When to tell current employer that I want to quit and switch to a different PhD I am currently employed as a scientific employee at a research institute, which means I get a salary but am not currently working on a PhD. Originally I planned to begin my PhD at this institute within the first year of my employment (beginning right away was not possible).

However, since I began this position I realized more and more that I did not enjoy the work and therefore I do not want to start do my PhD at this institute and instead look for different PhD positions in a related field at the same university.

However, I do not want to quit on the spot and look for a new position because

Finding a new PhD position might take a long time because there aren't a lot of open positions and it is not easy (for me at least) to even be considered and I am not sure if I can find a position at all. This means if I quit on the spot I would have to live without a salary for 2-6 months (after this time I would most likely just cave in and look for a job in industry which I assume will be a lot easier).
The people at my current job have been nothing but nice to me and I don't want to upset them by quitting before I can at least finish some of my open projects and give them some time to find somebody to replace me.

Another alternative would be to not quit on the spot but instead to look for a new position "secretly". I am not sure how I feel about this option because it feels very insincere and I would be afraid that someone could find out about it (since I am looking for positions at the same university)

For these reasons, I assumed that telling my current supervisor about me wanting to quit at some point in the future but offering to stay for the intermediate period is in both our best interests.

The problem I have is that I have a feeling that in the period after telling them, the work environment will be very awkward because they will be aware that I do not like the job and am just doing it for the salary.
Also, I am currently assuming that I wouldn't immediately be "fired" after telling them that I am looking for something else. If this assumption isn't true then not telling them would be the much smarter move.

Is there anyone who could give advice and confirm my suspicion that telling them openly that I will look for new positions is indeed the best move or tell me why it isn't?

I wonder if the choice is as stark as you think. It ought to be possible to begin a search for a new opportunity without advising anyone of your search. You can do this informally, of course, with other professors at other institutions, but also formally.

The time that it will be necessary to make your desires know can be fairly late, say when the new place requires letters of recommendation and letters from other sources won't do.

In some labs it is required to release employees at the first hint they might want to leave.

But if you can line something up that is pretty firm, subject to letters, you can finesse the decision even then. "I just got a fantastic opportunity and wish to follow it up", rather than "I've been looking for something else for a while now...".

But even if you make a commitment to leave, don't neglect your current work. Good work will make those letters better and easier to obtain.

But, you won't really know how employable you are until you start to look and see what feedback you get.

It might be necessary for you, in the short term, to let prospective supervisors know that your search is still confidential. I think most people would respect that if you give them a reason.


Chances of acceptance for proceedings? I am a graduate not in education. I gave a talk at a conference which was well recieved. My studies dont match those of the forum as much as otherd so I was surprised to be invited. Now I've been invited to submit an article to the conference proceeding (which are digital). Previous editions had 10-14 papers. There were 33 presentations at the conference. It was my first presentation and if successful it will be my first publication. But what do you think my chances are?

If you have the time and means to do so and you are interested in this opportunity, I would suggest doing it; it does not hurt and as someone who used to work in Higher Education, it was not out of the ordinary for scholars from other fields to contribute to conference proceedings (just as you presented at this conference) because Education as a discipline is inherently understood as multidisciplinary in scope. None of us can necessarily give you your chances without assessing the strength and merit of each person who would also be submitting. The positive news is that if you write something that you feel good about, if it is not accepted, provided there are no limitations imposed by the organization that hosted the conference, you still nonetheless have a publishable work in your pocket that can ostensibly be sent to journals for publication.


