Are there boycotts against publishers other than Elsevier? Academics have called for a boycott against Elsevier, with some success for instance because it has led to resignations (recently in the Lingua journal).

As I understand it, Elsevier is not the only publisher with absurd subscription prices, but it is being targeted because it is the largest one. Are there any similar initiatives against other publishers? (Springer, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, ...) If not, why?

The Elsevier boycott seems to be the largest one of its kind.  I understand the argument to be:

A boycott is easier to maintain against a single publisher than against several publishers at once, since it limits the cost to the participants while, if anything, making the boycott more painful to the publisher.
There's a short list of likely candidates for a single boycott---probably just Springer and Elsevier, and perhaps Wiley, as the largest and most expensive academic publishers.  Elsevier had been particularly active in lobbying on some related issues (SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act), and had recently been involved in several publishing related scandals (the ones involving Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, and the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine).

(I personally found these arguments strong, but plenty of people didn't, and some people have refused to participate in the boycott precisely because they think such a boycott should be more widely targeted.)


How should I politely address an email to two professors, one who holds a PhD and one who does not? I am planning to request an override via e-mail for a class which is taught by two professors; one of them holds a PhD, while the other hold a master's; I have never met either of them. Usually my first line would be something along the lines of:

"Hello Dr. X, Dr. Y"

However, I feel like if I say

"Hello Dr. X, Mr. Y"

it would seem a little weird. I don't want to be over the top formal, but I still want to be polite. I've thought of using "Pro. X, Prof Y" but I'm not sure. How should I address them?

My location is the U.S.

Given that they're professors, you can just use "Prof."

Having said that, don't worry too much about salutation. I'm sure lots of people have received emails calling them "Dr." when they don't have PhDs, or "Prof" when they aren't professors. Heck, I've even seen emails calling someone "Mr." when they're actually female, or vice versa. We learn to ignore the honorific and concentrate on the email text.


Do I mention that a paper in mathematics is a "Short Communication" or "Note" or "Research Article" when citing it? Apologies in advance for a possibly naive question. When I search for literature relevant to my research work, I come across articles that are published variously as either a "Short Communication" or "Note" or "Research Article". Possibly there are other variants as well. I have seen this distinction in the articles published by the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B.
My question is regarding the importance of the distinction between these categories for the purpose of properly citing a paper. Do I mention in the bibliography whether the article is a "Short Communication" or "Note" or "Research Article"? Somehow, explicitly naming the last category feels redundant, but the former two not so much. What are the best practices to be followed here? Is there a general rule that is to be followed for these as well as other categories?

No, you should NOT include this information. These designations are journal-specific and would provide little information to someone not familiar with each of the journal's classification schemes. For example, a short communication in one journal might represent a more impressive paper (because for some journals a very short paper might be, on average, more impressive than that journal's average quality paper [1]) than in another journal where the bulk of the papers might be short papers, often being "announcement of results" type papers. Also, many journals have no such classification, and thus the reader of your bibliography may wonder whether the paper was not classified in this way by the journal or whether you simply forgot to include the journal's classification.
[1] "Shorter Notes was established to publish very short papers of unusually elegant and polished character ..."


When a research statement of a fixed page length is required, are references counted in the page length? On mathjobs.org, a few jobs request a research statement of no more than 3 pages. Are reference pages typically counted for such requirements in the United States?

Unlike the NSF, where references often do not count towards page limits, I would assume that references do count as part of the 3-page limit for a research statement in a job application.

At the same time, few research statements I have seen in mathematics are as thoroughly referenced as an NSF proposal. The main goal of a research statement when applying for a job is to describe your own research and to demonstrate that you will be able to meet the research expectations of the job. As such, you want to keep the research statement relatively brief.

If you really need more than 3 pages including references, you should email the chair of the search committee to find out if it is acceptable.


How to stay motivated for grant applications I find it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to write grant applications - in my case to raise money for a post doc fellowship.

It seems to me that all bureaus require descriptions and research plans tailored very specifically. This is of course their right - it's their money. I find it, however, quite difficult to stay on top of it. I spend typically 4-5 full time days writing an application (is that normal?), and spend a couple of days being quite gloomy and unproductive when a rejection letter comes, as a lot of heart went into it.

How does other junior researchers handle writing applications? Any tips for motivation? Do you work in groups, or do you have a specific nice routine with a friendly PI to go over it - I am of course discussing my application with various seniors. Some have good input, most just tell me: 'don't worry, you are bright, you will eventually get something'. What to do until that happens?

Depending on your field, and the kind of postdocs you are applying for, 4-5 days might not be enough time (for European fellowships such as Marie Curie, for example, I would spend maybe 2 weeks).

But as far as maintaining motivation, it is not easy. You have to keep in mind that there are a LOT of other bright people applying for these, and an important factor is always luck (who is chosen to review your application, and what specific things those reviewers choose to emphasize).

Best advice: Don't give up.  Keep applying, at some point you will maybe get lucky. Until then, keep publishing, keep working. And remember, these big postdoc fellowships are not necessarily required to be a successful academic.


Where to get a basic introduction to a science subject published legitimately? I have a high school to undergraduate level introduction written for methods and applications of a particular science topic (~5000 words with tables and schematic, like a book chapter).

My goal is to get people especially students interested in this particular topic. My homepage does not have much traffic to help in this. I already have an offer to write a book but that will need some free time which I do not have at this moment.

Where to get it published legitimately? Online ok ISSN or similar required. Any suggestion where this question can be legitimately asked (if not here) is appreciated.

Paid publishers please ignore.

5000 words is too few for a commercial publisher to publish as a book, and it sounds too elementary to be published in a journal.

Your best chance is likely to find a paleoclimate textbook author and offer to collaborate with him or her. They might be willing to insert your chapter into their book.


What is a good scheme to determine percentage contributions to a paper Sometimes researchers are asked to define percentage contributions to a paper with more than one author. E.g., usually the supervisor in charge of the project will determine in which percentage each of the researchers who coauthored the study contributed to it (in my institution the supervisor is left out in order to prevent abuse). These percentages can then be used to distribute per-paper publication bonuses or for other (usually administrative) purposes.

Which is a good scheme to fairly determine these percentages, considering the inherent difficulties in numerically quantifying intellectual work? Are there "standard" procedures to do it?

This does sound awful. However, I understand trying to make the best out of a bad situation.

As you write, it is extremely hard to numerically quantify intellectual work. As such, I would strongly recommend going with an extremely simple weighting scheme, so as to minimize the acrimony of discussions that will certainly come. You don't want people to discuss why somebody got 15% of a paper, while somebody else got only 10%, because people are extremely fast in figuring out what this 5% difference means in $$$.

For each paper, get someone impartial to administer this. Then have all authors quantify everyone's contribution on a scale of 1-3. Don't go any finer, because anything finer is impossible. Let the impartial person pull all these together, average everyone's estimate of everyone's contribution and assign percentages based on the final number of points.

Advantages:

This is simple and understandable.
It requires no special software, apart from a few spreadsheets.
And it gets the job done.

Disadvantages:

It can easily be gamed. If someone consistently gives himself top marks, the impartial facilitator may want to have a discussion with this person.
How can a junior author, perhaps an undergraduate student, assess the contribution of the PI and how much time he spent writing grants to get the money?

So it may well be that this is impractical, given the disadvantages. In which case you may need to fall back on someone senior unilaterally assigning contributions.

In such a case, I'd again work only with three-point scales. If your scale only includes three possible grades, you can meaningfully grade contributions into "minor", "medium" and "major". Anything more fine-grained, like a four-level scale, and people will start arguing why they only got a 2 when they obviously deserved a 3.

Everyone, please feel free to point out further shortcomings in the comments.

(And: try to get this policy revoked. It is horrible. Either the bonuses are too small to spend much time on such a scheme, and to fight over it - and someone will always pick a fight over this, no matter how trivial the sums are. Or the bonuses are high enough to matter, in which case the fighting will be worse. Better not to give bonuses based on paper contributions at all. Scientists should be motivated to write papers for other reasons, like tenure or recognition, which still seems to motivate enough people to write but should have drastically lower chances of poisoning your work environment.)


Where can an academic put their lecture slides for posterity? I was recently asked this question by an academic colleague and realised I didn't know the answer.

Academic X is about to retire from a computer science department and has a set of undergraduate lecture slides he is very proud of. He would like to put them online so they are available to the world. Where can he put them?

The arXiv is not suited to hosting lecture slides.  There is wikibooks which is a possibility but the quality isn't great and it is in Wiki markup I believe.

The university he works at has no permanent location to host retired academics' work sadly.

Archive.org (not to be confused with arxiv.org) aims to be the world's library. According to its FAQ,

  The Internet Archive focuses on preservation and providing access to digital cultural artifacts

It cites the destruction of the Library at Alexandria as the kind of loss of cultural heritage which it aims to avoid, so preserving an academic's teaching material should be perfectly aligned with their goals.

The FAQ also has a large section on uploading content. I suggest you pass that URL along to your colleague.


