How to take advantage of scientific international association membership for career? In the last decades, many international scientific associations have been created. Organizations such as AAAS, IEEE, ACM, involve thousands of scientists and professors that have similar scientific backgrounds and objectives.

However, besides technical and resource taks (such as providing documentation, articles, books, and organizing conferences) their aim is to push scientists closer, and let them connect with each other and network.

Concerning this last point, I've always wondered: yes, but how?

I'm member of several scientific societies, and I think I should take more advantage of my membership to connect with other scientists.
But, anyway, except for conferences where we meet in person, how could I use my membership to get more connections?

How would you do?
What's your experience?
Are you member of some scientific associations? How do you take advantage of your membership in professional connections?

Many thanks!

The best way to take advantage of memberships in professional societies—beyond attending conferences—is helping to organize them. This will get you in touch with the other people in your field who are at an early-career phase. (Older faculty typically don't need to, or are higher up on the food chain.) Organizing sessions is also a good way to learn your specialty better, and to keep abreast of who's working on what.

In the long run, it can also bolster your career by providing you with "synergistic" (or "service") activities that show you to be a good member of the research community, which is important for getting job offers and promotions.


Do all Elsevier journals require ONE column format for manuscripts to be reviewed? I want to submit my paper to Elsevier Optics Communications, but I'm confused about the template of the journal. According to the guide for author, the manuscript can be in either Word or LaTex format.

It seems that there is no sample template for Word format, but they DO say that the Word template should be in ONE column.

This journal doesn't provide its own LaTex template but they provide the general template for all types journal in Elsevier. There is also a sample LaTex template which is in ONE column format. There are several options including "preprint", "review", "1p", "3p", and "5p". The default option in the sample template is "review" which has ONE column format.

What makes me confused is that the final format of Optics Communication (as can be seen in published paper) is TWO column. Does this journal (and maybe all Elsevier journals) require ONE column format for the manuscript to be reviewed?
 After the manuscript is accepted, the officer of the journal will turn the manuscript into TWO column.

In mathematics, usually authors aren't expected to format their paper according to the journal's template until after the paper is accepted. Even then, authors usually don't bother and leave it up to copyeditors. This is the case for Elsevier as well as other publishers. Although publishers' websites often "encourage" authors to format submissions in a certain way, these suggestions are typically ignored.

What is true for math might not be true for optics, so it is probably worthwhile to ask a scientist with firsthand knowledge of the journal (or at least the research field in general). Perhaps such a person will answer your question here. Otherwise, I would suggest that you only invest any effort into reformatting your paper if such a scientist (not an Elsevier employee) confirms that this is indeed important. If it's not practical to ask a colleague, you might e-mail a member of the journal's editorial board with this question.


If I withdraw my published paper from an SCI journal (Elsevier publisher) due to some conflicting issues; will it appear online after the withdrawal? My paper is appeared online 6 months ago, but due to some confidentiality of the data used in that paper, the company asked us to withdraw the paper. Their opinion is that, the authors didn't ask the permission to use their data, they just cited them.
Me and co-authors are OK with the withdrawal but we are confused that will it be there online after cancellation (with some notice in Red writing: CANCELLED due to this reason etc.) Or it will disappear online after cancellation?

I think the most common practice is keeping your article online with a notice that it has been retracted. You can search for retracted articles to see examples for this situation or Retraction watch.


What is the value of journal publications outside academia? I am an economics PhD student; I'm seeking to wrap up my PhD and do something outside of academia.

If I don't plan on ever being in academia, is there any value (career-wise) for me to get any of my work published in economics journals?

Ideally I'm looking for answers pertaining specifically to economics; but information on other fields is welcome too.

To elaborate (following some comments):

The reason I do not want to stay in academic economics is that too much (though certainly not all) of it is bullshit I cannot believe in. (This of course is just my humble opinion.) If I wanted to stay in the game and do well, I feel I'd be forced to manufacture similar BS that I simply don't believe in.

In other words, doing this PhD was for me a mistake. If and when I do get my PhD, I will not even feel proud about it. But now that I'm near the finish line, I reckon I may as well cross it, if only for the credential.

Right now I'm looking at working for one of the MOOCs. I enjoy teaching and believe that teaching/education is important. But it is also possible that I might do something completely different; I don't quite know yet.

So now I'm thinking: Should I just try to graduate ASAP with the lowest quality work possible? Or should I invest a bit more time and effort to polishing my work up, so that some of it can get published?

If you are planning to work outside academia as a specialist in your field, then you need to have academic knowledge. I don't see any value of having PhD papers publication while you are seeking non-research job positions; but, a wise employer will decide upon your CV.

As far as most of your time as a PhD student has been spent on research, so the employer is probably seeking the out put of the years you spent in university. These are the years you did not have enough freedom to work in industry, so the question here is what this candidate did at the university.

Nobody wants to hire a tired and depressed candidate who did not do well in his studies as a student and it may come to mind that he will be as tired as the years he was student, why to have him in company?!

So by having publications in your CV, you not make your CV comparative and comparable to the other candidates registering for the job; but also you will show that you are an ideal person in every situation. When you attend university, you did your best, finished your degree and have some publications; and the employer becomes more sure about choosing you. Percents bellow is my approximation of the need of publications in job market.

If I want to generally answer your question:

If you are going to be hired somewhere:

100% If it is a research job and related to your studies; then you absolutely need to show your research capabilities. So you need to prove that can do the research chores and then having paper publications is good idea.
80% If it is a research job and not so related to your field, then the title of your papers may have no significant value but you need to show your ability to conduct research and having publications shows that you have the ability and the knowledge to do research.
50% If it is a non-research job and related to your field, it seems that having publications does not make any sense but you have to show what you did in your education years, so if you don't have work experience in your CV, show that you have published something, show that you are expert in your field, have something in your CV!
10% If it is a non-research job and not so related to your fields of study; then you may not need that much publications (see my answer above).

0% to 100% If you are going to work on your own and do not have any plans to be hired somewhere, do some business, be an entrepreneur, etc., you are the one who wants to hire you, so having publications isn't significant. But keep in mind that having research publications gives you ideas to work with, opens your eyes as a specialist and opens many more job opportunities than a person who has not any insight to research. So having publications may give you many more opportunities than having no publications.

In my opinion, be firm in every step of your life, finish your PhD with most output and publications; and enter a job which is so related to your field and make use of the things you learn during your studies at the university. If you do not gain much from your education, then it seems that you have lost your time for a PhD. So what was the use to get a PhD?

By the way, I think that your question highly depends on answering to this question: What are you going to do after graduation? And, What the consequences of not having publications would be in your future careers and jobs. You are the only one who can answer these questions precisely.


How to include research with a professor on a CV after they have moved to a different university than the one I attended I am putting together a CV detailing my research experience as I finish my PhD. I noticed that one of the professors I worked with as an undergraduate at my alma mater is now at a different university. I checked out their lab website at the new university and it seems the graduate students who were working with them at the time transferred with them after I left the lab. I'm not sure how to list my research experience now that they are a university I was never enrolled at.
Do I list the name of the lab at my alma mater but link to the professor's contact information at their new university if someone reading my CV wishes to talk with them?

You did the research at the institution you attended, so that's what you should list on your CV.
It's not typical to put contact information for a professor on your CV, but if you'd like to make sure they are easy to find you can certainly add a note.
I'd do something like:

Undergraduate Researcher, Dr. I. Newton lab (now at Apple University)


No response from journal editors I'm not so sure what to do in this situation. I'm a final year PhD student who submitted a manuscript for publication in a clinical journal (paediatrics) about 5 months ago. I've been tracking the online status of the manuscript and as of February 2016 it indicated "all reviews complete". Its been over 1 month now and I've tried calling, sending e-mails, no reply whatsoever. The phone keeps ringing and I've also left messages (Its based in the US-I'm in the UK). There's only one e-mail address provided on their website and I've struggled to get contact details of any of the other academics on the editorial board.

I'm just getting a little concerned by the lack of feedback or update regarding the manuscript-has anyone experienced this before? What would you do apart from keep waiting?

Edit: Just to let you all know that I heard from them a day after this post!

Over a month seems normal to me. The editor will need time to consolidate the reviewers' comments and decide on whether to accept, reject, or return the paper to you for revision. It might take longer if the recommendations from the reviewers are conflicting. Bear in mind that the editor has other responsibilities and might handle a number of papers at the same time.

Usually in the online submission system there will be an option to send a message to the editor handling the paper. You can try it if there is one. I would not suggest contacting other editors in the editorial board as they may not be involved with the review of your paper.


