The fine line between academic research and applied industry research? I am working with a university on a research project. This project is a collaboration between industry and academia with the industry being the leaders. It is a computer science project working on an industry's product. The length of the project is one year, and this one year includes time to better formulate the expectations and requirements of the project.

For some background, the industry wanted to adopt some new software engineering patterns for Cloud computing (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices... yada yada) and couldn't find their way around applying these into their product. They were having some serious performance issues and looked to academia for a solution. The academics could find that it is not clear what is going on, but wanted to collaborate and understand as things develop.

Working on this project, I am finding that my greatest contributions on the project focused on identification and correction of a handful of bugs, or why 2-3 configurations could be far better. Many things look like just slight oversights and very trivial items regarding inexperience of using a library. With a constantly changing tech stack and a large software base, I can understand why these things would happen and can understand why nowadays, this would be one of the most relevant software engineering concerns and it should not be a surprise that an industry project ends up, to some degree, in this direction. At the same time, there is not much regarding novel algorithms or novel techniques...

I feel a bit confused because it feels like I'm at the fine line between computer science research and consultancy work. How would one go about presenting such work as research work e.g. to funding bodies? So I was wondering about, and hoping to start a discussion on the validity of such work and its presentation.

My own experience suggests that the academic value can be quite orthogonal to the needs of the business. The company wants to build a product and "ideas" are secondary to that. For the academic, the ideas are at the front. But the work to build and refine the product often gives a researcher ideas that can be developed independent of the product development. Time constraints may require that exploration of those ideas needs to be delayed, but in most cases they can be developed.

You already suggest one such idea in your question. Keep that idea in your research notebook and develop it as time permits. You may need to abstract it a bit for confidentiality reasons, but you probably want to abstract it in any case to make it more interesting and more general.

There is no real conflict other than time, assuming that you can present the problems in a sufficiently abstract way that you don't infringe your contractual obligations.

Spin Off is a big idea. The formal project is a "mine" for ideas. Dig them out.


Conducting a literature review, what period should the papers be taken from? In conducting a literature review i.e., research done on a particular topic for a certain period of time what is the prefered period of the review? Would it be advised if the time period is from 2000 to present only?

The year that a paper was published is entirely irrelevant to the question of if it is worthy of inclusion. I’ve read good review papers citing work that is almost three thousand years old and I’ve read good review papers not citing anything older than 2001. Using age as a proxy for relevance is an incredibly poor decision. You should include what is important for someone in the field to know, regardless of when it was published.


Open access journal for long-form publication I am currently working on a paper in the field of image reconstruction, or computational biology if you will. Now matter how I slice or dice it, it is one of these stories that cannot be told in 3500 words or so. Not only are there several equally important methodological points that need to be discussed to get a complete story, there is also quite a bit of background required to point out the subtle flaws in the currently popular ways of approaching this particular problem; and it takes some words to clearly point out what may appear to be a subtle problem from a distance, especially while making sure to be fair to everyone.

I don't intend to butcher what I feel is a solid and profound story for the sake of cramming it into some word budget. I am no fan of needless verbosity, but I really am going to need about 20 pages to do this right. I strongly prefer to publish in an open access journal. And I would imagine that an open access online journal does not have as much of an incentive to be stingy with word counts, no? PLOS computational biology would be a logical choice, yet they do have a restrictive word count. I can't find any open access journals that appear to be sympathetic to my plight.

Am I missing something? Or should I just write the whole article first, make that into the supplement, and then write a 3000 word teaser with nonstop references to the supplement to substantiate my claims? I am somewhat afraid that people will actually miss the point without an explicit disclaimer at the start of the 'article', along the lines of 'hey, if you want to read the actual story with a good flow to it, you need to start reading the supplement. this is basically just a drawn out abstract.'. If you are referring to the supplement, the convention is to refer to a figure of secondary importance; not to three pages of text you kind of have to read first to understand the rest of the article.

Does anyone have a helpful perspective on such a situation?

Plos One do not have an explicit word count limit, and computational biology should be on-topic for them:

  There are no explicit restrictions for the number of words, figures, or the length of the supporting information, although we encourage a concise and accessible writing style.

For further info see http://plosone.org/static/guidelines

Also, have you seen that Plos Computational Biology has two types of articles, Research articles and Software articles, and that the 3500 word limit only applies to the latter (see http://www.ploscompbiol.org/static/guidelines). For Research articles they only say:

  Although we have no firm length restrictions for the entire manuscript, we urge authors to present and discuss their findings concisely.


How to ask professor to post more example? My professor always posts solved problems on the course website but for the last chapter, he did not post any solved problems. Although we have our textbook, I think solved problems help me understand the chapters better. But now I could not understand the last chapter deeply, and I have difficulties to do assignments.

Could I ask him to post one or two solved problems? If yes, how should I ask?

Well as simple as you explained the problem in the question. start by explaining how his solved examples helped you understand X and Y ( e specific as much as you can). Then ask for solved example related to Z ( again be specific ) end with simple show of appreciation.

Good Luck!


Can I include the completion of Udacity and Coursera classes I have attended in an academic CV? Can I include in my academic CV that I have attended and completed the Coursera and Udacity classes I have been taking? I understand that these are not anything major, but the courses definitely gives a good overview and starting formal study on the subject becomes less cryptic. If I can include them without any negative impacts, then under what section should I include them?

No.  Specific coursework (whether formal or informal, online or in-person) does not belong in an academic CV.


What kind of citation can be used in a paper? There seems no recognized or fixed rule for citation sources, as far as I know,  the citation taken from publications or other open sources that can prove they are not something groundless is acceptable because at least the citation to be used as support for your argument in the paper has been used or established by other authors and the quality is guaranteed by the publishing houses or agencies like that.
Now with more and more information and materials in social media outlets and self-media available, the authenticity of the information cannot be ensured(but sometimes you have to admit there are so many anonymous genius online who are much superior to the counterparts in real life),and will it be OK to select such to be citation?

Whatever you use, cite it. If it is only a Tweet by a ten-year-old, cite it.  If it is a hallway conversation with your colleague, still cite it.

But do not expect your readers to believe it is reliable, or that it is from a peer-reviewed paper.


Business card for Ph.D. student - what should be included? I'm a Ph.D. student considering getting business cards printed to facilitate follow-ups after conferences, etc. I am barely in touch with industry but I'm in a field where business cards are common.

My university has a set layout, but we have quite some freedom on what to include. There are some questions on whether we actually need a business card as a graduate student, but here I'm more interested on what to include on them.

I'm thinking at least:

Name
Title
E-mail (as it is the primary form of communication for academics)
Post address of university

And maybe:

LinkedIn
Personal page

I'm hesitant to include:

Room number (we occasionally switch; updated room number is found on personal page)
Telephone (same as above; could include cell number)

Not including telephone may be a bit harsh, but I'm curious whether you have some input in these matters. What should be included and what is less important?

My experience of business cards in academia is that they are mostly just an easier way to share contact information than scribbling it on a napkin.

As such, the only things that are really important are institution, name, title (because everybody will expect it), and sets of preferred contact information.

As such, if you want people calling you, put down your phone number; if you don't want people calling you, don't put it down.  Likewise for all of the other standard aspects.  You probably should have a web page that you want people to visit.

As for social media sites like LinkedIn: I'm rather dubious about them, simply because there are potentially so many.  I think one wouldn't be a problem, but the extrapolator in my mind goes to a ridiculous image of somebody handing me a card with their LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, ResearchGate, Facebook, etc.  Don't be that person, or else if I meet you at a conference and you hand me your card, I may have a difficult time avoiding laughter.


Fellow student doesn't share progress in joint paper for coursework - how should I react? I'm currently enrolled in a course (Masters-level) where we are supposed to write a paper together with another fellow student. The paper will not be published publicly.
It has been difficult since the start to communicate with my partner. He often won't answer mails for over a week and then ignoring my suggestions and questions while forcing his own ideas on me without consulting with me. The course also requires mutual peer-review of our work, which I have done, but I received nothing from him.
He didn't acknowledge any of my comments in the document except spelling errors and didn't share his progress before turning in the paper for the first milestone. It turns out that there are still multiple formatting and style issues that I informed him about, and he broke some of my cross references. This is absolutely below my standards for submissions and I'm afraid it will reflect negatively on me.
How should I react to this? Should I involve the professor? I already made it clear to him that I prefer a more cooperative working style instead of waiting for his drops of content. The only thing I care about this point is a good grade and a good standing with the professor, since I consider my thesis in his department.

