How can I efficiently check the originality of my work? I have worked on many ideas where I found later that they were already published, which was frustrating. I usually look around before developing  my idea, but sometimes the articles I read or the keywords I use to look up any related works make me believe that my work is actually original until I find later, after skimming through hundreds of papers in the field (to further check the originality), or by a response from a reviewer that it is not the case.

In short, what's an efficient way to make sure that your work is original before developing the idea?

Edit :

Thank you for your answers. As suggested in the comments, I should have included addditional information so that the answers would make more sense.

I am a PhD student in Computer Science (CS). My main research areas are : Information theory, coding and cryptography.

Ask people

Doing literature research on your own is necessary, and you should spend some time on this to make sure that the result is not already available. But there is only so much you can find, and it often happens that the result has previously been published with a different name or title, which you could not have known about. More experienced people in the field might have come across those works and know that your result is not new.

So ask people in the field that you can trust. Your supervisor/boss/similar is usually a good start. You can also ask other people in your department. As you advance in your career, you often make new contacts with whom you can discuss such things. And, as you have experienced, peer reviewers will provide an additional "safety check".

Of course, make sure you only ask people who you can trust that they will keep your work confidential. If you are at the beginning of your career, your supervisor might provide further guidance on this.


Putting future TA position on my CV I am writing my CV for an application for a graduate program. The application process starts in February and the graduate program begins in September.

I recently accepted a position as a teaching assistant at my current university, and my employment officially begins in April.

Is it acceptable/advisable that I put this fact in my CV, which I will send in before my teaching assistant job officially starts?

I suppose you could list it with an appropriate comment, like "expected, Apr 2016 -" but I wouldn't say it's advisable.  It seems unlikely to me that any graduate program will accept you because you will have had some a little teaching experience by the time you start.  Presumably you were offered a TA position because some people in the department thought highly of you.  At least one of these people should be writing you a recommendation, and will mention it if they think it is important.  What's more important is their evidence/explanation of why they thought highly enough of you to offer you such a position in the first place.


How does a 1 yr. Visiting Assistant Professor (in physics) position look to a small liberals arts college So questions similar to this have been bandied about a lot here but I haven't really seen an satisfactory response to this particular one. I gather that the Visiting Assistant Professor  (VAP) at a small liberals arts colleg (SLAC) blows your chances for schools that prioritize research (R1) tenure track positions. Fine, not going to get those jobs anyways.

But how does either an school with less research emphasis (R2) or a SLAC look at this experience on my CV?

Background: 5 years as a post-doc with no actual teaching experience. Only teaching experience was TAing in graduate school. Pretty strong publication record but not top of the world.

I'm in applied mathematics, at a school that you would probably describe as "R2" (the old Carnegie classification system has been replaced by a newer system that no longer uses terms like "R1".)  In my department, that year of experience as a VAP would make you a more attractive candidate, since you don't currently have enough teaching experience to be a very strong candidate.

It would also be helpful just in terms of your having a broader range of experience in higher education- many candidates that we talk to simply have no idea what it would be like to be a faculty member at our institution and have unreasonable expectations.


Underrating and overrating of student in recommendation letter for post-doc: Balancing approach Many times in our professional career, we come across students, who had either taken our courses or were part of our research group, asking for recommendation letters for post-doc or graduate program (if the student is an undergrad).

It is also true from the point of view of human behaviour that it is practically impossible to be neutral during our assessment of the student and it also reflects when we describe their strengths and weaknesses in the recommendation letter. In most of the cases, we overrate or underrate the performance and if it is the latter, we are sometimes held accountable that we have jeopardized their opportunities. I am not sure what happens if it is the former; may be the student takes the blame as well as we, though in absentia.

Is there a way out to have a balanced approach while writing recommendations? Since I hope everybody believes that it is the not the aim to highlight only the weaknesses of the student but also strengths that can be used by the student and the host to move forward. The question is how much of these negative attributes are considered seriously and how much should we, as recommending authority, highlight them?
As a typical example, if the student is an extremely good experimentalist but is not so good, probably poor, in visualization of data, then what should be our approach if we have to address this attribute without being too harsh or too mild.

In most of the cases, we overrate or underrate the performance and if it is the latter, we are sometimes held accountable that we have jeopardized their opportunities.

Personally, I think that a good approach here is not to write a recommendation letter unless you are comfortable showing it to the student.  Unless there is some strict restriction to the contrary on the process, you can show the student the letter you have written and then let them decide whether they still want to use you as a reference.  This gives you the freedom to openly disclose negative aspects of the student's abilities, and leave it up to the student whether they still wish to use you as a reference.  This also has the secondary advantage that your student is able to see your assessment of their abilities, and if you have a negative view of some aspect of their skills/abilities/attitude, this is not a secret to them.  All you can reasonably be expected to do is to  make an assessment of the quality of the student to the best of your abilities; it is up to the student to decide whether you are a good person from whom to solicit a recommendation.  Blaming you for jeopardising their opportunities is shooting the messenger.

This idea relates to a selection problem that comes from the fact that some academics refuse to write a letter if they would say anything negative about the student.  Several of the comments to your question recommend this approach, and as a result, it is sometimes expected that all letters of recommendation will be unambiguously positive.  That is, it is expected that a good student will be able to find a given number of referees that can be unambiguously positive about their abilities.  Whatever you think of that filtering mechanism, in my view it is generally a good idea if the student knows what their professors think of them, and this is best accomplished simply by showing them the letter you have written.  For my part, in cases where I have asked my professors for recommendations for an academic program or job, most of my professors have sent me a copy of their recommendation without me asking them to do so.  (Often they have written a recommendation by email, and BCCed me into the email, even if the process says that applicants do not get to see the recommendations.)

Another related problem here is when academics (erroneously) think it is their duty to over-rate their students in order to be generous in their recommendation letters.  If enough academics do this then it becomes "normal" and other academics feel the need to follow suit so that their own unbiased ratings do not disadvantage their students relative to the prevailing norm.  So, the first rule for recommendation letters should be to give the most objective assessment of the student you can, and don't intentionally over-rate or under-rate the student.  In particular, don't feel the need to be generous to the student in order to assist them with getting a place in graduate school.  The second rule is that nothing you write in your letter should come as a surprise to the student; either you have showed them the letter, or they are otherwise aware of your views on their strengths and weaknesses.

  Is there a way out to have a balanced approach while writing recommendations?

As to the substance of how to avoid over-rating or under-rating the student, I would recommend that you start by setting out basic factual information about the marks the student got in your courses, and how that compared to the cohort.  This will lead you naturally to the ability to say that the student was "in the top X% of students taking my such-and-such course" (best to compare over several years if possible), which gives some basic quantification of accomplishment in your courses.  By placing the student's mark in the context of other outcomes in their cohort, you go beyond reiterating information that is already in their transcript, and this also gives you a "jumping off" point for further discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the student.

To progress from this point, it is usual to give some information on the existing skills of the student, the speed at which they are able to learn new skills, their ability to take a task from initiation to completion, and how much guidance and encouragement they require to do this.  It is common to also comment on what it is like to work with the student; i.e., their general attitude, and whether there are any difficulties in dealing with them.  For students of sufficient quality to be applying for grad-school or post-doc positions, they are usually good on all fronts, but if there is a weakness you should feel free to disclose this.  If you want to try to be balanced to an individual student, imagine that you have to write and submit letters for all your students, and the relative quality of each student will emerge by comparison of all these letters.  Thus, if you over-rate one student, then ceteris paribus, that detracts from the recommendations to the other students.  Try to be fair to all of your students by making sure you are objective in your assessment of each individual.

Finally, one important thing to ensure that you do not over-rate or under-rate the student is to avoid commenting on things where you do not have enough information.  Thus, if a student was just one person in a sea of faces in a large lecture course, you might not have any idea of their abilities beyond their performance in the course.  In these cases you should stick to what you know, and don't speculate on what you don't know.

  As a typical example, if the student is an extremely good experimentalist but is not so good, probably poor, in visualization of data, then what should be our approach if we have to address this attribute without being too harsh or too mild.

I would recommend you frame your assessment of the student in terms of your view on their potential for research in the program/position to which they are applying.  For any given skill, you can give an assessment of the present ability of the student, and also an assessment of whether the student has shown the required qualities to develop this skill to a higher level.  So if the student is poor in visualization of data, you would need to make an assessment of whether the student will be able to improve this.  Assuming your assessment is positive, you could then say something to the effect that the student has highly-developed skills as an experimentalist, but they need to develop their data visualization skills further (and you think they can do this).

This is another reason why it is generally a good idea to allow the student to read your letter.  If you inform the student of this drawback in their skills, you can also let them know that if they are able to develop that skill further, then you will be able to write them a more positive letter in the future.  This might spur the student to take an additional course on data visualization, or do some extra practice, and then come and show you that they can now do it really well.  For any identified areas of weakness, the student can see this as an opportunity to "plug the gap" and then come back to you for an even better reference at a future point.


