What is a recommended strategy on exercises in a mathematical textbook at graduate level? When I read a mathematical textbook at graduate level to learn and master a particular subject that I am unfamiliar with, I always struggle with the strategy on the exercises. Sometimes I spent one hour on one exercise problem without making any progress. Sometimes I skip exercise problems with guilt and worried that I may not have learnt the material well. I can think of the following possible strategies on exercises:

Ignore all of them. Just focus on reading the main body of the textbook.
Set a time limit. Say for every hour I spent on reading the main body, I spent twice much time on solving exercise problems. I try to solve whatever I can within two hours and skip the rest.
Never move on to a new session unless I have solved all exercise problems in the previous session. If I get stuck, spend hours working on it and if still no success, look it up or ask somebody until I understand the solution.
Spend a reasonable amount of time on each problem and if I could not solve it, read the solution from a solution manual. This strategy seldom works as for most books on graduate level, solution manuals are unavailable.

What strategy do you recommend? I personal feel that Strategy 3 is the most time-consuming but it is also the only one that does not bother my conscience. But because it consumes a huge amount of time, I am not sure if it is wise to adopt it.

Disclaimer: My thoughts about this are somewhat unconventional, so keep that in mind.

I don't have a high opinion of the sausage-link structure of (advanced) mathematics courses, where you get a chunk of "material," and then exercises on that material, and then another chunk of material, and so on until the term ends. Since nearly all courses (and books) use this structure, I think the students who do well with it tend to be overrepresented among grad students due to survivorship bias, but I don't think it's well-correlated with any meaningful measure of mathematical talent. So my first observation is: Don't sweat it.

My second observation is: Some people just have innately less sequential, more integrated, and higher-context learning processes, which creates a mismatch with standard instruction. The bad news is that very few mathematics professors seem to be clued into this and/or have no intention of modifying their course structure to support a variety of learning styles.

However, if you're working from a book, you can reverse-engineer and restructure as you see fit. So skip around, use multiple references, work on what makes sense to you at any given time. Above all, don't feel constrained by the structure of the book and use the exercises as a check on your understanding rather than a goal in itself. You don't have to do the exercises from section 4 right after reading section 4. You might get more out of it if you come back to them after section 7.

This is going to take some experimentation and self-observation and not all books will be equally amenable to deconstruction. But we now live in an age where even fairly obscure topics will have multiple presentations that can be located with a few keystrokes. You just need to find what works best for you.


How do I identify predatory and low quality journals? With Beall's List gone, how can I tell if a journal is spam? Jeffrey Beall removed his list of predatory journals from the internet this past Sunday. While the reasons for his doing this are not yet public, this is a real loss of a valuable service. Does anyone know of similar services available to the general public?

Edit: This other question is definitely relevant, but that approach is more appropriate for finding top journals rather than identifying bottom ones. I.e., following that method would probably exclude lots of valid, lower-tier journals. Are there any approaches to easily identifying a predatory publisher?

I heard about Beall's list several times on this site, but I'm amazed about its significance to some people.

When you start doing research, you need to know which papers are important in your field (your advisor or google scholar will tell you). Then you need to know who is the big shots, and not so big shots in your field. Then you need to know where those guys have published their papers (where your advisor published his/her papers).

Then follow the masters, submit to the conference/journal that they published. If it is a new conference/journal, you need to know some people in the PC members, editors.

If you know none of them, it's not a good idea to submit your paper. In the best case, they are not in your field. Even if you don't know them, you can check if they are from reputable university, if they have well-cited papers to become editors?

Another way is to check 5 papers published by this journal 5 years ago. If none of them has any citations, that journal is spam.

TL;DR: You don't need any list.


How can I introduce a fourth reason after having stated that there are three main reasons? In an academic paper, I have written "There are three main arguments for why X is not Z."

I have then discussed them like this:

  "First, .... (of medium length)
  The second argument is that ... (a bit long)
  The third and most important argument is that ... (longer)" **

** I did not simply use "First,... Second,... Third..." because there is some distance between the arguments. For example, the second argument is two pages long. I think writing "The third and most important argument ..." reminds the reader what these arguments are for.

Now I have realized that I have to make one more argument. And I want to start with "A fourth argument is that ..." after the third one.

Is it a problem that I stated in the beginning that I will give "three main arguments", but I give four? I don't want to say "four main arguments".

The three main arguments are widely discussed by experts in the field. The fourth argument is something that has only been pointed out (in two lines) by one author. The Thing is, my supervisor likes this fourth argument and thinks I should include it in my paper. That is why I want to mention it. I don't want to say that it is trivial because it can become important sometime in the future - just that it is not a main argument (or widely discussed) for why X is not Z.

What is the best way to introduce the fourth argument after the third while maintaining that the first three are the main arguments?

I did not simply use "First,... Second,... Third..." because there is some distance between the arguments.

I suggest that you open with:

There are three main arguments for why X is not Z: A, B, and C.

Then, rather than First, .... (of medium length)
The second argument is that ... (a bit long)
The third and most important argument is that ... (longer), you can use A, B, and C as section/subsection/paragraph headers.

  Now I have realized that I have to make one more argument. And I want to start with "A fourth argument is that ..." after the third one. Is it a problem that I stated in the beginning that I will give "three main arguments" but I give four? I don't want to say "four main arguments".

That's a problem, just write There are four main arguments for why X is not Z: A, B, C, and D. and use D as a heading.

  The three main arguments are widely discussed by experts in the field. The fourth argument is something that has only been pointed out (in two lines) by one author.

You could revise the opening as:

The literature agrees upon three arguments for why X is not Z: A, B, and C [1,2,3,4,5].

And follow that with:

A fourth argument has also been identified: D [6].


What is the timeline for academic job postings in the humanities in Australia? What is the timeline for the humanities (specifically literature) job search in Australia? In the US, jobs begin to be posted in September. Any advice for a US candidate looking for a level B (lecturer, equivalent of US assistant professor) position?

Universities in Australia take a slightly different approach from those in the US. Rather than recruiting serious academic positions almost exclusively at the assistant professor/level B level and recruiting in cohorts, they tend to advertise positions when they get new funding or when someone leaves, rather than on any particular timeline, and may hire (or cut positions) at any level of seniority.

If you look at the websites of universities, most of them currently have some academic positions open, with deadlines ranging from tomorrow to the end of July. You just need to be on the lookout for suitable positions in your field.

That said, the academic semesters in Australia run from about February to June and from about August to November, so it is likely that there are more positions being advertised in May-June and November-December, looking for people who will be ready to teach at the start of the coming semester.

ETA: Here's one for you to look at: http://www.jobs-monash.jxt.net.au/academic-jobs/lecturer-senior-lecturer-in-literary-studies/642748


Is asking an author I'm reviewing to cite me a conflict of interest? I'm reviewing a paper whose work is quite related to some of my early PhD work, that was about 2 years ago. I have a paper published in a Journal that proved that method A had good solutions for the problem X.

Now I'm asked to review a paper that does a variation on method A, although they never cite my paper at all, is not exactly the same, but I think there should be a reference, if not because it is my paper, but because by the time I did the survey no one else had used that method.

Now, that said, is it a breach of interest to ask the authors to cite my work, or at least read it?

If I were you, I would ask myself the following question:

  is it better for the paper to be aware of my work?

I believe this is the main question you need to ask. If you see your work is relevant to the problem and can enhance the paper content, then you have to point to it. If you see your work as a complement of the paper just reference it in the review.


Should I mention in statement of purpose that my undergrad degree is in a different field because my parents wanted me to do it? Is it okay to mention in my statement of purpose for admission to grad school in math, that my undergraduate major is engineering because my parents wanted me to do it?

I was initially wrote my statement without including my motivation for undergraduate degree, however people said it seemed too abrupt. However, without it, I'm not sure how to tell why despite being interested in math, I still chose engineering as a major.

EDIT: Thank you for your responses, I should mention that, after my undergrad degree, I have managed to enrol in one of the top masters program in math in my country and I'm doing well there, and also that there was not really any scope to learn pure math in my undergrad university.

Do not say:

  "I did engineering undergraduate because my parents made me."

Why?
Because you are applying for graduate school. The admissions committee wants to see adults. Referring to your parents (at all) makes it seem like you are not independent -- that your parents run your life. Whether or not they do, it does not benefit you to give such an impression. You don't want to put the idea in their heads, whether or not it is true now (or then).

I suggest, if your really must mention it at all, something along the lines of:

  "My time as a Engineering undergraduate has made clear to me my true desires. While engineering is a interesting and worthy subject, my passion is for mathematical side I saw during my studies."


Is an automatic copyright transfer clause in publisher's instructions to authors typically enforced/enforceable? Some publishers have a clause like the following in their author instructions:

  Submission of a manuscript implies... that if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors agree to automatic transfer of the copyright to the publisher.