What should I do if I discover a paper I rejected because of methodological flaws has been published in another journal? I recently discovered that a paper I reviewed a while back and rejected as a result of major methodological flaws had been resubmitted to another journal and published without addressing any of the significant errors that required the paper to be rejected in the first place. Is there anything I can do that doesn't violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to address the problem?

Two things are unclear about your question Is there anything I can do that doesn't violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to address the problem?:

What is the goal of any intervention?
Why do you think that anything should be done?

If, for example, you aim for retraction, I guess this could be difficult. You may go for this on the ground that you can prove that the authors were aware of the flaws you pointed out and submitted the paper knowing that there was something wrong. The journal may have some rule that the authors have to certify that the results are true to the best of their knowledge. If this really is so, you may have some angle of attack. If you aim for correction by the authors, it could also be difficult. However, you could consider writing a letter to the editor, pointing out what is wrong and then ask if the journal would publish such a letter. Some journals I know have such formats. You could also do follow-up research on the same topic and write a paper yourself where you refer to the paper with flaws and describe what wrong there.

For the second question, it sounds like you feel that "What's published and peer-reviewed should be true." While this resonates with me, it's not something that is close to true now and probably never will be. Mistakes happen. You may then trust in the scientific community that the flawed paper will be perceived as such in the long run and find peace with this particular paper.

Finally, the premise that confidentiality of the peer review process may permit some actions is not totally clear. As I wrote in a comment, I asked a question about this on MO and got very different responses.


PhD and postdoc with no first author publications- realistically what are my career prospects? I am a UK based researcher in life sciences. My research is in neuroscience, mainly involving in vivo electrophysiology. My PhD project was a disaster for a number of reasons (technical difficulties, difficult supervisor etc) and so I finished with very few results. Through a side project I got a middle authorship on a paper in a respectable but not outstanding journal (impact factor ~5-6). Despite all the difficulties I endured during my PhD I still wanted to be an academic researcher and decided to take a 3 year postdoc position at another UK university.

The postdoc project seemed promising and the lab had a track record of publishing decent papers. Unfortunately disaster has struck again, and none of my experiments have worked or produced anything publishable. I only have 6 months left on my contract and the odds of me getting a paper in that time are pretty much zero.

I know I need to think about what my next step is career-wise but I feel so stressed and demotivated that I worry I'm not thinking clearly. Plus my confidence is rock bottom from feeling like everything I touch in the lab falls apart. Part of me thinks it's time to cut my losses and try a different career path, however the thought of giving up on my long held dream of being a researcher is heartbreaking, and I then start to wonder if I'm quitting too easily. When I tell my science friends how I feel they all tell me that I'm not a bad scientist, that I've just been unlucky and that they're sure the next project (whatever it is) will go better. Are they right? Do I still have a chance? If I took another postdoc and got a paper from it, would that ever be enough to make up for the long gap in my publication record? Or would it be a  case of too little too late?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Are you intending to stay in academia? You stated in your question that you've always wanted to be a "researcher"... you should be aware that there are many industry positions with similar duties and responsibilities. Having zero publications isn't good, but your skills as a researcher aren't limited to the length of your CV. I would spend some time investigating positions in industry that would allow you to perform similar work to what you're doing now in academia.

Hopefully someone else can post something focusing more on your academic prospects.

Edit: Your comment of "not sure if my work is relevant to industry" deserves more attention that an answer on an online forum can provide, but very briefly:

You are not defined by your field. I have a BS in psychology, a PhD in biomedical engineering (which actually was entirely neuroscience, but all my courses were electrical engineering), my first two jobs were a bank quantitive  analyst and a data science manager for an insurance company, and I now work for a cybersecurity research firm. When writing a resume you choose which skills to highlight and how to sell yourself. I strongly recommend you re-evaluate your own skill set and see whats out there that interests you.


Citing a paper under review in 2 different conferences I am currently writing 2 conference papers. One is highly quantitative in nature and the other is absolutely qualitative in nature. I am submitting both papers to conferences having deadlines in the next couple of months.

The papers present results on 3 different research questions on the same topic and are highly related with each other. You could argue that paper A + paper B together present a holistic view of the answer to these research questions. Individually, paper A and paper B show a different side to the problem since you generally get alternate points of view from quantitative and qualitative works.

Since the papers and their results are highly interrelated, there exists a compelling reason for me to ensure that they cite each other. I have seen this question and this question which are also highly related to my question. However, my question is different enough, in my opinion to warrant a separate question.

How should I cite these papers? (one paper is going to be in APA style and the other will be in ACM style)
Does it make good sense to contact the Associate Chairs of these conferences for further clarification?
The most important question for me is, is this ethical? Does it not break the double blind review system? I am ready to not cite these papers if that is the case.

I am having conversations with my adviser about this but just want some broader perspective from different disciplines if I am somehow missing something.

Normally, you can update citations until the proofreading stage.  I've done that at more than one occasion.  When submitting the article, I cite Myself et al. (submitted 20xx).  Then the manuscript goes through peer review, revisions, subsequently typesetting, etc.  By the time the final proofs come out, I probably know whether Myself et al. is rejected or not, and can probably provide an updated citation.  In the worst case, I can replace it by a short text that this will be considered in a future publication.


How to cite USGS website refereing Landsat accuracy? I want to cite the official Geometric accuracy of the Landsat imagery, published by USGS on their website http://landsat.usgs.gov/geometry.php. The citation is suggested for a scientific journal.

I am using Mendeley, which ask me to fill in:

Title: Geometric Accuracy of Geometry???
Authors: USGS??? or United States Geological Survey??
Publication: Landsat Missions??
Year: 2016 - I think this is obvious
Pages: ??? What??? pages on website?

Date Accessed: - should I use the american or UK type of date? my paper is written in american english.

Personally, I would try to cite the project documentation, which has its own official page, rather than the webpage documentation.

Alternatively, if you cannot find those details in a tech report, I would cite the webpage as a user manual with a URL.

Last, for your specific style questions are unanswerable without knowing your target venue (e.g, journal, report, thesis, etc.).


Job Hunting for a postdoc I just finished my postdoc in Bimolecular engineering and I am hunting for a job, or a position.But my concern is that out of almost 80 jobs that I applied over the last two months, I have not received any feedback yet. I am not sure what the problem is, but there is even no notice of rejection! Could it be normal?

It is becoming harder even for top schools graduates but you should check the status of your application, either by checking it online or directly contacting the professors who you plan to work with. Most rejections will come late in April or May. Try to check with the positions that are directly related to your research and continue to apply for new openings.


Why is bad behavior more tolerated in academia compared to the rest of the industry? If you take a look at the various questions on Academia Stack Exchange where abusive, rude, or unpleasant situations are presented, you can quickly notice that there's often a culture of dismissal. Many comments and answers always try to play devil's advocate, for example:

trying to find a reason why a supervisor may only seem abusive but are actually just doing their job (and maybe their character is just not very friendly),
excusing rude behavior such as harsh criticism with no constructive feedback simply because it's common place in academia,
often proposing to give bad situations two, three, and more chances because giving up is shown as a lack of desire to grow in character (often for no reason but just "because it's bad to give up on a situation").

Only the most extreme situations usually result in answers that directly mention leaving the situation/going to the authorities (e.g. sexual assault).
But a look at similar situations on Workplace Stack Exchange paints a very different picture. For example, an abusive manager is never tolerated and most answers (rightly) point out that nobody should be the target of abuse and there's a general consensus to direct people to leave abusive situations as soon as there's a clear indication that they cannot be resolved properly. There is no merit in staying in a terrible workplace and fighting through it, sometimes it is just better to leave and find a better place.
Why is there such a widespread dismissal of important issues in academia? With the majority of graduate students going through therapy during their studies, I believe there must be more education about the importance of recognizing when someone's circumstances are genuinely in a bad position.

I suppose I disagree with the comparison between Academia.SE and Workplace.SE and your three points in general, but there's an answerable question here. I also agree with cag51's points that we (and at Workplace) always only get one side and that perhaps a bit of devil's advocacy is alright. Here I am writing from the perspective of US/Canadian academia.

But to get to the main issue:

[On Workplace,] most answers (rightly) point out that nobody should be the target of abuse and there's a general consensus to direct people to leave abusive situations as soon as there's a clear indication that they cannot be resolved properly. There is no merit in staying in a terrible workplace and fighting through it, sometimes it is just better to leave and find a better place.

As I mentioned in a comment, Workplace is full of software engineers, who tend to enjoy a favorable market in terms of employment. This means that for them, it's often very easy to apply for jobs and find a new one in weeks.
Why doesn't this work in academia?

If you want to stay in research, it's really hard to move at almost every stage of your career.

Academia is still heavily invested in the school calendar. If I was unsatisfied with my program, I would have to wait until the next fall to start somewhere. That's if I decided to leave in time to apply for another program (typically almost a year before starting; contrast this with employment). Even if I short-circuited the application cycle, I would still start in the fall.

