Transitioning from pure research to a teaching position I have a PhD in Computer Science and have been working as a "pure researcher" in an academic setting for the past 10+ years. I have a decent publication record, with a large number of citations to my work. As part of the research role, I have also been a co-supervisor/advisor of several PhD students and done presentations in front of conference audiences. I've done a bunch of "guest lectures" in a few undergraduate classes.

I'd like to transition from the current pure research position to a mixed teaching and research role. My motivations are to have more contact with people (as research can be lonely) and better job security. To than end I've applied for several teaching positions (tenure-track associate professor), but I've been told that the lack of teaching/lecturing experience (undergraduate students) is a problem.

Why would the selection committee see the lack of teaching experience as a deal-breaker?

I do understand that teaching requires a different set of skills than research. However, teaching skills can be learned, so is this a case of demonstrating the capability of learning such skills?  If so, what would be some acceptable strategies for obtaining such skills?

It's true that teaching skills can be learned.  But some people underestimate the amount of work required to do so, or do not commit to putting it in, or remain tied to ineffective philosophies of teaching, and thus do not become good teachers.  Others do, but it takes them some time, and in the meantime they don't do as well.

All other things equal, a search committee would rather hire someone who has already been through this, and will be able to walk in and teach well from day one, rather than needing a potentially long period to adjust (during which they will have to explain to their dean why this new hire's teaching evaluations are so poor).  Especially since you are applying at a more senior level (associate professor), your competitors likely have 5 years or more of teaching experience, and evaluations, letters, etc, that show that they are effective teachers.  Lacking that, it's understandable that you would be at a significant disadvantage.

It seems to me that the most natural course of action would be to see if you can pick up some teaching at your current institution.  Approach your chair and express your interest in teaching a class or two if the opportunity arises.  There will likely come a time when the chair just can't get all the classes covered, and would ordinarily consider looking for an adjunct, visitor, or graduate student to teach a class - then she will think of you.  If you pull it off with reasonable success, and make it known that you are receptive to continuing to teach, you will likely get more opportunities.  Eventually you can build up sufficient experience to be a good candidate for a different job - or maybe you'll find that your existing job, plus occasional teaching, satisfies you after all.  (Or maybe you'll find that you don't in fact enjoy teaching, and stick to the job you have.)

I'd think that this sort of gradual phase-in of teaching duties is likely to go better and be less stressful on the whole.  Even if you were able to get a full-time teaching job, you'd likely be asked to start teaching 2-3 courses per semester right off the bat - with no prior experience, that can be a pretty severe shock.


How should one react when one's work is rightfully critiqued during a conference presentation? When somebody presents the paper, the attendees ask questions about the paper. But what if they raise a legitimate objection when they ask about our work and we know that they are right? Should we accept that or should we defend ourselves?

I ask this, because recently I attended a conference, and in one presentation I saw an important mistake on one of the presentations' algorithms. But he denied my reasons, and both of us knew that my reasons were legitimate.

Should we accept that

Yes.

If somebody points out a flaw in your work, be thankful. They are giving you free advice. Don't try to be right at all costs. Of course it's awkward when people point out major flaws in your work when there is an audience, but it's part of the game.

If you believe you are right, defend your point using objective arguments. If you know the critique is founded, accept it and try to make the best of it.


How can TAs encourage institution to use different administrative software I'm teaching in a university where many different types of administrative software are used. Many seem a bit clunky and badly designed, but I'm only interested in those relating to teaching. Some of these, like Blackboard, are pretty poor in terms of usability, efficiency and reliability. However, the use of some of these software platforms are mandatory within certain parts of the university.

The university started asking senior staff and students their opinions about some of this teaching software. However, most of the teaching staff (especially TAs and Tutors) were overlooked in relation to such questions, which is unfortunate as the majority of student grading that takes place in the university, using this software, is done by this cohort. Senior members of staff who outsource administrative responsibilities to their TAs will likely see no reason to change the software that currently is in use. While more senior TAs will almost certainly complain about the problems faced when using this software to their professors, it is unlikely that many of these complaints will be passed on to anybody with any authority, and even if they are, the actual specifics of the complaint will likely be garbled when subject to such dissemination.

What sort of steps can members of staff who have issues with the purchase of such  software take such that the institution can notice and potentially respond to these kind of issues (I am unsure even what department or people are responsible for such decisions, or how to even begin finding out!)

The university started asking senior staff and students their opinions about some of this teaching software.

One thing you might do to figure out who, specifically, is behind this request. Did you see the e-mail by which this request was made? Whose name is on it?

In my opinion, it is fine to send an e-mail to this person and write something like the following:

  Dear Dr. So-and-So,

  I learned that the university is conducting a survey of its senior staff and students about Software X. I am a [your job title], so I was not included in the survey, but I use this software frequently and would welcome the chance to share my opinions. Could I please participate in the survey, and if so then how?

  Thank you very much.

Your message might be ignored, but it might not be. I have learned that some (not all university administrators are receptive to this sort of request.


Can someone become a doctor or work in health sector by completing a PhD degree in Philosophy in Medicine? three-year Ph.D. in Philosophy, in association with Philosophy & Medicine Project

If someone completes this Ph.D. degree, can he either become a doctor or work in a hospital/clinic or health sector?
I mean, is there any option/possibility/potential?

No, if by "doctor" you mean physician, and/or by "work in a hospital" etc. you mean "treating people with medical conditions".
A PhD is a kind of doctorate, but a doctorate in philosophy does not qualify you to treat ill people.
Depending on the specifics of the research project that students in the particular program you are referring to carry out, they might be able to work in the health sector broadly conceived, but they will not practice healthcare. Managerial or policy-related tasks come to mind.


How to calculate Hm-Index? Michael Schreiber proposed the Hm-Index.
It is related to the h-index but it adjusts for the number of authors on a paper.
So, for instance, if you had two people with a h-index of 10, but one had all sole-author papers and the other had multi-author papers, the one with the sole-author papers would have a higher hm-index.
However, I can't find a concise statement of the formula on the internet.
While a close reading of the paper provides the answer,  I think there should be a concise statement of the method quickly available on the interent.
Thus, how do you calculate the hm-index?
Schreiber, M. (2008). A modification of the h-index: The hm-index accounts for multi-authored manuscripts. Journal of Informetrics, 2(3), 211-216.

This appears to be the algorithm:

Order publications by decreasing number of citations
Assign a weight to each publication as the inverse of the number of authors (e.g., 1 author paper = 1; 2 author paper = 0.5; 3 author paper = 0.33, etc.)
Take the cumulative sum of weights while this cumulative sum remains less than or equal to the number of citations for a given paper. This is the hm-index.

So, in R code, it might look like this:
hmindex <- function(citations, authors) {
    dat <- data.frame(citations = citations, authors = authors)
    dat <- dat[order(dat$citations, decreasing = TRUE), ]
    dat$weights <- 1/dat$authors
    dat$cweights <- cumsum(dat$weights)
    list(
        citetab = dat,
        hmindex =  dat[sum(dat$cweights <= dat$citations), "cweights"])
}

And here's an example using the data from the paper of an academic with 8 papers each with a certain number of citations and a certain number of authors.
citetab <- data.frame(
    citations = c(16,15,14,12, 10, 3,3,2),
    authors = c(2,2,3,3,2,2,3,1))

hmindex(citetab$citations, citetab$authors)

It produces the following output:
> hmindex(citetab$citations, citetab$authors)
$citetab
  citations authors   weights cweights
1        16       2 0.5000000 0.500000
2        15       2 0.5000000 1.000000
3        14       3 0.3333333 1.333333
4        12       3 0.3333333 1.666667
5        10       2 0.5000000 2.166667
6         3       2 0.5000000 2.666667
7         3       3 0.3333333 3.000000
8         2       1 1.0000000 4.000000

$hmindex
[1] 3

I.e., the researcher's h-index is 5 (because they have 5 papers with at least 5 citations. But their hm-index is 3 (i.e., largest cumulative weight that is greater than or equal to paper citation count).
Some comments:

So it does not distinguish between different author positions (i.e., 1st or last author and weighted more in some metrics).
If a researcher only publishes sole author papers, h-index equals hm-index. In all other cases hm-index will be less than h-index.


If I appeal an admission decision by a German university at the court, would the department take it personally? I've applied to a graduate program at a university in Germany and there is relatively clear evidence indicating that they've missed one or even two of my documents in application review based on the responses they've given me. Now they are reluctant to reconsidering my application when I resent the documents to them and explained how those documents mean the reason they mentioned for rejection is clearly not true. This is not a subjective thing and it's completely objective and bureaucratic.

It's stated on my rejection letter that I could appeal the decision at the court and I have their emails where they explained reasons that are in contradiction with each other about those documents, which could help me make the case. I really like that department and want to have the option to go there later in my academic career, but I'm afraid if I take my complaint to the court, the department may develop some level of animosity towards me.

