Writing about complex ideas without getting stuck I'm an experienced researcher and find it relatively straightforward to write technical papers. However, I also sometimes want to write papers that present a complex idea, such as a novel synthesis of existing work, or a question that hasn't been clearly formulated in my field. In writing papers of this kind I often start to feel "boxed in" by my own writing and unable to express the idea I really want to convey. It seems like this should be a relatively common experience, and I am wondering if there are known techniques to avoid or overcome it.

What tends to happen is this: I start out with a 'big idea' that I want to write about, and start working on an outline, but I quickly get bogged down. The questions behind the idea need to be motivated, and the idea needs to be placed in the context of existing work. In writing about these things I find myself getting drawn along tangents, writing about side points that I didn't want to write about in depth (but which now seem necessary in order to motivate the work) or feeling like I need to review whole other fields of study that I'm not an expert on. Often I end up giving up on the draft, because it doesn't seem possible to clearly make the point I was aiming for.

There are essay papers I admire that don't seem to fall into this trap. They are written in a way that always seems to push toward their central thesis, even if they have to make a lot of side-points in order to get there. I even manage to pull this off myself sometimes - I just don't seem able to do it repeatably.

I'm confident that the ideas themselves are well enough developed to be worth publishing. I've developed them over years and can easily express them verbally or in slide presentations. But writing papers driven by complex ideas is a difficult craft in which I have no formal training.

I feel that the issues I'm hitting must be known and avoidable: What techniques are available to address them?

I am not sure what you have tried, so bear with me if some of these techniques are obvious to you:

Write from an outline: Complex matters need to be broken down. Writing from an outline helps with focusing on one thing at a time. It also helps with making sense of the big picture without having to go down each and every rabbit hole simultaneously. Remember that your outline isn't set in stone; on this consider the points below.
Explain your ideas verbally: You seem to be struggling with putting words on paper, perhaps because putting words on paper means fixing them. Explaining something out loud takes this pressure away, as everything can be qualified and corrected the next second -- you develop a sense of flow and can focus on the idea rather than the phrasing. Either talk to colleagues, or just to a mirror, a pet, or your left thumb. Programmers call this rubber duck debugging. You may find it useful (or maybe too restraining) to record your voice. I like to move around as I explain stuff to myself, and I had some good insights while running (alone and with a friend).
Either write in draft mode or in edit mode, never both at the same time: Draft mode is all about collecting ideas. Get the word count up as quickly as possible. In draft mode, you want to collect the raw material out of which you build your masterpiece later on. Silence the critic that lives in your left brain, and don't allow yourself to polish your draft yet. If you're really stuck, you may even try some free-writing exercises, like disabling the backspace key or writing with the screen switched off. Going off on a tangent is not only allowed but encouraged a this point! When later on you switch to edit mode, the first thing is to identify the key ideas that are now buried like raw diamonds in your draft. Highlight them, relate them to your outline (or write a new ex-post outline from them), and then structure the rest of the text around them, as you revise. Now, decide which parts are tangential and which are central to your argument. Cut the former and develop the latter.
Iterate! You will probably never completely avoid tangential thoughts proliferating in your draft, but you also can't tell which is which before you have written them down in draft mode and critically evaluated them in edit mode. As you progress through iterations of drafting/editing, the tangents become less. Before you ask: Yes, this takes time. Thinking does. None of the papers you admire has been written in a day, in one go.
Never delete big chunks of your draft once and for all. Instead, save the draft under a new file-name or use a version control system and make regular commits. This allows you to go back to earlier versions if you lost one of those raw diamonds somewhere along the way. It also permits you to be bold with revisions and deletions, making your text more concise and clear.
Reconsider the boundaries of your project: As you revise your draft, you may realize that what you originally considered a monolithic project is actually stuff for two or more projects. This is a good time to go back to your outline and split your draft in two: Decide what you want to focus on now, what you might look into next, and how these parts are related. The latter is part of your concluding section ("further research is needed..."). (If you will, this is point 4. on a meta-level.)


When should you not report plagiarism? It seems that most of the ethics and plagiarism questions follow the same basic archetype:

Q: I think there's some plagiarism going on, and I don't really want to report it, but I think I should. Should I?
A: It'll be tricky, but yes, of course you should report it. Consult your institution for more details.

My question: is there any case of academic dishonesty (including plagiarism) that a student/TA should almost certainly not report?

When you're not sure is probably one situation. You're accusing someone of dishonesty so you'd better be able to prove it.


Why add a minor to a PhD? As an undergrad I had a couple majors and a couple minors...no big deal. Ultimately all it meant was I took a lot of classes all over the place and went through the time and effort to declare them.

As a PhD student, though, declaring a minor is pretty uncommon. Hell, a lot of schools don't even offer the option. My understanding is that minors are usually for highlighting a certain amount of coursework in a closely related field to the one you're studying. Seemingly obvious pairings would be a PhD in Math with a minor in Statistics, or a PhD in Classics with a minor in Philosophy. However, unlike in undergrad (and really even at the Masters level), during a PhD the emphasis is primarily on research, not coursework. So why is a PhD minor a thing? Does it serve any purpose more than just another notch in your academic belt?

Personally, I am thinking about adding a Math or Statistics minor to my PhD in Computer Science, but I can't come up with a good reason other than "I'm interested in higher level math/stats and it's really applicable to the area of CS I work in." That's enough to satisfy me, I guess, but is there really any other reason to do this?

EDIT: I guess I should add that *in my case* I'm not thinking about a minor for minor's sake, but rather that I'm already taking a bunch of courses in that area so it just means an extra course or two. The question still stands though: why is it a thing? And, furthermore, does it carry different connotations in different areas (e.g. the humanities vs. applied sciences)?

A minor gives a grad student the option of diversifying his/her learning experience. Much research is interdisciplinary (like stats and CS), so taking a few classes in another department can be very beneficial. It also gives a grad student an excuse to take courses in something that isn't directly related to their research. (Minoring in a foreign language or business can be generally useful, for example.) In my own experience, most grads minor in something closely related to their research.

As far as I know, very few people look at a graduate student's minor. The biggest reason I can see for having a minor outside one's home department is to diversify one's educational background.

I looked around to see what universities said about this. Georgia Tech states that "The purpose of the minor is to encourage a wider interest on the part of the student and to provide a broader basis for the evaluation of the student's capabilities." (source) Stanford requires a minor for its Education grads (source).


Is it common for supervisors to approach their student and ask to work on publishing the student's masters thesis? My supervisor emailed me asking if he can work on trying to publish my masters thesis, with me being the first author. I have said yes, is it common for supervisors to approach students asking to publish students research?

There are in all likelihood differences between fields of study. In mine, it is uncommon, but if it happend it would be a good sign: You have produced something that is worth publishing, which is rare for a Master thesis in my field. Turning that research in an article that can be published is an art, which I would not expect a master student to master. So having the supervisor help you in that would be necessary in my field. It is right, that your supervisor immediately cleared who would be first author, and also right that you are the first author. That to me is a sign, that (s)he has the best intentions.

When I make such offers, I consider this as offering those students an opportunity to get an advantage very early in their (potential) academic career, or at least to get some inside experience of what working in academia is really like.


How do I lift my spirits after giving a bad examination paper today? I had my Mathematics paper today. Its of 90 marks. In the past, I have always scored 90 or at least 88. Today, the paper was extremely lengthly and I made a silly mistake in a question of 4 marks although I knew the answer perfectly well. I am sure other answers are correct. But I am feeling very depressed for failing my expectations. I have got my Science, Social Studies and English Paper in the next week. I think I will mess up in other papers too. I am afraid my classmates will tease me. I am afraid someone else will get full marks. How to lift my spirits?

As someone who has lived through this, the solution is to stop trying to be perfect and forgive yourself for making mistakes.  Classmates would tease me because I built up a shield of "perfection" to try to defend against criticism.  There's a big difference between setting goals for yourself and not allowing yourself to be human.  We're all human, including very smart people like yourself.

Try to turn the fear of someone else getting full marks into encouragement of others to get full marks.  I understand that many education systems around the world use rankings in classes for standing.  I did part of my education in such a system, and I understand how it leads to complex social implications.  The best approach is to encourage one another and whoever is on top that particular examination will be respected instead of envied.  The next examination, it may be another person, and that's ok.  By focusing on encouraging each other and being happy for each other's successes, you'll collectively raise your marks and achievements, which will server you much better later in life and your career than always being on top.  You will find that the opportunities in life, even in the most restrictive of harshly competitive academic environments, are not based solely on top grades, but rather a whole picture of the person.

You will NOT mess up the other papers because you clearly study hard and know the subjects.  Once you get into working on them, your spirits will lift themselves as you find your comfort zone in those topics that you know well.  You might even find that the previous slip up will help you with your creativity, which is even more important in Social Studies and English.

You'll look back in 10 or 20 years and everything will look different in retrospect.  Trust me.  I've done it myself. :)

Good luck!


