Can I describe in my own word few experiments from some academic papers to write a popular science book? My book is about a theory that is based upon existing theories and recent experiments in biology. Since biology is not my main field, and since my theory is interesting to the general public, I self-published my book.

The response to my book has been good.

But now I am afraid because I have described several mainstream biological experiments in my book, which although I accessed through my institution, and are not in the public domain. I was careful to cite the original research and describe results in a short, non technical way, in my own words. I also included several graphs in my book that I drew myself in a qualitative way, based upon the diagrams of the research papers.

So, can there be any legal issues with my book? A friend of mine is suggesting that I need to get permission from publishers of the research papers before describing the content of their papers, because I used their material for commercial purpose (to write my book).

I must clarify that the experiments that I have described are only a part of my book, about 20%, and the rest of the book uses the experiments to develop a semi-original biological theory of my own. I needed to describe the experiments to let the readers know the basis of my arguments.

In general, copyright protects words, sounds, images, and similar artifacts.  Copyright does not, however, protect ideas or knowledge.  The use of ideas and knowledge can be protected by a patent.  No intellectual property right, however, can be used to prevent a person from describing a published piece of information in their own words.

In your case, it sounds as though you are taking what you have learned by reading about this scientific work and presenting it with your own original words and images.  As such, I think that you have nothing to fear, as long as you are certain to give appropriate references and credit to the original authors whose work you are describing.  In a popular science publication, such citations might be more informal than in a peer-reviewed scientific paper, but as long as they are clear to the reader, what you describe doing appears to be entirely ethical and appropriate.


Is this plagiarism or just a bad practice? When I first began applying correct citations and referencing, I followed methods such as placing a citation at the end of the paragraph if I am paraphrasing for one person and not following a citation for each sentence. For example:

  One can use this website to write about various activities and interests such as music, art, science, etc... and one can also get in touch with the founder. However, to use the website, a person has to register and pay a fee. The website founder is known for his IT expertise. More people are joining nowadays than ever (Smith 2010, pp. 1-2) and those people can be great contributors to the website. Contribution is an important aspect of online communities (John 2014, p. 5).

Now I am reading about how each one complete sentence should be cited instead, and by using lead-ins to help the readers. In my above example, I want my readers to understand that the first 4 lines are Smith's ideas and the last 2 lines (from 'and those people') are John's ones. Now I realize that such a practice is a poor one as it may confuse the readers.

It should be something like (using lead-ins or ibid. for more readability, of course):

  One can use this website to write about various activities and interests such as music, art, science, etc... and one can also get in touch with the founder (Smith 2010, pp. 1-2). However, to use the website, a person has to register and pay a fee (Smith 2010, pp. 1-2). The website founder is known for his IT expertise (Smith 2010, pp. 1-2). More people are joining nowadays than ever (Smith 2010, pp. 1-2) and those people can be great contributors to the website (John 2014, p. 5). Contribution is an important aspect of online communities (John 2014, p. 5).

My question: Can what I did in the past be considered as plagiarism (as in not making it clear whose ideas are for whom (like readers may think that unreferenced sentences are mine) crediting wrong persons, etc...) or just a bad style of writing? (Field is business and using, obviously, author-date system)

Referencing your source, but in a somewhat ambiguous way, does not open you to charges of plagiarism.

It's good to want to get this right, and the first example you give is slightly less clear than it could be.  However, given that you have referenced your source right in that paragraph, no one is going to think you are plagiarising.  This is an minor issue of style and clarity; it comes nowhere near academic misconduct.

The repeated references in your second example remove the ambiguity, but they are rather annoying and distracting to the reader (though it is less of a problem in more concise style conventions).

To cite a source for a whole paragraph or section of text, add an introductory sentence and then put the reference there.

This will make it clear that the source was used for the whole discussion, without needing to repeat yourself.  It also tends to be clearer, better writing in general. For example:

  The blah blah blah website is one example that illustrates this phenomenon (Smith 2010, p. 1-2)  One can use this website to write about various activities and interests such as music, art, science, etc... and one can also get in touch with the founder. However, to use the website, a person has to register and pay a fee. The website founder is known for his IT expertise. More people are joining nowadays than ever...

Or something like.

  Smith et. al. provide a description of the website functionality (Smith 2010, p. 1-2).  One can use this website to write about various activities and interests such as music, art, science, etc... and one can also get in touch with the founder. However, to use the website, a person has to register and pay a fee. The website founder is known for his IT expertise. More people are joining nowadays than ever...


An already poor career profile turned worse this year. Any hope left for an academic career? 31 years old, with a PhD in mechanical engineering. Graduated last December, I did not get any decent postdoc position due to my poor publication record during my 5.5 years duration PhD (1 first author and two co-author papers).
Early this year I published 2 more papers from my PhD thesis and was working on the third when covid struck. In March, I was waiting for my work permit to join my PhD supervisor as a postdoc. I was supposed to get a contract of 1 year and planned to publish multiple papers during the period.
My work permit got delayed, I am still waiting for it, though under implied status, I was able to officially start working from June. However the uncertainty and wait severely affected my productivity and mental peace.
I have till now worked on three different topics, but they are at least two months away from being written into a journal paper.
Also, I am still working on the last paper from my PhD thesis, which should have been submitted till now.
Due to covid, I am restricted to job search in my current country of residence. I don't have a valid work permit, so I am hesitating in applying for other positions and I am also aware that my profile has not improved in any significant way from the last year. So, even if I do apply, I won't get anything.
With my age and the time spent in unproductivity, I don't know if I have any prospective academic career left. I have a prior Master's degree and 5.5 years long PhD degree.
Do I have any propects of a academic career left? I wanted give it a shot before going for industry. However, at the moment, industry seems unattainable too considering my lack of internship and professional experience.
Any advice or suggestions?

Ask yourself why you feel that you need an academic career. I have met too many researchers who are wedded to the idea despite the reality that the years are passing and their pace of progression is slow, their security of tenure uncertain. Do you just like the intellectual atmosphere? Do you feel it is prestigious? Do you think jobs elsewhere lack intellectual satisfaction? If you answer yes to any of these, it is important to realise that atmosphere, prestige and satisfaction may also be found in industry, in civil service, in places other than academia. And often they will be better paid ...


How can I protect a course I created independently from being taken by the community college I substitute for, when I am about to teach it there? I have created a course independent of the community college I substitute for. I contacted the CE department about a year ago to see if my course would be something I could offer as a CE course at the college. They were excited and after several meetings my course is scheduled to begin this fall.
However, there have been a few red flags that have me concerned that maybe the college will try to take my course and teach it without me being the instructor. No compensation for all the hours creating the course has been paid. Besides substituting for one of the technical programs, I am not currently a paid staff member. They did not ask me to create the course for the college, I came to the department with the course already created.
I guess my question is: how do I ensure they don’t take the curriculum as property of the college if something goes sideways?

I'm going to come up with a different answer.
Sometimes I've taken over a course from someone else. They've offered me their slides, exercises, questions, etc.
Sometimes I've stopped teaching a class, and I've offered my successor my slides, exercises, questions, etc.
I haven't been able to use anyone else's material, and I'm pretty sure no one has used mine. It's not much use - unless it actually tells you what to say, when I write a slide, I have some idea what I was going to say. No one else does, and they can often fail to make much sense of it.
They can't steal your course, your course is in your head.
(My favorite example of this was when we were giving a talk to prospective students. I usually did this course for our department, but on one occasion, a colleague did it instead. The colleague took my slides, and figured that these were going to be slides that introduced the department. What could they possibly say? I was told later by someone else who was there that there was a slide with a picture of my cat. My colleague said "And this slide has a picture of Jeremy's cat. I've no idea why."  [I'm sure that it was there for a good reason, or to make a point, but I completely forget what that point was.])


Do I have to be affiliated with an institution to publish on arXiv? Is arXiv the right place to put it? I'm a high schooler who recently found a derivation of a trigonometric function over complex numbers. I typed it up as a LaTeX paper and know it's probably not publishable to an actual journal. I'm deciding if I should publish it to arXiv and when I tried registering as a user it asked for my affiliation. Is an affiliation necessary to register and publish? Is it even worth trying to publish?

Independently of whether you need an affiliation, this sounds like a well-known representation of trig formulas (Euler's formula). There is quite some theory involved with this, including and up to Galois theory. You should check with someone knowledgeable whether you indeed discovered anything new.

It's fun to discover new stuff, and it's a cool feeling to recover things that very smart people came up with, but, once you are there, you have to give it the reality check, which is the ultimate hallmark of the scientist.

Perhaps some friendly mathematician from the local college is happy to spare half an hour with a talented high schooler to give you at least an idea how novel the idea is or what else to try from this point on?