Etiquette Question - Professor asked if I could meet after X time on Y day. I emailed to confirm a specific time but he has not responded I have been looking to get started in undergraduate research (CS) and finally got a bite on a cold email. This professor said he read my resume and "liked my profile" and asked if I could meet him after X on day Y. I responded asking if a specific time in that time frame worked for him. However, it's been a day and a half and he has yet to respond. (the day is tomorrow)

If he does not respond today, would it be rude to knock on his door during the time frame he specified? Or does the lack of response suggest he has rethought the offer?

No, it would not be rude to knock on his door. He's already said the time is OK! However, I would not have worded the email asking him if [time] is OK - I'd simply say something like "alright, I'll be there at [time]", which saves him from having to respond.

If he indeed rethought the offer, it'd be quite unethical of him not to tell you before you visit him. But you knocking on his door won't hurt anyway: the worst that can happen is that he tells you then that he's rethought the offer.


Is it it bad to become a part-time student in my 4th year and do a 5th year in my undergrad if i plan on applying for grad school? I'm currently a 4th-year student at a university in Ontario, Canada. Due to covid starting last year, I realized I wanted to pursue a master's after my undergrad and planned out the courses I would need. I didn't have many of the prerequisite courses needed for the master's and had too many courses required for my degree left, so I decided I'll do the 5th year (at the beginning of 4th year, I still had 6 courses required for my degree as well as 6 courses required as prereqs for the masters, and many of the prereqs are also prereqs for each other so I would have to do at least 2 extra semesters of school). Sorry, that may sound a little confusing.
Now, also due to covid I realized online school and learning through zoom was not helping my case, and I ended up dropping some courses and becoming a part-time student for this year. Due to needing the prereq courses for the master's program I hope to apply to, I ended up needing to complete 4 courses over the summer of 2020, and as of March 2021, I have been in school every semester since September 2019 and began feeling very burnt out. I decided for my mental health and to get better marks in the courses that were necessary for me to complete, it would be a better idea to go part-time.
My question is this: do grad schools view part-time studies like this negatively? I want to pursue a master's in Business/Management Analytics, hopefully in Ontario. I reached out to a couple schools who are my top picks, and they told me they have no problem with part-time studies, they just want applicants to have at least a B+/A- GPA in their final 2 years of school.
I recently dropped a course that was focused on Business Analytics because I felt very out of my depth. The course covered topics in Stats and Probability (courses I will be taking in my 5th year because I am completing the prerequisites required for them rn) and I felt extremely lost and did terrible on the midterm. The prof wasn't much help because he treated me like I was dumb when I didn't quickly understand the ideas of things like Support Vector Machines and Neural Networks (topics I'd never covered in the past). I've been beating myself up over this decision for a couple days now because I feel like I gave up on a course that introduces me to many things I planned on doing in my Master's, but I felt it was the best decision for my GPA and overall mental health.
Are the decisions I'm making good? I feel fed-up with school right now and feel like the good marks I've gotten are only because of my reduced course-load. I feel like a couple years down the line, I won't regret my decisions. But right now, it feels like I'm taking the easy way out when the harder route would result in a horrible GPA.

It seems from`

I reached out to a couple schools who are my top picks, and they told
me they have no problem with part-time studies,

that you've answered your own question.  Besides, you can't change the past, but only the future.  Therefore, my advice is to stop "beating yourself up".  School can be difficult at the best of times, and things have certainly been hard during this past year of covid.
At one point in your question you talk about classes that you found challenging because of your background.  So, if those classes will be important to your future, it might make sense to do some independent reading on the topics that are causing you troubles.  Sometimes, revisiting something can make a world of difference.
Things have a way of working out.  Be sure to reach out to people in person, as well as over the internet.  You may find that a lot of successful people have also faced challenges.  Knowing that can help a lot in getting past hurdles.
Spring is coming.  So is vaccine. Things will start to get back to normal soon.  You've got years ahead of you.  Don't worry too much about the exact school you get into.  Find a spot that you think you'll enjoy, and plan to enjoy it and learn a lot.  Sometimes, just making the choice to enjoy something (even with challenges) can make a big difference.
Good luck.


For a future in physics, should I pursue a dual major as opposed to just taking extra physics courses in mathematics degree? I'm an undergrad studying mathematics right now. I have a very big interest in mathematical applications of physics, and I have been debating whether or not I should change my degree to a dual major (math/physics), because of this annoying little fear that only the math degree won't prepare me for a career in physics research later down the road, at the graduate level. However, the Mathematics is the degree I want (I believe there are more opportunities - I'd also enjoy going into a [bandwagon?] research field like Artificial Intelligence)..

Would a BS (and of course grad school) in Mathematics alone be enough to prepare me for a decent graduate school future, if I decided to pursue research in theoretical/mathematical physics? Or would it be better for me to tack on the dual major in physics? I would rather not stay in school an extra year and a half (it's already taking long enough after the A.S. in computer science!), but if it's necessary, I could do that.

I found another thread on ASE about this, with someone recommending that of course a mathematics major take physics courses - and I have.

My specific question is if it would behoove me to pursue a dual major as opposed to just taking extra physics courses (or a minor).

This is essentially the bare minimum I have to do for just the mathematics major.

These would be the physics courses I could tack on. The darker colors are required for the dual major, the lighter ones are electives.

The grad program I'm looking at, by the way, has a Master's program in Math that offers courses like Riemannian Geometry, Riemann surfaces, Group Theory, etc, which I think are useful in theoretical/mathematical physics at the graduate research level. Here's a picture

Thanks!

(Speaking from the perspective of a US grad student who did double major, but who has no direct experience working on a grad admissions committee.)

  if it would behoove me to pursue a dual major as opposed to just taking extra physics courses

In general, the extra degree itself probably isn't much added value for what you want to do. You have your statement of purpose and the rest of your application to show what specific knowledge, skills, and interest you have. Grad schools will look at your transcript, seeing every course you took anyway. If you take enough physics courses, it shouldn't really matter what your diploma says. And by the time you finish grad school, your undergrad major will be even less important to people.

The question is how much is enough physics? I don't have any course descriptions to work with, but "Principles of Physics" sounds like a survey course for non-physicists, the kind of thing you won't learn anything useful from. If you want to do research in physics, you'll need a graduate-level understanding of physics, and for that you'll need plenty of undergraduate-level physics. You should have at least a core foundation of

special relativity,
classical mechanics (Lagrangians and Hamiltonians),
electromagnetism,
statistical mechanics, and
quantum mechanics

by the time you finish undergrad. Now since you are planning to do primarily math for the PhD there might be some flexibility in that you can hold off on some of this until grad school, but note you will still need even more physics knowledge to do research. If you don't know any physics discovered in the last 100 years, there's no way you can discover anything new, and all the subjects I listed are at least 100 years old.

To be sure, some math is very useful for physics. But just knowing differential geometry doesn't mean you know general relativity, and particle physics is more than just the pure group theory you'll see in a math course.

On the topic of labs: I've met a fair number of student mathematicians-interested-in-physics who say labs aren't important for what they want to do. That might be true for what I would call a mathematical physicist, but I don't believe it for theoretical physics. Some exposure to a laboratory setting is important for knowing what physics really is. This is based on my own experiences, as well as advice I got from my (Nobel-prize-winning, theoretical physicist) undergrad adviser. The thing is, undergrad physics courses are unfortunately largely doable with blind symbol manipulation. Those who are good at it (and mathematicians usually are) often end up thinking physics is just easier, less abstract math. But physics is an empirical science, which math most certainly isn't. A (well-organized) lab will show you how much more there is to thinking like a physicist than solving the Schrödinger equation with yet another potential. And if it turns out thinking like a physicist isn't your cup of tea, it's better to find that out earlier.

In summary: Decide what classes you want to take, keeping in mind that you'll need a number of actual physics courses, taught by physicists, if you want to do physics proper (rather than, say, prove pure math theorems deemed important by those with more of a connection to physics). If that list of classes is a superset of the physics requirements, sure, do the extra major -- if nothing else it might impress an industry recruiter should your career go in that direction. If it isn't a superset, just take the physics courses of interest and skip the extra major.


What should I do if I discover a typo in the title of my MS thesis after submission After I submitted my thesis recently, I discovered that I made a very silly mistake in typing the title of my thesis; I missed one letter. Instead of implementation I typed "implemenation". The thesis is now printed and submitted.

I was very cautious but still, this typo slipped my attention, probably due to some technical issues that I had with my LaTeX editor and using separate files for title and body. Now the typos is there and I want to fix it. I found similar questions (here and  there) but it looks like my problem is different. Do you have any suggestions? For example, can I submit an erratum?