Do you think I should forget about working in that department if I start an appeal process at the court, or could I assume that everyone could just be adults and behave professionally?

Note that while I asked previously about what possible decisions to take, this is just about the consequences of an appeal at court when it comes to working with the department in the future.

This depends on a lot of factors:

Who was involved in the decision to reject your application and replying to your inquiries?
Only these people (plus their superiors, such as the head of the admission committee or similar) have to be involved in taking this to court and know of it.
However, to what extent you can rely on only these people being involved depends on administrative legislation, which probably only a specialised lawyer¹ could tell you about.

If your application was rejected due to lacking strict formal requirements, this was probably done by administrative staff, and you are strictly speaking only “attacking” them.
If on the other hand, your application was rejected after an interview process or by a committee involving scientific staff (i.e., usually professors), the situation is different.
Is the application handled by the university, faculty, or the department?
(You can usually find out by looking at whom you interacted with so far.)
Now why would this be important?
In Germany, there is usually a certain animosity between departments and university-level administration.
Scientific staff usually won’t care much if their university’s administration is attacked because they are used to them botching things, but they can get protective of their own department’s administration, who may be much more valuable to them.
How valid is your claim? Your case will be viewed differently if somebody really botched something during the process than if all you have in your favour is a technicality.
Did you exhaust all other options? Even if you have been clearly been wronged, directly escalating to court instead of trying other methods of resolution will not be in your favour.
What happens if you succeed? The best you can expect in most cases that the admission process is resumed at the stage where you were rejected.
For example, if your application gets rejected on the entrance check, you still would have to go through an interview process.
Unless you and the university want to wait for the next regular round of applications, this means you get an extracurricular interview, etc.
Now, if everything goes really professional, all those participating this application will only learn that your application has to be re-evaluated due to a clerical error.
But you have to ask yourself how likely this really is depending on the above.
Are the positions limited? Would you be taking somebody else’s place? There are master’s programs where everybody with a suitable bachelor degree will be admitted, and the crucial selection is who gets a scholarship (because most students need one). In this case, suing for admission is more likely to be seen as an administrative issue (which the academic staff doesn’t care much about).

At the end of the day, a lot can happen between the full range of:

Only a few people you will never interact with again know that you went to court.
Everybody knows that you are the person who sued themselves into the programme due to a technicality and nobody will accept you into their group (for a master’s thesis) since you are presumed trouble. On top, everybody hates you because you are the reason that the admission process was overbureaucratised the next year.

¹ whom you should probably consult anyway


Getting article type information [New Result / Confirmatory Result / Contradictory Result] from bioRxiv The bioRxiv advanced search form lets one find articles by their type. Following are the three types:

New Result
Confirmatory Result
Contradictory Result

An RSS feed is also available here:
http://biorxiv.org/content/alertsrss

But I could not find any field in the entries for 'article type'. Is there a programmatic way of querying this information that I am missing ?

I could scrape the specific article page itself for this info. But that would not be too efficient. If anyone knows an API / RSS way of obtaining this information and shares it, it might be very useful.

Looking at the few XML in bioRxiv's RSS feeds, it looks like the information that you are looking for simply is not included in their schema at present.  Thus, I would say that your only options are:

Screen-scraping
Asking for them to upgrade their feeds


What happens when I can no longer find authors of a paper that I am submitting? What is the standard practice if I can no longer find students that contributed to a paper that we would like to publish now? The students contributed data, but obviously had nothing to do with writing the paper. Still, I feel that they deserve authorship. I can no longer find a current email address for them. Should I put them only in the acknowledgements section?

This is a tricky one!  Since some venues may require each author to sign over copyright, it complicates matters above and beyond the ethical question of what is right.

If you feel they deserve authorship, you should IMHO make a good faith effort to find them (web search, ask the university for contact info, etc).  But in the end, if you can't find someone and they contributed data but not writing the paper, I see no way you can include them as an author.  An acknowledgment would be appropriate.


Second author being lead presenter on paper at a conference? I am second author of three on a recently published conceptual paper (i.e., no data). The first author is a a student I co-supervise, although the paper did not stem from his thesis but is a contribution we were invited to submit for a special issue. Authorship order accurately reflects paper contributions.

We had discussed submitting an abstract to present this paper jointly at an international conference. The submission form allows multiple presenters but one must be named as the lead. My thinking was that this should be the student, since he is first author on the paper, but that I would contribute at least 50% of the preparation. However have found out that the conference funding from my department is only available to lead presenters. The student has funding for travel to the conference regardless, as he will also be separately presenting his thesis work. He has also stated it is no issue for him if I submit the abstract as lead presenter (I would of course credit him and provide the accurate citation for the paper with him as first author, or even present jointly as per the original idea if he wants to do this).

BUT - as a relatively new academic I would really appreciate opinions as to:

Whether this is not the right thing to do even if he says he is ok with it - perhaps I should just sit this one out and leave that material to the student to present at a later conference if he chooses; and
Whether it would actually just be weird for the second author to be taking the lead on the conference presentation i.e. being the named lead presenter, particularly if the first author is also present at the conference and/or involved in the presentation?

As a little bit more context, I am interested in attending this conference for the networking and learning opportunities, and don't have anything else to submit as an alternative being so new in the job. I have previously presented all my previous work.

As far as I see there is nothing particularly strange with any of the authors presenting while any other authors also attend the conference. (Well, I am from mathematics where there is no such thing as "order of the authors" but I also work with people from other disciplines which do have this notion.)

So having the second author presenting while the first authors is in the audience seems totally OK for me. (It could just be that the presenting authors is the "best presenter of the group" or, by contrast,  should train presenting…)

Also it is totally OK for you to be first presenter, especially since the student agreed. There are many different things influencing who presents some paper/poster (some of which you already stated such as funding, time to attend) and I think the audience would not even think about the issue much. In general, all authors should discuss who should be presenting and as long as all authors agree, the outcome is OK.


Is it possible to get a list of everyone who graduated from a college in a given year/field? I am interested in doing a project on graduate life-paths and need to be able to see the cohort a student graduated in in a given subject?

i.e. can I say I want a list of all the people who graduated from College College in 19XX with a BSc in Television Television?

So I have been googling and just started writing to schools, but I've been unable to find this or find out if it is even possible to gain access to such a database.

I appreciate your help and look forward to your thoughts!

Such data exists at the universities and departments. However, in many jurisdictions there are legal restrictions that would limit their ability to share it with you. There are also practical limitations: the departments want to keep a good relationship with their alumni. If the alumni get contacted every other week by someone doing a project, then that would be bad.

So to get access to these data is hard work. You need to convince them that this is a serious project, maybe you need IRB approval. You'll need to find a way to use that list without violating the law. Sometimes this involves you don't contact the alumni directly, but the department does, who will sent you the annonymised results. All this requires quite some investment by the department, so what is in it for them? Maybe they want to add a module to your questionair?


Learning efficiency of sitting in first rows of the lecture hall I have often heard and read the advice of sitting in the first rows of the lecture hall to learn more efficiently. Is there any research/study that looked at the effect of sitting in first rows of the lecture hall on the learning efficiency?

This article(The Effect of Seat Location on Exam Grades and Student Perceptions in an Introductory Biology Class By Steven Kalinowski and Mark L. Taper) examined the seat location during lectures and its effects on exams. It details the results of some prior studies and their own.
They assigned seating in the following way;

On the first day of class, we randomly divided students into groups of
three, and assigned each group to a row. Two groups were assigned per
row—except for the front row, which we left empty (because we believed
some students might be uncomfortable sitting in the very front). We
did not tell the class that we were studying the effect of seat
location on their learning

They used exam scores to measure student learning during lectures. Five exams were given to the class: four midterms and a final.
Their main finding was that there was no effect of seat location on exam scores
in the class.
They report that they obtained two noteworthy results.

First, we found no evidence that grades or student attitudes were
affected by seat location ...
Our second noteworthy result was that students who chose to sit in the
front of the lecture hall on the first class had significantly higher
GPAs than students in the back (P = 0.009, R2 = 0.18) (Figure 2). The
slope of the regression line was –0.10, indicating that, on average,
GPAs decreased by 0.1 point (on a 4-point scale) per row. This
represents a substantial difference in GPA between students in the
front and back (the regression line dropped from 3.9 in the front of
the lecture hall to 2.7 in the back).


Loss of an exam day in a four-week class A friend of mine is a mathematics professor at a college in the southeast United States (where they're currently expecting significant snowfall) and just asked an interesting question that I'm reposting here:

I'm currently teaching a four-week class, and next week is the final week.  There is a good chance that the college will be closed Friday due to the weather, but Friday is also scheduled to be an exam day.
How should I handle this?  I cannot afford to use the last Monday as the new exam day.  My initial thought is that I could post it as take-home exam with strict warnings about using resources, but we can probably guess how well that will go.

I'm sure that she would appreciate any suggestions you might have, and I am also curious to see what they might be.