Is it ethical to slightly improve upon someone's unpublished work posted in arxiv and publish before the original work? Is it ethical to slightly improve upon someone's work posted in arxiv and publish before the original work, however citing the original work?

I mean suppose the original work gets rejected in a top-tier journal (generally top-tier journal takes so much time) whereas the improved version gets accepted in a mediocre journal (suppose the mediocre journal is fast in reviewing).

Then what should the author of the original work (I am the author of the original work) should do?

I question, as did Dan Romik, your characterization of work posted on arXiv as 'unpublished': it is made available to what amounts to the widest possible public, it is just an un-refereed publication (or perhaps arguably a kind-of very slightly refereed one, if you read the conditions).

I suggest that the ethics of it depend on whether the later-published paper  acknowledged the arXiv paper as earlier work, or not. If it did, I see no problem.

If the later paper made no acknowledgement, then maybe there is a problem if its editor/referee(s) happened not to spot the earlier paper in arXiv and took the whole content of the later author as original.

But what the arXiv author could do in that event I could not begin to suggest. Best response would probably depend highly on the particular circumstances, which would no doubt be awkward to set out in this medium.


Resources for quantitative social science research workflow I'm interested in best practices for research workflows for quantitative social science. The best book I have encountered on the subject is "The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata" by J. Scott Long (2008). As the title suggests, it is largely about working with Stata, but the author begins by discussing general characteristics of a good workflow: accuracy, efficiency, simplicity, standardization, automation, usability, and scalability. (It is also a decade old now, and does not discuss version control software, unit testing, etc.)

What other resources (books, websites, etc.) are helpful for designing research workflows for quantitative social science, both generally and for specific packages (Matlab, Python, R, ArcGIS, Stata, etc.), and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each such resource?

Overview

To my knowledge, only a very few research workflows for specific packages / tools have been published (the R and Stata books listed below).

As the question is about research workflows, I have avoided the many published guides about how to use a particular quantitative analysis application, with the exception of the Data Carpentry website, because it is explicitly designed for social scientists and emphasizes the importance of a reproducible analysis.

I included the section on version control because, in my experience, it is not commonly used by social scientists.

General Resources

(pdf) Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner’s Guide by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2014)

Topics include automation, version control, file organization, data management, abstraction, documentation, project management, and code style. Employs a conversational. Freely available at the link.
Strength: Topics include most aspects of a research project. The authors are social scientists who sought better workflows.
Weakness: Level of detail in the examples and anecdotes varies considerably across principles.

(pdf) The Plain Person's Guide to Plain Text Social Science by Kieran Healy

Topics include: text editors (especially emacs) and markdown, version control, automation with makefiles, and using pandoc to generate HTML and Latex for presentation documents. Freely available.
Strength: Provides many links to valuable information on particular tools and topics.
Weakness: With the exception of the emacs starter kit section, the material is more motivational than instructional.

(Article) Best Practices for Scientific Computing published in PLoS Biol in 2014

8 best practices with subparts, including (1) Write program for people, not computers; (6) Optimize software only after it works correctly; and (7) Document design and purpose, not mechanics. Freely available at the link.
Strength: Very concise statements of general principles. Contains references to additional information.
Weakness: Because the principles are general, they cannot be used as an off-the-shelf guide for specific software packages or tools.

(Website) Data Carpentry

Strength: Freely available lessons with considerable detail on python, R, OpenRefine, SQL, and spreadsheets.
Weakness: Topics are largely restricted to working with data, and do not include other parts of the research workflow (some of which are addressed through the companion Software Carpentry resources)

(Website) Software Sustainabilitiy Institute Guides

Topics include Data, Project Management, Software Development (including testing), and Repositories and Project Infrastructure, among others
Strength: Many short articles on specific topics
Weakness: Not a unified work

(Book) The Practice of Reproducible Research, edited by Justin Kitzes, Daniel Turek, and Fatma Deniz

Strength: Many examples (case studies).
Weakness: Very lengthy. Not designed as a quick-reference for practitioners.

Version Control

(Book) Version Control By Example, by Erik Sink (2011)

Freely available as a website or downloadable pdf.
Strength: Explicit examples of how to use Subversion, Mercurial, Git, and Veracity.
Weakness: ?

(Application) Sourcetree

A graphical user interface for version control systems (Git, Mercurial), compatible with GitHub and BitBucket
Strength: Good for the less experienced because users don't have to use the command line
Weakness: ?

R

(Book) Reproducible Research with R and R Studio, by Christopher Gandrud

About using R, RStudio, Knitr, and Markdown to perform data management and analysis, document one's work, and create presentation documents in HTML or Latex. Also includes one chapter on using git and github, and one on data gathering using makefiles.
Strength: Unified workflow for research from start to finished product.
Weakness: ?

Stata

(Book)The Workflow of Data Analysis Using Stata by J. Scott Long (2008)

Topics include file organization, variable naming, data labeling and documentation, automation and one-click reproducibility, and larger project management organization.
Weakness: no discussion of version control software or code testing


Has anything changed about the "default" arXiv perpetual license? I am new to arXiv and when I asked several of my colleagues which license I should select for my submission, they tell me to use the one marked as default, referring to the "arXiv.org perpetual" license. However, the statement that implies that "perpetual" is default has been removed apparently. I am simply asking to find out why that is, and if anything important has changed recently.

Here is what the first page of an arXiv submission looked like in 2012, according to this blog:

Notice the underlined statement: Select arXiv perpetual unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Today it looks like this:

The default qualifier statement is gone! Why is that? Has anything changed?

The ArXiv default license has not changed (as can be seen in the version history on the license page, and by comparing its text using the internet archive wayback machine to jump back to 2012).

The following is my speculation on why the wording was changed: It used to be that publishing under a creative commons (CC) license (which are the alternatives on ArXiv) was basically unheard of, and so putting your paper on ArXiv under CC meant that you basically had no chance to submit it anywhere else anymore, since the copyright agreements of the publishers weren't compatible with CC.

Today, publishing under CC is still not extremely common, but at least an option in many fields (sometimes by paying an optional fee for Open Access, sometimes by default in Open Access journals). So, telling people to choose the default license was no longer as important. I assume that this is the rationale behind de-emphasizing the default license.

I would still recommend to go with the minimal license unless you know what you are doing - even if you publish it somewhere else under creative commons, it will not negatively impact you to have it on ArXiv using the default license.


Is a higher amount of literature cited in an essay generally seen as better? I'm a postgraduate M.Sc. student at a university studying math. Currently I need to write some essay/assignment (about 10 pages) for a seminar where we revisit already published work and describe it in more detail.
By asking other students about their essay I noticed a great difference in the amount of cited literature. While I use over 30 different resources, most of my fellow students only cite a handful of resources besides their main resource.
Now, it is clear that the quality of literature might vary, and that 30 redundant resources and/or unreviewed resources can be considered as 'bad' resources and sloppy research. But that's not exactly what I mean.
In fact, half of my literature comes from an extensive research on the problem's history and related work (and almost all the literature had been published and reviewed in some way or the other). The other half mainly consists of my 'main' resource for the seminar and some books explaining some higher Matrix calculus and other basics (like the volume of a d-Sphere) which I used to explain the 'main' resource in detail.

My questions are:

Is the amount of literature even noticed by teachers? Do they care as much as I think or do they generally just peek into the literature section and see if it makes sense?

Some of the literature I use has been cited in my original 'main' resource. Is it common practice to just cite them again (which leads to drastically more literature)? Or do I only refer to my main resource even if the statement comes from some other paper?

Does it make a good impression to have a long literature section (with useful and non redundant literature)?

While I love knowledge about the history and related work to a problem it is also much easier than explaining the core of the problem. Do teachers find this stuff interesting at all? I believe teachers are normally very familiar with the problem. My concern is that they are only interested in theory and proofs and might find literature reviews boring. (I did explain the core of the problem as it is important, but I would have done it in more detail if I had spared about a page of history and review.)

The quick answer is yes. Pertinent literature is meant to support your position and build your story. The amount of literature cited usually reflects how deeply and how comprehensively a topic was examined. However, I should say that the literature cited must be highly relevant to be considered as a valid one. It will not be a good practice to pad the cited works to simply give an impression of in-depth research. Experienced readers of academic work will be able to tell if the amount of literature cited actually helps your cause.


Building my personal phrase bank, would this be considered plagiarism? I have started to build my personal phrase bank since I’m a non-native speaker and struggling to build my arguments and sentences correctly. So I decided to mimic the structure of native authors who write in academia in general. To make it clear, I will provide an example:

An established phrase from others’ work:

  In recent years, it has become obvious that informal housing and land markets are not just the domain of the poor but that they are also important for...