How to arrange reading for a literature review and writing it? I am a studying for a master of management. It is the first time that I will write a thesis.
I found the literature review difficult: I found several articles, but I do not know how I will do next.
Should I read the articles and highlight what seems interesting to me and then re-read them and start writing, or should I read each article and start writing in parallel?

As a professor in a French grande école de commerce, I am pretty familiar with the requirements of a literature review for a master's thesis.

I can recommend to you an article I wrote on the subject. In summary, there are eight general steps:

Identify the purpose of your literature review. In your case, it is to understand what scholars have said related to the topic of your thesis.
Plan the review. Outline the steps that you plan to take to carry out the literature review.
Apply the practical screen. That is, clearly decide what kinds of topics you will search for and which you will not search for because they are beyond the scope of your focus.
Search for the literature. Try to have a meeting with you your school library to help you understand how to use the scholarly databases and get you started in searching for the articles.
Extract the data. Read the articles and use a table to record the most important elements from each article.
Appraise the quality of the studies. This step is probably not necessary for a master's thesis.
Synthesize studies. Do not just summarize the articles one by one; rather, identify and discuss the most important themes that run through multiple articles.
Write the review. Compose and put everything together.

The article linked above has details on each of these steps.

Reference

Okoli, Chitu, 2015. A Guide to Conducting a Standalone Systematic Literature Review. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37(43), pp.879–910. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol37/iss1/43


How to mention an amendment to the U.S. Constitution in text in APA style In the dissertation, several amendments are mentioned in a general way. Do you spell out the amendment numbers or not or does it matter?

Justice Douglas addressed the Eighth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment ...
Justice Douglas addressed the 8th Amendment and the 14th Amendment ...

The university handbook is silent on the matter, so APA style prevails. I looked in the APA 6th edition, which shows examples for in-text citations and for reference entries. But could not find any examples of a general nature.

I also do not have access to the Legal Bluebook.

Received an answer at the APA style blog:

Regular number formatting applies when an amendment is mentioned as part of a sentence: spell out for the first through ninth amendments and use numerals thereafter
(e.g., “the fourth amendment,” “the 12th amendment”).

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2010/06/how-to-cite-the-us-constitution-in-apa-style.html


Is my text lacking of citations? I've started my Masters in Computer Science this year and i'm facing some questions about citations. Papers and dissertations i've seen so far have a lot of citations even for the most basic subjects.

Now, i'm working on a paper and i have this question: should i explain things with my own words or use anyone's definition and properly cite their work?

I'd like to know what is the usual way of doing citations. I don't know if i write with my own words and look for citations (or even when to cite).

Thanks in advance.

To avoid plagiarism you need to cite most things that you use (exceptions below). It isn't a question of paraphrasing or not. If you use it cite it. Sometimes it is better to quote than paraphrase, but using other people's actual words is more a question of copyright than plagiarism. Plagiarism is making it seem like the work of others is actually your own.

The main exception is "common knowledge". You don't need to cite the fact that the Earth is roughly spherical and not flat (Sorry, Terry Pratchett, RIP). You don't need to cite the definition of the derivative in math. But if you get something out of a paper, it is most likely that it needs citation.

And, citation requires more than just the name of the original source. A reader of your work needs to be able to go back to the original and see the complete context of the idea, including the paper it came from and any references that appear there. A chain of evidence is vital to scholarly work.


Which license should be chosen in arXiv for a paper to be published in Elsevier? I would like to know what license needs to be chosen in arXiv for a paper that is to be sent to an Elsevier journal. I have read the terms of both arXiv and Elsevier attentively, but I'm still in doubt.

arXiv has the following choices for licenses (from their website):

  grant arXiv.org a non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article, and certify that he/she has the right to grant
  this license;
  certify that the work is available under one of the following Creative Commons licenses and that he/she has the right to assign this
  license:

  Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0)
  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0)
  Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0);

  or dedicate the work to the public domain by associating the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0) with the
  submission.

On the other hand, Elsevier explicitly allows to publish accepted manuscripts in arXiv, provided it's "updating a preprint", not creating a new one (a really strange requirement in my view, whose motivation I've never understood, but that is the subject of a different question) and provided that this is done with a CC-BY-NC-ND license, which is none of the above. From their website:

  Authors can share their accepted manuscript:

  Immediately (...) by updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the
  accepted manuscript (...) In all cases accepted manuscripts should
  (...) bear a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

How are those two things reconciled, as arXiv doesn't have the option of using a CC-BY-NC-ND license? There should be a way, as otherwise the mentions of arXiv in the Elsevier policy would be totally pointless - allowing you explicitly to publish on a site with a license that that site won't allow! Is it legal to choose "grant arXiv.org a non-exclusive and irrevocable license" and upload the manuscript with a CC-BY-NC-ND license? Would this mean that the first license is for arXiv and the second license is for the rest of the world? This is the only solution to the puzzle I can think of, but I don't know if it stands (it seems that one needs a degree in law to understand these kind of copyright conditions...)

How to add another Creative Commons license to an arXiv paper:

  We currently support three of the Creative Commons licenses. If you wish to use a different CC license, then select arXiv's non-exclusive license to distribute in the arXiv submission process and indicate the desired Creative Commons license in the actual article.

From the arXiv webpage about licenses.

How to indicate the desired Creative Commons license according to Elsevier:

  Elsevier requires authors posting their accepted manuscript to attach a non-commercial Creative Commons user license (CC-BY-NC-ND).  This is easy to do. On your accepted manuscript add the following to the title page, copyright information page, or header /footer: © YEAR. Licensed under the Creative Commons [insert license details and URL].

From Elsevier's sharing webpage.


To eventually become a mathematics lecturer in the UK, does undergraduate degree have to be from a good university? What is the initial process to become a Mathematics's lecturer at a University in London. I want to be able to lecture in a top university in the United Kingdom such as Kings College.

What is the academic ladder that I will have to climb?

Would my undergraduate program have to be from a good university or could I graduate from a mediocre university and then enroll in a masters program at a well known university followed by a PhD?

My goal is to become a lecturer and go into research in Mathematics.

First, let me point out that a career as you describe it not entirely plannable: There are many more who want it than who get it, and even if you are talented and work hard, success is not guaranteed.

It probably won't matter where you did your undergrad once you've received your PhD, although going to different universities could be beneficial, as it would expose you to more different academic cultures etc.

Once you have received your PhD, you'll want to do a good postdoc. Going to some top university abroad, or becoming a Junior Research Fellow in Cambridge or Oxford could be good choices. Make sure that you develop contacts at your desired university.

After some postdoc experience you can apply for eg a Royal Society Research Fellowship or an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, to be held at your desired university. During that time, try to convince the university to offer you a permament position after the fellowship ends.


Urgent help to decide on degree choice I would really appreciate it if someone could help me!!!
Aptitude and background
I am from the UK, and for A-levels, I am studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry, and I am predicted decent grades in all of them.
For my Morrisby Assessment taken a year ago: Numerical reasoning 70%, Abstract reasoning 80%, Verbal reasoning, 95% - This was slightly lower for numerical then I expected, but it does make sense since I have to try pretty hard in maths.
For me, chemistry is my strongest subject, with physics close behind-ish
Interests
Physics:

Pros: [1] Family likes the idea of me studying physics, [2] like quantum, thermal, chemical and nuclear physics, [3] opens the most doors out of compared to the other two, in that I can transfer into engineering/machine learning, [4] well-respected known undergrad for non-physics jobs.
Cons: [1] More difficult for me [2] dislike electricity, EM, fields, waves which are integral topics [3] On the surface, there seems to be less direct jobs related to physics compared to chemistry, in/out of academia (please prove me wrong though, i am only 18, hence why I am here asking!)

Chemistry

Pros: [1] Easier for me aptitude wise [2] Like all parts of chemistry, apart from some niche topics [3] (could be more transferrable to material science and nanotechnology? - therefore opening the 3rd option up as well [4] right now quantum chemistry and orbital approximations are my favorite subject [5] well-respected and known undergrad for non-chemistry jobs
Cons: [1] Less transferrable than physics [2] Don't want to be stuck in an industrial/pharma job, where I am glorified lab rat following a list of instructions [3] Lower job satisfaction on the internet compared to the other two

Material science

Pros: [1] Very large interest for it since it combines chemistry and physics components I enjoy [2] Possibly better paid, due to the large amounts of engineering involved [3] able to go into nuclear materials research, and medicinal too, therefore opening more opportunities than chemistry.
Cons: [1] less-respected well-known undergrad, and could always do it at postgrad level [2] Studying metals and ceramics seems boring, I prefer nanostructures!

Conclusion
Therefore, It would be amazing if you could answer the following questions! [or just provide info in general]
Is chemistry or a physics undergrad better to become a material scientist?:
Using the above information, which degree out of the 3 may be better suited for me?
Which out the 3 jobs, will be most in-demand in 6+ years, a chemist, physicists, or a material scientist?

My opinion.
At your age (at any age) planning years ahead is hard.
I'd recommend doing what excites you most and what you're best at. That seems to be chemistry. Doors may open (or close) down the road that you can't foresee.


