How do applicants for an NSF fellowship come up with a research plan for the research statement part of the applications I understand reviewing literature is an important part of completing the application. Do most applicants develop a plan independently solely based off of the articles they read or do faculty advisors usually give students a specific question to write about? How feasible are the research plans written by say a first year grad student who is new to their field? Is the intent of this part of the application just to demonstrate that the applicant is familiar with their field and can formulate a research plan or is it meant to be an actual plan of action for their grad student career.

The context of my question is I am considering whether to apply to the nsf fellowship this year or next year. I would say I have done enough literature review to identify holes in the literature that I could possibly propose a research plan for, but I am not sure if it would be something I would actually study or not because there are many things up in the air in my lab related to available facilities/research direction, etc.

Having reviewed GRFP applications,  and gone through the NSF orientation sessions, I'd say it depends very much on the level of the applicant, but generally, literature reviews are not anywhere near as important as you thought they were.

This process only vaguely resembles a research grant review, primarily because there is ZERO effort to match reviewers' expertise to those of the applicants.  Broadly, electrical engineers will review applications of electrical engineers, and biologists will review applications from biologists, but that's as fine-grained as the process will guarantee.  This means that you can't display fundamental gaps in knowledge that any practitioner in your broad field should know, but in all likelihood, nobody is going to go check your sources, or know much about the very special second messenger system that impacts a new subtype of cation channel that 2 people in the world study.

As to where the research plan comes from, that's going to vary incredibly by the level of the applicant.  A student about to start a program, who hasn't even set foot on their campus yet, is very different from a student that's been placed in a PI's lab for a year, and both can get funded!  For the young student, reviewers are looking for your ability to put together a cogent hypothesis-driven study and communicate it well (and not many reviewers would believe this is the study you will actually do your graduate work in) along with a somewhat viable path to get yourself established with the type of resources you would need to actually do similar research, and somewhat more than that for an experienced student.  My recollection (though I could be wrong) is that there is some earmarking of awards to the four levels  of application status, and that young applicants will get a competitive amount of awards, even though the experienced students clearly have more polished packages.

Reviewers are trained to assess you in two areas; "Intellectual Merit" and "Broader Impact".  Both are rolled together to make a holistic assessment of your application package.  Reviewers are looking for evidence that 1) you've got the intellectual goods to thrive in science, 2) you've made opportunities for yourself and have taken advantage of them, and 2) that you see areas where you can bring your skills to the larger community.  I can't say that you'll be successful if you can demonstrate success in these areas, but I can say that you won't if you can't.  Using your literature would be a part of this, but I'd say that if you don't make any mistakes in your use of the literature, you won't be hurting your application.

As to whether you should apply this year or wait until next year, that's a tough call.  The risk with the "make believe" type of applications, where you aren't even affiliated with a lab yet, is that one reviewer might not buy that the path you've outlined is viable, and considers this to important to recommend funding (I try hard not to do this, myself, though naivete can certainly be a strike against intellectual merit). This will kill your application.  I don't believe you are excluded from applying a second time, though, so the risk of application this round seems minimal.  You should verify eligibility for a second submission on your own, though (i.e., don't take my word for it).


Is having a chapter in an open-access book valuable as a publication? So I work in a project where the consortium is planning to write an open-access book with Springer publications.

There might be a chapter regarding the work I have done in the project. The editors of the book will be some other people, but every chapter will have the authors of the dedicated work.

Doesn't this mean that irrespective of the chapter's content, at the end if one cites the book, only the editors of the book are cited and not me?

I am just not sure how does it help when one considers writing chapter(s) in a book helpful in academia?

For the kind of book you seem to describe, I think citations would be to chapters of the book, hence to the authors.

But pretty much any reviewed and edited publication you have helps you, though some more than others. Since you have done the work, consider the relative merits of having this vs not having it, or someone else having a chapter in your place.

If you still had the work to do, you might consider where your time and efforts would be better spent, but with the work behind you, the writing effort should pay off over time. If no one else cites it, you certainly can in work that builds on what you did. It gives you visibility with the other authors as well, and can lead to future opportunities.

I don't see any negatives other than the time spent in writing. And, saying no to the editors might not be the wisest move.


Should I list GRE scores on my CV? If someone scores quite high on the GRE, how and where would they list it? Or would they even list it at all?

Copying my comment:

I don't think you should. I can't recall ever seeing test scores listed on a CV. Nobody really cares about GRE scores except graduate admissions committees, and they get the scores straight from ETS anyway.


How should a Phd student deal with rude professors or faculty? I am a phd student in IIT Bombay. I have found sometimes that professors or faculty behaving rudely especially with phd students. The situation being the student demanding better guidance on his research or while reporting complaints on unavailability of research facilites(infrastructure). Partly it seems the reason for the professors behaving so is because of their own frustration with their job which they pass it on to the students when they raise questions for which they don't have answers. And partly some professors think behaving rudely is the right way to scare students away so that they don't come back and trouble them. Also often the faculty feel they are being embarassed by being compared to their peers elsewhere and are being looked down upon, so have a bellicose attitude and start fighting at the slightest provocation. This is extremely frustrating for graduate students and they ask themselves why they made this grave mistake of joining for graduate studies here. But since few years already pass off by the time they realize this, they just try to finish a half hearted unhappy phd and try to run away from this place quickly with a wounded heart. Many of my seniors have experienced this who are now doing postdocs in US. How does one not let one's heart wounded in such a situation and how does one deal with such unpleasant rudeness on part of faculty?

There may be more happening with the professors to make them as rude as you say.  However, having said that, there is no excuse for incivility and rudeness - it is not professional and certainly not conducive to a productive academic environment.

On to your main question, on how to do deal with the day-to-day rudeness, I was in such an environment when I was completing my honours in geology.  This situation is similar to an unpleasant workplace.

This is how I got through the honours year:

Focus on your goal, not on the personalities - by this, I mean always 're-focus' your thoughts to be task orientated (not easy to do).
Form a friendship group amongst your fellow students, not to complain what is happening, but to mutually re-focus your attentions to your work.
Don't take anything said to you personally (also sometimes not easy to do).

Is it at all possible to transfer to another research group/university?  it does sound that the academics' frustrations are being taken out on the graduate students.

I hope this helps.


Distance Learning vs Free Online Education I'm currently enrolled as a first year student doing a computing related degree (my first) at the University of London (distance learning). Since I started, there has been a massive shifts in online education with a particular focus on the direction I want to take (computer science). With the exception to access to a wide-range of journals and digital libraries, the quality of the materials provided by the university are far eclipsed by those offered by sites such as Udacity and Coursera, plus there is no where near the same level of interaction among students or even lecturers for that matter.

Essentially, I feel like I am paying for a piece of paper and nothing more. I'm given a guide as to what is on the paper but I'm essentially on my own. I've spent all my savings so far on this, but would need to take a loan for next year. I'm both a mature student (28) and living in a foreign country, therefore the traditional paths were not open to me.

Is it worth it? Should I just invest the time pursuing the free courses and hope that It does not impact my employ-ability?

Basically, is your question is "Is it worth it to enroll in distance learning when you could do the same attending free online lectures?" I believe you can have some good input from  Looking for sources of online graduate-level education and Does one get academic credit towards a degree for open online courses?.

The bottom line is: online lectures usually don't provide academic credits. So you can't show an official degree to an employer, so it depends on the kind of job you want to do: if it's enough to show what you can do (say, for instance, you want to be a web-designer, then your portfolio is likely to be more important than your degree), then why not. But otherwise, you might have to stick with the distance learning.


PhD funding agency, and conflict of research and development I am doing PhD which is funded by Science and technology department. Those coming to check progress (first time) are mainly software engineers, while in PhD the work is research based. So far I have published some papers in initial years including a review, early experiments. Another Journal paper is ready for submission and one paper submitted which I co-authored. BUT these things are something only a PhD understands and they are coming mainly to check the software (still under development). What I expect from them is that they will definitely say that it should have been developed by now without realizing the research progress.

How should I justify the research part and the development part both so they get satisfied with the work? Because my advisor also told me that they don't know anything about research and they are mainly interested in the software.

Just try to explain that you cannot spend all your time on software development. Consider having your advisor present during the meeting to support this.

Show them the software, and ask them what they think about it, how they would hypothetically further develop it, what tips they can give you. Try to change the discussion to a constructive conversation where they help you and you can exploit their expertise. People generally appreciate when you value their knowledge, and are often happy to help.


Is it advisable to have a master or PhD thesis topic in mind before entering graduate school? This is a question that fascinates a lot of people prior to attending graduate school. The question whether one should already have chosen a thesis topic so that all efforts will be put on creating that thesis and more time can be used to explore that given topic.

Or a more basic question, is it feasible or even possible for someone to know exactly what their thesis topic would be before going into graduate school?