Uninteresting research area and contacting potential supervisors I've recently finished off my undergraduate degrees and am in the process of contacting various faculty members for MSc supervision. Recently I have been offered supervision at a research lab which I had previously worked with. However, I don't find the research that the lab is doing all that interesting. As a result, I've decided to contact a couple of different potential supervisors (both are world-renowned/highly cited) at a different institution. One of these potential supervisors has not replied to my last email and I'm thinking about contacting the other potential supervisor. My issue is two-fold:

1) If I move to another research area, will the lead supervisor at the lab that has given me an offer be jilted and could this adversely affect me in the future? Is it bad to reject an offer if I'm not interested in the research field? EDIT: The lead supervisor and another collaborator/co-supervisor are happy for me to leave if I don't like the research area. But I will still do some research at the lab over the summer holidays.

2) The two potential supervisors are both in the same faculty at the same institution. The one that I have contacted already is the Head of the prospective research group whilst the other potential supervisor is a member of it. Both of them work quite closely together (looking at their recently published papers).

Would it be unethical/bad for me to contact the other potential supervisor given that the Head of the group has not replied to my last email? It has been a week and a half since the last reply. Should I re-engage with the Head of the group?
Should I tell the potential supervisor that I'm thinking of contacting that I have already contacted the Head of the group? Will the more junior member feel like he was the second choice and hence inclined to not respond?

Your undergrad supervisor would be a terrible person if they tried to attack you in the future because you didn't want to work with them for your masters. That's just crazy, but it does happen. You'd be better talking to the supervisor and getting their advice about what you actually want to do. They may know one of the other potential supervisors in the other area and be able to set up and introduction.

Besides, even if your current supervisor did want to try to harm you later because you didn't want to work with them, wouldn't your rather risk that than get locked into research about a topic you don't like?

You should feel free to contact the more junior member of the potential research group. Do let them know that you've tried to reach the head, that you understand that they're very busy, and that you'd like to work with the group in the future.


Is the professor allowed to force all of his students to retake the final So my friends professor had his class take the final last week, but the problem was that the whole final was online even with all the answers, but he didn't find out till today and he is making everyone of his students retake it, and it got me wondering if that is legal and fair for the students who had already taken the final. My friend goes to Brooklyn College.

There's nothing illegal about it as far as I can see, so we can get that out of the way first.

As to fair, if there are still regularly scheduled class days, they can be used. If the exam is available online originally and planned to be made online again, then given a large enough testing window to account for other exams, I don't see a huge problem.

Now, if for whatever reason the exam would need to be retaken on campus or during a specific small window of time that students may have conflicts with, then the most logic solution in my mind is to make the final optional, or to cancel it all together.

However, the professor will have a fair amount of freedom to decide how to deal with the situation and will undoubtedly have consulted with their department head to make sure the solution seems reasonable (at my university we have to get our dean to approve any exam time outside the standard exam schedule). As a professor, I would personally consult with the department head if for no other reason then to give him a heads up on something that has the potential to generate academic grievances.

If your friend feels the solution is unjust, they should begin an academic grievance process, which will be outlined in the student handbook or similar. The first step is normally contacting the professor to discuss the issue.


Is it appropriate to use an Independent Study as a mechanism to get projects built? Our research group has a set of projects that we would like to have implemented, but lacks the necessary funds to complete all of them. Instead of prioritizing/shelving projects, is it appropriate to advertise them as "for-credit" independent study courses for graduate students. The alternative would be paying for the same graduate students as research/course assistants.

Universities and individual departments have criteria for allowable independent study courses. One of the reasons is exactly the scenario you outline. In my department, approval will depend on whether there is "academic value" for the student. Academic value, however, is subject to interpretation.

By all means, inquire with colleagues, department chair, etc. to find out the relevant criteria for you. Of course the student should feel that the project is worthwhile for them, or you won't get anyone signing up. Students will prefer paid positions, all else equal. As you know, it is routine at research universities for students to be paid as researchers, to do the research that becomes part of their thesis. You have to offer more value, or accept a lower ability student.


Is it ethical to include additional material in lecture notes if students buy them For most of the undergraduate courses I teach, I also prepare lecture notes and students usually buy a printed copy at a copy shop at the university. Sometimes I think it might be beneficial for the lecture notes if I include additional material which I might not cover in the course.

