether publication in the journal will enable your article to reach an audience that the conference paper did not previously reach. Prior publication of an abstract or poster presented at a conference will generally not impact the manuscript's eligibility for publication.

A similar policy is enforced by Elsevier (at least AIJ) and IEEE. Prior publication at a conference does not disqualify the content for publication in the journal, but the journal version usually needs to be more detailed or add new information. The standards of a journal are normally higher than those of a conference in terms of completeness of the exposition.
So in general it is fine to extend a conference paper into a journal paper, but you should always check the particular journal's policy, in case it has a different clause that overrides the publisher's policy.
Sometimes, the submission process of the journal specifically asks whether the paper is an extension of a conference paper. Even if it does not, you should make the editor aware of this fact (for example in the cover letter), and cite the conference paper in the journal paper, explaining what the latter adds on top of the former.


Citation in lecture notes? We do citations when we refer to someone else’s papers but what about lecture notes? If I come across someone’s lecture notes which has a different way of presentation of a theorem or some problem and I wish to expose my students to it, how do I make use of it? Can I use the other person’s diagrams or solutions and give them the credit?

There are two questions here:

how to cite?
can (and how) such materials be used?

The first question can be certainly answered. Library Guides from Victoria University has the following example in APA style:

  Ooi, D. (2018). AEB1804: Young People in a Global Community, week 1, session 1 notes [Course Presentation]. Retrieved from https://vucollaborate.vu.edu.au/d2l/le/content/177492/viewContent/2217850/View

This question also deals with citing lecture notes and when to do it. Concrete example for lab manuals and lecture notes.

An important discussion on whether to use citations while preparing your lecture notes can give a perspective on why doing proper citations in lecture notes is a good idea.

However, citing lecture notes has its limitations, since lecture notes are essentially gray literature.

Now, to the second question whether and how you can use them, which is a question of copyright. This question discusses the copyright-issues-free preparation of lecture notes to get you started.

Lecture notes rarely mention a license under which they are published, so you cannot assume they are in the public domain or under a permissive license. You can contact the author of the notes (or the copyright holder, which might be university). This will raise two problems (that theoretically can be resolved):

sometimes it is actually unclear who is a copyright holder for the lecture notes
you rely on the fact that the lecture notes you are trying to use do not infringe copyrights on their own

So, I would suggest the following. Use the material from the lecture notes in a way that will constitute fair use. Citing paragraphs here and there would certainly be fair use while using images and figures might not be, as well as using entire chapters. Use appropriate citations where applicable. Also, consider asking the author of the notes for an explicit permission.

Known assumptions and limitations of this answer:

you do not intend to sell your lecture notes
copyright law is complicated and has its own peculiarities in every country
you intend a fair use (in a common, not legal, sense) and wish to be as fair and copyright-respectful as possible


How to describe a program written by the author? If we build a setup at the lab, we describe it as home-built when we write the paper. What is the correct word to describe a program written by the author? The program has not been published and there is no intention to do so.

"in-house" program is the term I always use myself and see in other people's papers.

In the corporate context, Wikipedia defines it as

  In-house software is a software that is produced by a corporate entity for purpose of using it within the organization.

Here's an example in an academic context

  Energy minimization is done with yammp, an in-house molecular mechanics package.

Here's another example from academia

  All analyses were done with a battery of in-house codes and external analytical tools.

I wouldn't say "in-house" strictly means "the source code is private". I have sometimes seen people use "in-house" to mean "code our own research group wrote and uses, but which we also make available as open-source code". But if I see a sentence in an article like "All analysis was performed using in-house code", and no reference, then I read it as "We used some code we wrote ourselves which we haven't published anywhere", which sounds like what you want.


How much tweaking of figure design (not content) can I postpone until the final figures are requested? I have finished all of my manuscript revisions except for some minor details in the figure.

As I understand it, once the manuscript is accepted, a final draft of high resolution figures will be requested. In the past, I have also had requests to relabel and rearrange subplots.

Does this mean that I can wait until the final draft figures are requested to make minor tweaks, like aligning and sizing fonts and graphical elements? The content will be the same, but I still want to finalize elements such as the font sizes, line widths, title placement and legends.

In the interest of speeding up the process, is it acceptable for to submit revisions with the figures still in draft form?