The first thing I would do is to try contacting your partner again. You've said you already told him that you prefer a more cooperative style, but perhaps you should can be clearer about this. For example, if you say "I think you aren't communicating well, I need you to cooperate more", this is ambiguous and could possibly be interpreted as an attack on his working style. Instead, you can try to give more concrete suggestions. For example, setting up weekly meeting times for both of you to sit down together and talk about the paper and what you need to do next. You could also suggest setting up a google docs or dropbox etc. where both of you have access, so that you can both edit the document and see the changes the other has made.
If this still doesn't work, I would consider the cost/benefit of the next steps. You can escalate by going to the professor, but this isn't necessarily in your best interest, even if you don't like working with your partner. You say that there are formatting/style issues, and broken references, but to me these sound like minor issues that can be fixed pretty easily. It also sounds like your partner is doing a lot of work on the paper, which is good because sometimes you might get a partner who does nothing or does everything at the very last minute.
If you do decide to go to professor, you should understand that if you can't fix the group, the professor isn't going to be able to either. Maybe if your partner is ghosting you the professor can force the two of you to sit in the same room together, but beyond that they can't do a whole lot. Your professor is also not going to grade you easier because you complain about the group to them. Really the only thing the professor can do is possibly give you the option of working by yourself for the rest of the project (but they won't necessarily allow this). But of course, then you'll be out of a partner altogether.


How to deal with these so called "Minor revisions"? Update: Mars 29
Thank you everyone for your time and efforts to help me with the revision. The article has been resubmitted yesterday and accepted this morning. Without your help, I don't think I can do this. Except your suggestions for this revision, the more important thing I've learned from your comments is the altitude and methods of research， which points out the correct direction and helps me get rid of some misunderstand of research. Thank you everyone again. It's a excellent experience of discussing with you here and I expect more communications in the future.

I've received the editor's reponse for the second revision. He marked "minor revision" in the online system of submission. But his review is so confusing.

Reviewers/Editor comments:    As the reviewer kindly points out the discussion is very speculative. In view of this, the outcome of this manuscript is still in doubt and a final decision will be taken upon submission of your revisions.

Reviewer #1: The authors have responded to my comments.  The article has some value but its discussion is still somewhat heavy on speculation and somewhat light on hard analysis.  Leading the authors further toward a stronger analysis falls beyond the scope of the review and so it falls to the editor to decide whether that value is sufficient to warrant publication in [journal].

In fact, if I revise the manuscript according to their demand to eliminate the "speculations", I have to delete and simply a lot of the discussions. This is a real "major revisions" indeed. So now I am so confused for this so-called "minor revisions". I'd like to ask your help and advice, thank you!

Both the reviewer and editor are very polite and guarded in their answers. Reviewer #1 basically says that the analysis section of the paper is too light. OP seems to accept that in the comments. "if I simply these discussions (!), it will be revised a lot." Reviewer 1 says the analysis needs to be beefed up, but he is not going to do it. ("Leading the authors further toward a stronger analysis falls beyond the scope of the review...")

Reading between the lines of @Enze Ma's comment, I think I can see the potential problem: The author uses macroscale experiments ---it would help to know a bit about the area in order to understand what that means --- but uses microscale theories to explain these results. This is always going to be a problem and needs to be addressed honestly and directly. What is it about the macroscale results in the paper that make them different from previous work? Are the microscale theories, in fact, able to shed new light on the macroscale resuls? If not, what is the contribution of the paper to existing literature?

This final question is, of course, the most important and should be addressed first. There should be no waffling about the contribution. "I think my paper may extend the field ... " is not going to cut it. "My paper extends the field in these ways:..." is much more positive, stronger, less speculative, and is likely what reviewer #1 is looking for.


Is it immoral to expect uncompensated contribution to the university from doctorate students? In every university that I know, doctorate (and very commonly master's) students are expected to do a number of things which I would categorize as work, related to the operation of the faculty, such as:

correcting exams
supervising exams
supervising undergraduates in lab exercises, answering questions, usually organizing groups and  lab exams
teaching lectures on the methodology for exercises of a course
various errands for the professor (I won't get into detail in this, as it's clearly immoral in my opinion)

From what I have heard, those practices are common in Greece.  Every PhD student that I know has no official salary from the university, and may get paid from certain research funds for particular projects that he has to complete/contribute to from outside sources. According to the regulations in Greek universities, Master's and above students are obliged to provide "auxiliary work" without this being specified further.

Given the fact that correcting exams is actual work, isn't it immoral to do it without monetary compensation?

In universities in the USA, the type of work that you describe is typically paid for, with the student being employed as a Teaching Assistant (TA).  In some cases, this is an hourly job; in other cases it comes with a stipend and tuition support. The time a student spends per week varies, but in my experience is most typically averages to 10-20 hours/week (typically lower for hourly wage, higher for stipend).

Many departments do require students to spend time as a teaching assistant, under the theory that the work of instruction is an important part of one's education.  It sounds like the universities that you describe are using this theory, but then not compensating the students.

To my mind, whether this is moral or not depends on the nature of the work and the amount of time that is required.

At one end of the spectrum, if a student is asked to give a couple of guest lectures over the course of a semester, then the experience of preparation and explanation seems like a reasonable inclusion in their educational experience, especially if coached by the professor.
At the other end of the spectrum, if a student is asked to do 20 hours of grading and other "scut work" that has little educational value, then it is clearly a job for which they should be paid.

Somewhere in between there is some grey area, but in general my feeling is that the more routine and less educational aspects of teaching are work for which whoever conducts it should be definitely be compensated.


Selecting references for PhD applications: are industry references OK? My background:

Final year computer science undergraduate in the UK.
Spent one year working in a scientific facility developing software for scientists. My colleagues had previous academic experience (PhDs in math or physics).
Researched for 3 months under professor N within my university.
My dissertation begins in February, so cannot use my supervisor from that.

I want to pursue a PhD, and am at the stage of applying for programmes. However, each programme requires "two academic references", and am unable to come up with a second one (professor N being the first) that would provide the best application.

Giving many of you read references, and recruit PhD students, which of the following references would you prefer receiving:

A senior software developer where I previously worked (he has a PhD in physics), but I feel this is not "academic".
My personal tutor (a professor who helps with any personal or professional problems), whom I have not seen in a few months, but have used for references before (to get the aforementioned job).
Professor B who has taught me over the past three months, but whom I am not close with (on a personal or professional level).

I know my question is a bit specific, so perhaps to generalise:

Q. Is it acceptable to have industrial references when applying for PhD positions, or should I instead use university professors as reference? Even if they may result in a generic reference letter.

Q. How can I speak with professor B to avoid him writing a generic reference letter about me?

Industrial references are fine when your colleagues have good academic credentials.  It may suggest that you will be good at finding applications for research.

Generic references are not fine in academia: unlike industry, academics generally aren't interested in verifying that you have held the posts your CV says you have held, and they do mark down candidates whose references are less than stellar.  It is well worth asking a referee what they will say about you.

The easiest way to avoid referees writing something generic about you is to tell them what you have been doing, ideally in writing, when you ask for the reference.  Referees generally appreciate this kind of help when writing references, which is a quite significant drain on the time of many academics.


How to deal with grammatically incorrect suggestions from my advisor on master's thesis? I'm writing my thesis in English. English is neither my or my advisor's mother tongue. I'm now doing some corrections that were suggested. Some of them refer to the content of my  thesis and some of them refer to the language.

How should I deal with the suggestions that are obviously wrong? For example suggesting I put a comma before if or use a future tense after once. I don't want to intentionally make any grammatical errors in my thesis.

I agree with most of what is pointed out. There are only few amendments that I take issue with.

Should I just ignore his wrong suggestions? But then he may notice that I haven't changed what I was supposed to when he reads my thesis again.

Should I explain to him why I haven't changed what he suggested? I could quote some websites (when I disagree with what he proposes, I always look it up). Wouldn't that be rude?

It will be helpful for your advisor if you give a list of changes, and where they were implemented in the text, together with your new version of your thesis. That way (s)he won't have to read your entire text again and can just foucus on those passages that have changed. That document would also be a logical place for mentioning the changes you did not implement and give the reasons why you did not do so.

Your advisor will probably be very familiar with this way of working; this is how we respond to reviewers when we sent articles to journals. So this should not feel strange or offensive to her or him. This does not mean that (s)he will agree with you, but that is something you can talk about at the next meeting.


How to deal with guilt turning down non-tenure track faculty offer at current institution? I recognize my questions have some overlap with this one and this one. I feel those are largely talking about different things, though.