And the chance of transferring to a school nearby - so as not to disrupt your life incredibly - is close to zero, unless you live in Boston, maybe. Most people, upwards of 90% have already relocated for grad school, so doing that again is a hard-to-overcome stressor.

Finally, PhD-to-PhD transfers are very rare and tend to make people suspect a problem.

Leaving a studentship is much harder on your career than a job.

As cag points out, changing could mean delaying by a year (which is costly), but most importantly, people select programs based on their fit for their dream project. I'm speaking generally, but I came to my program because of the resources. Finding the same resources elsewhere is not the same as finding a more-enjoyable 9-to-5.

Do I fully support this model of academia? No, but you can see why someone would tolerate more to study something they're passionate about instead of deciding to quit running networks for Company A and instead run networks for Company B.

If I left my lab on bad terms, I would likely lose access to the data I have spent years building on. So poof goes a whole pile of projects. Whereas when you leave a job, those projects are someone else's problem. My career would be affected by leaving a bad situation much more than a random HR person's (just to pick on a different job).

Lots of people are passionate about their jobs, sure, and they would likely tolerate a crappier boss compared to someone who just sees their job as a 9-to-5 (which is totally OK). It's that in academia, everyone is expected to be that person, and so you can see what it may seem that what's easy to quit over in industry is harder in academia.
Finally, I haven't even touched on the hierarchical nature of academia. If you want to work in some field, probably your professor knows all the other professors in the same field. Upsetting them could - or feel like it could - basically get you excluded from the field of your dreams. Whereas employment networks are much larger and your line manager has much less sway over where you end up next.


Course load expectations for teaching track and how to negotiate for courses I am a new lecturer (non-tenure track) at an American engineering university (lecturer=teaching track professor, in my case). I am on a 9 month rolling contract and am contracted to work between Sep-May of a year. I am really young in my career and will embark on my first teaching assignment as a lecturer this Summer (2015).

Our university does offer graduate and undergraduate courses in the summer and needs instructors (teaching track lecturers or research/tenure track professors) to teach them. Usually, research/tenure track professors supervise Masters or PHD students in the summer and trade teaching for that. It is incumbent on lecturers to teach summer courses.

I volunteered to teach one course in the summer (June 2015-Aug 2015) and my department chair, who is responsible for course load distribution asked if I "would be willing to teach" a second course during the same months. I politely declined and offered to teach the second course in the following Fall semester if the need arose.

June-Aug is really "off-contract" season for me and teaching a course "off-contract" is compensated on an hourly or a per-course fashion ($xx/hr or $xxxx per course).

I am unsure of whether I was tactless in my handling of this situation. How does one manage such a request from the department chair? Did I shoot my career really early in the foot by declining such a request (however offering to teach the course in a later semester) or is declining a request OK in academia? How do I improve my approach to manage such a situation for course negotiation or teaching load distribution in the future so that I am not perceived as being a slouch "who dodged extra responsibility"?

As usual, there is no clear answer. People are different. "Requests" are different - maybe, the request in your case was an honest, open-ended question and your department head is not surprised that you said No. Maybe the request was supposed to be a rhetorical question, and the department head was really surprised that you said No.

  How does one manage such a "request" from the department chair?

Well, as you would handle any request. Check if it is ok for you to comply with it (do you have the time? is complying with the request aligned with your interests?), and if it is, agree. If it isn't, carefully explain why you can't do that, and offer alternatives. From your descriptions alone it does not sound like you did anything particularly wrong. However, most people are a bit more accommodating when starting a new job, so I would say that your department head was probably at least a little bit surprised that you turned him down.

  Did I shoot my career really early in the foot by declining such a request

"Shot in the foot" is maybe a bit strongly formulated, but it is certainly possible that the head has the impression that you are not overly flexible. I mean, asking somebody to teach a second course is not really an unheard-of request.


Whether to add co-author who helped in modifying a journal paper based on a peer-review feedback? Should I include as co-author someone who helped me in modifying a journal paper based on a peer-review I have received?

You should consider it, I think, but there is too little information here to give a positive recommendation. It would depend on whether the other person contributed to the ideas at the heart of the paper. If they only gave advice on wording or presentation, then probably not.

Note that editors and even reviewers making suggestions don't become co-authors. You have to judge their contribution. But note that they may have an opinion about it that you should take into account as well.

But let me suggest something beyond pure accounting and ethical obligation. While this may not be true in some fields that depend on rigorous bean counting to rate people, I'd suggest a general view that you are generous rather than stingy can serve you well in the long run. If I were the commenter on your paper, I'd suggest that an acknowledgement is enough (or more than enough). If I were the author, I'd be more inclined to include the commentator than not, though the first part of this answer still applies. Over the course of your career it may matter little whether you are the sole or joint author of any given paper. But, having a wide circle of people willing to collaborate with you is a big plus in the long term.

But, if you are at the very beginning of your career and looking for a job, you might need a sole author publication at this moment. That depends on the field, I think. But I'd suggest short term thinking only if truly necessary.


Can research project scholarship offers ever get retracted? I got an offer (written) for a research project scholarship, emailed the supervisor about the start date and they asked me to come in mid December.

I sent an email back confirming that I can start on that date. In the same email I asked them where I should meet them on the said date.

I might be overly paranoid of losing my scholarship, but it's been over a week and they have not replied.

Do professors ever have second thoughts about a potential research student that they've basically already confirmed that they will be working with? I know that they may just be busy, and my question was trivial, but would it be smart to give them another nudge?

Well, probably yes, if they find out you have a "rap" sheet for dealing in x,y and z etc etc.

But I think they have just been busy so have not replied, and are still looking forward to welcoming you on that date.

You may find that you receive an email with lots of info as you are on some other mailing list to get initial information... The wheels sometimes grind slowly...

Best of luck!


How widespread is the practice of delegating LoR writing to the applicant? At least two questions (1, 2) on this site indicate that in more than a few isolated cases at least, letters of recommendation are in fact written by the applicant and only signed off (or perhaps rephrased somewhat) by the recommender, who would actually be responsible for writing the letter.

Is there any evidence about the prevalence of this practice that goes beyond anecdotes? I realize that cross-country (cultural) difference may play a role.

There's a spectrum of "writing your own LoR. " As a faculty member, for example, I might correspond with the student:

Asking for bullet points that the letter should hit
Asking for a few sentences or paragraphs of the highlights that the letter should address
Asking for an entire first draft that is then revised
A complete letter that is copy/pasted in its entirety

In principle, I write all of my LoRs myself. However, with students in large lecture courses or that I don't know that well (for example, those who have left for a couple of years, and suddenly need an LoR out of the blue), I might ask for a variation of #1 or #2. I always rewrite whatever they give me so that it is in my own words.

I especially ask for higlights for students who are going into industry since I've never been on the hiring side for industry (only academia) and don't know what should be accentuated .

From the student's perspective, though, when they get a #1 or #2 request - they might mistake it for a #3 request.

I've never asked for a #4 type letter and although there are rumors of faculty that do, I don't see how they serve either faculty or student purposes. Faculty who are lazy tend to also be risk adverse and signing your name to someone else's LoR is risky. It doesn't serve the student either as students don't know the genre of letter writing and are unlikely to be able to write a strong letter for themselves. So while I won't presume that in the entire universe of universities, such a case has existed, I would think the actually prevalence is quite low and the reality is #2 and #3 type requests that are misunderstood by the student to be #4s.


What is "academic freedom", when so many professors and post-docs do only the research that is being funded by external agencies? Do professors truly get to work on whatever they want, in research?

I just read a job description for a post-doc position; the job sounds extremely specialized, with no room to do anything else outside of that job requirement.

And generally professors are funded by external agencies to do pretty specific research.

Is there really academic freedom for professors in the United States?

While it is certainly true that the bulk of university research depends on external funding, and thus requires approval of the external funder, there are a number of ways in which a professor in the United States (and many other nations) can pursue research with almost complete freedom:

Most professors own salaries are supported (at least at a "9 month" level) on the basis of teaching, not from research grants.  A research position, however, often teaches only 1-2 classes per semester, however, leaving significant time for the professor to spend on research, whether or not that research also has external support.
Some undergraduates are willing and able to work on research for course credit or even on a volunteer basis.
Graduate students and postdocs are sometimes supported on fellowships that put no constraint on the subject of their research.
Some institutions also allow professors to "bank" a portion of the research funds that they bring in, which may then be used later as unrestricted funds.
Early career professors often have startup funds and later career professors often have endowed chairs, both of which typically have no constraints on the research they can be used to conduct.
In extremely rare cases, a professor may get a "genius grant" or similar sort of external award that is a significant amount of unrestricted money.

The amount of resources available through such unrestricted routes is typically much smaller than if one can convince an external funder that one's work is worthy, but one can get quite a long way on preliminary work, proofs of concept, and small-scale experiments with rather small amounts of resources.

Combine this with the fact that there is a wide diversity of funders out there with different agendas and preferences, and one can see that academic freedom in research is very real indeed.