Is it ethical to add additional material if most of the students will buy a printed copy and the price will go up due to the additional pages? Does it make a difference if the material is available as a pdf in the course's page in a learning management system?

It is very thoughtful of you to be concerned with the increased costs to your students; indeed, professors should be aware of and sensitive to such issues. At the same time, it is important not to go overboard with such concerns. As an educator, your primary concern should be to provide the students with the materials that you feel they need. That can legitimately include material that you are not planning to cover in the course but feel would be beneficial to at least a reasonable number of students. When weighing the benefit of this extra material against the increased cost of 1-2 euros to purchase the lecture notes, personally I feel that the educational benefit wins out against the fairly negligible amount of money involved. So yes, I would say it is ethical.

As for distributing the extra material online for free, sure, that would work as well, but would probably send a signal to most of the students that this material is not important and should be ignored, and would dilute the pedagogical value of making the material available to the students.

Finally, note that my answer may be different if you personally were making a profit from the inclusion of the extra material. In that case there would be a clear conflict of interest that would warrant, at the very least, a good deal of extra caution and perhaps rethinking your entire approach to distributing course material.


Is a research thesis (report) with zero contribution to human knowledge acceptable? An alternate title could be "Do we award a PhD for what the student became or for what he produced?". More precisely, if a research thesis report does not advance human knowledge, yet still shows that the student acquired the right skills of investigation, should the title of Philosophy Doctor be awarded?

I kind of always assumed that a thesis (PhD thesis in particular) should have some positive results (where positive means "advancing the state of human knowledge"), and that part of the art of finding a good topic of research was the art of asking the right kind of question, which would yield some positive result independently of the answer. Similar views are expressed in this other stackexchange question and the corresponding answers:

  It is an expectation that the PhD would make an original contribution and/or advance knowledge in a given field. I understand this is a universal assumption for this level of study across all universities. (...) usually a PhD is measured on its contribution to expand knowledge.

Nevertheless, Justin Zobel defends convincingly the opposite view in "Writing for Computer Science", p.154 of the Second Edition:

  even if good results are not achieved, the thesis should pass if you have shown the ability to undertake high-quality research. (...)
  A thesis with negative results can, if appropriately written, demonstrate the ability of the candidate just as well a a thesis with positive results. (...)
  it is you, not the research, that is the primary object of scrutiny

Is there an agreement across disciplines about this question?

I am not directly concerned (I reported positive results in my PhD thesis long ago, have many positive results to report in my "Habilitation" thesis, and I certainly aim for my students to report positive results in theirs), but I am curious about the real objective of the thesis:
- as an advisor, I could suggest a more risky topic if it had the potential to teach more to the student without risking the whole graduating thing; and
- as a referee or member of an evaluation committee, I have to judge students and/or their thesis...

Extreme Fictional Example

A student and advisor do the entire research work following the most rigorous scientific process for several years, only to find their efforts ruined near the end of the process either by a budget cut, the disappearance of the species they were studying, or the discovery that the problem is the consequence of an obscure results from year ago in another research community.

The student has followed and learned the scientific process, but did not contribute to human knowledge (apart from maybe improving the index of its bibliography).  If the student has showed the qualities required from a good researcher, should(n't) he/she be awarded the title of "Doctor in Philosophy", independently of the contribution made to human knowledge?

This is truly a rhetorical question, and I doubt this kind of situation happens often. Yet the idea is new to me and I kind of like it, albeit I doubt the whole community would agree...

Opposite Extreme Example

Imagine that a student, stroke by luck, makes an amazing scientific discovery which deeply impact human knowledge, and can be understood by all even though the student  poorly redacts it. It seems clear to me that the society would not benefit from awarding a PhD to such a student, who has not learned how to do research even though contributing to human knowledge.

On the other hand, setting two conditions for the awarding of a PhD, having learned how to do proper research AND having advanced human knowledge by using it, introduces trade-offs and compromises (which again do not serve society).

