Submit an article to a conference, which contains a section that has been already published I want to submit an article to a conference, however, let's say 50% of the content of such article has been already published. The reason of such 'variation', is that after some suggestions, we applied some modifications to the methodology and the way to analyse the data, so basically a variation of the study resulted from that, but the core remains the same.

I actually never had the opportunity to present this study in a conference before or after the publication, so this is something that I'd really like to do; but I'd prefer to submit the 'second version' of the study, since I think that it is more complete than the published one.

I know that (if accepted) the entire article would not be published in the  conference proceedings (only the abstract), since its related to a published article, still I  would like to know if submitting an article that contains some part of a previously published article is something acceptable to do.

I'd appreciate your comments on this.

You could treat it as a new paper. Maybe after the conference, you could add more results and publish a paper from it.


How specific should I be in my SOP, regarding courses and thesis subject? I know there isn't an absolute answer but I certainly could use some hindsight.
I'm writing an SOP for an Msc at TU Delft in Aerospace, and I am having trouble with two parts of it : specifically I'm required to provide hypothetical thesis topics and explain why among the different tracks in Aerospace I want one in particular.

First of all, regarding the track, I've explain my interest by explaining in detail which courses I'm really eager to follow and which part of these courses I feel are the most appealing, but I'm not sure if I should be this is the right approach, I'm also wondering if I' not going too much in details by being so specific about the courses.

Then about the thesis subject, I know what the focus of the Msc is going to be , what courses I will follow and what the research themes are but I don't know what thesis subject are going to look like, and what is a relevant subject or not. So I don't know if I should stay a bit generic and talk about the fields of research or try to make a concrete thesis subject anyway ?

Thanks in advance.

The expected Statement of Purpose probably differs between fields, countries and even institutions. In economics, it is not a major factor in admissions even if required. People write about their general interest area and proposed topic, with the expectation that their actual thesis may be completely different.

As I understand it, the purpose of the SOP is just to demonstrate having an idea about the field in general and being able to distinguish subfields. As mentioned, this may vary across fields.


Thesis: What are the requirements before saying "There is no research on that" and how to phrase it? I'm writing my masters thesis in computer science and I haven't found a good source for evaluation criteria of the protocols I'm looking at in my thesis.

What are the requirements before I can say "There is nothing on evaluation criteria in the literature."

Is the fact that I couldn't find any enough? When do I know that I put enough effort into searching?

Is the fact that I couldn't find any enough? When do I know that I put enough effort into searching?

Obviously, there is no way to "prove" that something does not exist, so on a fundamental level that you did not find anything has to be enough. Of course, you need to make evident that you searched in a reasonable way. The guidelines of structured literature reviews have some rules on how to do this, but essentially it boils down to (1) searching all reasonable sources, and (2) searching for all the terms that could reasonably be used to describe what you are looking for.

  how to phrase it?

The usual phrase is "to the best of our knowledge, this methodology has not been used before to (...)".


Whether to publish one big paper or many smaller papers for a given research project? Let's say I invented a system to solve a problem. To run this system, I made my own algorithm.I also created some other things for that system. The main contribution was supposed to be the system.So is it a good idea to have as many research papers out of the project as I can? Or to publish a single research paper?

I have seen a lot of researchers where they were targeting a single problem and they proposed a single solution. Now, what they would do is write a research paper for every component separately. Then they would write a single research paper showing how all the components would fit together.

So is it a good idea to try and increase the number of publications you can have out of a single research project?

My own personal opinion is that the quality of your research matters not the quantity. But I have also seen a number of institutions requiring a specific number of publications to even apply for their jobs.

The way I see it, there are a number of factors at play:

Your goals: Do you want your paper to be published in a high-impact journal? If so they will most likely be interested in the whole story rather than a small piece of it.
Readability/General appeal: Can you make a coherent story with individual components? Will they all be interesting for wider audience on their own? In other words, if you opt for multiple papers out of one project; can you make sure these will be able to stand on their own? I personally think going for multiple papers is only valid when combining them into a single big paper would push aside some of your interesting results (or methods) to a metaphorical corner
Limitations imposed by the target journal: Can you actually put together all that in a single manuscript? In biomedical research you always get a limit on the number of words in the manuscript, and there is only so much you can put in supplementary.

With regards to quality-vs-quantity, I heard that early on in your career quantity is more important while as you become more and more senior, quality becomes the main concern. I am often told that as a PhD student I can, and should try to get involved in as many papers as I can. Around the time I do post-doc, however, it's time I pay a lot of attention to where I put my name and try to work on a good paper, preferably in a high-impact journal.


Potential Post-Doc supervisor visit: should I give a talk or just have a meeting? I am a PhD candidate in computer engineering. I saw an announcement for a post-doctoral position on the internet.

I wrote to the professor having that open position asking him if I could come to visit him and his lab, and talk about the position.
He replied yes. We agreed on the date and I asked him if he wanted me to prepare a talk with slides to give during the visit.

He answered:

  You are welcome to give a talk or we may just have a meeting. It's fully up to you.

So, what should I do?
Talk or just a visit?

A meeting would be more relaxing and confortable, and provide no stress and no extra work.The talk would need time to work on it, and would be more stressful, but may explain better my previous research projects..

What do you suggest to me?

Unless told you shouldn't, you should always opt to give a talk under such circumstances. It makes discussions with your potential future advisor and group members much more meaningful, because your interviewers now have a much better sense of what you do.

Moreover, a solid presentation of technically sound research shows that you have achieved one of the most important skills needed for a researcher: the ability to effectively communicate your work! As a postdoc, your advisor is going to expect you to have most of the research skills needed to complete your work with minimal supervision. Giving a good presentation will clearly demonstrate most of your credentials in a way that a face-to-face talk will not.

Finally, giving a talk to a (mostly) friendly audience is always good practice for your future career. (People get better at giving presentations by giving presentations!)


Questions about authorship rank and academic politics Disclaimer! I am a first year CS/Applied math master student so I do understand very little in how academia works. I am trying to fix it before I go into PhD.

I have discovered a scientist who works in the field I am interested in. This scientists is very successful career-wise. The scientists finished a prestigious university and had stays in very good places. Now the scientists is an assistant prof in a high-ranking US university.

However, literally >90 %  of his papers were written in co-authorship (as a rule, not the first nor the last author) with other more experienced researcher who we recognized as leaders in the fields. In fact, the only solo paper the scientist has is ones thesis! All PhD students so far have been also co-advised.

I have very little research experience but it seems to me that coming up with a good idea one can further develop is the trickiest part. Implementation (or, sometimes, even writing down actual proofs) is a technical work. I guess that the coauthorship was earned for some implementation work. It seems to me that there are much more people capable of / actually doing these technical work both in academia and in industry who do not get such recognition as the aforementioned scientist.

I may be envy but I find very little proofs of that scientist actual skills. Instead I have a feeling that the scientist makes very wise political decisions or is good as self-advertising.

Also I did very limited empirical studies and found that researchers who have highly-cited solo papers tend to have higher (4K +) citation counts then those who have almost exclusively co-authored papers.

My question is many-fold:

is what I have described normal? Update. Is it normal to have almost exclusively co-authored papers?
what should I do to mimic that behavior. It does not seem to be noble at all but apparently this is how successful academia people work.
Are indeed funding and promotions based on citation counts? If this is not the case, how those researchers without solo papers are assessed?
Is it true that those researcher who has successful solo papers are much better supervisors?

Update. I am talking here about theoretical research in CS/Applied Math. I guess in other fields there are many more opportunities for equally valuable contributions of many sides.

I should point out one of the most famous of co-authors in math: Paul Erdős. Erdős never won a fields medal or even wrote a seminal paper as a solo author. What he did do was "wander" around to different universities and help people solve problems. He was an extremely prolific writer (over 1500 published manuscripts) and is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. The ultimate mathematical Renaissance man who could seemingly work on any problem.  I think you would have quite a bit of difficulty in arguing that because Erdős never wrote a classical mathematics paper as a solo author, he was not a tremendous mathematician. (Though to be fair, in the past decade, his paper "On Random Graphs" can now be considered a classical work of mathematics. It just took 50 years for the work to become highly applicable).

I relate this story because having lots of co-authors does not necessarily mean having bad skills. Now I am not saying your professor is the second coming of Paul Erdős (I can't think of anyone currently in academia who can claim that mantle) but they might have other skills you are not giving them their due credit for.

Never underestimate the power of being able to organize a group of smart people and get them to work together on the same problem.

To answer your questions specifically-

It's neither normal or not normal. Tenure positions are rare enough that there are certain metrics that are highly predicative (e.g. individuals who are ahead of the publication curve for their field tend to get hired in tenure positions) but there is no conclusive metric. Individually, there is enough variance within each position that you cannot really say.
Collaborate! Having only solo author publications is probably not wise (unless you are in a field that is big on monographs). Having a variety of publications where you are first author, second author, and a middling author show your ability to collaborate and be a team player.
Yes, clout does increase likelihood of getting accepted. Being a big wig with 10,000 citations at an elite university means you are more likely to get a grant than someone with a handful of publications from an R2. But to be fair, the qualities that led that person to be a big wig probably translate into their writing and research caliber as well.
I have never seen any research or evidence that suggests that.