How to properly assess a student's knowledge of a subject Good afternoon,

Often times (in my experiences) tests questions are based upon irrelevant specific details that do not necessarily reflect a student's knowledge of the subject matter. For instance, I was once faced with a test on "The Once and Future King" that asked, "What was the name of the cow?"... I believe asking questions such as this does not accurately reflect a student's mastery of the subject.

In this light, are there any established best practices for formulating examinations that properly assess how well a student has grasped the concept of a subject?

P.S. - If you down-vote, please leave a reason so that I ask better questions in the future.

P.P.S. - I don't believe this question (singular) about examinations (specific) is too broad, since it has two very helpful (definitely adequate) answers with additional resources, which have been developed by Universities as best practices. These three qualities are what the 'too broad' hold explicitly asks the questioner to address. If, after these edits, Mods still think the question is too broad, please leave more feedback so that a better question can be formulated, or simply go ahead and close the thread. I think the two answers already given are adequate for anyone seeking an answer to this question.

I have found a couple of resources regarding the question of credibility of examinations.

The University of Michigan advocates that examinations should be:

Valid, (providing useful information about the concepts they were
designed to test)
Reliable (allowing consistent measurement and discriminating between
different levels of performance)
Recognizable  (instruction has prepared students for the assessment)
Realistic (concerning time and effort required to complete the
assignment)  (Svinicki, 1999)

For others' reference:

https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/assesslearning/creatingexams.html

http://www.crlt.umich.edu/P8_0 <- referenced UofM material above can be found here.

P.S. - The UofM website has further references, including the '(Svinicki, 1999)' that is listed above.


How do you know your paper is ready for submission? I am writing a 3 page letter and my advisor basically told me to prepare it by myself and send it for submission.

I have written papers before, but in most of those cases my advisors helped me a lot in revising the papers. Perhaps my advisor wants me to see how much trouble it is to publish a paper lol

I have revised and re-revised and re-re-revised my paper, but I am never sure whether my paper will get rejected because my logic is not perfectly right or maybe its horribly wrong.

When do you know you are ready to submit your paper?

The truth is that the paper will never be in perfect condition for publication. This is the role of peer review, to evaluate the work from an expert viewpoint. In general, I have seen that after 2 3 weeks and after 4 5 revisions the quality of the paper increases and reach a saturation point where the paper needs an external opinion in order to be improved. If an external opinion is not possible(the paper might be outside a peer domain), then one must forget the paper and to reevaluate it after some time, and then to submit for publication. However, what is more important is the idea and the results from the paper, and not only the presentation form. Also, the validity of the results and the interpretation is very important.


How useful is it to perform a systematic literature review? How well accepted has been (systematic) literature reviews in your research field, these days?!

I come from computer science field, more specifically Software Engineering. Some professors I keep in touch usually ask their students to perform a systematic literature review (SLR) as a research kickoff, rather than performing any kind of unstructured review. However, it's become harder and harder to get such kind of publication accepted in a highly-ranked publication (e.g., a qualified journal or conf). My feeling is that, in a certain extent, the community has already saturated the amount of papers reporting on reviews.

Hence, I'd like to know a point of view of people from other research fields, as well as their expertise on measuring the tradeoff time devoted to conduct a SRL vs. likelihood of having such a kind of publication accepted by a good venue.

A systematic literature review is never a bad thing. At the worst, you have a large database of literature that you can cite in future work. as well as a feeling for where the "low-hanging fruit" might lie. It will also give you a framework on which to build and grow your literature collection over time.

So whether or not you are able to publish it, a literature review is a good thing (within reason—don't spend six months doing nothing but reading literature papers!).


Sharing with research team about being affected by a natural disaster Is it professional enough to share personal worries with your research team and your supervisor where you are pursuing doctoral studies away from home and your hometown has been affected by a natural disaster like a tornado or a super cyclone in the context of your reduced productivity and lesser focus? What would be the recommended mode of sharing such information - in person or over emails?
If they do not react to your statement, does that mean that they see such a case as an excuse only and fail to understand the effect it has had on the doctoral student?

I would call it not only professional but close to mandatory. A supervisor has to be informed of special circumstances or reasons for specific behaviour in order to manage the team effectively, set realistic goals, assure the people are comfortable and to show basic human decency. You do not have to share something that makes you feel uncomfortable, and do not have to provide a lot of detail on personal circumstances. I think it is best to do so at an early stage, saying there is issue X and you would appreciate some consideration, rather than have to explain possible poor performance later after frictions have appeared.

Suffice to say that many academics have friends and family outside their country of work and are personally aware of what it means to be away from them in a time of need. I cannot imagine many supervisors who would not be sympathetic to such a discussion, or would not appreciate the honesty. In practice this may not mean more than a pat on the shoulder and some more relaxed time, but even that can be important. If the conditions allow, a leave or temporary interruption of studies can also be warranted.


What do you need to work in administration at universities? I would like to work in administration at university and I was wondering if there is any specific course/qualification that will increase my possibilities of doing so.

In particular, I was thinking of any job in the "support staff" in charge of general administration. This would include posts related to providing support to students and/or staff with general questions or paperwork but also including organisation of activities, improving processes/how things are done, etc.

I am currently living in the UK so I would also be interested in any specific information for this area.

Usually you apply for these types of bottom- and mid-tier positions through the human resources (HR) departments of the universities. This is the same in the UK or the USA.

If you search on the HR website, they will give jobs and the requirements for those jobs. For example, the first example below is a job posting that I pulled from the University of Illinois HR department's website. You will note that it requires a high-school degree or GED. This is rather typical. When I last hired a staff person, we required an Associates degree or equivalent work experience. The "equivalent work experience" allows us to hire people without an AA degree if we feel that they have enough skills even without the credentials.

The second example below is from Cambridge University in the UK. It notes that you must have at least A levels for this position.

Note that many universities in the USA have union contracts for their clerical and technical staff. This makes applying for jobs as an outsider very difficult because the union contracts usually stipulate that jobs are first filled from job pool candidates (i.e., union members). This may likely be true for the UK as well.


Does Trump's federal hiring freeze affect academic jobs in any way? How does President Trump's Presidential Memorandum Regarding the Hiring Freeze affect academic jobs in the United States?  Does it have any impact on public universities or research labs?  Does it have any practical effect on people currently seeking academic or research jobs?

I am not fully familiar with how education and research is organized within the US.

It's complicated.

In the United States the interplay between federal employment and academic positions isn't very clear-cut. This has resulted in unusual situations where members of the same department may be employees of a number of different entities and may be either federal employees, university employees, or organization employees (ex. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CaF)).

The text of the memorandum includes the following:

  As part of this freeze, no vacant positions existing at noon on
  January 22, 2017, may be filled and no new positions may be created,
  except in limited circumstances.

and

  Moreover, it does not limit the hiring of personnel where such a limit
  would conflict with applicable law.

The "except in limited circumstances" is the relevant bit because it means it means that open (or opening) positions may still be filled. From a pragmatical standpoint, it means that if a job positing went up after January 22, 2017, odds are someone can be hired into it.

Another line that is relevant is the following:

  Contracting outside the Government to circumvent the intent of this
  memorandum shall not be permitted.

This means that organizations that hire contractors are likely to put new contract roles on hold unless the position is vital to national defense. This may impact national labs, but is heavily dependent upon what the line of funding for the contract is. Be sure to ask about this if you are interviewing for a role.

Since this memorandum does not impact grant funding, academic and research positions that are paid through an existing line of funding are exempt.

In terms of actually conducting a job search. If you are on USAJOBS you should pay close attention to the details of the posting since some since some organizations like the CaF advertise for non-federal employees on there. These jobs would not be impacted by a federal hiring freeze. Likewise, positions that are in exempt from hiring freezes due to legislation (ex. medical professionals) are also not impacted. Positions at state and private universities would also not be impacted, and would unlikely to be advertised on USAJOBS.

Generally the most basic rule of thumb is that if you are applying for a job that is listed under the General Schedule there is a high likelihood that the hiring freeze applies.


Is it possible to get a PhD based on research papers I have written? I am working as a young scientist after finishing my masters in physics in India. In last three years, I have published 12 research papers (Quantum theory) with my collabrators. I am facing problems in registering for PhD in my institute.

How can I get a Doctrate degree based upon my  research papers without registering for PhD. ??

Is there any such degree in India or abroad which can be awarded to me based upon my research papers ??

I doubt that you will find such a thing anywhere. An earned doctorate almost always (I know of no exceptions) requires an official registration and most likely, your presence at the institution for some period of time. There are normally qualifying examinations and often (not always) some required coursework.

Your publication history, however, would be a very positive factor in obtaining admission to a program in most places. You don't say why you are having difficulties, so it is impossible to say if there is some impediment.

But the only way to know about your chances are to apply to a program somewhere other than your institute, and possibly in another country. But a research background would help your chances.


Example of joint submission to PRL, PRA We are thinking about a joint submission to Physical Review Letters, and PRA per these guidelines. I'm however not entirely sure how the two submissions should be exactly related, e.g. how much overlap the works may have.