There may be advisers, departments, universities, countries (academic cultures) or fields where you need to come up with your own idea. I would not think this is the norm, however. In many cases Phd positions are financed by project funding so that the project is largely defined. This does not mean that the entire PhD is staked out in advance but the direction is. When you start a PhD you need an adviser which would imply that the field and direction of research of that adviser will determine the direction of your research. In many academic systems you directly apply to a PhD project which is pre-defined. I could probably come up with more cases that point away from come up with your own thesis topic.

That said, however, it is not inconceivable that someone could enter a system with an own idea but since coming up with great ideas commonly involves having a deep understanding of a field, and that in itself being one of the goals of a PhD, it would be a very rare case.

So depending where you are or where you are heading in the academic world, you do not need to know the thesis topic in advance. You will be looking for topics that may interest you and once finding positions announced decide if they fit your interests. It is rare that you find exactly what you dream of so many go for positions that are "close enough". Another point here is that you would probably not select a topic only, you would also consider the academic milieu and if you think it would be good for you and your endeavour into research.


Retrieving the references in a publication automatically This is probably not 100% on-topic here, but this site is closer to appropriate than others. Let me give it a try: I have collected about 50 publications relevant for a project of mine. For these publications, I have all the important information like author, title, journal, etc, but most importantly, I have the DOI for each paper.

I was asking myself, is it possible to retrieve the DOI of the references given in each publication through a web-service, an open database or any other service?

Background is that I would like to create a graph showing the connections between the selected publications. One semi-automatic approach which comes to my mind is to use Web of Science, go through the stack of my publications and copy the DOI of the listed references.

Any better ideas?

Both Scopus and Web of Knowledge contain all the information that you need and have APIs that can be used to automate access:

http://info.sciencedirect.com/scopus/scopus-in-detail/tools/api
http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/products/related/webservices/

I have never used them personally, but I hope this kind of information can be accessed using them. Each site indexes articles with their own unique key, so you can use those instead of DOIs if you only need them as unique keys.

Neither of them is free; you can probably access them through your university's subscription though. Be sure to check the usage limits.


Is it illegal to share publications not in the public domain with collaborators? Back in my university days, I got into the habit of saving papers I had to read to my hard disk. At first I did this simply to organize them more conveniently, and have quicker access to them.

However, my reasons for saving those papers to disk gradually changed as graduation approached. In the end, I saved a lot of papers, because at one point I realized that I had unrestricted, unlimited, free access to an absolutely fantastic source of richness, and that soon after graduation, I'd lose all of that.

Years later, I now frequently end up in discussions, or get asked questions, or otherwise end up at a point where a common access to one of those papers really helps to progress the discussion. I often just send that paper around without thinking twice about it, more because I believe that's how science should work than anything else.

I believe most of those papers are however not in the public domain, meaning, people not associated with a university or other institution that has access, can not access the paper without some payment to its official publisher.

So is any of this legal? If not, what are the possible repercussions for me personally, and for the people I sent it to?

I realize this is a touchy issue, and there are many initiatives to open scientific publications up for the general public. A related question would be: do these initiatives (like all of these) exist partly because of this reason?

So is any of this legal?

Unless your sharing falls under fair use in your particular country (and with the Internet, sharing online is a tricky business anyway), you should not share the papers.

If you want to share the papers, linking to the original source is the best option, and Google Scholar or other online repositories can get you pretty far with a lot of material.  If you can't find an online source, you are limited to providing a cite and hope that whoever wants to find the article can use their library to source it.

  If not, what are the possible repercussions for me personally, and for the people I sent it to?

Practically?  Unless you are sharing the files openly to a broad audience (i.e., so they are available online), no one is going to track you down to sue you.  I would avoid linking directly to articles that aren't behind a paywall, but emailing them to people you are collaborating with is unlikely to cause you any trouble.


In what order should I list bibliography entries by the same author? Suppose that a bibliography contains two entries by the same author, published in the same year (and for the sake of simplicity, with no coauthors). Which order should they be listed in? At least three possibilities come to mind, and as this link shows at least two are considered in practice:

(Alphabetical) In alphabetical order, depending on the titles of the papers.
(Historical) In order of appearence, taking into account months and days of publication.
(Logical) In the order which makes the most logical sense, so that if paper B uses results from paper A then A appears before B.

Which of these is the most widely accepted / the most formally correct?

One instance where this question often comes up for me in practice is when writting a CV. Is there a difference between a publication list of a single person and a bibliography that happens to include two or more papers by the same author?

For a CV, it seems that a widely accepted rule of thumb is that the order of publications is inverse-chronological, i.e. one lists the latest papers first, and moves on with older ones:

Author, title1, ..., 2018
Author, title2, ..., 2016
Author, title3, ..., 2016
Author, title4, ..., 2015
...

In case of journal articles, I've never encountered option 1. (alphabetical). (In fact, I've never encountered this case at all) For the others:

(Historical) When the citation style is (Author, year) - then the citations in the list of references are sorted chronologically, and in the text it might happen (and is fine) that e.g. (Author, 2018) will be cited before (Author, 1990).
(Logical) When the citation style is [1,2] - then the list of references is sorted by the order of appearance in the manuscript, e.g. Author's 2018 can be [1], and Author's 1990 paper can be [79] (or vice versa).

Although, each journal has its own policy regarding the citation style and ordering of the references in the reference list. If the journal has a LaTeX template, then you let it do all the work for you. In case of issues/inconsistencies - the editorial office handles the final typesetting.


Found a figure duplication problem in an already published paper I published a peer-reviewed article several years ago. Recently when I look back on my paper, I suddenly realized there had a figure duplication problem in one of the main figures (That main figure has more than 20 sub-figures, I only have a duplication problem in two cases). What is worse, the original data is lost due to the broken laptop (This is a great lesson I have learned) so the original data is not available anymore.

However, (1) I can run an experiment again to show the same outcome; (2) this mistake does not hurt the main conclusion; (3) and the result has been validated by other groups. I am wondering in such a situation, should I talk with my mentor, rerun the experiment, update the figure, and ask for a correction for this paper. Or I should ask for a withdrawal since I can not provide the raw data anymore (I have seen the author retract their papers because of unavailable raw data e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2045615/).

You should definitively discuss this with your mentor, who presumably knows the conventions of your field. If conventions or journal policy are still unclear at that point you can always check with an editor of the journal what course of action they do prefer.
Take the following with a dose of salt, because my physics perspective probably isn't to be trusted in your case given that you linked to a medical journal. However, I'd think that if you can repeat the experiment (with proper approvals in place) to fix the mistake, and the mistake doesn't invalidate the main conclusion, then an erratum/corrigendum is probably the better outcome for all parties. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has some guidelines on how journals should handle corrections and retractions, which  seems to agree with my position:

Pervasive errors can result from a coding problem or a miscalculation and may result in extensive inaccuracies throughout an article. If such errors do not change the direction or significance of the results, interpretations, and conclusions of the article, a correction should be published that follows the minimum standards noted above.
Errors serious enough to invalidate a paper's results and conclusions may require retraction. However, retraction with republication (also referred to as “replacement”) can be considered in cases where honest error (e.g., a misclassification or miscalculation) leads to a major change in the direction or significance of the results, interpretations, and conclusions.

If even pervasive errors can be handled as an erratum, probably your case can too. Finally, here's an example of an erratum fixing a rather large image duplication problem by repeating the experiments. Also see this Retraction Watch post.


Can I cite a secondary source if the primary source is available? Assume that there are two papers A and B that give two different approaches to the same problem.

Paper A. This paper presents the method I used in my assignment.

Paper B. As reported in paper C (and some other sources):
  Paper B improves and combines the ideas in papers D and E. Without understanding D and E, it would be hard to understand B.
  Paper F shows that the method in paper B is no longer good/usable/recommended.

Reading all of papers B, D, E, F would take me a lot of time.

I did not use the method in paper B, but it is still part of the literature and has historical significance.
In the background/literature review section,

Should I omit paper B in my report (background section), or
Should I cite paper C as a secondary source?

The norm for secondary sources varies by field, and it is generally suggested that you follow what is normal in your field.

As I note in my answer to this related question, Should I cite a paper for its literature review? - some institutions insist on secondary citations, like Columbia, while some style guides (APA) permit secondary source citation. IEEE on the other hand explicitly calls out not to use secondary sources, period.

If you were in any of the fields I work in (computer science, psychology, HCI, etc.) which use APA/IEEE styles, I would suggest a third option: cite paper B if it is important, and don't accept that you first have to read the whole chain of papers leading up to B. Saying "B is important for [reason], and shows an important historical method that is not used here", and cite it. You don't have to understand every aspect of it in detail  to get the gist and determine if it should be cited or not.