Does a supervisor have right to submit paper without consents of coauthor students? Me and another PhD student, we are first two authors in a paper. We had a disagreement with our supervisor about submitting our paper to conference. We both opposed the submission as we think it's too early to submit our result and the paper will most likely be rejected. Our supervisor said, academically he has the full authority to submit the paper even if we oppose. My question is does a supervisor have the right to submit a paper from the point of view of the university?

Your supervisor does not have the right to submit a paper with your name as a coauthor without your consent. By making such a submission he would be making a false representation that all coauthors have agreed to the submission, thus essentially committing a form of minor fraud or certainly dishonest and unethical behavior that is considered completely unacceptable in the academic world.

Note that you write "from the point of view of the university", so technically there is a chance that your university has unconventional standards in such matters and in their eyes your supervisor is correct. If that is the case (which I strongly doubt), I would suggest getting the heck out of that miserable institution and going to a real university.

Finally, while it is absolutely possible that you generally have better judgment than your supervisor (a possibility that does not occur to many graduate students even when perhaps it should), he does have more -- probably a lot more -- experience than you in matters of publications, so I agree with jakebeal that it is worth questioning whether your objection to the submission is a good idea, and maybe consulting other experienced academics from your field.


Get Information about NSF grant with grant number Papers funded by NSF grants usually contain a phrase like "This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants ENG-XXXXXX".

I wonder if it is possible to find some information about these grants with the grant numbers. I am interested in who applied for the grant, original proposal etc.

I tried to search on the NSF website with the specific grant number, but did not get any results.

Visit research.gov

  Research Spending & Results gives the public, the scientific community, and Congress insight into federally funded research. Research Spending & Results provides information about how federal research dollars are being spent, what research is being performed, and how the outcomes of research are benefiting society as a whole. Anyone can easily access, search, and sort information in new ways through Research.gov. Currently, information is available for NSF and NASA awards.

Search the award data.


How do I regain my momentum in research after a long period of slacking off? I'm two and a half years into my PhD program. Recently, I finally worked up the courage to admit it — I've been slacking off for over a year and it's my fault. Now I'm determined to be productive in research again but realized that I forgot how to.

It was sweet in the beginning. I got a paper accepted at a top conference after my first semester, which was quite something for a first-year. I was enthusiastic about research back then, devouring papers in and outside my field and conceiving of new research projects even in my dreams.

Sadly, things changed quickly. At the beginning of my second semester, I took over a project left by a visiting scholar in my lab. That project was complicated and beyond my expertise. I poured hours and hours into it but barely got any useable data. Meanwhile, my own projects began to go nowhere. My advisor didn't offer any concrete help (e.g., giving advice on how to improve my experiment equipment or design, pointing me to people who might be able to help, etc.) but just asked me to keep going. After a streak of failed experiments, I felt disillusioned and started to spend less and less time on research. I spent what must have been 40 hours a week on my hobbies and social activities. I feel ashamed to admit it but even when I was in my office, I wasn't thinking about research — most of the time, I was just randomly browsing the Internet and waiting to go home. I only worked hard before major deadlines and managed to get some papers/posters accepted at major conferences. These achievements, however, paled by comparison in front of those of my cohort. My advisor noticed and mentioned several times that my research is going slowly.

This semester, I came to the realization that I've squandered half of my PhD career and decided not to continue on the path of self-destruction. I want to make the most of what I have left but feel disoriented about where to begin and what to prioritize. For instance, should I first catch up on basic research skills that I lack or come up with new ideas? Speaking of the latter, what are some good practices I can follow in order to regularly come up with research ideas? — I used to be good at this but have now lost touch with what good (or at least feasible) ideas look like. How mature should an idea be before it's a good time to talk to others about it? Should I ever share my concerns with people in my program? — They may look down upon me and I'm not sure what good it does, but it feels so painful to keep pretending that I'm right on track.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!!

This may sound stupid, but a good place to start when confronted with a seemingly unsolvable problem is just to start doing something. There are always some simple experiment/simulation one can run, some related papers one can read, or some results that can be written up. The point is to get back to making consistent and incremental progress, no matter how trivial it may seem or how many mistakes you make. Once you get the ball rolling everything else should follow, given your background.

Don't worry too much about coming up with research questions. Good research problems are not dreamed up in a vacuum. You have to immerse yourself in the literature and your research problem to see the gaps that others have overlooked or come up with new methods to tackle old problems. So when you are still trying to get back to speed don't expect brilliant ideas to just pop into your head.

Another thing you should do is to set up weekly meetings with your advisor. Or if your advisor is not available, then write up regular progress report, both for yourself and send it to your advisor. The fact that you can slack off for years and get away with it means that there is a lack of structure and discipline.


Writing Sample Topics: Applying for History Phd I am planning on applying to History Phd programs, and while I would love to apply for to enter next academic year, I am worried about my writing sample. For my university's honors program, I wrote a thesis based on a treatise that was originally written in middle French. To be honest, I'm proud of the work I did. It demonstrates my proficiency with French, and I think it's an interesting topic.

However, since graduating, my interests have shifted from early modern France to the French colonization of Brazil. I took Portuguese as an undergraduate, as well as a few upper level seminars focusing on colonial Latin American history, but I am worried that I will not be able to demonstrate my proficiency with Portuguese unless I have a writing sample that uses a substantial amount of Portuguese sources.

So I guess my question is: how narrowly focused should writing samples be? Should they broadly demonstrate one's ability to conduct historical research, or should I try to potentially alter another paper and scrap my thesis?

Thank you guys so much in advance!

In my limited, but certainly present*, experience with history departments, your writing sample wont be used as a negative indication of language abilities. Your statement of interest and and language test/coursework proof will be noted, but if you have no Portuguese in your sample they are unlikely to notice. Your interests sound like a natural progression and they do not expect to see undergraduate work that directly relates to your proposed topic. If you're worried about it, sit a formal Portuguese test of some kind and report that on your cv.

*before grad school I was the secretary of a history department in the usa and managed admissions admin for it.


How to stay in connection with a professor when you want to apply for the position in his group in next quarter? I got a strong recommendation from my former supervisor. He wants to recommend me to one of his former colleagues who happens to have no position now. So I have to wait until the Spring Quarter. But I want to stay in contact with him because everything could happen during this period from now to next March.

Basically, in that university, the professors have the absolute power. If I can get permission from him, I can secure this position. And I really value this opportunity as he is like among the top 5 in our field.

How should I do? I have no idea what should be in the email which could increase my admission chance and would not bother him. I guess he must be busy every day.

You could contact him to ask for him to advise you on some papers for you to read that are related to the work for that position. This way you have a good excuse to contact him, you gain extra points for showing interest and getting prepared in advance, and also provides you with another excuse to contact him in the future to clarify questions you may have from reading those papers.


Appendix before references when asked for separate page of references I'm submitting to a conference, which has the following text in the call for papers:

  Papers must be submitted in PDF format according to ACM guidelines and
  style files to fit within X pages including any diagrams and
  appendices, plus up to 1 additional page of references.

The ACM style files have the references before the appendix, but this text makes it seem like the references should be separate. How would you arrange the references and the appendix? Which would be placed first?

I think the order of mentioning the differenct sections does not resemble their order in the document. The way I read it, the journal only wants to clarify that the one page with references does not count into the X pages for all the other stuff. While I can't give you a source here, from personal experience the appendix comes after the references. That's just the way it usually works.


Is it OK to send email to journal asking for extension for a revision? I am in the process of sending the response to reviews to a journal. It looks like it will take some days for the revision.
In the reviews, the associate editor had commented the following

  Finally, I would appreciate if you could submit your revised paper by Jan 12, 2018. If you cannot meet this deadline please contact us (xxx@elsevier.com) to request an extension, otherwise your paper may be withdrawn.

I was wondering if it was OK to write to them asking for an extension or should I somehow submit the revision by Jan 12?

Ask for an extension. This is quite common in case more extensive changes/analyses need to be done.

Submitting a subpar version would waste their and their reviewers’ time, and may even end in a desk rejection for you.

When asking for an extension, shortly explain why you need more time (ideally, related to the reviews you got – show them you are working on the paper), and make a good estimate on when you will be able to resubmit. You don’t want to ask for several extensions during the same round.


Physics Courses in Undergrad to Apply for Physics Grad Program I am a sophomore physics student with an interest in studying applied physics or engineering in graduate school. I will take as many applied physics courses as I can in undergrad (and CS courses), but was curious as to what opinions most physics grad programs have toward Chemistry courses in undergrad. I have a strong feeling that Chemistry (2 semesters of it) would look great, but it would be hard for me to squeeze them in to my schedule. I know that it will vary by grad school, so I am wondering if anyone has a general rule of thumb when it comes to this?

Taking chemistry courses is good, but there is no need to remove physics courses from your schedule to add chemistry courses.