Short reference on writing numbers and units What's a quick and useful reference, either in print or online, for writing numbers and reporting measurements in scientific texts? Something I could distribute to all new students, which would cover things they should be taught but do not always know, like:

how to write big/small numbers in scientific form (1.78 10–12), including proper spacing?
how to write units of measurement, in text and in abbreviated form? includes: when do you capitalize units, when do you pluralize them, etc.
how to properly report significant figures, etc.
when do you write variables in italics/roman/bold/underline?

I guess these recommendations by the American Physical Society might be just what you are looking for. In particular, Style and Notation Guide for Physical Review/Physical Review Letters deals with scientific numbers, units, figures/tables, and use of roman/italic fonts. (For some strange reasons, it requires a secured connection to see the file; in case you couldn't see it, there is an excerpt here).


what is the research strategy to adopt to compile my notes into a scientific article for a conference? Suppose I read multiple scientific articles related to a specific topic, what are the kind and the research strategy to adopt in order to compile my note-taken into a scientific article for a conference ?

Conferences generally publish novel research: papers that present new findings, ideas or techniques. Research in academia does not mean the same thing as in high school. So if all you have is notes on other papers, that's not publishable.

The only real exception to this is survey papers, where you give an extremely comprehensive overview and framing of  research in a given topic. But these tend to be long, so they're usually in journals, and are usually written by experts who have been involved with the developments they're writing about.


A PhD in Informatics vs CS? I just had a conversation with an adviser who mentioned that there is little value in a PhD in informatics (specifically biomedical), when compared to a pure CS PhD. I have a background in computer science now, and am looking to stay in this field. However, my adviser makes the argument that to truly bring about innovation in this field (or really any interdisciplinary one) one needs to be grounded well in the basics of one of the pertaining fields. What is the truth to this, and would I be able to get this with a PhD in informatics?

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to include the location. I'm from the United States.

It depends on where you are and more on the details of the degree. Many other places than France use some variation on Information *, rather than Computer Science. Denmark for one. Others as well. In the US an information science or informatics degree is more often closer to a management degree than a CS degree.

However, details matter. Algorithms, Languages and Compilers, AI, and such will make it a CS degree whatever its name.

However, if it lacks those but has courses such as Information Processing or Transaction Processing or Decision Support Systems it may be not CS but something related.

Such courses as Database Management Systems could be in either, though a CS degree will focus more on the theory of databases and such things as Entity Relationship modeling.

In the US at least it is a bit confusing. But the general idea is that a CS degree is more focused on theory and an IS (Information Systems) degree is more (but not completely) focused on practice.

Careers can be built with either degree.

However, I'm surprised that anyone would think biomedical information systems is somehow a lesser art. There are many very serious issues that still need to be resolved in such systems and such study should cover such "hard" topics as security and encryption. But, details matter.

On the other hand, your advisor is correct in that to make progress in an interdisciplinary field you should start with a firm grounding in one or the other. There will still be a lot to learn, but the grounding in one will help you focus on what you need from the other.


Will ISIS attacks hurt my PhD application as a Muslim? I'm a dedicated person, very passionate about physics and pursuing my PhD at a good school is crucial to my life. I've been preparing my application documents for a while now. GPA is almost 4 and Physics GRE is 980. My general GRE is at the 97 percentile. Good recommendation letters. I have other few decent ranks since high school as well. HOWEVER, I'm from the Middle East, and yes, my name is Mohammed. I can feel how the world is infuriated about the Islamic community in general, though the vast majority of Muslims are vulnerable to (and on daily basis thousands are already subjected to) similar attacks from ISIS. The majority of us, including myself, are terrified by ISIS, sorry for and mortified by these attacks by ISIS.

My question: Will these events perhaps hurt my application? If you were to decide on my application on the admission committee, how would my citizenship, religion and name affect your decision?

So grateful for any attempt to help. In fact, I'm sort of developing anxiety due to this issue.

EDIT: For those wondering, I'm applying only for universities in the USA.

Will ISIS attacks hurt my PhD application as a Muslim?

Only indirectly.

Admissions committees have good incentive to get the sharpest, most hard working people into their programs. They will care about your excellent results, as they should.

But administrative procedures may hinder people coming from your part of the world more than other applicants. I am basing this on my experience of being a Serb who wanted to study at Western universities, while Serbia was screwing up royally on the political scene, waging wars and making enemies everywhere. Sanctions made it difficult to travel. A friend of mine was denied a visa even after being admitted into an academic program and obtaining funding. Tuition was more expensive for us (to study in the EU), but far less funding was available. Even though I obtained a scholarship that covered the tuition, it was paid to me in monthly installments while the university insisted that I (as opposed to EU students) pay the entire tuition up front. Nobody could employ me without massive administrative hassle, meaning I couldn't just work at a bar a few hours a week if I needed some extra cash. Phone companies would not let me have a contract with them, limiting me to expensive, pre-paid phone cards. And on and on the list goes.

So yes, I think your chances will be smaller, but not because of admissions committees within any given university. It could happen that academic staff are not sufficiently aware of the additional hurdles you're facing, though. On the other side of the equation, professors from your side of the world might be less experienced at writing recommendation letters, for example. So a number of small obstacles will accumulate, many of them stemming from recent and current world politics.

And my heart goes out to you. It sucks to be vilified by outsiders for things people you don't identify with are doing.


Will a dropped class hurt PhD application? I'm currently in a Master's program for mathematics and I want to apply for a PhD.

I'm thinking of dropping one of my classes because it requires a final project which will be very time consuming. (I would have very little time to complete obligations for my other classes.) If I drop it, this class will appear with a grade of 'W' on my transcript which stands for "withdrawn". I'm worried how much this will blemish my transcript in the eyes of PhD programs.

I'm thinking this won't matter so much because this is the only class out of 11 classes that will have been dropped. Also, this is a physics class, not a mathematics class.

If you have an otherwise excellent application, then withdrawing from a single course is unlikely to make much of a difference, especially a course in another field.  For example, if you get A's in four graduate math classes and drop a physics class in the same semester, I doubt any math graduate school will care.

It could look a little strange if the dropped course were on your proposed specialty (so people would think you'd be particularly enthusiastic about it), but even that wouldn't be a disaster.  If you aren't taking many courses and are getting worrisome grades in the others, then a W may look like you're narrowly avoiding an even worse grade, but in that case your application already has problems aside from the W.  Overall, the way I'd look at it is that the W might intensify other weaknesses in your application, but isn't likely to be a big obstacle in isolation.


Is it possible to switch from a "normal" IT career to an academic career? I have a long experience of working like a programmer in many companies, but I was always tending to research. Is looking for PhD position real for me? Is it like looking for a job and how is it different? Do they pay money for research at PhD position? :D
I was passing a lot of exams on my jobs, but have no publications at all.

Its very possible - but it also depends upon your profile. If you have a bachelors already its very easy to do a masters with a thesis component and then move towards a PhD. Or maybe if you have a masters already you can look into a Mphil and then PhD.
Something similar


Advisor miscalculated the personnel budget for research grant I am a PhD student directly employed by a German university, this means my salary is paid directly by the federal government.

In Germany, the salary of PhD students is (often and in my case, definitely) determined by the TVöD. This is the tariff negotiated between public sector workers and the state. The tariff contract deals not only with salary levels, but also on salary increments. These take place automatically after a fixed amount of years (one, three, six years, etc). Everything is practically set in stone.

It appears my advisor forgot to take into account the TVöD and the automatic salary increments when making the personnel budget for the grant for my research project (which is kind of funny since he is also subjected to them, and they are a big deal in Germany).

I will be shortly starting my third year. The matter came up after he reviewed the project finances and noticed the automatic and mandatory (please correct me if I am wrong) salary increment after the first year. In his own words: “you are earning too much money”. Just to be clear, all PhD students at our chair have the same salary level (E13, 100%) and are subjected to the same TVöD. This is in no way a surprise or something unexpected. The personnel budget was calculated as if my salary remained unchanged for the entire project duration.

This miscalculation means that the funds obtained form the research grant for personnel costs will not cover my salary until the end of my third year.

I have a contract directly with the German government up to the end of my third year, and I am outside my probation period (Probezeit). I have had no problems at all, and the chairing professor of my committee (not my advisor, these are two different persons) seems pleased with my progress.

I am looking for any legal and practical advice:

Is it possible for them to “demote” me to a lower level, part time, or similar?
This was an error from my advisor. I can imagine that eventually I will have a meeting with the chairing professor and my advisor to discuss this. What can they ask from me? What can they legally ask/demand from me?
If I have learned something in the past two years is that just as in companies, academia is a boy’s club (not in the sexist sense) in which you do not want to rock the boat. I do not want to burn bridges or have unnecessary legal confrontations. But I also refuse to being taken advantage of, specially since PhD students already work a lot of unpaid overtime, and this would set a terrible precedent for future colleagues. How should I go about dealing with this?

Is it possible for them to “demote” me to a lower level, part time, or similar?

In my experience, it is much less complicated (legally and bureaucratically) to transfer the required money from other sections of the grant such as travel or publication costs.

  How should I go about dealing with this?