My use of this phrase in my context:

  In recent years, it has become popular that the idea of both big data and open data are important for the development discourse and not just as tools of the government.

I’m actually concerned whether this similarity in the sentence structure might be considered plagiarism.

I wouldn't immediately call it plagiarism, but there is something you are overlooking.

  Writing is not as formulaic as you think. Yes there are standard
  grammar structure, syntax, and punctuation, but when you put sentences
  together into a paragraph, the meaning changes. So when you put words
  in a phrase bank together, the end-meaning might not reflect what you
  intended.

  So when you put words in a phrase bank together, the end-meaning might
  not reflect what you intended. Yes there are standard grammar
  structure, syntax, and punctuation, but when you put sentences
  together into a paragraph, the meaning changes. Writing is not as formulaic as you think.

In your mind, 1+2=3 and 2+1=3, but in the case of reading comprehension, the sequence and order of which you read the sentences change the meaning. At the same time, not all "1" share the same meaning either so from time to time you would have phrases that seem out of place. As Alexander woo suggested, the best way to learn is to read, write, and practice.


Should considerations be made if half of a project group drops the course? I am a student who is completing a course where the major assessment is a Project where you work in a team of four to complete it in different deadlines (Draft and Final).

However we have been informed that two of our group members have dropped the course and no considerations will be made. We are expected to work as a team of two when everyone else has a team of four (with some that I know of experience one person drop outs).

Would it not be ethical to make some sort of consideration? Maybe splitting my two person group and placing us in other groups that have had one member drop out?

The Lecturers reasoning is that "If someone is sick on your team you are still expected to make deadlines". However I know that if I had a deadline for a project and half of my team was off the entire time with some sickness then some sort of consideration would be made.

Is this ethical or am I looking at this wrong?

Thanks.

EDIT: The students are NOT COMING BACK

EDIT:
I just got back talking to him. He does not plan to change anything, stating that some people only have one person in their group now.

I said I would be happy to take them into our team but he said that was not an option. I emailed my unit coordinator as I believe this is unfair but I doubt anything will come of it.

At this stage we are just pushing on ahead but I am keeping my emails in case we fail and need to apply for a review.

I've seen this happen before. What ended up happening was that Mr. Doe ended up being allowed to do an individual assignment on par with the level of effort as a member the group assignment.

Losing members does not change deadlines. The same result is expected, i.e. a paper is due on a deadline. That shouldn't change, even though your group has changed. Half a group doesn't mean you can get twice as long to work on it, mostly because deadlines rarely move as a result of group changes, and practically because the schedule won't account for it.

What has changed is the amount of work you can realistically accomplish. Instead of having four person-units to work with, you have two person-units to work with. You will not be able to make the same effort as four people, but I highly doubt the professor will expect you to be able to meet that level of effort, simply because asking a human to fill in as two humans rarely ever works in the real world, at least not for long before that human breaks down.

Do not expect to change your deadline. Expect to change how much work you will complete by that deadline. Talk with your professor about how much effort the two of you will need to apply to meet his expectations, as opposed to whether or not you will meet his deadlines. Does he expect you to perform as much work as four students will do, or just meet the same timeline?

If he also wants you to do twice as much work as other students, then I'd have issue, but if he only wants you to meet deadlines, and will take into account that you're short 50% of a normal group, then I wouldn't find any real merit to saying the deadline is unreasonable.


What are typical rules for parallel academic appointments? Many universities have visiting (also sometimes termed adjunct outside the US) faculty positions for non-salaried academics associated with a department. My question concerns the cases where faculty members, rather than an adjunct appointment, hold parallel appointments at two different universities, perhaps as a part-time appointment.  What types of rules are there regarding e.g. attendance, affiliation in publications, teaching, PhD supervision, committee membership, access to funding, lecturing responsibilities, and salary for such cases? I'd appreciate pointers to corresponding policies or regulations.

What types of rules are there regarding e.g. attendance,

Contractual: Attendance requirements are defined by employment contracts.

  affiliation in publications,

List both, since you are employed by both. Perhaps order affiliations by who paid for the work, or include an acknowledgement to the institute that funded the research.

  teaching,

Contractual

  PhD supervision,

Your institutes will likely have expectations, either explicit or implicit. You'll have your own expectations.

  committee membership,

Likely institutional expectations, e.g., you must serve on at least one committee.

  access to funding,

Apply using the most favourable institution

  lecturing responsibilities,

I don't understand this point.

  and salary

You can negotiate with each institute.

  I'd appreciate pointers to corresponding policies or regulations.

Institution specific.


Order image from freelancer I am writing a journal paper. In order to illustrate my work, I need to include an image of the whole system that I have built. The problem is that I am not very talented to make good images, so I would like to hire a freelancer to create a professional image. My questions are:

Is it allowed to add an image that was not done by me?
Is it ethical?
If yes, what kind of contract I need to sign with the freelancer so that all the rights belong to me after the payment?

Many thanks.

In order:

1) Yes, if you paid for it or referenced it

2) Yes, if you paid for it or referenced it

3) your contract should say something like "copyright or all rights pass to client", BUT that may be a question for the Law stack...

Many images on many documents papers etc are done by professional artists for exactly that reason. They like / want the work as well...


Using images with CC-BY-SA license in slides or a thesis If I am using images with a copyleft license (e.g. CC-BY-SA), each of them as a separate, properly attributed piece, does it mean that the whole work (be it slides, a thesis or a book) need to be licensed in the same way?

Reasoning 1

This work uses images, so it's a derivative work and it needs to bear the same license.

Reasoning 2

This work is a collection. So, as long as I keep the images separate, and properly attributed/licensed, they do not affect the collection license.

Practical implications

Using Wikipedia images in a presentation - does it mean that it need to be released as CC-BY-SA?
Is it possible to use images from two non-compatible copyleft licenses (e.g. CC-BY-SA and GPL) in a single book?

Comment: My question is on what is legal according to these licenses, not what "won't put me in jail" or what can be waived by the law of a particular country.

Including CC-licensed images as discrete elements in your work does not require the overall work to be CC-licensed. Reasoning 2 is correct here.

(See a similar discussion on opendata.se)

The BY-SA license works in terms of "collective works" and "derivative works":

  1a. "Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue,
  anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in
  unmodified form, along with one or more other contributions,
  constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are
  assembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes a
  Collective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work (as defined
  below) for the purposes of this License.

  1c. "Derivative Work" means a work based upon the Work or upon the
  Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical
  arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version,
  sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any
  other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted,
  except that a work that constitutes a Collective Work will not be
  considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License. (...)

An image reproduced as part of a larger document ("see Figure 17...") falls under 1a as a collective work. You have to comply with the formalities of the licensing (4a, identify the license, 4c, identify the author), but section 4b is explicit that it "...does not require the Collective Work apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License."

If you do modify the image (eg by adding a new element to a chart, making a composite of two photos, etc), then you have to release that new image as CC-BY-SA, but you can still incorporate it into your non-SA book as a single collective-work element.

Having said all that, 1a could certainly do with some broader examples of what constitutes a collective work, to avoid ambiguity...

Edit (October 2015): a US district court has recently discussed a similar issue (a CC-BY-SA image being used as the cover of a book) and held that that situation clearly constitutes a "collective work":

  Because this 112-page book of maps is not in any way "based upon"” the Photograph, and because defendant did not "recast, transform[], or adapt[]" the Photograph when it used it as the cover art for the Atlas, see License § 1(b), the Court finds that neither the Atlas nor its cover constitutes a derivative work subject to the ShareAlike requirement. Rather, the Atlas is more akin to a collective work, because the Photograph was placed "in its entirety in unmodified form" alongside "other contributions, constituting separate and independent works" – that is, the maps."


How much time should be allocated to supervising undergraduate researchers? I recently asked this question about how many office hours per week are common for undergraduate lecturers but then I just read this one about supervising research done by undergrads. This got me thinking that perhaps my previous question was going in the wrong direction.

I have >300 students in 3 different subjects. 200 of those students are in one subject and that subject requires students to do extensive research. My challenge (explained in the question linked above) is that I seem to have too little time to properly support this many students.

These are business students so there is no lab. The research is reading the literature, finding data, integrating the two into some meaningful insight.

So, my question is, when supervising undergraduate students who are doing research, how much time on average, per week, per student, should this consume of the supervisor's time? 15 minutes? 30 minutes? 1 hour?

Edit: To put this in perspective, the students are not writing a bachelor thesis. However, they are expected to put in about 100 hours of non-class time (after the class time has finished) doing their research and writing it up. The final product is about 4,000 - 5,00 words (so far less than a thesis).

One person cannot possibly supervise 200 undergraduate research projects per semester of any substance. This sounds more like a term paper with a research component than 200 fully-fledged research projects. When I did undergraduate research, it was a 20-hour per week job that I got paid for, and even then my supervisor and I rarely met for more than half an hour per week.