This is a college level issue. The school should come up with a plan for how such a problem should be handled. It seems absurd to ask each individual professor to come up with a specific plan for his/her own students.


Asking a professor to supervise research done with a different professor I'm a 4th-year science student planning to do undergraduate research for credit during the summer. I completed an engineering course the previous semester and discussed research opportunities with the professor a handful of times. From what I gathered during our discussions, he is willing to have me do research with him and his other students; he wants to work out the details shortly before the summer starts.

My department allows me to receive research credit from other departments. However, there are some extra hoops to jump through, and the undergraduate adviser recommended that I find a professor who may be adjunct in my department to enroll me for research credit.

I brought this up to my engineering professor, who mentioned the name of a professor in my department that shares similar equipment for their respective projects. I have never met this other professor before, nor have I enrolled in a class with them.

Would it be appropriate to approach this professor and ask them to supervise the research I'm doing with my engineering professor? They wouldn't even have to actually supervise me; the bottom line is I'm wondering if they would be willing to enroll me for research credit within the department.

It is a bad idea for a professor in your department to enroll you for research credit under his supervision without actually supervising. This is taking all the responsibility without any control, contribution to educating the student, or simply a pleasure doing the research.

However, you probably should connect those professors from different departments, so that they determine their shared interest and responsibilities in this project. Between them (and probably the undergraduate advisor) they might determine the formalities to follow department's & programs's regulations; but if somebody's name appears as an advisor of a work, he must actually do some part of advising.


How to effectively explain why my research is important? I gave a presentation on my PhD research at university last week, and it was criticised for lacking practical significance. A different comment suggested the presentation was not placed in context. Could somebody provide some advice on how to place research in context and convey its practical significance? How can I effectively assess who/what/where/when will see the benefits of my research?

Ask yourself a number of questions:

Why am I doing the research?
What problem am I solving?
Why should anyone else by interested in this research?
How can my results help solve someone else's problem?

The first two questions will help you understand what you are doing from your own personal perspective, as well as establishing the context of the work. The latter two will help you establish why someone else would be interested in your work.

In short, ask What? and So what? about your work.


Is it appropriate to attend a friends' dissertation defense/FPO (USA)? My initial reaction would be that it would be highly inappropriate to attend someone's defense unless explicitly invited, and you should never ask someone for and invitation to anything. It should be something very private.

However, it referred to as a "Final Public Oral Examination" and the time, date, and location (i.e. Zoom link) is shared by the department and the university. I have been told that some things I would find mean and offensive are actually supportive and kind things to do, so I do not know if my initial reaction is the "correct" one.

I want to be supportive, while not going where I am not wanted/should not go. At the same time, I am not sure if there is just some level of unspoken assumptions/norms that I am unaware of.

Traditionally (i.e. several hundred years of tradition) these things are public. Intentionally so. I urge you to go, or at least ask your friend whether they would object - which they should not.

In fact other students in the department should probably also attend, just to get a sense of the sorts of things that get asked.

My own final act as a student was called a Dissertation Defense, not an oral exam, but anyone on the committee could ask any question, even quite off the wall questions. But no one did that. I remember the room as being quite full with lots of professors and even more students. I don't recall whether the rules permitted the public to ask questions, but that is sometimes allowed as well.

The candidate is expected to say sensible things, but not necessarily to provide an answer to every question posed. But think of it more as a sharing of new ideas with the community than a grilling. If grilling was needed it probably already took place in private oral exams covering some aspect of the field of study.

There are a few horror stories about people not getting their degree because of their (lack of) performance at such things. Some of them involve questions by out-of-field committee members that are a feature in some places. But the sorts of questions they are likely to ask are necessarily elementary and it is a real failure to not be able to respond sensibly.


PhD Dropout Applying to Unrelated Master's Program. How to explain it on SOP? I dropped out of a PhD program four years ago after one semester in good standing and am now preparing an application for a master's program in an unrelated field.  Obviously, I have to submit my transcripts from all universities, and my quitting will raise some questions.  So, what can I say in my statement of purpose (or anywhere, I suppose) that will put my quitting in the best possible light?

Thanks in advance for all your help!

Tell the truth - whether that be it was too hard, you lost interest, you had a disagreement with the adviser, it was a financial hardship, you had personal or family issues come up, etc. etc. Whatever the reason, just tell the truth. The admissions committee have probably read enough personal statements to read between the lines. Sort of like how in a job interview if you said "I left because it wasn't a good fit", chances are you had a disagreement with your boss (or something like that).


MSc Dissertation Tables & Figures Errors submitted I submitted my dissertation yesterday, one day before the due date.
Upon reading back through the dissertation, I noticed quite an error in my methods and discussion.
Unfortunately, due to adding a number of extra tables in my methods which in turn automatically were updated, I now have elements of my methods which is referring to the wrong table.
This also occurs in my discussion.

Example: "As shown in table 1 a p-value of....".
When in fact that is actually number as table 2.

I have a couple of hours so I could resubmit but I'd be cutting it very tight. Do you think I will lose many marks because of this?
I estimate referring to the wrong table occurs 6-8 times between methods and discussion but some references are on the same page so are clearly seen.

I emailed the lecturer but I haven't heard back along with a fixed copy.

Thanks for any help

I would go ahead and have it corrected and prepared ready - if they then say "submit a corrected version now or by 4pm" then you have it ready.

However, if they say have it corrected for final submission in 2 weeks then you are still ready.


How to find ISSN number of IEEE Sponsored (or IEEE related) Events? My University of Technology requires me to limit my research paper publications to certain venues, which have an associated ISSN number.  How do I find out the ISSN numbers for IEEE Sponsored events, such as in Croatia (Europe), when I can't find an ISSN number on their Web pages?  Here is the IEEE related conference URL: http://iwcmc.org/2015/?  Thanks so much!!!

You can look at this list https://www.ieee.org/documents/2005_present_list_of_titles.xls from IEEE of upcoming events, and events from 2005 to present with all corresponding publication numbers.

As a comment points out, many of the listings do not have ISSN numbers. However, you can look at line 10935 of the excel sheet and see your conference.

IWCMC.  The IEEE conference number is 34432 and ISBN 978-1-4799-5345-5


Have there been studies about the effect of idle time vs time pressure in learning? There is a discussion in our institute about how much of their time students should spend on lectures and homework.

My own experience has been that idle time and wandering of the mind is necessary for seeing the big picture, but I understand that this depends on personality, context etc.

Are you aware of any papers which discuss this issue? What are the keywords for this topic?

There is an article on college students under pressure. It details on the effects and the health related issues involved.

  Amy Novotney, "Students under pressure," American Psychological Association, Vol 45, No. 8, pp. 36 September 2014.

Although it doesn't explicitly account on idle time, you should be able to draw conclusions from the content provided.


API, EULA, and scraping for Google Scholar I love Google Scholar as my go-to place to search for papers. Some features like "forward-citations" and their nice-ish  autogenerated bibtex are life savers. However, sometimes I (and others) wish we could write scripts to help us:

Google Scholar with Matlab

Automatically building a database of forward and backward citations

However, Google Scholar does not provide an API, their robots.txt disallows scrapers on most pages of interest (for instance the cited-by results are not suppose to be accessed by bots), and if you try to make many requests (as a bot would) you will get an CAPTCHA.
Last year they used to have a EULA that said:

You shall not, and shall not allow any third party to: ...
(i) directly or indirectly generate queries, or impressions of or clicks on Results, through any automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means (including, but not limited to, click spam, robots, macro programs, and Internet agents);
...
(l) "crawl", "spider", index or in any non-transitory manner store or cache information obtained from the Service (including, but not limited to, Results, or any part, copy or derivative thereof);

Some Google services like custom search (for which I could find a EULA) still state this in section 1.4, but the link in the SO answer is now dead and I have not been able to find a new EULA for Scholar. From anecdotal evidence, I know that you can get in a decent amount of trouble of you try to circumvent Google's efforts to prevent scraping of Scholar.
Is there an official source where I could look up Scholar's terms of service? Or does the new unified ToS Google unveiled mean that I should be looking for the terms elsewhere? Is scraping still disallowed?

Not too sure if you are looking for this.

See One policy, one Google experience released by Google

  On March 1, 2012, we changed our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
  We got rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and
  replaced them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. The
  new policy and terms cover multiple products and features, reflecting
  our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience
  across Google.

That means all of the Google services have the same ToS, which is available here : Google Terms of Service

Here's a quote from that page

  Don’t misuse our Services. For example, don’t interfere with our
  Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface
  and the instructions that we provide.


Is there a list of countries (or universities) showing which prefer direct communication with referee? My students often request letters of reference from me. Sometimes to attend graduate school in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and sometimes in countries not internationally known for their education system.

Quite often the student says the university wants them to enclose the letters of recommendation and clearly some universities do not want the student to be involved in that communication process.