There are usually many culprits in such a situation (and you are not amongst them):

The funding organisation should have noticed that the alloted personal costs do not suffice for a PhD student (assuming that 100 % is the standard for PhDs in your field).

In fact, I have heard that some funding agencies explicitly fund a PhD position with a certain part-time level or full-time (depending on the field) for a certain period of time – as opposed to funding a certain amount of money that exactly suffices for this.
This way, the detailed sums (which not only depend on your level, but on many other factors such as location and similar) are left to the bureaucrats to determine and to move and scientific personnel (such as your supervisor) should never have to worry about this.
When issuing your contract, your university’s administration should have checked that they have the required funds to pay your salary for the duration of your contract.
Your supervisor may or may not have had the responsibility to check this.

So, even if your supervisor made a mistake, so did the others.
However in contrast to your supervisor, those are trained bureaucrats whose job only exist to do things like these and who do this on a daily basis. Hence, I suggest to try to unite against these with your supervisor. Not only do they have no real power over you (not being members of your “boys’ club”), but they also have access to general funds to cover for such mistakes¹.

¹ I witnessed a case where a PhD student got paid too much over a year due to being assigned to the wrong level (i.e., a situation similar to yours) and they did not have to pay back more than legally required (the past few months) nor was this money deduced from the grant that paid them.


Can you present an image without knowing who originally created it? I would like to present the image located on this website during a presentation I am giving next week.
http://www.taopatch.com/blog/quantum-dots-entangled-with-single-photons/

The image does not say anything earthshattering, it is well accepted that the structure of a CdSe/CdS core-shell quantum dot is as they depict in the image, but the image does a great job of illustrating it. I do not believe the website was the original creator of the image, after all they refer to a certain paper that was published and in no way reference it. I believe this is the paper: doi:10.1038/nature11573  The image that they use is not in that paper.

edit: Here is another website containing the same image: http://en.rusnano.com/press-centre/news/88604

Can I present this image without knowing where it originally came from? I suppose I could cite the website as a source, but since it appears that they took the image without citing the original creators, I do not want to list them as the source.

Best Case Scenario: As one commented, you can use reverse image search on Google; or just use other search engines and see who created it. If you find it, then you can use the link to the original artist as a reference.

Worst Case Scenario: The good thing is that there is a link for it! So if you couldn't find the graphical artist (the worst case scenario) add the picture and its reference (its related link) in the slide's footnote. To be on the safe side, use the popular link (one of the links on the first page).


How is a graduate school application affected if an undergrad does research in fields outside of their major? I'm an undergraduate freshman in the United States majoring in physics, but I am also interested in several other fields of research. I find many questions in biology and geology interesting. I'd like to explore mathematics. There are questions about materials that would be answered through research in chemistry, and there are questions in astronomy and cosmology that I'd be interested in getting involved with.

However, there are only so many opportunities to do research as an undergrad. Would it be limiting at all when applying to grad schools for most of your research experience to be outside of your graduate field of study (physics)?

When looking at graduate applications, the fact that a student has done a some research is much more important than the content (or even the field) of the research.  It probably does not even matter much whether the people reviewing your application even understand your research.  The key point is to have a one or more strong letters of recommendation from your research supervisor(s).  Many research skills transfer relatively well from one field to another, and faculty letters than can attest to your skill level are extremely important to your application file.

Some professors may have a marginal preference for students who have done undergraduate research in the same area in which they pursue graduate studies.  Personally, I do not.  However, it is unquestionably better to have research experience in a relatively unrelated area than to have no research experience at all.


Should I number all formulas in published documents for citations? When I write something that contains formulas, I only number the ones that I refer to myself. However, I found that some books or papers just number ever single formula. And that makes it really easy to cite individual formulas.

Is there some general rule to this?

The guideline for this is to use whatever method the journal to which you are submitting asks you to use.

As you indicate, many journals do this automatically, for exactly the reasons you suggest—to make it easier for others to cite and follow along your work. However, not all journals do this, and as a result, it's better to follow their guidelines instead of improvising.


Are there any data repositories commonly used in conjunction with arXiv? I will soon be posting an article to arXiv, and I have supplementary data that is approximately 800MB in size, which I would like to make available somewhere. Are there any data repositories that are commonly used in conjunction with arXiv?

There are a couple of relevant options for this sort of thing. These include:

Figshare
Zenodo
Dryad
Dataverse
GitHub
Bitbucket

They each have a bunch of advantages and disadvantages, and they satisfy different use cases to different degrees, so have a good look and decide which one is the best fit for your needs.


Should I approach my boss from my previous company for a LOR for my Master’s in Computer Science (From USA)? I graduated in 2018 (in computer science) and worked in an education startup (Sept'18-Feb'19), as a co-founder of sorts, and later joined a well-known company in Mar'19 and have been working there ever since. My main role at the startup was as an educational instructor (a fact which I feel can help my candidature) and doing sales in the part-time. Will obtaining a Letter of Recommendation (LoR) from the main founder help my candidature? While I can obtain two LORs from my current workplace, I felt that my experience at that startup would help demonstrate my commitment towards making education accessible.
I have obtained an academic LOR. This is specifically focusing on whether I need to obtain another Academic LOR or no.

It is likely that your application will be reviewed by a faculty committee. It is likely that some, at least, of them will want to see some prediction of academic success in your letters. If you were applying for other industrial jobs it would be different, but I suggest that at least one of your letters come from someone who knows you well and can make a fair assessment that you will succeed in an academic setting.
A head of a startup or others in industrial positions have a different focus and their letters probably can't properly attest to your academic qualities. It is impossible to judge how much they can help you, not knowing the details, but it sounds like a risky move.
Direct your letters toward the needs of the program you want to join, not the workplace you have been in.


"Please enter any comments you would like to send to the Journal Office" I'm submitting a paper to an Elsevier journal. One of the submission steps says that:

  Please enter any comments you would like to send to the Journal
  Office.

What does it mean? What should I exactly enter as a comment? I thought it means the cover letter, but it seems that I was wrong...

This kind of question is a "catch all" in case there is something you wanted to add that did not fit in any of the other questions in the submission.  If there's nothing you can think of that was not already covered in the rest of the submission, just leave it blank.  I have now submitted a number of papers on submission sites that use a question like this, and I have never had anything to add.


How much is the normal salary of a postdoctoral fellow in North America and Western Europe? I understand that the salary of a postdoctoral fellow depends on the field, project, contract, and so forth, but I am curious how much is the normal range for a fellow. Someone told me that he prefer to continue postdoctoral fellowship, as he gets the same salary of assistant professorship with less official duties.

In my experience, the range of salary for a postdoctoral fellow is much less than an assistant professor, something between $25,000 - $50,000. In Europe, it is in the lower side, but it is usually higher in the US.

I am curious to know what is the actual rate, and is there a norm for estimating the salary of a postdoctoral fellow?

In other words, when looking at postdoctoral openings, how much is an excellent/good/normal deal?

Let's find some official numbers and statistics. From this article:

  As a baseline, in 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral stipend for new postdocs was $39,264, increasing to $54,180 for those with seven or more years of experience. Funding levels at universities are broadly similar.

Post-doc salary guidelines depend on individual institutions, and benefits vary widely from place to place. In addition to salary, checking the benefits is important in the US, but less important in more civilized/socialistic (strike out the inapplicable term) countries.

A job site that gathers salary information from US job advertisements has the following for post-doctoral fellowships:

  Post-Doctoral Fellow average salary is $39,302, median salary is $38,000 with a salary range from $20,779 to $961,896.

I think it's safe to say that $961,896 is an outlier, but apart from that, the median matches  the NRSA number. It also shows that there is a broad range of salaries, even by browsing the job listings on that site.

For Europe, as I've said the situation is heterogeneous. I know how to find numbers for UK, at least. If you look at jobs postings from jobs.ac.uk for post-doctoral positions, the range appears to be £28,000 – £37,000 (apart from a few outliers). This would be roughly $44,000 – $58,000, but you have to adjust for taxes, health insurance, and then cost of living (which can be quite high in UK).

In France, CNRS is the largest scientific employer, and its post-doc salary is:

  The gross monthly salary of a CNRS postdoc is 2,500 €

As an anecdote, when I started as assistant professor, my salary was significantly lower than my post-doc salary. And even some of my post-docs in my group had higher pay than me (as well as some industry-employed PhD students). But money's not everything…


Does Oxford ever waive the IELTS language requirement? This question is quite specific but I believe it applies to other school of similar rank.

I have the following kind of IELTS English language test result:

  Speaking: 8, Listening: 7.5, Reading: 8.0, Writing: 6.0, average: 7.5.

According to Oxford's language requirements, they desire an average score of 7.0, which I do fulfill but also a score of 6.5 for each of the sub tests, which I do not.

With such very subtle mismatch, is it necessary to take the test again? According to the official guidelines, apparently, any offer is conditional until the requirement has been met.

I have four peer-reviewed publications in good venues; will it be of any help? I think the writing test result does not indicate my true level of proficiency.