Does anybody have some insights here? Or just a few example papers that have been jointly published like this.

Recently, I've been considering a PRL-PRB joint submission, and was looking for recent examples. It appears there is no external marker for them, so they can indeed be hard to find. My initial web searches led me to this question, and to a Twitter thread by a PRL editor actually providing some examples.
One way I came up with, that finds at least some examples, is to search Google for
"companion paper Phys. Rev. A" site:journals.aps.org/prl

replace "A" as needed. (This search matches how the reference tends to be formatted.)
For reference, some examples of joint submissions are:

PRLs with companion PRAs: 1, 2, 3
PRLs with companion PRBs: 1, 2
PRLs with companion PRCs: 1, 2
PRLs with companion PRDs: 1, 2
PRLs with companion PREs: 1, 2

These examples demonstrate that the overlap between letter and full-length article is somewhat variable, reflecting the nature of the results and how well they "split up". Nevertheless, a fairly representative case that I think handled the splitting well in a PRL-PRA joint submission wrote:

LETTER: We present a self-contained discussion of our methods and results below. The full technical details and additional developments are deferred to the companion paper [52], where we consider the problem of quantifying infinite-dimensional resources from a broader perspective of general probabilistic theories, extending the concepts discussed herein.

PAPER Intro: This work also serves as the companion to the paper [39] which deals with resource quantification in continuous-variable quantum mechanics. Here we provide a derivation and extended discussion of the results stated in [39], along with several additional developments specific to quantum theory. The general framework in GPTs can be thought of as a generalization of the concepts introduced in [39].

PAPER Sec. VI:
This section complements the dedicated paper [39] in which we focus on the case of continuous-variable quantum resources. In particular, the discussion below constitutes a
technical companion to Ref. [39], providing a detailed derivation and several extensions of the results mentioned there. Since all of our results for general GTPs immediately apply to quantum mechanics as a special case, the results of previous sections already serve as proofs of some of the results of [39]. Specifically, Theorem 1 in [39] is Theorem 10 here; Theorem 2 in [39] is Theorem 9 here; Theorem 3 in [39] is a consequence of our characterization in Sec. III and in particular the duality result in Prop. 2. The other results will be established below.


writing the learning outcomes and the syllabus I'm confused when it comes to writing learning outcomes. When searching online I become more confused.

How can I understand how to write good learning outcomes.

The same for me when it comes to the syllabus, I don't know how to start writing it.

If you are designing the course, you get to pick the outcomes.  So you get to decide what is good.  Learning goals will be specific to the course, discipline, and the type of students you anticipate teaching.

There are some general principles that can help.  For setting outcomes/objectives/goals in any context, the "SMART" criteria are good. Outcomes should be Specific, Measurable (by assessments), Achievable, Realistic, Time Limited (by the length of the course), and Evaluated (to see if the course is wroking).

The Bloom Taxonomy is a system for classifying learning outcomes/objectives/goals.  It is often presented with a list of verbs you can use to construct learning outcomes.  These verbs describe what the students will be able to do at the end of the course.  You get to pick which ones to use, but it's often recommended to use different parts of the taxonomy.


I want to approach a certain subject for my diploma project, but unofficially I may get a bad grade for doing so. What should I do? I'll need to explain more just so my question can be properly understood.

I'm a 4th year Biomedical Engineering student from Romania, currently enrolled in the "Biomaterials and Medical Devices" engineering Specialisation. The previously mentioned specialization was indirectly chosen in the course of the 2nd year, when we were told to apply to either Biomaterials and Medical Devices specialization, either to Medical Equipment and Systems - with no additional information regarding the exact difference between the two, even when asked bout it.
Due to the fact that I had several failed exams which did not have the time to retake until the specialization lists were made, I ended up in the BMD spec. even though I chosen the other one.

In the last two years we took part in courses regarding mostly Biomaterials and very to no little courses about medical devices (those being Introduction to Telemedicine, Medical Databases and sort of an Introduction to Medical Imaging) - the problem is the aforementioned medical devices disciplines were common; by that I mean that even though we chosen our specialization, 4 out of 12 discipline in the 3rd year were made by both BDM and ESM students.

Now being in the 4th year, I have to choose my diploma project subject in the way that it will reflect the things I have learned along these 4 years, with a strong focus on the last two, when the BMD specialization was chosen. Almost all my colleagues are approaching subject related to the synthesis, functionalization and characterization of Biomaterials, while I want to approach a subject related to medical devices. Since Romania is part of the European Union, it has somehow standardized its higher education up to a certain point to which students from Romania can apply their knowledge in other EU countries with no problem. With that being said, there is a EU Directive about the meaning of medical devices and all its subcategories, which states the following:

  Directive 2007/47/EC defines a medical device as (paraphrasing): Any instrument, apparatus, appliance, software, material or other article, whether used alone or in >combination, together with any accessories, including the software intended by its manufacturer to be used specifically for diagnostic and/or therapeutic purposes and >necessary for its proper application, intended by the manufacturer to be used for human beings for the purpose of:

  Diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, treatment, or alleviation of disease
  Diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, alleviation of, or compensation for an injury or handicap
  Investigation, replacement, or modification of the anatomy or of a physiological process
  Control of conception

Source: Wikipedia

But apparently, the faculty has been less than keen to apply these standards to the curriculum. Another problem would be that the evaluating commission would be made out of, let's say, 10 professors with 8 of them specialized on a different branch of biomaterials. Therefore, I have to choose a subject that these 8 professors would understand to, so they can grade me. Henceforward, no software, medical imaging or other subject like these ones. There was one student last year who presented a database of imaging results upon biomaterials which could be sorted using specific filters - and even though the presentation was correct and the database was up and running, he was given a much lower mark due to the fact that these professors did not understand the processes that made the DB work in the first place. After all these, the pro-dean has to approve my diploma project subject, before proceeding to it. The pro-dean is an ESM specialized professor and expects to see something related to biomaterials in it in order to approve it.

Should I go on and approach a non-biomaterial or almost-non-biomaterial subject as the description of my specialization give me the right to do, or just give up and find one related almot or entirely to biomaterials?

Your faculty presumably knows much more about the area, and if they suggest (formally or informally) that some line of inquiry isn't suitable for a thesis, I'd listen carefully. It might be that the task is just far too ambitious to really solve in reasonable time (I see that very often with my own students), or it sounds superficially interesting, but has already been solved or the solution (if found) won't be an advance. Sometimes the thema is worthwile, but the risk of not being able to complete it (or not getting results) is just too high.


License and attribution of images in compiled work for public outreach I am working on a lager poster about science which will be on display in a museum and may be made available online. I intend to compile it using images from different sources. Some are own work, some are Wikimedia Common (Public domain or Creative Commons), others may be plots/graphics from (mostly historic) journal articles (they are usually not open access).

To my understanding, the use of these sources for non-profit/academic purposes is free if attributed correctly. However, I am unsure about the consequences of compiling or slightly modifying these works. Journals may have their own license policies but my understanding is that reuse for such purposes is generally accepted. In addition plots which represent measured data may not be protected, it seems.

Here are some of my concerns:

Using a Creative Commons image may require me to publish the whole work under the same Creative Commons license. I suppose that this is not ok with licenses/copyright policies that apply for plots or graphics from journal articles?

The different images should fit in the design of the whole. In order to achieve this I may need to make minor changes, like cropping the image or changing the background color. Will such modifications be ok with Public Domain licensed images and the ones from journals?

May the license of the whole work be determined by the fact that I am working for a public university (even though this sort of work is probably not described in my work contract, so it could be interpreted as work which I do in my spare time)?

Generally, are there some good online resources which explain the license issues and attribution of images for this kind of work?

Here are some links I know:

http://creativecommons.org.au/learn/fact-sheets/attribution/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Credit_line

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/

There's a lot of confusion around this sort of thing in academic circles, because academics have been trained heavily about attribution, but attribution is mostly orthogonal to copyright. There is no general right to use things for academic/non-profit purposes, unless copyright law in your country happens to include "fair use" or similar provisions. They vary from country to country so I can't advise on them.

Some specifics, based on what you asked:

Something in the public domain can be used however you like, as the author has relinquished all copyright claims and "gifted" the work to the public.  Thus you can use it, modify it, etc. However, do not assume (as some do) that anything you see online is public domain. It's probably best to assume that something isn't unless you see a statement to that effect.
Something with a creative commons licence can be used according to the terms of that licence. The various varieties are quite self-explanatory. All will allow you to reuse the work for non-commercial purposes, but not all allow you to modify it (the "no derivatives" variants).
Something without any stated licence or that expressly reserves rights should not be used without permission - except possibly as provided for by any "fair use" style provisions that your country may have.

Generally the licence for your work need not be controlled by the works that it contains - "viral" or "copyleft" terms such as those of the GPL are not common outside of software licencing. However, if you choose a licence more permissive than that of works that your document contains, you should make it clear that it does not apply to (eg) those figures.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice; any of the above may be wrong in your, or any other, jurisdiction!


