How important is it to tailor personal statements to different departments, in mathematics? I'm applying to math graduate programs at the moment. How important is it to tailor the personal statement to the different departments to which I'm applying?

It is difficult to understand precisely what someone researches (outside of broad categories such as "geometric analysis" and "higher category theory") as well as get a sense of the department. Should I try to indicate who I would like to work with and why I would like the department even if I have only a shallow knowledge of it?

@RoboKaren's advice is good for many fields, and the basic point that you should know something about the departments you're applying to certainly applies in mathematics — you don't want to, for example, say it's your dream to study number theory in an application to a department which has no number theorists.  However, mathematics is extremely specialized, and incoming PhD students (in the US, at least) are not expected to have a very specific idea of what they will work on.  Most likely, you wouldn't even understand the abstract of your PhD thesis if you were to read it now.  This is true even for the exceptional few students who have done truly substantial undergraduate research; typically their PhD research is only very loosely related to it.

The implication of this for which schools you should apply to is that you should generally aim for departments which are strong in a broad spectrum of fields.  Fortunately, there are lots of them.

It's good to say something about your research interests in general terms, but the admission committee understands that by the time you start on your thesis they may have changed radically (say, from group theory to mathematical biology). If you yourself clearly don't understand that, it can create the impression that you don't know some basic things about how the field works.  (And of course you don't; you haven't even been to graduate school yet!  But nevertheless, you don't want to draw attention to that ignorance unnecessarily.)  Bringing up research interests is more important for demonstrating that you've been exposed to some substantial mathematics than for indicating why you're interested in a particular department.

So, to finally come to your actual question:

  I'm applying to math graduate programs at the moment. How important is it to tailor the personal statement to the different departments to which I'm applying?

Unless you've already discussed possible thesis topics with someone in the department — which is extremely rare in mathematics and not at all expected — I would say, not much.  Mentioning broad categories like "geometric analysis" is sufficient — again, as long as there actually are geometric analysts on the faculty!

All of this is intended as general advice for "typical" prospective PhD students in mathematics in the US (where "typical" includes even most successful applicants to top programs).  The exceptional few who have substantial research as undergraduates and want to continue in the same direction presumably have research mentors who can give them advice tailored to their personal situations.


Can I revise and use a part of my published paper in PhD dissertation? I have a published journal article and a book chapter (both are single-authored). I am in the process of getting permission from the publishers respectively to make the most of them for my PhD dissertation.
Well, my question is about what actions are okay as 're-use.' I asked these questions to a publisher once, but I have heard only very abstract answer (like, [...] a journal gives permission to 'reuse' and 'reproduce' to [...]).

Is it normal and okay to use only a certain part of the published article/book chapter?
(For example, exclude introduction and use only the analysis results).

Considering the overall flow of the PhD dissertation, I have theoretical discussion (Chapter 2) and analytical results (Chapter 6) far apart from each other.
In the published paper, as you can imagine, one come right after the other.
In this case, is it okay to split the published paper and put the parts in Chapter 2 and Chapter 6 separately?

If these published papers were part of your dissertation research, I don't see how there would be an issue. For example, at my University we were expected to submit and publish three papers for our dissertation. We then wrapped those papers into a single document, added an introduction chapter and conclusion chapter. My dissertation document was then published on the university website.
In my case I made sure that I did not use the publisher formatted final version of the papers. With the publishers I used, permission was not required for including in a thesis or dissertation. For example, I published some of my papers in IEEE journals. IEEE has a button on their site for each paper that you can click to get copyright permissions. It has a drop down that says "thesis/dissertation". All that they require if you are the first author is to include a copyright message to IEEE in your dissertation. Of course, the practice may be different in other journals, as the licenses will vary too.
I also made the choice to only publish my dissertation in the university's open access library repository as required by the university, and not in proquest's subscription repository of dissertations as that could result in monetization of another publisher's work.
In this example I gave, self-plagiarism does not apply because 1) you would be sure to acknowledge at each chapter's beginning that this is an already-published work, 2) the dissertation is a university requirement for graduation. Nowadays, many people are publishing their chapters separately and you are required to collate them into a single document for graduation. It wouldn't make sense to me to have to write an entirely new document to report the same findings in a more wordier manner. That would be a waste of time.


Number of citations after PhD I am trying to compare PhD training programs of different universities, institutes and departments in my field of interest. One of the comparisons I made is where did the previous students go after they finished their PhDs; how many papers did they write during their PhDs; and how much are they cited 1-2 years after completing their PhDs.

Now, comparing the citations counts is difficult. They vary quite a bit. How many times should  a successful young scientist be cited 1-2 years after completing his or her PhD? How about an average one? What is the minimum number to be able to continue in academia? I understand that exact numbers are difficult to provide but I would guess you senior scientists can provide good estimates.

Although this approach to measuring is plausible, I fear it is not what you want. Although of course things vary by field, the papercount per se, or even "impact factor", or ... any other easily-measurable thing is not quite what will affect things.

At least in mathematics (my field), a smaller number of very-good papers is much better than a large number of irrelevant papers. One might imagine that this would be measured by "impact factor", but it is absolutely not reliably so. As an extreme case, consider what happens when an important problem is finally and definitively solved: there may be fewer follow-ups, fewer citations, simply because there's little more to say.

And there's time-lag: I have many examples of 10-20 year (and longer) delays before people widely realized the interest of a given paper. Srsly, surely we're not trying so much to be of-the-moment-celebrities, but to make a long-term impact.

One could go on-and-on about the unreliability of appealing-but-fatally-flawed metrics... but the real point is that a less objectifiable judgement is necessary to evaluate the "merits" of a program. Stats on the students is probably not quite what you'd want, even though it might seem to be. E.g., at more elite places, there is vastly greater variance among students... so the "outcomes" are harder to interpret meaningfully... and, for you yourself, what those other kids did or didn't do is operationally irrelevant:

That is, your level-of-performance, that causes (or doesn't) respected experts to commend you to their peers, is what will get you a job, or not. The "published papers" thing is a side-effect.


Is it normal to submit an abstract to a conference when the research is NOT completed? I just started my 2nd semester of my part-time master, I was given a thesis topic last week and expected to submit an abstract this week.  Because advisor told me -> I would have not choice. However, I just wonder:
Is it normal to submit an abstract to a conference when the research is NOT completed? Or people normally completed the research then write the abstract?

I read a topic asking about how to write an abstract without having the result
How to write abstract for conference when you have no results yet?
So I have basic understanding of what I should not write in my abstract.

Is it normal to submit an abstract to a conference when the research
  is NOT completed?

Sure.  There are plenty of fields where the purpose of a conference is to discuss research that is "still cooking."  In fact, many journal publications can be viewed as interim reports on larger research programs that are still in progress.

You might use this opportunity to set a goal for (roughly) the piece of your thesis you want to have done by the date of the conference.  It's ok if that piece is relatively small, and nobody at the conference will hold you strictly to what you say in the abstract.

In fact, some people submit abstracts on one thing and then talk about something entirely different... I won't advocate that behavior as an intentional strategy, but I will say that many people (myself included) prefer a great talk to exacting consistency with the abstract.


Choosing between MS Word, PDF, and latex formats when submitting a manuscript for publication when all are allowed? I've been working on an article, and for ease of collaboration among co-authors and advisers I have used Google Docs thus far, so I'll likely need to do at least a little post-formatting once in .doc format. In addition, I use linux and LibreOffice when I have to, and I generally dislike using MS products.

I'm now preparing the article to submit and the journal I am considering accepts a wide range of file formats: .doc, .docx, .rtf, & .pdf (with .tex files after acceptance).

I feel inclined to put things in LaTeX since I am well-versed and like the idea of having finer control of the appearance of things, but it will certainly take a bit more time and I am ignorant of the layout process journals use when preparing an article.

Is there any real benefit of using LaTeX or another format when submitting an article to a journal (in this case PLOS One)?

That all depends on the journal you're submitting to. Quite some journals that accept Latex, also provide a template to use. With a template available and knowledge of Latex, it should be fairly easy to convert the GoogleDoc to Latex if you download as HTML and then use eg Pandoc to convert to Latex (explained here).

But people who are not comfortable with Latex, are likely better of using another option. Converting from GoogleDocs to .doc or .docx generally also requires an in-between step using PDF, and will generally give some layout issues, but when a paper is bound to be submitted it's not really the time to learn Latex.


Separating academic identity from social identity I would like to start publishing scientific papers soon. This issue pertains to the name I will use when publishing.

Basically, I would like to keep my personal and academic life separate and my question is "how can I do this?".