My question is, how do I know when I am writing a letter to a specific university if they prefer the student to submit the letter or if they prefer me to communicate directly with the school? I could check with each school as I write the letter but that seems like a lot of work which need not be repeated for each letter-writer.

Well, many good answers are already included in the comment section, but Let my try to summarize and extend this a bit:
First of all, there are good reasons for not involving the student (you can be more honest, the student can not pre-select). To my knowledge, ther eare at least three different submission types:

Student sends in recommendation which is written openly
Students has to submit letter of recommendation, but it must be enclosed in a sealed envelope
letter of recommendation has to be sent directly.

The chosen method might not only depend on the institution, but also on the funding scheme if the student gets financial support. The sheer number of possible combinations, combined with funding schemes which might vary from year to year makes the existence of a complete list extremely unlikely.
I would suggest to  follow the advice given by Stephan Kolassa to let the student figure out how the process works. It might be good to tell the student that if there are several options, you would prefer to send in the letter directly.


How to respond to my name being included in acknowledgements of incorrect/misleading paper whose authors ignored my recommendations? My colleagues (grad student + their advisor) from my department approached me, a fourth year PhD student in STEM, for comments on a manuscript written on a topic related to my research.

In two iterations over email, I pointed out serious logical fallacies in their arguments, instances of misleading references and attempts to skirt crucial issues in the paper. Most of the issues in the manuscript are still unresolved but the authors have thanked me for my comments in the acknowledgement section. I'm uncomfortable with my name being included in the acknowledgement section of an incorrect and misleading paper submission.

Would it be wise to politely request for my name to be removed from the acknowledgements?

How acknowledgments work is always a bit of a judgment call, but to me the following principle seems reasonable.

  You are free to acknowledge anyone in any paper as long as what you acknowledge them for is factually accurate.  If you have any reason to believe that the acknowledged party might take issue with the factual accuracy of what you write in your acknowledgments, it would be honorable to show them a draft of the paper and ask for their blessing on the wording of the acknowledgment.  If this causes them to ask to be omitted from the acknowledgments, then it seems reasonable to honor this request unless you feel that removing this acknowledgment compromises academic integrity.  (For instance, if you are including significant work of the acknowledged party, then just because they don't want you to mention that does not necessarily make it okay to do so.  This creates a sticky wicket that other questions and answers on this site have addressed.)

I believe it follows from the principle that whether acknowledgments are acceptable depends more on what they acknowledge you for than whether they drop your name or not.  For instance, suppose they thank you for "helpful conversations".  If you did in fact speak (or write...) to them about their work, then if they say the conversation was helpful, how can you argue?

I think that most savvy academics understand that just dropping someone's name in the acknowledgments does not mean that the paper contains their imprimatur.  Nevertheless it is shady to acknowledge someone -- especially someone very famous and eminent -- purely for the cachet that their name may convey to less than savvy readers.  Here is a famous review of Marilyn vos Savant's book on Fermat's Last Theorem that calls out the author along these lines: she acknowledged some very famous mathematicians, who when contacted by her surely did not say anything to indicate that the material in her book was correct (not only does it contain errors, but it contains errors that any practitioner or serious student of mathematics would regard as bizarre).

In the case at hand: I think the OP would be within her rights to mention that she would rather not be acknowledged in the paper.  Whether she wants to indicate that this is because she still finds the work to be significantly flawed depends on all kinds of social and political factors beyond the scope of this answer.  As to that I would only say: in my opinion, simply very politely asking for your name to be removed from the paper without getting into why is probably a higher percentage strategy than indicating that the work is still problematic.

Added: Let me add that the principle above is meant to be on the minimalist side.  In practice, if you think that someone is not going to appreciate being acknowledged in your paper for whatever reason, then unless there are academic integrity issues involved in omitting the acknowledgment it seems wise to do so.  Once I acknowledged a friend of mine in a preprint in a way which was factually accurate but nevertheless embarrassing to him: he simply did not want to be associated with something that he viewed as intellectually trivial.  I took his name out of the later drafts of the paper.  This incident has made me think more carefully about how acknowledgments will be received by the acknowledged party.


White Paper & MS in Mechanical Engineering? I am a Mechanical Engineering student & want to pursue Master of Science with specialization in Design/CAD. Recently I have come across white papers on website of some companies about their products. My friend told me that publishing a white paper would be beneficial for my MS applications. So I wanted to know:
1. What exactly is the scope of a white paper?
2. What sort of topic/information must one put in the paper?
3. How to publish a white paper (I mean is there a Journal for white papers or any other standard)?
4. How much effect does it have in showing my research aptitude compared to a scientific publication/ research paper?

In the research field a white paper is not so important. However, if you plan to work in an applied field,a white paper is valued highly because it shows you are aware of the current issues in your field. In general, white papers are issue-oriented.
For example, in the field of architecture "green" building materials are valued over traditional. But why? A white paper could present facts on "green" building materials versus traditional materials in terms of cost and performance. Other factors could also be weighed such as customer preference. Therefore, when the executives of a firm read the white paper it could help them make a major decision on materials they will buy in the future.
See below the definition of white paper:

White papers in business-to-business (B2B) marketing
Since the early 1990s, the term white paper has been applied to documents used as B2B marketing or sales tools. Far more commercial white papers are now produced for B2B vendors than political white papers for governments[citation needed].
B2B white papers are long-form content designed to promote the products or services from a specific company. As a marketing tool, these papers use selected facts and logical arguments to build a case favorable to the company sponsoring the document. B2B white papers are often used to generate sales leads, establish thought leadership, make a business case, or inform and persuade prospective customers, channel partners, journalists, analysts, or investors.
Many B2B white papers argue that one particular technology, product or method is superior for solving a specific business problem. They may also present research findings, list a set of questions or tips about a certain business issue, or highlight a particular product or service from a vendor.


Why is research at highly productive research institutions better than those at not-so-highly productive research institutions? As of time of writing, the University of Oxford is top of the Times Higher Education world university ranking list, while the University of Southampton is 118th. (Nothing special about the THE, Oxford, or the University of Southampton - I'm just picking examples.)

Because a university's research is usually a major factor in these rankings, an immediate implication of this is that as a whole, Oxford's research is "better" than Southampton's. Why is it better? I can think of some explanations:

Professors at Oxford are smarter than those at Southampton. Obviously the smarter you are, the better your research.
Professors at Oxford are more motivated than those at Southampton. Maybe they work 24/7 while those at Southampton work 9-to-5.
Professors at Oxford have more resources than those at Southampton. For example perhaps they have more + bigger grants they can apply for, and with more money, they can hire more students + conduct experiments using equipment their counterparts at Southampton don't have.
Professors at Oxford are luckier than those at Southampton. They "just happened" to pick topics that later led to massive advances and Nobel prizes, which made them academic superstars. Oxford then gave them very attractive job offers to lure them there. Now it's a rich-get-richer situation - once you are famous, other people read + cite you more too.

Are any of these explanations accurate? Are there other factors I've not thought of?

Your question is a bit circular. The "best" universities are at the top of the list because it's a list of the "best" universities -- however that is defined. :)

What makes a "top" university is largely a rich-get-richer feedback loop: The "best" universities attract the "best" researchers, which makes them the "best" universities. The "best" researchers get the most funding, which helps them do the "best" research. The "best" universities get the most money, which helps them spend more on research.

That explains why older universities tend to have higher rankings. They have had a long time to gradually build up that feedback loop. However, external factors have a big impact -- availability of funding and university management is important, as is the desirability of the location/country. Countries like the UK and US have a lot of good universities because they are attractive places to live and their government provides adequate research funding and, importantly, this has consistently been the case for decades or centuries.

One important point you are missing from your list: Some professors are teaching six courses per year -- they have no time for research. Other professors are only teaching one course per year -- they have plenty of time for research.


How much effort do researchers take to publish their source code? When publishing a paper, some researchers publish the source code used for the paper.

Is there any research/study/survey/... that looked at how much effort do researchers take to publish their source code? I.e. how many hours do researchers take to publish the source code for a given paper?

This isn't a peer-reviewed article, but nonetheless it's worth linking to because it specifically addresses your question, albeit as an n=1 case:

Bruna, E. 2014 THE OPPORTUNITY COST OF MY #OPENSCIENCE WAS 36 HOURS + $690

In this blog post, a biologist Emilio Bruna states it took about 25 hours of his time to appropriately document his code (associated with a research paper) to make it good enough for open source release on github.


Should I reward points for an incorrect answer if it is the result of misinformation presented in a TA's office hours? So a TA came to me asking for advice. He gave wrong information in office hours leading a student to a wrong answer.

The TA showed the student how to solve the problem via the wrong statistical test - the assumptions for the statistical test he used do not hold in this case. The answer generated from this test yields a test statistic that doesn't make any sense when you think about it's meaning. Kind of like if you were asked to "find the length of the fence that encloses ..." and your method produced the answer of -50 meters. The TA provided the student with step by step instructions, but did not do any of the numerical calculations. Had he done those calculations he would almost certainly have caught his mistake.