There are only 168 hours total in one week, and only 40 working hours in a week. If you spent your entire job meeting with all of the students every week, you could give them 12 minutes each. This is clearly impossible. 200 students is so many that giving them each a 30-minute kickoff meeting to discuss their initial idea at the beginning of the semester would take you two and a half weeks. This would put some students at a serious disadvantage over others by potentially delaying their project start or leaving them confused about what is required of them.

If these are not much more than a term paper, then one person can probably do this by putting the assignment together on paper or in email and only answering questions during normal office hours. These kinds of assignments have clearly articulated goals and guidelines and apply techniques as laid out in lectures and homeworks. If you want a more substantial, independent project, then you need TA support, at least 6 and as many as 20 TAs to cover 200 students.


Including in progress but invited publications in resume and/or CV I'm a co-author on two papers that were just recently submitted for publication. There seems to be a consensus that if you even include "in progress" papers, you should not include the journal they have been submitted to since they haven't been accepted by that journal. I was wondering if this is still the case for papers that are invited contributions to special issues?

I have seen people mentioning the 'under review' and 'in preparation' papers in their CV in the following way.

A. Author1, B. Author2, "The preparation of CV for a job" (under review)

A. Author1, B. Author2, "The preparation of CV for a job" (In preparation)

However, it does not add much value it the quantitative weight of CV except that people would know that your are active in your research.

If you are invited to submit an article, then you could mention like this:

A. Author1, B. Author2, "The preparation of CV for a job" (In preparation; invited for
special issue on Imagination)


Reference letter without permission I'm a PhD student and one of my research assistants (undergraduate student) applied for a non-research volunteer position on campus. He asked (via email) for me to be one of his references on the day of the application deadline. I didn't see the email until the day after. In my reply email, I apologized for not catching the email in time, said it would have been better if they gave me more than a few hours warning, and that hopefully he was able to find another letter writer in time.

He replied and said that he had put my name down as a reference anyway because of the deadline. I'm not sure if this was due to them misunderstanding how references work (first job?), or cultural differences (international student?), or procrastination with the application and simply assumed I would be OK with it. In his followup emails he seems to be aware that this was an inappropriate thing to do, but had no choice due to the deadline.

The problem is that even if he had asked me earlier I would have declined to be a reference anyway, primarily because I don't know the student well enough to write a positive letter (he had only been working in the lab for a couple of months at that point).

Today, I received the request for my reference letter, asking me to rate the student on various qualities and some open ended questions. I have enough time to write the letter, but I'm not sure of the correct course of action.

On the one hand I wouldn't have written an overly positive letter in the first place and putting me down as a reference without my permission worsens my impression of the student. But on the other hand I feel that as a supervisor (of his lab work anyway) I should suck it up and help them get the job regardless of how I feel about this situation, as he has been a fairly good student (kind and friendly) in the lab for the little time that I've known him. Additionally, I'll still be supervising the student in the lab regardless of whether he gets the job, and writing a bad letter may sour the relationship and create unwanted tension in the lab.

I'm not sure how to handle this situation. Should the employer be made aware of what happened? Can/should I decline to write the letter? Would there be any negative repercussions for me if I decline to write the letter after being put down as a reference?

I see that there is already a question on here about declining to write a reference (Should I decline to fill out a recommendation form after saying that I will do it?), but in this case I never agreed to write the letter in the first place and this was all done without my permission (or awareness, until after the fact).

As the student’s supervisor, it is your duty not to “help him get the job” but rather to act in a supervisory role, and that includes giving your honest opinion about the student to anyone he requests you to. When I get requests from students I hardly know to write them letters, I tell them honestly there isn’t much I can say other than what class they took with me and what grade they got, and that a letter from me would not be worth very much, but I always say I am willing to write the letter if they insist that I do.

My suggestion is that you simply answer the reference request from the employer as honestly as you can. If there isn’t much you can say, say so, but include whatever details you can speak about that may be of interest to an employer. If you really think you can’t say anything of value, say so. That would probably hurt the student’s chances, but that’s not your problem.

Finally, I wouldn’t mention to the employer the story about the student putting your name down without your approval. It may be annoying, but I would attribute it to the student’s inexperience and just let it go, although perhaps I would privately mention to the student that such behavior is counterproductive and also somewhat rude.


How to refuse to work with graduate students? How do you refuse to work with graduate students when they come to you and explain they want to work with you without necessarily being offered a job (e.g. a project that pays).
My advisor was very selective, he had conditions - students would need to take a course, Ace it, be in a percentage, then take a personality test, volunteer etc etc. He had many projects and million dollar fundings so it was just easy for him to have the authority and the department would be okay with this.
I am only starting and I have realized that I have been kind of soft about this, especially with international students knocking on my door and saying they want to work with me I accepted to be their supervisor. They have their scholarships too so I suppose that shows they have gone through a selection process, and it could be good for me. However, I noticed that it is actually very slow and time consuming to get them to a point where they start working on their own, and if ever happens, work academically (not just applications).
So I decided to be more selective. Then this student comes in and wants to work with me for all the wrong reasons. they have worked in field X for more than 5 years but wants to do their thesis on a new topic just so they will learn it, they didn't bother to take any related courses either. This is a student who deserted their MS some years ago and came back to finish somehow, sees literature review credits as "some checkbox". They signed up for the credits without talking to me (I didn't approve it, but the course is opened without a lecturer on paper, but students are expected to work towards their thesis with their supervisors)
When I explained them they don't have the necessary background, and I really don't have the time to start with a student who doesn't have the necessary beackground. They have insisted which would make me reconsider but the way they insist, using an authoritative language which is outright forceful, and it rubs me off the wrong way really, if I am a couple days late on reply, they send me emails (copy paste) repeatedly to my non work related emails as well (I don't know how they got it btw). Nothing shows up about the student btw as they are super secretive using initials only even for the email, basically a bit intimidating.  Their motivation is again a combination of wrong reasons imho. I don't want to waste my time and also their time. It is obvious that it isn't the right fit, I don't want to take up more students because I feel responsable for the ones I have, besides there will potentially be personal problems as well, my students are respectful and they are motivated by their topic, but I am not sure how to handle a student who thinks an alpha language is going to change my mind. but how to send this message across?

Assuming you really do not want to work with them and not even check them out if they are suitable candidates, the response is simply: "I do not currently have available slots for grad students." Not funding, but "slots". It means time, nerves, energy, whatever else could come into their mind.
If they have no funding, you say you have no funding for them and you do not accept students without funding.
However, if it is simply a case of you not being sure whether you should take them on, then I recommend preparing a few tasks that are relevant to the work you like to do. These should be pieces of homework that are introductory, but relevant to your field and take about 2-4 weeks of time to cover the entry literature and carry out. If they manage to do it, then you may want to reconsider not taking them. You may have a catch on your hand. Alternatively, you can set conditions of your choice.
Yes, if they want to work with you, you can set the conditions, no apologies. There is a reason for the classic "reluctant sensei" trope. It is a real technique to deal with this.
However, a student that thinks they can bully you is an absolute no-no, no matter how good they are. They are going to be nothing but trouble. So, here the answer is simple. First time: "Unfortunately, I cannot take you on as a student. Thank you for your interest." Don't give reasons. Second time: "As mentioned in my last mail from ..., I cannot take you on." Third time: silence. If they continue bugging you, divert their mails to spam or block them. If you cannot or are not allowed to do that, simply archive their mails without opening. Don't open them or you will be tempted to answer them.
You do not need to be outright rude yourself, but if they are, they have deserved the silent treatment. Keep in mind: if you know you will not change your mind, no matter how insistive they are, that will shine through and most of them will desist. If they believe to smell insecurity, they will pounce on it.


Why are operations research departments usually separate from mathematics departments? The title says it all. When I look online, they are usually separate departments

Choose from : history, habit, snobbery, tribalism ...

There is no logical reason for one choice of departmental structure over another. Just look at how often universities change their departmental structures.

If you bring some groups of people together in a named department then you are excluding other people whose work does in fact have a lot in common with the first group. Departmental structures are always compromises.

Most academics see the benefit of interdisciplinary work, but universities, on the whole, like the apparent orderliness of clear departmental structures.

As to the specifics of operational research: its history was in dealing with urgent practical problems in wartime. Its practitioners were applying mathematics, but were not pure mathematicians. Neither were they what many universities described as applied mathematicians, although in the natural meaning of the words they were, of course, applied mathematicians.

When I took a master's degree in OR in the 1970s, I was in the faculty of engineering. A very few years later, I would have been in the business school of the same university (with the same teachers).


What are we expected to do when citing literature? Open any research article and it is littered with citations. I’ve recently been wondering what is expected of us when citing the literature:

Are we expected to cite every reference relevant to our research article?
Are we expected to cite only the “best” references relevant to our research article, where best can be defined as the papers which have appeared in the best journals or papers that are most cited?
Do neither of the above apply? Are we simply expected to cite any paper relevant to our research article, just as long as we have cited something that supports/is related to our argument?