As a referee, if figures are in a rough shape, I will absolutely call the paper out on that, and demand improvements. This will potentially set the acceptance back by weeks. Unless the figures will take weeks to get right—and in this day, that would usually imply  that more data needs to be collected—then it's better to just do it right the first time.


MS program in Canada with bad undergraduate result I am not sure if this the appropriate place to ask such question. I have very bad undergraduate record with a CGPA of 2.40 which took nearly 6 years to complete. I have never thought to study again after my bachelor. But recently I am kind of desperate to do higher study. I attended for GRE, and  my score was 305 and my IELTS score is 7. I have 5 years of job experience as a software engineer. Is there any chance that I can get admission for MS in any Canadian university? I am kind of desperate to change my career path, I want to be an AI researcher. Is there any hope for me to pursue a masters degree in Canada or any north American country?

I'll be blunt, you have no chance. AI is probably the most competitive field in the world right now, and most applicants have exceptionally strong profiles and still get rejected. At the University of Toronto, most people who get accepted have 3.8+ GPAs, and have at least one publication at NIPS or ICML, on top of extensive research experience.

If you're really deadset on grad school, I'd the following:

1) Apply to course based masters instead of research based masters. These are significantly easier to get into. However, you get no funding usually and are expected to pay your tuition fees and living costs yourself.

2) Apply to a field other than AI, something fairly obscure with little competition. You have 0% of getting into AI.

3) Apply to low tier schools. You're not getting into U of T or UBC in Canada for instance. Maybe try Laurier and schools in that league.

4) Your GRE score is exceptionally poor, fix it. You need to redeem your low GPA somehow. Aim for atleast 164 Quant.


Email Professor asking if I can talk about the research we conduct I attended a networking event and met a distinguished professor at another major university. I am studying to attend graduate school for one of the Ph.D's that the university actually offers, and the professor would like to meet to me about admissions and research. I have been in an undergraduate lab with one of my professors for almost a year now at my university. I want to be respectful and talk about the research I am doing with my professor, but want to ask them first if it is okay to share our purpose.
I know some professors in the past do not encourage their undergraduate research assistants to talk about their work until publication. My professor will not be on campus this week but will be checking their email. I would like to get back to the professor I met soon to set up a meeting time in their office and discuss so does anyone have any advice or a sample emaiL I can follow asking my professor if it is okay to share the work we do in the lab?

Thank you very much.

First, I think you should assume that it is ok to talk to a potential future advisor. No one should forbid you to do this. But you can ask your current advisor if there are elements that should be held back "for now." If there are strong reservations, ask for advice on how answers to questions on the research should be stated. Those questions will come, of course.

One way to deflect questions that you are not comfortable answering is to refer the questioner to your professor for details.

Some things might be sensitive, such as incomplete results or innovative methodology, but it is more likely that the details of such things, rather than their mere existence, that might need to be held in confidence at the current time.

You can set up the meeting with the potential future advisor without hearing back, but keep your own advisor informed about the meeting.

You need to keep two people happy and their interests are a bit different, though not necessarily at odds. But don't neglect your own interest here.

You have a right to advance your own career, of course.


Is supporting Sci-Hub illegal/unacademic? In the classroom, one of the students asked me about Sci-Hub. I answered that I like the idea as I am against the tyranny of publishers. As a fun fact, I added that I have even donated to Sci-Hub.

Then, I received a notice from our department head referring the case to the disciplinary committee since Sci-Hub is illegal and any direct and indirect support of an illegal activity is against the university policy.

Is supporting Sci-Hub illegal / unacademic?

In my view it is foolish to describe Sci-Hub itself as illegal. Acts can be illegal, but not "things" or groups of people. Only activities. While it is true that they may engage in illegal activities, that is not the same thing.

However, if what they do is copyright infringement (very possibly) then you can't participate in that.

However, if you want to upload things for which you hold copyright to Sci-Hub or a similar site then you aren't engaging in any illegal activity, nor is any downloader, provided that you grant an appropriate license.

Countries and other jurisdictions make laws. People (and organizations) can break those laws, but the people themselves, and the organizations do not themselves become illegal.

I think your university is right to open a disciplinary hearing only if you advocate breaking laws to students.