I found many instances of this among disreputable publishers. But I was surprised to also see this policy at more than one Springer journal and a handful of other, reasonably reputable, venues.

I was also surprised, because we occasionally get questions here about withdrawing a paper after acceptance. The first thing we ask them is generally, "Have you signed a copyright transfer yet?" with the implication that before signing anything, you still hold the copyright to the submitted work.

So, what exactly is the automatic transfer of copyright referred to above?

Has this been enforced, traditionally? Is it even enforceable, generally speaking?

Or is it just a clause that some sketchy publishers put in there to deceive authors into believing that they don't have the right to withdraw their paper from the journal after acceptance?

A lawyer would be best suited to answer this, but as I have had several business law classes as part of my business education, I'll hold forth based on my understanding of intellectual property and contract law in an educational context.

The answer would be yes, that it should be generally enforceable.

Laws vary by state even in the United States, but in general, qualities that can make a contract unenforceable are:

Lack of capacity of the parties (legal age, sound minds, etc.)
Fraud or misrepresentation
Violation of public policy

None of the above apply to our situation (unless, for example, we have a precocious or senile scholar).

Enforceable contracts also require:

Consideration (exchange of something of value)
Meeting of the Minds (mutual agreement of terms)
Offer and Acceptance

Now let's analyze these requirements. Is there mutual exchange of value? The journal appears to offer that in exchange for copyright, the author gets to be published in a prestigious journal. Does the author agree at the time of offer and acceptance? Then we have an enforceable contract.

So this brings to light a strategy for attempting to retain copyrights of your work. Insist by striking through such language in a contract and make a statement that you, the author, retain copyright, and put your initials by the alteration. If the contract is in electronic form, communicate this through email just prior to and just after submitting your request electronically.

If they do not object, and rather, accept your submission, I would assert that you have established that any possible claim by them to your work is either completely unenforceable (certainly, in the case of a written contract) or (in either case) liable to cost them a great deal in legal fees to pursue.


What to do when visiting a lab or a university for prospective application? In his famous and interesting article "Ten Simple Rules for Selecting a Postdoctoral Position", author Philippe Bourne states, in the 2nd point:

  Rule 2: Select a Laboratory That Suits Your Work and Lifestyle

  If at all possible, visit the laboratory before making a decision.
  [...]

I think that is definitively a good advice, not only for Post-Doc applicants, but for all applicants in general. But, what is the best way to arrange a lab visit?

What to do when you're there?

Whom to speak to?
What to ask?
What to do?

Two options I can think of:

Simply email the professor and arrange a visit.
Some programs will have lab tours during the recruitment/orientation programs, so you can try to arrange to meet the professor on that visit.


Short postdoc abroad I'm looking for some career/life advice. I am currently 9 months into my first postdoc job in the US (originally 1 year contract) in the life sciences, after finishing a PhD in the UK. My contract ends later this year so I'll have been here 1.5 years and I'm not sure I want to renew it. I know most postdocs are usually 2-3 years in length, but I think I am ready to go back to the UK once the contract ends. The project is great, the lab is amazing and I've gained so many new skills. I know that finishing the project would be great for my career. But I've had some bouts of bad luck in my personal life and it has really affected me. I miss my family and friends at home and now I'm torn between my career and mental health...

Talking to my supervisor, she is understanding but also doesn't think I will have enough data by August for a paper as it's a huge ongoing project. I'm wondering what the damage would be from having that 1.5 year postdoc abroad on my CV without any papers. Or would employers look at it and be understanding that it might be difficult to be far from home or that I have at least gained valuable skills despite no papers as it was less than 2-3 years?

Anyone experienced similar situations or have any advice?

would employers look at
  it and be understanding that it might be difficult to be far from home
  or that I have at least gained valuable skills despite no papers as it
  was less than 2-3 years?

They do not automatically understand. You need to convince them.

There can be multiple reasons for 1.5 years without a paper. A big project that requires a lot of engineering effort is a perfectly reasonable reason. In this case, a letter of reference from your postdoc advisor is very important. You may help her to sketch out what she needs to write:

Your responsibilities and skills needed to perform in the project
Your contribution/achievements after 1.5 years
...

IMHO, you should not mention "be difficult to be far from home etc". It sounds like an excuse for poor performance, or at least it gives an impression that you are not able to overcome difficulties.


Should I mention in a PhD application statement of purpose that I earn a large income from a business I created? I am UK national applying for a PhD (microbiology) in the USA. The application process requires a statement of purpose which includes, among other things, a section on recent / current work activities that are relevant to the application.

I am a Master's student and have plenty of relevant details to talk about from an academic perspective (there is a separate section for this), but I also run a successful IT business and the transferable skills that I have learned from this form a core part of my relevant work experience for this section.

To illustrate my motivation and potential for success at graduate level, I was going to mention that I essentially started my business from scratch a few years ago and now earn a six-figure income. However, I am worried that the selection committee might view this unfavorably (talking about income is quite a taboo subject here in the UK), or worse they might question my commitment to a graduate program if they think I have a comfortable job to fall back on.

I should also mention that the PhD program I am applying to is fully-funded, but the cost of living in the area is notoriously high and most grad students have to supplement their income by teaching. I wouldn't need to do this as I have enough savings to be financially secure for the duration of the program.

Should I mention my income to demonstrate my aptitude, or will it do more harm than good?

No, don't mention income here. This just looks smug. But ofc you should mention that you are running a successfull buisness and explain how this can contribute to your Phd (experience, skills,...). The problem I see is that you want to do a microbiology PhD while running your own buisness? This could be a big problem because they don't want to fund people who are not 100% focused on their work here.


Should I mention a "math depression" I went through in my letter of motivation? I am a master student in mathematics studying in Europe and I am applying to several graduate schools in the USA. They aren't all Top 10 in these dubious rankings, but I am applying to Harvard, Northwestern and Rutgers.

Currently, in the first paragraph of my letter of motivation (=letter of intent, statement of purpose, personal statement, ...) I explain how I overcame a big slump (=phase in which I had not much motivation to learn maths) which I went through after completing my bachelor, so roughly 1 year ago.
I mention it because this was an important experience to me, and as a result I feel like a more mature mathematician, and I am now confident that I want to do maths in my life.

However, I read that one should never put negative things about oneself in the letter of motivation, so right now I'm having doubts.

Could people on the admission committee consider having gone through a slump a negative point? Do they only want to hear how awesome I was my entire life?

Actually, I kind of disagree with @TheHiary... I don't think you should put negative statements about yourself in your cover letter.
While they do not want to only here how awesome you would be, they do want to hear how, and why, you would be totally awesome working for/with them. You can look up some tips and guidelines about writing a cover letter here.
I also think that any half-page story has no place in your cover letter. It should be fairly short, clear and memorable/striking. I was suggested, two pages maximum. One page is better.
But, if it was an important experience for you as a potential researcher, there's definitely place for it in your cover letter, just not directly. What you should include, however, is:

what helped you get back your motivation
(you can say that e.g. a project made you "rediscover your love of science" without explicitly saying that you lost it for a while)

how your approach to research has changed in a positive manner
(e.g. working on the team project made me realize how important and helpful peer input, informal discussions and exchanging ideas was for my productivity)

how your vision of science/yourself changed after that
(e.g. working with Professor X. what made me secure in my opinion that I want a career as a researcher)

basically, any positive result of your experience is worth mentioning, but I would rather mention just what triggered the positive change of attitude instead of motivation-less period before


How important is the thesis document for judges on the day of the thesis defense? I want to defend my thesis in the computer networking field on master degree . all things are done. And now I want to write my thesis document. Is this document important for judges in the defend day or not to evaluate my thesis.

I ask this question because I think they just pay attention to your suggested method and result and presentation.

Is the document are so important for them? because if they do not pay a lot attention to that I do not like take a lot of effort on that maybe you say that I can put that on the internet for any citation By our language is not English.

If the answer is yes. I mean they pay attention to the document in case of evaluating my thesis. What parameter are important for them. Or better to say, I should bold which part or how to write my thesis in order to the judges pay attention to that? and they say themselves this student try hard and I should give him good score ( D: )

Is this document important for judges?

You are really asking the wrong question. Any official document that bears your name eternally is important for you and your future. You are a MSc student with probably small number of publications (if any) and a MSc thesis is an important milestone on your transition from a student to a researcher. It is also a quite large document (much larger than the typical scientific publication), so writing an excellent document at this scale is a valuable lesson even if you want to work in industry, where technical reports / documentation and deliverables are quite common.

Conclusively, you must always strive for excellence and always do the best you can. You must change your student mindset from "Would doing A would get me a better grade" to the adult mindset "Is this really the best I can do within the time constraints I have or could I do better?". So you should focus on producing the best thesis document you can (within your time constraints)  regardless of how lenient the committee might be on judging it.