To make it clearer why I want to do this, I'll mention that my current legal name is associated with a certain subculture which is quite unconventional. I want people searching/Googling my professional name to only be exposed to my "academic identity", and people searching for my legal name to only be exposed to my "social identity". There is nothing illegal going on. I'll give an example which is close to reality but I'll refrain from giving exact information. The example is that my "social identity" is an author of erotic novels while my "academic identity" writes papers in mathematics. That's not too far from the reality.
I would assume I am not the first one to have unconventional interests outside academia, the issue I guess is that my legal name is already tied to such an interest, which is a problem. And yes, this is quite amusing; feel free to laugh

I would be thankful for any ideas which would allow me to fulfill both my passions, despite their disharmony.
Basically, I don't want the names to mix together when someone searches for one of them, but I still want to be able to prove that I wrote the papers (in case I want to use them when applying for a job or for grad school). Hopefully there is some way to achieve this.
Other creative ideas to solve this issue are always welcome; maybe I am focusing too much on the name thing and there are other solutions.

I'll wrap this up with some ideas that I had:

I could just use a pen name for my academic papers I guess. I have finished my BSc lately. Problem here is that if I later want to apply to grad school, and I want to show that I have published papers, it could be hard to prove that I have written them (will it? maybe I'll have a pen-name on the papers but prove ownership by other means? like the email address on the paper?).
I could use a different spelling of my legal name on the papers (my legal name is not in English anyway, though I graduated from an English speaking university so my BSc has my name in English). That seems like they could still be linked relatively easily though and one could potentially show up when someone Googles the other name.
I could take on a new middle name (e.g. I could use a variation of my late grandfather's name, which I would gladly do) and use that as the first name in published papers (that seems like it could potentially work).

Some more comments

My last name is very common; my first name is very uncommon
I am aware of course that if I go to grad school they'll probably Google my legal name as well, and of course people who know me personally would be aware of what I do. It would be nice to limit it to those scenarios though.
Yes, I know I should have thought of this before linking my legal name to unconventional topics. I did not tell the whole story though and there was a reason for that.

Here are a few considerations:

Using a common name in place of a unique name will look unusual, since people who choose to publish under a variant of their name typically go in the other direction, to make it easier to identify their papers.  Everyone who learns about this will assume you either made an unwise decision about which variant to use, are trying to avoid prejudice based on your name, or are trying to disguise your identity.  In any case this change may attract attention, which is the opposite of what you want.

To separate your identities, you need to use your professional name in all professional contexts.  I.e., your university web page should use it, your colleagues should call you by this name, you should use it when you give talks or attend conferences, etc.  To have a successful academic career involving research you need to develop a scholarly reputation, and that can't happen unless everyone connects you with your publications.  That means either they connect the two identities or they know you under the name from your publications.  (In particular, it's not enough for you to be able to prove that you are the author.  In order for you to have a successful career, in the long run everyone must already know you are the author.  This is not such a big issue for graduate school applications, but it's a major factor in getting tenure.)

I wouldn't worry too much about proof of authorship.  This is not so easy to determine from the name anyway: even if you published your under full legal name, how would anyone know you weren't claiming papers that were written by someone else with the same name?  One big clue is your letters of recommendation.  If the letter writers discuss your papers, then everything will be fine.  (While if they don't discuss your papers, then that's a problem regardless of the authorship issue.)  At that point all you need to do is include a sentence in your publication list saying "My publications are under the name X."  You don't need to explain why, just to clarify the facts so nobody is confused.

Once you have started publishing, substantially changing the name you publish under is highly disruptive.  It can be done if necessary, but it may hurt your career by fragmenting your reputation, and the only way to combat this is by loudly and publicly connecting the two names.  This means you should try your best now to choose a variant of your name that you would be happy using for the rest of your career.

It's worth thinking about whether you need to do this.  In my experience, academia is tolerant of eccentricity and impressed by confidence.  If you treat this situation like it's no big deal, then I'd guess that most people will ignore it and anyone who tries to gossip about it will risk looking provincial or small-minded.  However, this of course could depend on the details of your situation.  (And there's also the issue of students: first-year university students are on average quite a bit less mature than faculty.)


Is it necessarily an advantage of a mathematical work to find connection between two different fields? EDIT: My question in the title was motivated by the following situation.

A mathematician from my field has solved a problem in this field which was considered to be important. In fact he even was awarded an international prize for this work. To solve this problem he has used methods from a completely different field of math which are not known to experts in his original field.

He managed to use these methods to solve few other open problems in the field, although less known than the first one. However he has failed to get other people to be interested in these tools since they require a really different education. For the same reason he cannot suggest such kind of problems to his students since they also would need to spend a lot of time to master the background from different fields, but even if they do, they would probably feel isolated.

Thus I am wondering to what extend this situation is typical, and whether there are other examples of mathematical works whose interdisciplinary character played a negative role in one's career.

It is clear that knowledge in other fields can be helpful, especially if one has an unusual combination of expertise such that one can see things others would miss even on well-studied problems. In fact, the variety of thoughts between colleagues of different background makes collaboration in math-related fields so much exciting.

It is hard to find examples where interdisciplinarity played a negative role in one's career, just for the same reason we don't learn about most of the useless approaches in mathematics (definitions that turned out to be useless, in particular not well-defined, propositions that turned out not to help for the problem they were thought for, etc.).

But from common sense I think that interdisciplinarity can never be negative unless you "cross paradigms", for example by mixing different contradicting systems of axioms to solve the same problem. Fortunately, in mathematics it's (today) quite clear what is not allowed.


Do evaluation / recruiting committees respect "co first authors"? Inspired by this question and this question, I continue my ongoing quest of understanding the concept of co first-authorship.

My question are:

In which fields does this notion even exist?
If the notion exists in your field, do recruiting committees (e.g., faculty search committees) actually care about this?

The background of the second part of this question is that it seems to me that a little footnote in a paper should be easy to miss for a committee, and even if a committee becomes aware of the claimed dual first-authorship, I find it hard to believe that the paper will actually be counted as another "first-authored" paper.

In theoretical computer science and mathematics, authors are (almost) always listed alphabetically. There is simply no such thing as a "first author", except lexicographically.  Equivalently, all authors are co-first authors.

In my experience, recruiting committees generally understand and respect this practice, but (at least in computer science, where order by contribution is more common) they do occasionally have to be reminded, especially for candidates whose last names start late in the alphabet.  One sentence in the CV and/or in a recommendation letter usually suffices.

For non-theoretical CS, I have seen CVs that indicated equal contribution of co-authors. Again, one sentence in the CV ("Stars indicate co-authors who contributed equally") made the notation clear, and the recruiting committee understood and respected it.

As Ari and gefei say, having a local advocate is much more important that having another (co-)first-author paper.  If nobody on the faculty is willing to pound on the table and demand that you get an interview, you won't.


Are the ISBNs of two copies of a book the same? I want to know whether the ISBN of two copies of the exact same book is the same or different. By exact copies, I mean to say same edition, title, publisher, country, price, author etc.

As noted in the comments, the purpose of an ISBN is to uniquely identify a set of books, all of which contain precisely the same content.  Thus, it is reasonable to expect that two books with precisely the same ISBN will have precisely the same content.

It is worth noting, however, that the reverse does not apply.  Two books may have precisely the same content but be issued different ISBNs because they come from different printings.  Likewise, printing errors, etc., can in rare cases render two books different despite having the same ISBN. For nearly all cases, however, the one-to-one relationship holds.


Have I 'spent' my negotiating power on higher salary, or can I further negotiate the TT startup offer? I have an R1 offer in Engineering. The department and Dean, per my request, have offered me a very good salary competitive with my competing industry offers, as well as excellent lab space.  However, the startup package is lacking. Equipment is 50% what I hoped for, travel budget is 25%, and they fund only one grad student for 2 years.  This will slow my lab-building.

As a note, I was asked to apply, but was planning to move to an industry position. The result was an early assurance that a competitive salary offer could be made.  The offer just arrived. I have, technically, not yet begun negotiating.

The question: have I spent my capital on this higher salary, or is the salary a reason to think I should be able to negotiate further?  Any suggestions on how to approach this in terms of tone/strategy?

Update: because salary was a precondition of agreeing to apply, negotiating was indeed expected, and successful. My tone in negotiating was all about thanking them while identifying what more I needed to succeed.

UPDATE: I negotiated beyond salary, successfully. The high salary was brought up in that process, and I nonetheless substantially increased my non-salary offer.

In general, departments don't like extended negotiations with candidates for faculty positions.  In some cases, candidates use this as a way to extend the time that they have to consider an offer so that they can interview for other positions and obtain other offers.  If a candidate ends up not taking the job after an extended negotiation then it may be too late to get the next candidate on the list.

There are differences between salary and startup packages:

In negotiating faculty offers the budget that pays for faculty salary is often different from the budget that pays for the startup package.  In any case, the startup package is one-time money rather than a permanent salary.  Thus if the one-time money is available it might be easier to come up with $100K more of startup funds than $10K per year of salary.

At public institutions, faculty salaries are often public information while at private universities these are generally secret.  At public institutions, it can upset other faculty members if a new assistant professor is hired in at a much higher than normal salary.  Large differences in salary are much more common at private institutions.