The student complains that she should not be punished because her TA made a mistake. TAs can change HW grades, if they have good reason to do so, and this TA wants to correct his mistake by rewarding the student the points on the problem. I told the TA that I would get back to him as I don't want to give my advice in haste. I think I want to say something like this.

to the TA: "Thank you for asking for my advice in this situation; it is indeed a difficult position to be in. However, this situation concerns me, not because you gave wrong info or bad advice, as we all occasionally make mistakes, but because you seem to have told a student the method for answering the question. While it's OK for students to get help from their TAs, it should only be by reviewing concepts and asking them 'leading questions' that nudge them in the right direction. Note I am not saying that what you did is objectively wrong, as I should have been more clear in my instructions at the beginning of the course, but in the future telling students how to do a problem, in my opinion, is unfair to the students who can't make your office hours."

to the student: "Your TA contacted me recently about changing your HW grade. While I sympathize with your situation, and understand that it is very frustrating to receive bad advice/information from your TA, it is ultimately your responsibility to make sure your solution is reasonable, and therefore I can not give you full credit on this problem. Ultimately the majority of the points you lost were not for using this incorrect method (the TAs error), it was for not interpreting your answer and realizing it made no sense. As stated on the first day of class and in the syllabus I require all students to interpret their answers to make sure they make sense. Please come see me if you would like advice on how to check your answers as this is a very important skill in all scientific disciplines and in life in general. TAs, solutions manuals, and even professors make mistakes. Never trust something just because it was told to you by someone with more authority."

Is this the right thing to do?

I agree that in principle, the student is responsible for critically evaluating information from all sources and rejecting any that's incorrect.  I wouldn't simply award the student points for the incorrect solution, but on the other hand it seems unhelpful to just mark it wrong and leave it there (and despite your explanation, the student will likely perceive this as unfair).  In similar situations, I've done one of two things:

Allow the student to revise the answer, and regrade the problem; or
Discard the problem for that student, and recompute the score for the assignment based only on the remaining problems.


How to get (a payed?) feedback with discussion? I try to publish a text without success. In peer-review most replies are "does not fit our journal", even though some journals gave me full referee's report (with negative opinion). I understand it is impossible to discuss all "low-level" works which exist (maybe the mine is one of them...which I do not believe). Yet I would like to discuss and defend my work. "Defense" is in peer-review process impossible, referee gives his opinion and the story ends. Linking my work on the relevant stackexchange forum did not help either: few negative comments were discontinued after I replied.

Question: Is there maybe a payed option to have the work discussed with the engagement of the referee to get and give responses? Is there a way to get discussion by paying (even on potentially low-level work)?

How to get (a payed?) feedback with discussion?

It is extremely country specific and strongly cultural.

I can explain how I would do in your shoes in France. You need to adapt my hints to your country.

I would first attend several university  PhD level seminars (or at research institutions like CNRS, CEA - I am employed at CEA, LIST but soon retiring - , INRIA, INSERM or Grandes Écoles like Polytechnique or ENS Ulm or ENS Paris Saclay -from which I graduated-). Or even Collège de France ones. BTW, Grandes Écoles and Collège de France are very French, you are unlikely to find equivalents in other countries.

At seminars with a small audience of less than 30 persons, you are allowed (at least in France) to attend them freely (no need to pay) and to ask clever (and politely) questions. You'll use Google or the Web to find such seminars.

Any scientific researcher is very happy to get oral feedback, as long as you respect his work (even if your opinions are different). That is part of the science game since at least Newton.

Then you have established some direct contact. Discuss with them your ideas. They might be interested. If they are, send them by email your draft and ask for feedback.

BTW, you should attend peer-reviewed conferences in your field of expertise. If in Europe, consider being part of some H2020 or HorizonEurope submission. Being inside a putative consortium submitting some research grant proposals will teach you many related skills. But you need to accept and contribute to your part (or even a bit more) of the submission efforts, and research grant submissions are generally highly selective (less than 10% of proposals get funded).

Read hundreds of scientific papers (in journals or peer-reviewed conferences) related to your field and scientific interests. Be sure to have a good bibliography of citations in your own text. A priori, several dozens of references (e.g. using BibTeX for your LaTeX paper).

At last, if you can afford that, consider starting some PhD. Your advisor will teach you most of these soft skills, including scientific writing skills, because that is part of his/her job.

My answer to another question on this forum also contain some useful hints.

PS. A poorly known fact is that on the average, every scientific publication has less than 2 or 3 readers. As Higgs explained in his Nobel prize talk, the "publish or perish" mindset of current academia is globally counter-productive: most of the research papers I am reading these years give a sense of déjà vu.


Is this website that claims to provide paper writing services real and legal? I've found a jaw-dropping page that offers to write essays for you (link redacted to avoid promoting them).
Quotes:

SWAMPED WITH WRITING ASSIGNMENTS?

EXCEL AT ACADEMIC PAPER WRITING WITH OUR HELP

And the "help" means...

HOW IT WORKS:
1 Submit task details
2 We find an expert
3 You get top-level paper

More details:

WHAT CAN WE DO
Our team consists of 40+ experts in academic disciplines. Peer-reviewed research, editing, proofreading, gathering sources and tutoring and writing - we can help you with any kind of daily challenge or struggle that college and university students face.

And the icing on the cake:

24/7 ASSISTANCE. URGENT DELIVERY. 100% LEGAL.

Is this site real (and legal)? This image

("ethics" !!!!!) suggests that the site is a parody...

Typically such paper-writing sites are "legal" in the sense that they say that the essays written serve only as "example" and are not to be used for assessment. Of course, you know, the clients know and the company knows that this is highly unlikely, but unfortunately, there is no way to legally enforce the academic integrity that such services undermine.
Maybe it will change in future, but for now, all that remains is for students to undergo a viva or to be examined under controlled conditions. Under Corona conditions, the latter is difficult to protect from cheating, either, at least without significant breaches in privacy (discussed in other questions on SE).


In choosing between MD-PhD and PhD, how should I factor in the expected age at which I'll start my career as a professor? My ideal career is to be lead a lab at a university as a professor.

If I completed a residency and fellowship after an MD-PhD, which I think I'd love because of the 80/20 split that fits my interests, I'd be in my mid to late 30s by the time I was ready to start an independent career, as opposed to a Ph.D., which I'd complete, with fellowship, around age 30.

I've heard the adage about scientists who don't contribute their biggest success before 30, and I'm concerned that close to 40 is far too late to start as an assistant professor.

Would I be better off going into a Ph.D.?

According to the NSF's report, the median age of a PhD recipient is 31.6 years old. That means you'll only be a little older than a typical graduate.

This age shouldn't be shocking considering in the US it often takes 10 or more years of college to obtain a PhD, so that means that most people will be late 20s or early 30s if they never went to industry or didn't graduate early.


Moderating online education forums: delete, snip or leave rudeness? I'm a moderator for an online forum for a particular module at a distance-learning University.

Part of the job is to answer questions regarding course materials, the other main part is to be on the watch for inappropriate content (rudeness, giving answers away, etc)

In the event of students being rude to each other (which is rare), I wonder what the best approach is. For example:

  I think your given use of fleebles to induce warbling is not a good
  idea for [reasons]. You must be really up-yourself to think that.

In this situation, am I better snipping the last part out (and leaving in the bit relevant to the discussion), removing the whole post, or even leaving the post there and only acting if the victim is offended. (Maybe there are other options out there?) I generally lean towards snipping, but I wonder if deleting the whole post is "cleaner" (I don't like deciding what can stay and what has to leave)

If the post was racist/homophobic/sexist/etc. then I would delete the whole post and report the student, I'm looking at cases which are rude and deserve a reminder to "be nice".

Snip the last part out, send a private message to the poster reminding them of the behavioral standards expected in the course forum.

I don't see any reason to remove the whole post, if there are parts that are appropriate. Removing the whole post makes it seem like your motivation is to punish the poster, rather than to keep the forum professional and constructive.

I would recommend against leaving rude comments there until/unless someone takes offense. This is a forum that is hosted and moderated by you, not your students. It is your responsibility as an educator to create a constructive learning environment (to the extent that you can). It's not your students' responsibility - they have to be responsible for their own actions, but they shouldn't have to be responsible for making you respond to other students' actions.


Visiting Student/Scholar Can one be titled "Vising Student/Scholar" at a university if one is already graduated from another institute (with BSc/MSc) and is currently not affiliated with any university?
Does one have to pay registration fees, etc.?
In this case, can one be paid for as a TA/RA by the university?

Is it different in US and EU?

I think that there are a lot of different variations, between continents, countries, and even individual universities. It is definitely true that pretty much every school in the US will have its own policy (since there are no national policies regarding registration in the US—although there are some rules that apply to financial aid obtained from federal sources). In Europe, things can also vary greatly between countries and schools (although they're trying to standardize things, this is still very much a work in progress).