How contribution in "data analysis" and "data interpretation" are different, for a scientific paper? When submitting a paper to a highly profiled publication, like Nature or Science, author contributions must be clarified. This may include study design; data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation; draft preparation and/or critical editing and review of the manuscript.
Among these aspects, I was wondering how data analysis and data interpretation are different? Consider the boundaries may not be quit clear, because more often it is difficult to analyze data to find true patterns without being able to interpret those patterns.

I agree that the boundaries are not quite clear in that it is impossible to analyse a set of data without giving some sort of interpretation to them at the same time.

The requirement however doesn't mean that you have to identify a single author for each contribution. For example, you can say that author A contributed to data acquisition, author B to both data analysis and interpretation.

In an experiment, data acquisition can simply mean running the tests without processing the data into more meaningful plots or graphs. The latter falls into the category of data analysis. Discussing what the data mean comes into interpretation. While interpretation cannot be absent in any analysis, and so I cannot imagine an author contributing to analysis but not to interpretation, the reverse may be possible. An author can contribute to interpretation without contributing to analysis.


Planning to start a Bachelor's degree during my PhD: what to say to my advisor? I am a PhD student on my second year. My advisor is one of the most understanding professors I have ever had the pleasure to work with: he is also one of the, if not the, most important researchers in his subfield, which is a really "academic" subfield, meaning everyone who studies this subject ends up in Academia, or with a really unrelated, low-paying job.

Now, I am really unhappy with my PhD: my research is, in my eyes, very weak (I know, I know, impostors' syndrome and so on, I am in fact looking for psychiatric counseling but, one must be realistic: from all PhD students, statistically, some are bound to underperform) and, overall, I am just not happy with what I do... Somewhere along the road I lost the little interest I might have had for research.

The thing is, I used to enjoy research, at least a little, and Academia offers very comfortable careers in my country, and other countries as well: I don't want to leave, study a new subject and find that, not only I am not suitable anymore for Academia, but also I hate whatever I started studying; and I hope that, maybe, with the right counseling, I might again enjoy what I do. Furthermore, I have a scholarship, and if I left with my PhD unfinished I would be heavily financially penalized...

So, the idea I had was to start a Bachelor's degree in a field that has better prospects outside of Academia, all while continuing my PhD: I will underperform even more in my research, but that is a price I think I am willing to pay. The problem is, how do I break the news to my advisor?

As I said, he is a very understanding person, but it will be clear to him that my intention is to, very possibly, leave Academia, since our field is so "academic" and the one I will start this new degree on is not. He will also be very unsatisfied with the obvious new drop in performance and, in my opinion, there are no good reasons to maintain under his supervision a PhD student, in a very academic field, that is not willing to stay on the field.

So, how can I tell my advisor of my intentions? Should I not (which, from a legal standpoint, seems possible, but I would feel extremely guilty)? What kind of arguments should I present to him, in order for him to keep me under his supervision? Would it be more fitting to just drop the PhD instead? I know this question could, perhaps, fit better in the Interpersonal Skills Stack, but the intrinsic topic is so very dependent on academic matters that I think it is a better fit here.

This is probably more of an opinion answer, but I would say you should say to your advisor either:

  I'm leaving my PhD because _________ and I am going to instead get a bachelor's degree in _______.

or

  I am not feeling good about my research progress and not enjoying research to the point that I am considering leaving the program - can you help?

To be blunt, your plan to do both at once sounds like a horrible blunder. If you are struggling in your PhD now, adding an additional set of responsibilities is not going to make that problem go away. I can't imagine your advisor giving you any different advice than I have.

Further, if you choose to not tell your advisor, I think this would be akin to what is described negatively as "ghosting" in the context of a personal relationship, which is considered to be incredibly rude towards anyone you have an established contact with. Slowly letting your performance decline while you stop paying attention to your PhD and start working on other things is just going to make everyone miserable, and probably destroy any chance you have of getting a good recommendation from your advisor in your future endeavors.

You suggested you've been looking for counseling, and indeed, if your mental health is suffering, that would be a good idea, much better than your plan to take on additional responsibilities.


What statistics should I disclose when giving grades to students? When giving grades to students, I often find it interesting to disclose some information about the grades distribution. I imagine that it helps to know where one is situated in comparison to others.

I usually don't want to disclose the maximum grade and the minimum grade, the latter obviously for keeping the students that didn't perform well motivated.

I usually end up giving the mean (or the median, should they be significantly different).

Can one do better? Information about quartiles maybe? What are your practices?

If relevant, I am teaching in France where the grades range from 0 to 20. I am interested in different situations: small class (~20) or whole group of students (~200), regular assignments or final exams.

--- EDIT ---

I am interested in keeping the students motivation high. Are there any (research backed-up) studies about that question?

I would suggest a mean, a standard deviation and some bands, e.g. Fail (<10), 10 - 15, 15 -20. Quartiles would also help, but two quartiles below the mean are not helpful. That should be more than enough. Personally, I discuss but do not report the percentage that fails and the maximum.


Google Scholar Syntax quirks: results depend on order of search strings I am working on a systematic literature review and noticed something quite disturbing since I want to base my work on Google Scholar results: The number and actual results returned by Google Scholar seem to depend on the order of the search terms (to some very relevant extent), at least if the OR operator is used.

This quirk poses a problem, to the extent that it sheds doubt on the reproducibility of the search results. How should I deal with this in my systematic literature review? Is there any plausible explanation for why the results depend on the order of search strings? Knowing this might help to find a workaround. The consequences of this behavior could actually be quite important to any academic user who searches for papers in their own research. Naturally we cannot definitely determine what's going within Google's algorithm as it is a blackbox but we still can come up with hypotheses that we might be able to test nevertheless (I cannot think of anything more scientific than that :))

What I found out so far:

The number of results shown on the top of the results page is known to be a rough estimate that does not necessarily reflect the actual number. Furthermore, only the first ~1000 results/100 result pages are reachable anyway. However, neither is relevant to this question since it happens for far more specific searches with below 10 results as well.

Some examples with their number of results (the results themselves differ too).

10200: ("microarchitecture" "pipeline") OR ("pipeline" "instruction set")
38100: ("pipeline" "microarchitecture") OR ("pipeline" "instruction set")
39300: ("pipeline" "instruction set") OR ("microarchitecture" "pipeline")
39800: ("pipeline" "microarchitecture") OR ("instruction set" "pipeline")

If you want to use google scholar as a means of measuring the number of papers on a certain topic: don't.

Contrary to what we often see in reviews or other publications, you did some more research than simply copying the number of results from a naïve search, and that research indicated that this number is highly unreliable (as should have been expected). Conclusion: Google scholar is not the right tool for the job. Its algorithms are unknown, and the sources it searches are unknown as well. Maybe it even counts the same paper multiple times, depending on which words you search for, who knows?

Having said that, in practice nobody really seems to mind an introduction stating "a Google search for XXX returned N results", but the question remains how useful such a statement is, given your findings.


How should use of a preprint server be incorporated into the publishing workflow? I am a biologist and very recently there has been a movement to increase the use of preprints in publishing biological research.  This has generated a lot of discussion about preprints and their merits and has spawned a few servers (e.g., bioRxiv) but I have not gotten a good sense of how I should incorporate the preprint server into my normal publishing workflow.

Workflow may be different, but the one I am familiar with is:

put preprint on arXiv along with sending it to a journal
after the final version is confirmed, update the arXiv with the newest version of text (with your formatting)
(in case there are serious mistakes or omissions, update arXiv at anytime)

Sometimes version on arXiv is put before the submission to a journal, for example:

there is some work that need to be done before the submission, but we want to have it before a conference we are attending, or a talk at another department (so we can point the preprint to the reader),
we haven't decided yet where or if we want to send it.

And in some cases, arXiv is used instead of a journal, especially if:

the work is not suitable for publication in a journal (e.g. a PhD Thesis, textbook), but we want to disseminate it, preserve it and make it easily citable,
the author prefers it that way (e.g. it is a short note, or the topic is unconventional and the author prefers to avoid struggling with editors).


Getting help from friend for literature search Suppose person A has a research project where they need to find a few articles on a particular topic, and write a review of these papers.

Being busy with other coursework, and feeling overwhelmed by the task of searching papers, person A decides to ask person B for help to find a list of articles on the topic. Person B is not a student in the course, but is willing to help person A.

Person A then reads the articles B found and writes their paper on their own.

Has there been plagiarism or other ethical violation committed?

EDIT: An additional concern is whether person A needs to credit person B's work. The goal of the paper would be to develop understanding of the field that the course is about, not specifically train for literature search. The submission will be graded.