It appears that the OP made his salary needs clear before agreeing to interview but that the startup package was not discussed before the interview.  Furthermore, the offer that he has received is the first offer from the institution.  Under those circumstances, it would be quite normal to negotiate the startup package.


Is it possible to submit paper to peer-reviewed journal without affiliation? I have conducted an evaluation on effectiveness of training interventions on elderly clients in a non-government organization. I would like to share the results by submitting paper to peer-reviewed journal. However, owing to policy of the organization, i was told to submit the paper on personal capacity. I would like to know if peer-reviewed journal accept paper from investigator without affiliation?

Yes it is possible to submit to almost all journals outwith affiliation. Just list yourself as an unaffiliated researcher. This answer covers well the additional hurdles you may have to jump (Who can submit papers to peer-reviewed journals?).


Negotiating salary before in-person interview for an administrative position I had an interview for an administrative (IT) position at a very prestigious US university. I had a second phone interview with an HR representative who asked for my salary expectation. I gave my range, and the HR person gave me their range, whose maximum is 20% lower than my minimum. She asked me if I was interested in continuing the hiring process within their range, and I asked to give me a day to think over it.

This is an extremely interesting position for me, but the modest salary increase would make the move to another state hard.

I counted all, salary, benefits, relocation package, but still it seems a tight fit. The HR person said that they are kind of locked into that range, which I have a hard time believing.

I come from the nonprofit world but I am not used to negotiation tactics in academia. Is this just a negotiation trick? How should I respond to avoid down-selling me without stalling the process?

Thanks.

Update:

I found some salary grades from this institution from a couple of years ago, and indeed the range I was given was the midpoint of the published salary grade, which includes mostly positions lower than the one I am apply for.

Without sharing details with my HR interlocutor, I replied that from my research, given the responsibilities, I expected a different range, and she replied that the range is non-negotiable because it's a nonprofit. Which I know is not true, because I myself work at a nonprofit.

So I could just walk out of the deal and see if they come back, but it would be a bummer to let it fall through without even a chance to get to a real offer. Or I could suck it up and go with their rate, and work toward a raise within the following year or two, but it would be a tough start.

Not sure what your question is. You could respond yes I am interested in continuing the process and see where it leads. Maybe they have some benefits you don't know about. Maybe the job is even cooler than you think. In other words maybe something happens and you are willing to take the job for less money. Then again, maybe things pan out how you expect and you tell them know that you have seen the complete offer and understand the job more, you cannot take it for less than X (whatever that number is, plus some wiggle room).

You could also respond no, because do you really want to put up with crap like that.


Is it right to submit a conference abstract knowing that I will not attend but my advisor will give my talk instead? My postdoc finished 9 months ago. My former supervisor has asked me to submit an abstract on my work to a conference next year.

No-one intends that I will attend the conference. My ex-supervisor has an invited talk there, and basically wants current and former group members to also submit contributed talks that  can also be presented  if the main authors don’t show up.

The supervisor essentially wants to be able to give three or four talks for the cost of one attendee.  I don’t really feel this is right. On the other hand I also want to remain on good terms with them, as they are a reference on my current job applications, and we are also still working on papers together.

Should I refuse to submit an abstract? Or just bite the bullet and write something?

I think it can be acceptable if and only if it is clearly communicated in the submission that the former supervisor is the intended presenter.  Deliberately misrepresenting who will present at the conference is dishonest.  If in doubt, contact someone at the conference.


What to do after receiving poor academic recommendation(s) I was recently applying for a number of PhD programmes, and I asked a number of my previous professors for recommendation letters.

However, after the results of these applications were released, it was found that one of the professors has written a clearly negative recommendation (in comparison to the others), despite the fact that I felt that the academic relationship was good and on comparable levels to the other professors, and that he specifically agreed to write me a strong recommendation letter.

I even noted in the request letter that "If you feel that you would not be able to write me a strong letter of recommendation, you should feel free to decline to write a recommendation". As other questions on this site have shown, it is not generally considered good form to write a negative recommendation, whatever the reasons.

I came to know about this, because the said professor submitted a number of recommendations late, and one of the interview requests from one of these universities was withdrawn, with the admissions department stating that it has been withdrawn after "reviewing recently submitted recommendations".

Furthermore, after speaking with some of my other recommenders regarding my other interviews and asking for advice regarding further steps, they mentioned that they received calls from admissions departments regarding "inconsistent recommendations".

As someone who would like to understand what went wrong during the process, what would be a good course of action in this situation? Should I approach the said professor and ask what went wrong, or would that not be a socially acceptable action?

I believe any answers should probably be relevant across all fields, but I am personally applying for a PhD in the US in the biosciences field.

Your professor either wrote the good recommendation they promised, in which case they are probably as shocked as you are, and happy to discuss what might have happened, and what to do now; or they lied to your face, in which case I wouldn't worry if talking to them is "socially acceptable." I don't know what would be the best course of action if the second is the case, but my first step would be to talk to them in person - just don't assume beforehand that it's one or the other, to make the meeting productive.

As two comments pointed out, there's also a (small?) chance that the professor meant to write a good recommendation, but failed at it. If that's even remotely a possibility, as well as probably in the first case above, it might help if they contact friendly faculty (should there be some) at one of the universities applied to, to better understand where the bottleneck is (within what is possible, considering the confidentiality of the process). Given that a letter-writer usually has some interest in the student they write a letter for succeeding, I wouldn't dismiss the idea before bringing it up with them, if appropriate.


Peer reviewing process in top math journals I submitted a a short note, less than 10 page long, to a very prestious journal in mathematics. It has been about 4 months and I have not heard back. I wonder if that means the note made it pass through the initial assessment and is under review or it simply doesn't mean anything. The status of paper reads: reviewing.
How does the reviewing process differ from lower tier journals to much more selective and reputable( whatever that means)journals?

The biggest difference between top level journals and others is the care taken in the reviewing process. Four months doesn't sound especially long.

Perhaps the journal publishes definitions of its terms such as "reviewing" which might give you an idea. But likely, it is being looked at by other mathematicians with knowledge and interest in your area. If the paper is straightforward it might get reviewed quickly, but be rejected for lack of impact. If it is not straightforward it will take longer to asses.

It is also possible that delays can occur if a reviewer decides after an initial look that he/she can't give the editor proper advice and passes it back with another reviewer then needing to be found. This could occur for many reasons, not all related to the paper itself. Some of the time delay is also likely due to the normal end/beginning of year academic scheduling with holidays occurring in most places.


My manuscript gets "with Editor" then "Editor invited", What is the main reasons for this? My manuscript status shows "With Editor" after initial submission. Then, (after two days) it takes "Editor invited". So, once, it with Editor, It should take the next step. However, it backs again to the first step. I really do not understand why it takes this two different status in a very short time?  What would this indicate? That is, my paper at the first time finds an editor, then they look for an editor to my paper?!

It could be that someone pressed the wrong button.

Or the editor wasn't able to review after they initially took in on and put it out for another to pick up (probably good practice, rather than it sitting in someone's in-tray unread).

If you think it's a big deal, then contact the journal. But maybe give it a couple of weeks first.


Is recommendation letter a completely professional thing or keeping good personal relation with the writer required? Is recommendation letter (faculty position) a completely professional thing ? I mean I completed PhD one year ago, I had good relation with my Phd advisor when I was his student. After that I left my country for postdoc and obviously the relation is not like earlier. Does keeping good relation influences recommendation letter or it is completely professional thing ?

If you did well during your PhD (and did not have a fight with your supervisor afterwards), your supervisor should write a good recommendation letter. Recommendation letters are professional and you do not need to keep a good personal relation. It happens often that people have to ask for recommendation letters some time after moving on to somewhere else.

The only advantage of being still there could be that it would make it easier to remind your supervisor if he takes too long to write the letter.


Politeness of a follow-up E-Mail regarding administrative task I have to get a certain document filled in by a professor in regards to my major/curriculum.
Initially, I reached out 3 weeks ago, and she instantly replied that she'll be happy to do so, and asked for some other information she needed. I replied with the information instantly, but didn't hear back, unfortunately.
10 days ago, I therefore sent a follow-up in the following form:

  Dear Professor X,

  I was wondering if you've had the time to look at  I sent already?
  Thanks!

  Signature

Since I still haven't received any reply, I was thinking of sending another follow-up of the following form:

  Dear Professor X,

  I hope you've had a good weekend.

  I was wondering if you had received my previous E-Mail?

  Thanks!

  Signature

Would this be polite enough? (For some reason it strikes me as a bit too straightforward, but on the other hand I don't really have any reason to add an apology either, I think.)

I actually encounter such situations regularly, but my follow up emails always look more or less like the above, sometimes with an apology for reaching out again, even if I think it makes the E-mail look much too submissive. So I'm basically wondering if it is appropriate to send follow-ups in such a format.
I just wouldn't know what else to say in them, since the whole point is just to get the target's attention again if they accidentally missed it, were too busy, or forgot about it.