I can't trust my supervisor anymore, but have to have his letter of recommendation. What should I do? Background
I did my masters research project with Prof X. While doing this I joined his lab, where he used to ask me to do random tasks i.e. taking part in different projects, conducting lectures to undergrad students, help him preparing presentations, doing literature reviews not related to my project. I did all those things because of my curiosity and passion for learning as many things as I could. Unfortunately, this delayed my progress in my masters research project.
The Prof. X seemed not at all concerned not only about me but also his other students, except when he wanted us to publish. Although the research field was new to me and I had to do everything on my own and I learned a lot. In the end, he was quite happy and satisfied with my work. He offered me  PhD position at his lab but having bad experience with him, I politely refused that right now I don't have any plan to pursue my PhD.
After that, I could notice he is very cold towards me. During my writing stage, he continuously burdened me more with different tasks related to lab. Moreover, after submission he totally ignored to pass the examiner's names to faculty and it delayed my masters results further two months, even though I requested him multiple times. Once I came to know about this delay through faculty, I told him very politely that how can he do that? He just said (laughingly): sorry I forgot about it.
This is not the first time I found him selfish and not consistent while having no concern about any of his student.
Question
Now, I am applying for PhD position and I need references. I have other other faculty members with whom I have worked with or taken courses and they are willing to witness my motivation and good performance. The problem is that they require one of the referee must be the main research supervisor, in my case Prof X. I don't trust Prof. X in this matter. What should I do now?

If you submit an application with a bad reference, it will quite probably sink your application. On the other hand, simply ignoring the requirement in the application may lead to a desk reject.

However, if obtaining a good reference from your advisor is not going to happen, you should probably address that up front in your statement of purpose and include the reference anyway. Disclose, in a neutral fashion, that you had difficulties with your previous supervisor, and focus on what you learned from that. If you can show in your SoP that you can endure challenging situations, and even grow from them, while also showing you are able to conduct high quality research, this may outweigh not having the critical reference.

Pros:

It meets the requirements of the application (if, indeed, you have verified that this is a hard requirement)
It demonstrates that you can endure challenges in research, as you will inevitably face more during your PhD (just hopefully of a different nature)
It shows maturity in your application (by favouring openness and transparency)

Cons:

It includes a weak reference letter in your application, if you can even persuade your advisor to write it
It risks presenting (rather than concealing) less savoury characteristics of your past research profile, which shows that you're not a "golden," flawless candidate.


Completing premed requirements after Bachelors I'm thinking about applying to medical schools in the USA. Many medical schools require a two-year course in chemistry including organic chemistry and a year long course in biology, as well as requirements in mathematics and physics.

I have already satisfied the mathematics and physics requirements and a portion of the chemistry requirements during my undergraduate study. Are there any programs that will let me cherry pick classes to satisfy the application requirements?

Yes. At many (most?) universities in the United States, you can take courses as a non-matriculating student to get your premed requirements.


What does "the authors must present insightful implications based on their experimental outcomes" mean? I am advised to revise my paper about a novel clustering algorithm. From the responses of reviewers, I have this question:

  "the authors must present insightful implications based on their experimental outcomes."

I haven't understood what the reviewer means? Does he ask about a real case study, because I applied my algorithm only to benchmark of the UCI Machine Learning Repository? Available: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets.html.

Without reading the paper and reports, I can only guess, but it sounds to me that they are asking "Why do your experimental results matter? What do they tell us?"


Citation type for a NIST Publications In my masters thesis I need to cite from "NIST Special Publication 800-22".
We are to use IEEE referencing style and I am using an online LaTeX editor to get this done.

Now that this document I need to refer to is a PDF document, I have no idea what is the type of the document that I should treat it as. Is that okay if I treat it as an article? Or else is there any other type that it should fall under?

At least in my field, NIST special publications and technical notes are cited as handbooks or reports. In particular, I'd cite that as follows:

  A. Rukhin et al., "A Statistical Test Suite for Random and
  Pseudorandom Number Generators for Cryptographic Applications", NIST
  Special Publication 800-22, US Department of Commerce, National
  Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, April 2010.


Is it normal for an instructor to refuse to tell students their current grade? I want to know what my current grade in a particular class is. The professor says she refuses to tell us our grades. The syllabus mentions the same policy.

Is this normal? What should I do?

I've been that professor several times. Much to my own chagrin, there often is no such thing as "the current grade". On a typical day during a typical semester, there are scores for homeworks, quizzes, midterms and whatever other assessments have been completed so far, and there is a formula in the syllabus that computes a "final score" from all the assessment scores, but:

the formula assumes all scores to be known, not just the first few. Extrapolating is not trivial, particularly if the rules include things like "the lowest homework score will be dropped" or "later midterms will be weighted more" or "the first homework will be dropped if the next ones show improvement".
the cutoffs for the grades are rarely decided upon in advance; they often are determined by looking through students's work (the final midterm or exam is particularly good for that, being fresh in the lecturer's mind) and clustering students into categories (e.g., if you see someone doing really good work, you put that student into the A-cluster, so the cutoff for A will be no higher than their score). Some lecturers also curve based on pre-determined ratios (something I avoid, but I've heard of lecturers forced to do this by the admininstration), but again it is impossible to predict the final relative position of a student just based on their current status, as some students improve heavily during the semester.

So computing a "current grade" is a nontrivial exercise in forecasting -- and a thankless one, as the reward curve is biased to the negative (getting students' grades right will net you some thanks; getting them wrong will cause trouble all the way up to disciplinary action). Teaching is hard enough without it.


Is it normal for PIs to change projects to unrelated research As I asked in a previous question, I ended up with a project that is not nearly close to my interests or research expertise, and my PI is pushing me so I publish something in that topic.

But that made me wonder. Is it usual for this to happen in Academia? I'm not talking "Topic was A and ended up with slightly related topic B", No, I'm talking a topic about a whole different field (even) than topic A, let say Topic Omega (Different Journals, Conferences, etc)

I reviewed my CV and the Job posting of almost 2 years ago, and it clearly said the job was on building algorithms for Brain Machine interfaces using Machine Learning.

However I ended up building electrodes (heavily balanced toward doing electrode characterization) for Brain Signal Capturing, and the paper he wants me to publish is in this topic, that is not nearly related to Machine Learning. Also, nowhere in my CV I even stated that I had nor the expertise nor the experience to deal with these particular field. And at the end of the day, had he advertised it as a heavily experimental postdoc I would not have applied at all.

We are talking Postdoc level here, not a grad student who suddenly switched topics. I just want to know if this is normal, or just a bad situation.

Knowing that this is normal might reduce my level of frustration, but if it is not, at least I can speak up in the exit interview.

I would say, no, it is not normal for a PI to shift focus so radically.

In the normal run of things, when hiring at the PostDoctoral level (and lower), the PI will have:

Submitted a funding request with a detailed outline of the research plan.
Have received acceptance of that plan and a budget.
Advertised open positions accordingly to the budget looking for people with the necessary skills.
Hire people with the necessary skills for the duration/budget allowed by the funds.
Supervise execution of the research according to the initial plan.

... pretty much in that order.

Topic shifts would normally occur where funding for a project has run out (which should correspond with the end of the PostDoc contract) and the PI wishes to find funds from other projects to keep the PostDoc employed and to extend the contract.

Shifts might also happen if the PI is pooling sources of funding together, which can sometimes happen: they might decide to juggle resources between different projects on the fly. This, however, is far from an ideal situation, esp. for managing researchers on temporary contracts.

The questions I would ask in your situation are: in which of the PI's projects you are working on, has it changed recently, where the funding for that project came from, and what the original proposal was.

If you have moved project, you should ask why.
If you are in the same project, you should ask why the topic changed so radically all of a sudden.


How are GPAs from different universities evaluated for admissions to MS programs in the USA? I am about to apply for a Master program in U.S. as I am about to graduate in Bachelor of Engineering. Though I heard that all my grades during all my academic life is taken into consideration (GPA). Here in Brazil is very common to have a huge gap between universities both in teaching level and avaliation process. So, holding a degree from a weak college may be much easier and thus helping you to get a higher GPA while a well-known college will be much more difficult and probably your grades will be lower. Even though you have a degree from the very best college and you do have a good knowledge of most subjects, the GPA from the person who came from the weak college may be higher.

This also extends to the outside world (comparison between GPA's from different countries). So, how is it really done in practice? Do I still hold a reasonable chance of getting into a nice college with not a so high GPA?

We have the same phenomenon in America, of course. All other things being equal, a 3.5 GPA from Princeton is much more impressive than a 4.0 from some random state university. The whole idea of GRE scores is to provide a metric that isn't confounded by the difficulty of different programs at different colleges in these ways. An additional difficulty you face is that  your American evaluators won't know how good or bad your university is. This makes your GRE score doubly important.


Can I copy text from a scientific paper onto my website without directly referencing? I am writing a text for a website where I'm going to sell nootropics.

I was wondering if it is illegal/fraudulent to copy the text directly from the scientific papers onto my website without directly referencing the papers? (I will reference the papers at the end of the text).

You must quote copied text and cite it where it is quoted.