Why do some journal proofs insert dozens of typesetting mistakes? Why do some journals change the final software and do not provide a template for the final draft(e.g. contains the same font as in the gallery proof)?
I often hear that some of my colleagues get unacceptable proofs (often even from Elsevier journals).
I am checking an Elsevier paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141029619305024) which was in the state of Galley proof (after acceptance)

letters in math equations look different: (converted all math equations to vectorgraphics)

letters have inconsistent size even in the continuous text

made a screenshot of the rendering of jpeg-graphics if the jpeg-image contained two images (a) and (b)

where they converted all simple *.eps-graphics (nothing complex) to *.jpeg with 110dpi (text is almost unreadable) also declare a min of 500dpi in the author guidelines

changed the font from the font declared in the template("Times") to "Charis SIL", now the continuous text is in Charis SIL, but the equations, the variables in the text and the figures are in Times
The font color is generally dark gray, but in math equations it is black

the variables in micro-environment are not aligned with the surrounding text (sometimes smaller letters are even higher then capital letters)

several manual line-breaks are awful (some lines contain more space than letters) also a short word is following

some lines start with "," or "."

converted a table (conatining text and two eps-graphics) to jpeg with obvious compression artifacts

added space between "mm" and "²"

removed spaces

some citations are outside the page border

According to the pdf metadata, it was created with Prince 10 rev 7, which only supports SVG as a vector format.
Why don't they convert all eps/pdf-files with inkscape to svg (can be done fully automatic as a batch-process e.g. pdftocairo.exe -svg "Input.pdf" "Output.svg")?
In my field, if I use a space instead of a small space, it is unacceptable or at least unprofessional. (As a reader, such mistakes are evident and disruptive.) And it is so super-important to add it as vector, but then the proofs ruin everything! Why do they have guidelines for authors if the journal introduces illegal (according to the guidelines) mistakes on their own?
Why do some journals change the final software and do not provide a template for the final draft?

Because they are incompetent.

That's about it, really. But don't lump all publishers/journals as one - the typesetters for one journal might not be the same as that for another journal, even one published by the same publisher, and of course there are good and bad employees everywhere.


Suggestions for high school student who is visiting a professor for HS research? So this is what she sent me:

  i emailed a caltech neurobio prof, dr. X, and he emailed me
  back and wants to meet me, im visiting him on june 16...i went through
  this sort of thing with ucla and stuff but this time i'm sooo nervous
  because he's a caltech prof and caltech is caltech...do you have any
  tips for me?

So my general suggestion to her is this: show that you can do something that can reduce the time load on his research (which is pretty much what all PhD/UG/HS research is about) - you want to do things that the professor wants to do but doesn't want to spend the time on, although some professors might be willing to "waste" a little time mentoring high school students and undergrads.

  he already asked me what lab and general knowledge i know i told him i
  know gel electrophoresis, pcr, restriction endonuclease digestions,
  immunohistochemistry, and some basic cell culture techniques and that
  i learned some basic neuroscience neuroanatomy and neurohistology and
  how to read fmri images through the us nat'l brain bee competition

I also suggested this: when making a list of your skills, show - don't just tell (although this is really hard for many high school students since they haven't had the chance to show yet). Professors are used to people who claim to know more than they really know.

====

What are some other general suggestions that can be helpful to high school students who are trying to do research with specific professors? Generalizable cases are fine - as I do get quite a few emails from high school students who want to seek my advice on how to get research with a professor.

As a HS student visiting a lab, a willingness to do some of the "grunt" work in exchange for a chance to do "real" research is helpful. Being able, and willing, to do literature searches on a database (e.g., pubmed), to download easy to get papers, and go to the library to get hard to find papers papers is really useful for a lab. Most researchers would happily trade their time teaching about the methods they use and love, in exchange for not having to make a run to the library. Being able to do data entry and carry out statistical tests, with guidance, in a program like SPSS, is really valuable. Being able to make charts/figures in programs like Excel, Photoshop and Illustrator is a real plus.


How to approach my supervisor when I've finished the task he assigned early? Given that it's a very broad question I'll try to create some context:

I'm in my first year (just started) and at the moment my task as PhD student is closer to learn the techniques and technologies used in the department than to real work. Almost in a weekly basis I receive small tasks which, once completed, are reported and then substituted by a new small task.

However, sometimes the task is completed and no report is due (for whatever the reason) so I'm stuck with no excuse to go to my supervisor's office and no work to do on account of not going to my supervisor's office.

My supervisor is a very busy person and so I have always the feeling I'm intruding when I 'request' (by mail or simply going to his office) to talk to him.

I would like to build some cofidence with my supervisor, but I don't really know how to approach him in the first place. Any tips?

Ps:I was sure someone would've asked this before, but I couldn't find anything so I would like to apologise in advance just in case it has already been asked.

Just talk to your advisor when you feel you need his input.

All of the busy people I know (myself included) want the people they work with to let them know if things are ahead of schedule. When I supervise a student, someone has to be moving things along. If the student takes responsibility for that, and can be counted on to come to me when he/she needs my input, it's much less work for me than the students I have to monitor more actively.

Having said that, there are several things that can also help:

Ask your supervisor to discuss the "big picture" with you. This way you'll understand what these small tasks are getting at and can make a reasonable guess as to what the next task will be. This will help with your problem and will also help you develop your skills as an independent researcher (which is what you're training for, after all).
Develop your own research interests (either side projects, or related to the work you're doing with your advisor) and work on those when you're "blocked" waiting for your advisor. This, too, will also help you develop your skills as an independent researcher.


Publishing from PhD thesis to papers I have a question on publishing papers from my PhD thesis. I found this topic in other answered questions, but never exactly the same (forgive me if I am wrong), and I need some more comments on this.
I wrote my thesis as a collection of few papers, following the model of my research school, but never went on submitting those, for several reasons and for several years. Now I think the right time came, but I am doubtful I can publish the papers in the thesis "as they are", since the thesis is publicly available. Well, to publish papers from thesis chapters is a common procedure in the research school I attended, but normally it is done in the same year, or few years later, while I graduated 6 years ago.
I contacted the editor of the journal I wish to submit one of the papers, asking if I can publish data already presented in my publicly-available-thesis. He replied that data can be reused, provided that it is clearly stated they are not original. Can the text be reused as well? I will make some changes, add comments and update literature reference, but a greta portion of the text will remain the same. Can this be a problem?
Thank you very much for your answers,
Clelia

You can think of your thesis as a preprint. Thus, you can extract manuscripts from it and publish them. This is essentially how arXiv works.


How would you react as a professor if a student has been going to your office hours and does not perform well on an exam? Say if a student goes to the professor's office hours to get help on class material and homeworks. Then, on test day, the student does not perform well on the test, and turns in the test with some questions not completed in a one hour time period. How would you react and grade as a professor?

The grade wouldn't be affected. The student's performance is their own. I would worry a bit about my effectiveness, and I would probably modify my approach with them in future visits. In particular, I would try to get them to do more exercises to support their learning. In some cases I would suggest a tutoring center if such is available. And there is always the possibility of an undiagnosed learning difficulty that might require specialized professional help.

But you don't say whose perspective this is. If you are asking as a student, then I suggest that you keep going back for more and following whatever advice you get.

But if you are asking as the instructor, then it is more complicated. It is a temptation for new teachers to say more in response to a question than is, perhaps, ideal. Sometimes the best answer to a student's question is a very minimal answer so that they are led to their own insights. A hint, not an answer. Or even a new exercise that will lead them to the insight.

Students too often get the idea that a professor asks questions because they want/need the answers. What they want, actually, is a change in the student's way of thinking and it is the search for the answer not the answer itself that is normally required to get that insight.

Students can, of course, get frustrated if you don't answer their questions. It can be a subtle dance. But sometimes responding to a question with another question can actually get the job done better than providing the answer.

But none of the student-instructor interactions or "extra" help should result in changing grades. The students still need to perform their part of the dance.

I've had to spend a great deal of time with a few students. Initially they stumbled and fell. But sometimes they got over the hurdles that they faced and did well. But it was their work that did it.


No specific license & no copyright transfer agreement: do I retain rights without restrictions? I have a question about publishing. If I publish a paper in a journal that does not specify any type of license used, and I am never asked to transfer the copyright.
Apart from this, the journal defines itself as "open" and there is no copyright notice of any kind in the journal's articles.
I think that I could retain all the rights without restrictions. What do you think about this?

What we "think" about it is of little consequence. The laws around copyright vary over the world. I think you are being a bit blasé about it. You need some explicit statement of any license you grant. If the publisher makes assumptions and does things you don't approve of with your work you may have little recourse other than a lawsuit that will probably cost you money. As Anonymous Physicist suggests, you shouldn't deal with such people as they are probably not reputable.
If they aren't willing to be explicit prior to publication and ask you to actually sign a clear agreement, then it is a giant red flag.
The risk is yours and yours alone. You may be fine, but no one here can provide any assurance of that. Talk to an IP lawyer to get knowledge of the local laws that will apply.
My worry is, if you give them an implied but not stated license, whether they can pass that license on to others. And, again, if they assume that, then it is a lawsuit that would be necessary to stop it. What "I think" is that you are stepping into a minefield. Don't do so blindfolded.
If you are associated with a university, they may have IP lawyers with whom you can consult.