I agree with you that publishers have put a lock on science and culture that is very unfortunate. Especially when copyright no longer seems to expire after a reasonable period, and fair use is losing ground. Publishers are transferring what should be a common good into a private profit making enterprise. They are, IMO, stealing from the public. If you can afford not to give them copyright on things then I encourage it, but the whole system has made it hard for academics to build a reputation otherwise. Long term this tends to make us dumber, not smarter. As they say: Sad.

I'll add an historical note. There was once a valid reason for publishers to want to hold copyright on articles they published. There was a lot of friction (read cost) between an author and a potential reader. As such, since the publisher bore a lot of the cost (not the creation cost, of course), they needed assurance that they could recoup what they spent in making scientific articles available - especially since the material itself had value, but the number of potential readers was small (relatively speaking).

But that world is now long past. Publishing is nearly frictionless now. Publishers can still provide a useful review (done by volunteers) and editing (done by paid professionals) function, but the distribution cost is near zero and borne partly by users in any case (internet fees). Most of the real cost of the creation of publishable material today is borne by the author, by universities and scientific organizations, and by government. Publishers in the old model are an anachronism if not an oxymoron.


How many places one should apply for postdoctoral position I need a suggestion in applying for postdoc position in mathjobs. In general how many places one should apply ? I mean, can my recommendation letter writers get disturbed if I apply for too many places and ask them to send email to too many places ?

Any help/suggestions will be useful.

Thanks in advance.

You should apply all the places where you want to have a job, and no more.  That may sound flip, but there's no magic number; it all depends on how many jobs are the market and what sort job you would accept.


Questions about transcript and PhD admission I recently received an email from a school that I applied to . They told me to resend the transcript since they could not see the grades. The problem is that my transcripts are long and it is easy to get lost. For example, grade in year 1 is in page 1, grade in year 2 is in page 5, grade in year 3 is in page 7. I have explained this to them but for other schools should I anticipate this and send them an email for explanation in advance? Or should I wait until they ask me to do so?
I have another question. On my transcript, there are some pages that are irrelevant and do not give a lot of information. However, I still decided to keep the transcript as it is when submitting the application because the document that contains the transcript says "any alteration to this certificate renders it invalid". Furthermore I do not want to omit any information because it is dishonest according to me. Do you think it is a good choice? As a result of this, the adcom might have trouble understanding the transcript because it is too long and they do not have a lot of time in general.

I think that you should provide your own summary in form of a list, where each entry gives reference to the original translated document page.
And to do so independently of what you have wrote in a CV or other parts of your application. I mean make the summary a kind of cover letter for the official document.


How much decision time is given for tenure-track offers I've been applying for tenure track positions in computer science.

Recently I visited university X for an interview and they have hinted that they are likely to offer me a position after my second visit. Assuming all goes well, how much time can I expect to be given for deciding on that offer?

I have also applied to several other places where any decision won't be made within the next few months. So my worry is that I might receive an offer from X "too soon" and hence won't be able to also take into account other opportunities.

In my experience, this depends somewhat on the level of the hire.

A search for a full professor, named chair, department chair, or dean might result in a long period of negotiations with the candidate.  These kinds of searches often go "one candidate at a time" rather than bringing in all candidates for on campus interviews at nearly the same time.  Since the process is sequential, there's obviously more room to give the candidate time to consider the offer.

However, when it comes to hiring a new assistant professor there are typically several reasonable candidates that were all interviewed on campus at about the same time.  If the university suspects that a top candidate isn't likely to take the offer they may make an offer with a short deadline in hopes that they can still get their second or third choice.

In the past when I've made offers as a department chair (in mathematics) the offers were open for one or two weeks (with some possibility for an extension if there was negotiation going on.)  I have had to say "no" to requests for extended time to consider an offer.

You can always ask for an extension of the time period, but I wouldn't count on getting one.

I've also participated in searches in other academic departments.  The only reason for extended time on offers that I've ever seen was negotiation of startup packages- in the physical sciences and engineering new faculty often have very specific needs for laboratory space and equipment that have to be negotiated and this can take time.


Contacting multiple potential supervisors at the same department? I am interested in topic X, and I would like to find a supervisor for that topic. At one particular uni, there are quite a few people interested in my topic, and I need to find out who might be a fit and whose interests are maybe not so aligned with mine.

Should I just message all of these people at the same department? Would it potentially reflect bad on me? I am also worried that in case two of these people are interested, I am facing a dilemma when applying.