I am in a situation where I have been offered a non-tenure track faculty position at my current university. This is also the institution in which I did my PhD, but the tenured faculty I would be working for is not the person I did my PhD with; I have been working with them since finishing my PhD though. So I feel a great deal of appreciation for the institution and the faculty member I'd be working with.

However, there are a few issues with the position, and I am considering a competing offer in industry that seems to better fit my personal goals. I (and some mentors without a dog in the race) feel  that I would grow more in my area of research in the industry job. The non-tenure track position has been very hard for the faculty to fill, and they tend to lose whoever they hire to industry anyway because industry offers far better compensation. If I accept the industry job and turn down the faculty job, I will still be working with the faculty for a few months. I am not worried about the faculty seeking retribution, or that I will be burning a bridge, especially because I have been open about other offers and my goals from the beginning. Despite that, I still feel a sense of guilt considering the industry offer, and I think that might be clouding my judgement in the decision of which offer to accept.

So the question is as stated in the title, but I can be more specific. I recognize this may not be a question that can be answered with concrete steps, but what I am looking for is how to decline the faculty job in a way that will be palatable and not seen as greedily choosing industry over what I'm offered here.

If they really wanted you (or anyone) enough, they would make the position more desirable (tenure, pay, etc.).  They do it for other positions.

Don't you worry yourself a bit.  Be pleasant on the outside, sure.  But realize this is a business situation.  You have competing offers.  Take the one that does more in terms of pay/etc.

Also, often to advance in life, you need to move around some.  That's nice that you have a cozy situation there and people that value you.  But move on and do it elsewhere.  It's not unusual for companies or organizations to pay more for someone external than someone internal.

In particular, it is completely normal for someone in your situation to move on (recent grad).  If anything hanging out at your school is more the oddity.  So nobody will care that you moved on. Will wish you the best.


Who gets to write book reviews for academic journals? Some journals publish reviews of newly published books in their field. It's not clear how authors for these reviews are typically chosen. Can you apply for writing a review? Or should you do just like for a regular paper: buy the book, read it, write your review and submit it? How is this typically handled? Is it reserved to the editors to initiate such reviews?

I am sure this varies but is most likely one of the following (in some kind of falling order):

you are a well-known and respected researcher/educator in the field

you have recently written material that are key to the book (perhaps referenced in it)

you are known not to know the word "No" (makes the editors work easier)

you are friends with the editor (makes his/her life easy)

I doubt many editors will necessarily take you up on an offer (depending which category you may fall into) but I am sure some might be fine with it. It never hurts to contact an editor and express interest. You should then provide a background for why you should be considered for such a task.


Why is it required for Test Administrators and Proctors to constantly walk around the room during testing? I ask this because from my experience, a TA and/or a Proctor moving around the testing room looking over my shoulder is distracting and breaks my concentration. I have been in both positions, TA and Proctor and I try to only move when a student needs something,  such as a pencil or paper. My administrator seemed to get angry today because I was standing in one place too long. I also noticed that I have a better view of testers when I can see them all from a fixed point not turning my back on part of them throughout the test. Does anyone else see moving around  the room as distracting to testers?

It is not globally required: e.g. I do not move around the room unprompted when proctoring an exam.  So it is probably a matter of local academic culture and/or preference of the (head) course instructor.

In these kinds of fine points, academic culture differs so strongly from place to place as to make it clear that there are not always deep, well-thought out reasons for doing things one way or another: many institutions do things in a certain way because they "always" have done so.  The academic culture shock that I experienced in moving from the US to Montreal was considerable.

For instance, I believe that I first learned the word "invigilator" when someone introduced himself to me as an invigilator for my course.  If you had told me before I arrived in Montreal that final exams there have professional invigilators, I might not have believed you.  In the US, if you are teaching a course without a "common final" (I imagine that common finals occur only in a small minority of all courses taught, but I don't know for sure) then you, the instructor, are very likely the sole inviligator/proctor/administrator/TA in the room when an exam is taking place.  (Not that having professional invigilators is a bad idea: if you have the infrastructure in place, why not?  But I assume that they get paid at least a little bit, and this would never fly in the state university at which I currently reside.)

So understand that when I say that I do not move around the room when giving a final exam, I mean no one does.  It is not really clear to me what cheating I might be missing out on by only looking at the students from the front of the room.  I should say that I am used to a classroom environment with stadium seating and small flip-up desks so I can see a lot from the front of the room.  I also teach a subject -- math -- such that coming in with a cheat-sheet or something like that would not make things that much easier.  Even consulting the internet on your cell phone while in the bathroom would not help that much -- one does need to show one's work, after all -- unless the student was unusually insightful and well-prepared about how to cheat in this way.  In my local academic culture, cheaters are not insightful or well-prepared...


Where to publish (recreational) mathematics without a PhD? I have been out of undergrad for some time now but was interested in publishing a few things I have been working on. Are there any good "beginner" journals where someone without a mathematics PhD might have a chance at publishing something?

It might be important to note that most of the material would likely just be more on the recreational side of things.

Thanks in advance.

Of the journals of the Mathematical Association of America, you can choose between The American Mathematical Monthly, the Mathematical Magazine, and The College Mathematics Journal. The three have (perhaps subtly) different scopes1, and short of you telling us exactly what your results are about we cannot tell you which journal is the best choice. (On the other hand, you can easily write to the editors of one of those three journals to see where your manuscript would best fit.)

As Dirk mentioned, The Mathematical Intelligencer is also an obvious choice (again, caveats about not knowing whether your paper fit in their scope).

If you aim the material at the mathematical maturity level between secondary (high school) education and first years of a college education, two good publications are Pi in the Sky which is published by the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and Parabola which is backed by the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Another general mathematics magazine you can try is Plus Magazine based at Cambridge; the editors specifically asks you to contact them in advance if you want to write for the publication.

1 A very rough guide is that in terms of "mathematical maturity", the "age" of the readers are such that CMJ < MM < AMM.


Life as a financially independent academic I hope this is not to much rambling, but there is a concrete question in the end. I really like being a mathematician. I like the constant learning, I like working on problems at research-level and I even like teaching university students. I did my PhD and definitely had fun, but during the time, I have also seen aspects of academia that I do not like, most of which fall under "publish or perish", namely the constant struggle for grants, publications and the all-elusive tenured positions.

I'm obviously not alone in this, but let's assume that I have some money, not enough to be overly rich, but enough to keep a modest standard of living without ever having to work. (The details of this are not part of the question, just assume that salary will not be much of a job-motivation.)

Now this got me thinking. I would never want to "retire" at an early age, but on the hypothetical, what if I do not join the fight for tenure and instead effectively tenure myself?

I know that there are many people without university affiliation, who occasionally publish some papers, but are there any who do this full time?   There would be enough time to talk with collaborators, write articles I am actually interested in, visit guest lectures at the local universities and  the occasional conference on a holiday. Apart from teaching, I would do what everyone else is doing, just on my own. But would it work the same? A possible doubt is, would many people even be interested in working with me? I'm a reasonably competent mathematician but would probably be ineligible for many sources of funding, couldn't offer a big name or any return visits, and would be less motivated to get joint work published in the best possible journal. To put the question succinct:

Is life as a full-time "independent researcher" feasible?

What are other pros and cons? Are there precedents (apart from bored 18th century noblemen)?

I think this is completely feasible for a mathematician and maybe several other fields. No academic affiliation is needed to attend academic conferences or to publish papers. What you need is some means of collaboration to help firm up your ideas, nothing more, really. For that you need to meet people and to exchange ideas.

What would be frowned on, however, is replacing a paid faculty member with a volunteer. Most people do need that paycheck and it seems somehow wrong to deny someone that opportunity. You aren't suggesting that, of course, so I see no issue.

The easy way to achieve it, assuming that you live near to some large university (preferably) with a large faculty, is just to go and introduce yourself. You might need an invitation first, arranged by email, campus security being what it is today. If you can interest a member of the faculty (or a few) to talk to you about common interests you could probably get a standing invitation to participate in research seminars and such. If your ideas are sound, people will be happy to work with you.

Since internet communication is easy these days you could even use a conference to meet people and then work remotely. Or use your Alma Mater as a source of contacts.

One possible negative, however, is the level of commitment you are willing to make. If you are working on joint research, you need to do your part so that others aren't let down. I don't see that as a big issue in mathematics, but it might be in some fields.


Making a joke in an email asking for a PhD vacancy? In How to contact professors for PhD vacancies?, Suresh suggests (and I believe most of you agree with this):

  Think about their work. Find something intelligent to say (even a question).