Citations at the end are vague and can be misleadingly general.  Specifically, it can give the impression that the cited works support all of the text on the page as a whole.  Specific citations are honest in that they clearly delimit what is being cited from the rest of the content of the page.


Is a IEEE student member counted as a member in a submission to a transaction? I am going to submit a paper to a IEEE transaction. I am a student member of IEEE. In the auther line of the paper, do I append "IEEE, Member", "IEEE, Student Member" or nothing after my name?

I have published in the IEEE and "Student Member, IEEE, " is what you should write after your name (if you care to), because you're not a full member. Note that it doesn't have any benefits to it — you don't get a discount/additional copies/favorable review/faster review/muffins/... nada. It is exactly the same as if you had listed nothing at all.

Perhaps the only advantage might be for senior members, who want visibility (as a member) in order to be elected a Fellow, and for Fellows, if they want to show off (but by that point, you probably don't care).


What are some good ways to figure out one's interests in mathematics, before applying to PhD programs? Are there mathematics seminars to attend in the summer, or do they typically only occur during the academic year?  I am referring to American universities.

An idea I had last night was to YouTube some math seminars to see what talks I can watch quickly - talks are about an hour long.  I found a good PDEs talk from a Princeton seminar.  I hope to find more talks that are available online.

Is this not advisable?  These are talks given by experts, and as a lowly master's student, I naturally do not understand about 90% of the mathematics being talked about and written on the chalkboard.  I am mainly just trying to get some sense of purpose of, say, studying PDEs, its difficulties, etc.

I am also making progress on a master's thesis, but my gut feeling is that this problem is too narrowly focused and in the end may not help me figure out better my research interests in a PhD program.

What else could I do?

Are there mathematics seminars to attend in the summer, or do they typically only occur during the academic year?

I think none of the answers thus far actually addressed this.  At most US universities, seminars don't happen, at least not regularly, during the summer.  One reason is many faculty will be traveling.  However, sometimes some people, possibly grad students, will organize an informal seminar to read through some books or papers.  If other people aren't doing it, you can ask around to see if people are interested and organize it yourself.

  What else could I do?

In place of seminars in the summer, there are usually lots of conferences and workshops as well as summer schools specifically geared towards young people.  Look around for what's available (you can try asking some professors if they have suggestions) and go to what you can.  Many of these have funding for students, but unfortunately most of the funding may have already been given away by now.

Edit: By the way, it's not expected that you know what you want to research when you enter PhD programs (in math in the US, say).  Many people who start aren't even sure if research is for them.  Most programs are designed so that you can use the first couple of years figuring out what you want to do.  (And even later, research interests may change---I may be doing something completely different in a year or two from what I'm doing now.)


PhD dissertation burnout duing pandemic (COVID-19) I am in the process of writing my PhD thesis and it happens to be during the global pandemic crisis. My submission date was supposed to be June 2020 (we are in April 2020), but my supervisor has been kind enough to extend it to September 2020 due to the current circumstances so as to give me more time. However, I feel completely burnout, and I'm scared it will evolve into a depression.

I don't live in the country of my origin, so I am away from my family, support system and anything familiar. I also have a tendency to feel lonely and get stuck inside my head but I went to therapy when I first moved to  where I am now and made so much progress. Normally, I have things under control, I go to the gym regularly, and hang out with friends on weekends, play basketball, go on hikes, maintain a relationship with my colleagues at the institute, and volunteer, which all help.

But since we are in quarantine, the isolation and the PhD stress are taking their toll on me, and I feeling super unmotivated, lonely, and defeated. I have extreme self-doubt and pretty much a negative outlook on my personal and professional life. I cry daily and I feel physically exhausted even though I have been getting enough rest and sleep. I try to write, but I can't concentrate. And the more I don't make any progress, the more anxious I become. This is in addition to the feeling of just wanting to be done with this phase and moving forward with other things in life. I feel stuck.

I don't know what to do, and I'm scared it would evolve into depression. What can I do before things spiral out of control?

From what you've said you have already slipped into depression precipitated by external factors associated with the COVID pandemic. You could screen for this by taking a PHQ-9 questionnaire which is probably what a GP would do (https://www.mdcalc.com/phq-9-patient-health-questionnaire-9) but if you are crying daily and cannot concentrate then it probably isn't necessary.

If you have had thoughts of suicide or self harm you need to seek urgent medical help. If not, you still need to seek professional help on a semi-urgent basis. You should apply to your university's disability services or whatever it is called at your university for special circumstances and adjustments for which you will need a letter from your health provider and you should do this early rather than at the last minute.

In the meantime, you should try online cognitive behavioural therapy websites such as Headspace (https://headspace.org.au/) or Unmind (https://home.unmind.com/) or whichever equivalent your institution may have access to.  Some have made their platforms available for free during the COVID pandemic to certain groups and this may be worth a look. You need to tell your supervisor and consider pausing the PhD or going part time if you can.

Most importantly, you are not alone and you can find many people who have written about how the COVID crisis has negatively impacted their mental health (https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/apr/24/what-is-the-covid-19-crisis-doing-to-our-mental-health-podcast) or (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/think-about-the-best-case-scenario-how-to-manage-coronavirus-anxiety).

Don't suffer alone, get help early, know there are many people who empathise with you.


As a student, how to deal with low quality tools in lab assignments? In a lab today we were working with electronic circuit boards (kind of like old-fashioned Arduinos). I had done the prelab but I had a great deal of difficulty trying to get my circuit board to work in the way it was supposed to. Slowly, everyone in the class left. The next class arrived and I continued to work. I consulted the TA for help several times and eventually I was able to prove that the board I was working on was faulty. It was very difficult, as it seemed to work as expected with one micro-controller, but given multiple some funky stuff started happening. The TA emphasized that it was important to understand the basics and advised me to come back tomorrow to make sure I understand how to use the circuit board. I already missed a class staying in late today. This is very frustrating especially considering I pay lots of money to be in the class and half the labels on the chips are so faded you're not even sure what you're putting in.

My question is, could I have done anything differently (and not missed my next class)? I find it nonconstructive to blame things on the equipment, but it does really happen sometimes. Should I have pressured the TA more for help? It was 1 TA for a fairly large class but she almost never looked at what I was personally doing and just gave general advice. What would be fair for marks? An omission or an extension?

This was embarrassing and frustrating. After the TA told me how I had to be able to do this, I thought about dropping the course. It would have been unfortunate if it was because I happened on a defective board.

Should I have put more pressure on the TA to help me or make sure my equipment was working properly?

The answer for your question is based on three cases.

Case 1 -- Inadequate instructions: If you feel that you did not have enough tutoring from the instructor. You ought to request for a demonstration of the exercise. The instructor is obliged to answer. Otherwise you could try consulting a peer for help; one who knows enough to do the exercise.

Case 2 -- Defective equipment: Once you are able to follow up with the instructions then you should be able to detect faults, if any, with the given equipment. If defect is suspected, have the instructor inspect it. Then she would be obliged to set you up with a new set of equipment. If such an arrangement is not available, then report to the department regarding the defective equipment.

Case 3 -- Inadequate knowledge: If everyone is able to execute the exercise without any issues, then you want to contemplate on your prior knowledge of the practicals. You should have clarified your doubts in the pre-lab session. The solution: ask the instructor in her free time to catch up with the basics. Although the better option would be learn it yourself if the TA is really not approachable as you describe so.

If your problem is a mixture of the above three cases, then resolve in the order case 3, then case 1, and then case 2.


Failed at all meetings I am a postdoc researcher in mathematics and finished my Ph.D. some month ago. I wrote three papers during my Ph.D., and I am the only author for two of them.
The day when I started my postdoc position, my mentor asked me "let's work", but I was not ready, so I made a lot of mistakes. My mentor works some area that is not close to me. We tried to work together, but I couldn't follow what they were working on it.
Monday, we had a meeting with her college about a project that I was working on. I gave a conjecture that I wanted to reach it, and then he gave a contradiction example for it and then left the meeting. I felt so bad.
Moreover, they don't treat me as same as when I came here. I feel they think I cheated them or I am weak or stupid because sometimes I feel they ignore me and they don't answer my emails as either. I asked them to write a recommendation letter for some job, but they didn't do it.
These problems made me think about whether I am a mathematician or a lucky guy that I wrote some papers. You can look at my previous questions and see that I had this problem in my Ph.D., but surprisingly I finished it.
I have had several meetings here, also some online meetings, that all were terrible. Now, I lost my self-confidence and am scared that I am losing my reputation due to the above problems and it will spread in the club soon or later that I am a stupid mathematician.
I wanted to quit academia for industry because of the above problems, but as you know, finding a job is very difficult now due to COVID-19, so I'm just looking for a postdoc position, which is very difficult.
To be honest, I don't have anyone to talk to about my problem (my Ph.D. supervisor doesn't listen to me) which is why I wrote here almost everything. What should I do to break all the failing and walk in the right direction?