First and foremost, I would strongly advise you to not worry too much about the printed copies.  Printed copies of any literature, not just your thesis, are largely vestigial these days: it is the electronic copy that people looking for literature will be able to discover, and it is the electronic copy that they will be generally capable of accessing.  In my experience, the current purposes of the printed copy are:

Fulfilling depository requirements of libraries, where paper is still the best known method for long-term archival storage (even plain text files rot quickly---ever heard of EBCDIC?).  In all likelihood, nobody will ever access these paper copies.
Giving "trophy" copies to people that you personally know, like your advisor, your family, or other mentors who have helped you.

Neither of these really needs correction: the library depository copies are likely write-only artifacts, and the trophy copies are going to people who already know you and are likely to laugh and sympathize with you over your typo rather than hold it against you.

What I think is worth getting corrected is any electronic version.  For that, you need to talk to whoever is in charge of maintaining the electronic depository at your institution.  Often, this is the librarians, and they will generally have a procedure for fixing errors---your error will by no means be the first or the most severe that they have dealt with.


How likely are you to be stressed in academia? So a little context. I'm a second year masters student in theoretical physics and last year I almost had a burnout. I mean that I had symptoms of burnout but it was not severe enough to be an actual burnout (luckily). What stressed me out most was the frequent deadlines. The material also got harder compared to my bachelor which contributed as well. After taking it easy for a while now and talking to a psychologist to help cope with stress I'm feeling much better. I would rather not have this experience another time or even worse. So, since a lot of theoretical physicists go into academia my question is how likely are you to be stressed in academia? Or more specifically

How likely are you to be stressed in academia? Do you know examples of people who are very stressed/not stressed at all?
If it is stressful, is it possible to reduce your workload? Or is it possible to manage this stress?

A majority of the expectations tend to be self-imposed.

While there are some things you're made to do by others, most deadlines etc come from your own choices. Do you agree to referee that paper? Do you want to submit to that conference? Do you agree to give that talk?

There is no "having done enough".

There is always something more that you could do. There will be almost certainly peers who get much, much more done than you (or at least appear to do). Research is never finished. The academic job market is very tight, so until you have tenure, there is always this question of "could doing this extra thing be the decisive factor in whether or not I get a job"?

Deadlines tend to be on a medium time scale.

Unless you are eg a postdoc with a micromanaging team lead, you will be rather flexible in the short term. Teaching aside, things are of the "do this this week/month", nor "this day".

There does seem to be a widespread culture of celebrating stress.

While relaxed academics exist, in my experience most academics tend to convey an aura of constant low-level stress. Of those, many seem to enjoy this. Admitting to be overwhelmed is very much acceptable, but I suspect that the stress can be infectious for some people.


Can one acquire "tenure" through teaching or being something like a Research Associate at a university lab? This question is specific to the United States.

Can one acquire something like "tenure" if either

(1) their primary / only responsibility is teaching undergraduate courses

and / or

(2) they work as a Research Scientist for a university lab but are not professors.

I am wondering about job security, basically.

No, generally speaking, tenure is not offered to teaching faculty, usually called lecturers, or research scientists at American universities.  The AAUP has long argued that teaching faculty should also be eligible for tenure and they report that a small number of universities have created tenure tracks for teaching faculty.  But it's rare.

That said, if you can get hired full-time as a lecturer, your job security is pretty good, mainly because (speaking from experience serving on the lecturer search committee here at Michigan) it's so hard to find qualified individuals who want the job, given that it's so dramatically less attractive to academics than a tenure track appointment.


Is it acceptable to ask a potential supervisor about my suitability for a PhD with them? Is it considered acceptable, in general, to ask the potential PhD supervisor whether one's profile is considered good/suitable for a proposed PhD (sciences) topic?

Countries: USA, Spain, Switzerland, France

Why not?

Ideally, write them a short intro letter introducing yourself and telling them something about your background and interests and whether it would be worthwhile applying. Worst case, you don't hear back. Second worst, they tell you thanks, but it's not relevant. Third worst, they are interested, but have no funding.

Make sure you check their website for their interests and research and ideally identify one or more papers which resonate with your intended direction and introduction. Some applicants manage to hit just upon something that the supervisor may just be interested in doing but never found someone to cover.


Tips on answering "What can you do to enhance our department?" and "Why are you a good fit?" type of questions in job interview I am preparing myself for a job interview for a lecturer position.  According to many articles on academic job interviews, a common question to be prepared for is that " what can you do to enhance our department?"
I'm  not sure what exactly the committee would mean by that? I understand that I should tailor my own answer but question is not really clear to me.

This is an update for those who are planning to go down this route:
I had my interview. I was asked a lot of questions regarding my teaching philosophy and experience.

I was asked why I like to teach at their university?(to protect my privacy name of university will remain anonymous-but lets say it's a prestigous research university).
One particular question I was asked was that what was the most difficult part of teaching I ever faced and how I dealt with that.
Also they named a few courses and asked if I've taught them before.
They asked if I have ever taught classes as instructor and not a TA.
They asked a follow up question asking if I did  A to Z of the course preparation myself, e.g. writing syllabus, making exams etc.

At any rate, while I didn't get the cliche of why-are-you-a-good-fit? the committee aimed to get to know me and investigate my teaching skills in detail by asking straightforward  questions.


Innovative and free publication platform I would like to create an open access journal / a platform that is free of charge for authors and readers. Ideally, I would like it to get away from the current norms: offer the possibility to publish peer-reviewed articles, but also drafts, offer the possibility for reviewers to comment on drafts, offer spaces for videos and audios, and to share parts of our data in order to facilitate the replications of studies. Finally, one part would be devoted to a space where researchers can build knowledge together, like some kind of wiki.

My question is: do you know anything existing that sounds similar to this?

The currently most complete solution is probably the Open Science Framework, which doesn't yet support peer review but is planning to - and it can be somewhat simulated by using Hypothes.is. Then there are quite a few projects working towards this goal to some extent. Thus, a relevant follow-up question would be: with what reason are you looking for existing projects? To compare, to contribute, or to build upon? That would be relevant to what platforms we could suggest.

(That said, if you want to do some research on your own, I wrote an overview of alternative platforms a while ago.)


How to submit a computer science paper to arXiv when I am a physicist? I am member of the Physics Department at my uni. I did the arXiv registration and automatically was allowed to submit papers in maths and physics. However I am interested in submitting a pre-print work in computational linguistics (mixed with acoustics). I found the right place in arXiv to do this: https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to sumbit papers to computer science -> computational linguistics. How can I do this?

That is somewhat hidden. Here's where you find that:

Login to the arXiv, go to "My Account". Below the info-box with your information there is the link "Change User Information". There you'll find boxes for the different groups to tick.


Alternatives to Google Scholar, dblp to measure scientific impact of a research article? Are there any cross-platform websites to measure scientific impact of any research article? I am aware of dblp, Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. Recently, ResearchGate is quite popular. However, all these are not optimal in several aspects.

For example, Google Scholar is a good platform for citation index, particularly h-index of any author; dblp is intended for most authentic, however lacks in the timely updating. ResearchGate seems to be updated mostly by individual scholars. I know that it is not possible to find a comprehensive database with authentic information contained. Thus, the criteria may be as follows: timely manner, self citation exclusion, information entered by authors or robot cross-checked by any person, and most importantly free access to scholars. (Scopus is not free.)

You have a compilation to scientific research referencing websites and networks, and some links to further information, here (post in spanish language, with automatic transation available).


Department not giving me TAships after a dispute with professor, what should I do? I got in a dispute with a professor I TA'd for, and now my department is not giving me TAships.  What should I do?  I am required to teach more classes in my department in order to satisfy a graduation requirement.  In addition I do not have research funding and I'm dependent on TAships to make money.

Nobody actually told me I wouldn't be allowed to TA again, but I suspect I have been blackballed by my department (and there's no way for me to know, since the application process is opaque, and they can just keep rejecting my applications without telling me why).

The first thing would be to meet with the department chair to get the story. If that doesn't yield a satisfactory result, many universities have an appeals process, and you could call on that avenue. If teaching is an actual requirement, then they would need a pretty compelling reason to effectively terminate you without just cause and doing the Due Process thing, although this depends on the legal system in your country, of course. But you would have to be pretty blameless (e.g., if the dispute was over a significant error on your part as a teacher, that could be the end of the discussion).


Post-doc positions in Mechanical Engineering What is the best way to approach professors when looking for a Post-Doc position ? Are there any particular search tools for this type of position ?

I found a similar question on this website: How to maximise one's chances of getting a good postdoc position?

My question is more directed towards the way one should contact potential advisors, specially if they are in foreign countries and a face-to-face meeting is not possible. Is it better to contact directly the Professor or rather contact fellow PhD/PostDocs of that laboratory ? Is an e-mail sufficient or should you try to contact that person through tools like LinkedIn or ResearchGate ?

What would be a good time to do so ? 3 months, 6 months, a year before finishing the PhD ?

Should one be specific on what you would like to work on or rather general so that more possibilities are available ?