What is the purpose of peer evaluation of teaching? At my UK university all new teaching staff, as part of the requirements to fulfil the requirements for a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE), have their teaching observed by a member of their department, a member of another department, and a member of the Education Department (who run the PGCHE course). I don't understand the advantages of being observed by the three different people. What should I strive to get out of each observation?

I'm attending a similar program at my university (also UK based), and I was observed by a senior member of my faculty, and by another attendee of the same program.

The main point was to initiate a reflective process of our teaching. Hence, the observation was not an evaluation, but simply the collection of some pieces of evidence, that described our lecture. Our actual assignment was not the observation in itself, but how we reflect upon the evidence, by describing how we feel about it, how we analyse it, what conclusions do we make about it, and what are the next steps we decide to engage on.

Interestingly, I've collected different types of evidence from my two observers: the senior member of my faculty made some observations in particular related to the content of my lecture, while the observer who was on the same program made some observations related to some of the techniques taught in the program that I used during the lecture. In both cases, all observations were really useful to start the reflective process. I can only assume this is the rationale for you to have three different observers.


How specialised should research prior to tenure be? When establishing yourself as a researcher, the importance of independence from your PhD supervisor and focusing on a niche area (to establish popularity in a particular sub-field) are fairly well-established. For longevity of research career the polar opposite criteria of collaboration and breadth have been suggested.

Defining the terms field and subfield etc. is important, so taking the following hypothetical example:

Subfield - PhD research uses a common computational method applied to a number of closely related problems.
Related Subfield - Other PhD students in the group apply the same method to different problems.
Field - Computational methods related to PhD yet distinct applied to any problem in the super field
Superfield - Broad area of research encompassing theoretical, computational and experimental work, eg superconductors, photonics, etc.

After PhD and prior to tenure, how specialised should one aim to be and how closely related to the PhD should the specialty be?

If given the choice, is it best to focus exclusively on a related subfield topic (generally project based research typical of most post doc positions), or take on another topic in the field, or to develop breadth by researching multiple related sub field topics in collaboration with other groups?

This answer warns against being too narrow; see aeismail's answer for reasons not to be too broad.

The precise answer is going to depend on your institution and your field.  But as a first order approximation, you must establish yourself as an independent intellectual leader in a broad enough research area to attract good tenure letters.  An obscure subsubfield beloved by only ten researchers probably isn't going to be enough, because not all of those people will be credible references — well-known, active, full professors (preferably with named positions and Academy memberships) at top-ranked US departments (assuming you're at a US institution) who are not your advisor (and preferably are not your coauthors or from your PhD department either).

So your question becomes:

How large a field do you need to consider to include a sufficient number of viable tenure writers?
How you establish a world-class reputation within that field?

As a general rule in my field, you should move as far away from your PhD thesis as possible while still being visible and productive.  But other fields may have different expectations.


Should cheating be reported? I am doing my Masters in Mathematics at a reputable university in the UK, but there has been a lot of cheating so far.
Due to Covid, we have two forms of assessment:

Coursework
Open-book, open-internet, two-hour exams

Throughout the first semester, I had multiple students reach out to me for help with their coursework - I would give them some tips or maybe refer them to a section in the lecture notes. This wasn't really an issue. As the semester progressed, there was more evidence of serious cheating. For example, during one of my group coding assignments, within 15 minutes of the assignment being released, an international student sends the group the entire solution. Hundreds of lines of code in 15 minutes, something that would usually take us a week to do. This is just one example. Surely the professors know that this is going on?
During my undergrad, after leaving the exam room, I would have a good estimate of how I did. If I answered 80% of the questions, I would get ~80%. There is no room for guessing, you either know the answer or you don't.
As part of my revision for the winter exams, I did all the past papers and found them fairly easy. The exam, however, I found extremely challenging and not closely related to our lecture notes. This makes sense, it was an open-book, open-internet exam - they wouldn't ask questions that could be answered by looking through the lecture notes.
Fast-forward a couple of weeks, the professor sends out an email, saying that the average grade was 2% higher than previous years' grades. This surprised me, how did students score higher on a substantially more challenging paper?
Last week, I was invited by a coursemate to a discord group. Most of the members were international students and they were speaking Chinese so I couldn't tell what was being said. As I started scrolling through the messages, I found entire exam paper was uploaded to the discord group chat and they were sharing answers!
Should this be reported? How would I go about reporting it? Would anything be done? Do the professors really not know that this is going on?

You should report this immediately, but be sure you collect evidence.
Edit: The reason that you should collect evidence is that you are accusing your fellow students of gross academic misconduct that would result in serious consequences. Not only will it be impossible for anyone to pursue the matter without evidence, but making baseless accusations could result in negative consequences for you.
Screenshot correspondence (if it’s in Chinese get it translated or find a native speaker among the faculty who can translate). Emails, text messages etc should be saved as well. If your university is reputable, it will deal harshly with these cases.
The actual procedure varies by institution but the first person to contact is the professor. They’d likely want to know that this is happening and would be furious to hear this. It’s quite possible that the professor is unaware, or simply unable to obtain evidence that something is going on: if everything is happening on a non university server there’s little they can do to catch cheaters.
Would anything be done? That depends on the institution, but what you’re describing is pretty clear cut. Students can get expelled and in the case of international students, have their visa revoked as a result. If this happened in my class I would do everything I can to ensure those students are punished as much as possible. The likeliest outcome is failing the class and getting a remark on your transcript.
Help make academia better and report them.


Elsevier Computers and Security "With Editor" status just after 12 hours - what does it mean? I am new to journal submissions. I have been working as a research assistant at the University in Sweden for 3 months. Yesterday, at 5:00pm I submitted a paper to Elsevier's Computers & Security. My paper was received and had the status "Submitted to Journal"

The next day at 6:00am I got an email that my paper had its status changed status to "With Editor". All of this is very new to me, and I do not understand that what this new status means. Does it mean that someone is working on my paper just now?

Can I infer the journal's view/reception of my paper from the speed of the status change?

In electronic submission systems the manuscript (MS) is handled according to a certain work flow. When a MS is submitted it has to be assigned to an editor who will check, for example, if the MS is appropriate for the journal or adheres to journal "Instructions for Authors" (or equivalent). The editor will then either start to assign reviewers to your MS or pass it on to an Associate editor (equiv.) to do the same. Then several rounds follow that is beyond this post. Thus there are lots of steps that your MS will undergo and the system will signals some subset of all steps involved.

So the likely interpretation of your observed change in status is that the journal, possibly through some administrator, has assigned the MS to an editor for further processing. This does not necessarily mean much but it shows your MS is on its way forward in the journal work flow. The process of moving a MS to a new step can be done very quickly and will largely depend on the timing of the person doing the chore. In the journal where I am editor, there is a six day limit to move MS from submitted to an editor. Usually the move is made within 24 hours and shorter depending on when the MS is submitted and when the admin checks the newly submitted MS list.

Se also this Elsevier link


Can professors have romantic relationships with post-docs? Can professors have romantic relationships with post-docs (in the same department)?

I feel like this point is a bit more subtle than, say, professors hooking up with students, since post-docs and professors are considered peers / colleagues.

Policy on this may vary from institution to institution, so those would need to be specifically consulted.

However, the whole "when is a romantic relationship taboo?" question hinges most importantly on one thing: does one of the individuals involved exercise some sort of power over the other. It would be odd for a professor to have a relationship with one of his or her own postdocs, where the postdoc will likely need a letter of recommendation or decision on financial promotion from their now-conflicted lover. I think, generally, there is usually not a policy against this but might be frowned upon.

This is why it isn't a good idea for a president to sleep with a white house intern, or a teacher to have a relationship with one of their current students. Even if it were technically legal, and no bias was ever realized, the potential for bias and conflict is too strong.

A professor in one department and a postdoc in another department should present no problem though, if there is no potential employment/financial promotion conflict, e.g. English Dept. vs Physics Dept.

Another question to consider is whether the relationship precedes both individuals being a member of the institution. For example one member of a married couple gets a job at the institution and the other enrolls in school there. But even in this situation, I can see potential for conflict if they are in the same (or closely related) departments.

As long as everyone is open, honest, consenting adults, and clearly discusses potential conflicts with the appropriate personnel then there may be no issue though. Trying to keep it secret, especially if there is potential for a conflict of interest is probably not a good idea.


What should I do if the admission committee has missed something in my application and rejected me? I applied for a graduate program and I was rejected, but there is evidence suggesting that there was a mistake in reviewing my application. Now the school seems reluctant to reconsider the application. What should I do? Is there any real chance of being reconsidered?