This is not very specific, I thought you were referring to undergraduate but if you have 4 peer-reviewed publications already then I guess you must be at least PhD level?

In the former case, in my experience Oxford University does not waive the requirements for English and you are probably better off if you take the test again. By the way, my understanding is that you need a 7.0 average AND at least 7.0 in each component.

If you are applying for something more senior (PhD, Postdoc, etc) then it depends on the individual department at which you'd be working.

-edit-
Aah, just seen you tagged this with PhD. The requirements you list (7.0 ave + 6.5 component minimum) are for a Master's degree rather than the DPhil.
To my knowledge the IELTS requirements vary by department (mine doesn't seem to have any, for instance) but it looks like a 7.5 average with no less than 7.0 in any one component is the most common requirement. Based on that you will definitely have to resit the IELTS exam.

You can see the generic requirements here: http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/applying-to-oxford/application-guide#content-tab--3
For a DPhil the 'higher level' requirements would be needed, if applicable to your subject.


Which are the criteria I have to follow to choose a citation style for my book? Suppose I have to write a book, how can I decide which citation style choose? I know that the most used are APA, MLA, ISO 690 but I don't understand what is the difference and which one is most used for what...

I assume you are asking about an academic book, in which case the following applies:

If the publisher's style guidelines specify what citation style to use (many do), then use that one.
Otherwise, use the citation style that is commonly used in your field. Here is a list of the commonly used citation styles for many fields.
Finally, if several styles are commonly used in your field and the publisher has no requirements, choose the one that you think will be most useful to the reader. (For example, depending on the content and style of your book, you may find footnote citations more useful than in-text citations, or vice versa.)


Does Canada have similar tenure-track system as the USA? Does Canada have similar tenure-track system as the USA? Does it have around 6 years in a tenure-track position before getting tenure?

This study reviewed tenure-track positions across Canada. The time range from first probationary appointment to tenure is 3 to 7 years, with an average of 5 to 6 years.

Simon Fraser University's tenure track policy states that professors and associate professors shall be considered for tenure no later than the 4th year of the appointment, with options for early consideration or extensions. Assistant professors are considered for tenure no later than the 6th year of the appointment, with automatic promotion to Associate Professor if tenure is granted.


COVID-19 - Should I start applying for other jobs having accepted a post-doc verbal offer months ago? I accepted a verbal post-doc offer from my future PI through email in late January. The university has asked me to fill out some forms for paperwork and visa application from time to time since then (the position is in the US and I need to apply for a J1 visa for it) but I never received an official offer.

Unfortunately, all US visa services have been halt due to COVID-19. I am really unsure when I will be able to start the visa application and when I may enter the US. The planned starting date was in April which is definitely impossible now -- I do not know how long the PI is willing to hold the position for me. Given all this uncertainty (also chaos from recent family issues), I am reconsidering applying for some local jobs.

I know that in the industry, it is commonly advised to continue looking without a written offer. Is this also the case in academia?
Will it be unethical to start looking, potentially rescinding my acceptance of the verbal offer if I secured another one? I have not signed anything and the circumstances are quite special, but breaking a commitment feels wrong. I do not know if this will burn bridges with the PI.

What will you do if you were in my shoes? Any advice will be much appreciated.

You should only accept formal written offers.  If you follow that practice, you will never be in this situation.

Since it is too late for that, you should request a formal written offer immediately.  Yes, you should look for alternate employment.  There are several possibilities:

You never get the formal offer.  In this case, get a job elsewhere.
You get the offer and can start the job.  Then start the job.
You get the offer and cannot start the job because you cannot get a visa.  Since you do not have a visa, even if you accept the offer the agreement is invalid.  Find a job elsewhere.
You do not get the offer, but do get a job elsewhere.  In this case, inform the university that, if you do not get the offer in a reasonable period of time, you will no longer be available.
You get a job elsewhere, and after a long time you get the written offer and visa.  Now you have the opportunity to experience both jobs!


Disabilities in the Classroom Are there any special provisions provided for students who have schizophrenia (for example)? Is there an "adjustment" to grading? Or perhaps there is no adjustment to the grading process per se, but only to the due dates? Is there anyone here who has been in this type of situation?

Every university I have been affiliated with (in the U.S.) has had an office of disability services, tasked with evaluating individual cases and making (binding) recommendations to instructors.

If your university has such an office, then you should refer this case to them and avoid judgement calls of the type you ask about.


Going into a PhD expecting to take longer I'm in the following situation: currently I'm finishing my Master's in (mathematical) Logic in Amsterdam. I'm interested in doing a PhD (preferably in the US), either in something more applied or in continuation of my current research (set theory/proof theory). I've understood this logic department has excellent placement for PhDs (many go on to places like CMU, Oxbridge, Berkeley, Stanford) and the study program is considered fairly intensive. However, I have significant chronic health issues preventing me to study much beyond 70% of what is considered ordinary full time studies here, without it affecting my mental health (although I should add that in this program around 25-40% of the people don't fully reach the 100% rate). The illness does not affect my ability to do mathematics, just how much I can do effectively of it in a day. Therefore, in all likelihood I would need more time, or at least the possibility of more time, to finish a PhD successfully. Say the average time of some PhD program X to finish is 5 years, I might need 6.5-7 years. I've read many questions on this site related to my situation, but I get very mixed signals in the answers.
So:

Given the situation is it even reasonable to attempt a PhD?

Suppose I were to apply for a PhD in (say) the US, and I am honest and upfront about the  situation to my potential supervisor, would such extensions be possible? Or would it just mean an instant rejection?

If I'm open to pursue more applied avenues (logic in computer science perhaps) would this change the answer to the above two questions? The reason I ask is that I've gotten the strong impression that such programs are in general somewhat less intensive than those in pure mathematics. But this can also just be a symptom of superiority feeling that floats around in many pure math departments ;)

My advice, for the US, is to share your medical condition as narrowly as possible. Most US universities will have an office for student support in such things and they may need to know so that they can provide some services that will help you. But I, personally, probably wouldn't share it even with an advisor unless and until it proves to be an actual issue. I don't know whether this is a purely US view, but there are rules about discrimination for medical conditions here.
I also wouldn't try to work out in advance some "part time" degree. Just take as long as you need to take (caveat below).
I'm guessing a bit here, but also suggest that you are better off in pure math than applied math here, since the former seldom has deadlines to worry about. Research takes as long as it takes. And you are probably better off in a subfield that you already know pretty well to help you get through any coursework and comprehensive exams.
Don't worry about or suggest "partial stipends". Most doctoral students in the US serve as TAs, working with students in elementary classes, grading or running study sessions. Stipends without duties, as such, are pretty rare, though you seem to be writing about a pretty high level place where they may be a bit less rare. But they are likely funded by grants, even then.  If you can put in the time for that, then it doesn't need to end since you are providing a service that the university vitally needs.
Caveat: Some universities have a quite firm maximum number of years of study. Make sure you know about that before you begin, but also that you know what accommodation can be made in your case. And many students take seven years to complete for other reasons. You don't have to hit the median to be successful.
Again, the student support office can be your friend.


As an instructor, how to use the first day of class? I found some relevant advice on the first day of teaching online (e.g. here, here, here, and here). Common themes include setting expectations, motivating the course content, and having two-way interactions with students.

Besides for reviewing the syllabus (and relevant university-wide policies referenced but not located in the syllabus), how can an instructor most effectively use the first class session? Are there any especially effective ways to do these things on the first day of a class?

Students basically want to know if they should take your class.  To that end I would include

A short (10-15 minute) sales pitch explaining what exactly your class is about and why your topic is interesting.
Administrative details of the class (I would cover this after the sales pitch, so students who are late don't miss anything).
A presentation on the first topic in your syllabus.  This is important because hearing your first lecture will give them a good idea of the difficulty of the class, which prerequisites are required, and the style/quality of your lecturing. Also, if your entire first lecture is a sales pitch, students will feel like they wasted time coming to your class, or that your class is "easy"/not serious.


Can I get into a top school C.S. Ph.D. program with a Master's from a lower ranking university? Is it possible, and what are the chances of doing so, to get into a Computer Science Ph.D. program at a top school like e.g. the U of Toronto with a Master's degree (say, with excellent academic record) from a lower-tier school?

My situation is as follows:

I am about to complete my Master's degree in math (GPA will be between 3.7 and 4.0) in a program with a high reputation (acceptance rate 40 out of 170). I have done mainly (functional) analysis and mathematical physics, and some differential geometry and probability theory. No computer science-related stuff. Also, no statistics (so far at least).
However, I am increasingly unhappy with my field, and I would like to go into machine learning. I know how to program and I have won some competitions as a high school student at federal state level (Germany), but I haven't taken any university courses in computer science so far.
This term I'm taking courses in databases, operating systems and machine learning. That will be enough to get admitted into the Applied Computer Science Master's degree at the University of Heidelberg (note that Master programs in Germany are two-years programs). Certainly not itself a bad university, but the computer science program doesn't really have a very high reputation (after all, there's a reason the admission requirements are so low). With virtually no formal education in computer science, I just don't have a lot of options at the moment.
Assuming that I will complete that Master's program with a very good GPA (and also additionally take the one and the other undergrad course like e.g. algorithm design to catch up), what would be my chances to be admitted e.g. into the Computer Science Ph.D. program at the University of Toronto or a similarly good school? At the moment, I would certainly have no chances to be admitted into their Master's program.