I have read a couple of the recent, most cited papers of the professor. It is considered to be a breakthrough in the field, and of course very interesting. I have some questions, but I'm afraid that they are just trivial, that the answers are lying apparently in the papers (in the professor's perspective) that I can't see.

But I decide to write an email to them anyway. When I'm about to describe what I've read, I come up with a joke about that breakthrough method. That joke is only one sentence long, and for me obviously it's funny. However, I'm afraid there are some backfires if I decide to joke about it. Maybe the professor will see that the joke has no relevant to the method (explaining kills the joke), or it will be too informal in the first contact.

So is it safe to put the joke into the email?

TL;DR: Women rates funny guys as more intelligent. Are professors the same?

TL;DR: Women rates funny guys as more intelligent. Are professors the same?

No, not really.  In ordinary conversation, nobody is expected to say anything deep or knowledgeable.  Making a joke at least shows more cleverness than many of the alternatives (such as chatting about the weather).  On the other hand, in a context where you might be expected to say something with real academic content, just making a joke instead suggests that you don't have anything else to contribute.  I think it would be better to try to engage with the subject matter, even if you are clearly not an expert yet, than to look like you are deflecting the issue with a joke.

The worst case scenario is making a terrible joke and seeming overly proud of yourself for making it.  Don't write to someone doing gene editing and say "Your recent papers are really impressive and have been getting crisper and crisper (get it? LOL!). I guess mi Cas es su Cas, am I right?"


Should the marker be responsible for explaining assignments and exams or the instructor? Some instructors tell their students to ask the markers about the questions on assignments and exam papers after they are marked. But many markers are not quite familiar with textbook or other teaching material. Who do you think should take the most responsibility in answering students questions on assignments and exam papers, markers or the instructors?

That depends very much on the type of questions.

Normally a marker who is not the course supervisor / instructor should be given a sufficiently detailed marking schedule. However, even for a very detailed  schedule there often is still room for a marker to make judgement calls, and the marker should clearly apply these as consistently as possible. When students simply want to understand why they got the marks they got, then that question should be answered by the marker, in particular when such judgement calls are involved. When a student does not agree, this should be escalated to the instructor.

Other questions, for example whether the marking schedule itself is correct, or whether an alternative answer got the right number of marks, should in my view be answered by the supervisor / instructor -- any dispute over such a matter will in the end involve him/her anyway.

And as a student, If I have reason to believe that the marker is not too familiar with the material, I would go straight to the instructor.


What are good reasons to write my thesis in English? I'm studying in Germany. German and English are not my native tongue, but I prefer to write my thesis in English for the following reasons:

My English is better than my German (not a good reason).
My supervisor's native tongue is English (not a good reason).
I'm analyzing the socio-political situations in an Asian country. Although the official language there is not English, the bulk of the existing literature review (written by natives and non-natives) is in English. Also, English is virtually the only foreign language learnt and used over there. It's just easier to find materials in English; thus, if I write my thesis in German, it would be a laborious task to translate any cited materials. These are probably good reasons.

Could you suggest a convincing way to word my reasons as to why I prefer to write in English? I'm filling a form of demand to write in language other than German, and they only give a small space (a line) to state my reasons. How about the following?

  The existing literature review is mainly, if not almost entirely, in English; the country's second language is also English.

Is this convincing? Thanks.

Clearly, in the time you have performing research and interacting with other people in your field, you were using at least one language, likely more than one given your research on a country that (likely) does not speak either English or German. However, your thesis has some specific audiences to address. If written in German, it certainly addresses your local university department, and the academic community in Germany. Writing it in English will dramatically broaden the potential audience, since many more people in the world can read English as compared with German. But, do those additional people count much? That is up to you to determine, and the university to agree to.

Look at your references, fellow academics you've met at conferences, and those you wish to interact with. Write in the language most likely to be accessible to them.


How can I get copies of library of congress's archival manuscripts? I require photocopies of "Archival Manuscript/Mixed Formats" from the Library of Congress. They have a collection from one author which has otherwise unpublished technical documents that are very relevant to my area of expertise. Judging by the indicies, there are at least 20 boxes (out of 106) that are relevant. None of these are digitized and most are very technical documents with information not seen by people in my field.

I'm not sure the best way to attack this problem because travelling there is far from where I live now (6 hrs by plane) and the librarian I spoke on the phone with didn't think that our library could request it. LoC seems very restrictive about working with their material, that is they won't let me personally go the stacks and browse the boxes, and they say they only allow 5 books to be reviewed at a time.

Are there any tips or alternative ways to get the materials? Our research team is rather large for an academic team, so would it be worthwhile to ask a Congressperson to request it on our behalf? Just looking for input.

This is not an answer, but too long for a comment.

I used to live around Washington DC metro area. I went to Library of Congress very often. They don't have open shelf policy. You sit in one of their reading rooms and pick a desk. You request for materials to read. The librarian will find them and put on a cart. Somebody moves the cart out to the desk you sit. After you finish, they'll put them back to the shelf. I never checked out books from them. Don't know their check out policy.

I remember there was a certain limit number of books for the request. 5 seems to be correct because you can only load a certain number of books on the cart.

It is definitely worth while to ask a Congressperson to help if you live in the US. But, it sounds like it's worth making a trip there to examine everything they have. 106 boxes is a lot. It takes half a container. I am afraid no libray is willing to take such a huge task - I assume you're thinking of inter-library loan. My 2 cents.


Citing own image based on others work Let's say I create an image which illustrates the ideas of others as part of a paper I write for university class work (so it's not about anything I want to publish).

A simple example: Foo Bar says in their paper: We have a state machine with states A, B, and C.

I want to summarize their idea in my paper, but they do not have a graphic to illustrate it, so I create a graphic for my paper looking like this:

A --> B --> C

Do I need to cite it? My text makes it clear that this is not my idea (and it properly cites Foo Bar), but just looking at the graphic, this isn't clear.
If so, how would I cite it? Would "Graphic Title (based on [Foo Bar, 2016])" work? Is "based on" strong enough to indicate that this is not a graphic created by Foo Bar or a graphic based on a graphic by Foo Bar? Would "based on work by [Foo Bar]" be better? Or is there some standard for this situation that I'm not aware of?

This question is similar to How to cite a rebuilt graphic, but not a duplicate, as I did not rebuild a graphic, but build a graphic based on a description.

You could add a note to the figure caption as follows:

  Figure X: [figure_caption ...] (This figure is based on work by Foo
  Bar 2016).

In addition to the citation in your text, you can also add a proper citation in this note (using your citation style of choice).


Should you organise reviewer points thematically when preparing a complex response to reviewers document? I was recently reading some suggestions on how to effectively write a "response to reviewer comments" document. One suggestion was to consider categorising reviewer comments by theme.

  Categorize the reviewers’ comments: If there are too many comments, it would help if you separate the comments into categories. For
  example, all the comments related to methodology could be grouped
  together, all related to language could be under one category, etc. If
  you decide to do that, make sure you add a sentence such as “I have
  separated my responses to the reviewers’ comments according to several
  categories in order to achieve an integrated approach in my
  responses.” SOURCE

Previously my workflow has been to do this internally but to still organise the response document  by reviewer order and then by the order implied by their response. So, I would number and give a title to each reviewer point. I would then organise these into categories in a separate document (just for me) and work out the best way to sequentially work through them. If two reviewers made the same point, in the response to the second reviewer, I would just refer back to the relevant review earlier.

So my question:

Is it advisable to re-organise reviewer points thematically in the response document? Or is it better to retain the order implied by the editor's letter?

Some initial thoughts:

Organising by theme will mean that points made by different reviewers and the editor are interspersed. Thus, it will be harder for the editor or reviewer to identify their specific points. A naming convention might reduce this issue a little bit (e.g., I often name reviewer points R1.1, R1.2, etc. for Reviewer 1 Point 1, Reviewer 1 Point 2), but not completely.
Response documents vary in complexity. I imagine when there are a lot (e.g., 50+) separate points to address that thematic organisation might be more relevant. Similarly, when there are more reviewers, there may be more overlap in the points that are raised and therefore greater benefit in organising thematically.
Some reviewer points are distinct enough that they need to be addressed separately, but may not be as clear when not seen consecutively.

Any organization of your response will help.  Be sure and have someone else proofread your response before sending.  The organization of your response should follow the organization of the review, if at all possible.  Sometimes people use "in-place" editing, where a response is done in the review's own text, but this probably is not formal enough for your situation.