How should I proceed, how do these things usually work?

TL;DR: You should contact all of the possible supervisors at the same time and ask for a meeting or a call. And you should be completely open about the fact that you contacted multiple advisors.

Why:

If you contact one after another this gives (possibly) a bad impression for everyone.
I understand that you would like to prevent the dilemma of multiple advisors being interested but this dilemma will show up anyways once you have chosen a advisor and started the work.
You do not want to be disrespectful but you are faced with a decision. Everyone should understand your dilemma and should appreciate your efforts to be as fair.
You should be honest to yourself. While I do support your way of thinking you are causing this dilemma yourself because you want to have the choice.

I would think that the etiquette will differ greatly across the world, so I don't know how well it is received that you would like to have a choice/control here. However, I think it is totally understandable and a good advisor will also understand your intent and process.


Does it look better on graduate school applications if I'm getting a M.S.? I am going to be a rising junior (undergrad), and I plan on applying to graduate school in mathematics. Our school offers the opportunity to get a B.S./M.S. in math, or simply a math B.S. To get a B.S./M.S., I'd have to sacrifice some courses outside of math (like english, history, etc.) in order to take more graduate math classes (need 8 total). I'd still plan on taking graduate courses even with the B.S., but it would probably be around 5-7 instead of the 8 needed.
In terms of graduate school admissions, would this matter at all? It seems to me that there's probably not too much of a difference given that they would see the coursework anyways. But who knows, maybe given the fact that there's so little time spent on each application, that having a M.S. would be just enough to stand out and have a name remembered.
EDIT: United States - sorry about that!

I'd have to sacrifice some courses outside of math (like english, history, etc.) in order to take more graduate math classes (need 8 total).

In general more math or related courses instead of non-related courses would support your application better. For some context, these mandated non-degree courses are not globally agreed to be necessary. For example a 4-year math degree in US can have less content in math then a 3-year math degree in Germany. Essentially some degree programs can have "bloat" approximating around or above of 1 year work (8 to 12 courses). It is not at all obvious that these courses in necessary (as they are not mandated in a lot of places) and I have never ever seen any admission body / personal being even remotely interested in the existence or non-existence of a -very basic introductory to a discipline of humanities-.


Does dedicating to god undermine my aspiration on research in-front of review panel? I need to submit and present well documented research reports of mine to a panel of experts. It is well known that there is a custom of including dedication page to any significant reports.
I want to include the statements like

Dedicated to god <-name->

My colleagues are cautioning me to not include such statements due to multiple reasons. The key reasons include: panel mates may be atheists and hence may not receive it properly, it is not encouraged for a research aspirant to mention god related statements in academic matters etc.,
I am interested to know the validity of the second reason: is it true that dedicating my report to god can be taken as a pit to my research aspiration?

Generally, I don't think that dedications are common. In engineering, for instance, you never see a dedication except in a textbook (not common though) and PhD thesis.
Besides that, no scientific reviewer should be impacted by a dedication. There are always black sheep, who won't like it or even have a problem with it.
As reviewers or a panel are always a bit of a draw of luck, I would stay on the safe side and not put this in (any sciences/engineering).
If you are so faithful and personally committed to dedicate this work to "God" from a personal point, that's what matters. It's not necessary to state it.
But that's a decision you have to make.


Why does my PhD supervisor not talk to me directly? There is an incident between me and my PhD adviser, which is repeated for the second time (The first time was a couple of months ago), and its details are:

My PhD supervisor talked about me and my problems to one of the post doc scholars in our department, who is not my PhD adviser's post-doc. The first time my PhD adviser talked to this post-doc about me, he said that I was not present at a conference and presentations. In fact I was, and even in some of those presentations my PhD adviser was present and I'm pretty sure he saw me there explicitly. But I heard from this post-doc a week later that my PhD adviser was not happy cause he didn't see me there... I never received a notice from my PhD adviser and he never talk to me about that. As a result, I said that maybe was just a mistake and moved on.

Today, I heard from this post-doc again that my PhD adviser is angry cause I removed a document that he requested me to update that yesterday. In fact, I updated that document just a couple of hours ago and fortunately it is uploaded in the box and could show the details of changes to that file and how many version is uploaded. Also, box could show who viewed or downloaded the files and the last time my PhD adviser saw that file or downloaded was yesterday, when he requested me to update that and I did it today morning. I'm just mad and angry because if there is a problem with me or my work or my personality or whatever why my PhD adviser does not talk to me directly? He could just send an email to me say hey what the hell are you doing?! instead of talking to other people and I incidentally hear the problems from other people behind me?! I'm just angry and please excuse me for typos or rude language.