Rather than just asking if they received the previous email, reiterate what it is you're asking about, why you're asking them specifically, and include a deadline. This saves the recipient from having to trawl back through three weeks' worth of email to find your original request. So, you might want to send something like

"Dear Professor X,

Is it possible for you to fill in this form that I need for [insert reason here]? I'm asking you because [insert reason here]. The [admin people/ university/ department] need me to send it back to them by [deadline]. I've attached the form to this email.

Thanks in advance for your help!

AnotherStudent"


Advisor dies suddenly, advice needed for research students This has not happened to me, but to a friend in the final stages of her PhD, she and the rest of the research group are understandably devastated, as the advisor was not only (in my friend's words), brilliant, but very kind and approachable.

My friend and all the research students are also worried about their research projects, as the advisor was one of the top researchers in that field and apparently, the only researcher in that university.  The associate advisors have indeed stepped up, but as good as they are, they do not have the insight that the late advisor had.

What is a bit of advice that people may have for this situation?

One suggestion is that the research group (students, co-authors etc) band together to help each other out, with the guidance of the associate advisors.

I have looked over this question and the posted answers, but I feel that this situation is considerably different as there is the ever-present aspect of the feelings of loss, that are present and should not be ignored.

We had a similar situation at my university when a professor running a large group with millions of research dollars passed away. There are a few issues that have to be dealt with, and usually the department chair and/or the dean play a major role in this

research funding: often this can be transferred (in consultation with program managers) to faculty in related areas who (depending on the degree of involvement in the research) either merely manage the money for the students involved, or might play a more active role in spending it.
students: students need committees and replacement advisors. Again, the department chair, in consultation with the students and related faculty, might be able to assign faculty as caretakers for the students.
teaching/committees: while there are likely significant teaching/committee disruptions, these don't affect the former students of the researcher, so I'll ignore this component.

My view is that students that are close to graduating need someone who can sign off on their thesis work (hopefully without too much modification). They hopefully already have a few other people who can write letters for them for jobs, and can mention the advisor's demise in their letters to explain the absence.

Students earlier in the Ph.D program (say just post-qualifying) are in the biggest bind: they've spent enough time in their research area to have committed to a topic, but now they have no one to guide them. They are the ones who probably need the most help from senior students, other faculty and the department.

Students early in the program have the option of switching advisors, or even schools if there's no one else in the department who can advise them/fund them/works in their areas of interest. Again, the department is usually sympathetic and might be able to provide such students with short term funding via TAships if that's an issue.

None of this of course addresses the feelings of grief and loss


Is it OK to use "/" in scientific writing? For example, would it be OK to write: Many of these articles belong to School of Thought A and/or School of Thought B.

What about the other cases in general just to replace "or" with "/"?
E.g. This brain area might coincide or connect with the brain area responsible for...
Can I write it as "This brain area might coincide/connect with the brain area responsible for..."

"It's best to avoid using and/or," Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl, "You'd be hard pressed to find a style guide that doesn't admonish you to drop and/or and rewrite the sentence with just and or just or."

Rather than "Many of these articles belong to School of Thought A and/or School of Thought B," try

  Many of these articles belong to School of Thought A, School of Thought B, or both.


Is there a conventional word that describes a professor for whom you were a TA I am providing a block of contact information to someone and the last line of this block it is requested that I provide the relationship between this person and myself.  Basically I am trying to find a concise way of saying:  "Professor for who I was the (sole) course TA"

Maybe this question is better suited to the English language forum, but because of it's academic, I figured someone experienced here might have an answer.  Here are some options I considered but found misleading and unusable:

Supervising professor --> in academia this implies your thesis
Professor --> Considered because it's a broad term, but again, in academia my first thoughts run back to the thesis supervision
Supervising professor (TA) --> not sure it's obvious what the (TA) is referring to.

I don't think this will make much difference, but it's actually very important that answer to the above be as short as possible, as it is part of a short list of positions/interactions held with this professor.

I would initially suggest terms supervising lecturer or supervising teaching professor. However, both terms are not perfect due to potential interpretation of "lecturer" and "teaching professor" as formal positions. In order to improve this, it might make sense to add clarifying term "class" and remove "teaching" from the second option. Therefore, my final suggestions are the following two options:

supervising class (course) lecturer;
supervising class (course) professor.


Unsolicited CVs from grad school applicants - ignore or try to help? I am a graduate student in physics and every other month or so I get an e-mail from someone who wants a grad school or even postdoc position. These e-mails often start out "Dear Professor (my name)," (I'm not a professor) and go on to explain that they are a motivated student looking to do a PhD with me, sometimes referring to a position that I am supposed to have advertised (I didn't). In the past I have often sent a reply in which I try to be disinterested but helpful, pointing them to the jobs section on our website which explains clearly who to contact.

I'm asking because today I got another one:

  I would be pleased to join for the PhD Studentship position into your institution for (field that has nothing to do with my institution) research.

Oddly specific and inaccurate at the same time. I don't mind just deleting it. However, I'd like to help if I can.

Why do people do this? To me, it seems counterproductive.
How can I help them onto the right track?

I think we all get these emails and being famous and more senior probably means getting more of them. I am not famous or senior so I get one/two of these a day. I reply to them all. I am not sending man to mars and and can spend 30 seconds to reply to someone who sent an irrelevant one or spend a bit of time helping someone who was genuine and/or had a high calibre and went and studied my work. Naturally the quality of my reply depends on the quality of the email I have received. Thats the least that I can do. I must confess at times it has been a one liner saying "at least do a bit of research and see what I do instead if this generic meaningless email and have attached my boilerplate text explaining why this is not helpful and what they should do" but also sending a three pager, correcting mistakes I have seen in CV, cover letter and/or proposal and calling people I know to help somebody out.

Why do I do this? Yes it takes time and we are all busy but I enjoy the fact that I am in a position to guide someone and help them out in bettering themselves. Many have done this for me before and believe it or not those guys who replied were really helpful. I do the same in hope that it might inspire someone, help him/her succeed and give them the sense that people do care about you and want to have your back. Same way many people are in this community who give their time and help strangers they don't know.

Now answer to the question:
Write a boilerplate text for the ones who send you random stuff. This is not the last time you will get something like this. Explain why this is not going to help and what is the correct way. You only have to do this once and whether they take your advice or not is their choice...

In future if you become an academic please do try to help people and don't see their efforts as SPAM if you feel they are genuine and have tried. Also give the benefit of the doubt to the ones who send random emails. They might just be desperate and need some help. Preparing some text to explain the above might actually help someone. It might be that he/she has got bad advice about how to go about finding positions etc.


Do all preprint servers have the non-updating issue in google scholar It has been identified on stackexchange that Google Scholar has a bug where ArXiv  publications are not updated to match the final journal publication information in google scholar (for several months). And the answer claims that google has stated that fixing this bug is not a priority for them.

My question is: Does this bug exist for all preprint servers or just ArXiv? This a huge problem in my field (where the convention is to not cite ArXiv papers), so I'd rather post my pre-print elsewhere if this problem does not exist for other preprint servers.

BioArXiv and ResearchGate come to mind as possibilities.

I've been following the Google Scholar Preprint Bug for several years. Claus Wilke (who first characterized the bug in 2014) and I tried reporting it many times. Finally, we caught up with the creator of Google Scholar, Anurag Acharya, in the comment section of Scholarly Kitchen. I was a jerk, which didn't help, but Anurag's responses kept us feeling frustrated.

Anyways, Anurag did shed some light on the cause of the bug in this comment:

  Most preprints/ahead-of-print versions are indexed in early-version model — as they should be. Articles that are indexed in early-version mode are recrawled and reindexed frequently. Changes to their location, their content, their format, their versions are expected to be frequent; this allows changes to be picked up soon.

  Occasionally, a preprint that has been in that state for a while can get indexed in the archival mode. When that happens, updates to that article (location, content, format, versions etc) take longer. Articles that are indexed in an archival mode are reindexed less frequently – as they must, if the indexing system is to use the limited crawl capacity at the journal sites effectively.

Therefore, the bug occurs when a record (preprint in our case) is stagnant for too long. Then that record is placed in archival mode, which triggers the bug, by causing newly crawled versions of the record to be silently ignored. Therefore, according to Anurag's description, the bug is not limited to any single preprint server.

In line with the description, it appears longer publication delays increase the chance of the bug. Perhaps a workaround is to frequently update the preprint so the record never enters archival mode.


Best ways to obtain a scholarship for a Masters in financial mathematics/ quantitative finance I am not a UK or US citizen but I would like to get a scholarship to study in a master program in either financial mathematics or quantitative finance. My GPA is around 3.65-3.7 but I will still like to study in the best school I can.

Are there any clear guidelines on how to increase one's chances of getting a scholarship in a subject like this to attend a decent school in the UK or US?