I have also considered doing a one-year computer science conversion Master at a better school, but I found the curricula of those programs rather basic and concluded that doing a 'real' Master's at a not-so-good school would be the better option. But maybe that's just my German way of thinking... Here in Germany the name of your schools means relatively little, but my impression is that things are somewhat different in the anglophone world (in particular the U.S. and the UK).

Would it increase my chances if I combine this degree with edX MOOCs from top-tier schools like MIT?

There are some academic-cultural differences between US (where I live) and Canada, so take my answer with a grain of salt.

Top CS PhD programs in the US are looking primarily for concrete evidence of research potential in PhD applications.  This is especially true in machine learning, which is by far the single most popular research area for PhD appicants.  (At least a third of last year’s PhD applicants at Illinois listed ML or some close variant as their primary research interest.)  I cannot emphasize this enough—competition for PhD programs in ML is incredibly fierce.  ML has become the default area-of-interest for smart people who like CS but don’t really know what they want to do.  High grades and test scores might be enough to get a human being to look at your application, but they will not be enough to get you in; classes ain’t research.

In addition, since you’d be applying with a masters degree, you’ll be compared with other applicants with masters degrees, many of whom will already have ML publications. (Unlike Europe, most PhD programs in North America require only a bachelor’s degree to enroll, and most new PhD students in those programs do not have master’s degrees.)

On the other hand, a strong background in functional analysis, differential geometry, and probability theory is extremely rare among computer scientists, and could be a huge advantage, if you can leverage that expertise into concrete evidence of research potential.

Some specific things to aim for in a master’s program:

When you apply for PhD prorgams, you will need recommendation letters from well-known researchers researchers in your target research area.  Make sure the department where you get your master’s degree has those researchers!  You should be thinking in terms of potential faculty mentors/references, not departments.
In your PhD application, you must be able to talk about your research interests using the idiomatic language of a researcher, not just as an interested student.  Moreover, your recommendation letters must present concrete evidence of your research potential.  Make sure that your masters program gives you an opportunity to do research (or at least indepedent study projects) with those well-known researchers in your target research area.
A purely course-based master’s degree will work against you; classes ain’t research.  Similarly, using MOOCs as evidence of your expertise in ML will work against you, because we only have your word for how well you did, and MOOCs definitely ain’t research.  That doesn’t mean on-campus courses and MOOCs are useless, but you should use them to enable your research, not as end goals in themselves.
Leverage your strengths.  Look for MS programs that will help you develop research expertise that takes advantage of your particular skills.  In particular, look for potential faculty mentors who have, or at least appreciate, a similar mathematics background to your own.
Sadly, the name of your school does matter.  There are too many good applications; people apply all sorts of stupid filters to limit the number of applications they have to read.  (It might matter less coming from Germany, where there’s less variance in quality/reputation.)  Wherever you are offered admission, ask for data about PhD placement before deciding which offer to accept.


Is It Possible to Reliably Find Editorial Board for the Conference Proceedings? I am in the process of submitting thesis corrections and attempting to add sufficient reference information for our school's Thesis Office. They are requesting that I add in the editors for Conference Proceedings.
Occasionally, I can find the explicit listing of editors for a conference (I am looking at Control Systems conferences, such as HSCC, ACC, ICRA, etc). With institutional access, I can find the Proceedings on sites such as IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, etc., and some of the sites list the editorial boards directly on the site. Others, however, may not list this information, and I try to look at the electronic material available for the proceedings, but cannot find a reliable method to find the editors to add to my reference.
May I ask if anyone has suggestions for reliably finding the Editorial Board? Should I just contact the Program Committees?

The "editors" for a conference, such as they exist, would typically be the program chairs (if that position exists), or the general chairs (if it does not).  This should be listed on the conference web site or the front matter of its proceedings.


Will the Ph.D. stipend be enough to support my parents? I am considering to do a Ph.D. from the USA and I wonder, if the stipend would be sufficient to support my parents.

I estimate that I need to send about 400 USD a month to my parents. Will I be able to afford it?
Am I correct in assuming that the typical USA stipend would be about 20K a year?
Will I be violating any terms of employment of the university, if I take up part-time employment during my Ph.D.? What is the typical nature of part-time jobs one may find? Is it worth it?
Is one eligible to seek part-time employment under F1-visa (I am assuming that is the typical student visa)? If not, what are the other options? Are the other visas significantly harder to obtain?
Are graduate school stipends taxable in the USA?

I estimate that I need to send about 400 USD a month to my parents. Will I be able to afford it?

I live on a graduate TAship that pays slightly more than 20K per year. I can put away about 200 USD every month. I live in a fairly expensive city, eat out once or twice a week, but don't have a car. Exactly how much you will be able to send home will depend on your lifestyle and where in the US you live. New York? You'll probably have very little left over. Middle of nowhere, out on the coutry? 400 USD is reasonable.

  Am I correct in assuming that the typical USA stipend would be about 20K a year?

Depends on your subject area and school. Some have more funding for grad students, others have less. Your advisor may also be able to supplement your salary from his grants if he's well-funded. (Bur yes, somewhere between 18 and 25K are the most common figures).

  Will I be violating any terms of employment of the university, if I take up part-time employment during my Ph.D.? What is the typical nature of part-time jobs one may find? Is it worth it?

Typically, you will have a TA-ship which will count as your part time job. Most schools require you to get special permission to have additional jobs, and these permits are very hard to obtain. In addition, a PhD is hard. You won't have time for much more work outside.

  Is one eligible to seek part-time employment under F1-visa (I am assuming that is the typical student visa)? If not, what are the other options? Are the other visas significantly harder to obtain?

You can only work for up to 20 hours a week during term-time on an F1-visa. These 20 hours have to be on campus, and typically your department will report your TA hours as your work hours. This effectively prevents you from working extra during the semesters. During holidays you can work for at most 40 hours a week, on or off campus. As a student, you need to be there as either an F1-student, or with permanent residence. Permanent residence is orders of magnitude harder to obtain (pretty much impossible).

  Are graduate school stipends taxable in the USA?

Depends on the state, and if all of it is payed out as a scholarship, or if some is payed out as a salary.


Capitalization of "Subsection" I write a mathematical paper. Do you capitalize "subsection" when you refer to a specific subsection? For example, I would write:

"In Subsection 3 we show ..."

But I would write:

"In the previous subsection we showed that ..."

What is the consensus on that issue?

You've got it right.  Think of it like proper nouns vs. pronouns.  Compare:

  Mr. Jones told me about types of stars; then he explained how they burn hydrogen.

and

  Subsection 3 explains about types of stars; the next subsection explains how they burn hydrogen.


What is a PhD forum? Is it similar to short paper submission? I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering and I have been looking at submitting a paper to one particular conference I wanted to go to. In the end, I have missed the deadline for full paper submission. However, I still can have the option of doing a Ph.D. Forum submission. I been to several conferences already, but I am not really familiar with a "Ph.D. Forum".

What is a Ph.D. forum exactly? Is like a short/poster paper? (2-4 pages?) Is work still publishable?

My advisor tells me that it could be good idea for me to do it anyways, if I want.

The nature may vary from conference to conference, but in my experience a Ph.D. forum is typically an event intended to help graduate students learn how to present and how to shape their papers to fit the expectations of the field.  It is often a place for students to start getting advice and feedback on their work from the larger community, and for the larger community (who may be interested in hiring the student in the future) to start getting to know them.

As such, it is typically very lightly reviewed and only sort-of counts as publication.  As such, it is not worth very much on your resume (the value is in the networking and feedback), but it will not usually prevent you from later publishing a full version of the same work elsewhere.


Contacting a professor in the university you are applying I am applying to American universities. And just like many others, I intend to apply to many of them.

Anyway, I read a lot on the internet about this application thing and I notice that I should contact a relevant professor, read some of his articles and form an opinion (like in the answer of How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students? ), maybe for the professor to acknowledge who this applicant (me) is.

I think there would be a big obstacle. Let's say I am applying to 10 universities, then I have to contact 10 professors. Their work may belong to the same big branch, but definitely to small branches. What I want to say here is, 10 articles in technically 10 different areas, and they are totally not easy to understand. Then it would be literally impossible to do such a task.

I really hope I took it the wrong way somewhere. Do I understand this "contacting professors" part? Hope you could answer me

Only contact professors if you are genuinely interested in working with them and can demonstrate that you might be a good fit. Profs get a lot of generic cold emails so it isn't worth it if you aren't excited about them specifically.