Your best bet is to contact officials at the international office of whatever institutions you're interested in attending, and asking them directly.


Is there an established way to lobby arXiv to expand the paper subjects it covers? A couple of days ago, it was announced that SSRN—a popular working paper archive in the social sciences—was purchased by Elsevier. As Elsevier is one of the most reviled of publishers, many scholars are now looking elsewhere for places to store working papers, and arXiv is an obvious candidate, but arXiv focuses nearly exclusively on technology and the natural sciences.

Is there an established procedure to petition arXiv to expand its coverage to include other disciplines, or do we just have to hope they notice and make the change?

Only arXiv offers the guarantees against new takeovers.
All the cloud services around might suddenly change their open policies at best.

arXiv   platform is well engineered and there is already a Quantitative Finance category, adding more in the economics side should not be a problem, if they are willing to.

One possibility is to start a campaign on specialised webservices such as change.org.

With a lot of people asking, they might easily take into consideration the proposals to widen their scope.

The major problem would be how to advertise this  campaign. Your question got an average 80 views in 10 days.


What's a degree "by resolution"? The screenshot beneath is from Prof. James Goudkamp's profile. See the red arrow.

What's meant "by resolution"?
Why was this MA obtained after all his other degrees?

I know that the Oxbridge MA "is an academic rank, and not a postgraduate qualification", as

  Bachelors of Arts with Honours of these universities are promoted to the title of Master of Arts or Master in Arts (MA) on application after six or seven years' seniority as members of the university (including years as an undergraduate).

Basically, it's a "free masters degree" to members who otherwise don't qualify for the masters degree, for various reasons.

Here it is, direct from Oxford:

  Conferment of Degrees
  7.1. The procedures for the conferment, both at the Encaenia and on other occasions, of Degrees by Diploma, Honorary Degrees, Ordinary
  Degrees, and Degrees by Incorporation shall be determined by
  regulation, and the regulations concerned shall be published from time
  to time in a Handbook for the Conduct of University Ceremonies.

  7.2. (1) In the case of a person in any of the categories set out in paragraph (2) below who does not hold, and is not qualified for, any
  of the Degrees (other than Honorary Degrees) of Doctor of Divinity,
  Doctor of Civil Law, Doctor of Medicine, Master of Arts, Master of
  Biochemistry, Master of Chemistry, Master of Earth Sciences, Master of
  Engineering, Master of Mathematics, or Master of Physics of the
  University, Council shall as soon as possible propose to Congregation
  that a Degree of Master of Arts by Resolution be conferred upon that
  person without fee, if (and only if) he or she holds both a bachelor’s
  and a doctor’s degree (other than an honorary degree) of any
  university or universities or of any such other institution or
  institutions as Council may determine by regulation from time to time,
  or that at least twenty terms have lapsed since he or she first became
  a member of a university or such other institution, or, in the case of
  a person who is not a member of any university, that he or she is at
  least 25 years of age.

  (2) The categories referred to in paragraph (1) above are:

  (a) the Chancellor;

  (b) the High Steward;

  (c) the Vice-Chancellor;

  (d) the Proctors;

  (e) the heads of all the colleges, societies, and Permanent Private
  Halls included in Statute V;

  (f) the members of the governing bodies of all the colleges and
  societies included in Statute V (but not of the Permanent Private
  Halls);

  (g) the principal bursar or treasurer of each of the colleges and
  societies included in Statute V (but not of the Permanent Private
  Halls), if he or she is not a member of its governing body.

  (3) In the case of a person excluded because none of the conditions in
  paragraphs (1) and (2) above is met, Council shall proceed as soon as
  possible after one of them has been met.

  (4) Nothing in this regulation shall restrict the power of Council to
  propose to Congregation that a Degree by Resolution be conferred
  without fee upon any person it considers appropriate.

  7.3. A Degree by Resolution shall be deemed to have been conferred with effect from the approval of the resolution by Congregation.


Why did journal subscription prices increase by 25% between 2013 and 2017? (vs. 5% for US inflation) I read on https://journals.ebsco.com/products-services/explore-content :

Why did journal subscription prices increase by 25% between 2013 and 2017?

That's much more than the US inflation (~5.1%  between 2013 and 2017 (mirror)):

(source of the image: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/  (mirror))

The direct answer is "because they can". Demand for journals is pretty inelastic - increasing the price doesn't cause much of a fall in demand. Can you imagine your university not subscribing to a journal like The Lancet or Science?

Behind that answer however is a storm of interlinked factors. Here're some of them:

Publishers are under pressure from their shareholders to show revenue and income growth. This is no different from university administrators pressuring their faculty to show research output growth, university ranking growth, and so on.
The total number of academic papers being published worldwide is increasing quickly. To shareholders this sounds like an excellent opportunity for growth! But not all these papers can be published in top journals, so a lot of them end up in not-so-good journals.
Most of the papers in these not-so-good journals are actually very seldom used. For example take the Elsevier journal Wave Motion. It's got an impact factor of 1.575, which is pretty medium. I picked a random paper, "An elastodynamic computational time-reversal method for shape reconstruction of traction-free scatterers", Vol 72, page 23-40, July 2017. Then I went to Web of Science, found the paper, and checked the usage statistics. Guess how many times it's been used in the past 180 days - three times (!).
Since the usage is so low, libraries are incentivized not to subscribe (and remember, this is a solidly middle-of-the-road journal - imagine what it's like for the bottom-tier ones). But if libraries don't subscribe, the journal makes a loss. What is the publisher to do?
Let's take the obvious thing to do, and one commonly argued for, which is to close the journal. If publishers did this en masse, there'd suddenly be no more journals except the few top-tier ones. Remember that the papers published in these not-so-good journals aren't necessarily bad - they're usually just rather boring, low-novelty papers: the backbone of science. Without the journals, these papers would never be published.
Another thing about these not-so-good journals is that they're crucial to researchers from developing countries. It's true that these researchers might be slightly less capable than those in developed countries, but it's also probable that they simply have fewer resources. If one is not able to access the Large Hadron Collider, one is also not likely to make breakthroughs in particle physics. Hence one ends up with boring, low-novelty papers that won't make it to top journals.
On top of all that, let's add the fact that some academics think that they write papers, they edit journals, they serve as reviewers, they deserve to be paid for it. I'm not saying that they're wrong, but you can see the tension this belief causes.

And then there's open access. Most forms of OA ties the revenue to the number of papers published (there are other models, but those journals are loss-making and only stay afloat because of an external source of funding). This means there's an immediate conflict of interest for the publisher, which is why there's predatory OA publishing, and in turn is why there's a backlash against OA. Also consider what it's like from the publisher's and library's points of view.

Publisher. If you convert a journal to OA, you're giving up subscription revenue. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Further, many academics prefer to publish in subscription journals even if they have access to OA funding, since if they publish OA they have to jump through some administrative hoops. There're also lots of academics in developing countries that simply cannot pay for OA. There's no guarantee that your 100-papers/year journal will still be 100-papers/year after you convert to OA. Do you dare? Remember your job is on the line (see comment above about shareholders).
Library. OA costs money. You need to free up funds somewhere to fund OA. In theory you should be able to use subscription money to pay for OA, but in practice, you're either subscribed to a journal or not. You can't just pay $3000 less for a subscription and use that for OA for a single article. The only way is to unsubscribe, which effectively removes access to every paper in the journal.

Finally, let's not forget that publishing is a notoriously poorly-paid job, and the publisher also has to keep its employees happy.

tl; dr: it's a difficult world out there. If you have a solution, you'd be in contention to win the Nobel Prize in Publishing.


Should I waive my right to view my recommendation letters? Most graduate applications provide a choice for applicants to view their recommendation letters at a later date. There is a mention of some US mandate alongside.

Is it a better option to forgo this choice in the application? Will the recommending professor feel more secure then?
What is the procedure for the applicant to see his/her recommendation letters? Does the university readily show them when asked?
How ethical is it for the student to ask for the same, especially, for example, after being rejected from a program?

Among the faculty members I've known (at US research universities), there's a widespread feeling that recommendation letters should be completely confidential unless the writer chooses otherwise, and that viewing them using FERPA is unethically taking advantage of a legal loophole.  Almost all the students check the waiver box, and if someone doesn't, then the letter writer is more likely to assume it was by accident than on purpose.

In this context, my advice is:

You should always check the box.  If your recommenders believe you may look at the letters later, they will probably write weaker, vaguer letters.  (For example, the most compelling letters often involve comparisons with other students, which may be omitted if you'll be reading the letter.)
If you are not checking the box on purpose, you should say so explicitly.  If you do this silently, people may assume it was an accident, and then if they learn later that you viewed the letters, they will be more offended than if you had announced this plan in advance.  (And they may actually find out, since the staff who handle your request may find it troubling and leak the information even if they aren't supposed to.)
You would learn less than you might expect from looking at the letters.  It's remarkably hard to judge letters out of context, without having seen other letters from the same people, and it's not likely you'll discover a clear reason for your rejection.  If anything, it might mislead you: you might decide that Professor X was damaging your chances by being insufficiently enthusiastic, without realizing that Professor X is never enthusiastic and in context this letter was viewed as very positive.