What is the difference between this "book" and a research paper? I don't know a lot about the scientific research and its concepts. What is the difference between this book and any research paper?

From my understanding of the research world, I know that link.springer is a journal and journals publish research papers after reviewing. If that is the case, then what is that book doing in link.springer? Is it really just a book? or Do people call it "published book"?

Springer publishes books as well as journals. This particular item is a reference book published by Springer. You can certainly cite chapters of a book like this.


The difference in writing style between a book chapter and article in a journal My discipline is educational technology and I have been invited to submit a book chapter about integrating technology in my region. I published many articles in top refereed journals, but not sure whether the focus, style of writing and structure of articles are appropriate for book chapters.
Anyone can highlight the main differences?

You would want your chapter to fit into the whole project, whereas a journal article can usually stand alone.

Your chapter should not duplicate material in other chapters, although you may refer to material in another chapter.

You will want your chapter to be generally accessible.  For the specialized journal article, that doesn't matter so much.

The editor (could be more than one) may want to be rather more involved in choosing the content, organization, presentation, etc.,for a book project than for an isolated article.

To get a feel for the style desired, you could ask the editor(s) for one or more examples of the desired style.


What are cautions to take with second hand data in an interview? When analyzing second hand information in a data set (participant is recounting someone else's experience), if you cannot access that person to confirm their experience, what are some cautions to take in interpretation? Can you use the data at all?

Also, if you do use the data, wouldn't there be potential ethics issues considering the other person has not signed a consent form?

...what are some cautions to take in interpretation? Can you use the data at all?

The most obvious caution to take here is simply to be upfront in your research about the fact that certain data is unconfirmed 'hearsay' data, consisting of a recounting of another person's experience, without confirmation from the primary person.  Whether it can be used legitimately depends on the purpose.  There is no particular reason that data could not be used at all, but that really depends on whether hearsay evidence constitutes valuable evidence on your research question.  Regardless, in your description of your data, and subsequent interpretation, you should be clear about the fact that this data is hearsay, and your interpretation should take account of this (e.g., one possible hypothesis would be that the hearsay account is incorrect).

As in courts of law, hearsay should be considered to be weak evidence, due to the possibility that the account of another person's experience may not accord with that person's own description.  Hearsay evidence has an additional degree of removal from reality relative to direct evidence from a person about their own experience and actions.  As such, it has a higher chance of error, and this should be conceded clearly in your analysis and interpretation of your data.

  ...wouldn't there be potential ethics issues considering the other person has not signed a consent form?

As with any academic research project, if you are using data that identifies the characteristics or experiences of individuals, it is generally the case that you will need to present your results in a way that anonymises the data, and does not allow the reader to identify the characteristics of any specific individual.  The same should apply whether the information comes directly from that individual, or as hearsay from another person.

There may be cases where it is legitimate to report hearsay information about individuals as part of research.  For example, a research project might ask respondents to give feedback and opinions on the actions of local politicians, in which case it would be legitimate to report this data without the consent of those politicians.  (In this case the respondents would be anonymised, but the politicians probably would not be.)  In other cases, when you are dealing with people that are not public figures, it might not be legitimate to report outcomes that allow identifiability of those people.

If you are unsure about the ethical requirements for your study, you should contact the relevant ethics boards or ethics officers at your university.  Academic studies involving people generally require ethics clearance anyway, but if this matter has arisen as an additional issue, you should contact the ethics board and seek further guidance from them.


PhD stipend continues being paid I graduated with a PhD after 2 years (I was very efficient) and even though I have already received my degree and moved out of town, I'm still getting a stipend deposited into my bank account. I contacted my advisor about it but my advisor didn't reply at all, so I don't know what to do about this. Is there a minimum funding requirement or something like that? Or is it just a mistake? What to do now?

Contact your department, CC'ing your advisor.

It happened to me once: I was paid over the summer by my department even if I was out of the US for an internship at a company research lab in Europe.
I came back in September and found additional money in my US account. I told our administrator. she figured out what happened and she told me that in case I had already spent the money, the department would have found a way to ensure things would get straighten out with the university.
I still had all of it, so I just wrote a check to the university to return the money.


How are simultaneous discoveries handled in biomedical publishing? So my situation goes like this : I happened to land upon a significant discovery in my lab In a very field very hot right now. My  bosses are awesome and we send our findings to a ~20 impact factor journal as a rapid communication. Journal review comes back 3 weeks back, reviews are favorable. 2 of 3 reviewers just commended work and did not  ask anything  and third one asked to show extra proof.  I do some extra experiments for revision of article and we send it back this week. I think we satisfactory answered all reviewers questions.

The day we send it back we hear of  a similar paper published in a  different but very famous  journal by a well known scientist of that field. While his work is much deeper  than our rapid communication in one cancer , ours is more broad and applicable to more cancers than his work (that’s why rapid communication as we had hoped we could build upon the work) We also show a very different mechanism that his lab  didn’t. It’s a question of two different labs landing upon a similar  discovery simultaneously. Now my paper is still under review by that top journal. How will his publication this week affect my chances of getting accepted by this journal?
Time line is this:

my article submission: Feb 20 2018
My revision submission : Mar20 2018

Similar paper submitted : October 2017
Similar paper gets accepted : Feb 18 2018
Similar paper gets published: Mar 20 2018

I am pretty sure if he hadn’t published,  our paper would have very likely got accepted because it’s a big discovery. But now that he has, I am feeling all the jitters, nightmares etc. it’s literally  two years of my day and night hard work that has gone in this work. Just super concerned.
I am not a PhD, just an  MD. So I am unaware of how these situations are handled in biomedical scientific publishing.

Just wanted to share the happy news that the prestigious journal has accepted my manuscript as it is and the report will be online by coming Friday. My discovery therefore gets published less than 3 weeks after the other lab published theirs. Simultaneous discoveries, I would say!

Thanks


Is it bad form to ask someone to be my advisor over email? The faculty, of course, will not first hear from me over email - we have maintained semi-regular research-related meetings over the semester. I have not yet asked her to be my advisor, but now since the academic year has ended, I want to make this an official advisor-advisee relationship. I'm wondering if it would be bad form to just ask the question directly over email, as she doesn't seem to be around the department anymore. I should add that I am already a PHD student in the department, and funding is provided by the department, so I am not really asking for money either.

I would first send her an email asking when she might next be around campus and able to meet.  If she responds that she's traveling (which is entirely possible now that the academic year is over), I think you can send a polite follow up asking her to be your official advisor.


I have nothing to show for the last five years but graduate school and I can't finish/want to leave this field I have no formal work experience. I have a BA in sociology and went into graduate school for education. Instead of following my instincts or really thinking about whether I could teach childhood as a job, I told myself it would feel more natural. It has not.

I will fail this program if I have to teach full-time, which is required to graduate (as is an exam that's so new there are no prep books, and it is required to stay in this program). I am in my mid twenties and have zero formal work experience. Foolishly, I'm one of those people that could barely juggle a full courseload and work. I've always chosen school and realized too late that graduate school was a horrible choice for me.

In terms of anything resembling work, I've assisted as a volunteer in classrooms, written papers and portfolios, and have put two years into this program but am incredibly unhappy and cannot finish, nor do I want to be in this profession anymore. I thought it was the one way to put my useless liberal arts degree into a professional path.

Before that, I went through a year and a half after graduation looking for entry level office job, bookstores, retail...no callbacks. Maybe three interviews in the whole time. Temp agencies stopped responding and when I called one to ask why they weren't calling me in to offer advisement, they said they'd have to call me. I graduated with a 3.0 but my resume was too weak, I guess. I had friends look at it to see that it was passable, but as I said I have no experience and I'm now in my mid-20s. (And for what it's worth, am incredibly ashamed of myself.) No experience, no work. My family says I am "unemployable" and I fear they're right--I was in this program two years and should have pulled out sooner. It looks suspicious. If nothing else, it is damaging because I went to school full-time instead of working.

The time, money, and effort I spent on this makes me feel bad, but the lack of a degree/ANY work experience in all that time makes me feel worse.

So there it is, I have no work experience AND no degree to explain the time gap. Can I salvage this? I feel embarrassed even to put the school on my resume b/c of the lack of a degree, but it's the only thing I have to show for the last few years.

(This is in teaching/early childhood. I don't know how to spin graduate school into first experience in even a basic clerical job.)