First of all, OP, take a deep breath.
There are two well-used tropes on SE, one is 'get mental health support' and 'impostor syndrome'. Both have their place. And if you really feel it is a mental health issue, go for it.
However: I do not think your case is either. You have an objective (I do not say real, you will soon see why) reason to feel down. You have been just shoved to the side by an insensitive PI.
Of course your question is, were you just lucky in your PhD?
Yes, you may have been lucky that you had a good PhD topic. You may have been lucky that you just needed to scratch its surface and results would gush out. Yes. That's luck. That's researcher's luck, it's the luck of the one who can harvest it; the expert in the field. It may be luck or not, but it's still yours and deservedly so.
Others, say, equally talented to you, may have spent their whole PhD on some miserly results to be scraped together in some work paper, who knows? They were less lucky. Was it their fault? Not necessarily. They were good researchers, just picked the wrong topic.
Almost unavoidably, you will run into bad luck periods, but, on the long run, good research comes from honing your instinct on where good luck can be more regularly found to loiter around.
Let's move to the second one. Collaboration. Comes this guy spewing stuff at you and you are lost. You do not get them. Note: "them", not the "math". They confuse these two. They think you don't get the math, but that's not what happened - they simply didn't explain it properly.
Sometimes, you find people, where conversation flows naturally, as if you always had worked together. There is a natural intersection of ideas, even where you do not understand them, you fill it with insights and interpolations from your own experience, quite naturally. It is exhilarating to work in such conditions, and rare. But it happens. And it's the most fun science can be.
You got the opposite. You got some - perhaps famous - guy as mentor that you simply couldn't tango with. It's not your fault.
Or perhaps it is? Your PhD supervisor does not listen to you - well, perhaps your choice of mentors is what needs to be improved?
So, your mentor found a counterexample to your conjecture and left the room. What does he want to prove? That's simple to see one? That if you have not such superior vision into the field, you are not worth to discuss with? How did you get to this guy? Ask yourself this question.
Whether the counterexample may have been obvious, it may be not, I cannot judge. A famous chess master made once a complete beginner's blunder in the opening moves of a game. It happens. It's not nice, but it's not an excuse for a put-down.
If he is that dismissive of your work, cut your losses, and get a different mentor. Find colleagues, mentors etc. who you have a common language of mathematics, where you understand what they say when they say it (I do not say that you need to understand their math fully, only you understand what they communicate). Find a place where you intertwine into the scientific discussion. You do not have to be a Gauss, Galois or Grothendieck to be a good mathematician. Having luck is fair game if you put in your part of the effort (note: I say effort not talent - if you can do a PhD in math, that's a given).
TL;DR

You feel down for an objective reason, not for some mental health problem. You have been treated badly.

You are entitled to luck in the choice of your research topics. You were lucky in your PhD thesis. Expect also some bad luck in your career, but develop the scent for the good places.

Collaboration requires effort from both sides, not dropping packages and expecting someone to pick them up, which is what your mentor did. Perhaps that's the way to test you, but it's not a way to treat people. Get a different mentor.

As with luck, the right collaboration partner can make results come out easy. It will feel effortless and not because the partner does everything. Like luck, find where these people loiter around.

So, perhaps the one thing where you are really not yet good at is finding the right people to work with. Your supervisor, as well as your mentor are both not exactly the most ideal of colleagues. Maybe, however, you are just in a difficult location. Clearly that's something you should work on changing.

It's not your fault. You are entitled to researcher's luck. You are entitled to a proper explanation of fresh concepts, or else direction where to read them up before "wasting" the precious mentor's time. First and Foremost, you are entitled to be treated as a human.
Get out of there and either a mentor or position or even just visit to a group who are interested in your stuff and who you can communicate with.
Good luck. If it comes, it's yours.


How to finish Master's Thesis when my adviser is too busy to help me thoroughly edit what I have written? I have finished my B.S. and I am now finishing my M.S. thesis (already finished M.S. classes). My original thesis topic was not getting me anywhere and I came to my adviser asking him to allow me to switch to a new topic that I have already started working on. The professor allowed such a change and I believe my new work is much better and more interesting. Unfortunately, the new thesis topic is not my adviser's area of expertise.

Moreover, I have been late in turning in my thesis for several semesters since I've also been working full time much of the time after I finished my B.S.. This makes it feel like my university does not really care about my success anymore and I am not even being pressured to finish writing my thesis as I would have been if I was a full-time student.

I will be finishing writing my thesis on this new topic, but much of the work I have done have not been checked by anyone with a Ph.D. This worries me. Should I just crowd-source some comments for editing my thesis from friends and try to just get it turned in and accepted so I can present? Or should I seek out more professors who are more familiar with this new topic and try to have them read it (it would take at least several hours to do this and, keep in mind, I am not a full-time or even part-time student right now)?

I think my work is good and I will pursue trying to get it published in a journal once my actual M.S. is done, so I am not too uncomfortable with the things I've written.

It sounds like you have two major concerns about getting quality feedback from your advisor: (1) he's busy, and (2) he's not as familiar with your new topic. I'll address these separately.

Getting high-quality feedback from someone very busy

To get the best feedback possible from your advisor, make sure that whatever you send him to review is as polished as possible. If he's pointing out typos and areas where the writing has issues, he's not going to have as much time to evaluate the content, which is where his feedback is most valuable.

It will also help if you identify and tell him about the areas where you think you most need extra high-quality feedback: "Could you tell me what you think of the formulation in Section 3, I'm not so sure about that part."

Getting high-quality feedback from someone not an expert in the topic

Even though your advisor is not an expert in your new topic, he's an expert in something and he knows what good work looks like. He knows when an argument seems weak and "hand-wavy" and when the evidence on offer doesn't support the claim.  So he's still likely to have good advice even if he isn't as familiar with your topic as you would like.

In fact, for PhD students at least, it is generally assumed that the student knows more than the advisor about the thesis topic by the time the student is about midway through the program.

On crowdsourcing thesis feedback

Having said all that, it's still useful to get comments from others in addition to your advisor.

Ask your friends to read your thesis to (1) find typos and obvious mistakes, and (2) note areas where they think something is unclear, so you can improve the writing. This will help you make sure the version you send your advisor to review is as polished as possible, so you'll get better feedback from him.

If you know some professors who are expert in your topic, you can send them a copy, but follow the advice for getting feedback from someone very busy: Make sure what you send them is very polished, and identify where you want their help the most. If you don't know any professors who are expert in your topic, then after your advisor gives you his feedback, ask him: "Do you think we should also send this to an expert in the topic for review? If so, do you know anybody we could send it to?"


Should I introduce myself to my supervisor via e-Mail or set up an appointment to introduce myself? For my graduate studies my supervisor was assigned to me without me having spoken to him first. Now I am wondering if I should introduce myself via e-Mail and then ask for an appointment, or keep it short and ask for an appointment specifically to introduce myself. I don't want to waste his time or appear rude.

I would send mail suggesting you think it might be helpful to meet, just to get to know each other, and ask if your supervisor might suggest a time that's convenient.


I believe a publisher is infringing copyright when reproducing a figure I created. What can I do? A few months ago an Elsevier representative contacted me asking for permission to reproduce one of my thesis figures in one of their books. Since this figure is only in my thesis (introduction section) and is not published elsewhere, I retain full copyright.

Because I am truly concerned about the negative effect of Elsevier policies on science at large, I am boycotting Elsevier. I considered not granting them permission, however I thought that this would mostly affect the authors of the book and have very little effect on Elsevier. I asked my Facebook contacts what I should do, and one of them proposed a very nice solution. Basically, he suggested that I publish the work under some terms so that everyone, and not only Elsevier, can be directed to the specific conditions under which this work can be reused. So I posted my figure on Zenodo (this actually makes sense because I have been asked many times for permission to reproduce this figure - mind you, that's the only reason why my thesis gets cited at all).

I replied to the Elsevier representative referring him to the Zenodo entry, and specifically letting him know that the modified version of the figure that they want to use does not comply with my terms (since it removes the text stating I own the copyright).

Last week, I noticed that a preview of the book is available in Google Books. To my surprise, I noticed that the version of the figure (fig. 11.1) that they ended up using does not comply with the terms I communicated to the Elsevier representative. What can/should I do about this?

Edit

I contacted the Elsevier representative who apologized and corrected the image. The Google Books link above now shows the copyright notice as it should (hopefully this settles the nonsensical debate initiated by @user71659 depicting increasingly weird scenarios in which Elsevier had recompiled the figure from scratch).

You attempted to use a crayon license, that is, modify the terms of an existing well-established license to better suit your needs.
This is frowned upon, because it can cause legal complications. In particular, the license CC-BY-NC 4.0 license that you attached to your work states

The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional or different terms or conditions communicated by You unless expressly agreed.

or, in other words (human-readable version on their website)

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

The CC folks officially forbid you from using that name and logo if you do modify their terms:

Can I change the license terms or conditions?
Yes—but if you change the terms and conditions of any Creative Commons license, you must no longer call, label, or describe the license as a “Creative Commons” or “CC” license, nor can you use the Creative Commons logos, buttons, or other trademarks in connection with the modified license or your materials.