I think the fundamental worry many students have is of a terrible letter, a single letter that ruins what would otherwise have been a successful application.  This can happen, but I see an example only once every few years.  And even in those cases, it often looks like it should have been predictable to the applicant.  (For example, if you have had difficulties with someone in the past but things seem better now, don't ask for a letter without a serious discussion of how they think things stand now.)  So I wouldn't worry too much: the chances you could dramatically improve your application by substituting a letter are small.


Reference on the authors' willingness to receive public, online feedback on their work Is there any research/study/survey that looked at authors' willingness to receive public, online feedback (e.g. public comments on the publisher' website) on the papers they publish?

I am mostly interested in the field of computer science > machine learning / NLP / data mining, and English-speaking venues.

Here are two studies that appear to focus on this question:

Nariani, Rajiv, and Leila Fernandez. "Open access publishing: what authors want." College & Research Libraries 73.2 (2012): 182-195.
Mulligan, Adrian, Louise Hall, and Ellen Raphael. "Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers." Journal of the American society for information science and technology 64.1 (2013): 132-161.

Both studies find a lot of ambivalence in current attitudes: in essence, one the one hand, it could be useful, on the other hand Don't Read The Comments.


How to find relevant and new open research topics? How can one find relevant and new open research topics?

When working on my PhD thesis, I find it hard to find open questions in my very specific research area. Which approach do you take to find new and relevant topics?

Try to find papers giving a state of the art review on your field. They'll be easy to find, they generally have a lot of citations and written by the experts in the field. Some of those review papers (ones I've read at least) provide suggestions to researchers as to what needs improvement in the field. Good luck.


Does "bad credit" affect postdoc application in math? Does a bad credit score affect my chance in applying for a postdoc in math? In my case, I have a credit card that had the bill sent to the wrong address and this impacted my score with all three credit agencies.

I have a lot of experience with postdoc hiring in mathematics at several institutions.  There is no mechanism by which faculty who are reading postdoc files would know your credit score, so you shouldn't worry that it will affect your application.

HR departments don't really play a role in academic job searches (aside from technical things like approving the wording of job ads).  It is all done by academics.  So though in the private sector HR departments do things like run credit searches, this just doesn't happen during faculty and postdoc searches at universities.


How much do European PhDs care about GPA? I have an undergrad degree in field A and have a lot of skills that led to me doing research in field B (not a lot of crossover traditionally, but the lab skills are similar and the experiments I run in field B are improved by the lab techniques I have from A).

I am now a fulltime research assistant at a top 10 university and have done interesting work including introducing methods from A to our work in B and proposing experiments grounded in understanding the science of B.

I want to do a PhD, but the trouble is I have an undergrad gpa of ~2.0, and my degree is in field A. (I also did several years of undergrad research in A, including some pretty advanced work, in a top 20 department.) I will have glowing recommendation letters from some top names in B because of my research work.

I want to do a PhD and a lot of people have suggested Europe because they're shorter. Do they care as much about gpa as American PhD programs? If so, I think it might not be worth applying because of GPA.

There are a number of relevant differences between North American and European PhD programs. First, it is key to note that practices differ greatly from country to country. The following answer will focus on general trends across Europe, but be aware that there will be exceptions.

One big difference is that in Europe you generally would not be applying to a PhD program, but for a specific position with a specified group/professor. As such there are typically less requirements set by a graduate school (such as a minimum GPA) to deal with. Since there is typically only one position to fill, the hiring tends to be more risk averse, and things like recommendation letters become more important than pure grades. People will still however look at the grades and a 2.0 GPA will certainly raise some eyebrows.

Another difference (also mentioned in other answers) is that in continental Europe, it is typically expected that PhD applicants have already obtained a Master's degree. It is very unlikely you will be hired without a Master's. The only exception to this (I know of), is the UK where it is more common to start a PhD directly after the Bachelor (and PhD's have a short nominal length of three years to boot.)


I am interested in pursuing a Masters/PhD program in the US but I do not have a bachelor’s degree My interest is in the field of Psychology/Neuroscience. I am currently a monk/meditation teacher and I dedicated my life to helping people find inner happiness and peace 20 years ago when I was still in high school. Will this vast experience of working with people for 2 decades qualify as field experience and earn me an entry into a graduate/PhD program? I have gained spiritual insights in the nature of the mind and emotions; what I am now looking for is the scientific backing for all my experiences. I want to blend spirituality, Psychology  and neuroscience and develop effectiveness be methods for happiness and inner peace. I read some replies that it is indeed possible to directly enroll for a graduate program. Could someone please guide me how do I go about it? I live in India and I am planning to appear for GRE and TOEFL in August this year.

Your experience is not in science, why would you have equivalence in any science related bachelor degree?

I am completely sure that your experience on religion/spirituality/self-help/alternative therapies/human interactions will not guarantee equivalence in psychology or neuroscience related degrees. The knowledge expected from a person holding one of these degrees is completely different.

However, instead of pursuing a PhD why not engage in a bachelor course? The bachelor will give to you many tools of which you will need to work in a PhD.


When is it useful to include the code in a thesis? I am writing my master of science thesis and I am not sure whether I should add some of the code I have written: they are not proper programs, but more like input files to be fed to a commercial program (Nastran) very popular in my field.

My concerns are related to the fact that I am not making any discovery, just applying the things I have learned reading the manual. Still, I feel the code will make the effort I put into the thesis to also learn this language clearer.

Making your code available along with your thesis can be very helpful to other researchers who are trying to reproduce your results.  I'd encourage you to do this.

However, you should not simply insert a printout of your code into the text of the thesis, since that will make it difficult (practically impossible) for someone to use the code that they obtain from a printed copy of the thesis or even a .PDF of the thesis.  Rather, you should put the code into some online repository (such as e.g. github) so that others can download the code from the web.


Pros and cons of having your doctoral degree on our ID In Germany and Austria¹, it is possible to have your doctoral degree noted on your passport, official ID (Personalausweis) and similar documents of identification.
Whether allowing this is a good thing in general is debatable but the subject of another question (that is arguably too opinion-based for this site).

Having acquired such a degree, I fail to see any strong arguments for or against making use of this as an individual (and the Internet does not provide much searchable information on this issue either). Obviously, it flatters the ego and can be used to impress some people, but then it involves some effort and may come off as arrogant to others. But I am wondering whether there are some situations where there is a more clear advantage or disadvantage or whether I am grossly misestimating the situation.

Note that I do not ask you to make this decision for me. I am fully aware that I have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages myself. I am just asking for arguments.

¹ which seem to be the only countries where this is possible if some websites are to be believed

Finally, for the search engines: Was sind die Vor- und Nachteile davon, seinen Doktorgrad im Personalausweis vermerken zu lasen?

I did add the degree to the passport, and I can tell you that so far it only had disadvantages (though no severe ones).

I added my master degree, and did not need a new passport since. So now that I have my PhD, its not even accurate anymore.
In China, authorities looked at my passport and me very sceptically, when I did not add my degree to the train ticket, and thus the name differed between passport and ticket. They did not understand my explanation, but let me pass on the train anyway ;)
Most time I book a flight ticket, I can only select Mr/Mrs as title. So I have to think everytime, whether I should add the degree in the name field. Usually I don't do it, hence again the ticket and the passport show different names. It caused a strange look in America, but no serious problems.
My new colleagues (in a foreighn country) looked at me like i was crazy, when they saw it.


How to find a co-author? I am working on a manuscript and need some collaborations in the part which is out of my expertise. I personally don't know anyone in this field.

It will be a good paper to be published in a top journal. How can I find a co-author to help with this?

Is it OK if I send my manuscript to some academics in the field and invite them to collaborate, or it is an odd invitation?

A few possible things you may do for a prospective collaboration:

Look for authors who published in the field which you wish to publish in (citing from this post). You ought to have researched on a set of papers from which you would have developed your idea or an enhancement to. The authors from those papers may guide you.
Contact in sites that facilitate collaboration and discussion like ResearchGate.net and Academia.edu. There are many who have collaborated this way and become from strangers to research associates.
Mail invitation; this may or may not work. A discussed in the comments, your mail may be tossed by a spam filter or even be ignored. But it has worked before for some people.

Having stated above, getting reliable co-authors, may not be so easy. This is one of the reasons why professional research ought to be conducted with a supervisor/advisor or a mentor who is established in the field. They ought to guide you along these lines.