I guess this is a really open discussion topic where there is not a "correct" answer, so feel free to share your personal views and experience.

Context: I'm not in mechanical engineering, but am a potential post doc advisor.

Remember: ootential advisors are (almost) always on the lookout for good people, even when they don't have money to hire them, because they always have grants submitted, so any time soon they may receive another grant.

It is fine to contact potential advisors directly, but beware that they will receive many such emails, including many that are easily considered as SPAM, due to their impersonal and indirect nature. This means that your emails need to be personal, and they need to quickly establish what you do and what value you could be to the potential advisor, for instance by finding a real connection with their research.

Having a concrete research proposal is also a valuable idea, but beware that a potential advisor may not be interested in supervising a topic that is outside their core research focus.

Contacting a potential advisor 3 months in advance would put you in the running for any positions that the advisor may have open.

Contacting a potential advisor 6 months in advance might be a way of putting your name in the advisor's mind, but it would probably be too early to actually get a position. That said, the advisor may have applied for some funding, and this may come available after those 6 months. Then having your name in the advisor's mind would be a good thing.

Contacting a potential advisor 12 months before you finish might be useful if there is a funding opportunity that you both could apply for.

Of course, contacting the potential advisor 3 months before you finish might lead to an opportunity 12 months down the track, and so on.


What exactly is a "non-archival venue" and "workshop with proceedings"? Questions:

What do people exactly mean when they say "non-archival venues" although the venue might have "publications"?
What is the exact difference between "workshop with proceedings" and one without it? Is there a way to determine this without having to contact organizers?

Note 1: I perfectly understand the consequence of being archival or having proceedings however what I want understand the meaning of these terms. For example, if workshop puts out pdfs of accepted papers on its website, is it considered proceedings? Is your paper now "archived"? Or is it "published" only if it has DOI? If you submitted short paper and it was assigned DOI but they never put out online copy of your paper anywhere then is it considered "published"? What exactly does "archiving" mean in academic context and how exactly is it supposed to be done by the organizers?

Note 2: I understand there might not be one well established standards but I would like to know common understanding in the community. For example, Venue1 says you are allowed to publish elsewhere but they also go ahead and assign DOIs anyway. Venue2 says they don't accept papers published elsewhere. So now what? if your paper in Venue1 really "published"?

What do people exactly mean when they say "non-archival venues" although the venue might have "publications"?

Usually a conference/workshop is made "non-archival" so that the research presented at the venue can be published somewhere else (either before or after the event), i.e. the venue does not require exclusivity. An author can present their work to the conference/workshop specialized community, while at the same time keep the option to publish it in another reputable venue (for instance a journal). It seems common that the venue would let the authors choose whether they want their paper to be published in the proceedings or not, in this case the proceedings are made of the papers whose authors opted in. Example: https://sites.google.com/view/acl19studentresearchworkshop/call-for-paper.

  What is the exact difference between "workshop with proceedings" and one without it? Is there a way to determine this without having to contact organizers?

The difference is literally that in one case the papers are published in the proceedings of the workshop, in the other they are not. In my experience workshops without proceedings do not require submission of a full paper, only a one page abstract for instance. There are also some conferences/workshop which don't have proceedings, but the abstracts presented can be selected for publication later as a full paper in a journal. In general this kind of information should be provided in the call for papers, but if it's not then the only way to know is to contact the organizers.


What happens if the editor cannot find reviewers? I submitted to a journal a couple of months ago. The editorial flow is somehow quick and very transparent. I receive notifications for all events happening to the manuscript.

Unfortunately, the managing editor contacted me three weeks ago. They informed me that the assigned editor could not commit to the job and left. Another editor was immediately assigned.

However, I was contacted today by the new assigned editor. I was informed that all the contacted reviewers so far either refused to review the manuscript or did not respond to the invitation. They are now looking for other reviewers.

Despite the bad luck surrounding the manuscript, all of this happened in a reasonable time and I am satisfied with how quickly they react.

Nevertheless, these events made me reflect. Even if an editorial board possesses a fair network of reviewers, there is still a little risk that all the contacted reviewers either refuse or do not reply.

What happens if no reviewers could be found for a submitted manuscript? Is the journal going to reject the manuscript because of a lack of reviewers?

Short answer: the editor will continue to try and find other suitable reviewers, sending them invitations and waiting for replies. At some point, they may come back to you and ask you to suggest names (additional names, if you had already given some when you originally submitted the paper).

It can happen that an editor has a hard time finding suitable reviewers that accept to review a manuscript. There are a few factors in play, such as:

the journal is not well-know;
the editor is new, or not well-know in the field, or does not have a very good network;
the research reported is atypical, in a very narrow subfield, or joins different areas (so that no one reviewer feels confident in accepting)
the elements sent by the editor (title and abstract) are rather boring or tend to confuse the potential reviewers

Note that most of these factors do not reflect badly on the manuscript, so there is no need to feel bad about it. The editor is likely to continue his search of reviewers. I see two other options that the editor could choose from, but I judge them as rather unlikely:

Evaluate the manuscript himself, and make a decision based on his own review. After all, it's his job, and the reviewers' role is only to help the editor reach a decision.
Refer the manuscript to another editor, or to the editorial board, so they can make a decision on it.

Finally, note that it may take quite some time to find suitable (and willing) reviewers. In the case of one paper of mine, it took the editor 3 months to find adequate reviewers, and that was actually for a prestigious journal. However, the paper was atypical enough (and the research was quite novel) that many potential reviewers did not feel able to review it adequately. (And in case you wonder, it was accepted on the first try, once the editor found reviewers.)

Edit (regarding your comment): my advice is don't retract your submission, unless you think it's the journal's fault (unwilling editor or unknown journal). I know it's tempting! But especially if your work is multidisciplinary, it will take time to find reviewers, even if you submit it to another journal. Thus, better let the current submission process go to its end.


Do professors benefit from undergraduate research? And does it depend on the type of field? Undergrads in biology can do the menial work, but what about undergrads in the computational sciences?

Are they more or less likely to benefit from undergraduate research in schools/fields where the undergrads tend to be especially self-motivated? (I don't know much about the ratio of self-motivated undergrads to non-self-motivated undergrads, but the professors I talked to at Brown and UChicago said that working with the undergrads at those schools was incredibly rewarding since they tended to be very self-motivated).

As you suggest in your question, this likely will vary from both field to field, and from lab to lab. In the two research labs I've worked in, one engineering and one neuroscience, undergraduates did a tremendous amount of useful work. In engineering, they would help with circuit design and fabrication, as well as doing background research and presenting their findings to the group as a whole. In the neuroscience lab, they would do cellular recordings and prepare cell cultures, as well as participate in paper writing.

In both cases, the undergraduates benefitted tremendously from the experience in a number of ways; they experienced the life of a researcher, they got to perform actual research work, they published articles and conference papers, and they received excellent letters of recommendation. The lab also benefitted, in that they had a (most of the time) highly motivated student who was interested in doing work performing research, the grad students/professors had more time either prepare other experiments or write papers, and all the benefits of simply having someone else around to bounce ideas off of. All in all, if the lab is organized enough to handle the logistics of providing the students with regular (non-busywork) tasks to perform, it's a win-win situation for everyone.


What is scholarship score in paper review? I got paper reviews and I found there is an item scholarship,

Can anyone tell what is scholarship score mean in paper review?

A guess but robably means good use of the pre-existing literature.


How should I avoid someone patenting technology in my paper/poster? I am working on a paper in the field of AI. I've developed a new technology that allows many state of the art benchmarks to be improved on. I want to make sure that when I publish the paper, anyone/company that wants to use the technology can do so free of charge with no strings attached. My fear is that someone will patent the work soon after I publish the paper and prevent this from happening. Should I patent the technology myself before publishing? Is there a better solution?

You need not patent your invention. The requirements of a patent are that it is new, useful and non-obvious. To another person your published work is considered prior art. If someone else tried to patent your work the patent office would reject it as anticipated.

Of course this assumes the patent office finds your work. The inventor could fail to disclose it and the patent office could fail to find it in search. In such a case you can typically submit your work to the relavent patent offices to have the patent/patent application invalidated/rejected.


Time between on campus interview and tenure track job offer I would like to know how much time it can take for a department to make an offer after an on-campus interview for a tenure track assistant professor position? In my field the on-campus interview is the second interview that follows the phone interview. This is about universities in the U.S.

Unfortunately, there is no clear and well-bounded answer.  In general, however, you should anticipate the time to be on the order of months.