I can't answer for the US, but it is highly unlikely that you would get any sort of funding in the UK. Unfortunately UK funding is very hard to obtain (even for British students) and is, in any case, largely restricted to EU nationals. Further any Masters level UK funding is generally awarded as a precursor to a PhD. This is known as "1+3" funding. Good luck though!


Thanking fellow PhD students in a paper I am just about to send a paper for publication, and I would be grateful for some advice on how I should acknowledge my fellow PhD students.

The paper in question is my own, in the sense that I am the only author. However, it is clear that science does not happen in vacuum, and it was helpful to have an informal discussion with my collegues from time to time. For instance, I would explain to them the outline of the argument, and they would see if they see an obvious error, or suggest that I use a well-know theorem which might be applicable, or ask a question about a possible generalisation.

What would be an appropriate form of acknowledgement? Is it generally a good idea to add a line like

"The author wishes to thank his fellow PhD students [insert a list of ~5 names here]"

in the acknowledgements section? On one hand, I feel it's best to err on the side of being too polite, but on the other hand I'm not sure if it won't come across as name-dropping or trying to win favor.

If this is relevant, my field is (pure) mathematics.

The acknowledgements section of a paper is a perfect place to thank people who significantly aided you with the paper, but not to the level where authorship is merited.

Unlike the acknowledgements of your thesis, however, the tradition of such sections is generally to be somewhat more strict in the notion of direct and material contributions: you should not be thanking your dog here.  So, for example, if your officemate actually read and critiqued the paper, acknowledgement is appropriate, but if they just helped to keep your spirits up, acknowledgement is not appropriate.

(I am answering from the general traditions of computer science, which are related but may not be quite the same as your area of mathematics)


what is the common academic way of linking a section of a paper to a previously published paper? Assume you have a published paper in journal X. Now, you are writing a manuscript for journal Y. One section of this manuscript is very similar to what you published in X.
So how is the common academic way of referencing this section to that published paper?
I mean, it would probably look like this:

III. Method blah blah

This method has been previously addressed in this paper [ref].

The point of writing a scientific paper is to communicate what you have done and how. A key factor is to keep a clear trail of your sources. If you need to re-iterate an already published method you basically have two options:

Simply state that you use the method described in "so and so" (yyyy). If you have made any changes to the method originally described you do of course need to provide details on those changes.
If the method is somehow so key to your paper that you think it is worth re-iterating the method description then rewrite it in your own words and, perhaps, start out by saying. I have followed the method described in "so and so" (yyyy), what follows is a re-iteration of his/her/their description. You can of course include changes you have made to the method but then it has to be crystal clear to the reader what is from the older paper and what is new.

It is quite common, at least in some fields, to provide a abbreviated description, focussing on key aspects and ignoring parts that are more obvious. After all the reference to the original description should be given and the source for the information is there.

What you should totally avoid is to quote the section from the older paper. It is always better to provide your own version of whatever you are "quoting", since this may make clear your interpretation of what was originally said. Straight quotes hide such effects.


Should peer review invitations be accepted if one is unemployed? My colleague lost his job in academia due to COVID-19. He has zero income at the moment and there is little to no funding or employment opportunity in his field (invertebrate taxonomy) in his region (a developing country). He is now looking for other non-academic jobs.
But being one of the few experts in his field, he is still frequently invited to review manuscripts. Each of these reviews takes a long time (especially large taxonomic monographs) and takes away his time to develop skills and look for jobs. And hours spent on peer-reviewing are not remunerated by anyone. Should he just outright reject such invitations? Should he give reasons for rejecting such invitations too?

Peer review is not a tax: if it doesn't make sense for somebody to peer review, they shouldn't do it.
Instead, I view peer review as:

an opportunity to contribute to a community that I care about, and
beneficial to me in helping me "keep my tools sharp" on critical thinking, writing skills (even as a reader!), and exposure to authors and ideas I might not otherwise read.

Because responsible peer review takes a significant investment of time, however, I set a budget for myself on how much time is sensible for to contribute over the course of a year, and I refuse assignments that would take me over that budget.
I would thus advise your colleague to consider a sensible budget, given their current situation and how much those motivations make sense to them. Yes, peer review may take time away from job development. On the other hand, peer review may still feel meaningful as a contribution, an intellectual connection, a motivation, etc.
Maybe the budget should be zero.  Certainly the budget shouldn't be 10+ hours per week.  But it may be entirely reasonable to put in a couple of hours of peer review per week if they still enjoy and benefit from it.
Bottom line: the amount to continue peer reviewing is an assessment that your colleague needs to make for themselves based on their personal situation and to periodically reassess as that situation evolves over time.


How PhD projects are acquired in pure mathematics In pure mathematics (please only answer for this field, as other areas are different), what is the ratio of PhD students finding a project on their own, versus working closely with their supervisor to find a project versus the supervisor giving their student a project?

As mentioned by Buffy in the comments, you're unlikely to find an actual ratio to answer your question without gathering some data. However, it seems like your question is actually where your research project would come from as a PhD student in pure math.
The answer is quite simple: it depends on you and your advisor.

Have an idea for your project? Tell your advisor about it and get their feedback! A thesis project (or even a side project) needs to be both interesting and manageable within a restricted time frame. One of the main reasons you have an advisor is to learn how to ask interesting but manageable research questions. Your advisor's experience is a valuable resource for learning this skill.

Want your advisor to give you a project? Ask them about it! Some advisors have lots of project ideas and are happy to share them with their students. Other advisors will be more hesitant to give you a project -- I know some who think it is important for students to come up with their own questions.

Want to come up with your own project but don't know how? Tell your advisor and ask for advice! They will probably tell you to read lots of papers, listen to lots of talks, and ask lots of questions. You can tell them the ideas and questions you have, and then you can ask if any of the questions are interesting. Again, asking research questions is a skill that you need to develop.

A corollary of this discussion: don't just pick an advisor based on their research area or whether or not they're "famous." Every advisor has a different approach to research and mentoring, and you want to make sure that your advisor's style is compatible with your personal working style. If you don't like the idea of your advisor making you find your own question, or if you have your own idea for a research project that you want to pursue, then you should be sure to ask potential advisors about this before deciding to work with them.


Is it a good idea for a part-time post-grad to start an Academic CV? As someone who returned (part-time) to academic pursuit in a different area a number of years ago, in which time I have completed my BA and now am in my first year of a MLitt, I am wondering is it a good idea to start to compile an academic CV? I am unsure as to if their would be any benefit of it for me, as a part time student, and at what point I should start to compile it.

At the moment in my own head the advantages are;

It may be of use in applying for funding.
I may need it if I wish to go on to future study
It would be good for myself to keep track of what I have achieved.

I have read a number of question on the site about what to put in a CV and realise that at the moment mine would be pretty sparse, as I have no publications, but my advisor has mentioned about me presenting at a conference and I have just applied for my first funding.

In general is it a case of everyone should keep an academic CV or do you just compile and tailor one when and if it is needed?

I am wondering is it a good idea to start to compile an academic CV?

Start as you mean to continue: it is certainly a good time to start keeping track of all of your academic achievements in a structured way. Later down the line, this will prove invaluable as you will have a record of all your presentations (with dates, slides, venue, etc.), all your publications (with venue, full-text pre-prints, maybe a .bib item), all your reviewing activity, all your visits, and so forth.

Otherwise the cost of trying to recall all these details later might be prohibitive and you might forget things. At the moment, you may be able to remember everything you've done, but trust me when I say that what you were doing four years ago can become hazy.

You could keep your record as a CV in LaTeX format or a database or an Excel file or a HTML homepage. Even a journal notebook would be preferable to nothing. Keep one format canonical so that you don't have to synchronise multiple versions. And keep back-ups!

Of these options, I would recommend a homepage. It helps your impact to have a public personal homepage where you list all the pertinent details of your research (and to link to it where you can, short of spamming). Also consider getting a personal domain: hosting homepages on work spaces is convenient, but there's a chance you might lose that space (and the associated links/ranking) if/when you move institute. If you get a personal domain, some soft advice is to get a .org ... they're more trendy in academia (otherwise .edu, etc.).

In any case, whatever version you keep canonical, get in the habit of keeping it up-to-date in a consistent style. Mapping the records to a CV format for specific purposes further down the line then becomes trivial enough.


What are our main concerns regarding academic dishonesty in Massive Online Open Courses? As illustrated by the recent NY Times article, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have recently gained a lot of attention because of their new model for educating students.

What are the main concerns regarding academic dishonesty in Massive Online Open Courses?  It appears to me that academic dishonesty may be difficult to police for an online course.  Is this correct?

I think that the question is somewhat misleading. Ethics only factor into a very small percentage of students in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC's). Most students who participate in MOOC's are only taking the course to learn something. Academic integrity is more of an issue when the students are taking the course for some external reason.

Some possible external reasons are:

Enrolled in the course through the university, and receiving credit for the course
Required to take the course by an employer
Taking the course as a pre-requisite for another course or program

In each of these situations, the role of verifying learning seems like it would be outside of the course itself. If students choose to cheat, it does not necessarily reflect poorly on the course or the program, but rather reflects poorly on the student.