Pursuing a research career in a university without teaching duties, is it possible? Is it possible to pursue a research career inside a university without teaching duties?

I don't like to teach, I love research and I love being affiliated to a university.

The universities I am interested are based in Europe, UK and USA.

Thanks

Yes. In the UK such positions are called Research Assistants or Research Associates. There are also Postdoctoral Researchers.

These are full-time salaried researchers who are employed on specific grant funded projects. The only down-side is that they are often fixed-term contracts linked to the fixed term research grant; however, UK employment law does offer some protection, because if you land several sequential fixed term positions at the same institution you are regarded as a permanent employee with greater rights when the funding ceases.

Such positions are advertised in the Academic press (such as the Times Higher Education Supplement) or on jobs.ac.uk.


Why does academia still use scientific journals and not peer-reviewed government funded alternatives? ------ NOTICE ------
The above put box "This question already has answers here:  Why are journals used in modern scientific academic research?" is wrong and void: it has a title that sounds similar to my question but the question goes into Arxiv and the answers are in regard to Arxiv ("Arxiv is not peer reviewed") which is not the issue discussed here. The question here is why "peer-reviewed government funded alternatives" are not used.

The field of science is under-funded but we follow a publication system that has two major (expensive) options for publishing:

Paywall journals: Scientists do the science and write the papers
(using mainly tax money). Scientists act as editors and reviewers
check the quality (while paid with more tax money). Once years of
work have gone into a paper the journal takes it without paying the
authors, academic editors and/or reviewers a single cent and puts
the paper behind a paywall. Now universities have to pay the journal
huge amounts of money (exact numbers are usually not available due to NDAs) to access the paper to which the journal did
not contribute anything (apart from minor formatting issues and
putting a pdf on a webpage maybe).
Open access journals: Same as above (scientists do all the work) but
authors even pay the journal a substantial amount of money which can
easily go up to 6000 USD in "respected" journals (I am not talking
about predatory open-access journals here – the 6k is for example
for the journals of the American Chemical Society which publishes a
few of the leading journals in our field). For this amount of money
the journals do the minor formatting issues mentioned above and
upload a pdf on their webpage. There is just no relation between
their fees and what they do for it. Here 60-100 USD would be more appropriate than 6000 USD.

Is this not fundamentally wrong that scientists do the work and journals skim off the profit? Why do scientists (and tax payers!) still put up with this?
I do understand that historically :

Journals made sense as someone needed to print the
articles into books to make them accessible to everybody and
layouting might have been something non-trivial but nowadays this is
not the case any-more.
Scientists have brought themselves into a dead-lock due to a
publish (in high impact and "respected" journals)    or perish in
which you have to publish in certain journals in order    to be seen
as a good scientist.

But would it not make much more sense to have tax-money funded    web-portals that use editors and reviewers to assess quality of    articles and make them available for download as journals do it currently? That would cost a fraction of    the paywall and open access fees that journals make money from at the    moment.
Why does science still stick with journals? My feeling is that the field of science does not need the journals at all anymore - what am I missing here? I have never really gotten a satisfactory answer from other scientists (mostly things like "this is how things are and we can not change them") therefore I am asking here  ...

There are many businesses which are inefficient in the sense that you judge publishing by. There is nothing requiring markets to accomplish some collective endeavor efficiently. Instead, markets are only efficient in terms of people being able to pay for things they want. For example, whether avocado toast is good nutrition is irrelevant to the market. But if you want to pay $15 for it, and if there is someone else willing to give you an avocado toast for $15, the market will certainly provide for that exchange.
Likewise, your arguments about how the current publishing system is inefficient are tangential at best. It so happens that a lot of people (in the current world, not in some fantasy post-journal world) want to publish in journals, and read what is published in journals, which is why the journals exist. You point out some important reasons for this and say you understand this, but

would it not make much more sense to have tax-money funded web-portals

Well, no, it wouldn't. If there is demand for service A, why would the market fail to supply A and instead supply only service B which doesn't fill the same needs? The answer is that a free market wouldn't. You could have government force the market to not provide service A and only service B, but then you have a non-free market. Which isn't the end of the world, but it so happens that most people in charge of government these days favor free markets, barring corruption.
That's the most direct answer to your question: The current publishing system is in place because that's what the free market came up with, and implementing your system would require government interference in the market. It is not politically expedient to implement such interference. This is all for today, mind. 20 years ago open access was a pipe dream, perhaps 20 years later publishing will change completely. But we can only speculate about the attitudes of the future.

I'd also like to point out some inaccuracies in your question.

Scientists act as editors and reviewers check the quality (while paid with more tax money)

Actually editors often get paid by journals. Also, not all research is publicly funded.

Now universities have to pay the journal huge amounts of money (exact numbers are usually not available due to NDAs) to access the paper to which the journal did not contribute anything (apart from minor formatting issues and putting a pdf on a webpage maybe)

These days, a lot of research is made freely available after a few years, the university is really paying for quick access (and also access to very old papers).

Here 60-100 USD would be more appropriate than 6000 USD.

No, it wouldn't be, because no journal would bother. $60-100 USD would buy you maybe 1-2 hours of work from a single skilled person in which they must:

Read the manuscript
Finding reviewers and keep bugging them to submit reviews on time
Read reviews and decide if they make sense, then pass them on to the author
When revised MS is in, work with reviewers to decide if the revisions address the initial concerns
Work with authors to get it formatted and proofread

It is not realistic for a single person to do a single one of these in a few hours, much less all of them.

Is this not fundamentally wrong that scientists do the work and journals skim off the profit?

There's nothing more wrong than any other for-profit enterprise. The only thing you can criticize here is the entire concept of seeking profit, but I don't believe there are currently significant contributors to science that are opposed to profit seeking. The closest thing that comes to mind is China, but they have for profit journals also, and a lot of Chinese research is published in western, evil capitalist, journals anyway. Now that you mention it, when the USSR was around I think they did have government run, non-profit journals.  But it is not considered "fundamentally wrong" by most governments today.

make them accessible to everybody and layouting might have been something non-trivial but nowadays this is not the case any-more.

No, it is easier, but still non-trivial. Even just writing a manuscript purely for yourself takes some work to get all the equations, figures, citations and so on to display correctly. But if you had a journal where you want a uniform formatting from many articles by many different authors, it is a lot of work to come up with a system that works for everybody and also get the authors to follow it.

That would cost a fraction of the paywall and open access fees that journals make money from at the moment.

Government can be notoriously wasteful, so it's not a given that it would be cheaper. Perhaps the cost might be spread out over everyone via taxes, instead of being born by individual universities, researchers and those poor souls who actually pay $30 to download a PDF. But then the first two are already covered by tax money.
You have to also consider quality of service and not just cost. The classic US example of government-provided service is the DMV. It doesn't make sense to be a realist on private publishing and an optimist on public publishing.

My feeling is that the field of science does not need the journals at all anymore - what am I missing here?

Well, I suppose we can say you are missing the trees for the forest. Science is not a single person. Individual scientists obviously do need journals. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, they don't need them to publish - but they still need the credibility of being peer-reviewed and the visibility of being in a highly-read journal. They also need them for the mundane reasons of justifying job and grant applications.


Effective ways of encouraging "weak" students to make use of office hours I find that a not-so-insignificant number of my students could benefit from coming to talk with me during office hours about homework assignments, their exam preparations, etc., and I'm looking for ways to encourage them to do so. I am a big proponent of students being proactive, and figuring out on their own that they need to seek out help, but I am not seeing enough progress on this front and am, thus, looking for alternatives.

One of the main problems I am observing is that, on homework solutions, some students clearly don't know what they are doing, and coming to talk to me about how to proceed could potentially be very beneficial for them.

  Since good students already utilize office hours, when needed, what are some effective ways of getting the relatively weaker students to attend office hours?

One idea I am toying with at the moment is to make office hour interactions with me grade-able, and worth a certain percentage of the grade. As an example, consider the following:

Say a homework is assigned, student W is the "weaker" student, student S is the "stronger" student, the homework is worth 10 points, and the "interaction-with-me" component is worth some amount of points, say, 10.

Student S turns in a solution, which is correct/mostly correct [say, 85% or more correct]. In this case, student S would receive anywhere from 8.5 to 10 points on the homework grade and, since their score on the homework is greater than or equal to some threshold, say, 85%, they also score 10 points on the interaction component, whether or not they utilized office hours.