Regardless of the method used in retrieving related articles, the decision to accept the sources and use the information provided in the articles is yours. There is no violation or problem that can come of it, as it is no different than searching for articles online. Is there any other information you are withholding that could make you worried about this practice enough to warrant your asking the question?


would it sound weird to ask for a professor to be as a permanent reviewer of a journal or conference? In my current work, we organize a CS conference every year, and we also have a journal in the CS field. However, we are currently facing a problem with some reviewers. On few occasions, we have a couple of reviewers who rejected the sent paper, saying they have not been appointed for the current year. However, they have acted as reviewers in previous versions of our conference. The question would be if it would be sound weird to ask a reviewer if he would like to form part as a permanent reviewer of the conference or journal. Are there any suggestions about how to deal with this?
Thanks

It doesn't seem odd at all. You can simply ask a "good" reviewer if they are willing to review again in the future. I suspect many will say yes and some will fail to respond.
When you ask, you can also ask for subjects/topics that most interest them. This would ease the work of the program committee in the future, as they would be a bit less likely to send requests that are unlikely to be fulfilled.
Another approach, used by some CS folks is to put up a page with received papers, perhaps just titles, and send out a broad appeal to previous reviewers (and others, perhaps) asking if they are interested in any of the papers.


Should I accept an invitation to give a talk from someone who might review my proposal? I submitted a grant application a few weeks ago where I was asked to list some potential reviewers. One of these potential reviewers just invited me to give a talk at their university. I would like this potential reviewer to be able to review my grant application because I feel that they are knowledgeable in the field and would have a favorable view of topic in my application. By accepting this invitation, would I be creating a conflict for this potential reviewer? Should I not accept the invitation? Should I give a talk on a different topic than my grant application so as not to bias the reviewer?

It's the potential reviewer's responsibility to declare or avoid any conflict of interest, not yours.

If the potential reviewer isn't asked to review your proposal (or declines for other reasons) then there's no conflict of interest.

If the potential reviewer does end up reviewing your proposal and you've declined an invitation to speak at his institution that potential reviewer might hold it against you.

If you do accept the invitation, this wouldn't by itself be sufficient to create a conflict of interest that would prevent the potential reviewer from reviewing your proposal.

Thus I wouldn't hesitate to accept the invitation.


Is it normal to feel like I bought my way into graduate school after being rejected and then accepted when I was awarded an external fellowship? I initially got rejected by the two schools I applied to (horrible pGRE scores, lackluster GRE scores, and only did research at my undergraduate institute), but then I got an NSF fellowship, and was almost immediately accepted by both schools.

I feel a little hurt by the whole acceptance process. I feel like I was essentially told: "you are not good enough to pursue space physics in our program, but because you have money we will let you in".

Question: In this situation, is it normal to feel like you essentially bought your way into graduate school? Or that people will always look at you as not good enough?

From what I've heard the NSF fellowship is not an easy one to get, and having one seems to carry some sort of prestige. Sure, the program may have accepted you on the ground that they don't have to pay you, but the fact that you have an NSF fellowship may have changed the admission committee's perception of your ability, which could be what tipped the balance in your favour. No matter what, there is no point in dwelling on the past. What matters is how you perform in the program now, not how you got in. Don't be the college freshman who keeps talking about his high school athletic achievement; truth be told, nobody cares.

As for your lack of passion for the subject, I want to point out that passion usually does not precede mastery of a subject. Rather, people usually develop passion after they become good at something. So I don't really think lacking passion at this point is a deal breaker. I'm sure astrophysics is large enough for you to find something that you are good at and can develop a passion for. Of course, if you can't see yourself doing research, teaching, or anything science-related in the future, you might want to rethink about your decision to go to graduate school in the first place.


Applying for industry jobs: how early do you submit job applications? I've heard conflicting advice on this, from 6 months prior to graduation all the way to "wait until after you've graduated so you can start immediately". On the one hand you don't want to give yourself too little time to interview, but on the other I understand that employers may want you to start immediately to fill a need.  Is there anything rude/impolite/weird about applying for a job knowing that you won't be able to accept an offer for several months?  Do companies routinely wait on Ph.D.'s to finish?

Most articles found by a search for "how long does it take to find a new job" state anywhere between 3-6 months. Anecdotally, both for myself and for my friends, this is quite accurate. This, combined with the fairly frightening statistic that unemployed people have a MUCH harder time finding employment, would lead me to strongly recommend that you start well before you graduate.

Most positions that hire PhDs are familiar with the nuances of hiring someone who hasn't yet graduated. I currently work in industry, and we've had a number of people who've had to take a few days vacation to defend their thesis. You should mention during the interview process where you currently stand in your PhD work so the employer knows what to expect, but from my experience it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Do note that some positions require the PhD of their employees, so you would not be eligible for those types of positions until you graduate. I would still recommend interviewing anyways so you're not starting from scratch... you can just contact them and continue when you actually receive the degree.


Why does my advisor / professor discourage all collaboration? So I have had this advisor for about 8 months now. Literally all students in my department talk very highly of him: his previous graduate students (master's) have gone on to have successful careers in PhD programs or are top data scientists who earn six figures.
I just took his class this fall. He prohibited all collaboration for homework, and we were not allowed to ask him questions either, unless we thought there was a typo on the problem or similar. Also, we were not allowed to discuss the material with others i.e. we cannot study for exams together or even talk about the book we were using. Or any of the topics. According to him, "collaboration is for undergraduates who struggle". So yeah.
Well, moving forward with his research. He refuses to read anything I write if it has a typo or I've made a mistake with citation. He won't read anything I've done, if he sees an imperfection. He also has strictly told me not to discuss my research with others / seek help elsewhere. Him I can ask questions, but only on papers / reading that I should do. Nothing about how to learn to program something or if I have a difficulty understanding a theorem. He always tells me "you're a master's student, you should do this on your own, you're not an undergraduate anymore".
Also, he has questioned the legitimacy of my undergraduate degree a few times due to me not being able to prove something he finds "trivial".
Now he wants me to learn programming in C, which we never discussed when I began my research. He compares me to his previous students, claiming how so and so worked 95+ hours per week on their master's thesis for 12 months after finishing all their classes. He idealizes cultures where studying is prioritized over everything, even one's mental health.
I am frankly getting tired of this, and contemplating on switching advisors. Am I just going crazy, or are his remarks completely out of line as an advisor? Is collaboration and similar stuff really that bad and makes you lazy and incapable of doing stuff on your own?

This sounds pretty extreme, even for the "sink or swim" school of education. If you can meet the extreme standard without going crazy you will probably turn out ok, if a bit of a workaholic. But the road will be hard and painful.
But, given your sense of it, you should probably move quickly to the exits. Not everyone is like that. Some of us actually try to be supportive.

As for the "why" of it, he just seems to demand perfection and won't compromise in any way.


When can a professor refuse to sign off on a committee-approved thesis? (Breakdown of a larger issue - full story here)

I did a masters research project as part of a grant project my professor received. Her project was to redo a standard, widely design using a new technology as a feasibility comparison, to see if the technology should be adapted as an accepted (possibly standard) design. My thesis project was to redesign key part of the original design in order to provide her with design parameters; we then iterated over each design twice more to finalize on common parameters.

It took a couple months to get clear criteria from the sponsor, and we finished a couple months behind schedule, but ultimately our work was a success. Our work was combined in a single dual report to serve as both my thesis and her official report.

Following my successful defense, with no changes from my committee, she bluntly refused to sign off on my graduation paperwork until she had official acceptance of the report from the entity funding the grant. She admitted this was an entirely separate issue but "wanted something to hold over my head in case they ask for changes". This delayed my graduation significantly, which has had serious consequences for my professional career. As far as I can tell, the was done solely for her benefit to secure full grant payment (to her) and not as any part of the school's needs or my graduation requirements.

If all the requirements of a prescribed study program are met, are there any situations when it would be appropriate for a professor to deliberately delay a student's graduation?

From a mere common sense perspective, this is, clearly, grossly unethical.  However, professors at most institutions are given a huge amount of latitude in making decisions of this kind.  That latitude is intended as deference to the professor as the one closest to the situation and a recognized scholar in the field, etc, etc.  It's not intended to extend to capricious or unethical behavior, but I'm sure your case is, sadly, neither the only one nor the most egregious.

As the professor has already departed academia (and good riddance!), there's not much to be done about that particular individual.  In a few years, though, you will likely be getting contacted by your alma mater frequently as they are very interested in what you would like to contribute, etc.

There might be some opportunity here to ask to speak to someone who will be interested to know why you are unable to donate.  Until they have clear policies in place that prevent the kind of abuse you were subjected to, you can't see your way clear to making contributions to an institution that, through their own negligence, damaged your career while it was in at its most vulnerable point.  Obviously there's no guarantee you will get through to someone who will listen, but it's worth a shot--if they do, it might prevent someone else from going through what you went through.

To anyone else going through this, get everything in writing.  "Why are you withholding your signature?"  Get a paper trail, or it's your word against the infinitely more powerful professor's as to what is going on.


Contact professors whom are not listed on application I forgot to include one of the faculty members who works in my area of interest in my application for grad school.
Since I have not mentioned him in my application, would contacting him and requesting a review help my admission?
As far as I know, every professor in the department (CS) could put a review on an application even if he/she is not listed in the potentials. But I think he might ask himself why the applicant did not include his name in his application and simply ignore the review request.