To understand why, consider these typical components of process:

After your interview, a number of other candidates may be coming to interview.
Once all of the candidates interview, the faculty needs to decide who they want to hire. This may happen in multiple stages (e.g., first a search committee triages down to the top candidates, then the full department chooses between them).
A formal offer is prepared for the top candidate and negotiated amongst the department and any other involved university organizations (e.g., HR, deans, centers, etc.).
The candidate has some weeks to decide whether to accept the offer, possibly including more negotiations and revisions to the offer.
If the candidate says no, things begin again with offer preparation, negotiation, and decision for the next candidate.

Every one of these steps is likely to take on the order of weeks, so you can see how it can easily add up to multiple months.


Becoming professor and showing autonomy - when to exclude supervising professor from co-authorship Following common scenario:

You wrote a proposal for a larger several million € research project with several university partners after your PhD, the project got funded and you are the project manager, the professor is project leader and official applicant and principal investigator mainly visiting the regular meetings of the research alliance but not doing the micromanagement of employees, Phd students etc. He also encouraged the project leader to go for tenure, write a habilitation thesis etc.

The problem I see: A researcher seeking tenure has to show autonomy, especially postdocs should leave their Phd supervisor for 1-2 years and join other research groups or industry before coming back to the old group and leading a subgroup. This is not written into stone, but advantageous facing a committee deciding professorship and many professors did go similar way.

In germany now the junior professorship exists with and without tenure after the professorship. But also the habilitation is still common to work for a professor.

But how can you sell your autonomy? Should you negotiate hardly with your professor to publish some work on your own with him as a coauthor (who did neither conceive the experiments, in best case only review the publications internally before submission). Do you highlight you have to compete with junior professors later facing committees and need this autonomy in publications, also technically you are not the principal investigator, but do 95% of work to get money and conduct the project?

It's a delicate question to discuss this with your professor which you owe more or less for your PhD, but who also made profit from your work. Ethically, I know my professor has not many good reasons to be a co-author doing not much more then visiting meetings and reviewing the publications. Technically this is the common case, but due to junior professorships I think the situation changed a lot in comparision to 10 years ago when habilitation was the common and only way to become professor working until then for an already tenured professor.

EDIT: this is experimental sciences. So you are often dependent on expensive lab equipment of your supervising professor. Maybe an idea then is also to work more on theoretical papers, then authoring alone should be acceptable/negotiateable with professor?

Assuming that I understand it now, I do have a suggestion. Given the norms in your field, in which the PI is (I think) a co-author of every paper and who controls the grant and the research, you can't really distinguish yourself without help. But if others speak to your qualities more than you do, it might be enough - or even better. That would be the case in the US, anyway. Especially if that other is your PI and former advisor. You are, after all, his academic descendant.

Suppose you are looking for a position elsewhere. Suppose your professor writes the letter that says you wrote the grant and were the lead investigator for much of what grew out of the grant. Not your words, but theirs. That is pretty strong.

That may be easier to negotiate than trying to write as sole author, acknowledging the professor. Such might be possible, depending on personalities and norms, but maybe not.

At the opposite extreme is excluding your professor unilaterally. I'm guessing that would be breaking norms in your field and place. It is also a terrible way to move forward if you become alienated from that professor. They are not going to be there for you either in career moves or research opportunities.

In any case, it would be useful to have a conversation (or series of conversations) with your professor about this very question. "How can I distinguish myself here sufficiently so that I can move to an independent position? Can you help me do that? What should we do to enable it?" If the professor is honorable, and you don't suggest otherwise, you should get the help you need. And the professor, knowing the entire story may have options for you that none of us here can conceive of.


Why are new encyclopedias being published when there is Wikipedia? Recently, I have noticed that I have been visiting Wikipedia more and more frequently for finding information on technical materials that I need for my work and research. Over time, I have noticed that many entries on Wikipedia are well-referenced and reliable and also, I have found it rather comprehensive, at least in my field of work and study. Consequently, I wonder if it is necessary to publish and/or purchase new technical encyclopedias? Is it merely because Wikipedia is not still very comprehensive or reliable that new encyclopedias are published or updated? If the answer is no, then what are the reasons that authors and publishers still invest on encyclopedias?

There are a number of specific policies and practices of Wikipedia that reflect judgment calls, and it's perfectly reasonable to treat them differently for different projects:

Above all, creators of another encyclopedia might want to exert editorial control over the product. The rest of this list expresses some of the specific ways they might do that.
Wikipedia explicitly aims to serve a general audience; another encyclopedia might be designed for an expert (or afficionado) audience in a certain field
Wikipedia contributors may be anonymous, and the majority are
Wikipedia maintains a strict egalitarian ideal, which makes it difficult for subject matter experts to exert special authority
Wikipedia's peer review mechanisms are very specific; publishers of another encyclopedia might design them differently
Wikipedia's standards for sourcing, and its threshold for inclusion, are very specific; publishers of another encyclopedia might design them differently
Wikipedia has very specific standards around copyright of text and media

On my connections to Wikipedia: I have been editing Wikipedia (almost exclusively the English language edition) as a volunteer since 2006. I designed the first formalized program to support university instructors assigning Wikipedia composition, on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, in 2010. I have run a Wikipedia training and consulting company, Wiki Strategies, since 2009. I have served as editor in chief of the Signpost, Wikipedia's volunteer-run newspaper, since August 2016.


Are PhD studies in molecular science possible following revoked RN license due to drug use (fired, but no criminal charges) I have a former nursing student who "gave up" his RN license due to drug use (not being sober).  He has been sober for 20 months, but can't get his license for another 2 years of proven sobriety.
This young man is an actual genius, was accepted to medical school and invited to apply by several medical schools due to his 98 percentile MCAT...when he told them about his RN license, medical school admission was retracted.
He could get his PhD in Molecular Science (human metabolic studies), but he believes he would not be accepted anywhere due to his past big mistake due to background checks and he is honest (transparent about his mistake).

I have no domain-specific expertise here, so take this answer with a grain of salt. But broadly speaking, having been fired from one’s job at some point in your life is not an obstacle to getting into a STEM graduate program in the US (and I’m sure most countries). I’m not aware that it’s even required to report such things in your application anywhere. And I’m not aware that PhD programs do background checks on their applicants. No program that I am familiar with does.
So yes, a job in health care involving care of patients may be more problematic, but at least a science PhD seems well within the realm of possibility.


Can publishing good peer reviewed scientific articles be seen as a part of good academic record? I have this doubt inside my mind after graduating from my master's program. Can publishing high IF scientific articles be seen as a good academic record during masters. And will it be considered by the top world-class educational institutes to be a good academic record apart from having good marks in masters? I am asking this question as I wish to apply for technical masters and the scholarships for the same at world-class institutes.

If you apply for a PhD position, and you already have articles that are published (or accepted for publication) in "high impact" journals or conferences, that is certainly a plus.

If you apply for a job, in many cases, the people who evaluate you have no appreciation of what academic research and publishing involves and what it means to have published. (Of course, there are many exceptions to this; such as highly technical engineering and science-related jobs.) However, they still might be impressed, so I would include it in my CV.


How to explain to my boss where not to publish? I have some continuing misunderstandings with my advisor. For some time I am actually doing my research as a one man show, but due to my faults and a lot of work I still did not finish my PhD. I am paid by him, so I still need to have good relations with him.

However, he often gets some real and spam "invitations" to journals and conferences and he always tends to send my work there (he doesn't have more or less anything else). The problems is these journals are often fake journals like from the SCIRP publishing. I managed once persuade him not to send the payment a year ago, but now they wrote him again and he sent them the money and came to me to say that they accepted our article. I do not particularly like to have my name in these "journals".

A similar problems is with conferences. Maybe this one is not that bad– I am even not able to google this random conference about everything in Gdansk now, but they promise publications indexed by ISI or SCOPUS –  but I already submitted the paper to two conferences (two disjunct parts of it) I chose and I want to publish it in a good journal from one of them or some other one. I don't know if the extended paper from that conference my boss wants to visit might spoil the better publication.

I also forgot to say he puts himself as a first author. But actually, he writes the complete article himself, but he doesn't have full access to my data, just a couple of graphs and images, so the quality of the articles is not that good, and I prefer not to waste my time to edit articles to these strange places, so it is probably better I am not the first author.

How can I persuade my advisor NOT to publish my work in these 'fake' conferences?

I've heard similar tales.  The realistic side: you can fret, tell your advisor he should try for a better journal, change advisors, or bring it up as an ethics violation.
Yet none of those will get your thesis finished.

You need to concentrate on finishing your thesis. & if that means you need to stop all other projects, then that's what you do.  Apparently, you're sidetracking...writing other papers, in addition to your thesis?    Or, is it that your advisor has a lot of paper ideas (or you get enthusiastic about new ideas and present the ideas to your advisor?) and you've been very willing to work on more projects?  (This can be a double-edged sword...tempting to get involved in several papers/studies, but it keeps you away from your thesis)

You should have a list of journals that are acceptable to you (starting from the best, elite journals to good solid B journals), why are you waiting for your advisor to send YOUR work to a conference or a publication ?   Based on your description of the issue, these papers are actually coauthored (with your advisor)-  your advisor did the writing, with some of your data.