The skills acquired as a graduate student are often very employable outside academia. I was doing a PhD in Linguistics with a focus on corpus linguistics. As part of my education, I learned statistics, Python scripting, Mandarin Chinese and technical writing. Those skills ended up getting me a job offer from a major computer software company, which I accepted and left grad school to take.

You probably have more employable skills than you think. Spend some time thinking about what skills you possess and what professions need those skills. a PhD to your name is not the first thing employers look for - they look for whether you have the skills that they need.

Stop thinking about your degree and start thinking about your skillset.


Can I hide my master degree permanently? I am doing an undergraduate masters (4 year course) in Cambridge and end up having a first class honour in the BA and upper second class in the Mxxx. I have emailed the uni to abandon my fourth year result but seems that it is too late to withdraw. Can I just destroy the degree letter and hide my Master degree?

Hide it from whom? The only scenario I can see is that you want to omit it from your CV. But if you do that, how are you going to explain the one year gap?

It's also worth noting that you didn't get "a first class honour in the BA". You may have got first class honours in one or more years of the Tripos, but your degree certificate will say merely that on a certain date, in a congregation holden (sic) in the Senate House, you were admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Not that my employers have asked to see the certificate.

Finally, "permanently"? Don't make rash decisions which you might regret. In two years you'll be able to graduate MA and that (in Cambridge terms, at least) is a higher degree than the MMath/MEng/etc. You can put MA (Cantab) as your postnominal letters on your CV and hide the Mxxx that way, although it will still make sense to mention it as an explanation for what you were doing this past year.


How much is a PhD worth without publications or a reputation? I asked this question a few months ago about addressing in-group bullying during my PhD.

How to address in-group bullying without compromising PhD/career?

Things have not improved over the past few months - in fact I think they have gotten worse. I'm three years into my PhD and at least a year of handing in. I'm still very much in the experimental phase, so unfortunately 'writing at home' is not an option now or anytime in the near future. I've been pretty scarred by this environment so I highly doubt I will end up in academia. While I am currently on funding, it will run out a year before I hand in, so I will need to self-fund.

My current question is this: How much is it actually worth to have a PhD if I do not have any publications or references by the time I submit?

It's worth quite a bit, especially if you're going into industry. Even if you have no publications, you still have the PhD title. I know of quite a few employers where simply having a PhD means you are awarded a higher starting salary even if your job scope and title are the same as others.

As for the things themselves: publications is less important but references still matter.

Publications: if you look at a typical job advertisement in industry, they don't say "you must have published 45 papers" or anything like that - these kind of criteria can determine promotion from assistant professor to associate professor for example, but are simply irrelevant when it comes to finding a job in industry. As long as you can demonstrate you have the skills to do the job, you have a chance at landing it.

Nonetheless, a savvy HR person might notice that you have no publications, which will be unusual (people with PhDs have generally published at least something). Before going to a job interview, I'd prepare a response to this question if asked.

References: there aren't many jobs that require references, but they exist. These are typically very important jobs where the company can't afford to make a mistake in the hiring process. The process might involve multiple interviews, aptitude tests, and references, before you are hired.

The good news is this kind of job is rare. It might happen for example if a company is replacing its CEO, which is not the kind of job you'll be ready for fresh out of grad school in any case. You can also get references from people other than your supervisor. The bad news is, if you are asked to provide a reference, you have to provide one.


Reporting a student who cheats Firstly, I do not believe this to be a duplicate of the related recently posted question due to the key fact that that user was anonymous to his class and I am not.

This has happened 3 times now. While taking standardized tests, someone cheats. These aren't just classroom tests, but rather officially proctored, nation-wide tests. The first time, some students had significantly more time, both starting before the official call to start, and ending after the official end. The Proctor was pretty relaxed, and either didn't notice / didn't care. The second time, someone's phone went off twice, and on full volume (the student in question had to stand up and manually turn the phone off). The Proctor did not alert his superiors, although many students had lost a significant amount of time and the incident negatively impacted our scores. We were told beforehand that any distractions during would be an immediate invalidation of the test (we even had to keep our phones in a box), but this seemed to go unnoticed. The third time was similar.

I complained to my peers afterward, and they all told me not to tell anyone or do anything for fear that it would cancel or negatively impact our scores (most of them did well). I didn't feel comfortable with this, but I didn't report anything both for fear of both my reputation being impacted, and for fear of my scores being cancelled on a test that I studied significantly for and potentially did well on. If I were to report any of these incidents, most people would immediately know that it was me who had filed the report, and I would be severely socially ostracised. I did/do not desire this at all. In hindsight, I should have kept it to myself, not expressed my worries to my friends / acquaintances, but unfortunately this did not happen.

In a situation like this, what is the appropriate course of action post-disclosure? Report the student in question and risk negative reputation, a cancellation of scores, and hard work put in (but do the right thing and have fairness reign), or keep the cheating to oneself (and preserve reputation but carry a dishonest weight)?

I don't know in which country you live. If a phone ring, this is not cheating because a phone that rings does not provide any information to a student. However, if a student is using his phone to look up at information on the internet, take phone calls or send messages, or look at answers stored on his phone, this is of course cheating. So if the phone just rings, I don't think that it really matters.

About ending after the official end, if it is just a few minutes, maybe that the professor just decided to give a few more minutes to give a chance to those who could not finish the exam on time. I don't know about your country, but in my native country (Canada), it is not something unusual that a professor will give 5 more minutes to students if he sees that many of them have not finished the exam. In that case, this would not be called cheating, as long as every student can have this extra time.

So, if you think that it is cheating, then you can report it (if you think you are OK with the possible consequences). But from your description, I am not sure that we can really call this cheating.


Role of positions' geographical diversity in (US) academic career perspectives I'm curious about the impact of geographical diversity of positions (postdoctoral or junior faculty) on career prospects in academia.  In my current job search I see a small number of positions at universities outside the US that potentially fit my research interests and experience.  I am wondering whether pursuing these positions would be beneficial to my current long-term goal of returning to an academic position in the US.

What effect does international academic experience have on academic career prospects in the US?

If you are just talking about the geographical role, rather than comparing things like great position at a world renowned foreign university versus a two-bit US institution, then it is true that it can be harder to get a US tenure-track position coming from foreign university.  The main reasons are (i) smaller schools are often less willing to fly in overseas applicants for interviews and (ii) (for positions with teaching experience expectations) it's advantageous for candidates to have experience teaching in a system comparable to the American one.  See also this recent answer from RoboKaren.  Another possible concern is that you get involved in some research niche which is popular, say only in Europe or Asia, but not the US, but this can also happen at US institutions.

That said, you shouldn't take these concerns too seriously if you find a position that you like, and these concerns don't play too much of a role for research universities.  However, consider the possibility that you may need to do another postdoc in the US/Canada to improve your chances of getting jobs at smaller schools where this may be an issue.

Addendum: The above was just in answer to the bold question, but not to the issue in the text about whether it is in some way beneficial to go abroad, say strictly for diversity reasons.  Here there seems to be negligible benefit, all other factors being equal, as the US already has a diverse amount of resesarch, and one can still learn from and even collaborate with foreign colleagues (at least in many fields) thanks to travel and modern technology.


When can I know the updated status from reviewer or editor after i submit a revised manuscript to that publisher? I have submitted a revised manuscript to an international journal of quantum chemistry at 8 August. My articles status still remain under review, I also don't know my article get accepted or rejected, I feel anxiety and cannot sleep well in this 3 weeks since this is my first articles. Should I write a polite inquiry email to the editor from that publisher to ask the status for my revised manuscript status? Thank you for advice.

Check with your colleagues in quantum chemistry what the standard timeline in publication is. In particular, you want to know how long it takes to receive reviewer reports. If your colleagues have reviewed papers, you can also ask how long they are given to review.

Chances are very good that 3 weeks is not too long - in fact it'd be abnormally fast to receive a decision in 3 weeks. Therefore relax, and wait.

If you're still concerned, I would email Wiley and ask about the status. They probably won't be able to give you a decision, but you can still ask questions such as how many reviewers have agreed to review, when the review due dates are, and so on (no guarantees they will give you the details though).


Mention MOOCs in email to potential PHD supervisor? I graduated from a top Russian university (computer science) with moderately high grades in 2013 and after 3 years of industry experience decided to pursue a PHD abroad (ideally, in Germany). I know exactly what topic I want to investigate, found a professor who had recently done research in this field and am now composing an email to him.

I got some useful pieces of advice here at SE:

How to write a Cover Letter for applying to a PhD programme

Optimal structure of cover letter for PhD application submitted directly to PI

How much detail to include in first email to potential PhD supervisor?