If you really think your application needs a boost you could do this, of course. But you could also contact the professor simply to express interest in the area.

"I am applying to your program and am interested in your area...". But you need to express it so that he knows that you know something about the area.

I wouldn't try to flood the person with information, but you could ask for him to comment on your application and suitability as a student. If he asks for more information, you could send it, but just sending a CV blind is likely to be ignored.

Since the reaction is a matter of personality, there is no way to predict the outcome, of course, but it might be a mistake to appear to be pleading.


Is there any regulation governing the accessibility of research papers? (to ensure they can accommodate the reading preferences of the users) There exist some regulations regarding the accessibility of educational materials  (mirror), such as the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (mirror) or the  Section 508  (mirror).

Is there any regulation governing the accessibility of research papers?

To the best of my knowledge, no such law has ever been passed (though I'm no legal expert).

Even if such a law was passed, however, enforcing it would likely be difficult or impossible:

How could one assess the accessibility of a paper that can only even be understood by a tiny community of specialists?
How could one ensure that an obscure or newly-invented notation can be translated to alternative formats?
How could one effectively force scientists to invest time and energy in compliance, when funding agencies can barely even get them to do quick and easy things like pre-registering medical studies?


Is it ok to add new details to the camera-ready version of the conference paper? My conference paper got accepted. I was told I have an extra page for the camera-ready version. And my method is built upon an existing method. Now I realize that, in the existing method, there might be one key component that could tackle the proposed problem in my paper. Removing this component might not only influence the performance of the existing method but also my method. However, I skipped this detail in the previous version of the paper as I think this is not my main contribution and the space is limited. And also if I put the description of this component on the paper, I thought the reviewers might focus too much on this component instead of my own contributions. Should I add the description of this component into the new version given I now have enough space?

Usually not, but as Buffy said, ask.  I don't know your field, either, so this may be specific to my own.  However, accepted papers are almost never modified after they are peer reviewed, since even a "minor" change will need to be reviewed again.  Think of what it might mean if a mathematical proof were accepted, then slightly modified but those modifications introduced an error.  Without thorough review an erroneous paper would be published.
In many conferences I've been to the answer to that has been to address it at the podium, not the paper.  Papers are written sometimes months before the conference, so it is accepted that more work will be done.  Use your talk to introduce those changes, and then turn the work into another article.


Thanking the teacher I'm an Erasmus student and I've had pleasure to meet a really great teacher who taught me more than anyone before. I would like to show my appreciation and thank her, but I'm leaving a week bofore the end of the course - and the grades release.
I want to be polite, appreciative and show my respect not to be a "teacher's pet" (I'm an Erasmus, I don't care about the grades, just the learning experience).
Should I came to her after the class and simply thank or send and e-mail or I'll be just making a fool of myself?

Thank you for your answers :)

You won't be making a fool of yourself, we all appreciate a "thank you"...

You can choose to say in person, and your idea of "thank you for the learning experience" is good.

An email can also be fine, which you can send to arrive after the grades come out if that is a concern for you.

Do it, it will be fine. Or do both...

Edit, as Bob points out a handwritten note or card is also good.


How to make a paper anonymous for reviewers when it heavily extends on your own previous work? I am writing a paper that continues and extends my previous paper (the usual situation), and I plan to submit it to a journal that conducts a double-blind review. It is a research that started recently, so I have only one paper published.

The published paper represents a strong foundation of the research, which means that I would have to refer to it in the new paper at least a few times (basically the new paper extends it). While the peer-review is double-blind, the reviewers would then easily realize who is the author.

Therefore, I can't just cite it as it's someone else's research because it's obvious that I am talking about a paper of mine.

  How can I refer to my previous paper completely anonymously so that
  the reviewers cannot realize who is the author of the new paper?

I am insisting on this because I don't believe that there is such a thing as a completely unbiased peer-review process, even when double-blind. I am new in the field, and I can imagine that this is where a reviewer could have prejudices. Stupid reason, but I already have an unpleasant experience with this.

I cannot cite the paper by removing the author and retaining the title, as it would take 5 seconds for a computer-literate person to find the full record.

On the bright side, while the previous paper is easily accessible, the reviewers probably would not be aware of it because it is from a conference that is not really in that field. But still, they would manage to find it with some effort.

Would it be acceptable that I mention that this paper extends my previous research that cannot be cited in order to accomplish the anonymity of a double-blind peer-review, and that the citation will be added later?

Disclaimer: I work in a field in which double-blind reviewing is either completely absent or so rare that I have never encountered it.

  Would it be acceptable that I mention that this paper extends my previous research that cannot be cited in order to accomplish the anonymity of a double-blind peer-review, and that the citation will be added later?

No, I don't see how that's possible.  The principle that you must cite work that you use or build on -- no less so if it's yours -- seems much more basic than your desire to get genuinely double-blind refereeing.  Moreover, if a paper continues previous work, can anyone sensibly evaluate its added value without having access to that previous work?  I can't see how.

  I am a new guy in the field, and I can imagine that this is where a reviewer could have prejudices. Stupid reason, but I already have an unpleasant experience with this.

When you self-identify your reasoning as "stupid", there's a clear opportunity to think it through again.  The process of journal submission and publication has a non-negligible random component: it would be unwarranted to assume that an experience that you had once or twice will necessarily recur.  Your desire to circumvent an unfair refereeing process seems premature.  If you feel like you're being treated unfairly as a new researcher, there are more productive ways to react to this: make it more clear why your work is competitive with or superior to the work done by more established researchers.  I don't know of any academic field in which journals systematically don't want to publish work by new researchers that they believe is better than prior work just because those researchers are new.  It is also true, unfortunately, that new researchers can overestimate (and also underestimate!) the value of their work.  It is hard to hear that the thing you slaved over for months and years is not good enough for a second-rate journal in your field.  But it may be true nevertheless.

Let me say finally that I see a little irony in your approach: you lament your treatment as an unestablished researcher, but you are in fact more established than most people: you have published a paper that your present work builds on.  My experience is that it is much easier to publish a second paper on the same topic in a reasonable journal than a first paper, just as it is easier for an artist to sell their second painting for a reasonable price than their first.  In publishing the first paper, the journal has conferred on your work the important imprimatur of publishable value.  Insisting on throwing that away will probably increase your chance of receiving "anti-newbie bias" in the evaluation of your followup work!


When to acknowledge funding I got a funding from the DFG called "Eigene Stelle". My question is whether I have to acknowledge funding in every article I write or just in the articles that are related to the projects in my proposal for the funding?

I think that it is enough to acknowledge funding only in articles related to the proposal but I am not really sure and found no reliable source for that.

Typically, funders require acknowledgement in every article that was supported by their funding.

So, what's actually getting supported by the funding?

If you're a professor or researcher with multiple sources of support, then you are generally expected to account your time to each supporting project separately.  So if you're supported 10% by a project, you only put 10% of your hours on that project, and only the things you actually do with that time get acknowledgement---i.e., publications related to the specific project.
If you're a graduate student or postdoc, however, you'll often have only one source of funding that supports both your work on the project and your continuing professional development in general.  In that case, you put the acknowledgement on everything, because it's all being supported by the same funding, whether or not it has anything to do with the original proposal.

Note that what's really important here is the accounting, not the position or the proposal.  If funding supports you in create a publication, that funding must be credited, whether or not it's within the expected scope of the project.


What is the average salary of Assistant Professor in South Korea? What is the average salary of Assistant Professor in South Korea? How tough it is for a foreign faculty member to get public and private sector funded projects for his/her lab?

Quite good: $43-50k

Since foreign faculty members are common in South Korea, likely it isn't any tougher than for local faculty.

source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/South-Korea-Brings-in-Foreign/126508


Is it a good idea to upload rejected papers in arXiv? I have a few earlier works which have been rejected from conferences and journals in the past (last 6 months). Now, I and my co-authors are not interested in submitting elsewhere and have no idea on how to improve these papers.

I was thinking, will it be a good idea to upload these papers in arXiv? Will it create any wrong impression in the community? Will it have bad impact on my profile?

Yes, you should upload them.

If you think the works are good and worth reading, but don't see a good opportunity to publish them in a journal or at a conference, then the arXiv is the way to go. Actually, many people have unpublished manuscripts and even some influential work only exists as technical report or preprint. It's not uncommon.

If it would be worth it to pursue "real publication" is a different question...


I'm Applying for mech eng MS as an undergrad in pet eng, will it matter if i take another mech eng course my last sem or not? I'm an undergrad in petroleuum engineering applying for mechanical engineering MS in graduate school

I have two options to graduate:

Take 23 credits (I take 20 almost every semester anyways) and enroll in an Applied Thermodynamics course so it appears on my transcript as having taken one more mech engineering class
Don't take applied thermodynamics and have all general electives and pet courses my last semester (which would still be 20 credits).