Here are some details about the story:

The reason for rejection was mentioned in my rejection letter, and apparently, it was a very objective and quantifiable admission requirement that they thought I don't meet. But that was simply wrong, and they seem to have misunderstood (or even completely missed) one of my documents. It is a university in a different country, and apparently, they misinterpreted the document, which was issued by my undergrad school, and missed important information. I explained the document to them and they responded with a change in the reason, but the new reason in a way contradicts the previous one and it again seems to be about missing the exact same information related to that document. The new reason is also even more objective and almost purely bureaucratic, so I explained the policy of my undergrad university to them and what the information in the document means, but then I did not hear back from them anymore.

What should I do in this situation? So far I've just been explaining to them how there might have been some confusions, but with their most recent response, it seems to me that most probably, they misunderstood my documents, and might have even completely missed one of them! I'm afraid of pursuing this more seriously and directly because the department is one of my favorite departments and I like to keep the option of going there later in my academic career open.

I am assuming you don't have a prospective advisor at this institution working with you on your admission. If you do, they will be in a much better position than us to tell you how to navigate this situation!

The concrete policy would depend on the country or individual institution, but to me it seems unlikely that they would reverse such a decision after the fact. In all probability they have limited places that they have filled already. They might also have rejected you for reasons they don't like to say openly, such as because the other candidates were equally good and didn't require double-checking the paperwork.

To know more about your chances of appeal, you would have to look into how similar cases have been handled by this department in the past, but that might be quite difficult without a connection to someone with historical insider info. While you are contesting the decision, the administration will naturally try to say as little as possible to avoid giving you ammunition.

If re-applying next year is an option for you, I would try to strike a more collaborative tone and ask how you should present your documents so as to avoid confusion in the future. And also try to strike up some contact with a faculty member who might help you. They don't necessarily need to actually do much, but an internal interest will give the administration some incentive to spend time answering your questions.


Working unofficially and unpaid after internship got cancelled, should one give full commitment if not intending to continue as a researcher? I am an undergraduate student who has signed up for a 4 months internship at a Canadian university with the Mitacs global intern program.

The initial deal was to travel to the Canadian university for the internship where I would get paid and work closely with the supervisor.

Due to the pandemic, the trip was canceled and borders closed. The Mitacs organisation canceled the internships. However, as I didn't have any possible internship in my country, I agreed to continue the internship remotely by Skype without getting paid.

The problem is that I usually have a strong work ethic, although I am definitely not continuing in research. I believe I should do my best at my current job. I don't think it's okay to lay back and not get it perfectly done but there is 0 motivation.

The supervision is very minimal and I am not getting paid, plus home work.

Finally, I am looking for advice. Should I continue my internship as a good committed person and work full time? Or should I work part time, get it done poorly and learn something for my career in the mean time?

Should you exchange your time for very minimal supervision (and no pay)?

That depends on whether you perceive the value of very minimal supervision to outweigh the value of your time.

You should consider whether alternative uses of your time (e.g., paid work, vacation, personal study, ...) are more valuable.


Colleague's grant application resembles my PhD thesis A colleague/friend has asked me to review his application for a very large grant, which appears to resemble my PhD thesis.

The backstory is as follows. My PhD thesis was the first detailed study of Phenomenon X. My colleague works in Context C. Phenomenon X is present in Context C.

Three years ago, while we were both PhD students, I suggested to my colleague that we put together a postdoc grant proposal to study Phenomenon X in Context C. We talked informally about being co-PI on the project but made no agreement.

Two years ago, my colleague told me that it would be better if he worked on the grant with someone more senior because we would have less chance together as two fresh PhDs. The idea was that I would be written into the project. My colleague asked me to send him a literature review on Phenomenon X, which I did.

Now, my colleague has sent me the draft of his grant application asking for some assistance and comments. The research questions in the application are nearly word-for-word the same as those in my PhD thesis and the application claims that Phenomenon X has not been studied before. My PhD thesis on Phenomenon X is not mentioned, nor is other relevant work. The literature review in the grant application uses the same sources as my PhD literature review. My name does not appear anywhere in the grant.

What are some appropriate courses of action here? My idea at the moment is to give my colleague the benefit of the doubt - maybe it was unintentional oversight or he had planned to add these details later. I would respond suggesting the grant application includes other work on Phenomenon X, including my PhD thesis, and to make the research questions more original. But I'm worried this will seem too territorial.

I suggest three things. First remind him of your dissertation and send a link to it, noting that there is similar wording that might become an issue. Second, I would, under the stated circumstances, offer to help in the application. It seems like it might be an attempt to extend your work, rather than to plagiarize it. That is always appropriate. And you could also assure that you aren't plagiarized if you are in the loop throughout.

But, if you have the time and energy, I suggest that you offer to be a consultant on the grant as it progresses. This would get you named specifically in the application, at least. Your actual participation could be minimal, or not, but you could at least see how the work progressed and get more involved as time went on. It might not be impossible to be paid a bit for consulting work, depending on the agency and its rules. Consultant on a grant is a CV line, if nothing else.


How often do universities in General have admissions for graduate programs? I am thinking to apply to a graduate program in computer science (Research Masters or PhD), but I am not sure how often universities accept applications.

For example I know the University of Toronto does so each December (so only once a year). But I wonder if other places (anywhere in NA or Europe) have different patterns.

In the US there is no general system. Most universities will have deadlines for admission once or twice a year with a few having more. They are matched to the normal Fall and Spring semester system used in most (not all) universities. However, most students enter in the Fall with deadlines for application likely sometime in the Summer or possibly the Spring.

But each university will operate on its own schedule so you need to check.

Another consideration is when you need to apply for positions like Teaching or Research Assistant. Those might possibly be once a year even if the admission deadlines are twice. So, check about that also. Likewise scholarship and grant funding can have separate schedules.

Narrow down your search to a few universities and look at the details for those.


Is it appropriate and useful to inquire if an open position has an internal candidate? It is not unusual for institutes to advertise positions (faculty or not) for which there is an internal candidate.  In such situations, for external candidates, it may be difficult if not impossible to get in.  When a position is advertised, is it appropriate and useful to inquire if a position has an internal candidate already?  It might save a lot of time for the external candidate and possibly others (such as recommendation-letter-writers).

I assume that there are often-if-not-always internal candidates for open positions, in academia and outside. There are always students looking for Ph.D. slots, Ph.D. students looking for postdoc positions, assistant and associate professors looking to move up to the next level. (Same for non-faculty positions, but that seems OT.) Sometimes the people responsible for the position may not even know yet about such internal candidates, because they may not yet have sent in their application.

So the question probably rather is whether these internal candidates are already frontrunners. The professor may want his extremely productive Ph.D. student to continue in the postdoc slot but may need to advertise externally for some procedural reason. The department may want to continue a certain research specialization and plan on promoting the retiring professor's assistant prof. In such a situation, external candidates will need to be very convincing to win.

But: how often will the external candidate be told this? If the external advertisement is legally required, the hiring people may even open themselves up to litigation if they openly tell an applicant that they are only soliciting outside applications as a fig leaf.

On the other hand, the department may explicitly be searching for "new blood", so internal candidates may actually have worse chances than external ones. Which, again, nobody will tell you (or the internal candidate).

Of course, it makes sense to tap your network and see whether the grapevine can tell you more than official channels. However, this kind of information can be unreliable. So if you hear from multiple sources that a given position will be filled internally, it may make sense to not make the effort.

Thus: there will likely be internal candidates, but you will probably not know how good their chances are. If you are a good match for the position, go and apply. Don't worry about internal candidates. This is one part of the hiring situation you can't control, just like the mood of your interviewers. Giving up on an application because there is an internal candidate will be counterproductive in the long run.


For interview questions about innovative or engaging teaching, is it OK to say I give lectures in the standard way? If asked a teaching question in a interview for a math professor position about how you engage students or innovate your teaching, would it look bad if I say I'm just a traditional lecturer, teaching either using the board or slides or both?

This is in fact how most people lecture in my experience, it works fine, and the interviewers probably know this. And students like it, but somehow it feels almost shameful to admit it.

"I engage students by giving clear and insightful explanations of concepts [include some examples], using a standard lecture format with the board or slides."

When someone asks in an interview, no-matter what the topic, which cutting edge approaches interest you, they are subtly asking three entirely different questions (in order of severity):

Are you even exposed to any of them (which shows an interest in your subject in general)
If yes, do you have an opinion on any of them (which shows leadership, independent thinking)
Can you justify it with evidence (which shows critical thinking, experience etc)

Saying "no" is like answering "no" to all of the above.

Your answer is effectively saying "no I know nothing about that, nor do I care to know or have to justify myself".

Even if the end-message of your answer is that at the end of the day you prefer traditional teaching, your answer will be much better received if it first shows knowledge of all the cutting edge techniques in the field or even some experience in trying to adapt them to your own teaching, which show promise in general and which do not, your personal opinion on what works and what doesn't, why, how it fits your particular style or not and why, how you think students benefit or not, or tend to respond in each, and why you feel that traditional teaching trumps all of the above based on your experience, and critical judgement of the competitor methods.