On math papers and general questions they need to address If you proved something new in math and want to publish it (or even before you've started proving that and before you have thoughts on publishing anything), do you need to answer questions like "why do people care about what I proved?", "why is this topic interesting?", "how does this fit into a broader picture?", "what theoretical implications does this have?", etc.? I have some background in linguistics, and in linguistics, from what I understand, it is essential to answer these questions (even before you've decided to work on some research question/problem). But I've taken a look at several math papers from arxiv, and I didn't seem to see those questions addressed. So does nobody care about them in math, and as long as you proved something new (or gave a better proof of an old result), this itself is considered good enough?
If so, then I guess this question can be extended to "how do you choose a good research question in math?", but maybe it should be a separate question.

Yes you do have to answer these questions, and math papers do.  But you may not have noticed it as a non-mathematician, because math research is extremely specialized, and the broader picture will still be incomprehensible to you (or to most mathematicians).
Suppose I wanted to read Wiles's paper providing the final piece of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.  I would have to spend about 2 years of intense study to get to the point of being able to even understand what the basic theoretical constructs of the paper are, and I'm closer to this area of mathematics than 70% of mathematicians.
I might add, as is customary for more important papers, Wiles's paper pretty extensively addresses the bigger picture.  Less important papers will have a smaller, more specialized audience, and there is no need to explain the picture as broadly.
One does not choose research questions in math; one chooses research questions on Glauznov operators on Tchaikovsky cohomology of Rubenstein spaces (example completely made up using names of Russian composers).  Naturally, one explains the motivation for one's research for (the 10) other people working on Glauznov operators on Tchaikovsky cohomology of Rubenstein spaces, and the papers that introduced Glauznov operators, Tchaikovsky cohomology, and Rubenstein spaces all explained the motivations for these ideas.  If you think your paper is important, your introduction will also explain the implications of your work for the overall study of Tchaikovsky cohomology of Rubenstein spaces.
I've done a cursory look into the historical chain of ideas that leads to my research.  It's about 15 layers of theoretical constructs from something a non-mathematician might think about.  About 200 years ago, some mathematicians took a naive question and created a theoretical construct to help understand it.  They found some facts about this theoretical construct, and some other mathematicians created a further theoretical construct to understand these facts about the first theoretical construct.  Repeat about 15 times to get to my research.  (Take a different chain of about 25 layers of constructs to get to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.)


How do so many people here on Academia.SE, and in general, afford lavish higher education programs? I graduated last year with a BS in Computer Science. I do not come from a particularly wealthy family, (very low middle class), and was only able to afford my education via school loans/scholarships and working low-wage jobs, with no support from my family or anyone else. I realize some scholarship/loan programs extend into grad school. But I don't think those cover all costs.

Now I'm lucky enough to have a decent-paying salary in industry, along with benefits and living on my own, and I'm thinking one day (sooner rather than later) I'd like to try my hand at research or continue my degree, but these things cost money, in addition to my regular living expenses.

I read posts here often about academic people being in positions of choosing between these crazy research grad programs, some in Japan, or Ireland (while they currently live in the U.S./U.K.) then moving around between countries/universities often for their SO's education or to pursue a new research interest. I'd love to live somewhere else for a while and do research.

I'm becoming increasingly jealous of the people with these opportunities - assuming I were to even get into one, how can I afford these programs, especially given the fact that people working in/during Academia generally don't make as much as those in Industry?

Is it simply a matter of having a wealthy family/connection or saving up? Am I missing something here?

Bachelor and Master degrees are a lot cheaper in Germany. In fact, they are mostly free (you need to organize and pay for your housing and living). For a PhD you don't pay but get paid, often with employee status, but sometimes with a stipend instead. So financial issue pose significantly less of a constraint compared to the USA.


Is citing only high-impact articles in my publication ethical? This question is related to the articles that are often cited in introduction or motivation section of any article. Often while writing an introduction, I mostly cite the famous works that are relevant to my work. Some other time I also cite the recent works from high-impact journals that are relevant to my work. This is primarily because these works are more show-cased and are widely available.

However, even though these works are relevant, is it ethical to just cite popular relevant works? What if an author published a more relevant work and it never got popular because he published in a low-impact journal? (This is refutable by saying: “Interesting work always gets cited and gets popular, irrelevant of the journal’s impact factor.”)

No, omitting work you know to be relevant simply because its publication venue does not have as high an impact factor is not ethical.

The purpose of citations is to point your reader to the relevant additional literature, give credit to the work that came before you, and position your work in the broader space.  Indexing the most prominent venues (and thereby reinforcing their prominence) is not one of their purposes.

If you read the paper, and it materially impacted your work, you should cite it. And you should cite other papers that are relevant.  You don't have to cite every thing that has ever been written on the topic (and as Googlebot mentioned, review articles are a great thing to cite), but quality of individual papers, not prestige of their publication venue, should be the deciding criteria.

  This is refutable by saying "Interesting work always gets cited and gets popular, irrelevant of the journals impact factor."

I do not believe that refutation, but even if it were true, it would not be true if authors approached citation as you are proposing.


What goes in a student success statement for a faculty application? One of my faculty position applications requires me to write a student success statement. I'm unsure what such a document should contain. Is this similar to a teaching statement?

I would recommend e-mailing a contact in the department and asking them. I expect that the answer would be "It's just a teaching statement", although it could be different.

Another thing you might do is search the university's website for "Student Success" and try to get a sense of what particularly the university means by this buzzword. Keep in mind that this requirement was possibly imposed by higher administration, and the people reading and evaluating your application might or might not have high regard for the intent behind it.

Edit: (too late for OP, but perhaps still of interest) From what I can tell, when universities talk about "student success" they are usually talking about efforts to make sure that students don't fall through the cracks. So in a "student success statement" you might talk about how you've gone out of your way to help students who are struggling.


What to do if a paper by respected authors has obvious problems, and I have told them so already? I have recently found a paper of a very respected research group in my field. In this paper, they have some theoretical calculations, and they are obviously completely wrong. Not in the sense that the results are wrong - the formulae themselves have nothing to do with what they want to describe. Imagine something equivalent to a paper in which they want to use the Poisson distribution, but their theoretical derivation is that of a Gaussian distribution, while in the text they claim that this is how the Poisson distribution is derived. It makes no sense if you know about it, but is still close enough that readers might not realize the difference. (Personally, I am really wondering how it got through the review process, but that's a different topic.)

What is interesting, however, is that the results they show are correct, i.e. they behave as if they had actually used (the equivalent of) the Poisson distribution instead of the equations they actually wrote down. It's possible that the actual work was done by someone else than the person writing the paper (who is the senior researcher), or maybe they tortured the wrong formulae until they behaved similarly to the correct ones, it's hard to say. But the experimental results are fitted correctly by their simulations, so technically one could argue that everything is fine.

However, recently the same authors published a review paper in which they basically copied the whole theoretical part of the old paper. Of course, it is wrong again. And I am really worried about this idea that completely wrong formulae get through the review process again and again, just because the author is well-known or the review process is a sham.

So I have contacted the authors and told them that I think there is a mistake there (of course I also suggested that I might have misunderstood something, but I know that I did not misunderstand anything). The response that I received had nothing to do with my original points, however. I replied again and emphasized that I believe that there is a mistake there, and the next response was very brief and did not really give a straight answer again. I feel like any further correspondence would only make them angry at me, if they aren't already.

So what should I do now? The papers are not widely cited, but my field is also something of a niche. They might still have some impact and might mislead others. The journal does not have a clear guideline with regards to errata, and since the fits are correct and only the theoretical derivation is wrong, I am also not sure how "relevant" this really is. For me, something like this is really important and annoying, but the journal might brush it off as unimportant details.

By the way, I do not actually want to start a fight with these researchers. If I write the journal now, and the journal then contacts them, I'm pretty sure they can put one and one together. This kind of bothers me. But this is not the most important point. For me, the death of science starts in the small things, and if I find an error, I want to do something about it.

(I should also mention that, yes, I did read the other questions that were similar. The answers were not satisfactory I thought, because they mostly assumed that the person asking the question might have misunderstood something. The questions were also about errors that invalidate the whole paper, while mine is a bit more subtle. The results are fine, but the foundation that is given is shaky, and they keep using that foundation in all their papers.)

Just a guess here, but I think you have done everything you can be expected to do and it up to the authors now. If they do something positive by your standards then all is well. But if they don't you aren't likely to get them to change unless they reach out to you in some way.

You could, of course, produce a study with the correct methodology and attempt to publish it as a confirmation of the results of the other group. That is worth doing in any case. But how much you want to criticize the "respected authors" in your work is a judgement call that you should make only rather late in your process, not before you begin.

I think that would be a good outcome for everyone, actually.

But don't let the inaction of others frustrate you. It is out of your hands what other people do and going up against an establishment might not be a good career move.