I'm trying to weigh the benefits to the costs and I'm not sure admissions officers seeing one extra mech engineering course outweighs the negatives of 23 credits... but some input would be nice!

IMO, it won't matter.  Given that you're in the process of applying (which is a time commitment as well) I would recommend option #2.

A reassuring piece of advice a PI gave me as I began the application process was:
the admissions committee and PIs you apply to work with do not look to see that you are already an expert in the area you apply to, they are looking for evidence that you have the aptitude to succeed in their graduate program.

NB: I'm in neuroscience--not engineering.

Good luck!


Teaching experience as a subcontractor for a university program I work as an instructional staff at a local university. The program is marketed and hosted by the university and the certificates are granted by the university signed by the department dean as well. That being said, I was hired by and on the payroll of a subcontracting company, which also provides the curriculum.

I am also granted access to the university resources e.g. given a .edu email and listed under the university directory as an instructor-affiliate.

Does that mean I can list my experience as having worked for the university, the subcontracting company or both?

I suspect that legally you only work for the subcontractor since the university didn't hire you directly. This is especially true if the contractor supplies curriculum.

But in the materials you can also say where you performed your duties, listing the university as the client, but not your employer.

The university might object if they don't have a real relationship with you directly and you try to indicate otherwise.


What happens if the second reviewer for a conference proceeding keeps missing their deadline? I have submitted a journal article to a conference proceeding which will be held in June this year. Though I submitted it on time in December and the first reviewer accepted it in the first week itself, still I didn't receive a second reviewer's response. In the online submission system it appears as initial submission status, with the phrase "reviewer missed the deadline" repeated thrice in red color. If I cannot get a second guest editor what will happen to the article? Is it possible to accept an article without a second editor? How long would this usually take?

This is not your problem but the conference organizer's one. They have to ensure a proper reviewing process.

Usually, they are contacting the reviewer and apply some pressure. It they still get no review, they acquire a third reviewer as replacement (or a program committee member does it by themselfes).


What should I do if the first author wants me to write the whole paper? I have finished three years of work in a Ph.D. program. I've published one conference paper as sole author, and have recently sent out another paper to a prestigious conference.

I started a project last October with a professor who does not have anything to do with my dissertation. He asked me early on to do a lot of work so I asked him who is the first author, and he said he would be. I've already written the full literature review for this journal paper, and came up with the framework by myself. He has only advised me on it.

Now, I have a clear idea about my dissertation, and I have to write my proposal and defend it this fall. So, the work with this professor is rather burdensome to me right now. So far, he has not worked on it at all. I've written six or seven out of the 15 pages of the journal paper. The main thing left is data analysis. He wants me to do the data analysis and write it up as well, and recently he also asked me to write introduction of the paper. At this point, I thought, he wants me to write the whole paper, which he can edit at the last moment and become first author.

Since this paper does not have anything to do with my dissertation, I do not want to work with this paper anymore. I told him I am busy with my own research, it seems like that he will wait until I finish writing the paper.

What should I do? I do not want to cut the relationship but he is asking too much which I think is unethical. Any strategic advice will be appreciated.

UPDATE:
I talked to the professor and said there must have been misunderstanding about the responsibilities as a second author in my part and as a first author in his part. I said that I understood that writing literature review will meet the responsibility as a second author.

His brief comment on the e-mail was that he wrote a conference paper already, and this journal paper (that I'm working on) is a developed version of the conference paper. So, he did the major work already for the conference paper that is why he is the first author. And he stated that I am supposed to write a literature review and to do the data analysis for this journal paper.

OK. He has integrity in his position. I remember that he said something like this when we started this paper 10 months ago. But the problem was that his position was not re-enforced again, and the lit review I've done took off to a different terain. That means, I did a lot of creative interpretation of the framework. (Sorry, to technical folks. This is social science study using business management theories. The upfront literature review is very significant. My dissertation uses machine learning and NLP stuff. yes, this paper is unrelated with my dissertation).

Anyway, the reason I'm writing this update is to provide the professor's perspective that I've got to learn recently. So the major lesson I've learn through this experience is to keep reinforcing (in emails) about my understanding of my and his responsibilities on this project.

First of all: Good call to talk about authorship issues at the beginning, rather than only once troubles started! Now authorship issues do occasionally have to be re-negotiated depending on the course the project takes.

There do seem to be potentially two separate aspects in your question:

A. What to do if I have contributed as much as I am willing as a secondary author, yet the first author keeps asking for more?
- Point out that you have done X, Y and Z, and that you are only willing to do significantly more if you are the first author (fundamental reading + commenting remain unaffected of course).

B. I started a side-project, and I no longer want to work on this AT ALL.
- Make clear to your co-author that you have no intention to work on this project anymore, and that this pertains to the future, too. Either give them free rein to continue the project without you (either with you on the author list or not, depending on your preferences); OR make sure you are still available for basic reading/commenting, but simply nothing more extensive.

In both cases, if the coauthor shows a significantly stronger reaction than "medium annoyance", then maintaining a positive relationship to them is futile anyway.


Should I put a "technician" pseudo-internship on my resume for biology grad school? I completed a pseudo-internship-like experience offered by one of my undergraduate professors this semester. The job title was "biology technician," but my jobs were more geared towards learning than actual work.

Tasks I learned were: cleaning glassware in the biology department, organizing microscopes slides, cleaning microscopes, calibrating digital pipettes, and basic autoclave operations.

There were many other tasks, but I fail to remember them now, but would these skills be a boon to a grad school application, and if so, how would I incorporate them into a 1 page resume? I even filmed a video on autoclave use for instructional purpose.

Yes, why not? For a grad school application, you might as well list anything that shows your interest   and involvement in your field. List it as whatever your job title was, and if possible add a line or two describing your activities.

But if possible you will want to inform them about it in more depth. If the application includes a cover letter, statement of purpose, or similar essay, use it to describe what you did in this internship and what you learned. If the application requires recommendation letters, consider asking the professor who supervised your internship to write one.


mentioning MOOC's I took in my scholarship application I'm preparing my application for a master degree scholarship, would it help to put the MOOC's I took in the application, I earned five MOOC certificates and expecting another two in the near future.

FWIW, I put the MOOCs I've completed in my tenure portfolio as a professor and it actually went over really well. So yeah, go for it.


Designing a credit-by-examination exam I have been tasked with writing an exam for a student who wishes to receive credit-by-examination for an upper-level course in my department.1  While the department head suggested just using the final exam as the basis, I don't really think that works as it misses out on a lot of the material that was assessed via other means (e.g. paper writing, presentations, etc) as an integral part of the course.  In contrast to many lower-level courses that cover wide swathes of basic material that is very conducive to comprehensive examinations, this course has both a wide and shallow (assessed via tests) and skinny and deep approach (assessed via papers and presentations).

Given a course that approaches the material in both broad and deep ways, how should an exam that is supposed to represent having done both styles of learning be designed?  Or would it be fine to give a student credit (presuming passing) despite not demonstrating competency in an integral part of the regular course?

I freely admit being completely against this CbE procedure in principle, but since I couldn't get out of it, I want to do this correctly.

Update: Thanks for the answers everyone.  After making the exam, the student never bothered to show up to take it.  Hooray for wasted time.

There is a lot missing information here that makes it difficult to provide an fully informed response. For example, the subject, whether this is a theoretical or application class, the way it is taught, the number of topics, the scope and sequence etc.

At many universities, credit by examination is only possible if the student wants to prove that they already have mastery of the subject. In other words, unless the student is completely lying, they should already be highly familiar with the content of this subject and the simply want to prove that they already know it.

If the current final exam is comprehensive in nature it should be suitably for credit by exam, regardless of one's philosophical position. The reasoning being is that the student needs to demonstrate mastery of the entire subject and not just a portion of it. If the current final exam is not comprehensive, mixing it with the mid-term should help to develop a comprehensive exam.


How to say “thank you” to a professor who has written a recommendation letter for me? I recently asked two of my professors to write me recommendation letters and they promptly and kindly accepted to do that. It is now two weeks since then. I want to send “thank you” notes to them. Is it enough to send e-mails? I have heard that it is more polite to send a written letter by US post, but it is a little bit weird when we are all in the same building! Isn’t it? Can I send them some kind of gift on a special occasion?

Don't worry about it too much, just say thank you.  In person or over email are both fine: getting a good recommendation letter is a big deal for you, but writing recommendation letters for good students is a part of normal routine for a professor.


IS impact factor around 2 good for bio-engineering field? I need to Presenting an article as a lesson exercise with good impact factor, so i found this paper :

Sleep behavior assessment via smartwatch and stigmergic receptive fields

With this impact factor:

With this H index:

I googled the impact factor range for good journals, so i fond so things like this:

And somewhere i found some different acceptable impact factor different field like 3 for Civil Engineering and not acceptable by below 5 for medical sciences.

SO i asked here is around 2 IF Index is good in bioengineering and also there are any sites to index the Impact factor of publications based of filed of study?

Thanks.