Contrast that with "no I just teach". Doesn't sound so professional does it?


In applying to graduate programs, what are best practices for proposing research to investigators before and during the application process? I am a recent graduate of biochemistry from the University of Maryland, College Park and am currently working as a postbaccalaureate fellow at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

For context, I work in a group studying rare inborn errors of metabolism. Our lab is transitionally oriented as we are working on the development of animal models of the disease and gene therapy.

I pursued research in a rare disease group as I am a patient of a rare congenital skin condition. I am currently enrolled in a study which is working to defined the molecular characteristics of my disease (outside of the NIH).

I would like to remain translationally oriented in my graduate pursuits. My proposal in its basic description would be to develop an animal model for my skin condition and pursue gene therapy or gene editing to correct its manifestations. This area of research (gene therapy in dermatopathology) in general is relatively underrepresented in the scientific literature (does this make my proposal stronger?). If anybody would like any more information I can absolutely elaborate.

I will be applying to graduate programs next year. How should I approach investigators (relevant to the described field) with a research proposal such as the one above before and or during applying? I would appreciate hearing your perspectives!

Graduate programs in the United States (since that is all I know) will typically have a letter you write as part of your application. It is there where you identify an area or areas you are interested in working in. My program in particular requested that I speak to this in the written letter AND identify a few professors and areas of research I want to pursue in explicit fields in my application.

Besides doing the above, you have a few options that all center around getting feedback on your proposal, which I cannot stress enough. I've lost count of the number of times I thought I had an excellent proposal or idea, when in actuality it wasn't all that great; however, having a kernel of an idea gives others a starting point to help guide you into a better direction. One option is to discuss this with your supervisor at NIH and see if there is any potential for you to either present work similar to your proposal or attend a conference to network and speak with people that work in this area. Knowing which conferences to attend could be based on your supervisor's opinion or you can find labs or people working in your field and see where they usually publish.


Makeup exams and posting solutions Suppose you are an instructor and you have given a (midterm or final) exam. This is a substantial portion of the grade; a student who misses it has little chance of passing the class. (I have in mind a college course, but maybe this a question in high school as well.)

Suppose that a few students don't show up for the exam. Of course, if the students were ill or had personal emergencies, you would like to give them a chance to make up the exam. You send them an email after the exam, but hear nothing back for a few days.

After those few days, you grade the rest of the exams, and would like to return them to the class and post solutions online so that your students can learn from their mistakes

However, if any of the students who missed the exam will later ask for a makeup, then they will have the advantage of seeing the solutions. While you certainly wouldn't give them an identical exam, it seems like this would still be a substantial advantage.

What is the fair thing for you to do here?

EDIT:

I thank Peter K. for commenting. However, the referenced question is about a quite different situation; it has nothing to do with discussing or posting solutions for the rest of the class.

Don't give the same exam as a makeup exam.  Rather, write a separate exam to use for makeups.  Even if you haven't given out a set of solutions or returned graded papers, students  who took the main exam are likely to have shared information about the exam with students who need to take a makeup.


Reliable Rankings of US Universities? I am aware of US News which publishes the rankings for US Universities every year.
But somehow I feel that they try to emphasize more on private universities than public(state) universities.
Also they have recently stopped showing the rankings according to fields of study(CS, ECE, Mechanical, etc) without paying them.
Google also could not help me find any reliable ranking organisation.
I would like to know whether there is any respectable ranking organisation other than US News.

Both of these organisations are International but you can search by region and study area.

Top Universities is complied by the QS Quacquarelli Symonds
This page explains the methodology they use to rank institutions.

The Times Higher Education rankings are compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine in the UK with the help of Thomson Reuters. According to their site

  rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.


Is an Executive Doctorate different from a typical PhD with respect to the level of assistance that is permitted on the dissertation? I began tutoring an Executive Doctorate student last fall in a class that he was taking. After that class ended, he was able to begin working on his dissertation and wanted my help for it as well.

Here arises the problem and the question. He has been asking me for increasing "help" on his dissertation to the point of asking me to read articles and find citations and to rewrite sections of his dissertation to address concerns from his committee.

My initial thought is that this is something I should not do, but as he is not a typical PhD student, I am unfamiliar with the expectations. So, what exactly is the difference between an Executive Doctorate (also called an Executive PhD.) program, and a typical PhD program, and does that difference allow for him to receive this much assistance on his dissertation?

More information: Looking a little more, the program he is enrolled in is listed under the Doctoral Programs section of the page listing all of the programs offered by the department.

Based on this article, I would guess the answer is: officially, no.  It seems quite unlikely to me that there is some other standard of intellectual honesty specifically set up for "Executive Doctoral" student, since it is such a new category.

It certainly sounds to me like this person is asking you do an inappropriate amount of work toward their doctorate; doctoral students aren't expected to be completely isolated (much of my thesis was based on joint work), but asking you to rewrite seems like crossing a line.  It's up to you to decide what you want to do, and whether you feel comfortable with the work.  You could always contact the person's advisor, but you should be prepared for that to burn your bridge with this person.


Is it possible to do a self funded Ph.D. without masters in Germany? Is it possible to do a self-funded Ph.D. without masters in Germany? Is it ok if someone writes to professors asking for a Ph.D. position in his lab? Will they take students if its self-funded?

I cannot comment due to low rep. There are fast-track PhD programmes in Germany, but a bachelor degree is necessary to enroll in such. Often PhD students are payed for teaching duties 50% TV-L, engineers mostly 100% from group budget and/or external funding. But this often implies trying to use results from such external projects for the PhD thesis. When you are paid by university/group budget for teaching duties, your PhD work is often more or less your private hobby/side job apart from teaching. This varies heavily among different universities, for humanities sometimes people working on a PhD have no long contract (> year) or only a temporary one (during semester for some month) to my knowledge. In STEM, especially if you work in experimental scienes (using facilities/expensive devices), a master degree is necessary. I didn't hear of fast-track programmes there, but I'm sure very bright students in theo. physics, computer science, math... could find a university willing to let them start PhD without a masters. In experimental sciences I would not recommend it, as a researcher needs to gather experience in small, mid, big (bachelor, master, PhD) projects in my humble opinion and the risk would be unnecessarily high that the phd students fails or needs more time for his PhD than master graduates.

So these are some hints how the system works. Technically I think there is no-problem to do a self-funded PhD and in the spirit of open/citizen science I would promote it, how big the likelihood for this is that some Professor is willing to let you work in his group, advise you, spends time, offers you the use of his devices probably depends on your branch, research idea (you should have one), pre-results/experience, less on grades as we have an inflation of very good ones in Germany.

But, in my opinion, there has to be a strong link between your bachelor work/experience and the future PhD work (theory and methods), otherwise I would not start to search for a group, as the professor will have to deal with additional bureaucracy for your case.

The other thing is, it's better to have publication(s) in peer-reviewed journals before submitting a PhD thesis to the faculty. You need the name and institution of your professor to gain some likelihood that your papers get into review at all. Uploading your "stuff" to arxiv.org will not be sufficient... Finding a professor for self-funded fast-track PhD is one thing, the other one is not to get robbed of your results after years of research if you technically do it privately. This risk is uncalculable. Personally, I would only think on self-funded PhD under supervision of a   full professor with permanent position in his 50-60s ;-) And such ones have on average per month a few hours to talk to their PhD students...

To conclude, technically possible or not, there are a lot things you should think about and outline and check in advance before starting a PhD odyssee. But also, when you do non-self-funded one. I see to many just jumping into a PhD due to wrong reasons or without good reasons, about the failed PhD's you can read nowhere.


Advisor trying to patent an idea for himself even though we wrote the paper together! My advisor is trying to patent an idea without me. I got to know that he is registering the patent through the IP officer at our University. When I asked him about it, he did not give me a straight answer and has not responded to any of my emails inquiring about this. The idea he is trying to patent is literally the entire paper that a colleague and I wrote as co-first authors. I have defended my PhD and I am about to begin my job in industry.

Any advice on how to go about this situation ?

If I go against him,I have 2 fears at the moment i.e.

He might make my colleague's PhD miserable because the two of us would be on the patent, which he does not like (he tried to remove one of the inventors on a previous patent but I convinced him otherwise). I was lucky enough to graduate on time.
He would not provide me any more recommendation letters for green card, etc.

And advice is appreciated.

The proper place to handle this, now, is the IP office at the university. Raise the issue in your own name so that your colleague doesn't suffer any consequences, but if negotiations follow, make sure everyone appropriate is included.

But you may also want to consult an IP lawyer. The university may be able to help you with this also.

It is hard to avoid all negative consequences in a situation like this, of course. Especially if the professor is a bad actor with power.