Now that creates a slightly different problem,
-- and it is one you will have to resolve (maybe repeatedly) for your entire career. Some coauthors will send a paper anywhere..because some schools don't care where the paper is presented or published (oh, those schools will prefer elite journals, but at many schools, quantity is more important than quality).

My suggestion: finish the thesis.  Don't show any other work to your advisor.


How to cite a section of a wikipedia article? I'm kinda new to academia and was wondering how citations are done. In particular, say I wanted to cite the "Inspiration, pure and applied mathematics, and aesthetics" of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics

Would I cite the whole article, or is there a way of citing just the part I want?

Also, who do I mention as the author of a Wikipedia article?

Lastly, what format would is commonly used for writing such a reference?

This question is very basic and broad in scope; have you made any effort to research it? If you search for "citation reference style" on one of the major search engines, the first few pages are full of useful tutorials.

There are many different formats used for references (e.g., Harvard, APA, Vancouver). If this is for an assignment, ask your instructor which format he or she wants you to use. If this is for a journal article you hope to publish, consult the journal submission guidelines.

Normally, page numbers are not required for short articles. For something longer, such as a book, page numbers (or perhaps chapter numbers or section numbers would be used.


US postdoc application with one-page research statement (no cover letter!) [psychology/linguistics] For a one-year postdoc position (extendable up to three years) in psychology/linguistics in the US, I'm asked to submit a cv, two published works, and a one-page research statement (so, no cover letter).
I am wondering if I should understand this research statement as a short "cover letter"-type of writing, including past experiences, future plans, and why these plans fit in this department, or should I only describe my plan for the research project that I would like to carry on during that time?  Should I be really precise as to what and how I want to conduct research during that year?

Thank you!

The best answer to this comes from the institution itself and it is really impossible to know exactly what they expect. But your CV should cover your past work and general position.

In the absence of any other information, I would think it best to focus on what you want to accomplish in the first year and an idea about how you will attack the issues. So, yes, pretty precise, but not pedantic. As always, write for the expected readers. If you know who you will be working with, it is probably them.


How to prevent being intimidated by juniors in your group publishing before you I am working towards my PhD for 2.5 years now. A few of the students who joined after me under my advisor have recently published in top-tier conferences. Though I have worked pretty closely with them and mostly have been involved in troubleshooting their problems while they were conducting experiments or studying for those papers.

I am very happy for them and have nothing against them, but when I see that I don't have a single publication to my name, I get a bit depressed. Earlier, this used to give me motivation and my killer instinct just made me work harder. But as the time has passed, I feel demotivated. My advisor still considers me amongst his best students. Mostly, I didn't publish my work till now because I didn't find it doing justification to my expectations. And I wanted to send it to a top-tier journal which would require extensive evaluation and mathematical rigor, which I am still working upon.

Is it common to be intimidated by such such situations and what is the best way  to overcome the feeling that you haven't done anything.

Note:

I have a lot work but unable to overcome this feeling when every few months, someone gets a paper accepted to a conference.
I am reluctant in sending papers to conferences since I am a self sponsored student and also not full time. So I want to utilize the funds available to me judiciously. The conferences won't fund me since there's a rider of being a full time student.

First off: if you are not a full time student, it's natural that you will take longer than others (who I presume are full time students). Don't feel too pressured by this.

Second, if you are involved with your colleagues' papers, should you be a coauthor on them? Especially if this took time you would otherwise have spent on your own projects?

Most importantly, have you discussed your specific problem with your advisor? It appears like getting a publication accepted would be helpful to your peace of mind. Your question has a faint whiff of perfectionism, which may prevent you from submitting and publishing. Your advisor would be the logical person to discuss this with. He should have a good understanding of the expectations in your specific field. If he considers you one of his best students, this is a good starting point!

I would recommend that you write your advisor an email along these lines:

  Recently, some other students in our group got accepted in upper tier
  conferences. I am extremely happy for them, and this motivates me
  immensely to follow their lead. I would like to get something accepted
  in a comparable venue soon. However, I feel unsure of what level of
  quality is sufficient for publication - at what point do I stop
  polishing and submit?

  Could we have a meeting in which we discuss some of my current
  projects and work out what I still need to do to get a manuscript into
  submittable form, ideally with a time plan? Thank you!

Finally, I assume you have already read and taken to heart this canonical question, right?


Are research opportunities common in India and how can I enroll in a research program in India during my undergraduate studies? I am an Indian, currently in 12th standard and I am pretty sure next year I am going to be in a decent UNI for my bachelor's in physics. I have read a lot about undergraduate research in Western colleges but I am not very sure about that here in India, as I have heard that a very small amount of money from the GDP is spent on research every year - like 0.6%. So I was curious if I will be able to get any research opportunities during my initial college years or not.
Another question is:
-- Are researches necessarily done by college professors or there are other groups of researchers who provide opportunities out of school?

Some observations:

In India, as far as I know, some institutes like CMI, etc. offer (or used to offer) internship programs. Please note, it is usually very competitive to get selected. Earlier, they used to select students based on NPTEL exam results. I remember reading somewhere that you could also email the respective professor and ask if he/she is willing to assign an intern. So, it is best to email the professor. He/she might invite you to work with him/her during Summer/Winter vacation.

Sometimes, I see professors of electronics asking undergrads to write codes. So, you can understand that they would let you do something which perhaps they might not be very comfortable with (reasons being, new languages, new areas, etc). I remember a friend of mine was assisting a professor by writing python codes for some machine learning experiment. Most of the Physics/Electronics professors in India above 50s are comfortable with FORTRAN, while the younger generation learns Python right at high school.

Usually, you would not see much research in a normal college offering undergraduate degrees. They wouldn't have the equipment, etc. They go to a university for those.

So, if you are willing to contribute to research the best thing would be to:

talk/email professors from your areas of interest. If you are in a reputed institute like in one of the IITs, IISc, etc. it becomes easier and it's best to try to get into one of such institutes.


When do I say I can only start PhD late I am applying for a PhD position in computer science in Europe. They specify a start date but say that it can be negotiated. Due to other circumstances, it is not possible for me to start until a month and a half after their given start date.
I see two options on what to do now. Either I say so at the end of the motivation letter potentially putting myself at a disadvantage, or I start negotiating once (/if) I get an offer, risking that someone will be annoyed at me because "I was supposed to tell them earlier" (which would clearly not be a good way to start a PhD if that someone would be the supervisor).
Which option should I choose? Would it be advisable to wait until I have an offer?

(European professor with hiring experience here.)
A month and a half is not a significant delay, but a quite moderate one. If the professor wants to hire you, it's rather likely that they would be happy to have you already one and a half months after the planned start date! So I recommend to not address it before you have an offer or they ask.
More generally, it's understood that people take a few months to start a new position, even more so in academia, where people typically move between countries for a job. That applies even stronger in the times of a global pandemic, where visa issues alone can defer the start date by many months.


Individual presentation for a PhD application A friend of mine applied to a PhD program and luckily they called her for a presentation. They said that the presentation should be a maximum of 10 minutes long and should consist of three slides. These slides should include past experience and research interests, they say.

We are trying to prepare an optimal presentation. We think of,

(1) Presenting a brief CV, including academic background, education etc.

(2) Past research experience, especially during the MSc thesis,

(3) Work experience.

In addition to research experience, we want to emphasize the teaching experience and the experience gained from the courses taken.

However the problem is that research experience and work experience significantly overlap with each other and we are concerned about not using slides optimally.

We would like to hear advice from you about this type of presentations. Or if you know any sources on the web that are specifically for these type of situations, we would be very happy to hear them.

Note that the presentation should be ten minutes long with three slides and should focus on interests & past experience of the individual.

I have not been in this situation so my answer below may be at odds. I was required to have a chat with a potential supervisor and then lodge a detailed application. The fact that the supervisor endorsed my topic was a sure indication of acceptance by the university.

It appears that you are being over cautious (and I can understand why - you only get one shot at this!). My advice is to follow the simple rule of presentation i.e. keep it clear, concise and relevant.

So I would suggest the following for your three slides:

Slide 1 - Tell them what you want to do and how you will do it (i.e. topic and methods)
Slide 2 - Tell them why you want to do it (i.e. gap in knowledge you are addressing)
Slide 3 - Tell them how qualified you are to complete it (i.e. your skills and experience)

The contents and presentation skills go hand in hand, so prepare thoroughly. Unless you have a good reason, don't be too defensive of your approach. Give the impression that you are ready.