TL;DR - Ethical concerns only matter for students who are required to take the course. The people requiring them to take the course are responsible for ensuring their academic integrity.


Is finding answers and paraphrasing cheating? Sometimes I have trouble coming to conclusions on my own sometimes and I really do love learning but...

I sometimes scour the internet looking for answers to homework questions and then paraphrase them. I honestly retain and understand better from this, although I know I'm avoiding penalties by doing it.

Do you think this would violate an academic integrity policy? I am never copying the answers, strictly putting them in my own words, and often shortening them to the main points.

Thanks!

Nobody can answer this question except your instructor.  Academic integrity policies vary wildly from one course to the next.  Some instructors explicitly allow consulting outside sources; others explicitly forbid it, even with proper citation.  Which policies are appropriate, and in which contexts, depends on the class.

If you find yourself unwilling to ask your instructor, for example because you think even asking the question might get into trouble or subject your work to additional unwanted scrutiny, that's an excellent sign that you believe it's cheating.  But if you think it's cheating, you're not going to do it.  (Right?)  So you have nothing to fear by asking the instructor.


Is it possible to work from my parents' home on a postdoc? I have a postdoc (in mathematics) lasting for less than 8 months. In the UK, at the area of the university, I find it difficult to find accommodation since no one wants to let to me for such a short period of time, which is very annoying.

I was thinking I could live with my parents, and visit my adviser once a week or so. The journey would be about 3 hours each way. And we could Skype.

As a PhD student, this would have been acceptable, but I wonder if it is different since I am now a member of staff. Is it frowned upon? Will it cause problems for the department (eg. desk space) or for myself due to tax purposes? It's an EPSRC funded grant, so I wonder if that may also be an issue.

Only your school and your department and your group can tell you what their expectations are. Ask them.

But face-to-face networking with others is hugely valuable both for your current tasks and for being aware of new opportunities,, and think carefully before you give that up. I've been working from home for about 5 years now (commercial, not academic), and it has definitely cost me in terms of career progress despite my making deliberate efforts to stay in the loop.


Math postdoc at home university I am a math postdoc in Europe, and have been a postdoc for the last 6 years. Unfortunetly, I was still not able to obtain a tenure track position
(I was very close to get one, but because of bad luck will have to try again next year).

My current postdoc position ends in a few months. Because I thought that I will get a tenure-track position this year, I did not bother to search for a new post doc position until very late in the year. As a result, in a few months I will not have a postdoc position.

My Phd advisor came to the rescue - He can fund me as a postdoc at the University I did my phd in.

I would like to ask if people will look bad on someone that goes do a postdoc with his advisor in future job searches?

I should mention that I did not work with my advisor at all after my Phd, and am very independent in my research. Still, I am worried about this, and wonder what people think about such a situation.

Thank you

I wouldn't turn down the position with your advisor out of concern for how it will look at your CV.  It's hard to know for sure what will trigger a negative reaction in any one specific person; there are a lot of different people on hiring committees so it's very hard to absolutely rule out the possibility.  But precisely because of that, you can't let the possibility of something looking bad paralyze you, since almost anything could.  Someone once pointed out to me that there are certain things on one's CV that "look bad" but only really to people who are looking for some excuse to knock you down; if you don't give them that thing to take a hold of, they will surely just find something else.

Furthermore, I think the possibility of having a CV that suggests a charmed path of continuous success is a horse which has already left the barn.  If someone is going to hold a postdoc with your advisor against you, they could also certainly hold being on your 7th year of postdoc, or whatever number you had done; certainly if there's a gap between the end of your current job and the next one, they can hold that against you.  I would take whatever path is going to give you the best short term chance to do good research; that's what your job search next year will be based on, not exactly what path you took while doing it.


Research vs Review paper Objectively, is it more difficult to get published a research or a review paper?

Thanks

As far as I know, there is no data available of rejection rates enriched with information about the paper type. Therefore, you can't tell objectively.


How to gauge the prestige of an individual researcher when selecting a PhD advisor Is there a process one could follow when assessing the prestige of a specific supervisor when evaluating PhD programs? I ask because in the academic world, the professor almost trumps the school. I am not sure if that statement holds for industry. How can one assess if the PI's reputation is large enough to offset the fact that conferring institution is not in the top 5 or ten schools for that discipline. I am aiming for of an entrepreneur/industry trajectory and in an ideal world this would not matter. I want to believe that as long as you stellar work experience, the sky is the limit. I just have in the back of my mind in a hypothetical situation where you are trying to pitch and idea for VC funding having that pedigree may be helpful.

In my opinion, the prestige of a potential supervisor in the industry (vs strictly academic) can be (rapidly) assessed by first checking his academic curriculum vitae for:

The committees he is part of. As an academic working with the industry, he should be involved with one or several government / industries related committees with a focus on state of the art application of the knowledge in that industry (procedures to do x,y,z) common best practices (for that field), budgeting and assigning funds, defining road-maps for the next 5, 10 years etc. I know some academics working closely with the transport industry (or government related agencies) - and in addition to the usual academic implication, they are also working actively with those instances, often have a student doing a project with those instances as well.
His publications : he should write or be co-author on papers/books that are recognized in his field. Often large efforts with large groups of academics. His methods/work should be found or referred in some textbooks. He should have international collaborations. Patents ?
Editor : is he on any editorial boards for relevant journals ?

If he is an early career academic, is he that person who is always everywhere, always organizing something, always at conferences and meeting with half a dozen presentation - this could give a hint that this person is dynamic and his career may be promising.

This information should be easy to find. If it is hard to find, this may be a flag. I would personally have a good confidence joining a researcher with at some degree meet those characteristics, even if he is not a tenure at a top university.


How to encourage faculty involvement as judges in a local research exposé? Our university has a an annual event showcasing graduate student research projects and has a competition for best presentation.  However, faculty involvement (as judges for the event) was very sparse and we had a difficult time getting enough faculty to volunteer as judges.  I know that faculty time is very precious and this event did demand a lot of time and provided little incentive other than free food.  How else can I encourage more faculty involvement in this event?

We have the same kind of event, and we get reasonable faculty involvement. A few things that help:

Faculty are likely to show up and get involved if their students participate. Make sure students of many different faculty participate and remind the professors of this fact.
Remind, remind, remind. Send regular (but not daily) reminders to the faculty. Keep the emails short, and let them know what's expected of them - show up at this place, at this time, and encourage students.
Get different people involved in different aspects: some might review the presentations, some might help with pre-screening, and so on. The more people are involved, the more they feel part-ownership, and the more likely they are to participate in other ways.
Do this regularly. It's often hard to do this the first time, but once it's a regular occurrence, people get used to the rhythm of it and how it fits into the calendar.


How to address the recruiting committee in a cover letter in case the recepient is not an individual to the best of your knowledge? Specializing the question
Who to address on the cover letter?,
let's assume that you apply for a tenure-track position in the US in computer science, that the job announcement has no particular individual listed, and that Google/Bing/Yahoo led you to, say, "recruiting committee" (as opposed to "search team"). Then, which opening would be proper:

To Whom It May Concern

or

Dear Recruiting Committee

or

To the Recruiting Committee

or

Dear Representative of the Recruiting Committee

or

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen

?
How about the punctuation after the opening? No punctuation, a comma, or a colon? I.e.:

〈Whatever opening〉
〈Whatever opening〉,
〈Whatever opening〉:

All are o.k. according to the broad English grammar, but, in academia things might be more special.

Use an inside address and a subject line, then dive into your letter.  You can skip the salutation in letters to committees.

  Recruiting Committee University of Whatever City, State
  Zip

  Request for appointment

  I would like to be considered for a full-time appointment as ...


Master student pursuing PHD: how to spend summer break? So I'm a master student pursuing a PHD. I'm currently following a research master program of which the natural path is a PHD program, in which I am seriously interested. I already hold a regular master in marketing and a bachelor in business.

My field is business (specifically, quantitative marketing, but I also like some extensions to strategic topics in management).

Now I want to spend the summer (break) doing something fruitful for my skills and/or possibly, carreer. I expect to be done with course obligations around week 19, new semester starts in september which gives me at least (in case of resits) 10 weeks of free time but can easily be around 15 weeks.

I identified some options:

Work in advance for thesis (look for suitable topic, review literature)
Summer school (abroad)
Contact someone from my department to collaborate on research
Contact someone from my department to advise me on extra readings
Find an intership or job (may be difficult when regarding my field, experience, and time available)

Can someone give me some advice or other ideas?