How brief I should be when contacting a professor for a PhD position for the first time?

But one question remains.

In fall 2014 I discovered Coursera and since then completed nearly 30 MOOCs, most of them being relevant to the topic I want to do research in. These courses, despite being undergraduate level, did expand my knowledge a lot and, honestly, gave me a taste of what a world-class higher education looks like. I consider completing these MOOCs a valuable achievement of mine, but do professors think so? I'm afraid that if I briefly mention "some courses on the Internet", it would seem unprofessional (there's a ton of crap on the web that calls itself "online courses"). But if I go into too much detail ("completed MOOC X from Princeton, MOOC Y from Stanford, ..."), it would be too long for the initial email. As I already know, the most important thing when making contact via email is to be brief.

Would you include such information in the first email at all? My concern is that both my undergradute research and my job are not directly (but, somehow) connected to the research topic I'm interested in (the topic is quite new, not much research exists there yet). MOOCs are exactly what gave me a broader perspective and inspired me to continue my education.

What is the proper way to write about it?

It is possible to be both brief and comprehensive.

Be brief in the main e-mail: completed X MOOCs from established institutes.

Refer to an appendix for a complete list.  In that case, if the potential supervisor cares at all, s/he can glance through the list to see if s/he is at all impressed.


Is it looked down upon to do a second PhD (vs a postdoc)? In January, I started my third year of a computer science PhD.  My goal has always been to balance "X" and computer science ("X" being a non-engineering subject), and I thought I could do that at my current institution while officially getting my computer science degree.  Unfortunately, I underestimated the extent to which I'd be required to work on my advisor's agenda (he is strictly a machine learning person), so, while I've gotten a few minor papers in computer science + "X" workshops, I haven't been able to pursue the research agenda that I particularly care about.  In addition, I realized I really need a more deep study of "X" than I realized, and potentially than of CS.

The way I see it, I have three viable options:

Leave this summer with a terminal masters in CS, find a temporary job as a software engineer or whatever I can manage for a year, and apply to "X" degrees this fall, to start in Sept. 2021.  This doesn't sound too bad, but I'd risk not getting into "X" and ending up with no PhD and hence no chance at a faculty position (which I want).
Continue publishing workshop papers on the side, and try to get a postdoc in "X" in a few years. My worry is that if I skip doing a PhD concentrated on my desired research topic (which is fairly specific and isn't something people are currently working on), I'll never get a chance to explore it fully, and that I'd only be able to get mediocre postdoc positions if I'm applying to a field I don't know enough about.
Get a PhD in CS as fast as I can, and then head straight to the start of another PhD in "X".  I like the idea of having a PhD in my back pocket, and this way I would have a lot of time to develop my research agenda, but I'm nervous that admissions committees would look down on someone who was "collecting degrees."

Any advice?

Also, for clarification: My desired research agenda in "X" has nothing to do with machine learning, so, while I can try to merge interests while a CS student, I believe it would be fairly superficial and only for the purpose of leaning my resume in that direction.

Edit: "X" is a humanities field that generally shares very little with CS except among a very few "computational X-ers"

I guess I would approach this from the opposite end. You want a faculty position, what is the best path to that goal? And would your feelings change if you had to fit your future research plans into a more acceptable box?

You say "no one" is working in the field you want to work in, and it's not a sufficiently interesting topic to catch your current advisor's interest in letting you play around in that space. Have you reached out to anyone in X field at your university? Do they seem interested or supportive? Are they willing to commit cold hard cash to your training or research?

To me, the idea that you're interested in a 100% new out-of-the-box field suggests that actually finding a faculty position in that field would be close to impossible, because from a hiring committee's point of view, your chance of landing big papers, big grants, finding students who share your interests, etc., would be next to zero. You'd be fighting uphill the whole way.

The reality is that academia is hyper-specialized at the moment, and academic careers have probably always been very prestige-/stature-driven. Someone doing computational medievalism (or whatever) risks seeming like a dilettante by the medievalists, and imho most science-minded folks sadly don't hold their humanities colleagues' research in very high regard. [aside: i very clearly remember attending a career panel back in grad school where a physicist casually suggested that humanities papers don't undergo peer review. The indignant English prof in attendance lost no time setting the record straight!]

Therefore, you might consider whether your research direction, however novel/interesting it is to you, has a place in your academic ambitions? Or maybe once you land your CS professor job, you could always try and learn something during a sabbatical? In any case, before you put years of your life, not to mention your own money (my understanding is that most humanities PhDs are self-funded or require substantial time spent doing teaching work for a small stipend), you should get more perspective from others whose opinions you truest in the two fields you want to bridge.


Authorship dispute on a paper that came out of a final report of a course? Background: I had a course about 1 year and half ago that is required to do a simulation for its final report. I developed my idea about simulation based on some papers I read and wrote a proposal based on that idea and submitted to instructors. Instructors send back my proposal and said it's good but the course requirement is to have a group mate on this final project for sure. I was reluctant to it but because it was course requirement, I just randomly searched for someone that did not have any group mate yet and I found someone that she did not have any idea about my proposal at all. I wanted her name to be on my proposal and final report just because of course requirement and nothing else. Because I even did my preliminary test simulations on my idea based on the codes that I wrote by myself and it turns out my idea is gonna work. It was not the greatest idea out there but it was something for a graduate course and I really liked my idea and wanted to do this. So, I just matched with this group mate and gave her all the code that I wrote and all the resources in terms of papers and other softwares and asked her just like an operator run these codes and simulations and store the results and I will post-process them by myself. That was all the story about this final report and I wrote the report and submitted it and successfully got A grade and done.

Problem: Sometimes after this course, I just decided to publish this idea even in a not so great journal with IF ~ 1 or even less. Because, I thought the idea is nice and new and even the results that I got because of this course project is good enough to warrant a junior publication as something that I did in my spare time. So, I decided to convert the final report into a paper. Initially, I was thinking it might be fair if I put my group mate on this paper because I'm not a native English speaking and she is an american and maybe she could at least help to polish the English of the paper. So, I sent a draft paper to her for her review about a year ago, but she promised to read and send her points back to me, which never did and I did not hear back from her. I think it was stupid but I wanted to just be nice and that's it. So, I decided to remove her name and publish it just in my own name. As a result, to completely even eliminate her contribution to just running my codes as an operator, I rerun all the codes again by myself and post-processed them again (it was good to make sure at least results are reproducible...) and added some other idea that I read newly in some papers and I submitted my draft to arXiv and it's online now. I also submitted this preprint to a journal that is not that great but it's not that bad for publishing a paper based on a course work and at least the journal is not predatory.

Question: Recently, my adviser found my preprint in arXiv and he's arguing with me that you should put the name of group mate in that article because her name is on the final report. Furthermore, you should withdraw the preprint because it's low quality. OK, the low quality is not something we want to talk about cause it's really relative and by the way my adviser does not have any experience on this specific topic. My question is only because the name of my group mate is on the final report of that course, does it warrant her an authorship?! I mean, why I can't write an even very very very low quality paper based on the codes and idea that I developed initially? Probably, you might know that I'm really angry and it makes me mad that I can't publish something based on my own work because I just put the name of someone on a piece of paper without contribution from her? By the way, it's not her that arguing and it's only my adviser that wants to fight with me. Any idea or suggestion is appreciated.

While it's impossible to judge contribution from outside, I generally recommend erring on the side of inclusion when it comes to authorship.  If there's a reasonable argument that somebody contributed, it doesn't really cost you anything to have them on the paper.

Furthermore, there are many ways to contribute to a paper (see, for example, the CRediT taxonomy), and many journals even require a contributions section in which you can explain who exactly did what. In this case, it sounds like you wrote the paper, designed the system, built the system, and both of you ran experiments. You can't ethically "undo" somebody's experimental work by redoing it yourself.

What you should never do is to drop somebody from authorship without consulting them. You had a draft with this person on it as an author, and even if they never got back to you, for all they know they're still a co-author. Probably it doesn't matter to them very much (or else they'd likely have gotten back to you), but it's still unethical to remove somebody from authorship without their consent. It is also unethical to submit a paper without the consent of all of the authors, so that's also a potential problem in this situation, where you're just kinda doing what you feel like without consulting with anybody else.

In fact, the basic problem I see here is that you seem to be operating without any advice from somebody who can help you navigate these questions (as well as the issue of quality, which I won't touch otherwise). Your advisor is likely a good source of such advice, and even if you don't like/trust your advisor, you should be able to find somebody who knows the scientific world well who can be a mentor for you.