So it is going to be difficult to argue for your additional restrictions in court. They are likely to be void. For legal purposes, we can assume that your work is licensed under an unmodified CC-BY-NC 4.0.
Notice 1 still stands, because the CC license allows you to specify your preferred name and wording for the attribution (and it seems to me that they complied with it in the book). Notice 2 is void. Notice 3 still stands, because the license only covers non-commercial use.
So Elsevier is infringing it because they are using it in a commercial work, right? In principle yes, but you wrote that you had an exchange with them and essentially authorized them to use it in the book under the terms listed in Zenodo. We would have to review your full conversation with Elsevier to see what you really wrote to them.
Disclaimer: IANAL.


A lecturer wants to grade me based on 'creativity' in a task, how do I succeed? TLDR: In a course where students are required to do exercises, a programming project and write a report in small groups, the lecturer announced that grading will be based on 'creativity' and how funny or interesting he thinks the results are. How can I cope with this as a student?

I am taking a mandatory course where a programming project and exercises are carried out in small groups of students. Over the last years, the projects were relatively similar from what I've heard, and the course is known for a comparatively large workload with no deadline or fixed extent.

An anecdotal example told by the lecturer is that someone wrote a 170 page report and implemented his own wireless transfer protocol (which is only partly related to the course contents). Students from the last semesters took up to around a year in total to finish their projects.

This is my final semester where I take courses (hopefully), and the only semester I am able to take this course specifically. After that, there will be my masters thesis.

In the introduction to the course, the lecturer has mentioned that he does not want to keep the old format of long reports about the basics, but rather wants students to write 'creative' blog posts in addition to a report to be turned in. In particular, he is looking for us to write about things he likes or perceives as funny (but is still related to the topic, which according to him has a lot of potential for this).

In addition to the report and programming exercises, he lecturer wants students to write creative written blog posts about topics closely related to the exercises. These posts are supposed to contain funny and interesting information, as in "we accidentally made a mistake but the outcome looks/sounds funny" or "during the exercises we found out/made an assumption and verified it by xyz".

I want to mention that this is the same lecturer who fell asleep during two of my talks he had to grade, and I was previously dissatisfied with his grading on one of these. Now I have a new task where the desired outcome is unclear, and the task description is very subjective. During the introduction, I have explicitly asked for fixed deadlines and a statement about the extent of the project and report (as in, how many pages and such). He replied that he would 'probably' write down a few sentences about the task soon.

My worry is that there will be a lot of work for me, since i would like to get a very good grade. In addition, I fear that my work won't result in what the lecturer wants, and I am worried that I might get a worse grade than desired due to 'creative' grading.

My questions are:

Should I communicate this to the lecturer?
If yes, how?
How can I effectively deal with this unclear task in a way that will not leave me frustrated and overworked?

I understand that me being unsatisfied with a grade is not so much a problem and rather common in students, but my main concern is that I don't want to do unproportional amounts of work and then be given an average or worse grade.

tl;dr: your lecturer is right in principle. Commit time and effort to your project and try to be creative.

In higher education, students are expected to develop the skills which enable them to apply a number of techniques, compare the results, evaluate their effectiveness, synthesise new methods, or even suggest new approaches to a problem. Your lecturer is right to expect students to be creative.

In the last decades academia is under an increasing pressure of corporate managerial culture: education is considered as service and students are treated as customers. This creates a new kind of relations. Some students expect to acquire complex skills without spending sufficient time practising them (without feeling overworked) and expect first-class grades without committing themselves to the work required. Some students, supported and encouraged by academic managers, require more strict and deterministic rules to be set for academic assessments, such as precise specification of assessments, past papers to be provided with model solutions, and new assessments to be very predictable. Under this pressure, academics are forced to remove creative elements from their assessments and ultimately from their courses. As the result, many students don't develop the creative, teamwork and communication skills which are important for employers.

Even if your lecturer was not very efficient in communicating expectations, they are right in principle: they actually want you to use education as the opportunity to develop right skills. You want security and a good mark. Your think as a consumer; your lecturer thinks as an educator.

So my suggestion is: trust your lecturer; commit time to the project; try to be creative as much as possible. For this, learn at least 3 different methods to solve the problem, reproduce them, and try to create one more from scratch. Compare the results and present results in an engaging and visual way. Plan at least 5 hours of work for 1 minute  of final presentation or 1 page of final report.


What is the meaning of “In Proceedings Of ...”? I saw the phrase “In Proceedings Of ...” many times on Google Scholar. What is the meaning of that?

For example, “In Proceedings of the International Conference of ...”. Does that mean that you send this paper to that conference and they accept it?

When it comes to conferences, if there were submitted papers, and they were published as a volume, that volume is called the proceedings.

A paper that was published in the proceedings must have been accepted by the conference.

Sometimes the proceedings are published as a standalone work, and sometimes they are published as a special issue of a journal.

It should be noted that some societies publish a journal that has "Proceedings" in the title, such as the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" or the "Proceedings of the Royal Society". These should be distinguished as standalone journals and not confused with the proceedings of a conference.


How to address professors in emails? I have been greeting all my professors as "Professor (last name)" in emails I send to them. I think this is normal, but at my university all the professors/lecturers use their first name when ending emails they send.

For example, if the teacher's name was "Joe Smith", they might end an email they send as follows:

Regards,
Joe

This behavior is the case with all of the professors I've had, so it seems to be something that's global to the university. Should I be addressing my professors by their first name in emails? I would have done so already, but I don't want to sound disrespectful. I've looked it up but haven't found any guidelines my university gives on addressing faculty.

Also, I think this question is different from others because as far as I know, my university is an exception with all professors using their first name.

If in doubt, "Prof. Lastname" is always appropriate for an undergraduate addressing a professor.

I sign all of my emails with my first name, but would find it quite strange if an undergraduate student started addressing me by it, unless we had done research projects or extensive service together justifying that far more intimate form of address.


Monochrome vs grayscale in scientific journals? Many scientific journals accept only black & white articles.

Does this mean that only monochrome (black and white only) articles or also grayscale (gray is OK) article are OK?

The same question holds for books.

I have a confession to make.  I absolutely ignore it when a publication tells me they want grey-scale or black and white.

Yes, they want it because somebody is going to put something on some dead trees, they're going to be cheap about it and not use color, and somebody might actually pick up a dead tree and see my mangled image.  But either they're also going to put it in a PDF, or else I'm going to put a pre-print in a PDF and that PDF is going to go online in all its radiant rainbow glory, and that is what people will actually read.

So [CENSORED] monochrome.  That is so 20th century.


References/resources on problems surrounding peer review in physics? I was watching this video on YouTube (this is the second part of it) and it motivated me to ask this question.

From the videos:

  ....that's the good aspect of peer review. It should work to sift out problems with the interpretation, problems with the results. It should work to improve a paper. The problem is ..... there is a huge volume of stuff and we are increasingly getting swamped. .... here is one of the worst examples of where peer review has entirely failed. ....

The examples he talks about is discussed in this blog post.

When you zoom in, you can clearly see that it is photo-shopped.

  ...this is one of the top ranking journals in the fields...

  Now here is the really troublesome aspect... if they had done it better
  (you can see a much better photo-shopped image in the blog), how would we know.  Not only is money spent in that lab, other groups would chase this up and that's the worrying aspect and it builds and builds. Science is like that.

  In the past if the referees didn't pick it up, that was the end of the story. We now have something called the post publication peer review. There are sites ( PubPeer) and there are blogs (ChemBark, Chemistry Blog) where people upload paper and say well this looks like a great paper or in many cases they go "there is something I don't quite get here" and that leads to lots of comments from people in the field and I think this is where we are evolving to... away from the traditional peer review system. The publication is seen to be the start of the scientific process and not the end, where you generate debate.

My questions:

Are there other such examples in physics? Can you point me towards a blog/site or something of the sort that goes through these things?

Are there any blogs, articles or essays that discuss problems surrounding the peer-review process (in relation to physics). How it can improved, where alternative methods like post-publication review are discussed ? I know ChemBark for chemistry, I am looking for it's "equivalent" in physics.

I would like to slightly disagree with the Hauser's answer regarding the possible methods of scientific misconduct in physics.

Unfortunately, in more theoretical parts of physics some people can manage to pretend that some complete and utter nonsense represents a new result well enough to fool the referees and editors and thus beat the peer review system.

A prominent example of this (to our luck, very rare, at least AFAIK)  phenomenon is the Bogdanov affair, see also e.g. the web page by John Baez on this and the Nature article on the ensuing scandal; a sample of the works involved is available through this Google Scholar query. The Bogdanov (a.k.a. Bogdanoff) brothers got their Ph.D.s using the papers in question, one in physics and one in mathematics, and in early 2000s have published a number of strange -- to put it very mildly -- papers in a number of reputed physics journals, including Classical and Quantum Gravity and Annals of Physics (and e.g. the Annals of Physics paper is still there -- it is not withdrawn until today). The papers were not just wrong -- they turned out to be downright gibberish.

In the light of the Bogdanov affair it is not a big surprise that sometimes peer review also fails to detect even a really large-scale plagiarism, as in the infamous case of more than 60 works by a group of Turkish physicists who plagiarized earlier work, see e.g. the Nature article and this post at Peter Woit's blog for details.