But if you see someone's work that really does interest you, then definitely reach out! In a short email, use a few sentences to demonstrate that you are interested, know what they actually do (take a look at a few of their papers), and why you are a good fit (relate your experiences to their work).


Self-censorship to prevent grievance being filed by classmate I am currently an undergraduate student in my last year at a Canadian university. Today, I gave a presentation about anti-censorship technology being developed at my institution. We were required to ask questions to the audience at the end of the presentation and one of mine was a multiple choice question that asked where the technology would not work, with answers that included "The People's Republic of China" and "Republic of China" among others.

One of the students in the class who grew up in China asked a leading question about why I had two options, to which I responded: "there are two countries that call themselves China". He became extremely aggressive at that point and stated that I shouldn't be pushing my political beliefs on the class (the class was about technology and business), and yelled a standard Chinese political line about a united China in the middle of class. In the moment, I quickly just apologized that he was offended by it and somehow got the presentation back on track.

I spoke with the professor later in the day and he said the student came to him with a list of demands, which included, among other things, a public apology in class, alteration of my slide deck before posting it to the discussion board, and a meeting between him, the professor, and I.

I believe I am in the right when it comes to this topic and during my discussion with my professor, he agreed that students have a right to freedom of speech. He left it to me to decide what actions on the demands list, if any, I would be willing to do.

I feel some remorse, as I didn't think that the question would be taken so violently by a member of the audience, but the level of intensity in my classmate is extreme. He stared at me consistently for the rest of class and, to be honest, made me somewhat uncomfortable.

I agreed to the meeting to start, but what else should I do? Disciplinary actions, like legal trials, tend to not always work out for the person who is in the right - there are many innocent people in jail. I want to stand up for freedom of speech, but don't want to be crucified under a formal review because one of the reviewers may have also been indoctrinated by growing up in China and share the same views. I'm sure just like anything, if you dig hard enough, you can find something to get me on if the administration wanted to.

The irony that I see in this whole presentation is that it was about anti-censorship, and my classmate wants me to censor myself and only accept his version of truth - which is actually a lie.

You are, it appears, being bullied. You will encounter people with strong, even irrational feelings irrelevant to you and your work with some regularity over your career. Engaging is seldom useful. You are not responsible for his demands, and this issue is not one in which it appears you want to involve yourself. In your coming meeting, engage as little as possible with his narrative. Bring all topics back to how you are being made uncomfortable, and how you wish to be left alone.  You are correct in your statement, but don't seek to assert that. Just let this angry individual exit your life without engaging with his angry demands. If he escalates, your department will certainly help you; use that.


Should I be citing wrong papers and preprints whose correctness I am unable to judge? I am currently writing a paper with a rather extensive literature trail. There is a question (see bold) that I came across in multiple instances and I can't seem to find an answer to it on this site. Here are two examples.

Firstly, I am unsure whether I should cite papers that are wrong. For example there is a paper which discusses an issue relevant to a part of my paper. However, important parts of the paper have been shown to be wrong, and there is a published comment addressing these issues. A retraction was not found to be necessary.

Secondly, I am citing a couple of preprints, which I studied carefully and found to be relevant for completeness of the discussion. However, while I am able to judge the scope and relevance of the claims, I am unable to judge their correctness, since the methods lie outside my field of expertise.

In both cases above, my main question is whether by citing an article, do I obtain a responsibility for its correctness? I understand that this probably depends on how exactly the work is cited. For definiteness, let us take

  A related model was discussed in [preprint citation].

as an example.

In such a context, the paper is tangentially relevant and should in my opinion be cited, even though it is only for completeness reasons. It is however not peer-reviewed and I am unable to judge its correctness. At the same time I am not stating this anywhere, which would sound weird and obscure the point. So the question here is if I can cite it without being partially responsible if the cited paper turns out to be wrong in the end.

I am aware of this post: Is it right to cite a retracted research article?, however I believe that it discusses a different issue. In this question I am specifically asking about the responsibility of assuring the correctness of cited work, also having in mind that it probably is practically impossible to check all the references in a paper for full correctness.

To answer your general question, I would argue that it is only your responsibility to:

ensure the correctness of your own work and claims;
honestly report your methodology, experiments, and findings;
do a thorough literature review and acknowledge all relevant prior work; and
where appropriate, provide your critical assessment of those works.

Thus, my answer is: no, you are not responsible for whether the cited work is correct.
That being said, you are responsible for making sure that everything that you claim to be true is true.

Regarding your first example

If there is work that has been shown to be inaccurate, as in your first example, you should state as much, and ideally give a citation to the correction.
Depending on how relevant the inaccuracy is to your work, you might explicitly address it in the text, or just acknowledge it in a footnote.
For example:

  Previous work has shown that this issue is important [paper].\footnote{Note that this paper was found to contain errors [correction], but those errors are not relevant to the present discussion.}

Regarding your second example

In the scenario you presented, you are actually stating that the preprint has not been peer-reviewed simply by citing it as such.
In your list of references, it will become clear to the reader that the work you are citing is just a preprint, and therefore has not been peer-reviewed.

However, as mentioned above, it is your responsibility to make sure that anything that you say is accurate.
For example, rather than saying

  Pi is exactly equal to 22/7, as was found previously [preprint citation].

you should say

  A previous study found that pi is exactly equal to 22/7 [preprint citation].

Similarly, in the example you gave, your claim is actually true:

  A related model was discussed in [preprint citation].

(Assuming the preprint does in fact discuss a related model.)
If you instead want to make a claim regarding whether that model is accurate, then you should state what you know to be true, and acknowledge any genuine concerns/skepticism you might have.
For example:

  A previous study showed a similar model to achieve 99.93% accuracy [preprint citation], although that model was only tested against simulated data, so we expect the performance of that model to suffer in the real world.

However, since you note that you are "unable to judge their correctness", I assume you do not have any specific concerns about the cited preprint.
In that case, my advice is to just ensure that your claims are accurate.


Submitting a paper that contains the researcher name to a conference that employs double blind reviewing Me and my co-researchers is submitting a paper regarding speech recognition to a conference that is held by the university where we study. In this study, we, strictly for the purpose of trolling, included our co-researchers name into the dictionary for speech recognition. Curiously, the performance of the speech recognition at recognizing the researcher's name has generated interesting insight for analysis. The analysis works by breaking down the phonetic of the researcher's name. The usage of the researcher's name is crucial since the researcher's name provides the best example.

Unfortunately, the conference that we're submitting employs a double-blind peer reviewing system and my researcher whose name is in question is widely known in the university for his achievements and trolling so it's very likely the reviewer knows him.

Is there anything I can do to mitigate this besides submitting to a different conference?

It is hard to see how it would be obvious to a reviewer that the researcher whose name is used is also an author. In this case there should be no issue about reviewing.

But, you could also inform the conference chair and ask for advice there.

In some similar cases it might be possible to obfuscate the name for review purposes, but your description indicates that isn't possible here. But, you might need to change a few phrases if they make the relationship explicit. And note, also, that the final version is normally a bit different from the reviewed version. Reviewers themselves often suggest changes.


Should I cite a concept I have already cited earlier? I am writing a proposal for my PhD and it is majorly based on numerical modelling. I have cited the original model that I will be using earlier, and I think it is very clear throughout the proposal which model I am talking about. Should I still cite it again when I mention it later even though I think the running theme throughout is of the specific model I want to use? For example here:

  The experimental data thus acquired will then be used to construct the deformation history for the fractured rock, which will then be used to parametrise the numerical models.

I cite the models a few sections earlier, but the models are discussed throughout the whole text.

This is hard to answer precisely without seeing your entire document.  In general, I'd say if it is very obvious what you are talking about, then you do not need to cite again.  The problem is that what is "obvious" to one person is not obvious to another.  Especially it can be hard for you to know if it is obvious or not because you are too close to it.  One suggest is to have a friend or other graduate student read the whole paper, and then ask them for an opinion.  Or, just err on the side of slightly more citations.


How to investigate why students do not do their homework? I teach freshmen courses. The lessons are in the classroom, but I also use an LMS to receive homework, to communicate grades and comments, and to post additional readings and resources.

It is normal to encounter a few students not doing work, but this term, I found about 80% of one section doing no homework, even easy work. To investigate why so many students are not doing the work, I tried these strategies:

I sent private messages to each student informing them that they missed several assignments and that it is their responsibility to inform me of any problems. The students did not reply.
I posted a private survey to the LMS to all students, asking for students to describe any problem they were having with the LMS or homework. None of these students completed the survey.
Seeing no replies after 5 days, I set aside some of class time for a whole-class discussion on this topic, but this made students nervous. In retrospect, realize this was a poor choice.

I did learn through the discussion that some students did not know how to use the LMS and now that we've spend 20 minutes covering that (again).

After my discussion, more homework is coming in, but still about 50% of the class has a 0%.