There are (in rough approximation) three reasons for citations:

1. Giving credit

If our paper builds on other papers, if we have taken any ideas from anywhere else, if anyone did something we are doing before, etc, we have to cite them. Questions such as "Is this peer-reviewed?" or "Is this accessible?" do not matter in this category.

2. For proof/evidence

Often we will claim that something is true without establishing its truth within our paper. Then we need to refer to other work for this.

Here, selectitivity makes sense: Citing someones blogpost claiming that X causes Y is not going to me particularly impressive. Citing a mathematical proof written in English available online in a journal is better than referring to a thesis written in an obscure language only availbale in hardcopy at some particular university (although do not forget 1.: if the thesis is prior, we may have to cite both). In sciences, it makes sense to some extent to cite multiple independent sources, less so in mathematics.

3. Providing context

We also cite to provide the broader context our research fits into. Some citations may have a "If you liked this paper, you may also like the following"-flavour. Here we have more or less full freedom what we want to cite. Pointing to one well-written survey article may be much better than citing 25 individual paper without much comment.


Applying to Teaching Position in the Same Department as My Advisor... Should I Mention Her? I'm applying for tenure-track teaching positions right now and have, more or less, a single cover letter that I modify for each one of my applications.

It so happens that the department my advisor teaches in has such a position and I am intending to apply.  To give some context to this, my graduate program was at an institution that is associated to but very distinct from the institution my advisor is a faculty member of.  Though my PhD advisor is one of my biggest professional connections, I hardly have any other connections within this department, though most other people there know that I was her PhD student and would certainly recognize my name from my application.

  My question is: Is it necessary/recommended that I modify my cover letter to reflect my relationship with my advisor in any way?  If so, what should be included?

I honestly think there is a slim chance I would be selected for an interview let alone hired, but I would like to get a sense of what's appropriate in this kind of situation.

I would mention her, certainly. You don't need to make a big deal of it, but just mention somewhere that you worked on your dissertation under the guidance of Prof M. It is probably a matter of public record in any case.

You should also probably give her a note that you are applying to her department. Under the circumstances you state there should be no issue about it, and she may be able to help you along if your relationship was good. Being at the same place gives you a way to carry on research trajectories already set in motion.

She probably won't do for a formal letter of recommendation, however.

And you can, of course, ask her before you apply about the advisability of it and also this very question.


Finance paper with different decimal places I am writing a finance paper and I change my data frequency from monthly to daily data,

With monthly data, two decimal places is fine. However, my daily results look strange with two decimal places.
For example, 1.0042 becomes to 1.00; then I have a tables full with 1.00, which is not informative for my readers.

Can I increase the number of decimal places for the daily results?

Any examples of this would be appreciated!

This is an issue of significant figures. You say the value of 1.00 is not informative, but trailing zeros after a decimal point do, in fact, carry meaning. Showing a number that's been rounded to 1.00 indicates that the true value is somewhere between 0.995 and 1.004 - we know that the hundredths place rounds to 0. If you show the number as just 1, I can only infer that the true value is somewhere between 0.5 and 1.4. You're losing information, since we know that the tenths place is indeed zero, and that the hundredths place rounds to zero. Keeping the trailing zeros after the decimal point shows the level of precision with which you have measured your values.

You are free to round the numbers to whatever precision is meaningful for your domain, but keep in mind that your representation can reflect the precision of the underlying data - there is indeed a difference between a value of 1 and a value of 1.00.


Why does an "external member" of a thesis defense committee come to your defense? I am curious why would some professor from another university come to my university (in Turkey) merely for my defense.

What benefit does this professor have in it?

Do universities pay professors for being an "external member" of any student's thesis defense?

Some external professors are in the same field and others are not. They serve different purposes. They might be paid a small stipend, but it is usually (as far as I know) just an honorarium. The receiving institution probably also pays for travel and lodging if the person is from away.

For the professor it is just a part of service to the profession. Their own institution may provide some recognition for it or not. Often annual evaluations are on research, teaching, and service.

However, the purpose of an in-field visitor is, at least partly, to give some external validation to the program that is visited. I've been asked if I think the entire program is up to the standards I would expect. This help prevent academic incest where a department only speaks among its own members and loses connection to the larger goals. "Would you give a doctorate to this candidate based on the thesis and overall program?" Here the visitor is from a different university for this to make sense. Sometimes from a different country.

The purpose of an external member of an examination committee, however, is quite different and may even come from the same university. In mathematics, the visitor might come from philosophy or a language department. They are normally not expected to read the dissertation and couldn't be expected to understand it. But they are expected to ask a question or two of the candidate and the quality of the answer can be heavily weighted in the evaluation of the student. Sometimes it is just a request to explain to the visitor some terminology used in the defense talk. A layperson's explanation is expected, and the candidate normally is expected to do a good job with the answer. Advanced students who can't intelligently discuss elementary things in their field are at a handicap. I've heard of situations in which the examination was failed for this reason alone.


Why does an admissions committee need to look at the whole transcript? Admissions committees look at a student's entire transcript to get an understanding of their academic abilities. Why is it not sufficient to judge a student's academics based on GPA alone?

The problem with GPA as a measure is that it just mixes together a bunch of different classes indiscriminately.  Consider these three different students:

This student is pretty steady, but not great, and tends to get an even mix of As and Bs across all of their classes, obtaining a 3.5 GPA.
This student always takes the class with the easiest grading policy whenever they can, and tends to get mostly As in the "easy" classes. When they cannot evade a "hard" class, they get mostly Cs, resulting in a 3.5 GPA.
This student is very strong and gets mostly As, but there was one semester when family problems disrupted their life, and missed assignments caused them to get Bs and two Fs, also ending up with a 3.5 GPA.

As you can see, even though all of these students get exactly the same GPA, they are very different. Student #2 is clearly far weaker than Student #1, who is in turn weaker than Student #3, whose GPA has been strongly affected by the one  problem area.

If we can see which classes they took and what grades they got on those classes, we still don't have the full story, but can get much closer to an appropriate evaluation of each student's actual strengths.

This set of pages at Berkeley may be useful.


How to treat an under-performing coauthor? I am a postdoctoral researcher in a lab, having person (e.g.) X as a colleague, also a postdoctoral researcher like me, having obtained a PhD two years after me.

Here is the problem: In the last two years, I have taken initiatives that have led to a number of publications. My collaboration with X was not so close, since I ended up doing 80% of the work, in addition to having the original ideas, and he/she was only helping by e.g. writing a Section, having general discussions, or giving general comments.

I have tried "pushing" (with frequent emails, meetings etc.) but it did not have a good result, as I understand that he/she does not feel motivated by me: the result has included some "ugly" emails, not an oral though.

I have been doing this, waiting that in exchange, X would include me as a coauthor in one of the papers that would occur from his/her research (none so far and nothing in-progress from their part, as far as I know).

How to treat this person, given that he/she will not leave, as the professor seems to have some special interest in them.

In my domain, the order of the authors in publications matters, so in our "joint" publications I am the first author, but is this enough? I am thinking that if we both continue independently we would both lose, but do not know how to motivate him/her. I suppose the pressure has to come from the professor, who let's say that cares but has other more important priorities. I have mentioned the problem to the professor, he/she just told to X that they should produce more, and that's it.

How to handle this situation?

You might simply consider that the current situation is fine: you say that you do get help from your collaborator, so there is little reason to stop working with him or her; you lead the collaboration and, for this, get first authorship. This will earn you much (well deserved) better opportunities; by comparison, your collaborator will have a hard time, because no recent first-author publications will look bad on his or her CV.

You might have wanted a more active collaborator, and it is a good idea to try to help him or her do better, but you just cannot push someone against their will. It is possible that he or she does not have what it takes to handle more core tasks, or that so he or she believes. In this case, pushing too hard would amount to cornering him or her into an impossible situation, no good would happen.

Learn to change what you can (e.g., if you have the option to start another collaboration with someone else it might be a very good idea; if you have another job available with potentially better co-worker, you might want to try it, etc.) and do with what you cannot change. Ultimately, you have the upper hand on your own work, and that is how it is supposed to be.

Ho, and about getting co-authorship in exchange for your work: no one is supposed to give you co-authorship in exchange for anything; you can rather be invited to work on a project, and then this work is what grants co-authorship. I am not sure how you meant it, but giving co-authorship as a mere reward for something unrelated to the publication is a serious academic misconduct.


Editor gave me five days to revise paper – chance of acceptance? I recently received a review of my paper from a journal. Two referees suggested some changes and one referee just rejected the paper claiming that this study was not necessary. The editor decided a major revision. I revised my paper and two referees appreciated the rebuttal and paper while one referee still rejects.

Now, the editor gave me five days time to submit a revision. I sent. Is there a chance of acceptance?