Unlike the Jan Hendrik Schön case, AFAIK the papers by Bogdanov brothers did not involve experimental data or predict outcomes of reasonably doable experiments, so their case is pretty much a pure peer review failure at the level of the referees and editors (and of course a failure of their thesis advisors too).

IMHO, the Bogdanov affair shows that the argument regarding going to production and post-publication review from the Hauser's answer does not seem to work well in the more theoretical parts of physics, especially when the authors make no readily verifiable experimental predictions.


Do all PhD programs have publishing requirements? At the bottom of this webpage are publication requirements for PhD students at Skolkovo Institute of Technology. Is it common for PhD programs to have specific publication requirements like this?

I think the answer is no, not all do. But if you rephrase it slightly you get a different result. If we define PhD strictly as a research doctorate (though some schools might be weak on that), then a dissertation of some sort is required. In all fields, and for all advisors, I think that the attitude, if not the specific rule, is that the dissertation be of publishable quality. The exceptions, where the committee doesn't have such an attitude, seems to me to be a vanishingly small set.

That is a judgement made by the advisor and committee in many fields. In some fields, and apparently at some universities, prior publication is required. But that is just a way of having an independent judgement about publishable quality; by the journal/conference reviewers. The decision is, then, somewhat distributed.

Some dissertations never get published other than informally (university libraries, University Microfilms, etc). Some result, after the fact, in one or more publications. In my own case (though long long ago) there was no formal requirement other than a submission to what was then University Microfilms. But a shorter version of the dissertation was published a few years later.


Professor not replying to my email. Why? I wrote an email to my professor yesterday to ask makeup exam. But he doesn't reply until now.

Test was taken a week ago. But, I can't take it because of family emergency(my grandfather passed away) and sudden move into new room (my hostfamily kicked me out without prior notice.I think the reason is outbreak of covid-19, and I'm Asian). Those are my nightmare!

In your opinion, can he admit my makeup test? and why doesn't he reply my email...?

Expecting an overnight reply to any email is unrealistic. He may have some issues of his own to deal with, given the worldwide pandemic. He will probably reply "in good time", but by his standards.

Whether you are allowed to take a make up or not we can't say here. It is up to him and to the institution. I hope it is allowed and expect it would be given the family emergency. But the other things you mention have little bearing on the issue.

But waiting a week after the missed exam wasn't wise, and expecting an instant reply after you didn't offer an explanation for a week is a bit "over the top".

I suggest that you wait to see what the reply is. There probably isn't really a need for instant action at this point.


Which GPA (cumulative or major) is more important for graduate admissions in the US? I live in US. In some applications it is asking to enter your cumulative and major GPA. However I am wondering which GPA is more important and which one is used for admittance famous graduate schools (Top 10) in engineering program?

First of all, remember that GPA is more of a negative filter than a positive filter.
If you do not have an excellent GPA in your relevant major, then you are definitely going to have trouble getting admitted.  The GPA outside of your relevant major is less important, but it will still raise major questions if you have, say, all As in major and all Fs outside.


Is it reasonable to ask candidates to create a profile on Google Scholar? I was in the evaluation committee for the adjunct lecturers this year, and it was a complete nightmare. There were over thirty candidates and many of them didn't have an account on Google Scholar, which made tracking their impact really hard, due to name collisions etc.

My question is would it be a reasonable requirement to force the candidates to create a Google Scholar account, so that we can easily track their publication/citation record and impact?

My hesitation is that it would require them to give away private information to a third-party company, and some people wouldn't like to be forced to do it, or even raise legal issues.

As much as I like Google Scholar, requiring candidates to create a Google Scholar profile specifically seems inappropriate. You are effectively saying you won't hire people that don't use Google.

What you could do is make it an optional part of the application or you could ask candidates to submit something more vague like a "citation report" and suggest that a printout of their Google Scholar profile is sufficient for this.


Is it possible to protect a paper before publishing it? In an answer to the question How to protect scientific open research from being patented? one reads

  ...if you publish your research, this protects from anyone subsequently filing a patent on it. Even if they had invented it previously, your publication would invalidate a future application.

Now, consider the field of Mathematics. Say a mathematician has obtained a nice result, but for whatever reason can't publish a paper on it momentarily.
Can they do anything to hold some kind of priority over anyone else that comes up with it and publishes it before them? If so, what happens in practice if someone else does indeed publish it before them?
The practical result of this "protection" should be the ability to make the journal take your paper (which you should quickly write) instead of the one by the researcher who published before.

In particular, would time-stamping work?

Now, consider the field of Mathematics. Say a mathematician has obtained a nice result, but for whatever reason can't publish a paper on it momentarily.

This bears further explanation.  Publication in mathematics does not happen so quickly, but if you have a "nice result," you should be able to submit it for publication.

  Can they do anything to hold some kind of priority over anyone else that comes up with it and publishes it before them?

If two different mathematicians or groups of mathematicians obtain results at approximately the same time, they should both be able to publish.  The gap between submission and acceptance of most math papers is typically 3-18 months (with anything less than six being quite speedy), and the gap between acceptance and publication is another 6-24 months or so.  So if a rival paper gets published before you submitted yours, there are three possibilities: (i) the other paper was in fact first; (ii) you delayed submission for a significant length of time, or (iii) you experienced substantial delays in the publication process (including rejections of your paper).

For most mathematicians, the best way to hedge against getting scooped is to (i) write up your results in a timely manner, and (ii) post the paper to the arxiv as soon as (or even slightly before) the initial submission.  In the mathematical community, an arxiv preprint will have the same effect towards establishing "priority" as a formal publication.  It also has the chance to alert a rival group to the overlap of effort before the works have been published.  When this happens, the two groups should examine each others papers and decide how best to proceed.  In some cases this means that each paper cites the other and they both get published.  In some cases the work is combined into one joint paper.  And yes, sometimes one of the groups decides that what they have done is "majorized" by the other group and decides not to try to publish their work.

From the way your question is framed, I have the suspicion that you are not very familiar with mathematical publication culture and may be thinking about things in somehow the wrong way, but I can't put my finger on what it is.  But in particular you write

  If so, what happens in practice if someone else does indeed publish it before them?

and

  That is, the practical result of this "protection" should be the ability to make the journal take your paper (which you should quickly write) instead of the one by the researcher who published before.

With regard to the first quoted passage: with very high probability, the prior publication will stand without formal comment and you will be left to try to explain/establish why your paper should still be published.  I have seen "statements of priority" published about math papers, but probably fewer than ten in my entire life.

With regard to the second quoted passage: first of all, no author has "the ability to make the journal take your paper" in any circumstance whatsoever.  I'm not sure I completely understand the situation you contemplate: if the journal has already published the other paper, then it is too late for them to take your paper "instead."  If you're saying that they should retract the published paper and publish yours instead...well, I have never seen that happen. The only circumstance in which I think that could even be plausible is if the authors of the other paper literally stole your work and passed it off as their own.

Also...what do you mean "which you should quickly write"?  If you see a published paper on work that you've completed but haven't even written up yet, then as mentioned above that other paper was probably written 1.5-3 years before yours.  So how could you have priority in this situation?


Accepting offer from one place while waiting for answer from another place I have received an excellent job offer from institution A. I have also applied to institution B, which I would likely prefer over A if I had the choice. I believe I have a shot at getting an offer from B, but it is far from sure, and they will only start making offers well after I have to give an answer at A.

Suppose I accept the job at A and subsequently I am offered the job at B. Once I accept A I would commit to staying for at least 1 year, but starting one year later at B should not be a problem.

My question is: how and, more importantly, when should I tell A about B? I can think of three possibilities:

1) I tell A even before I accept the position at A (and before I get the answer from B). I believe in honesty so I would prefer this but there are the obvious risks that A will withdraw their offer or assume that I will leave at the first chance I get (which is not quite true; if I don't get B I'd stay at A for at least a few years).

2) I tell A right after I accept the position at B (this would mean I would start my job at A with everyone knowing that I'm leaving after a year - awkward).

3) I tell A at the very latest legally allowed moment. This would seem best from a selfish point of view, but in addition to having to lie about my future plans there is a risk A will find out I accepted the job from B anyway (it's a small community).

Any additional thoughts are very welcome! In particular, how would you react in each scenario if you were a member of A?

Edit: Thank you all for the comments and answers. In my situation A is not able to wait until I get an answer from B; I agree this would be the best solution. Although I haven't made a decision yet, I'm leaning towards avoiding all the scenarios in the question and either accept A and withdraw my application from B, or reject A, wait for B, and keep applying next year if I don't get B.

I'll comment from the point of view of a former department chair.

A job search is quite an administratively arduous task to undertake when you think about it. You need to seek and gain approval to initiate the hiring process, deputise a search chair, convene a search committee, advertise an opening, screen applicants, interview them, check references, and negotiate a deal that includes a start date. All this needs to take place so that the work of the department -- teaching, research and engagement -- continues without a hitch.