Should I host my academic website under my institution domain or under a domain of my own ? My institution provides a dedicated storage space to host our academic websites, which is reachable via the institution domain (something like http://people.institution.org/John.Doe/).

I try to have a tidy website of a few pages listing my publications, research area, contact, etc. It is currently reachable through my institution domain. I try to also put some efforts in SEO when people look up for my name or particular research area on search engines.

I'm in my last year of Ph.D. and I will undoubtedly move to other institutions in the next few years, so I am wondering if it wouldn't be preferable to host my academic webpage on a dedicated domain http://www.johndoe.com, which would prevent the need to do the SEO all over again each time I will switch to a new institution.

The only advantage to use my institution domain is the affiliation, but this information is present on my website anyway.

I'm a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering in France, if it matters.

Why don't you just do both? By both, I mean use both URLs. I "do both", so when I graduate, I'll still have my site for others to see. You can do this in many ways, but I had my university student page auto-redirect to my personal home page. The code for that is like a one-liner.

This grants me the opportunity to refer people to different sites depending on the situation. I think myname.com is undoubtedly easier to remember than the nuances in my university student site URL: people.school.org/first.last ... On the other hand, if the situation is more institution-based, perhaps it's better to stick with my college's name. You've got options this way.


How can I get a second review of my grades? How can I ask for a different faculty member to evaluate my final grade as opposed to my professor?

I know this is an "odd" question but if there is a possible way for that to happen I would greatly appreciate advice.

I will leave the details out of it, but the long & short of it is that this professor has gone out of his way to publicly humiliate me on false claims which I will be contesting. But my concern isn't proving correctness, but rather ensuring that my grade is fair.

You can petition the head of the department/program if you think that your professor has a conflict of interest and can apparently not be fair in grading your class. But you have to be prepared for the department head to then ask the professor what his opinion on the issue is -- and in all likelihood, the professor will say that nothing untoward is going on and that he/she can be unbiased and fair.

In other words, if you're asking for the judge to be removed from the trial, you better have evidence. For example, you probably want to make sure that other students can corroborate your claims.

I'm saying this because as professors, we see students claim all the time that they are treated unfairly -- but in the vast majority of the cases, they're just not very good students. So expect that just making such a claim will, alone, not get you very far. You'll have to have evidence.


Interpretation of a PhD degree in a very broad, interdisciplinary field Back when my older brother started his PhD degree I asked him what it meant to be a doctor in something other than medicine. I don't recall the exact wording he used, but the idea he portrayed was that you take a field, a narrow and specific field, and you specialise in it to a level at which when you are done, you have become one of the ultimate experts in that very specific field.

For instance if you are working with combustion physics, you might be one of the leading experts in efficient 2 cylinder, ultra-light engines made out of refined aluminium... Alternatively if you are into neuroscience you might be an expert on a particular neurotransmitter re-absorption in a particular zone of the brain following heavy exercise (or whatever, hopefully you get the point). It might be an opinionated view of a PhD but I feel it's a common way to look at a PhD degree; a certification of expertise.

Fast-forward 15 years... I am about half-way in my PhD studies in the highly interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics, where statistics, mathematical modeling, physics, molecular chemistry and programming boil together with cell biology, to top it all you typically have a theme spice, which in my case is cancer biology. I have a growing feeling that I am getting stretched thinner and thinner by the day, instead of becoming increasingly competent in a specific field, I become semi-competent in increasingly many fields.

That being the case I am not sure I (or others like myself) will fit the "definition" above. I would appreciate some perspective as to how one should be seeing highly interdisciplinary PhD studies and the development (as a scientist and a professional) that graduate studies entitles. Subsequently, how should one go about to profile him/her-self to future employers, seeing as there is no one natural field to pursue, but rather many different ones.

I completely understand your feeling. I can tell you that many other people in this field feel the same. This has nothing to do with how smart or how good they are. This issue also bugged me a lot, but I can offer some insights:

Bioinformatics/computational biology is really huge and you cannot be an expert in all aspects. Even if you look at senior scientists in this field, I do not think there is someone who is an expert in all subfields. You simply can't master all the physics, math, CS, chemistry and biology at an expert level - even in a much longer time than a PhD.
You can still have a huge impact without being a super-expert in every subfield. Just look at some of the research published in top journals. The reason is that you will have knowledge and a way of thinking that people restricted to a single field may not have. From personal experience, I can say that this is a significant advantage for asking certain types of questions and coming up with certain ideas that single-field specialists won't come up with.
After a while you will realize that you actually are an expert. Maybe not in the sense that you know everything about everything, but you will see that you can give good advice to other people, foresee potential problems, and so on. In addition to knowing a lot about computational biology, you will become an expert in things such as quantitative modelling, applied machine learning and "big data" analysis (I hate that term), skills which are very useful in a wide range of fields.
The fact that you cannot become an expert in everything doesn't mean you should neglect learning. On the contrary, you should constantly try to expand your knowledge in all related fields. And yes, it can be more difficult than learning only one subject.
Finally, in the end you will be working on a specific problem in a given biological problem with a given set of tools. That problem is what you really need to be an expert on.


On agreeing on length of PhD program in advance and three year studies I know people say in Europe (say in Computer Science) a PhD normally takes three to four years. My concern is: is there no way to know the number of years in advance? Is it not something I can "agree" with the supervisors before hand how long it will take? Exactly? Not approximately, rather exactly. In other words are three year long phd programs common?

Almost certainly not.

Even in programs where the PhD research phase is supposed to have a defined length (for instance, when students receive a fellowship to cover their work for a certain period of time), it is not possible to guarantee that the PhD program will actually be completed in a certain period of time.

It can be possible to finish; however, without knowing how well a student will perform in advance, advisors can only estimate how long a PhD program will take. There is simply no way to guarantee in advance how long your student will need to finish her program. The main issue that we have is that research is inherently unpredictable, and if things don't work out right, it's difficult to say people can finish.

We can try to work with a student to plan to finish in a certain period of time, but we wouldn't try to guarantee that until the middle of the student's PhD progress.


Is my advisor right, am I a turn-off? I'm doing a Phd in math. Unfortunately it didn't go very smoothly. I'm in the fifth year now, and a Phd is not in sight.

This is due to several things, personal problems (I suffered from a depression for several years), but also my advisor and me just not getting along very well.

I know I should have left him years ago, and I tried, but I'm still stuck in this situation. That's my background.

Now today I had a depressing conversation with my advisor. He offered me to continue my Phd with him, but at the same time he also said it would be "highly unlikey" that another advisor would accept someone like me with this difficult background, as there are "plenty of talented people".

So I would like to know how other people (preferably people who advise) would rate my situation. Is my advisor right? Is it too late for me to change? Is my background such a turn-off?

It sounds like your advisor is right, and your situation is a turn-off.  He wants you to succeed to improve his own track record, as he is at least by reputation partially responsible for your success or failure.  And other potential advisors don't have that motivation.

Since you're both in this together, and since you have so much to lose relative to him, I think you need to come to a plan together, and you need to listen to him very carefully and be as cooperative as you can muster yourself to be. He wants you to complete. He wouldn't have had that blunt conversation if he just wanted you to flounder. You need to now cast the past into the past and move forward with whatever you choose to do.


Using materials from a CC-BY-licensed poster with logos I would like to borrow a figure (likely as is) and/or a stylized table (likely adapted) to use in a survey research paper, to which I'm contributing my part(s) as one of co-authors (those materials nicely summarize the trends of the subject matter). The source, from which I want to borrow the above-mentioned materials is a poster, licensed under CC-BY and shared on figshare (). According to the CC-BY license, it seems that there should be no problems whatsoever, given that I will follow the terms of the license. Specifically, I plan to properly cite the materials (including DOI) as well as make a note, specifying which one is adapted, if any. Is there anything else I should keep in mind?

Also, the CC-BY license "stamp" on the poster states that companies'/products'/projects' logos on the diagram are not covered by the license (obviously!). So, in this case, I assume that I should either include the same note or a statement along the lines of "logos of companies, products or projects are the property of their representative owners", which seems like a valid case of fair use.

In Addition to the citation, you should give the exact copyright information of your source below the figure and table you (remixed and) reused.

For your source you should give: CC-BY-SA, all logos excluded.

Please note that the license is CC-BY-SA and not CC-BY. Even so CC-BY is given on the web page, the poster says CC-BY-SA. The SA means:

  ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

In other words, if you remix the figure and table, you have to publish under the same license, i.e. CC-BY-SA.


"It is our policy not to include attributions of figures and tables" - what does this mean? I just received some proofs of an accepted paper, for me to review prior to publication. The email from the publication staff included the following paragraph:

  It is our policy not to include attributions of figures and tables. If you feel that such citation is necessary in the case of your article, please indicate so when sending your page proof comments and corrections back to us.

(no other relevant context.)