Whether to seek correction after my paper is published when the order of my first, middle, and last names is incorrect? My article has just been published in a reputable journal. I discovered that my name is in Last, Middle, First order e.g Bagud, F.M instead of Bagud, M.F which doesn't go with APA style. Do I need to raise a corrigendum or should leave it? Actually, the name was written as Bagud, Meas Ford and the copy editor asked me to identify the surname among the three in which i chose Bagud. Thereafter, my name appeared as Ford Meas Bagud (Bagud, F.M) in the published article.

I can relate to the discomfort of having your name misspelled, however, I don't see how to completely resolve the issue.

First, if the mistake was already present in the proofs, then you're in fault for not noticing and there is nothing to be done. If the mistake was introduced after the proofs were accepted by the authors, then it's the publisher's mistake. But to my experience, there's little they can do to remedy the situation.

As anedoctal evidence to this, I recently had a very respected publisher re-order our list of authors after the proofs (second and third authors were switched in a four authored paper - order was initially alphabetical). The publisher offered to publish an errata, that is, a minor one liner in a forthcomng issue stating the correct author order of our paper.

Although not as reconforting as having a correction in the actual paper, it's not completely useless as you can prove (in your case) that it was actually a mistake and you are not simply claiming a random paper in your CV, but I don't think you will ever need to prove this. The issue is that your paper will still be published and cited with the incorrect name, and probably not correctly indexed e.g. in your Google Scholar profile.

TL;DR contact the publisher and ask for a correction, but expect no more than a published errata.


Why people put the details of publication process like revise and resubmit in their CVs? In my field (economics), I see lots of scholars (some of them are famous in their field) putting their papers with the information (R&R at Journal X.).

I understand the fact that they try to transfer the signal that the paper in question has an academic quality but what happens if the paper gets a rejection after the third round of revision? Can it be worse for the reputation? So, what are the pros and cons to give the information like R&R or "conditionally accepted" for a paper in publication process?

In economics, the publication process takes a long time.  The slow review process largely results form a slow review and a slow resubmission process. Because editors know that reviews are slow, they only send items to review or give an R&R if they think they have a good shot of being published in the journal.  The fact that a paper was sent for review or given an R&R a particular journal means that it passes some bar of quality. This signal is important on a junior researcher’s CV. Noting a paper is under review also allows the CV reader to understand that the paper is fully written ( although of course there are other ways to note this).

There are few downsides to the researcher to noting that a paper is under review or has an R&R because It is such an established norm in the field. I would not hesitate to follow this norm if you are preparing your CV.


Critiquing or commenting on someone's talk Assume I attended someone's seminar talk which I liked a lot. Also I heard that yet another expert X also said that the talk is interesting.
Is it ok to say to the lecturer that the expert X and I liked the talk, or should I not mention another's opinion?
Now assume the opposite situation: the expert X and I did NOT like the talk.
Is it ok to say to the lecturer that X and I did not like the talk, or again should I not refer to other people?
[update] Now assume that the lecturer explicitly asked me if I heard what X said about his/her talk. Can I tell the lecturer X's opinion (assuming X did not ask me in advance not to do that)?

X, being an expert in the field, can presumably find ways to communicate their opinions to the speaker, publicly or privately, if they wish to do so.

Often, opinions communicated between experts will be much more complicated and mixed than a simple like/dislike. "I agree with you on points A, B, and C, but I think point D is contradicted by Y's research. I'll send you a reference." is much more likely than either extreme.

If you just heard X talking about point D and Y's research, you could get the impression X disliked the talk. If you just heard X talking up points A, B, and C you could get the impression X liked the talk. Neither impression would be fully accurate.

Unless X has positively authorized you to speak on their behalf, you should not do so. If asked directly, indicate that you are unsure and, as suggested in a comment, encourage the speaker to talk to X directly.


If I saw a research result similar to mine from my PC duties, should and how should I contact the authors? It happened many times that I saw a paper submitted to a conference where I am on the PC, or a journal where I am editing, and such paper had something similar to what I am working on. The situation is worse when I already have something better.

Of course I should declare a conflict of interest and should let others handle the paper. But I always wonder whether I should contact the authors.

If I don't contact the authors, they might doubt the independence of my paper from theirs. This will be worse if their paper was not published at that point (perhaps it got rejected several times).
If I do contact the them, they may feel that I push them to do something they don't want to, such as making their paper public or collaborating with me.

There are more pros and cons, but I will stop here to keep the question simple.

In my experience it is not a conflict of interest to be working on something similar.  As @TheWanderer said, that's exactly why you end up reviewing such papers.  Nor is it appropriate to use your knowledge of their submission to contact them.

Generally speaking, as a program committee member, you should treat what you see there as confidential, and treat the fact that you are reviewing it as confidential as well.  If you choose to provide comments in your review, based on your own experience, that can help them improve their paper, that's great.  If you feel like your personal knowledge of the area is such that to comment on it you would be revealing unpublished information of your own, you need not include such comments.  You should simply evaluate their work in the context of whatever is public at the time they submit.  If someone else publishes something that makes their work obsolete, and it appears between the time of submission and the time their own work would appear, it's rotten luck but I think they would still need to treat the soon-to-be-published work as having precedence.

The same applies as a reviewer for a journal of course.

In some fields there may be exceptions.  For instance, there are open-access journals with public, attributed reviews.  But in CS these seem quite rare.


Style guide for academic conference talks Is there a comprehensive style guide aimed at academic slideshow-type talks?  Googling has given me random style suggestions from various sources of dubious credibility. Most give obvious information, like opt for effective pictures over text.  Most seem aimed at business presentations, so might compare the virtues of pie charts and bar graphs.

The issue that sent me finally looking for a style guide is looking for the best practices on "uncovering" information on a slide piecemeal.  Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't, but I've never used a thoughtful decision process.  I would appreciate suggestions about this in particular.

You can, of course, avoid "uncovering" just by putting the uncovered information on its own later slide.  So related to uncovering, I'm also interested in ideas about when two pieces of information should be separated into different slides or when it is best to put them on the same slide.

If one exists, I'd like a reference made by an organization known for this sort of thing, e.g. something like AP, MLA, a university committee, or an discipline-specific academic organization.  I'm also interested in the general thoughts of practicing academics, whose credibility will be clear from their experience and from upvoting of their answers.

Edward Tufte is classic and well-recognized authority on scientific communication.  His book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a wonderful guide for thinking about your visual communication (including slides). He also has a fierce critique of PowerPoint which serves as a good negative guide of pitfalls to avoid.


What computer specs should be included in numerical results section, when, and why? Generally in the numerical section for papers I read, they include (if at all) computer specs like how much RAM, CPU speed, or type of processor.  What kinds of computers specs should I include? When should I include them? Why? Some general scenarios when you don’t need to include the specs would be helpful. As I am writing an interdisciplinary paper, I would also like to know about a possible dependency on the field.

For this question I would especially like to know why.  I know the basic idea is reproducible research, but are there really any cases where it is imperative to know it was an i5 Intel processor?

First, some (hopefully) obvious remarks:

you only need to present CPU specs if you are going to publish CPU timings
CPU timings depend on variety of factors, including hardware specs, OS, drivers, libraries, software, configuration of this software, etc. It is unlikely that the combination of all these factors will be reproduced exactly.
Even a very detailed list of hardware specs that can be published in an academic paper is likely to be incomplete: for example you can say that CPU is i5, but will you mention the rev? will you mention the microcode version? will you mention how well the CPU is cooled and how recently the thermopaste was changed?
The same is probably true for the software: it is unlikely that one can report versions of all drivers / libraries / software involved in the process.

It becomes clear that any publishable list of specs will not be sufficient to reproduce the settings. In my opinion, the exact reproduceability is not achievable and hence is not the aim.

I always provide and use the CPU specs as a rough guide that helps me to understand the behaviour of the CPU timings reported as a function of problem parameters. Can this slowdown be due to the data falling off the CPU cache? Can it be due to insufficient memory and hence disk swapping? Does this software allow to use all CPU cores or is only one core active? Can we (roughly) compare the timings reported in this paper with the timings reported by competitors, or are the setups too dissimilar?

At least once in my own experience I encountered an example of scientific fraud, when the reported timings could not be achieved on the declared CPU due to trivial complexity estimations — it could be easily shown that even at 100% efficiency the stated CPU could not perform the calculations needed in time claimed. In this case the details of the setup were handy to make the case.

Final note: reporting CPU specs is important, but making the code available is far more important and I wish people in academia do it more often!