I'll add here that you might not be the only one to have informed them and that they are taking time dealing with it somehow. Anything from ignoring it to fixing it.


Assessing a penalty for inquiries regarding exceptions to deadline policy My problem: Though it's made explicitly clear to my students that I do not accept late work and do not grant extensions, I get at least 5-10 e-mails a week asking about extensions. I want to deter these emails, I feel obligated to respond, but my response is usually "See the syllabus regarding missed assignments". Dealing with this is costly in terms of time spent replying and clearing my inbox.

I make it very, very clear in my syllabus that I do not give extensions for assignments under any circumstances except limited administration excused cases and that I will not respond to requests (a blatant lie, I do respond because I care what they think of me and the course). I remind my students at the beginning and end of every class of their impending deadlines. I also regularly remind my students in class that deadlines matter and there are no extensions and no late work. My assignments are brief, and are available for over a week for the student to attempt, I don't feel my demands are unreasonable. I stress in the syllabus and in class that the way I accommodate the various life issues that cause missed deadlines is that I will drop their lowest X assignments, where X is a very generous number

My question: is it unfair of me to put a syllabus clause that specifies a minor penalty for e-mail inquiries regarding an exception to the deadline rule?
Something along the lines of "Each e-mail inquiry asking for an extension on a late assignment may be subject to a Z point penalty on your overall homework grade" where Z is not an unreasonable number.

Would I be a total jerk? Is there a better way of solving my problem?

A colleague had a phrase along the lines of:

"Any email question or request that is already answered in the course documentation will not be replied to".

Seemed to work well for him.

But I would not do any type of downgrading for that.

Students do talk to each other and it soon gets around "well don't send that, as it won't be answered.."

Relevant questions that did warrant a response did get answered to the student and, sometimes, repeated to the class as necessary.


How do you balance school and study? I know there's many different questions that involve having a life with a healthy work-life balance but my question is different: I'm looking for a balance between my school life(high school) and studying.

But I don't mean studying for school-related stuff. We usually have enough time to study in class and sometimes during lunch hours. I'm talking about my independent studies involving math and programming.

What's stopping me from doing so? Well, when I get home from school, I only have about 3 to 4 hours until I go to sleep so that leaves me with 3 hours at most to study when you count things like eating, bathing, etc(nothing unnecessary) which is way less than what I want. This is making me loathe school and not want me to pursue a college degree because I feel like if I had more time to do math and programming, I could accomplish much more than I am now and so school is preventing me from reaching my best self.

I have tried many things. First, I asked my math teacher to put a grade higher for math which she did(I'm in grade 9 but I do grade 10 math) but I find the classes way too easy(I dare say even easier than grade 9 math that my friends are doing) so I bring my own stuff to work on but for some reason, the teacher told me I can't be doing that even if I have done everything she's asked for and am not disturbing anyone else(I asked my teacher to put me up yet another grade but he said no because then when I reach grade 11, I won't have anything to do).

I try to do math in my other classes as well but if the teacher finds out(which, on many occasions, my teachers have), they would just get understandably mad so I need to be really careful to not get caught but that requires me to pay attention to my surroundings which decreases my focus to do math problems.

I also get tutored by a grad at my local university but we have at most two 2-hour classes per week so although it's definitely helping me, it's not that huge.

My question is, have you ever been in such a situation? If so, what did you do about it and how was the outcome?

Sorry this is so long, I tried to make it as short as possible:)

Thank you so much for your time!

P.S: I have the tag "work-life-balance" because it's the closest thing I could find to my question but if you think there's a better tag, please feel free to change it

(re-writing my answer after some further reflection)

It seems that right now, you have a burning passion to be studying Math and Computer Science, which is very commendable. However, my advice would be to spend some time now working on a longer-term plan for your future, and how your passion for these areas fits into it. At a basic level, I would suggest a key goal of this plan should be: 'how do I get to a position where I am doing what I am passionate about and getting paid a live-able wage to do it?'

So, your plan might be to go to a top tier college and major in CS, then go on to do a PhD, then become an academic in that area. Or, alternatively, it might be to major in that area and then go and work for a particular company in Industry that is doing work in an area that excites you, which is closely-related to those fields of study.

Then, once you have that longer-term plan, you can look more closely at the details of how can you get to that destination as quickly as possible and what the next step should be. You can also look more closely at what the requirements are for that next step. For example, you can (and should) reach out to some of the top 5 colleges you are planning to apply to, to see what their entrance requirements are.

You might find that they are looking for candidates that are fairly well-rounded and have shown excellence over a range of courses, not just one or two. You might also find that you would need to get a good score on an SAT-style standardized test, which might require knowledge beyond just Math and CS. If this is the case, then you know you can't afford to neglect your other courses. However, knowing that they are required for you to take the next step towards your longer-term goal should give you more motivation to study them, because now they are no longer pointless and irrelevant to your life.

On the other hand, you might find a college that would be willing to take you on sooner, if you are showing exceptional potential in one or two subjects, regardless of your performance in other areas. If that is the case, it might provide you with a quicker path to your destination and then you may be able to afford to slack off a bit more in those other subjects. But, I think it's very important that you verify this first. I.e. you need to do your research to see what options are available for your continued education and what they require.

You might also find that some colleges prefer candidates that can show evidence of extra-curricular activities, such as sports or music. If that is the case, then it might be well worth investing some of your extra time into some of those activities, as a means of helping you to reach your end goal, of being paid to do what you have a passion for. This is probably a healthy thing to do anyway, as it's good to have some balance in your life and make time for social activities and to keep yourself healthy.

So, in summary, give some serious thought to your longer-term plan of where you are going and how you are going to get there. Simply succumbing to the immediate burning desire to study Math and CS might not be the most effective way to realize your long term goals. Unfortunately, the education system has to cater for a very wide range of students and it's not always possible for it to be tailored perfectly for every individual. So, keep an eye on the longer term plan, so that even if you end up spending a year or two doing things that you would ideally not be doing, at least you know they are helping you work towards those goals. As you progress further in the education system, you will find you get more control and say over what subjects you study.

Good luck!


How to 'stay up to date' in your field? In academia, it's important to stay up to date with the latest 'hot' hypotheses in the your field. By 'hot', I mean the hypothesis that are most important/topical/relevant/popular. Perhaps the best way of staying up to date in a given field is by reading the literature. But  I'm wondering if there are any shortcuts? Are there any websites or papers that list the current most 'hot' hypotheses in each field? Google Scholar lists the most cited papers but I'm wondering if any resource goes one step further by listing topics?

I suggest some ways of becoming up to date:

Following the related top scientists and authors on that field on Google Scholar
Following the related top researchers and professors web sites and their research lab and groups publications.
Ask to contribute to work for or work with them.
Check related Linked-In groups to know more about academia and industry.
Visit their labs and talk with them.
Take part in the related conferences.
Check the related conference proceedings. For example, the IEEE web site has lots options to help you.


Sending a thank you e-mail to a professor as an external intern I'm new to Stack Exchange and I apologize if my etiquette on posting a question on this platform is "wrong".

So I took a course last year with a professor who was exceptional on her subject that gave me a better perspective on the subject, and ultimately got me a really good internship in the same domain.

How should I write her an e-mail (without being awkward) with a thank you note, as I wasn't in touch since the end of that course?

I think the proper answer is "Just Do It." She will be delighted to hear from you. Tell her about your current success. Open and close with "thanks". That's all it takes really.

Of course the things you say here would be excellent to include in your thank you.

However, sometimes a more formal letter is called for, sent by ordinary mail. That is up to you, of course.


How to connect with a professor? I am a mathematics undergraduate student from India and am presently in my final year. Being a bit less talkative, I had not had many conversations with my professors even though I had tried to maintain a good score in my subjects and learn them well. However nowadays,  when I am trying to apply for my master's I am becoming aware of the need for connections with your professors. However I am not sure how to do this and I have no clue whom to talk to. Isn't it awkward if you just go to a professor's office say Hi and try to start up a conversation?
   So can anyone suggest how to do this? Also is one year (or maybe a semester of 4 months as I have to start applying after that) enough to make good connections with professors?
Thanks in advance.

From my experience, whether you are outgoing or talkative is not that important. Myself and my former PhD supervisor would notice good students based off the academic merit even when they struggled with English as a second language or if they were a bit introverted. It is not necessarily about your ability to become friends but more your ability to produce quality research when you get trained. A good PhD supervisor will be able to recognise that.

That being said, depending on the culture of course, my approach was to first send an email outlining your interests and request either a brief discussion, or a coffee when they get a moment.

I don’t think it is awkward at all to knock on a professors door and say hi and tell them your intentions to become a researcher.

I am not familiar with how it works in India but in Australia, if someone knocked on my door and was interested in doing some research, I’d buy them a coffee and have a chat if I was free. Otherwise, tell them to come back another time.