When a department makes an offer to an applicant, it is in good faith. It is expected that the other party acts in good faith, too. The worst that can happen is that an offer is accepted with an ulterior motive in mind. This is because operations might be severely affected. For example, say you're hired to undertake a typical load of teaching and research at the assistant professor level. In particular, say you're assigned to lead one subject in the spring semester and supervise three master's students. The department was up front about this responsibility, it was part of the negotiation, and you signed a contract of employment. If you were to give notice a few weeks into your employment that you would be leaving to take up a post in another university, then the teaching and supervision responsibilities would be reassigned and may cause disruption.

As chair of the department, I would seek to handle this in two ways. First, I would activate that clause in your contract that states that we can ask you to see out the remainder of the semester. This is a standard clause in most academic contracts, but may be different in your specific case. Second, I would activate another round of hiring to fill in your position in time for the summer session or autumn semester.

Depending on your performance in this situation, I may or may not have a word to the academics in your new department about the issues you put us through. (Shock horror! We do talk to each other.)

What would I advise in this situation?

That you have applied for a position in another university is material information that I would like to know. While I don't think you have any legal obligation to disclose this (and I'm not a lawyer), it remains material to the decisions I, as department chair, need to make. You don't need to draw attention to it, but it is important to our considerations, nonetheless.

It's not as difficult as you might think. We expect that you've sent your application to a number of places and we have a sense of our department's standing in relation to other departments in other academic institutions. Thus, you're simply confirming what we already suspect, and it's likely that we've factored it into our assessments.

I would prefer to know during the negotiation stage. The statement you make should be brief and to the point. It's not likely we're going to dwell on it anyway. For example, "I'm considering positions in other institutions. I wanted to put that on the table." My standard response is, "Thank you. If you accept our offer, we expect you to meet your obligations under your contract."

Good luck to you.


Submitting journal version of an article while conference version is still in review In my field (electrical engineering) it is a commonly-accepted practice for publications to be produced at various stages of the "evolution" of a research project, meaning that preliminary results can be published in a workshop paper, intermediate results in a conference paper on the same topic, and "final" or "definitive" results in a journal article. This paradigm is supported by the IEEE, for instance. As long as you cite the original work(s), state that the work is an expanded version of an earlier work (published at the lower stage of the "evolution") and obtain copyright clearances, this is a generally accepted practice.

This leads to a significant reuse of content across generations. I have heard multiple times that the threshold for jumping from a conference to journal paper is "30-40% new material".

My question is this-- do you need to wait for a conference paper to be accepted/published to submit the journal version of an article?  If you do not wait, does this violate the "multiple submissions" principle, even if the submissions are not identical, and not at the same "hierarchy". If so, why does waiting for the conference paper to be accepted make this "okay"?

The reason for this question is the case where you are on a tight timetable to submit a journal article, but you want to include some conference results that are currently in review (and may be for several more months).

As a general rule, as long as you are honest with the editor and reviewers, you're OK:

Make it clear in your cover letter that you are submitting an extended version of a paper that is currently under review at a conference. Also clarify this anywhere else in the submission process where you are asked whether this submission is an extended version of an existing publication.
Submit a copy of the conference version together with your journal manuscript, so that reviewers and editors can evaluate the new contribution. Note on this copy that it is currently under review.

Some journals have a policy specifically covering this case. For example, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications:

  It is also possible to submit the journal and conference version at the same time.  Or the journal version can even be submitted first. The journal version should not have appeared, however, at the time of submission of a conference version of that paper.


Should I do a dual Ph.D.? So there are already some good questions on the topic of double doctorates:

Is doing two PhD's a good path?

When does one go for a double doctorate?

I'm looking for some advice specific to my situation. I'm currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in a mathematical field (computer science) but most of my research is geared towards applying these methods in a scientific field (stellar astrophysics). Because of this, my advisor is encouraging me to take up a second Ph.D. in astro. He says I can write one dissertation to get both degrees, and he doesn't think that it will delay my time to graduation too significantly.

On the one hand, it is attractive to me, because it might help qualify me more towards future positions in astrophysics. On the other hand, I don't necessarily see too much additional value in getting a second one; to me a Ph.D. is a license to do research, and one doesn't need two licenses. Further, I'm sure there is a real risk of it delaying my time to graduation significantly despite what I might be told. I'm also not completely convinced that it would equip me with skills that I wouldn't already be getting, although it might demonstrate to others that I have those skills. But then again, can't they just look at my publication record? Finally, while I absolutely love astrophysics, I am also attracted to other sciences, and I wouldn't want a doctorate in astro to cause people to think that I can't work in other sciences also.

Are all these concerns legitimate? Have I laid out the pros and cons appropriately? Are there other considerations I should contemplate? Are there some drawbacks or advantages that I haven't listed?

I don't really see the point. I agree with a PhD being a license to do research. If you are interested in astrophysics and want to get a strong profile for future work there, make sure your publications are related. That's much more convincing than two PhDs.


Is it still possible to get a decent job in academia (specifically physics) nowadays? I am an American high schooler considering what to do in university. I am immensely interested in theoretical physics, and I would quite like to become a professor in the subject (I've self-studied quite a bit of it; while I'm no master, I can still do enough to have a decent bit of reputation on the Physics S.E.). However, I've been hearing some rather concerning things from others already in academia about becoming a professor in physics in particular. First of all, I've heard here that every new crisis is permanently harming the job market in academia overall. Secondly, I've heard in several places (including here, if I recall correctly) that the job market for new mathematics professorships is starting to dry up, which most likely means the writing is on the wall for physics professorships. I've heard plenty of personal anecdotes from friends who have parents in academia about how brilliant folks who went to top class schools are now either not able to find work at all or only able to find work in small, relatively unknown universities. Finally, I've heard from a couple physics professors and chairs that it's somewhat difficult to find a first position in physics in general (though it is apparently relatively straightforward to achieve tenure once you get your foot in the door, so to speak).
I've really enjoyed my self study, and research seems quite lovely with the little experience I have with it. Thus, I'd really, really love to grab a PhD in physics and teach and research for the rest of my time here on this planet,  but I'm concerned I'd be left out without a job if I tried to do so! Is my outlook on the situation too bleak, or would I be right to travel a different path and perhaps research on the side?

I've heard from a couple physics professors and chairs that it's somewhat difficult to find a first position in physics in general

This is a dramatic understatement. I always recommend reading the first chapter of Karen Kelsky's book. She demonstrates that our universities are not in crisis -- that was 20 years ago. Rather, they are in decay. Most departments are not growing; they are shrinking and cutting back. Yet, graduate programs keep pumping out PhDs.
For physics in particular: APS reports that in 2012, 1800 physics PhDs were awarded. In contrast, there are 9400 physics faculty positions total -- about half of which are at institutions with no physics graduate program (i.e., schools that -- with a few exceptions -- focus on teaching rather than research). From this, you can estimate what fraction of physics PhDs end up with faculty research + teaching positions (see also here).
In short: saying you want a faculty position is like you saying you want to join the NBA -- of course you do! But even for the best students, it is a long shot.

I'm concerned I'd be left out without a job if I tried to do so

Now for some good news. 1-year post-PhD, only 4% of physicists are unemployed. The overall unemployment rate for those with a physics PhD may be around 1-2%. There are research positions outside of universities, and there are also non-research positions that are both intellectually engaging and financially remunerative. Further, you should not have to incur debt to attend graduate school. Thus, attending graduate school in physics might be a good choice (financially and otherwise) even without the allure of a faculty position. But it is certainly good to be realistic about the situation; indeed, you might consider subfields, projects, and skills that could lead to interesting work both inside and outside of the university.
Note: this answer, and the statistics therein, refer entirely to the situation in the US.


My postdoc advisor just now said she cannot support me after 6 months. What should I do? After graduating in February, I was waiting for my work permit to start my one-year postdoc position. Finally, after 2 months delay (due to COVID-19), I have got my permit today and now I can start the paperwork to have my position finalized. However, now my postdoc advisor informed me that there's a change in the financial situation due to an industrial funding partner retracting their contribution and I can be supported for only 6 months. So, now I am clueless on what to do about this.

What should I do? I am going to start applying to positions again from next week. Any other advice for me?

Given that your contract wasn't finalized, there probably isn't much you can do.

But there are a couple of options, all risky. You could ask the PI if there is any chance that additional funding could happen to at least complete a year. The answer might be maybe and you could decide to take a risk and do the short postdoc and hope for more. In fact, you could ask to be first in line for additional funding. You might actually be able to help secure funding as part of your work.

You could also, just drop out of the position and search for something better, provided that you have some way to make that work.

But looking for another position immediately is certainly a smart thing to do.


What should the instructor do about a student who is not aware of their disability? A student has obvious symptoms of a disability which is relevant to the instructor's class.  The student does not appear to be aware of the disability.  The disability does make it harder for the student to succeed in their education.  What should the instructor do to help the student?

Depending on the nature of the disability, I'd suggest first talking to the relevant disabilities/accommodation office. First, they may have some paperwork or data about the student which hasn't been given to you; I've had students with accommodations before who were simply uncomfortable or unable to present them to the instructor. Second, even if they don't, they'll have more guidance on what to do here which may be very school specific.