Double-blind review: submit a follow-up paper in a very short time My colleagues and I are planning to submit to a conference which adopts double-blind review. The deadline of the conference is in 3 weeks. The work we plan to submit is built on our previous work that has just been accepted 2 weeks ago.

The first paper was actually submitted 6 months ago, but it was rejected at the first time. That's why there is only a very small gap of time between the two papers.

We need to cite the first paper, and its title together with the list of authors already appeared in the list of accepted papers on the conference website.

We can try to cite it as somebody else' work. However, any reviewers can conclude that this is the work of the same group. In this case, do we violate the double-blind review policy?

How should we proceed? We desperately want to submit to this conference, waiting should be the very last option.

I've been in a similar situation before. After consulting with the conference chair, we decided to place an anonymized version of the accepted paper in a dropbox folder and cite it anonymously as our own with a link to that dropbox file in the reference. I also added a footnote in the paper to explain that this previous work is accepted but not yet published, and how this previous work contributed something totally different from the work presented in the paper.


If you are a GRA are you consider fully funded? I have nearly completed my Master of Science. Refreshing my Resume. I have been funded as a GRA every semester I was a Master's student – meaning my tuition was waived and I received a month stipend.
Is it the correct terminology to state:

"Was fully funded as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) for _________ Institute of
Technology while pursuing his Master of Science."

Is that correct, or is the term "funded" more-so used for PhD students or those that secure guaranteed funding for X number of years. In my case, I essentially kept renewing my GRA positions on a semesterly bases.
Last, should I explicitly mention that my tuition was waived and I received a month stipend, or do employers not care about that.

Yes. I'm not aware of the term "funded" having a strict or legal definition. If you got paid every semester, then it sounds like you were fully-funded, and it's fine to say this.
As for what employers want, I'm sure this varies widely, but I doubt that being "fully funded" by itself will count for much. If you had to go through a competitive, merit-based process to "win" funding, it might be worth a bullet explaining this achievement.


Is it appropriate to submit a previously presented workshop paper to a peer-reviewed journal? I have a paper that was presented at an NRC workshop and was not peer reviewed.  Moreover, although this work is accessible at an NRC website, it is clear from reading the literature that search engines do not discover the paper and no one is aware of its existence.

Is it ethical to submit this paper to a peer-reviewed journal for publication?

Different journals have different standards for what counts as prior publication.  For example, most computer science journals happily accept "extended journal versions" of existing papers that are intended to supersede the prior publication, as long as there is at least 30% new content and the relationship to the prior paper made explicit.  Some high-ranked biology journals, on the other hand, are so obsessed with "novelty" that they will consider a submission improper even if only an extended abstract has previously appeared.  Check the policy of the journal(s) that you are considering: either it will be listed clearly online, or the editorial staff should be able to give you a quick answer about their policies.


Are magazines (journals) "Scientific American" and "Popular Science" peer reviewed? Wikipedia says that New Scientist publishes articles which are not peer-reviewed.

But I found no information about "Scientific American" (SciAm) and "Popular Science" (PopSci).

From the Scientific American website:

Generally speaking, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN presents ideas that have already been published in the peer-reviewed technical literature. We do not publish new theories or results of original research.
Please allow six to eight weeks for the review process.

From this and other submission instructions on that page I conclude that the manuscripts undergo a general review that is probably aimed at accuracy and style, which is different than typical scientific peer-review of original research.
No scientific peer-review is mentioned in the relevant page on the Popular Science website either.


On the market for TT faculty positions, is having my credit frozen a problem with University's background check? Like many Americans, after last year's Equifax fiasco, I froze my credit with the big three. I'm on the job market, and at least all the Universities in the US do (or will do) a background check on the tenure-track faculty candidates (not sure if schools from other countries do so for international applicants).

So far I was able to get invites for interviews + campus visits, but I'm not sure at what stage the schools will do a background check.

So my questions are:

does the fact that I have my credit frozen impact my chances as a candidate in faculty positions in the US?
what about in other countries, such as Canada, UK, and other EU countries?
If so, what should I do? just lift the freeze now? or will the school contact me if they can't get access and ask me to lift the freeze for them? or will they just reject me outright?

I've never had trouble with the law etc, or even my credits. The only thing is I have been a victim of at least one of these security data breaches in the past couple years, the worst probably being the Equifax fiasco, which prompted me to place the freezes.

Any advice or suggestion appreciated! Thanks!

I'm on the job market, and at least all the Universities in the US do (or will do) a background check on the tenure-track faculty candidates (not sure if schools from other countries do so for international applicants).

I’m not sure where you heard this, but if by “background check” you mean specifically something that includes a credit check (as your question seems to suggest), I’m pretty sure the statement is false. At my large university where until recently I was a department chair and was closely involved with hiring of several new faculty members, I am not aware of any practice of running credit checks on anyone; if it happened at all, it would be part of the paperwork an incoming faculty member has to go through after already receiving and accepting an offer, so would have no influence on any decision making at the department side. In other words, at least at my university this would not be a concern in connection with your tenure-track application.

Aside from my personal experience, the other reason why I’m pretty sure your assertion is false is that in many US states it is illegal to base hiring decisions on job candidates’ credit history. Thus in those states no sane hiring process would attempt to obtain such information prior to making an offer, and I can’t think of a good reason why it would make sense to obtain it after making an offer either.

Good luck with your job search.


How important is it to have publications to get a math postdoc? The applications often ask for a publication list. If the only publication on the list is a thesis in preparation/preprint, would the candidate's application be rejected because of that? Is it necessary to have more than a thesis to be competitive/considered?

I ask this because one mathematician told me that he doesn't care about the number of publications, but about the quality of the work. Then again, 5 high-quality publications is better than 4...

[The following answer is from the point of view of a tenured professor of theoretical mathematics at an American university.  I believe that most of what I say applies in many places outside of the United States, but not everywhere, and I will not try to say exactly where I think it applies.]

A generation ago the publication culture within mathematics was quite different from other STEM fields.  Students leaving their PhDs were not expected to have any publications at all, and I believe the majority of them did not.  This phenomenon was pretty extreme, to the extent that for many eminent mathematicians you can see that their first publication is work done at an REU when they were an undergraduate, often followed by a gap of about five years, then their "real" publications begin only after their thesis.  A postdoctoral job was awarded mostly based on the relatively brief description of the thesis work provided by the student and (more importantly, I think) the student's thesis advisor.

[In my case, I graduated with a math PhD from Harvard in 2003 and my first paper wasn't until 2005.  To make sure I wasn't overextrapolating from my own experience, I went back to look at my classmates at Harvard.  I found a few cases in which a paper from their thesis appeared slightly before they graduated, but in most cases their first paper appears 1-2 years after graduation.]

Nowadays, a few graduating PhDs can still function on the above model, but only under really ideal conditions: top program, advisor with enormous pull who says great things about you in the letter.  To get personal again:

1) I am about to graduate my fifth PhD student at UGA.  All of these students had at least a submitted paper by the time they graduate; in most cases they had one or more accepted papers.

2) Part of the application for postdoc positions at UGA [of which there are several kinds, but this is a common feature] is a publication list.  I have been responsible for making offers to postdocs for a while now, and I am struggling to remember making an offer to someone who didn't at least have a publicly available submitted preprint.  Sometimes we have had candidates who were otherwise of interest but it's hard to pull the trigger based on seeing none of their work when there are so many other applicants who have multiple papers.

And to get less personal:

3) Whereas 15 years ago good students from top departments didn't need and most often didn't have any preprints, nowadays it is more common for good students from top departments to exit with several papers.

I do however want to add an important caveat: more mathematics done is better than less mathematics done.  [As is not so surprising!]  However, more papers are not better than fewer papers if the more papers don't create the impression of having done more work of significance.  In particular, the cultural of theoretical mathematics very much works against the LPU model espoused in another answer: writing too many papers on the same topic "without new ideas" creates a poor impression.  If two mathematical journals differ by one tier, than having one paper in the better journal is better than having at least two papers in the worse journal.  If the journals differ by more than one tier, having one paper in the better journal is probably better than having any number of papers in the worse journal.  The top journals in mathematics want to publish important, substantial, difficult, breakthrough work: if you split one such 40 page paper up into four ten page papers, then you have four papers that each do very partial things and are not going to be published in nearly as good venues.  Moreover you will get the reputation as having "more papers than theorems," which is not good.

I would say that the following is a good publication model for a new math PhD: have a portion of your thesis already submitted to a good journal and have one other reasonable paper [possibly on a different topic] published elsewhere.  More papers than that is not necessarily helpful: the quality of your thesis work still matters more.


Very obscure job posting for faculty position. Pass onward, or keep to myself? I am a contract-limited faculty member in the United States. My subfield is small, but known for its warmth and intimacy.