Is this a realistic salary for China postdocs/ assistant professor? After reading this (Persistent issues with salary pay as a postdoc in China: What can I do?) I am kind of worried about working in China with regards to pay.

On paper, the type of salary advertised by some universities is fantastic for Chinese standards, even Western standards.

For instance, on https://www.mathjobs.org, postdoc/assistant professor salaries are in the range of 200k-500k RMB per year. For Chinese standard of living, this is considered very good.

Is this a realistic salary? Any experience to share? I am a foreigner and do not know much about Chinese academia.

Also, this salary does not tally with what I read elsewhere online and speaking with some Chinese friends. According to them, 100k RMB per year is more of the norm in China for postdocs and junior faculty. The Chinese universities do give some other benefits like housing/research funding though.

Thanks.

Please take my answer considering my declared conflict of interests:
I am the author of the linked question "Persistent issues with salary pay as a postdoc in China: What can I do?". Here we are within just 5 days from departure and still the payment issue is a monumental struggle.
I shall update my situation in that question soon after I am gone.

Now, directly answering your question. I have been offered another postdoctoral fellowship at CAS/Beijing for (theoretical) 250k/year. My friends in that same lab (lower salary, Chinese PhDs) claim they never had issues with being paid, stating they get 9k every month sharp.
I have done some research around and in fact standard salary is within 120-180K per year, with the problem that typically some 35k off the total are withheld until the very end. They claim this is to ensure you'll complete your "duties".
However postdoctoral salary offers are on stead increase, and now there are several places offering >200k per year, up to 280k per year as the highest I've heard.
Mind you that the Chinese system works on a local logic of "meritocracy" which is solidly based on rankings. This means that highest salaries are offered to the youngest PhDs coming from top-rank universities from 1st world countries who published in top IF journals. These individuals will get offered >250k per year as postdocs with a wide margin for negotiating extra benefits.
This brings me to another point: in Chinese culture negotiation is never-ending. This means a signed contract is just a formality symbolising your engagement, and from that moment on rules and terms can and will be moved around depending on a complex game of mutual understanding. This is called "guanxi" in business in China and can be very hard for foreigners to understand & digest.
Finally, this brings up again the issue I face while here. What was written in the original offer and even on contract may be quite different from reality. Carefully read the discussion at zhihu.com/question/52131526/answer/232792998. This is a top university in China offering attractive contracts for postdocs and locals are complaining they finally get a fraction of the promised figure. I know how it feels.

Realistically, expect earning anywhere between 8-12k a month depending on your "qualifications" for local standards, while working 10h per day 6x a week and being asked for more. Expect some dirty game around your payment, possibly involving potentially illegal activity (e.g. being asked to generate fake invoices).

All points taken, it boils down to your personal reasons for taking a postdoc, and why are you considering this and that lab, and why in China. If you're the kind of righteous law-abiding animal-loving individual who enjoys straightforwardness and openness, a healthy work-life balance, and drinking some wine with a good cheese on occasion... probably coming to China might not be a good idea. If you're seeking a stable salary pay and a professional work environment towards erecting as a established professional, probably taking a postdoc may not be the shortest nor surest path.
I don't think you should focus your worries on salary, all the more in China where it may vary without warning.


How to name and cite different versions of Microsoft Kinect? There are at least two types of Kinect cameras, one is called Kinect for Xbox 360 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect#/media/File:Xbox-360-Kinect-Standalone.png)
and another one is called Kinect for Xbox One (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect#/media/File:Xbox-One-Kinect.jpg).

First, do they have shorter names (eg. Kinect v1 and Kinect v2) widely accepted in the research community? Moreover, how would you cite them in a scientific paper?

I'm now sure if this question is more appropriate for UX stackexchange or for the academica stackexchange. Kindly let me know in the comments. Thank!

It is commonly called Kinect V1 and V2. In the research community, it is widely accepted, just because it is their name, example here.

Note that it is not the true name, as you stated. The best thing I could think of, is to highlight at the beginning of your article (or in the part you spoke about Kinect) that Kinect V1 refers to Kinect for XBox 360 and Kinect V2 refers to Kinect for XBox One (note there is a standalone version for Windows).


Is it frowned upon to request solutions manuals from the author? Maybe the answer to this is probably as vague as "it depends." I'm a graduate student trying to pick up some extra math skills. I'm reading a couple of texts and attempting the exercises but the difficulty/specificity of some exercises is such that I fear somewhat frequently asking for guidance would be burdensome to whoever I ask for help (peers, professors, my advisor, etc.). My preferred system would be to try my hand at a collection of problems for a few days, and check my thinking against a solutions manual (consulting others if I encounter something I really don't understand).

Some authors encourage instructors to contact them for solutions manuals if they are planning on teaching with their book. As a self-studier, should I generally expect a similar offer extends to me, or would it be frowned upon to ask for a solutions manual?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Your request, as a self-studier, to obtain the solutions manual seems perfectly reasonable, and I wouldn't hesitate to make it.

It's true that your request might not be successful, because, as some commenters suggested, the solutions manual may be kept away from students to prevent cheating.  It may be hard for them to verify that you are not a student trying to cheat.

However, I see no harm in asking.


What do I do as a depressed and incompetent TA? My mental health is declining and as a result I haven't been a good TA.  For example I let my students out of section early because I was too tired to present some of the material, and I did not understand some of my section notes because another TA prepared them, and I didn't read them in advance.

I also have trouble helping students during office hours, and often ask students to repeat themselves, and I don't do adequate preparation (by reading the solution sets in advance).  I often don't know how to answer questions and I ask the students to collaborate with each other and solicit help from people who have already solved the problem.  I wasn't the best TA to begin with, but now that I'm depressed, I am basically useless, and embarrassingly so.

I feel pretty bad about this and I am also terrified that my students will complain to the professor, who is friends with my advisor.  What should I do?  I haven't told the professor or anyone about my diagnosis (of bipolar disorder).  And I am afraid to talk to the people at the school counseling center, because they might force me to take time off (this happened to me in college), and I can't really do that in grad school without irreparably burning bridges.

I utterly disagree with Mad Jack. You do not need to resign and by resigning, you set yourself up for a future where you will think of resigning every time you have a task that you do not think you will be able to complete to the high standards you set for yourself.

Try to disaggregate the two things -- the depression and the incompetence. If you are merely incompetent (or not as competent as you would like to be), read the rest of this answer. If your depression is putting you at risk to yourself or others (and will not be alleviated by acceptance that one cannot be competent at all things all the time), then perhaps Mad Jack's advice is warranted.

Now, about incompetence.

The reality is that you cannot be good at everything you do. Not all classes go well - even with the best of intentions. Sometimes, a class just fails. Sometimes it's your fault, sometimes it's the students, sometimes it's a combination. There are many classes that I've wished that I could have quit teaching halfway through.1

Sure, after you finish this semester your TA evals might be bad, they might be scorchingly bad. But that's ok. You fulfilled your obligation -- poorly, perhaps -- but you fulfilled them. The students themselves will recover. It's terrible that we can't all be always be stellar teachers, but we're human beings. You're just a blip -- one section of one of the 32 classes they take at the university.

You've found out that teaching does not come naturally and that teaching is hard. This is a good life lesson. It's part of your graduate education.  You will get better at teaching the more you do it -- or at least figure out how to work around your incompetencies. We all do.

1. In the interest of full disclosure, I also struggle from depression and so this is written to you from the position of a peer. This advice is of course null and void if you at risk of entirely melting down. Your first duty is to yourself. But only you can know how close you are to endangering your own health for the sake of the class -- not anonymous internet peers.

Anecdote: I was forced to TA a class on a topic that I knew nothing about when I was a grad student. It quickly became clear that the even the most basic students knew infinitely more than I did about the subject. I was a terrible, terrible TA but my professor worked around me, the students learned to never come to my sections or office hours, and somehow we made it work. Now every time I get assigned a terrible TA, I believe it to be karmic retribution for my past sins. So talk to your professor. S/he may have also been a terrible TA and may be more than willing to work with you on this.

Finally, mood disorders like depression and bipolar disorder are not incompatible with academia. There are many successful academics with tenure (Kay Redfield Jamison and Emily Martin have both written books on their own experiences with bipolar disorder). Yes, during our trough periods things can be hard to do, but when the fog lifts we tend to be more productive. I've used that successfully to write two books, publish numerous articles, blah blah. Fortunately I'm at a university that allows for some umm ... eccentrism in the faculty body. I am three sigmas on that scale. :-)


How can/should I indicate that it's okay to use open access content in a paper? Suppose I want to reuse some substantial piece of content - say, a figure1 - from someone else's paper in my own scholarly work. If the other paper is under a traditional license, I'll have to obtain explicit permission from the copyright holder (usually the publisher), and then when I include the figure in my own work, I can say "Figure from reference [x], used with permission."