I do not see this problem in my other sections, nor have I had this failure rate in past years.
A student signed me into their account, so I could confirm that there were no anomalies in the LMS for this section.

I want to identify why this section has so few students submitting work, so that I can make appropriate adjustments to the course, as necessary. How can I investigate this problem further, without making students nervous to explain?

You have been around the block a few times, so I interpret this question to be "What is going on with THESE PARTICULAR students?" And of course I don't know.

I have run into some scenarios at my large public university which may be relevant:

Recent admission changes which bring in students from more low-income schools with less experience with self-regulated learning.
Changes in course requirements which allow less-experienced students to take the course.
Limited timing of a different required remedial class made one of my two sections also all remedial.
A shift to making a class more online also allowed students to fall behind more easily.

Whatever the reasons, I would also want to know why this results in homework avoidance and how to help overcome this.

Have you tried having undergraduate tutors ask the students what would help? Your students might feel safer admitting problems to peers.


How to manage your advisor's jealousy over your work? Say you made a smart move in solving an important question that your advisor did not think of and all of a suddenly your advisor becomes jealous because you have made your advisor look bad. What are the best way to manage situation like this?

I'd distinguish between three scenarios:

If you have accomplished something genuinely magnificent (e.g., you just proved the Riemann hypothesis), then it may be natural for your advisor to feel a little envious, particularly if it was something your advisor had hoped to do someday.  Hopefully they'll soon switch to feeling proud of their amazing student, and in any case your career success is assured by your great accomplishment.
In less extreme circumstances, this could be a real problem.  If your advisor feels threatened by your success, then you may need a new advisor, since you certainly don't want an advisor who goes around explaining how you aren't as great as you seem.  Before you reach that point, it's worth discussing these issues.  For example, you could say "I've felt some tension recently, and you seemed upset with me at the X Symposium.  Am I doing something that's making you unhappy?"  This may be an awkward conversation, but it's worth a try.  It's possible that you are somehow making the problem worse (for example, by publicly saying things about your advisor that could be interpreted as disparaging, even if you didn't mean them that way), or that your advisor will feel a little sheepish that you noticed this behavior and will try to change.  If talking about it doesn't work, then I don't know what to suggest.  You either find a new advisor or put up with it as best you can.
It's also possible that it's all in your head.  I become suspicious whenever I hear someone attribute other people's behavior to jealousy, since it's an awfully convenient excuse.  Until you have really clear evidence, you should keep an open mind regarding other explanations.


Google Scholar has lumped two publications into one How do I correct a google scholar error or omission or duplication?

You can edit it manually.

If you log in to your profile, there are several options to combine/separate articles.  You can also edit specific article details: click on the article title, then click on the pen icon in the top-right:


Are there any trustworthy Mathematics fee-based open access journals? Some open access journals, like Integers for example, don't charge the author any fee for publishing their article. Other open access journals do charge the author a fee and the author has to pay the fee so that their work can be posted online. Are there any trustworthy fee-based open access journals?

I'll try to link to pages which describe the open-access policy of the respective journals.

Both Proceedings of the AMS and Transactions of the AMS allow the author to pay a fee to make their article freely available electronically from the journal.  If the author chooses not to pay the fee then the article is not freely available from the journal (but the author may post the final preprint on the arXiv or their personal website).

The (few) Elsevier journals I have looked at have a similar fee for publishing open-access.  One example of which is the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.  You might try their Journal Finder, which has a checkbox to only search for journals with open-access options.

Springer offers a similar program for some of its subscription-based journals which they call Open Choice.  Not all of its journals have this option (e.g. Acta Mathematica doesn't).

We also note that Elsevier and Springer both publish a number of purely open-access journals, but I can't comment on their "trustworthiness".


Academic job future for applied mathematicians I've heard many times that it's getting harder and harder each year to find a place in academia for scientists. Now I'm on the hunt of a post-doc and the "what about the future?" question arises.

So, by looking at mathjobs.org, I really get the impression there are lots of jobs! But after further inspection, I notice most of them are non-permanent positions, which begs the question: Are there people in a constant nomadic life? meaning that they are switching from non-permanent positions to another in their entire lives.

I would like to restrict the answers to applied mathematicians because I think we are a lucky group that has a higher possibility to shift to industry jobs if academy fails. I like to believe that because of it, there are fewer people fighting for academy positions.

Maybe another related question is, at which point one is too old to switch from academy to industry?

I'm a pure mathematician, so take what I say with a grain of salt.  My sense is that "constant nomadic life" is not a particularly accurate view of things.  I think it is true that the number of years of postdoc people often do is slowly increasing (or maybe more accurately, the sort of research track-record that's required is increasing, and it takes most people more years of postdoc to achieve that record), but I mean that taking 4 or 5 years after Ph.D. to get a permanent job is quite common, rather than 2 or 3.  Those 4 or 5 years might mean two multi-year postdocs, or a 3 year postdoc and a year or two at institutes like Max Planck or MSRI; after that time, it will get hard to get temporary jobs.  I think a fair number of people get through 1 or 2 postdocs and then decide to get a non-academic job, but I suspect most do not have reasonable options for continuing in academia in temporary positions (sometimes they have permanent options they decide are not worth it).

If you look at the job listings on mathjobs, there are currently about 500 TT jobs, 170 postdocs (which will generally not want to hire someone after more than 1 postdoc), and 120 "non-tenure-track" positions which is a big grab bag of things, mostly an equal mix of mislabeled postdocs and teaching positions (many of which are continuing).  If you figure TT jobs are hiring for 20-30 years, and the postdocs generally for 1-3, the disparity isn't THAT bad.

As an editorial note, I will mention that I think too much funding has gone into postdocs at the expense of TT jobs in the past few years.  I know it sounds really good to help the next generation of scientists train, etc. it would also help them a lot if they could just settle down and stop moving.  However, I think things have not gotten quite as dystopian as you suggest.


How should I consider a possibly rude reply from a potential PhD advisor? I am in my first semester of my applied math PhD program in the United States. The professor (potential PhD advisor) of the course I am auditing has replied to my question about the schedule for the final project:

I mentioned several times in the chat box in class. Did not you attend or did not you listen?

I had honestly not remembered that this was done and so it is my fault for not listening properly. However, I am interpreting this reply to be quite aggressive or rude. Should I no longer consider this person to possibly be my research advisor? How does one handle such a reply?

Thank you all for your advice and general comments. They have very much helped me.

He/she is probably very busy, and has repeated the same message probably N times.  Also, we all assume students will find the required information by themselves.  Nowadays, I find that students simply don't spend the time to look for information.  Their first instinct is to simply to message me, and hope that I will solve their problems for them; this is very similar to a kid asking their parents, can you please clean up after me? It is ok if you are 2 year old, but not OK after a certain age.
As for whether the professor should be a supervisor, you should look at whether he/she is successful in supervising students.  Yes, he/she may not entertain trivial questions and tell you off, but that may mean you need to work independently and at a high level.


Improving chances of selection into a course at university I am currently entering my third year at university, unfortunately my grades in the second year were lower second honours (which places me in the bottom 40 percentile) putting me at a disadvantage when picking my major subject module for this upcoming year.

We are not asked to submit a CV or attend an interview for admission into major subjects for the third year.

Students who pick a specific major subject are also asked to pick a minor subject - selection for minors is usually not deemed to be competitive. However, it turns out the minor subject I have chosen (entrepreneurship) was actually over subscribed and thus allocation has been delayed for the course organisers to make a choice as to which students are selected.

For the past two years at university I have spent a lot of time getting involved in, and reaching elected executive positions within entrepreneurship societies and groups (very rare for an undergraduate).

I feel like if the course organisers were to know about my additional interest, I would easily be accepted into the course. Every other student I know (in my academic year) does not show an active interest in entrepreneurship except for a few who only picked the course as a minor subject.

However I believe the course organisers are forced to make their decision based on grades alone, this may result in my rejection.

Would it be acceptable for me to email the course organiser and explain my situation (and interest in his course) or would that be deemed as an unfair attempt to skew the decision making in my favour?

EDIT: As well as undergrads studying my subject the course is open to other undergraduates (in other subjects) MBA and Ph.D students. Making it difficult for the course organisers to make a decision based on grades alone (as many MBA or Ph.D students will have received their honours at a different university where the honours system cannot be objectively compared).

Limited admission courses can happen at any level, for a number of reasons.  In my own experience, it has tended to be some combination of three cases:

The department intends the limited admission to be a filter, to redirect "unpromising" students elsewhere.
Resources are simply limited, and only a certain number of students can be supported (this is especially the case for courses that are experiments with the curriculum).
"Permission of instructor needed": this is some sort of special or favored upper level course, and the instructor is aiming for something more like a seminar or reading group than an ordinary course.