The go-to-place to look up Impact Factors (IF) is Web of Science's Journal Citation Reports (JCR). As it is a commercial product, you(r institution) needs a subscription to access it.

JCR puts journals into categories. In this case, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing is listed in the categories Telecommunications and Computer Science, Information Systems.

In Telecommunications, the journal ranks 53 out of 88 journals in Web of Science 2018 (the latest available). The first-ranked journal has an Impact Factor (IF) of 22.973, the last one 0.350, the median 2.274.
In Computer Science, Information Systems, the journal ranks 96 out of 155 journals. The first-ranked journal has an IF of 22.973 (the same as in the other category), the last one is 'not available' (the second-to-last is 0.282), the median is 2.170.
There is no category called 'Bioengineering' in JCR, but there is one called Engineering, Biomedical. It contains 80 journals, the highest IF is 17.135, the lowest is 0.452, and the median IF is 2.272.

Using these three categories as benchmarks to assess the journal's IF, one can see that the journal is always close to the median value, and therefore certainly okay. But whether it is 'good' or not for the purpose of your exercise you need to ask your instructor.


Is verbatim copying several paragraphs of text with citation considered plagiarism? Is it plagiarism if I copy several paragraphs from another's source (let's say a CS paper) into my work and then footnote Source: ..., for example, as background information?

If you copy something verbatim, you are required to put quotations mark around it, and also cite where the quotation came from. Anything less could be construed as plagiarism.


Research schedule for postdoc application in mathematics I am currently applying for a postdoctoral research grant and one of the requirements is a schedule of research work.  In experimental fields such as biology I can imagine how such schedule may be structured, say from this to that date conduct this or that experiment. In mathematics where no hypotheses are tested in the same sense as in experimental fields, no data are collected (in general) and detours or changes in approach are not uncommon, how can such a schedule be outlined?

I have never served on a grant committee, but I have experience as an applicant. Even though you obviously do not have any experiments or data collection planned, you surely have some idea of what you want to do, and how you want to approach that. And you know how many years you have available. By estimating the relative difficulties in each step, you should be able to come up with a rough idea of a timeline. What I believe they want to see is that you are able to give a realistic estimate of how difficult your proposed research is and how much time it will cost. You also might have different somewhat indepdendent projects in mind. Are you going to do the sequentially, or in parallel? Maybe you plan a research visit to another university. Answering such questions gives you a rough schedule that you can include in your proposal. I don't think it has to be very long or detailed.

Clearly during the course of the research it might be necessary to change the plan, because things did not work out as anticipated. But that is no different in other disciplines I am sure, and the reviewers are surely aware of that.

In short, the main goal in my opinion is that you should be able to show that you have a realistic assesment of how your proposed research can be completed in the alloted timeframe.


How do I thank a professor for choosing me as his PhD student (via email)? I emailed my potential supervisor to express my interest in her works. We talked once and I was encouraged to apply to the university. Recently, I emailed her to inform her that I have submitted my application. I got a response from my potential supervisor that I am admitted. How should I thank her for admitting me?

Also, one of my recommendation letters is not submitted yet. Does that mean I am definitely admitted? Because I have to ask about financial aid and scholarships and I have no idea when or how to do so...

How should I thank her for admitting me?

Just like you would phrase any other similar email, within or outside of academia. There is no need to overthink this. There is no specific protocol for that, and no need for a special "thank you" email (although an answer that acknowledges that you have received the mail and are still interested in the position is definitely advisable).

Dear XXX,

I am very happy to hear this, and I am looking forward to working with you.

Can you please advise me on what the next steps for me are?

All the best,
Mahsa Gamiji

As a quick sidenote to all those expressing disbelief that a single professor may have decided to accept or reject a PhD candidate: This is how it works in most places in Europe. Don't assume that admission to PhD school is organized the same as in the US everywhere.


Math journal question - long publishing delay My paper was accepted for publication in May 2019. Almost two years later, it still has not been published. Other papers which were submitted and accepted after mine have already been published. What's going on here? Should I email the journal to get an estimate for when my paper will be published? I feel a bit pathetic to have to send them an email to ask "golly gee, when are you going to get around to actually publishing my paper." Any advice would be appreciated.

Do not send a mail to the journal; send it to the editor that handled the paper. They are an academic, so they are going to be more sympathetic and understanding of your deadlines and external constraints. In addition, they have at least some limited power to insist with the production team, and they have a direct interest in their journal's reputation.
And if there is someone that should feel pathetic, I believe, it's whoever receives your e-mail. Two years is really unacceptable even for fields with slow publication times; at least the paper should have appeared as published online (with the word "published" attached to it clearly).


Should a TA be doing software development for the professor? I am a PhD student and a new TA for a class. I receive no extra money for TA'ing. Instead, my TA'ing offsets my advisors need to fund me. The professor I'm TA'ing for knows that I have advanced software engineering skills from professional experience.

The class I'm TA'ing for is very different than lecture style classes. It is more of an incubator/studio/software project class. In addition to office hours and lectures, the professor has asked me to continue development on future iterations of custom software made specifically for the class. The professor has previously paid other students to do this development. While I am able to do this development, is this a valid use of a TA?

I can't help but feel taken advantage of, because my software work usually pays quite well.

It sounds to me like you have unusually advanced skills for a TA, and the professor is quite rationally trying to allocate the resource he has control over (your time as a TA) to its maximally productive use. That sounds pretty reasonable from the professor's point of view. Whether he has a right to assign you this particular sort of work would depend on your institution and department. At my department, TAs sign a contract at the beginning of the quarter which includes a list of the types of work they will be expected to do. If the professor wants to add something that isn't on the standard list, that needs to be discussed prior to that stage. The contract also specifies the number of weekly hours the TA will be working, and obviously the professor needs to respect that limitation as well.

Now let's think of how things look from your point of view. I'm not exactly sure why you feel taken advantage of for being asked to work on the software project, except for details that sound irrelevant to me, such as:

that the professor has previously paid someone for a similar service (maybe he did not have access to a TA with such qualifications as you);
that you would have gotten a higher salary for doing similar work in industry (but you willingly chose to go into a graduate program and subsist on a grad student stipend for a few years);
that you are not paid directly for being a TA but through some kind of indirect funding arrangement (but you are still committed to doing work as a TA for X hours per week, so I don't see why that should matter).

If I make the reasonable assumption that the high-value software development work is more intellectually stimulating than other duties the professor can be assigning you as a TA (grading papers or other boring gruntwork), are you not yourself better off working on the software project? In that case, could it be that the feeling of being exploited is simply regret for choosing this particular academic path when you could have stayed in industry?

To summarize, my feeling is that unless the work the professor is assigning you is completely outside the scope of work that a TA in your department could be reasonably expected to help with (which may be the case if you are, say, in a humanities program), you are probably not being taken advantage of. But perhaps I misunderstood the situation or your reasoning for being concerned; if you care to clarify any of the details I will reconsider my position.

Edit: I'm sorry if the OP finds my answer a bit tone deaf. I'm generally quite sensitive to and concerned by the phenomenon of exploitation of graduate students in academia, as can be seen by perusing my SE history. I think it makes sense to revise my verdict slightly: Jack, you are not being taken advantage of any more than TAs are typically taken advantage of. That is, I don't find anything unusually exploitative about the software development being discussed here, but the whole system of employing graduate students in academia as cheap labor (whether it's calling them TA's, RA's or something else) does carry with it an unpleasant whiff of exploitation. This is well known and recognized by many people (and has provided fodder for many a web comic). So you are right to be at least a little concerned about that -- how much exactly depends on your school. But I think that is off-topic given your specific question. Bottom line is, be aware of your rights, and if your contract says you should only work X hours per week, insist on following that to the letter.


Will a journal reject my paper just because a grad student is the sole author? I have been working on a topic(numerical analysis) for several years, and I discovered something new which can be verified by numerical experiments. But my supervisor doesn't allow me to publish it, though he does admit that my research is worth publishing.

So is it possible to publish my research without my supervisor? I have done the research all by myself, the idea, the numerical experiment is original and without any help from my supervisor, but I am still a student. Will the journal reject my paper just because I submit the paper while I am still a student and without any co-author?

As many people are wondering why my supervisor will not allow me to publish, I give my own explanation below:

He has a strong desire to control all the research in my lab, I am afraid he is the only person who is doing research in my lab, all the students who have published just wrote the articles, all the ideas are from my supervisor. All the ideas by the students usually will be abandoned.
I am an international student here, although I don't think that the relation with my supervisor is totally broken, I'm afraid he wants to postpone my graduation, so that he still have a PHD student in the next year. (Here is East-Asia, he can do like this without any opposition, it is not abnormal here as far as I know)

As someone suggested, my real problem may far beyond the simple question of the title. However, I do want to know if it is possible to publish a paper by a student solely. Of course any advice on whether I should or not publish my research is also appreciated.