Now, consider student W: If student W utilizes office hours, and it seems like they are really trying to understand how to tackle the homework assignment, then this student would receive 10 points for the interaction component [student W's homework score, though, would reflect their performance on the homework]; else if student W does not utilize office hours, and they scored below some threshold on the homework [again, say, 85%], student W would then receive whatever they earned on the homework and zero points for the interaction component.

The above is just one idea I have at the moment. One thing I don't like about it is that it increases the documentation burden on my end. One possible solution to that would be to require students to document their office hour interactions with me on their solutions such that it would be a relatively quick check for me at grading time.

I have found personal (email) invitations to be very effective at getting certain students to come to office hours. (After attending once by personal invitation, they seem to be much more likely to come again without an invitation.)

The emails typically look something like this:

  Hi Jane,

  I noticed that some students, including you, had trouble with the theoretical basket weaving questions on Homework 3. I would be happy to review this topic with you during my office hours this Monday, 3-6PM in room 901. If you have class or other obligations during that time, you can email me to set up an appointment at another time.


"Breaking in" to reading papers in an unfamiliar field? I graduated from my undergraduate degree about a year ago and took a job in industry.  While completing that degree, I did research with a professor related to machine learning.  However, after finishing that project, I don't think ML is where I'd want to do my research if I decide to reenter the academic world.

The advice I've received regarding applications to grad school is to be reading papers of a professor I want to work with, at least with enough understanding to suggest a new idea/direction of my own.  However, I don't really know exactly what I'd like to research, but I do have some general topics I'm interested in (categories on the level of "robotics" or "cyber-physical systems") --- figuring out what areas are still active research and what is ancient history is a bit harder than when I could just turn to my advisor and ask "what/who is at the cutting edge in this field?"

Aside from just "jump in the deep end and keep reading until it makes sense," are there methods or techniques that might help me build context or evaluate the areas I'm interested in?

You could use a database, thorough your university library for example, to search for papers in your area of interest (with keywords or author names etc). This will help you see what others are researching and publishing and to determine if that is what you want to do too.

Reading relevant blogs and forums (that deal with same or similar topics as the one/s you're interested in) may also give you some ideas.

Similarly, talking to academics you may wish to work with is a good idea, as already suggested to you by others.

I would also make sure that the academic I am working with is someone who is going to be supportive (and have time for me) to make sure that I get some help (rather than being completely on my own). If this relationship doesn't work, your job is going to be much harder. You can change direction of your research later in the degree or post graduation.


Order of “List of”s in TOC Is there an accepted order in which "List of"s should appear in a thesis?

For example, I have a section dedicated to "List of (Code) Listings", another for "List of Figures", and another for "List of Symbols". Is there a preferred order in which these should appear in the document?

For Ph.D. theses, some universities (including mine) care about some aspects of the format in minute detail. They should have an office where such things are checked. Find that office and ask.

If the university doesn't care, then ask your adviser whether anyone cares. If your adviser cares, obey. If your adviser doesn't care but thinks someone else (with some authority in the matter) does, then ask that someone else.

If nobody cares, just do whatever looks reasonable to you.


Consulting potential postdoc positions: Good idea to avoid the email being ignored I'm planning to consult a potential future advisor for a postdoc position. However, they do not put up any advertisement for postdocs, thus there is a large possibility that they cannot afford a postdoc. However, even if they cannot afford any postdocs, I still prefer them to read my email, as our work are close in some degree and I do not wanna lose the opportunity for them to point me to someone else. For this reason, is it a good idea to not mentioning postdoc position upfront in the subject and only mention it much later in the body of the email?

Professors are often very busy. Sometimes they receive more than 100 emails per day, not including automatic messages. An email from a stranger without essential information in the subject field / first line is not likely to be answered.


What does the publisher mean by “Manuscripts […] are not returned to the authors”? I submitted a paper to the journal Mathematica on January this year, but I haven’t heard anything from them so far. I tried to write to the editorial office a few days ago, but did not receive any answer.
Then I noticed the following sentence on the web page of the journal, in Information for authors:

Manuscripts not accepted for publication are not returned to the authors.

Could someone explain me its meaning? I thought that, even in case of rejection, at some point they would let me know. Does this sentence mean that this is not the case?

Back in the Olden Days, to submit a paper you would mail a hard copy to them. This notice says that they will not mail it back to you; they will only send you a letter with their decision. But nowadays, when we do things by the internet, this notice is largely an anachronism. However this journal does say it still can accept submissions also by ordinary mail.
Assuming you submitted your paper by Internet, I expect you will receive a decision on publication by email in due course.
As a mathematician, I always wait at least 6 months before I inquire about a paper I have submitted.


Is it a good practice to work on multiple projects simultaneously during PhD study? The idea of working on multiple projects simultaneously during PhD study is introduced in Feibelman's "A PhD is not enough", Chapter 8. It identifies the following advantages:

When you temporarily run out of ideas, you need not be blocked but can simply turn to another project.
When a project has been completed, you do not have to spend entire days wondering what to do next.
Working on more than one project is the only way a young scientist should undertake an inherently long-term project.
It forces you to be broader than otherwise.
It will lessen the impact on your career should you be scooped. This is something to worry about if you have chosen to work in a hot area.

And I think doing so will keep me more self-motivated because sparing some time on a more ambitious but risky project would remind me that what I am doing now is connected to bigger and profounder problems. However, some suggest this would make a distracted PhD study.

PS: I am in the field of Machine Learning and Statistics.

This is very subjective and environment-dependent, and my opinion is orthogonal to qsp's answer based on my experience.

My PhD topic was a continuation of my MSc topic with the same advisor. However, halfway through I found another topic, unrelated to the first one, that really interested me. Long story short, I ended up with a sandwich thesis (this was planned from the beginning) consisting of 3 published papers on the 1st topic, and having published 8 papers on the 2nd topic to fill my CV (plus 2 papers on a third topic from a completely different field, and 2 other dydactic texts in lesser peer-reviewed journals). This was enough to graduate with honors (1st topic) and to get a prestigious grant on the 2nd topic which is my main research interest now and on which I'm building my scientific career. I'm very pleased with this outcome. (I abandoned my 1st topic altogether as eventually I lost interest in it.)

So if anyone asked me if they should work on unrelated topics during their PhD I would without hesitation advise to go for it: one broadens their knowledge (some ideas from one topic may be useful for the other), builds a bigger professional network, learns to work on different things in parallel, and ― like me ― may find a topic that is a much better fit than the original one. And I think it should be considered an advantage, as it shows one is open-minded and flexible ― and it was by my thesis referees and the grant committee.

At least at my institute, it's rather common that PhD students are involved in a number of projects on different topics, lead by different senior scientists, and also conducted by themselves. One of my friends is actively involved in ~5 of them, and keeps doing well in each.

But, as I said in the beginning, this is subjective. Some people may simply not be suited for it; some advisors may dislike it (having a conflict with one's own advisor is almost always a bad idea; on the other hand, a PhD is a time to build one's independence and scientific maturity, but this is a different issue); if someone is in a short (e.g., 3 years) program with fixed duration, indeed it might be a better idea to focus on one topic for the time being (I did my PhD in 5 years); if someone loves their topic, why should they look for something else? Etc.

So one should judge by themselves if it's a good thing to work on multiple projects. This is advisor/institution/field/culture/perspectives/... dependent, so there's no one universal "yes/no" answer.


The review results for my journal paper submitted to the special issue of a reputed journal is 45 days overdue. Is it normal and what should I do? I submitted a research paper to a special issue of a reputed computer science journal (SCI indexed) and the results were due on January 31st. However, the results have not been announced to date, and my email to the Guest Editor requesting for information on the delay has gone unanswered. I am really worried about this delay without notification, as the whole point of submitting to a special issue was to get reviews faster than regular issues. Is this big delay normal? Should I be worried that my paper is lost or worse? I can see the status "Reviewing" when I log into the journal's tracking service. Please advise on what I should do.

Thanks in advance.

Oftentimes, and that's valid esp. for academia, a call will be better than an email. It's really easy to oversee (deliberate or not) an email, but if you call, the editor (or a secretary) has to answer. And if you have someone on the line you can ask your questions directly and he has to answer or give you sme other sort of feedback.

It's annoying for a lot of us, since an email is easier, faster,  you can better oversee what you're writing and you don't have to call someone and speak to him personally. But from an efficency point of view, a call is in most of the cases the best approach.

Just ask polite, don't make some sort of accusation or preasure somthing, but that are the same rules that apply for emails.


What incentive does an institution have to hire expensive research staff instead of having PhD students fill all those roles? I don't understand why a research institution (that awards PhDs) would employ (expensive) full-time research officers. Why couldn't those jobs be done by a group of government-funded PhD students instead?  (The PhD students seem to be free or at least less expensive to the institution.)

No funding? Simple, just hire more PhD students! They can do whatever the institute requires them to do, such as publishing X number of papers. They are smart but cheap.

A PhD is where you learn to do research to a doctoral standard.

A research job is where you apply what you've learnt.

These things are different things. They are not the same thing.

It's like why you see a qualified doctor instead of an undergraduate studying medicine.