If you're dealing with the first case, then there may be a formal standard, and you're just out of luck.  Much of the time, however, professors have some leeway in how they handle selection.  In some cases, students are actually encouraged to present their case (but if that was the case, you would know).  As an instructor, I would rather any day be dealing with an enthusiastic and hardworking student than one who's just there because it's part of their program, even if the hardworking student is somewhat more poorly rated.

So yes, by all means get in contact, express your enthusiasm and background, and see what the instructor says.  If you're polite and willing to take no for an answer, then the worst that can happen is they say no.


How important is the "major" of the PhD? For sake of argument, let's say I obtain a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's degree in physics, and then a PhD in physical chemistry but from a department of chemistry. Can I then go on to be a physics professor? Or would I be confined to teaching chemistry?

One can imagine equivalent situations for other fields. Say, for example, a bachelor's in computer science, master's in computer science, and then a PhD in computational physics from a department of physics. Could that individual then become a computer science professor?

It depends more on the aspect of your research. If you have a physical chemistry degree but do research more in the realm of physics, it is possible that you could be hired in physics or chemistry, even hold a joint position in both.

The limiting factor that your PhD major will be in that it is the general area where you are more trained in, that is, you can probably teach courses in your major better than those in the other department. Sometimes hiring decisions do take this into account.


Exclusion from PhD in Economics selection in Italy for degree I received an exclusion email from Italian University for PhD in Management program due to not eligbility.

I earned 4-year bachelor's degree (Vietnam) and one-year second level master diploma (Italy) => Total 5 years of studying

The requirements are: bachelor (3 year for Italian system) plus Master of Science (2 years) => Total 5 years of studying

My question is: how to solve my current problem for next year in order to meet their requirements:

Solution 1: take a 2-year master and wait next 3 years for applying
Solution 2: take some extensive courses which they provide credit/certificate.

Anyone has been in my situation? Could you give me some advice?

Many thanks

This is a very specific question and the answer may even depend on the particular university and how they interpret the rules.

I suggest you approach the secretary that is responsible for graduate admissions, and ask him/her directly whether you need the 2-year master's program or are there other options.


Should a student be penalized for using a theorem outside of the curriculum? I am taking an abstract algebra course and I am really interested about the topic.  So much so that I spend most of my time reading supplementary materials.  I consequently know a lot more theorems than the ones covered in class.

In a recent quiz, I used a theorem in one of my proofs that was not mentioned in the lecture since.  My professor gave me partial marks for my answer for the reason that we didn't cover this theorem in class even though the proof was completely valid!  I can't really see where he is coming from.  How would someone be able to use a theorem correctly if he doesn't know its proof?  I was quite baffled by his comment.

Do you agree with this?

EDIT: The professor just Emailed me and said that after thinking for a while, he decided to award me the full mark for the question. He also mentioned that he didn't want discourage me from studying the subject (since he saw most of my previous quiz grades were full marks) and I was passionate about it, but kindly requested that I include any proof for a theorem that I cite from now on in his exams. He also sent a broadcast message to the whole class indicating this.

This depends on what is announced in the syllabus and on the kind of test.

If the syllabus explicitly says that tests should be solved using the course material only, then, yes, any answer using anything else than course material is not totally correct and should get deductions. If the syllabus does not say so, the answer is not so clear anymore.

If the test is kind of a final exam on the whole course where the students are tested on the whole subject, than I (and this is a personal opinion) would not deduct anything if the proof is technically correct, whatever tools have been used (unless the problem says "solve this with this method"). However, in an intermediate test it may well be that the instructor wants the students to show that a certain technique can be applied or a certain concept can be used. Going beyond the course material spoils this idea and (again, personal opinion) one may deduct points, although it would be much better if these policy has been stated beforehand.

The above should answer the question "Why could points be deducted?" but not the "Should points be deducted?". I think the answer to the latter question is really opinion based (and may be a question for matheducators.stackexchange.com).

As a side remark on "How would someone be able to use a theorem correctly if he doesn't know its proof?" I (and I guess most other working mathematicians) do that all the time. I would not get anywhere without using theorems of which I haven't even dare to read to proof. Some examples from outside my field: People use Fermat's last theorem, the "Kepler conjecture" (also a theorem now), the four-color theorem, the "10,000 pages theorem" on the classification of finite simple groups, the Poincare conjecture (proven as special case of the geometrization theorem)…


Reference private resources in paper Some of the deliverables of a project I'm working on are of a private nature (due to commercial reasons) and will not be released to the public. Would it be acceptable for a (conference or) workshop paper to reference one of those deliverables?

To give some more background, part of an algorithm on my paper is based on work described on one of those private documents. I need to acknowledge that somehow.

part of an algorithm on my paper is based on work described on one of those private documents. I need to acknowledge that somehow.

The algorithm has not previously been published, so you can claim that it is an original contribution of your paper. You can acknowledge the project in your acknowledgements section.

Problems might arise if your paper and the private document have different authors. In this case, you should seek permission from those authors to publish your paper and you should acknowledge the contribution of those authors.


Decision pending for more than 15 days I have submitted my paper in one of the Elsevier journals. It was under review, and now it is decision pending for more than 15 days. Does it mean that the paper will be rejected?

"Decision pending" means that the decision... is pending. They haven't decided yet.

There isn't any secret code to deciphering the submission tracker. Things just always take much longer than we think they would.


Would you consider using another's analysis as a basis for your own analysis on a poem/story plagiarism? I'm just wondering what people think about this. I've had several literature classes where I'm assigned to analyze symbolism/figurative speech/other devices or themes and I almost always search online several analyses of the poem or story beforehand as a way of kick-starting my thinking process. However, I'm not entirely sure if this qualifies as plagiarism since many literary devices seem to be factual with not much room for opinion. I never copy the author's exact idea word-for-word, but my arguments seem to go down the same vein as what I've read because I can't help but be influenced.

It might be plagiarism or not, depending on how you present it. If you do it in such a way that the ideas seem to the reader to be yours alone, then it is clearly plagiarism. It isn't the "word-for-word" issue at all. That is irrelevant.

But if you quote the original work and then take off from there, extending the ideas of the others(s) and you provide a citation for it then it is clearly not plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking the ideas of another as if they were your own without attribution. It is always fine to extend the ideas of others, provided that it is clear that it is an extension and clear that you don't attribute the underlying ideas to yourself.

Don't confuse this with copyright, which is more to do with the actual words used.

However, if this is for a class, then the standards set by the professor may go beyond mere avoidance of plagiarism. So, while you may avoid plagiarism by using proper citation it isn't necessarily true that you meet the course standards. The judgement on that will only come from the instructor.


Should postdocs work only on the projects they are hired for, or can they work with other people in the same research group on other projects? Would the latter be an issue with the funding body, when the project proposal and budget only covers the expenses for hiring one postdoc? Note: it is the supervisors who got the grants, not the postdocs themselves.

Since the supervisor got the grant, he is ultimately responsible to the funding agency for the research that was funded and for any results. So the postdoc should definitely talk to the supervisor.

Actually, this would be a great opportunity for the supervisor to help the postdoc grow academically, since postdocs are of course expected to take on more responsibilities than Ph.D. students, and start making their own reputation in a field, not stay in the supervisor's shadow. So the supervisor should certainly understand that the postdoc will start flexing his wings and be interested in other topics - it just needs to be commensurate with the goals that the supervisor got the money for.

If, conversely, the postdoc got his own grant, he should first of all look through the paperwork he presumably got, signed and returned before the money started rolling in. It is quite possible that an expectation of the funding agency as to the amount of work the postdoc should be spending on this particular project is already somewhere in the paperwork. Of course, even in this case, it makes a lot of sense to discuss this with the supervisor, who presumably has a lot of experience in this field, and possibly with this particular funding agency.


Career Suggestion: Should I try to improve my manuscript or try to increase paper count after submitting PhD thesis I am a PhD student in Applied Mathematics. I submitted my Phd thesis and starting to apply for postdoc positions.

In my PhD thesis I have one work published in a tier 1 math journal and the other two works still unpublished. My question is the following: Should I submit the unpublished works in tier 1 journals and try to improve the quality of the manuscripts (with the reviewer's suggestions) or, submit to 2nd/3rd tier journals so that it gets accepted as soon as possible so that my paper count increases. I want to apply for faculty positions after 2 years from now. At this phase of my career what option should I choose?

If the question is whether to emphasize quality or quantity of publications, the answer is "both." But if you have to pick one, go for quality. People understand that peer review takes a long time, so it will not necessarily be held against you if your papers are still under review when you're applying for jobs. But it will be held against you if the papers are substandard in quality, or if they're published in mediocre journals.

  Should I submit the unpublished works in tier 1 journals and try to improve the quality of the manuscripts (with the reviewer's suggestions)

You should first of all improve the manuscripts as much as you can on your own, and with your advisor's help. Then submit to appropriate journals. Manuscripts do sometimes improve with referee comments, but just as often, a referee will reject a paper without detailed feedback (especially if the paper is clearly not good enough). Attempting to treat peer review as a free editing/consulting service would be a waste of the editor's and referee's time.