Should the glossary in my dissertation be minimalist or comprehensive? Context: I'm in an interdisciplinary field -- Computational Social Science -- and therefore my dissertation will be drawing on theory, empirical findings, and methods from at least four different disciplines. My dissertation topic is "Institutional Innovation Based on New Knowledge".  Many terms have no settled meaning even within a single discipline, and many terms have definitions of my choosing, to suit the scope and purposes of my dissertation.

I'm using LaTex packages for glossary and hyperlinks so that all glossary terms get highlighted hyperlinks when they first appear in each chapter.

My question: should I aim for a minimalist glossary where only the most technical, obscure, central, or controversial terms get defined, or a comprehensive glossary that aims to define all important terms.

My aim is to make it easy for readers (mostly my committee), especially so that they won't waste time either trying to find my definitions or spend too much time reading/checking my definitions.  Most of all I don't want them assuming that I'm misusing terms or that I haven't adequately defined them.

I'm not concerned about the extra workload of completing a comprehensive glossary.  I'm good at this sort of task and it helps me as I write the body of each chapter -- I don't have to keep defining terms or reminding readers of my definition.

The downside of a comprehensive glossary is page count.  I'll guess that it will add 20 or 25 pages.  I don't want to "bloat" the dissertation any more than necessary.

If you think it will improve the usefulness of the thesis, and it isn't too much trouble for you, then I'd say by all means go for it.

I would not worry about page count. I don't think anyone cares how long the thesis is.


How do I voice my opinion that the teaching of students is being neglected? I'm in a Phd program right now and it seems there are some unethical practices going on in my department. Examples include: testing over irrelevant material or material that was not really covered, not grading/giving feedback on homework, instructors breaking college and department policy for convenience, dishonest course description and listed prerequisites.
When I got my masters in a different discipline at another institution, I felt everything was so well put together and my instructors really cared about the class and the students. I have considered leaving with a masters in stats since I feel slimy for participating as a TA in what I mentioned above, but I would like to reach out. Does anyone care? Would anyone listen? Who should I reach out to? How should I phrase my concerns?
I can include more details if that would help.

EDIT
I wanted to give more details:
I'm in a Phd stats program right now and I have a masters in math (I was all but dissertation)
I TA for a masters level core class. The instructor doesn't grade, lecture or make notes for the class (they are reusing the video-lectures and notes of another instructor from previous semesters). As far as I am aware, the instructor just pulls questions from a bank of questions for tests/homework. When I learned the material, I took a two semester sequence to cover everything and we still didn't cover all the material this class does. Every semester, masters students spend more than 1000 USD on the course and have to drop due to lack of background even though they work hard. Last semester about 25 out of 80 students dropped. The only prerequisite for the course is calc III.
For another course, the boss (instructor) of another TA in my cohort tried to make the TA create the assignments and tests which is against department policy.
In my case, I have had several instructors whose exams don't reflect the material covered in the homework and I feel that I could have not studied and done just as well (bad) because the exam questions end up being some difficult honors calc II question instead of using the material we cover in class. In fact, one instructor got stuck for a few minutes when giving us the solution to a problem that no one was able to solve on an exam. A subgroup of my cohort is unable to attend office hours for a required class due to having another required class and the instructor was unable to accommodate them due to "being too busy with research".
In summary, I feel that the department is trying to make money off of master students and is more focused on research than being good teachers.
Maybe this is normal and didn't know since my last institution was really good. Just let me know if it is. Thanks for your time.

The fact is that institutional norms and expectations regarding teaching vs research for faculty vary widely. At my current institution, teaching is very important. At my previous institution, no one really cared. Basically, I would not voice this opinion in any strong way unless you want to make your life difficult. It would only work if the faculty member you are working for is disliked and the person you complain to is firmly on your side.
I did have a similar situation as this in my PhD institution and "voiced my concerns" in a very tactful way. I argued that the course was extra challenging because it was a new advanced level course and had not been given enough resources. (Note that I was careful to say nothing about the effort or quality of the instructor.) The department was able to pay me extra as a TA to take over some of the instructor’s responsibilities. But the instructor was someone who got on the other faculty’s nerves, and my advisor was the associate dean for academics.


My advisor does not provide any solutions and wants me to work alone So, my advisor works in a group style, meaning we have these weekly meetings, where all of his PhD students and RAs are present. We plan the work ahead and set aims, but these aims are always very general and non-specific.

For example, it is always like "you must publish in the X journal something about improving the 4G network, because that's where the money is". He usually asks for publication planning without having done the work first.

We rarely have 1-1 meetings and even when we do, he does not provide any guidance, he just sets aims and I have to work alone to achieve them (no one else in our group works on the same topic).

This gets even worse by the facts that:

I do not enjoy the topic that much. Long story short, I was assigned this topic after changing supervisors for logistics reason (Worth mentioning the relation with my previous supervisor was excellent, but unfortunately as I said, I cannot go back to him due to logistics).
More importantly, he is very cautious with sharing his research and does not like to work with people outside the group.

As an example of the 2nd, I had asked him if I could write a paper with another researcher outside our group. He said yes, but after a month of work and 2 days before the deadline, he changed his mind and said I should remove the other person's work and name from the paper, otherwise we are not going to submit.

I am 2.5 years into the PhD out of a 5-year long program, so half-way through.  However, I cannot work alone on a topic I do not enjoy, with a person I do not get along with. What should I do? Should I change supervisor again, keep working alone or quit maybe with a MRes?

Some people I have talked with say this situation is common and normal.

Some people I have talked with say this situation is common and normal

Absolutely!

It is going to be a very hard process to change how your advisor work! Most of the time, you won't be able to! So, you will need to learn to adapt. You need to consider the following;

This is not your first PhD! You changed advisors before.
You are half-way through your current PhD (only you knows how many years you wasted or what's your current family situation).
You need to graduate!

So, my advice is to follow your adviosr and be flexible.

When I first started my PhD, a new PhD student joined my grouped and have similar issues like yours. He changed advisors, schools and wanted to continue publishing with another researcher (his friend who have finished his PhD from a previous school where he joined before). The bottom line is, my advisor tolerated him for sometime but then gave him two options;

If he [the student] continues the "drama", he can leave. If fact, he told him that he knows a professor in another school that might be willing to take him.
Follow the process and get his degree!

To me, that student was very brilliant, had very unique way of thinking and solving for solutions! But, it was very clear that he needed to do everything on his own (and way)! Many advisors do not like that (especially, well-known ones).

I get that sometimes you can get a project that you do not like! So, what!! Do you think that you ganna be always working on projects that you like! I doubt that! At this level, you are a researcher (try to be a professional one). Think of it this way,  if you are a surgeon, you operate on people! You can not say, "No, I do not want to operate on this guy because I do not like him" This may sound harsh, but in a way, is true!


Can you be co-advised by 2 other faculty instead of 1 for PhD My primary research interest is in computer vision and deep learning so I will be applying to the CS department. But I also want to be co-advised by a prof who is in the radiology department and work with another prof who is part of the physics department (High energy physics).
Is that a allowed. And if yes, does that seem feasible, or "look good" on the statement of purpose during the application?

Yup.
I know it’s quite common in Israel (and I know of someone else who has two advisors). No idea about the US though.
I personally think this should be more widespread- with the way research is going these days, most impactful work span multiple domains and it’s not possible for a single professor/lab-Group to develop expertise in all these domains.
So multiple advisors bringing their expertise is a win-win for everyone involved!


Funded PhD position chances for international students in Austria In the midst of my quest for potential countries to find a funded Ph.D position in computer science, I came across Austria. However, my initial impression was there is no big chances for international student there for the following reasons:

Most of the universities websites are not fully available in English (In contrast to German universities websites, Austrian's one have many brochures and sub-links related to postgraduate studies in German only)
I have sent few emails inquiring the admission and I received responses apologizing for not accepting international students
Every time I google (Ph.D computer science Austria) I get results about Australia instead. (I know the way I used to search here is trivial but isn't this an indicator?)

So my question here, do you agree with my impression or not? If yes, do you have more information that Austria has no many chances for international students? If no, would you explain why. Generally, do you advise to go ahead with my search in Austria or it is waste of time. All answers and comments are appreciated.

Doing a PhD in the German-speaking part of the world works a bit differently. Typically, you would find an advisor that has project funding or the like and is willing to hire you as a "scientific employee". Being admitted to the PhD studies itself is most often not that difficult once you have an advisor - there are formal requirements, for sure. But with a Master degree from a "proper university", this is likely not to be the problem.

The employment part is also very relevant when it comes to visa questions, health insurances, and the like. It may easily be that the reason why you have been told that no international students are taken is that without the prospect of getting employed in a Professor's research group, there is little hope for getting a student visa for PhD studies (that's just a guess, though).

A notable exception to the above guidelines are graduate schools. A well-known example is the one of the IST Austria (http://ist.ac.at/), which has internationalization as one of its explicit goals. You might want to have a look at their web page. But even the text on that page talks about "employment as a PhD student".