Unless there are some general reasons to impose a deadline on your paper, such as that it is intended for a special issue, I would strongly guess that your paper is practically accepted and the editor only wanted you to apply some minor changes. I only ever heard of such short deadlines when the only things that needed to be changed were minor and quick to do.

If the editor expected you to present changes and arguments to sway the third referee’s opinion, they would have given you more time. If the editor had decided to follow the third referee’s recommendation, they would have rejected the paper immediately and not further waste your and their time with it.


How to publish the design of a low-cost alternative for an expensive equipment? I am a physics undergraduate. We were working on a summer research project, while this idea unexpectedly came up. We worked on it for some months and developed a low-cost alternative for one lab equipment that we were using for our project. We have performed various standard tests on our equipment, and in all of them, our equipment fares well, mostly on par with the commercially available equipment. We have done the literature review, and ours is a novel idea.
We are not much interested in patenting or marketing the product because of the huge time and resources involved. To clarify, our equipment does not have any 'breakthrough' technologies involved, it is just a handier and a more affordable version of otherwise expensive equipment, but it gets the work done.
We want to share this idea so that it may help others like us, but at the same time get us some credit for it.
We are new to this kind of research, hence do not know what to do next. Ideally, how do you go about publishing such a topic?

Have you tried Review of Scientific Instruments?


Should I cite Papers to acknowledge usage of tools? I've found that a few tools uses in scientific research, request that if you use them,
you add the paper they were discussed in to your bibliography.

For example:

Theano requests you cite: "“Theano: A CPU and GPU Math Expression Compiler”
Scipy requests that you cite it as a misc reference.

Is this common?
Is it reasonable to cite a paper (in Theano's) case, that I have never read, because I have used the tool?
Is it ethical?

I would be pragmatic here. Citations are a currency in science. If the authors of a tool help your research by providing the tool to the general public, it is only fair to reference their work in the way they requested it to happen - and, certainly, citing a given reference in a paper that uses their work is not an unreasonable request. I cannot image why it would be unethical to say something like

  We have used Theano [1] to evaluate XY (...)

in your paper, where

  [1] J. Bergstra, O. Breuleux, F. Bastien, P. Lamblin, R. Pascanu, G. Desjardins, J. Turian, D. Warde-Farley and Y. Bengio. “Theano: A CPU and GPU Math Expression Compiler”. Proceedings of the Python for Scientific Computing Conference (SciPy) 2010. June 30 - July 3, Austin, TX

As to whether this is common, I would say yes. Most authors of well-known tools in my area specify a preference for how their work should be acknowledged.

If you are bothered by not having read the paper you are citing, there is a simple fix for that - read the paper, and decide for yourself whether it is worth citing in that context (but, generally, the answer will be yes).


Should I mention my university name when publishing a paper if I'm tenured teacher but not researcher? I'm teacher in a French university (I don't know if the right english term is 'tenured', I mean I'm hired permanently in this university, not temporarily), but I don't have any research role and I'm not connected to any research lab.

Still, I continue to do research during my free time (mostly continuing what I did during my PhD, not connected to the local labs research fields), and I would like to submit a paper to a journal.

Question: as I'm not hired by my university to do research, but only teaching, can I submit a paper like this:

  On the cohomology of finite infinite categories
  John Doe

  University of Cityname
  283, rue de Paris - 12345 CITY
  john.doe@univ-city.fr

or should I submit it this way, without any university name:

  On the cohomology of finite infinite categories
  John Doe
  john.doe@gmail.com

What could be the potential problems if I use my university name / edu-email address, whereas I'm not hired as researcher?

The fact that this research isn't part of your job shouldn't prevent you from giving your employer as your affiliation. A paper by David Pincus about certain weak forms of the axiom of choice in set theory (J. Symbolic Logic 67 (1997) 438-456) lists his affiliations as "Department of Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Cambridge City Hospital". I can assure you that none of these anesthesiology departments paid David to prove theorems in set theory; he did this work in his free time.


Is beautifying a dissertation looked upon unfavourably by the examiners? I'm writing an Msc dissertation on planning space projects and I would like to add interesting bits of information on the opening page of each chapter. Though the image and the accompanying information are not directly linked to the central thesis, they add some interest around the main arguments.

Will this be looked upon unfavorably? As an academic reading this work, will this bother you or make you feel distracted / think this is unnecessary?

For example, I have this on the introduction page:

In the end this is somewhat a matter of opinion. I personally do appreciate a nice  and professionally looking layout. I am not sure however if adding images that are unrelated to the thesis itself are that helpful. If you want to start each chapter with a quote or image (which can be a nice touch), I would recommend to at least try to find someting that is related to the content of the chapter.

Most important in the end however is of course the scientific content of the thesis. If the content itself is under par, no amount of beautification is going to help you. The last thing you would want to do is to give others the impression that you spent more time on the appearance of your thesis than on the scientific content.


Is it acceptable for a lecturer to refuse to allow their qualifications and work experience to be placed on a university website? There are several universities which have a staff profile page on their websites. Lecturers usually list their academic qualifications, work experience, the modules they teach and the papers they have published there.

Since the page is public and qualifications and work experience are private information, can a lecturer refuse to provide this information?
Is a university allowed to disclose a lecturer's background to the public or other staff members without said lecturer's consent?

Sure it is acceptable for a Lecturer to refuse to do this, given that it isn't a condition of the Lecturer's being hired that they agree to publicly posting the information, nor is doing so strictly required for the lecturer to do the other parts of the job that are required.

My own view is that it'd be crazy not to make your information publicly available, since there's no harm in doing so, but much harm in terms of lost opportunities from not doing it. Still, there's no legal or even moral prohibition against making poor career choices.


How to deal with and communicate overflow of ideas with a supervisor when working on a thesis? I had a bad previous experience with flow of ideas. I received a fellowship for six months to work on a project. I started on the project. I was very active and attentive with my supervisor who was very supportive and flexible. I worked very hard, but after two months many new ideas accumulated and I started trying on the dataset and searching for new datasets, after two more months, I had a shallow understanding of all of these ideas. It was late to focus on one point and I got depressed and I ended the project earlier and my supervisor told me I wasn't focused and I didn't do the tasks she suggested and my body language reflects I am not even listening to her (as I say OK a lot) and she will not write to me a recommendation letter.

I am now working on a master thesis with a new supervisor who is nice and flexible. As usual, I started working very hard, but having this terrible anxiety of losing control on the topic and after one month of work, I found that the idea I am working on, will not lead to a real advancement in science, so I changed my mind and changed the research idea a little to what I believe might benefit science. But I fear to discuss with her, because I know after another month, I will have another idea.

In brief, the first problem is that I lose focus not only because other ideas are attractive but also because I feel the idea I am working on isn't worth my effort and there should be an improvement. The second problem is assuming it is right to move between ideas, how to communicate this with the supervisor ?

First an anecdote. A long time ago I was a pretty good photographer. I had a simple manual film camera and two lenses, one fixed, one zoom. I made some nice photos, not just "snaps". Then, when I started to earn more money I bought more equipment. It seems that for every piece of camera gear I bought, I got worse. Just decision overload, I think. Instead of seeing what was revealed in the viewfinder and framing things, I would be indecisive about whether I should use some other lens, or whatever.

Next, a solution, I hope. But it doesn't involve your advisor.

Start a notebook for yourself. Either electronic or on paper. My preferred method is paper. When working on any idea you have another idea that is related, add a page to your notebook, or update an existing page. Just one page (making paper advantageous) so you don't spend too much time and effort on it now. Then, return to your original work.

This notebook is your "future work" resource. The pages are there just to give you a start on an idea that you once had that you now want to develop. In mathematics, it might consist of pages of variations on definitions that you think might be interesting, or potential theorems, or possible relationships between things.

If you can make the interruption of creating a new page in the notebook short enough then it doesn't interfere with your current work, but assures that you have a record of those thoughts so that you don't lose them.

I finished my doctoral dissertation having a fairly large file of these pages, many of them quite interesting. Among other things, the breadth of ideas I'd saved help me gain insight into the general area in which I worked and I don't think I'd have gotten that insight if I'd been too focused on only my dissertation. But I might not have finished the dissertation if I'd immediately followed up each of those ideas.


How to follow specific journal or conference in google scholar for new paper? I want to follow few journal and conference. IS it possible to create alert for such specific item in google scholar? or is there any other system available for these kind of tasks?

Many conferences and journals have RSS feeds that you can aggregate with an RSS reader. Usually they are linked on the conference / journal website (though sometimes you need to search for "rss" in the page source because it is hidden somewhere).

Example: the arXiv math.AG site doesn't mention RSS anywhere, but the page source does.