I think what you're asking is fairly subjective, might depend somewhat on your field, and also, your options and opportunities can differ greatly according to the country in which you're doing your Masters.
The most I can offer, as somebody who just started a PhD, is to tell you what I did during my Masters (that was outside of regular program) and, more importantly, why and how I think it helped.
I did two research internships abroad, one before my last year of classes, and one during my last semester that played out as co-supervised research for my Master thesis.
What I got from that:

I saw what research entails in other countries where research is important and valued (research in Croatia, where I come from, is at mediocre level at best)

I experienced working in two very different labs, under very different supervision, different lab dynamics and approaches towards research

I discovered which setting works best for me and which setting I work best in
(e.g. I prefer a relaxed, flexible environment and being advised/supervised by somebody openly helpful and talkative (it's just a thing for me) as opposed to strict working hours, getting tasks without understanding the importance and when the feedback (especially the negative aspects) is constrained because of inherit cultural politeness)

I made valuable contacts who are at various levels in the research hierarchies - some of them gave me ideas, others encouragement, and some even gave me recommendation letters

in informal settings, I exchanged concrete ideas as well as general attitudes towards research and science (and life) with people that come from different cultural and academical backgrounds

I found out how (very different) PhD students think of their "jobs" and what they think of their career choices and I was free to make my own assessment about how happy and fulfilled doing the PhD made them and why, so my guess about how happy it would make me was more educated

the proximity to the location where I finally applied for a PhD got me the PhD grant - I would have never gotten that particular one if I wasn't there to have a few informal talks and give my grant presentation

To summarize, what you should be aiming to get from your summer activity is diversity. Diversity in attitudes, approaches, contacts and ideas. You're allowed and encouraged to work and thrive in an environment best for you for anything more permanent (several years long), but you can't really know what you prefer if you never tried anything different.
I'm not going to tell you which activity to choose, but I would go to the one that had the potential to expose me to most new people, ideas and attitudes. You can always sacrifice some sleep to do extra work, but no amount of work in the world can measure up what you get from formal and informal interactions.
In my (a bit Utopian) view of the world, that's how science progresses: scientists travel and during those travels, the best of many worlds collides. By the end of those travels, hopefully, all the worlds are a little bit better off. When you're old, wise and grumpy, you travel to give back to the community and spread the ideas you spend a big part of your life to shape. But, since you expect to be giving back later, that entails you to travel when you're young, curious and perky, and get the most of what the community has to offer - little, baby ideas, and chisels to shape your own ideas.


Are there tools to implement an institutional open access policy? Many universities have adopted open access policies, giving their employees an incentive to make their scholarly articles freely available online.

To enforce this policy, universities should ideally keep track of the research output of their employees, and remind them to upload their papers if they are not freely available yet.

This is a rather time-consuming task: I wonder whether there are tools to facilitate or automate this process.

Such tools could perform some of the following tasks:

Track the published papers and match their authors with the employees list (probably using some bibliometric platform like crossref.org)
Locate freely available versions of these papers
Run a repository where the papers can be uploaded (there are plenty of tools available for this task)
Manage waiver requests from researchers who want to opt out of the policy
Provide statistics about the publication practices within the institution

Building on Cape Code answer, what you seek for is an institutional repository. There are many, but it depends by the single institution. You should ask yours.

Software used are often DSpace and Eprints (but there are others): these systems let users upload pre-prints and other documents; release them with Creative Commons licenses, use DOIs (sometime provided by the very same institutional repository); provide digital preservation, provide statistics, etc.

The open access movement has a strong component in librarians, who in the last decades built protocols and best practices.

Every institution is different and offers different services.


Adjunct to Full time position conflict I have been an adjunct at different community colleges.  I just got offered and accepted full time teaching position job (verbally) not in paper yet.   The unfortunate situation is that I already signed contracts to adjunct a couple of sections at another school.  It is possible for me to teach at both schools, but my fear is getting burned out, and want teach my full time position well.

However, I feel that if I back out of my written contracts it can jeopardize my full time teaching position (and future prospects), since that is just a verbal agreement and I haven't signed a contract for that.

Should I back out of my adjunct classes so I can concentrate on my full time position.  Or should I just stick to teaching both for that semester to avoid possible backlash?

You can ask for an unsigned copy of the offer letter for full-time, and explain that you need to look it over so you can decide how to proceed with the adjunct work. They should understand and even appreciate that you don't want to leave anybody high and dry. Likewise, you might consider contacting the chairs of the departments where you are adjuncting and get a sense of how difficult it would be for them to find someone else to teach the course. It could go either way. They might not have a good back up plan, or they may have a reserve of graduate students who need to teach to improve their CVs.


What makes a good chalkboard? I've encountered lots of chalkboards through my career, and they vary widely in quality.  Some write smoothly and erase cleanly; for others, the chalk squeaks and the eraser just smears.

I assume there are differences in the materials they use, the construction techniques, how the surface is prepared or treated, and so on.  But I'm clueless as to what these differences might be, and how they affect the quality.  If I'm looking for a "good" one, what questions should I ask?

(Academics are one of the few groups these days that use chalkboards on a regular basis, so I hope this question is suitable for this site.  Please note that I'm not asking for specific product recommendations, just general information.)

The good chalkboards appear to be made of porcelain enamel fused to a steel core. See this site for more details on the manufacturing process. As JeffE mentioned in a comment on another answer, cheaper chalkboards are made by painting wood or chipboard with a special chalkboard paint. Although these are good for crafts, they are NOT the kind you want to have in a classroom. They have to be primed with chalk before the first use and after being cleaned with a damp cloth. Also they will often have to be given another coat of paint after being used for a while.

For non-squeak writing, break long pieces of chalk in half--this will usually take care of the problem! I have noticed that regular, i.e. daily, sponging with an all-purpose cleaning solution also helps to prevent smearing while writing/erasing.


Should one offer to take over a lecture that the lecturer is struggling to teach? Once upon a time in a lecture I attended, the lecturer had clearly not fully understood the material and was struggling to explain it. I was a student, but very knowledgeable about the topic, and had taught it many times in informal settings, so I felt silly just listening.

In the interest of the other attendees' learning, I considered offering to take over the lecture. However, I stopped myself, out of concern that the lecturer might feel humiliated, or think I'm questioning their authority more generally.

In such a situation, is it appropriate for a student to offer to teach a topic? What about other teaching staff who are attending? How would one politely suggest it, or otherwise deal with the situation?

Related questions: From a student's perspective: offering alternative viewpoints on lecture content, handling unintelligible lecturers and handling lecturers who just read from the book. From a lecturer's perspective: teaching a class you've never taken.

Perhaps the best approach would be to ask leading questions that helps the lecturer head in the right direction.  Or, offer an answer to a question that wasn't going well.

I've taught classes (especially ones that use complex libraries, such as parts of a game engine, that I wasn't a seasoned expert with), and have had students who had more experience with a specific topic chime in to the discussion with details I didn't know.  It was great. I've also had students who were aggressive and conveyed arrogance and had them derail the class by setting up a me vs them dynamic.  Not so great.

The most important thing is classroom dynamics:  let the lecturer retain control (ie. facilitate the discussion) but you actively participate. The lecturer should be there to create a learning environment, not bestow knowledge on the class.  You can make it clear you know the topic, and let them have you participate as much as they are comfortable.

Asking to "take over" would not go over well;  offering your knowledge on bits and pieces and nudging the lecturer in the right direction through questions would be better.


How to explain a physics mechanism that I study from other paper in my report while avoiding plagiarism? As I understand about writing a research project report or master thesis report, it must be complete, self-sufficient. The readers can understand the report/book by reading it thoroughly without the need to consult other sources.
I can think these two ways:

just stated that "the complete mechanism is discussed in [1]."
But this options make the report not self-sufficient.

paraphrase and cite the original source
This is what I am doing.
But I worry that the paraphrase is so similar to the original writing because what I am trying to explain is a physics mechanism which I think it is hard to explain it in another way, especially the structure of the explanation.

I really appreciate any suggestion.

You can quote (within reason) and/or paraphrase quite freely as long as you cite the source. For some things there are only a very limited number of ways to state something accurately so "using the same words" is not an absolute prohibition in certain fields. There are scales of measurement here. But in those situations in which you need the exact words (such as, perhaps, definitions), quote and cite.

Plagiarism is when you try to represent another's work as your own. You aren't doing that here. Copyright infringement is when you copy another's words without permission or other justification. Normally, academics expect that short phrases may be quoted from their work. For longer passages, however, it is wise to seek permission from the copyright holder, of course.

However, there may be another way in some circumstances. Sometimes it is possible to take older work and summarize it in a way that loses almost nothing. Rephrasing work in a simpler form may help both you and your reader to understand it better than the original sources. It isn't always possible, but may be worth the effort. This takes insight, which is worth cultivating.


Do degrees from the ETH of Zurich value the same as 'normal degrees'? I have noticed that the ETHZ gives the following degrees / titles upon graduating:

  Bsc ETH [Subject] instead of BSc [Subject].

  Msc ETH [Subject] instead of MSc [Subject].

  Dr. sc. ETH Zurich instead of Ph.D [Subject].

I am aware that there already is a question on academia stackexchange about why this is the case.