A friend of mine in a different country recently sent me a job posting advertised by another institution in the United States. I have absolutely no idea where he found it. I didn't even know that this school had a department in my field, frankly. The deadline is in three weeks, but the job posting has not made its way to the central repository of job ads in my field, nor hit any of the major mailing lists. Yet it's a coveted tenure-track position that seems legitimate, described in a Word document hosted on the webpage of the department in question (though not directly linked to from it, as far as I can tell). I've never seen a job more poorly publicized. I suspect that this department is hiring someone in my subfield for the first time ever, so I can understand not knowing about the appropriate mailing lists, but beyond that it seems awfully odd.

Anyway, my question is about ethics and competition. The first thing I wanted to do was to send the job posting around to a circle of colleagues who, like me, are looking for long-term academic employment. Of course that brings with it the risk that the job could be given to someone who wouldn't have heard of it otherwise, but I just can't get comfortable with the idea of sneakily keeping it to myself. Not when the support of my colleagues is one of the major reasons I was able to get to this level. I'll probably apply for the job, of course; but if I don't get it, I want people I like to be in the running!

Or is that utterly foolish and naive?

I guess I'm trying to figure out where the line is between being helpful and being so generous that I'm shooting myself in the foot. In this case, I can't find it by intuition alone. Would appreciate input. Thank you!

You are not obligated (unless by your own moral principles) to facilitate the distribution of job ads.

You could take a broad self-interested perspective. In this case, you decide whether and how much you want the job and get a sense of your chance of getting the job without further distributing the job ad. Then, you think about how much you value others you care about getting the job and how much you value the profession as a whole making a better selection decision, and how much more likely that is to occur if you were to distribute the ad either to colleagues or to broader mailing lists, and also a sense of the cost in terms of your chances of not getting the job. From there, you can see what most aligns with your values and goals.

In general, I would think of job applications as a domain of life that is often governed by the principles of fair competition. By fair competition, I mean the idea that it's okay to focus on yourself. You shouldn't go out of your way to hurt other applicants, but that equally there is no expectation that you will help other applicants also (especially when you are competing for a single prize). Thus, if you learn information that might help your application (e.g., interests of the employer, what they're looking for, etc.), you are under no obligation to share this with other applicants. If you know about the job, and others don't, you are under no obligation to share it. The assumption here is that it is a domain of life where the ethics of competition operate. The assumption is that other "competitors" in some sense are also operating by these rules.

Anyway, these are two perspectives. My sense is that if you're very keen on getting the job and you think that you have a reasonable shot at getting it, that it would be reasonable to keep it to yourself.


How to not get lost during bibliography research? After a phd and a 1 year boring job in a private company, I finally found a postdoc position than looks very interesting to me.
I am very excited to perform research again, but I would like to avoid the mistakes I did during my Ph.D. to be more efficient.

I would say that my main waste of time was that I was too disorganized.
Often I did measurements, forgot to write all the parameters, and had to do it again. I think I will now be ok on this point, with but if you have advices here, I will happily read them.

Then, my main problem and one of the things I felt very inefficient at, was bibliography research. For example, when I wanted to get information on a very precise topic, I searched through google scholar or science direct and found several articles. I tried to picked the most interesting ones, but then I often got lost in the different references cited by the article. I always felt that I had to read every of these references to get things perfectly clear and become confident on the topic. Of course this never worked, because there are usually many references and references in those references (would take ages to read them all) ... So I often ended reading only parts of all the articles cited by the main article, barely remembering what I have read.

Does someone have an efficient method to avoid getting lost in all the articles cited in one article, and all of their references ... and so on?

I believe you are on the right track. Of course you don't need to read everything, only what is more important for your research. Hence, the most important thing would be to be focus for long periods of time and not to question the time spend. AT first, probably the best start would be to read  the review articles, which discusses different approaches in the field, and then to move to a particular direction. After one have an onset of the phenomenology one can start to digest the mathematical details, and to find the most pedagogical papers which explain the basic details. Do not hurry in your research, keep in mind that there are also research projects also for long time, for 2-3 years for example, or even for decades. Looking at my senior peers, I think the best thing would be to have an continuous effort for many months, every-day(of course, you can take short vacations). Finally, getting lost in the literature makes you adapt more quickly to changes and to different ideas, it is a normal thing.  Good luck!


Must I reference resources for definitions I express with my own words? I am writing a master thesis. When must I cite a resource I used ? Most of the time, I read a definition in a given book and express it in my own words: must I mention the book in question for this particular case ?

If you recall a definition which may be unknown to your users, it is always a good idea to refer to a book/article from which the notion originates. Do this even (actually, especially) if you choose to rephrase the definition in your own words. Remember, references are important to navigate your readers and put your work in a context. Definitions are no exception.


How fast is the admission procedure for single-slot PhD applications in top universities in the UK? I have applied to five different universities. Four of them are in the UK and the last one elsewhere in Europe. Based on initial discussions, two of the UK universities consider me a competitive applicant (they encouraged me to apply after informal inquiries). Given my impressive publication record, I think I am the best applicant for the position which is not located in the UK.

Most probably, I will get an offer from the non-UK university quite soon. However, I would not like to accept the offer before hearing anything from the UK universities. Suppose I am also the best candidate for the UK institutions. How fast will they decide? The places are single-slot, so would it be rude to ask one week after the application period closes?

I would only email the UK institutions if the non-UK institution says yes, and write something along the lines

  Sorry for contacting you so soon after application period has ended, but I have been offered a position in [some place] already at this time. I understand that you probably have received many good applications, and may not decide yet who to offer the position first. However, I thought you might be able to tell if others' applications were much stronger than mine. I would prefer to study with you, which is the reason I am sending this email.

I would then decline the non-UK offer only if the response was very positive sounding one.

It can depend on the time of year. At my old UK university,the standard PhD admissions process would take over a month. If the timing worked out, we would generally lump single slot applications in with everyone else so that interviews and decisions happened at the same time. If the timing did not work, we would do them individually. This meant it was really down to how fast the PI wanted things to go. The PI would do all the leg work, screening, and interviewing, and then put a single candidate forward to the admissions committee. A week would generally be very quick, but a month would be on the long side.


Master of Research (MRes) schools in the U.S.? Are there brick-and-mortar or online schools that confer Master of Research (MRes)-type degrees in the U.S.?

I've never seen the term "Master of Research" used in the US.  Many master's degree programs in the US do include a significant research component (either a thesis or project) while other master's degree programs consist entirely of coursework.  In either case, the degree can be called an MS (Master of Science) or MA (Master of Arts) degree.

In programs that do include a thesis, the thesis might be 6 out of 30 credit hours in the degree program.  This is nominally 20% of the program but in practice students often spend much more than 20% of their time on the thesis.  In my experience in mathematics, 3 semesters of course work plus two semesters of work on the thesis is more typical.


Should I email a professor during Christmas and New Year Holidays? I got a project confirmation from a professor 2 days ago. The project would require me to travel abroad during the summer vacation period of May-July 2021. The formalities such as offer letter and visa forms are pending. The professor told me that he would be on vacation for a few weeks but would be in touch via mail. I sent him my academic records yesterday but I haven't received a reply from him.
Should I wait and send a mail after Christmas? Should I contact him in January?
He was enthusiastic about offering me the position and I'm sorta panicking. Would greatly appreciate some help.

Give it a rest.  If you mailed him yesterday, you don't need to mail-bomb him again today.  Wait for him to respond, perhaps after Christmas.


For Applied Maths / Engineering masters and PhDs transitioning into industry, do they still get to use MATLAB? MATLAB seems to be the software of choice in applied math and engineering departments that I know of.  It is a very well-documented software, and so learning how to utilize it, whether it'd be for visualizing data or modeling differential equations, is extremely easy.

But what typically happens for people leaving school and transitioning into industry?  Is MATLAB used in industry at all, or is it more of an Academia thing?  One thing I've noticed is the enormous cost of purchasing MATLAB for personal / non-student usage.  It's like 3 or 4 thousand dollars for a license.  In comparison, a student license costed me $20 for a year.

MATLAB is absolutely used in industry, and I'm certain that's where the majority of the company's income is from.

If you like, you can think of the extremely cheap student and university usage as a "first taste is free" policy by a dealer: it is highly advantageous to MathWorks to have large numbers of students graduating with experience and comfort in MATLAB. If it's then part of the standard "tools of the trade," that's something that most companies can afford for anyone who clearly needs it to accomplish their job: if a good engineer costs you $300K/year (when salary, benefit, overhead, etc., are all included), and having them use MATLAB makes them a little more efficient, it's well worth it.

Now, if you're not in a job where that cost-benefit tradeoff is clear to the leadership, then you'll have a hard time getting ahold of MATLAB --- and that's what free and open source alternatives (in this case Octave) are for.