Etiquette on sending a thank you e-mail to respondents who gave me helpful information Sometimes there are cases in a e-mail correspondence with academia staff (professors and bureaucrats) in which I don't know which is the best practice. I wonder if there is any best practice for the following cases:

Reply to a reply: when I ask for information via e-mail, and the reply gives me all the information I want, should I send an email just to thank them, or is this considered a bad, time-consuming practice?

How does a professor react to this kind of reply? And what about a bureaucrat (who maybe receives more e-mail)?

If I asked for an internship and he gave me a negative response, is not replying to him considered rude or normal?

To send a short mail saying thanks for a service provided is never wrong; in fact, it is good etiquette. Sending such a mail also serves as a receipt acknowledging you received the information. I recommend a very short mail; do not overdo it, the show of gratitude is enough.


Is there a way to search for more recent papers than the one I'm currently reading? Authors of scientific papers usually use the introduction of the paper to introduce the subject of the paper by reviewing previous work in that field, i.e. the works that serve as the foundation of the current research they have conducted.

Therefore, it is fairly easy to get acquainted with the subject in general, because you get a bunch of relevant references right from the start.

However, it often happens that when searching for papers on a certain topic, the best match for my search is a paper from a few years back. While most scientific knowledge is viable for a decent amount of time (really depends on the field, but as a generalization), sometimes I want to know what progress has been made (if any) in the specific field of research I'm interested in.

So my question is: Is there a simple and convenient way to find later papers about a certain topic?

In detail

How exactly do I do it? If, for example, I have this paper from 2013, how do I find newer papers about the same subject?

A simple way that I usually follow to find newer papers about the same topic is using google scholar. Google scholar gives you the ability to find papers that cited the paper you are interested in, and those papers are usually published after the paper you are interest in has been published (i.e. more recent work).

For the example you provided in your comment, google scholar gives me 57 articles/results that cited your example


License for research projects What is a good way to license your research projects?

Diving into the details of most licences, a lot of their wording and concerns seem centered around 'redistribution', and are not so much driven by the concerns of the spirit of academia.

Personally, I have been active in diverse fields; from fields with great standards in terms of code dissemination, to fields with abysmal or almost complete absence of any standards of code dissemination.

When it comes to making code available for academic use, I am somewhat opposed to 'permissive' licenses, and id prefer to release under the absolute most aggressive 'copyleft' principles. I resent the idea of other so called 'scientists' cranking out non reproducible papers that make use of my carefully packaged and documented work, in any way whatsoever. Yet going over for instance the AGPL, considered one of the most 'copyleft' licenses, it seems to be barking up all the wrong trees.

For instance, technical details concerning 'distribution' like static versus dynamic linking are completely unimportant to me. In fact that whole debate about what constitutes 'redistribution' is rather moot when it comes to research I think. Claiming you did something using some piece of software is arguably always fine under any license that seeks to restrict redistribution; since none is involved.

All I care about is that if you seek to build on my work in any way, that you are bound by the same standards of dissemination. That is, not just some passive duty to make code available upon request (I know how that pans out in practice); but a proactive duty to have your code available on a publicly accessible service, and to have it contain runable examples that I can get going with minimal effort on at least one major platform. That is, without spending days to reverse-engineer your development environment. I suppose that could be formalized by requiring use of some CI service; if you can run some tests automatically, everything needed to run your software must be available as code.

For the specific library I have in mind, I am actually quite happy if people adopt it for commercial use free of charge, and redistribute it in whatever way. Id prefer if they contribute back but whatever. But I am absolutely not fine with perpetuating some of the abysmal code dissemination standards going on in some fields of academia.

Is there any license that covers such an intent? Or is it about time one gets written?

The short and to the point answer is that no currently existing licence does what you want. If you wanted to do as you say, you'd need to write a new licence. That would probably mean employing lawyers.

The long answer is that I doubt whether any such licence would be enforceable in practice. Further, in general scientific software that is released under restrictive or unusal licences is generally not well used by the community. See Lior's Pachter experience. Important here is not that this was about for-profit vs not-for-profit use, but that when people are unsure about a licence, they just won't use your work.

If you don't care that people won't use your work you must ask why you are releasing it in the first place. One hopes that you are releasing it because you wish to further the horizon of human knowledge and believe that your library has a role to play in doing that. If nobody uses your library, you are not meeting your goal any better than if people used the software in non-reproducible science. I you do not want people to use your library then you are not doing science, anymore than those that refuse to release their data or methods are.

Putting all that effort and cost into inventing a new licence, which in the end might lead to people not using your software is a poor use of resources to achieve your ends. Much better to expend that effort convincing journals not to accept non-reproducible things, reviewers to actually review the reproducible of the code and into creating infrastructure that makes it easy to do.


How should I deal with students copying down the problem incorrectly? I give quizzes in my recitation classes. I write down the problems on the board. My handwriting is okay but not great and most students can read what I'm writing but because of chalk marks, bad writing, bad vision or whatever some students copy down the problem incorrectly. Mostly the changes are trivial (I wrote a 2 and they wrote 12, but the computations are the same). Sometimes the way they copy down the problem significantly changes the problem.

I don't want to penalize the student for misreading. But I don't want to be unfair if the problem is harder or easier for that student.

How should I grade these problems?

EDIT: I have 80 students. I give 21 quizzes in a semester. That is 1680 quizzes in a semester. Maybe 1 or 2 of those are miscopied to the point of being different problems. I am not going to change how I give quizzes for such a tiny irrelevant fraction of quizzes.

My solution is rather boring and simple. What if, after writing the problems on the board, you read the problems outloud with and or to the students. Hearing the problems will reduce many mistakes due to mis-seeing what's on the board.

After reading with or to them you can then ask the students if anything is unclear on the board. They ask and you can clarify your handwriting.


What is an affiliate professor? The answer to this question seems to indicate that an affiliate professor is effectively just a member of the department for administrative purposes. If that is the case, why is George H. Miley both an affiliate professor and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign? Presumably his status as a professor would already grant everything that is granted to an affiliate professor.
(The above links to an old webpage, but the current one seems to say something similar, he is both an affiliate & an emeritus professor.)

In the example you give (https://grainger.illinois.edu/about/directory/faculty/ghmiley), the person is "professor emeritus" in one department, and "department affiliate emeritus" in another.
I can't speak to that university in particular, but in certain universities, a professor in a given department can only take on graduate students from that department.  Affiliate status with another department allows a professor to take on students graduate students from that department as well.


Highlighting sentences in the statement of purpose I am under the impression that admissions officers are busy people and they have lots and lots of applications to review, especially in top schools. Because of this, it could happen that the some statements of purpose might not be thoroughly read.

Does it make sense to highlight things (underline, bold) that I think admissions officers are looking for? Like ranking or publications? What might admissions officers understand from the statement of purpose if they found these highlights?

I use a similar approach, using bold to highlight key words or expressions in a short free text summary in my CV. The benefit is that points I think are key to my career are visible even at a glance. As you mention, many are stressed and reading through letters take time. Although the persons responsible for the admission process should read the material carefully, it is only human to, for example, get tired after a large number of applications. Using highlighting and other forms of structuring elements (paragraph breaks or even bulleted or numbered lists) to make the text easier to access is therefore a good way to make the reading easier.

To anyone thinking that highlighting might induce unfair advantages, it is worth stating that it can also easily back-fire if the highlighting is not consistent or give an impression that is not consistent with what the text or other supporting material will indicate. In other words, any highlighting must be done with care to be a tool to simplify the access to the information and not to skew it.

Depending on where you are in your career, the CV will be the most important part of an application. Finding ways in which to summarize, for example the general impact of your articles or other activities becomes important. This is why I have a short summary text at the start of the CV, the lists of publications is then supporting the statements about number of publications, the citations of individual articles, etc.


Where to use MLA in-text citations for Computer Science paper I am currently working on a paper on the subject of Probabilistic Turing Machines. To do so, I will be using several print sources, as well as online resources. I have never written a computer science/mathematical paper before, and I am unsure where to place in-text citations (MLA). For example, I am giving a formal definition of a PTM using information from a specific section of a textbook; included in the definition are a couple of equations. This is about one paragraph in my paper. Would I place an in-text citation citing the book at the end of the paragraph?

In general, does every fact need to be cited? For example, if I were to say a PTM is a type of NTM, would this alone need to be cited with an in-text citation?

Would I place an in-text citation citing the book at the end of the paragraph?

Right after the paraphase. If it took a whole paragraph, so at the end of it.

  ... does every fact need to be cited?

Generally, you do not need to cite information that is considered common knowledge. For instance, facts found in many sources or facts easily observed.

  if I were to say a PTM is a type of NTM, would this alone need to be cited with an in-text citation?

I would say no. Even Wikipedia is already aware of such. But be aware that it is an arbitrary choice. Expert audience will have different expectations of what constitutes common knowledge. If you have an adviser ask for his help.

Further, your argument might be stronger by using supporting evidence from other sources. Additional information related to the topic you're discussing would help to verify your claims. Hence, cite others work if such statement is crucial to your argumentation.