However, if the other paper is under an open access license or is in the public domain, and my own work will be released under a compatible license, I don't need to explicitly contact the copyright holder to ask for permission to use their content. When I attribute the figure in my work, can I still say "used with permission"? Legally speaking, I do have permission to use it by virtue of the license under which it is released (or lack thereof, if public domain), but including that phrase makes it sound like I've received an explicit statement of permission from the copyright holder, and I wouldn't want to give a misleading impression about that.

If I shouldn't say "used with permission," what would be a suitable replacement? If it's under a Creative Commons license, for example, I could say something like

  Figure from reference [x], used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license

but that seems a little verbose. Is there a better alternative?

I'm also interested in how to handle this when the content is in the public domain, or is under a much more permissive open access license (perhaps one whose attribution requirement is merely "you must credit the author"). I understand that I'm not legally required to include any notice saying that I'm allowed to use content under such a license. But for this question I'm more interested in the ethical obligations that a reader might perceive.

1Even though a single figure would often be considered fair use. But let's pretend for this question that whatever I want to reuse is enough that fair use doesn't apply.

This question concerns a similar situation, but is asking about whether it is legal to reuse content at all, whereas I'm asking about how to properly show that it is legal to do so, after it's been established that no explicit permission is necessary.

Almost all CC licenses include an attribution clause. As of the 4.0 version, this means:

  Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Clicking the "appropriate credit" shows some more information:

  If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other slight differences.

So the easiest way to satisfy this is, indeed, to say

  Figure from reference [x], used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Where your reference should contain the rest of the information, including a link. If you're pressed for space, you can abbreviate the license (CC BY 4.0), or put the text in a footnote.


GRE exams for those seeking a Masters in Computer Science Since the Computer Science GRE exam was dropped, I have to take the normal GRE exam (sighs).  I've looked at a few sample questions, and it's something I'm just not good at.  I have a Bachelors in Computer Science with a 3.1 GPA (out of 4.0)  I have two core questions:

How well do I have to do to get accepted into most decent universities for a Masters in Computer Science?
What is the best way to study and practice for GRE exams for a C.S. major?

UPDATE (02/18/2015):

I got my scores in for GRE. Verbal: 153, Quantitative: 160, Essays: 4.0. I'm not sure how good this is or not yet.

I studied for about 4 months. First 2 months it was little studying every week. The third month was studying every other everyday. The first 2 weeks of the 4th month studying everyday. The last 2 weeks were heavy studying.

How well do you have to do on the GRE?  That depends entirely on how much weight the admissions committee gives to GRE scores.  Some universities may not really care.  Others may use GRE's as part of the screening process.  Universities have not adopted a universal policy as to how GRE scores should figure into admission decisions.
It doesn't matter if you are a CS major or any other major -- general principles of good study techniques for the GRE hold true for everybody.  If you are an independent learning who is self-motivated and skilled at structuring your own study, then you can probably just get some good test prep books.  If you need more structure, then you might benefit from paying for a course.


Protocol for checking in on a letter of recommendation more than once? Quick background: I am applying to grad school and asked two professors from undergrad and a current work supervisor for letters of recommendation and they all said yes.  I asked about a month and a half out from the due date, gave them all updated resumes/statement of purpose/any other information or paperwork they asked for. My supervisor got the letter finished rather quickly and sent me an email to let me know. About two weeks out from the application due date I sent a brief reminder/follow up email to my two professors ("just a reminder this is the due date, let me know if you need any more information" etc). Last week (about a week before the due date) one of the professors got back to me to let me know she had finished/submitted the letter. The due date for my application is in a few days and I have not heard from the second professor.

My question is: I have already sent an initial follow up email for a letter of recommendation. Is it considered rude or pestering to send a second email? I have no qualms on how to word this email - I will still be very polite and accommodating of course - but I understand professors are very busy. I don't want to be a bother but also I need this third letter of recommendation and this professor willingly agreed to help me. Is there a protocol for a second round of follow-ups for letters of recommendation?

No, it will probably not be considered rude to repeatedly ask for a letter.  The professor agreed to write the letter and clearly understands what it is and why you need it.  If it is a few days before the due date, they haven't turned in the letter and they haven't responded to your last email, they evidently need the repeated reminders.  I honestly think it is more likely that they will be sincerely grateful that you are helping them to complete a task they agreed to do than that they would be even a little bit annoyed with you.  But if they do get a little bit annoyed with you -- okay, maybe that's what helps them write the letter.  It would be highly unprofessional to respond to this kind of behavior from a student by writing a worse letter or not writing it at all, and I honestly don't know of any professors who would behave in that way.

Finally, let me say: faculty turning in letters late is such a common thing that in many circles at least there is a de facto grace period for faculty to turn in letters which is up to a week or two after the actual, posted application deadline.  As a student it is hard for your mind to really be eased by knowing this, I expect, but it helps to understand the faculty mentality: if I turn in a letter two days after a deadline, I would actually be annoyed if it were not considered.  (And I would know it was my own damned fault, but I would be annoyed anyway.)

Good luck, and keep at them.


My supervisor wants to put someone else as first author on one of two papers when I have done most of the work on both. What should I do? I have completed experimental research on a novel topic. I was the instigator of the direction of the research and the one to find the results. Then, theoretical work was performed to support my experiments. While the theory confirmed all my work, there was nothing original or new in the theoretical support. I wrote the paper and drafted the manuscript.

The group supervisor wants the theory paper to have the theory researcher as first author. The group leader's arguments is that "there will be two papers, so share the first authorship".

I think this is unfair. Why should I have to share my work just because there will be two papers out of it?!

I am asking for guidance on this. In particular as scientific supervisors, is it fair to put the main researcher as an "et al", just because someone else in the group has not got a paper?

Generally speaking, it is infeasible for us to judge whether authorship or the order of authors on any given project is "fair", as all of those depend a great deal on discipline and the particularities of any given project.

That being said, from the little text you provide the 1/1 split does sound fair. There are two papers coming out of the work, one experimental and the other theoretical. The person who did the experiments first-authors the experimental one, the "theory guy" leads the theory paper. So far, so good, I would say.

You say that there was "nothing new" in the theoretical work. This seems highly unlikely to me, what would even go into the theory paper if that was indeed the case? In general, providing a solid theoretical basis to experimentally observed results is a very valuable contribution, that you maybe need to learn to value higher. Sometimes the theoretical methods to achieve this are straight-forward, but this does not diminish their value for your project.


Is omitting a school with blank transcript considered unethical in academia? Suppose one was accepted to a school of higher education, but due to personal reasons withdrew three weeks after the beginning of the first semester without registering for and attending courses. Suppose he is now reapplying to other schools and has to submit all transcripts from the universities attended. Is including information about such a school relevant on an application? There is no transcript to submit, and no grades.

If you did not enrolled/registered yourself, you did not attend that school of higher education. You could maybe insert this information of being accepted by that school but never registered somewhere in your submissions if there is such space for extra info on the Education section.


How to write a methodology chapter in a masters thesis Is there a standard way to set up a methodology chapter, other than just listing equipment and explaining the execution of method and analysis?

I find this type of set up to look childish and too simple, in a way. Maybe I only need a good example of a preferable layout.

How you have described the methodology section is in general, precisely what you should do.  One source for assistance with writing this section is from the University itself - they will often have a suggested outline.

For example, Monash University has a webpage Discuss your methodology page, have a general outline for a scientific-based thesis methodology, such as:

  rationale for choosing materials,  methods and procedures
  details of materials, equipment and procedures that will allow others to

  replicate experiments
  understand and implement technical solutions

They also have examples for other disciplines, but a strong suggestion is to read and learn from other dissertations from your field - also, ask your advisor if they have examples.

A good methodology should be clear and concise and written in a way that someone else could replicate your experiments and get about the same results (or at least, similar results) and have an understanding of why the equipment and method was chosen.


Can an unpublished but accepted article be used for an MSc degree? I have a student who is doing his MSc in CS. When he was finishing his courses we managed to present an article and it got accepted for a conference in the field. This conference is going to be in September approximately, and the proceedings will be out in March of the following year.
He wants to present this article as the research dissertation that is one of the requisites for obtaining the MSc degree. Would we have any problems if we publish this article in the database of our Faculty, because this could be available months before the proceedings appear? What can we do in this situation?
I was thinking that maybe the student could make a short paper describing the principal findings of the research we did, citing this unpublished work, and present that to our Faculty repository; would that be feasible? I personally do not believe that the student should have to do another research project, because he already got this one accepted.
Any advice?