Does anybody know what kind of attribution they are referring to here? I have a hard time imagining some kind of attribution that would ordinarily be appropriate, but could be removed as a matter of policy (ethically).

I'm not going to ask the staff member who sent me the email, because it doesn't apply to my paper anyway. I'm just wondering if anybody here knows.

While I have not encountered this before, my guess is that the journal has decided to discriminate against non-academic citation (e.g., crediting of image sources per Creative Commons licenses).

While I believe that this is improper and unethical, I have encountered worse.  I have, in fact, encountered a major journal that refused to allow citation of anything that was not a journal article, because that journal's field does not typically have peer-reviewed conferences.  To somebody coming in from computer science like myself, this is clearly incorrect and unethical: the editors of the journal, on the other hand, saw themselves as manning the barricades in defense of scientific quality and refusing to allow inadequately peer-reviewed material to infiltrate their publication.

In short: I think this is another case of "academia varies more than people think it does," in this case unfortunately being baked into a journal's policy, and would recommend anyone encountering such a policy to simply make their case as suggested by the policy.


Should limitations of a methodology with proposed solutions be discussed in the Limitations Section? My methodology is online ethnography. This methodology has certain limitations such as identity play, falsification, and artificiality of data.
However, its proponents have suggested some strategies for coping with these limitations and my study is based on them.

I am confused because I think the limitations section is concerned with limitations of a study that were not solved or accounted for, and that are to be avoided in future research.

So, should I discuss these limitations, that have alternative approaches or proposed solutions, in the limitations section?
Thank you

With the caveat that this is discipline specific, you could discuss your questions in several places in your article.

First, you can begin to nod at this briefly in the methods section of your article. Every methodology has some drawback or limitation and my advisers always told me to acknowledge this in the beginning. For instance, while doing semi-structured interviews, I admitted that my sampling was convenience and snowball based and restricted to 30 participants. However, I followed this up by citing 2 papers which talk about appropriateness of sample size in grounded theory approaches and theoretical saturation and why this is not hamstringing my paper completely.

Second, one of the ways of validating qualitative studies from a methodological perspective is to look at issues of credibility, transferability etc. One of their solutions is to do member checks (especially for interview based studies) In one of my current projects, I did do member checks and talk about this approach as mitigating some of my methodological drawbacks in the Discussion section of my article.

Third, you can definitely talk about this in the limitations section of your paper. There is no panacea to solving a human-centered research problem (and indeed various nuanced facets of every research project, however thoroughly investigated they might be are almost always incomplete) In the limitations section of my papers, I put down both theoretical as well as methodological limitations of my work and discuss potential ways to approach them in future work or follow up studies.


Dismissed from PhD due to disability-related misconduct: how to answer question about dismissal? I committed plagiarism at the end of my PhD. My psychiatrist found that the plagiarism is related to a psychiatric disorder (mental health problem). I have published many papers in top journals and this behavior was clearly out of character.

I was asked to voluntarily withdraw from my PhD program. However, I have a psychiatric explanation, and I have a psychiatrist who can vouch that my mental health issues have been resolved and there should be no further incidents in the future.

After taking time off to get treated and to recover, now I am considering applying to PhD programs again.

However, I am facing a question from most universities that I am applying to. Is there any hope for a student who committed misconduct that is related to a disability?

I am nervous about this application. Can anyone help me figure out how to deal with this issue in a proper way?

It's not easy to understand how a mental health issue can lead to plagiarism, and it's less clear still how a medical practitioner could reach the conclusion that a specific instance of plagiarism was a consequence of a mental health issue. Unless those things can be documented and explained in a credible way, it is unlikely people will overlook the circumstance.

If people can be convinced that the plagiarism was a consequence of a mental health issue beyond the plagiarist's control there remains the issue of convincing them that it will not be repeated. Since plagiarism is professionally unacceptable, its cause, while relevant in a moral sense, is not relevant in a practical sense; someone who plagiarizes cannot work as an academic professional, whether or not that person is morally responsible for the plagiarism. Consequently, even people who have accepted the difficult to believe claim that the plagiarist could not control committing the past plagiarism will have to be convinced that he/she can always control him/herself in the future.

Summary: people have to be convinced the plagiarism resulted from a mental health issue, and people have to be convinced that the mental health issue will not recur. Convincing an admissions committee of either seems difficult. There are many people trying to get into PhD programs, and those deciding on admissions generally are reluctant to dedicate resources to candidates who they judge to be at risk of not completing the program. The slightest hint of a lack of forthrightness or an unwillingness to accept responsibility is likely to condemn the application of a candidate who has already failed to complete a PhD program for the reasons described.


Professor Matters for Independent Study? From what I understand, independent studies are important if you want to get into a good graduate school. But does it matter who you’re doing the independent study under?

In some ways everything matters, but probably not as much as you think. Probably not enough to worry much about it. A lot of things will help you, but working hard and gaining skills is pretty high up the list.

I'd suggest that rather than trying to game the system, find courses (including independent studies) that will make you well educated and well rounded. There are fine teachers without a huge reputation. There are terrible teachers with a great reputation. There are all of the other combinations as well.

Study something meaningful with someone who can help you learn it well. Work hard at it. The rest will follow.


Recommendation letter after 1 month? I am applying for a US PhD program. One of my recommendation letters arrived 1 month late.

Should I

1) contact the department

or

2) contact potential supervisors to kindly ask them to consider it, given that the delay was out of my control?

or

3) do nothing?

Contact the department immediately and provide evidence that the letter itself was delayed. Then cc your referee on the correspondence.


Grad School ~ Submitted Personal Statement Instead of Statement of Purpose I submitted my applications for United States doctorate programs in computer science with a personal statement. This statement detailed the meaning of research, academia, and AI to me, as well as my experience in the field and why I wish to attend that school, instead of career goals and in-depth examples of why I wish to pursue my specific subset of AI. This initially happened because I read a few posts detailing what people like to see in a computer science application that required a personal statement, which I absentmindedly assumed was the same thing as a statement of purpose. How much of an issue will this pose? Do I still have a change of getting accepted? I've applied to top 30 schools as I am coming from a fairly strong undergraduate university and have research experience.

No one can really judge how others will look at your application, but there are a number of people here who are currently involved in doctoral admissions who say they ignore (or merely scan) the SoP. You missed an opportunity to detail your future plans and a specification of field, unless you stated that elsewhere.

But, I doubt that it is disqualifying. If your admissions materials paint a solid picture of your accomplishments and your letters of recommendation stress your likelihood of success you should be fine.

But if you have a chance to amend your application, you might want to do that. And fix it for future applications you might make.

This might be more of an issue outside the US-Canada region, I think, but probably not a huge deal here.


Transferring knowledge from one field to another A professor once said to me: publication is about intelligent copy paste from one field to another. His claims were right in a sense that he knew what results already exist in one field and apply it to the other non-mature yet field. Ofcourse he didn't mean a literal copying.

  If you are working in a cut-edge research (a new obscure area) and
  already familiar with another stable mature-enough area, is utilizing
  one's techniques to the other is a good approach for making
  contributions to the field?

is it count as a good contribution?
is it common in Academia? (specifically for Computer Science field)

Computer Science has many subfields, I remember that there was a running gag in NLP that people just took algorithms from the 1980's and pushed papers out like a treadmill.

Other fields like Statistical Machine Learning has a more math oriented approach and you do have to come up with novel stuff most of the time.

However, when you do interdisciplinary research, it is very often that many good techniques just don't get tested because many people do not know how to use them, or do not have the time to understand them very well.

But to answer your question, I think is a pretty valid practice, very good researchers have great papers where what they did was basically apply a widely known math tool to a novel problem that few people were working on.

An example that comes to mind is how Factor Analysis, a widely known CS method (1993) was just applied in 2007 for the problem of discovering Connections in Gene Networks, not only that, people were using linear regression on that just 10 years ago.


How much teaching in Sweden is done in an intensive block mode? According to somebody at my university, the entire higher education system in Sweden is taught using an intensive "block mode": instead of students enrolled in multiple courses/subjects over a semester, they enrol in just one subject at a time for three or four weeks, then move on to the next subject.  I'm trying to find out whether this is in fact true.  Does anybody here know about university teaching in Sweden?  Thanks.

It varies, most likely between universities but also between disciplines. In my field, a social science, the bachelor level has full-time courses except the final semester in which two courses run in parallel. At the advanced level, the students take two courses at the same time. But in a closely related master's program, courses are given the way you describe.

At my university in the STEM field, I believe it is more common to be enrolled in 3 or more courses simultaneously.

For your specific situation, it should, however, be fairly easy to check online.