My question is: what can I do to solve this problem and why my PhD adviser does not talk to me directly about my problems? I appreciate any suggestion.

Update:

I talked to my PhD adviser right now and he was quite okay and cool with me and did not talk about the incident that post-doc talked to me yesterday. So, I think something is wrong with this post-doc... I really appreciate if someone help me to find a proper way to tell this post-doc that my issues or problems are not his/her business...

You seem to be getting all the information about your communication issues with your advisor from a third party - the postdoc. That information may not be accurate, though I can't say from this distance. But you should consider the fact that it is the third person with the problem and not yourself.

But the solution is to go and talk to your advisor. I wouldn't take a confrontational attitude, but mention that you did the work requested and were at the meeting you mention, etc. Ask for an assessment of your progress and position. If there is a problem you will know, from the actual source. If there isn't a problem it should be obvious from the way the advisor responds.

Like many such meetings, this needs to be face to face and informal. If you suspect from the answers you get that the post doc is trying to subvert you, I'd spend some time deciding on a plan before complaining about it.

If your advisor, in fact, has no problem with your actions then there probably was no reason for him to communicate. But if he does have an issue it is better that you hear it directly and you may need to take the initiative to make that happen.


Being quoted for an incorrect statement Once I expressed an opinion on a question in a discussion with a person working on the problem. My opinion didn't work in its original form but could be modified a little to make it correct, i.e., although not completely correct it contained useful information.

Recently I found that the person I was having the discussion with has quoted me in a paper in an incorrect form by mentioning that I'd expressed the statement. But he has made no claims about its correctness. The person never asked me later for explanation and didn't even check if the way he is quoting me is correct. The discussion was brief and spoken. And he did not even send me a copy of his paper afterwards.

I feel that he should have asked me for clarification before quoting me in the paper or at least he should have given me notice that he is quoting it. At the time of the discussion he agreed to what I said and told me he would contact me about it and even send me a draft.

I don't like being quoted for a statement I don't know, and moreover I am a little bit pissed off by his action (quoting a brief informal discussion about a possible proof of some result without notifying me or asking me for clarification). What should I do now?

The paper is not published yet, it is on arxiv.org.

Contact the author first.  Assume the best, that their memory is faulty, and suggest alternative text in a friendly manner.  If you do not get a response, contact the editor of the journal they have submitted to.

Ultimately though a lot of people get misquoted, and a lot of publications get misunderstood & cited inappropriately.  If it's really a big deal you might get a publication out of contradicting it, but otherwise just be glad that people think you are important enough to mention.  It's better than not being given credit for your own ideas!


Publishing a new dataset, based on existing Is it ethical and academically (or otherwise) acceptable to publish a new dataset, derived from an existing, well cited dataset?
The only novelty in this case are:

Newly computed features (based on published work), not currently part of the dataset
Data re-organisation, not existing previously, that aims to standardize partitioning of the dataset

The dataset in question pertains to Machine Learning.
(Related question at: Law Stackexchange)
Update:
The only reason I wish to publish my version is to provide an option of common grounds for paper-methodology comparison. Currently, every author prepares his/her own desired subset and publishes the ML task results. This makes it extremely difficult to compare the papers or sometimes even simple reproducibility.
My proposed subset will be a standardized subset that every one can use directly and will help in comparison across papers.

I would suggest to just make the code available to generate the new features, and reference the data set you've taken from as well as the previously published methods that your code uses, rather than distributing the output.
The code is probably more broadly useful because it could possibly be used with other data, and if new versions of that data set come along your modification will be obsolete whereas your code will not (assuming the structure of the data does not change). If the combination of approaches you've used are themselves fairly novel, it may even be publishable as a paper as well, particularly if you have some results to show why doing these steps is useful in some way.
You could probably find a lawyer to argue that somehow you're allowed to do what you are proposing to do, but I don't see why. Even if technically legally allowed because of issues with considering data IP of any sort, it just feels a bit wrong to take someone's work and make it newly available with minor modification.