This will depend on the conference and on local copyright laws.  I can't speak to the local laws, since I don't know what local is for you.
You may be asked to sign a copyright form, and that form will have the answer for you.  For instance, it may clearly state that the paper in its exact form is not allowed to be reproduced in any way (although I strongly doubt it would, that's a weird thing for an academic paper).  My thesis was paper-based in the sense that it contained literally the papers I wrote and had accepted, in camera-ready form.  We were allowed to do this because the various publishers considered this to be appropriate use (in fact, my copyright forms all explicitly stated that inclusion in thesis documents is acceptable).
If you are not asked to sign anything about copyright, and laws in your country agree, you retain all rights and may do whatever you want.


Same presentation topic for different conferences Is it possible to give the same presentation, e.g., invited talk, tutorials, and like (same topic, slight change in abstract and other parts) in different conferences? Is there any plagiarism issue like with papers?

It's entirely reasonable to give the same (or nearly the same) presentation for different audiences.  This frequently happens with invited talks, which are often expected to present a survey rather than a particular new result.  Thus, there is no expectation of novelty and thus no issue with plagiarism.

If you are presenting on a paper, on the other hand, the talk should be novel simply because it is about a paper that is novel.


Course design: basics first or teach "as you go" I am going to offer an elective course which I am free to design. The topic is a bit special, but we can assume I give a robotics course. I will teach a fair amount of probability theory which I need to solve problems in robotics. Therefore I have to teach both and there are, I think, two ways:
1. Teach probability theory first, then robotics.
This is what all my professors did as I was studying. The problem here is, that there is no concrete application to robotics at the time I teach probability theory. Examples are "made up" and so is the homework.
2. Teach robotics and introduce the necessary probability theory when needed.
The students see immediately why it is necessary to learn probability theory. They can directly apply the theory to solve their real problem in robotics. However, it interrupts the robotic topic. The first time I need (parts of) probability theory takes two weeks. Then we would do robotics again and apply the new concepts. Then, after 2/3 of the course comes probability theory again, as we need a further different topics to solve more problems. Maybe once more.
Are there any good resources on howto teach courses like this?

I assume you know your students better than I do, but this would depend to a certain amount on what sorts of things they expect. At base, it seems like they are expecting/wanting a course in robotics. Starting out with something different might disappoint them and turn them against you in a way that could be hard to "make up" later. This implies doing statistics/probability "just in time".
However, students who are used to, and comfortable with, highly theoretical courses might be fine with "basics first."
But another alternative is to give them, early on, a set of readings on probability that you advertise as being essential a bit later in the course, while you focus on the robotics part. The better students might spend some time scanning, at least, those readings, making it easier to do the probability stuff when it becomes essential. You might even be able to find a vehicle for responding to questions on the readings without cutting too much into the time you spend on robotics early on.
And, of course, if their expectation is that robotics is just "applied probability" then theory first would likely be better.
But, think first of the student expectations and work to satisfy that as much as is reasonable.


How often do Ph.D. holders hold faculty positions in different, but related, fields from their Ph.D.? This is something that I thought about a while back when reading (I forget where) about someone who held a Ph.D. in chemistry, but focused on physical chemistry throughout his Ph.D. years and actually became a physics professor.

I was wondering how often this happens. For instance, do electrical engineering Ph.D. holders with very physics-oriented research become physics professors ever? What about vice versa? Or what about, for instance, applied mathematicians specializing in cosmology. Do they ever become physics professors?

More important question here: does this open up the possibility in which one can apply for faculty positions in multiple departments, thereby increasing one's chances of a faculty position? Or does the interdisciplinary nature of it actually limit the candidate's faculty choices?

Note, when I say someone is a professor in another field, I mean, for example, they received a Ph.D. from a department of chemistry and were subsequently employed by a department of physics.

For interdisciplinary researchers, this sort of thing can happen fairly often.  For example, if you are a chemist working on ecological applications, you might well have started out in a chemistry department and end up in an ecology department, or vice versa.  This happens even more so when dealing with disciplines that may be categorized differently by different institutions: for example, is work on medical devices part of biology and the natural sciences faculty or part of electrical or mechanical engineering?  Generally, however, if it's going to happen, there is at least some logical trail that you can see how the faculty member got from point A to point B.


What are the main practical complications/challenges to using Linux as your full time OS, particularly as faculty in Biology/Ecology? I am an ecology post-doc and considering switching from Windows to Linux for my main work computer (I am not a mathematical modeller).  I have used Linux before and I am aware that, with effort, one can accomplish most any task in Linux that one can in Windows but I have not tried to convert my whole work computer over.  And sometimes making a specific type tool/application work or share files with colleagues' tools (likely Windows based) can take a lot of effort/time or be error prone.  As academics we all have limited time to troubleshoot issues that might appear optional.

So, my question here is for people who have made this switch or seriously considered it: what are the specific main challenges you encountered (which types of applications/tools or other issues) in making this switch?

I'm especially interested in word processing, spreadsheets, databases, statistical software, plotting and presentation software, reference management, communication, and any other applications that allow you to fulfill key responsibilities as biology faculty. I know there are various ways to port/emulate/etc Windows applications into Linux (e.g., Wine), but I'm interested in approaches that don't simply use that for every application I'm used to in Windows. And I'm asking about what challenges you had transitioning (or why you choose not to) rather than just asking for a list of Linux applications that fulfill these needs (that said, do mention specific applications if you think they are less well known).

(I'm trying to keep this narrow and not about the benefits of either OS over the other - no need for a Linux/Windows flame war.  I've also tried to prevent this from being an opinion oriented question by asking for specific problems, but please let me know if I should modify to improve further).

This question might well be closed as off-topic, but here is my experience as a mathematics professor who has used Linux on his primary desktop machine at work (and on my computer at home and on my personal laptop) for 20 years.  Before that I ran Solaris on Sun workstations.  Before my academic career, I worked as a Unix system administrator in the 1980s, so I had a lot of background.

Your IT department might be unwilling to allow you to run Linux on a university-owned computer and might be unwilling to allow you to connect your personally-owned Linux machine to the campus network.
You may be required to purchase university-owned computers from a particular vendor whose hardware might not work well with Linux.
Your institution might require you to use specific software that only runs on Windows.  For example, earlier versions of the widely used Banner ERP system couldn't be used in Linux. I used to have to authorize purchases that were made with my department's purchasing cards using a Windows only software package (actually a web app that required Internet Explorer 6 and wouldn't work with Firefox or Chrome.)
You may have trouble interchanging MS Word Documents or Excel spreadsheets with Windows users (Libreoffice is pretty good but still not perfect.)
You may not be able to use licensed software (such as SAS, MATLAB, etc.) that the university has site licensed for Windows.
Your students and colleagues will probably be using Windows machines and you won't have an environment that perfectly duplicates their setup.  This can make it difficult to reproduce problems that they have, even with free software.  For example, I recently had an issue using Octave (an open-source MATLAB like language.)  My code ran fine in Octave under Linux but failed in Octave under Windows when a colleague used it.  This turned out to be due to a bug in the math library that was used on the Windows build of Octave.
Your IT department will almost certainly not provide any support for problems that you might have with your Linux system- you'll be on your own to resolve any issues that come up.

I've always made sure to maintain access to a Windows machine for this few times when I really need it, but in recent years that's been extremely rare.   I've got a university-owned Windows laptop that I haven't powered up since July, and I don't miss it.  Despite dealing with many of the issues above, I've had a very good experience using Linux and wouldn't consider switching back.


My research was plagiarised and won best paper of a conference. How to proceed? I am a PhD student in electrical engineering, and I recently found out a published paper from another research group which I am collaborating through a joint project using exactly my idea and the data that I collected.

I don't have any public evidence that I was working on it, but since it is a joint project, the other research group was aware of my research and my ideas.

On their paper, they don't mention my work, they don't acknowledge and they didn't ask permission to use the data that I collected. They had access to my data because I needed to use their equipment to collect the data.

The paper that they published won the best overall paper of the conference and they got a prize of €2000.

I contacted the head of the research group to make them withdraw their paper, but they don't agree, they claim they are doing something different, but they suggested to add myself as one of the authors (even after the paper was published), which I don't agree at all since I didn't work on this paper.

I have evidences through emails, meetings and presentations that they were aware of my research. I would like advice on how to proceed.

Talk to your advisor. If you have compelling evidence they may be willing to stake their reputation and research collaboration with this group in order to get them to at least acknowledge your contribution after the fact. Again, you need to be prepared to hear that your advisor will be very limited in what they can do apart from trying to straighten things out informally. Given that papers usually take several months to write, I’m curious to know why no one knew about this happening.

Ownership of the idea is going to be hard to argue at this point given that the paper has already been published (and has won an award!). It won’t be withdrawn, it probably can’t be withdrawn since it’s already been published, not a reversible action in most cases. The authors could say that you misunderstood, that they independently came up with the idea, or any number of plausible sounding defenses.

Your best plan forward is perhaps to be involved in follow up work, and be more careful with this group who’s acted in an unethical and mean way.