Publishing paper does not necessarily need co-author and supervisor. However, it is strongly recommended. Having experienced co-author (not another unexperienced author) with couple of publications like your supervisor has several benefits, including:

Your co-author reads paper and puts effort to make it more professional and  mature for publication. He/she checks to ensure there is no mistake in technicality, presentation, and English.
It gives more confidence to reviewers to ensure that what you did is scientifically correct and is also producible. Though rejection of papers with several experienced authors is also a very common issue.

In research, there are several small hints and tiny things to consider that can impact on the final results/outcomes of the research. If you submit without your supervisor/advisor's, particularly without his help and actual supervision, it is very likely to have those error.

In reality, research is very much complex, though it might look very simple. There are many many things to consider before undertaking research, reporting it, and even trying to submit it. Thus, your idea might not be yet ready for publication yet. Your supervisor may want to help you do not get a quick rejection that discourages you.

I don't think that exist any supervisor on the earth that avoid publishing paper unless there is either threat to its credit or the work is premature. Your supervisor may exaggerate on the quality of your work/paper though it is not yet mature enough to encourage you. So, if he admit that your paper is good, it is not 100% sure that your paper is ready to publish at the moment. Remember that your supervisor can see lots of other things that you cannot see in this stage.

So the bottom-line is that, try to further work on your idea and convince your supervisor that the paper is good and he -as a normal humankind- should be more than happy to co-author the paper with you since publication is one of the main KPIs for academicians across the globe.


How does academia handle bookbinding in the US? To explain further, I have loved books for a very long time. I've always been interested in how they're made, and the possible "illnesses" that can befall books and how one goes about to "cure" them. I want to do it as a job, and the research I've done has lead me to learn that there's printing press bookbinding, with machines, and then "craft" bookbinding, the work by hand. I want to know how I can obtain the skills to become a "craft" bookbinder. The "old" way. Are such programs offered at US universities? If not, what is the usual path for gaining such skills in the US?

There are two main academic tracks I'm aware of that care about craft bookbinding, in a way that is beyond hobby: fine arts, and "library and archives".

In schools of fine arts it is not uncommon to have "3D design" classes that can include craft binding concepts and techniques as an option. Other classes can focus on leather-work, print-making, binding, embossing and imprinting (often used with book covers), etc. Depending on the size of the school and the local area, they may have occasional seminars specific to book-binding, and some will even be open to non-degree seeking students. So if you have a local arts program, it may be worth a visit/information/tour, and you can ask them if they may have any programming or faculty with experience in your area of interest. In may indeed just be a single person and you could try to take a class with them, or they may even be willing to work with you directly in a helper/apprentice/tutor role. You might also be interested in fine art restoration and preservation, though this is a not a program universally available at all art schools.

Artists are the primary 'consumers' and practitioners of modern craft book binding, because they care about one-offs and details in a way that commercial printers just don't (and can't) care about in the same way. Some commercial shops, especially serving high-end marketing/promotional companies do still buy craft binding work, but it would be hard for someone just with an interest in the practice to connect through this route.

The other main academic track is in library and archives, specifically in the sub-areas of preservation and restoration. This usually isn't focused only on books, though there are book-preservation specialties - but most people in the area will study a broad array of document preservation, from arts to historical documents to books and other artifacts. This will get you much closer to book illnesses if there is also a need for restoration. This is more of an academic path, as I don't know that they are as open to non-degree seeking students who just want to learn as book binding - but it might be a lead you can try to follow.

There may also be hobby-focused classes offered at community/trade schools in your area, as Buffy mentioned - which are also definitely worth a check, and probably your first point of contact if you are mostly interested specifically in learning how just to work with books.


Why do textbooks often include the solutions to odd or even numbered problems but not both? I've just gotten a textbook (physics) for next year and I noticed that, like many other textbooks I've had, it contains solutions to only odd-numbered questions.

From my experience, this is typical, at least for texts at the undergraduate level.

If anyone is wondering, the text is "Fundamentals of Physics" by Halliday & Resnick 10th edition.

My question is, why do textbooks often include the solutions to odd or even numbered problems but not both? In my case, I don't think space is the answer because the answers section only takes up 7 pages.

This allowance is a custom to allow instructors to give homework where the solutions to some questions were not provided directly to the student (at least not in the book - this was from a time where searching for solutions to homework was not so easy outside of personal social connections).

If an instructor just wants students to work on problems where the students can easily refer to sample solutions at the back of the book, the instructor can just assign "problems 1-7, odds only". If they want to assign only no-solution problems, they can assign "evens only". If they want to give a mixture to try to encourage students to mix up their solving strategies, they can assign both. To go farther, putting them at the back of the book was another way to try to make it take a little more effort to look for the solution, to encourage the students to try to solve it themselves rather than immediately looking at the solution.

Finally, it is a custom that the problems tend to go from easier to harder, with some texts making the highest numbered questions of a chapter require more knowledge or skills than is actually provided in the accompanying chapter.

As you can imagine, this isn't the only system of designing a textbook that would support these uses, but it just became a very popular and simple way to do it - so you can generally expect to see it in many of the textbooks you'll encounter.


which option should i prefer Thesis vs Non-thesis for MS in CS? I've got admission for MS in Computer Science in a US university. Which option is better Non-thesis or thesis ? How do I decide which one I should take ?

In my experience, many non-thesis options are used as bailout options for students admitted to PhD programs that get deep into the program but decide not to finish. On the opposite side of the coin, some professional Master's programs have both thesis and non-thesis options where there's no discernible downstream difference between the two. If you want to continue in academia, having a good Master's thesis to point to in your PhD program application is probably better than having nothing. If you plan to go to industry, the Master's thesis may do you no good unless you're trying to reach a job in a research department at a company or national lab.

If you can answer some of these questions about what you want to do with your life after your Master's degree, you might be able to sort out an answer.


Is concentration an extremely important working habit? I study mathematics and by "working" in the title, I mean researching and serious reading on my field (reading difficult papers, books, etc.) I believe the answer for other fields would be similar.

Am I right in saying that concentration is an extremely important working habit? I definitely feel that my working habit needs improvement: I stop working and check email/facebook, read news/forums, or even play a few blitz chess games from time to time. I believe that it is very distracting and that my efficiency is low. I also listen to music but this is probably less distracting and sometimes may even be helpful.

Is it right to say that an ideal working habit is that

  Be completely immersed in working, avoid all possible distractions, refrain from visiting any irrelevant web sites, turn off mobile phone and email notification. Work for a few hours until reaching a planned milestone, or when the body forcing a stop (micturition, hunger, low energy level, etc.)?

As a mathematician, this is a very personal matter. Some people work 9-17; some have very irregular working times. Some have a habit of always going to the office to work, to help mentally separate 'work' and 'time off'; some work from home when they have no teaching or administrative tasks to do. Some people listen to music, some don't. Some check their Facebook at work, some don't. Some work in long streaks, some prefer to have a quick pause every half an hour or so.

Do whatever works for you. At this point in your career, you have been a student for at least 12 years; you should know yourself and be able to evaluate your productivity objectively.

This is even more true for a mathematician: mathematics is mostly a mental endeavour, and it is easy to start thinking about your work in your head when you are engaged in other activities, such as walking, driving or showering.
Sometimes your best ideas will come when you are not actively working/studying. Of course, you can't do everything like this, but the important ideas often strike at improbable times.

If you are a student starting out with maths, the only advice that I can give you is plan ahead, and recognize when you are going to be late if you don't increase your productivity. Many students can't tell when it's the moment to really turn off your Facebook and start studying until it's too late. Poor midterms should be taken as a big warning sign.


Can postdocs get a funded position by direct contact? Every month, I receive several emails from India or similar countries for a postdoc position in my group.

I am an assistant professor in a small university. I wonder how many applications/emails receive famous professors at top universities?

When a PI has funding for a postdoc position, he post the position, and will receive tens (if not hundreds) of applications.

Receiving these emails made me wonder, maybe this method is working that many people are regularly using it.

Does a PI offer a postdoc position by such emails? Normally these candidates are not very strong, as they have already applied for posted positions.

I think that what has happened is that there are stories floating around, rumors with some kernel of truth, that this approach works. Sometimes I get emails from folks who are highly qualified in their area, but have no relation to our work. I think the model of what has "worked" is probably misunderstood.

I think the only thing that has ever really worked is for the "applicant" to send out mass emails to everyone they can find that's even remotely related until they hit on a few people who do have a position open and who direct them as to how to apply through proper channels. Occasionally these folks do actually have good qualifications and do get a position. The story of this process gets mangled, and people begin to think that mass emailing really works rather than realizing that it's targeted applications through the appropriate channels that worked but were found by luck.

I mostly don't respond to these kinds of emails unless the candidate is actually highly qualified, related, and I just don't have anything for them. I got one from someone in the UK this week who is working in my field, looking for a PhD position, and already has 3 (!!) master's degrees. Unfortunately, we run an HPC center and don't have faculty positions or advising rights, so I wrote the guy back and let him know that. Rarely do these emails deserve such a response since the candidates are applying randomly to every name they can find, i.e. wet lab biologists applying to an HPC center.