More interesting is the question about their equivalence in industry or academia. Please don't misunderstand. I don't want to ask if they have the same value as an Ivy-League degree or not. If a college or university asked for people having a master's degree or a Ph.D. degree, are candidates with a Msc ETH or Dr. sc. ETH considered too? Would they think something like 'Oh hey, he has a Bsc ETH, so he has no real bachelor.', or do they think that Bsc ETH = Bsc?

are candidates with a Msc ETH or Dr. sc. ETH considered too?

Of course, yes.

The reason for the presence of the ETH qualifier is well explained in this answer, and the (possible legal) validity of a certain degree can be established regardless of any qualifier attached to the degree.

Moreover, if you look at the position of ETH Zurich in international rankings, you will see that it can be certainly classified among the top universities. Whatever one can say about the real validity of such rankings, a university would probably not be able to stand in top positions if its graduates were systematically ignored in other university selections. And if this were the case just for the presence of the ETH qualifier, I'm sure they would have already removed it.

  do they think that Bsc ETH = Bsc?

Given the prestige of the ETH Zurich, I'm sure that several if not many selection committees would think Bsc ETH > Bsc.


What are the moral and legal consequences of "not thanking" government for not providing viable grants? Recently, on various social platforms, an image containing an unusual acknowledgement in some paper have been circulating. This is about the following paper RF fingerprint measurements for the identification of devices
in wireless communication networks based on feature
reduction and subspace transformation by J.L. Padilla, P. Padilla, J.F. Valenzuela-Valdés, J. Ramírez, J.M. Górriz, Measurement 58 (2014) 468–475, which has the following Acknowledgement:

 "This work has been carried out despite the economical
difficulties of the authors’ country. The authors want to
overall remark the clear contribution of the Spanish Government
in destroying the R&D horizon of Spain and the
future of a complete generation."

Another interesting example provided by @Federico Poloni is the paper  Rumour spreading and graph conductance  by Flavio Chierichetti, Silvio Lattanzi, Alessandro Panconesi,
where the authors write:

"Unacknowledgements

This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian
Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB
program, project RBIN047MH9-000. The Ministry
however has not paid its dues and it is not known
whether it will ever do."

Another paper recently published offers a sad story in the acknowledgements,(I will just put the reference here "On functional representations of the conformal algebra", by Oliver J. Rosten, Eur. Phys. J. C (2017) 77:477
DOI 10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-5049-5)

In "A New Horned Dinosaur Reveals Convergent Evolution in Cranial Ornamentation in Ceratopsidae by Caleb M. Brown, Donald M. Henderson, Current Biology, Vol. 25, Issue 12, R494–R496
DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.041, there is a proposal:

 Funding for this research was provided by the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and the Royal Tyrrell Museum Cooperating Society.
C.M.B. would specifically like to highlight the ongoing and unwavering support
of Lorna O’Brien. Lorna, will you marry me?

In "Rotational splittings with CoRoT, expected number of detections and measurement accuracy" by M. Goupil, et al., Caleb M. Brown, Donald M. Henderson, Current Biology, Vol. 25, Issue 12, R494–R496
, where is the following text:

 We do not gratefully thank T. Appourchaux for his useless and very mean comments

There are also more:
Van Valen (1973). A new Evolutionary Law. Evolutionary Theory 1:1-30.

I thank the National Science Foundation for regularly rejecting my (honest) grant applications for work on real organisms (cf. Szent-Gyorgyi, 1972), thus forcing me into theoretical work

Although I fully empathize with the authors view, I wonder about the legal and moral consequences of considering adding of such an acknowledgement in one's
future career.

P.S. If you have discovered a similar story in a different paper that it is not listed here, please feel free to add it. Thank you!

Academic publications are in general not the right place for politics. And especially not for personal vendettas. Doing the latter is deeply unprofessional (though I'd wager some great scientists did this as well).

However, government officials and institutions are public not private actors and as such are in democratic societies put to more scrutiny (in their official function) than private actors. Addressing StrongBad's concern of people starting to "not thank" your publisher,supervisor etc, this is definitely a difference I would see.

For contemporary major moral discussions - like "should we start a genocide or not" - I'd say the bigger moral question can trump the professionality aspect by far though.

Now that we covered the general and extreme cases, back to the dirty middle ground.
Criticizing a political official or institution who acts in a researchers opinion damaging to science (or to society by his stance to science) or who likes to claim supporting science while his acts paint a different picture, I'd consider a borderline case.
It's a public body and it affects science, thus to some degree relevant for the audience and the author. Especially when there is no official body properly representing the scientific community in that country, such a statement may be a reasonable approach to inform the public about the opinion of the broader scientific community. But it comes off as petty easily if it's just general critic for a particular agenda that doesn't suit your own ideas or if it seems you are just angry because you in particular didn't get funding while others did.

So legally, it's irrelevant in most countries, as long as you don't include libel or insult (depending on country). It is, in general, unprofessional, but sometimes the bigger issue at stake may still validate it morally.

It's basically your individual choice to break with the professionality in order to further your political agenda. It may hinder your scientific career and cost you reputation, while helping your agenda. However, if you're unlucky it may also have the opposite effect and along with your own reputation loss, cost your political movement reputation with conservative people/voters/observers. In the end, it is very context depending - who are you criticizing, for what reasons, who is your audience and how receptive may they be to your message. Same for your career. If your scientific peers agree with your opinion they may ignore your breach with professionality - but does that also hold for international colleagues who may have no idea what you are ranting about?


Undergraduate research feels like it is going nowhere. Any advice from someone experienced? A bit of a preface; I am an electrical engineering undergraduate student. Almost exactly a year ago I asked a professor I had as a freshmen (I'm a junior now) about joining a research team. I was very surprised when he messaged me back with "Come see me." Keep in mind, this professor is very old (in his 80s) and foreign born, so he's not the best at communicating in general with me. After sending me home with some totally unrelated papers he worked on in the 60s and 70s, he essentially told me that he'd find something. Well, about a month passed and nothing, so I messaged him again and he said he found something.

He put me with a PhD student working on something that sounded familiar and understandable from digital logic class. Well, we get started and this grad student is very nice. He runs me through some fundamentals of what I need to know. The important part of this is that he never tells me what we are actually working on. The next 6 months of my life turn into studying abstract algebra textbooks, not electrical engineering. I get sent packages of like 15 assorted research papers that look like complete gibberish to me. But whatever, I keep pushing onward.

Well, weeks turn into months and I start to lose motivation because I feel like I am left in the dark. I tell this grad student all the time that if there's any meetings I can go to to please invite me, but I never really get anything back. He finally gave me a vague idea of what we are doing about 6 months in. He seems to have either forgotten about me or just doesn't care. I feel like I am absolutely useless to this research. This further perpetuates me not wanting to even try to hike this mountain. I'm the kind of person that can accomplish great things if I feel like I have guidance. I don't know if he feels like I am incapable or doesn't want my name on his research paper. I am a first generation college student, so all of this is very new to me.

The last I spoke to him was right before spring break where he said he'd send me some materials, then this pandemic hit and I haven't heard from him in like 4 months. Any advice what I should do? I emailed him today and still haven't gotten a response. That old professor that got me the research retired this semester. I've never actually met the professor that my grad student works under because, again, I feel like I am not important.

Undergraduate research feels like it is going nowhere.

That's normal.  If it were easy, it would have been done before, and it would not be research.

  he's not the best at communicating

That's not normal.

  he never tells me what we are actually working on

That's not normal.

  if there's any meetings I can go to to please invite me, but I never really get anything back.

That's not normal.

  I don't know if he feels like I am incapable or doesn't want my name on his research paper.

More likely he's disinterested.

  I am a first generation college student, so all of this is very new to me.

<5% of people with college degrees have studied abstract algebra.  Being first generation isn't that relevant here.

  I haven't heard from him in like 4 months

The pandemic doesn't excuse zero communication for four months (assuming he's alive).

Conclusion:  You are not receiving adequate research mentoring.  Find new mentors.


Disclosure of academic dishonesty during background check for tenure track I am a CS PhD student in my final year in North America and I will be applying for academia jobs starting Fall 2020. As far as I know, there will be some sort of background check during the hiring process.

As for my past background, I had an incident during my undergraduate year where I submitted a project with citations at the end, but omitted in-text citations and so I was charged with plagiarism. The committee decided that it was unintentional and allowed me to redo the assignment with a 30% grade reduction penalty and the incident didn't show up on my transcript. So how should I report this incident with my prospect employers? Is this considered a crime or misdemeanor conviction?

Any suggestion is appreciated. Thanks!

The purpose of the background check is to find out if you are likely to abuse children on campus, assault your colleagues, or steal from the university.  It is not related to academic integrity.

Academic integrity is evaluated by reference checks and transcript checks.

Convictions are decided by law courts, not university committees.  You have a conviction if a judge or jury convicted you in a court.  This does not include university honor courts that are not part of the legal system.

  So how should I report this incident with my prospect employers?

You should report it if you are asked to do so.  You probably will not be.