Finally, if you really feel like you would like to escalate it further, reach out to your university's ombudsperson, vice-dean for research matters, or department head (depending on your university's structure the point of contact differs). Again, since you say you don't have public evidence of precedence, I doubt there's much they could do, but at the very least that would be the correct order of doing things.

In particular, I would most definitely not go to the conference chairs, publicly post something online, or escalate this further before consulting with the appropriate people. You would be burning serious bridges by doing something like that, and chairs/editors are very much averse to getting involved in such things if they don't have to. You may end up looking like some bitter person who sees a colleague's best paper and wants in on the action after the fact.


Accepted in MSc program but not invited for a visit? I tried looking this up online and could not anything related to this, so figured asking here would make sense. Kind of related to this. Here is the story:

I live in US (not an International Student), and applied to few graduate programs in engineering (MSc program). Last week of January, I got an acceptance letter from my top choice with no funding currently available (my top choice because it has consistently been top 3 in its program for the last decade). Since this school was out of state I have never visited and I emailed the coordinator asking how to go about scheduling a visit. The reply said the department would invite selected students to campus for campus visit events.

Well, I wasn't invited for campus visit. So now I called the advisor and essentially stated "before making a decision I would like to visit the campus see how I fit in. What would be the best way, to make sure I get to talk to someone." I kind of emphasized I don't want to show up there unannounced and not be able to  communicate to the faculty. The reply was that they had an event couple weeks ago, which was invite only and if I want to visit the campus I need to reach out to the faculty and schedule something with them on my own. This particular part  kind of got me irritated. This advisor also stated no reimbursement will be available (this is okay as I am currently working but some sort of reimbursement helps, plus I live in west coast and school is in mid west which would be an expensive trip). Every other school I have been accepted, have stated that they encourage me to visit and to contact them if I want to visit and offered some sort of reimbursement.

This is the highest ranked school I have been admitted so far. Earlier, I would have loved to go here without question but am not so sure any more.

Am I just being overly sensitive here, or is this pretty common? I feel like why would you accept me so early, and not even be courteous enough to schedule a visit (wasn't even asked  about campus tour)? Again, I'm not complaining about reimbursement, I can accept that. So now, should I contact each professor who I would be interested in working with or take this as cautionary sign on how life would be when I get there?

I was accepted into multiple MS programs in math. None of them invited me for a reimbursed visit. When I applied for a PhD, every program gave me an all expenses paid tour. It has been my experience that if you are an MS student, you are not going to be cared for much. If you are a PhD student you will get much more in terms of "acceptance perks."

That being said, they should at least be willing to guide you to the proper resources for learning more about their school. If it was me, I would not accept the offer from your first choice. They do not sound easy to work with.

I would reach out to a few people that you want to work with at your first choice school. If they also blow you off, that would be a bad sign. A really bad sign. A degree from a middle of the ranking program is worth more than five blown years on trying to get an MS at a high rank institution and banging your head on the wall. My experience is that it is much better to go to a school where they care about you and you will be happy than to go to a school where they do not even know you and are totally unwilling to help you.


What can stop me from getting a PhD degree? I am mid stage PhD student. I have done qualification exam and course work etc and from last around one year I am working on a one research problem. There is small progress on that problem, but till needs to add more things to make it publishable. I am also aware that in the field I am working research gets their PhD with 1-2 papers and even I have heard they can award me a PhD without even a single publication ( I have seen few online ). Some senior researcher told that TAing etc also a part of work and should be considered as a integral part of PhD.

Question : Is it possible to get a PhD without a single publication? What can stop me from getting a PhD? Other than If I show a bad behaviour etc

It is pretty rare that one gets a doctorate without publications and/or an acceptable dissertation. What is "common" in your field has little relevance to your particular situation. You need to make your advisor and maybe a committee satisfied that you have done work of sufficient quality. Your requirements are local to a University, or, perhaps, to the regulations of a particular country.

Serving as a TA may get you better recommendations for an academic job after you finish, but have little relevance for the doctorate itself.

Yes, bad behavior would stop you most likely, but you need to focus on the research that leads to acceptance.

Complaining to a supervisor that "others have done it" will likely get you precisely nowhere - if not set back.

In another question here you have indicated you are in your fourth year. This makes me wonder whether you are getting sufficient guidance from your PhD supervisor/advisor. If not, you might try to improve your relationship with him/her in hopes of obtaining the guidance you need. Four years isn't yet excessively long in the current situation, but you should  assess your progress and make sure you and your advisor agree on a plan for completion.


How to avoid using "I" in a research paper in case of referring to my previous work? As I know, using "I" and "we" should be avoided in research paper writing.

But in one of my paper, I am the only one author.

And in the introduction I wrote something like AA et al. proved that ..., BB et al. found that ..., CC et al. stated that ....

Then the problem is that I want to refer to one of my previous research that I had conducted with Mr.CC. I and Mr.CC are the only two authors in those researches.

In this case, which one should I write?
(1) I and CC confirmed that ....
(2) My name and CC confirmed that ....
(3) The author and CC confirmed that ....
(4) Our group confirmed that ....

For me, I think the (2) sounds awkward. (4) may not be able to use because I am not in his group in "CC et al. stated that ....". But I am not sure whether the (1) and (3) are suitable.
Thank you very much in advanced.

For more information : I did not involve in "CC et al. stated that ....". This is the result of his team. But I involve in "I and CC confirmed that ...." which is the work that only I and CC did it. So CC will be referred two times in this paper.

There are two options I know of (I've seen both).

One is to ignore that the person you are referring to is one of the authors, and write exactly the same way as if they were a third party. I guess this makes some sort of sense if there is no direct link between the two sets of work.

The other option is to use 'the first author' (or 'the second author', as applicable).


If I wrote a textbook, or other form of academic material, is it okay to use problems found online? Lets say I decided to write a small textbook, similar to how people have all sorts of "Learn to Program" books, but for other subjects like Calc, Chemistry, or similar. If I used examples problems, say from https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~kouba/ProblemsList.html
or
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcI/CalcI.aspx

(for calc, popular sites used for practice)

Would it be legal to just copy paste those problems (not the whole webpage but pick and choosing certain problems) in the book?

The reason Im asking is because Ive seen a few books like this, and always wondered if they had to come up with problems on their own, or if they pulled from a bank. Obviously lots of calc problems are similar to eachother, or the exact same, so I figure there is no copyright on any given problem, but I wasnt sure how it worked. Interested to find out!

In general, no. You may not republish materials found on the web unless you attend to copyright laws in your jurisdiction. These laws vary quite a lot, but for your intended purpose - inclusion in a book - you will need permission in most places.

Sometimes the original publisher will explicitly give permission on a web page, such as a Creative Commons permissive license or a statement the the material is public domain. But even a license comes with restrictions, such as, perhaps, attribution.

Sometimes the original publisher will include something like terms of service like these from Lamar University. Your use is bound by those unless you make other arrangements with the copyright holder.

In the absence of any statement to the contrary, you should probably assume that the creator or other copyright holder "reserves all rights".

When in doubt you can and should contact the creator of any materials. Both of the links you provide actually have contact information.

In addition to copyright law, for which you can be sued, there is the question of plagiarism. It is considered unethical to claim any work created by others as if it were your own.

I'll note for the record that there are a few exceptions to copyright law, but they don't include republishing the work of others. If those problems have "value", then that value is owed to the creators.

Also, copyrights generally expire, but the terms are normally very long - something close to 100 years at this point.

There is one subtlety, however, that partly explains why you see the "same" questions in multiple places. Note that it is words and "expression" that is the subject of copyright, not ideas. The only "ideas" that can be protected from reuse are those covered by explicit patent. That is a completely different thing. There are some things, however, for which there may be only one way to properly express it in a given language.

"Integrate f(x) = sin(x)"

is one of those things. The sin function and integration are ideas with common terms. There are very few other ways to write that problem. So it will appear in that form or one closely similar to it in most calculus books. In general, the ideas are free to use.

Finally, you seem to be asking for legal advice and no one here can give it. In particular, no one here can give you permission to do something that is illegal to do under civil or criminal law. I am not a lawyer. My advice is conservative to help you avoid stepping into a problem that is best avoided.


Colloquial term for relationship between postdoc and phd with same advisor Colloquially, two phds from the same advisor are referred to as academic brothers/sisters, i.e. if i am a phd student with advisor X and someone else is a phd student with advisor X then we are academic siblings. In this framework, how would one describe the relationship of a postdoc to a phd, both having the same advisor?

I don't think there is any specific word for this.

In my experience, the "family" analogy (sibling, grandparent, uncle, etc) is only ever used for relationships defined in terms of the PhD advisor/student relationship.  I've never heard anything similar used for advisor/postdoc or any other type of academic relationship.

I think you just have to spell it out.  "He and I both worked with X; I was X's student and he was her postdoc."