Citing paywalled articles accessed via illegal web sharing There are a few sites which offer paid articles for free. It’s something unethical, especially for those who upload to that site, but for me, it’s good for expanding knowledge.

As a readers, can we cite those documents, and can the editorial board know that I’m using those articles?

Nobody will know how you have gained access to the article. Feel free to cite articles found via whatever sources.
It might not even be illegal to download content from the website; check your local laws and Berne convention (if your country is signed up) to be sure. In any case, this is unlikely to affect your reputation in any way.
Remember to cite the source appropriately; a journal or a book, not a pirate website or any other medium. The pirate website is usually not the publisher. You do not cite the university that has bought access to research (probably funded by public sources and peer reviewed by academicians funded by public sources), or the colleguage who shows you an article, or the library that contained a copy of the article; these all have the same role as pirate website.
You might not want to be vocal about using such a website. Some people still see it as ethically questionable. That said, using various pirate websites is increasingly common, and the status of many academic publishers among academians seems to have taken some hits, so many researchers will not care about how you get your articles.
You also have the ethics tag on the question. The ethics of pirating digital material are a polarized subject. You might want to do your own research here, or ask a new question for what the main arguments for both sides are, if it has not been asked already. Some people say that pirating material is analogous to physical theft, while others say that intellectual monopoly laws are bad and breaking them creates more good than ill. (I happen to think the laws are far too strong and harm humanity, and should be weakened substantially or entirely removed.) I strongly suggest reading on the matter until you have found strong statements of both points of view to come to an informed decision.


Should I post a response to reviewers online? I usually spent an incredible amount of time answering the questions raised by reviewers when submitting research manuscripts to a journal. The length of the response is often longer than the paper itself. Such a process, albeit time consuming, has significantly improved the quality of the work.

Since there are many thoughts that can not be delivered in the paper, which are elaborated in the response of the reviewers, I am wondering whether it is good to upload the response online along with the paper? (e.g., research profile page) I think this will benefit the readers but am not sure what might be the consequences resulting from that? Do note that I don't have any clue as to the reviewers' identities.

You are free to post your response as you see fit, If you know who the reviewer(s) is/are then you may need to think twice about mentioning their name(s) since. I am not sure how you may be thinking of posting such comments but I assume you will rewrite them into some form of self-contained text. As such it would not be very different from a blog entry and so one suggestion would be to use a blog type web to add comments around your publications. You may also provide means for commenting on your papers and associated posts.

But, in short, no problem posting your own thoughts but stay clear of adding the thoughts of others that may be given in a context other than open posts.


Is it ethical to do phd thesis about topic someone else did it before? I have a big problem and I need your opinions and your advices.

Someone did his PHD 4 years ago using data collected over 10 years to develop some equations and simulate them. I re-measured the same data 2 years ago (i.e. spanning over 12 years; the methods of collecting the data are different) and I want to develop equations with simulating them in different program (I will do the programming of it). One of the equations was developed by him, and the two others are different. Is it ethical to continue my thesis or not? Is it considered as plagiarism? I have cited his results in the Scientific Background section, and in the Discussion I will compare it with my results.

It doesn't sound like there's an ethical problem here -- as long as you appropriately credit the earlier work. (That is, prominently cite the prior work and clearly explain the relationship.)

However, you should note that re-doing someone else's work with minor changes will generally be viewed as less significant and novel than the original work. In particular, doing almost the same analysis as someone else's PhD thesis is likely not sufficient for another PhD.

That said, it is valuable (and often publishable) to re-do prior work. This is helpful to you and the community, and could form part of your PhD.


Student comments from meetings frequently overreacted to by senior 'management' I've worked at several UK institutions over the past 10 years and one aspect that consistently raises my eyebrows is the reaction to student-staff liaison meetings* from senior members of the team. Often, these meetings are merely an opportunity for the 'representative' to voice their own concerns and are clearly, obviously, not representative. Yet, time after time, when a far fetched and often untrue complaint/comment is made in one of these meetings, senior staff go into full meltdown and start firing off perplexing and demotivating e-mails asking for things to be fixed because the students are unhappy. The simple matter is, as previously stated, these are often not representative views and the sample size is one: the person who said it.

In any other context, a sample size of one would be immediately disregarded by those with only rudimentary scientific knowledge. No sound conclusion could ever be drawn from that sample. Yet, if this sample happens to be one student in the context of a 'staff-student liaison' meeting then it appears to be absolute fact to senior 'management'.

My question is for fellow academics from across the world, do you have this nonsense to deal with? What do you tell 'management' if they ask you to change based on comments from a single source? Am I being too touchy about it?

I am a lecturer at a UK institution.

*These meetings are usually bi-yearly where student 'representatives' voice any matters arising on their degree

For the those thinking "Jeez, this guy gets a lot of bad comments". I have not once been on the receiving end of this but I know good colleagues lose sleep over it.

I also see the benefits of these meetings, I do not wish for them to be scrapped.

[Converting a comment to an answer at the invitation of @hueblue...]

I feel you are focussing on the wrong part of the issue here. It does not make sense to encourage 'management' to ignore the student representative's views; inevitably this will just create problems and bad feeling in the future, when students get the impression that their input is ignored.

The real issue is that (at least in your perception) the student representatives are not doing their job properly: they are using their position as a platform for their personal views, rather than those of the student body at large. It seems to me that this is what you should aim to address. Some things to consider:

How well do the student body understand the role played by their representative(s)?
How are elections handled? Are they treated as important, or an annoyance to be dispatched as quickly as possible in the first lecture of the year?
Is the student body aware of the issues that are being discussed in meetings attended by their representative(s)? Do they know when meetings are due to take place?
Are students reminded to send comments to their representative(s) in advance of relevant meetings?
Is there a clear, well-advertised, equitable opportunity for the student body to get together and discuss any issues and concerns they have with the representative(s)?
Do students have any way of knowing what their representative(s) said in meetings? Are minutes or summaries circulated to the student body at large?

I suspect that at present, the answer to most of the above questions is 'No' - certainly that was the case when I was a student. If you can change some of them to 'Yes', you will probably see a marked improvement in the quality of representation.


Why aren't all research articles on PubMed? I was recently doing some research on PubMed and I noticed that, in my field of research (plant science), some articles are referenced and others are not, even for two articles in the same journal...

Does everyone know what is (are) the condition(s) for a paper to be listed in PubMed?

Because PubMed is about biomedical literature and life science journals. Things are blurry, however, because of two factors:

Obviously, there is no strict definition of what is (or is not) biomedicine.
PubMed does not select “article by article”, but has a list of indexed journals, from which all papers are indexed. Yet, a single journal's scope can be very varied.

Combine the two, and you get the idea that there is a lot of variability in whether an article on a given topic is published. For example, my own research field is materials chemistry, and about two-thirds of my papers appear to be indexed in PubMed: probably because those were published in generic chemistry journals, which also happen to publish some papers of relevant to life science.


What should I do if I believe my former advisor is alleging to journal editors that I have copied his study? I have been through many different things with my previous advisor.

He wrote publications with my research proposal with his former female student after forcing me to give up the topic.  Also, as soon as I completed the simulation study for a different study, he asked me to stop again and then gave it to her again (she published it as a single author).
He simply asked me a personal relationship. I told him no.  Then he did his best to kick me out of my program. Even my Dept. and graduate college forced me to leave without my degree for about 6 months.

Luckily, I completed my Ph.D. and I am now doing my post doc.  Recently my paper has been rejected in the 2nd round from a top journal.  I heard from a colleague that my previous advisor called the chief editor (who was his student) and asked him  not to accept my paper, alleging I copied his study (it cannot be true).

Despite my experiences as his advisee, I haven't ever talked about anything about him because I need a job.  He just made a lot of crazy rumors about me, but I have been quiet.  Should I be quiet again?

I would talk to the conciliation board on your university and to the editor . Ask your colleague, if he/she will confirms that information in front of the conciliation board. Furthermore, I would do some research (or hire someone) about code of conduct on your university valid this case. Last but not least I would write down every single accusing in a chronological form (kind of factual report).

Maybe you can prove by the timestamps of your files, that he copied ideas from you and not the other way.


Maintaining Credibility with Data Obtained by Hand Recently, I was doing a project in computer science (involving modes of computation) that had a very specific time limit. Unfortunately, due to software problems, I was forced to obtain my data by hand. I went to substantial lengths to ensure the correctness of this data, but am worried that my credibility and the credibility of the data will be significantly decreased. What should I do to maintain credibility?

There is probably little to do but be honest about how the data was obtained. If it holds up under review then you have no issues. The past is the past.

However, if you have a chance you can try to obtain a better data set under more controlled conditions. This might be the core of a follow-up publication, either validating or invalidating the earlier result.

You learn something from just about every study. But if you are honest, it is hard to complain.