LaTeX Document - would I make every instance of a term internally hyperlinked? I'm writing a Computer Science Dissertation and am wondering if I should make all mentions of terms in my glossary hyper linkable to the corresponding glossary definition. Should I or shouldn't I?
EDIT: Thanks for the feedback guys. Although the advice is somewhat conflicting, I think I'll hyperlink the first mention of these terms in the report. Might leave this until I've written the entire dissertation too! Else I might get too caught up in ironing out something that isn't worth very much, haha.
More advice is welcome! Thank you!

Yes you should. But hide all the links: \usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}.
You cannot expect the reader to start on the first page and finish at the last, someone interested in a particular topic jumps to a subsection and will be happy to find a linked glossary term.
Manually linking the terms at the beginning of each chapter contradicts a main advantage of Latex.


Can I publish a sum up paper? Are there papers that sum up ideas and results from other papers? What are their characteristics/form? Do they provide insights on the field or try to predict the future?

I have read some papers for a class homework and I would like to know whether I should try to summarize and publish it somewhere.

The sum up papers you are referring to are called review articles. In order to write one, you should know the research area in question very well.

Note that there are also systematic reviews and reviews of reviews (tertiary reviews).


Is there any way to do good research without people noticing or follow up on my work? My research, which in my opinion, is quite important, has unfortunately been getting noticed by people who has previously ignored them and systematically avoided to cite them.
This is not ideal for me! Because I want to remain as virtually anonymous for as long as possible so I don't get scooped. I really hate the feeling that the moment I publish my next paper there will be a flurry of paper that follow my work, leaving me with nothing to work on!
Is there anyway I can still remain anonymous and secretly working on my breakthroughs?
Help!

The prospect of getting "scooped" in extensions to your research project is rarely a big problem, because you always maintain a head-start on others through the period of time it takes for a paper to go from completion and submission to a journal to publication.  Even if your paper is extremely well-written in the first instance, there is usually at least a six month delay between initial submission and publication; if you require revisions to the paper then the period of delay is longer, and it can often take years until publication occurs.
Now, obviously you can start working on extensions to your work at any time you want.  If you do your work sequentially, and you start working on extensions as soon as you submit your previous work, you will still have a head-start of at least six months (if not a year or two) on those who later read your published work and then decide to extend it in like manner.  If that head-start is insufficient then you can always start working on your extensions before submitting the finished product of previous work.
Irrespective of this, I would encourage you to see interest from other researchers as a desirable outcome, and be flattered if there is a "flurry of papers" that follow your work.  (Oh, what I wouldn't give to have such a problem!)  This is desirable for the progression of science and other academic fields.  It is useful to have multiple researchers pursuing research in a field to progress it more broadly and rapidly, to give a heterogenous range of approaches on the subject, and to act as a check on erroneous work.  Most researchers have the opposite problem --- it is often difficult to get other people interested in your work, and many good papers end up with zero citations because they do not attract interest from others.


Academic position in the UK, do universities in the UK pay for dependent tuition? I'm an assistant professor in the US and I would like to move to the UK. My daughter will be starting college this September and I was wondering if universities in the UK offer any tuition waivers if my daughter enrolls in the same university? and which universities in the UK would offer something like this.

Update: it's worth mentioning that my daughter and I are US citizens. we don't hold any UK or EU citizenships.

I am an American and was an assistant professor in a UK university. They laughed at me in the polite British way for being a stupid Yank when I asked about benefits like this. With the single pay spine and the craziness of British tax law, they wouldn't even know how to do it in a formal way.

If your daughter attended your school (department in US speak), they could probably work with you to wave the international fees and only charge you home fees (9k a year), but with Brexit looming, you cannot really count on any future promises (or even a guarantee that she would legally be allowed to attend a university).


How to decide on what citation format to use when writing on legal history? I am an amateur historian who is considering writing a book about the history of Treason in the United States. I have a dilemma with how to format citations.

The book, by nature of being history of law, would have to cite both historical and legal sources.

Should I cite everything using Chicago Style, everything one of the law citation formats, or use the Chicago style for the history sections and the law citations for the legal section?
Does my choice in citation format affect my book's ability to be cited in academic journals?

If you are hoping to submit the book to certain publishers you could check what guidelines they have for authors. For example, here is a link to the Oxford University Press

I would not recommend to use the Chicago style for the history sections and the law citations for the legal section. Using a consistent citation style across your manuscript would normally be expected, and again some publishers may expect you to use a specific style.

If you are using a citation style used by your publisher I don't see why it should impact on if your work would be cited or not. The content of your work and if other academics use it should be what would gets it cited.


Recommendation letter from an Emeritus Professor I am applying to a PhD programme and am planning to take recommendation letter from an Emeritus professor who has known me for past 5 years. However, the professor does not use college id any longer and has asked me to provide his gmail account for electronic submission of recommendation letter. Will using such id harm my prospects as a PhD candidate? Should I use some active professor instead?

No, the form of the email address won't matter. You want letters from those who can best support your candidacy, so don't bother with others. If they are the best choice to support you, then get the letter from them. Someone with emeritus status has had a long career and is probably well known.

Of course, a former professor should identify them self as such in the letter, naming the institution.

I doubt that electronic systems will block you, as not all letters come from academics in any case.

Some of us still maintain university hosted web sites and are listed among emeritus faculty.


How inclusive should my CV's publications be? I'm in the process of transitioning from industry to academia. Over the years I've been minor contributor to a number of publications and conference presentations and published once as an undergraduate in the school's peer-reviewed journal. This work was in a number of different fields that are different than the direction I'm going. Should all of this appear on my CV, or should I limit it to work done since going back to graduate school?

Typically, your C.V. is expected to contain a fairly complete accounting of your life's scientific work (unless you are so advanced in your career that you can do a "selected publications" CV that just lists your greatest hits).

As such, it is generally best to list every publication on which you are listed as an author, no matter when it may have been published.


Are "fact sheets" an acceptable reference? There are times in my research papers that I need to cite generally accepted facts. For example, health care costs are rising. The CDC and other large organizations often create "fact sheets" with dozens of facts about a topic. Many times these are only published as a webpage. Going through the references to find and interpret the original research is time consuming and seems excessive. For example, I might introduce a paper with "here are some facts about rising healthcare costs" to lead into the main research which is a method to help address those costs.

I've used these fact sheets previously in conference papers, but I'm curious if they are generally accepted by journals or if they are considered a weak source.

If they are summary statistics, where possible, it's better to cite the source report or dataset but in general it's reasonable to cite such fact sheets as a published document authored by either the named author(if named) or the department which has generated it.

If the summary stats are published as part of a report cite the report, if they're just published as a web page then you'd cite it as a web page with retrieval date included.

How strong a source they are depends on the fact and the source. For example, statements about population changes or similar on a web page published by the census bureau would be an extremely high quality source.

On the other hand a snippet of general health advice without citations in a public brochure may be of far lower quality.


Ethics: Having students use my referral link for a product used in the classroom? I was using a Web service I particularly like the other day, and noticed that they have a referral program.  (More specifically, UsabilityHub, but the details of the service itself aren't important.)  So then this hypothetical scenario came to mind.

Suppose I'm slated to teach a class, and decide that said Web service would be valuable in my teaching.  Let's say that:

It's genuinely useful in my pedagogy and/or for helping students produce quality work.
It's a commercial service and has no student discount, but the most relevant parts are free.
I don't require use of this Web service, but I encourage it (though not through any formal means, i.e. no extra credit for using this service).
I happen to use this service for both personal/hobby projects and for professional work, all under one account.

Now suppose that this Web service provides a referral program, i.e. if anyone signs up with my referral link, both I and the new user get benefits of some kind.  However, these benefits are not monetary in nature--they're a form of credit for the service, and cannot be redeemed for cash.

Is it ethical to ask my students to sign up to this Web service through my referral link, given that I use this Web service in both a personal and professional capacity under the same account?  Let's say that I tell them everything that I mention in this post, too (including my usage of the service).

Oh, and I should clarify that this is entirely a hypothetical scenario.  I'm not even in a position where this is actually an issue for me.

There is a saying, "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion," which I believe applies well to an ethical dilemma of this sort.  Despite the somewhat nasty origins of the quote, what it has come to mean is that in some circumstances one must not only act ethically but also act to ensure a very clear appearance of ethical behavior.

In this case, the question is this: could a reasonable person question whether you might have chosen to recommend this service in part because of the benefits that redound to you yourself?

In this case, since there are a number of other ways that you might have gone about obtaining similar capabilities for the class, it would be reasonable for a student or other person to wonder if you were influenced to recommend that particular site due to the benefits that you would obtain through the referrals.  Given your position of authority, then, I believe that does create a genuine ethical concern regarding the referral program.

I see two basic approaches to resolving this:

Recommend the service, but do not make use of the referral program.
Recommend both this service and several of the other competing services.  Note that this is the one that you personally use, and for this service provide both a non-referral and referral link (being transparent about the benefit to you).

Personally, I would prefer the first option, since it's completely unambiguous, but would not find the second particularly problematic.