I assume that by negative results, you mean non-significant results.

"It is an expectation that the PhD would make an original contribution and/or advance knowledge in a given field." Yes, this is true. And "X doesn't work" is a contribution to the field.

(To use an example from my area). Health practitioners are constantly dreaming up things that might work to treat various ailments (illnessess), and using them. The job of health researchers is to find out which ones work - and most of them don't work.

We used to joke that our role as health care researchers was to say no. "Nope. That doesn't work. Don't do it. No, that one's not effective either. No, don't use that. No. No. No."

Pressure for positive results just means you tweak models and data until you find them - using 'researcher degrees of freedom' (see http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/11/1359). Your results are therefore significant, but worthless.

My PhD thesis was trying to demonstrate the nature of the relationship between stress and psoriasis symptoms (many people say "stress worsens psoriasis" - it's taken as a given truth, but it's never been empirically demonstrated). I was trying to answer things like what kind of stress, how long does it take, does it differ between people? I never found any evidence that stress did worsen psoriasis. Nor that psoriasis worsened stress (or any other psychological symptom).

A PhD is an educational process. One should demonstrate that one has learned. The most important thing about a PhD is showing what you know, what you have learned, and what you understand. If anyone gets to the end of a PhD and says "Well, those results were all positive, just as I expected", they've learned little. At the end of your PhD (or any research project) you should want to start again, and this time do it properly.


Is sharing research progress and ideas on blog acceptable? Public outreach is an important part of being a researcher, in my opinion, and blogging is the method of choice for many researchers. Is it okay to share recent research progress, explain publicly what you are doing, what kind of experiments/simulations you are running, why you chose these kinds of simulations, and the main conclusions you could draw from the simulations, and what you think comes next? I am not sure if research group leaders are keen on such being made "publicly available" before a paper is published. Of course, some might read your idea and realize something huge, do it themselves and take credit, and claim they came up with it independently.

I hope to get a  PhD in computational chemistry in the next few years, and I would very much like to share ideas, share my thoughts, and explain concepts as an attempt at public outreach. This would, naturally, lead to sharing of some group-specific ideas and progress. Is such behavior generally supported by research group managers (or the university in general)? How would journals respond to publishing papers where some progress figures and ideas have been "published" on personal blogs?

Blogging is very common and appreciated in mathematics. For example, here are some blogs maintained by well-known mathematicians: Terry Tao, Quomodocumque, Tim Gowers. None of these blogs are devoted exclusively to mathematics, although each of them contains plenty of math. Each of these links to tons of other math blogs, so you can see many more examples.

I think that what you propose is a very good idea, subject to some caution. As Alexandros suggests, I would only discuss other people's ideas if you get their permission. (Or, perhaps, if you are discussing something publicly available. In mathematics this is certainly considered okay but you should check with someone in your discipline.)

Most importantly, I would suggest waiting to blog about your work until after you have completed it and made your results publicly available. (In math it is typical to post a preprint to the arXiv at approximately the same time that you submit your paper for publication, and at this point your work is considered public. But in some disciplines a paper is not considered "public" until it is formally published.) There are several reasons for doing this. One is that you avoid the risk of being scooped. Another is that, by waiting, you get to advertise your finished work. Typically, math blogs contain links to PDF copies of the papers they discuss. When I get interested, I often want to click through and read the paper!


History of mega-collaborations Curiosity spurred by this recent question: what were the first mega-collaboration papers (hundreds/thousands of authors)? Which institution/project/experiment started them? How were they received at first by the editors? Did some journals object to them?

According to this article from 2012, papers with multiple hundreds of authors began primarily as a phenomenon in physics, and the massive physics collaborations in areas like particle physics and space sciences continue to be the ones expanding the bounds of mass authorship.

Historically, the post notes:

  In 1981, the highest number of authors on any paper indexed by Clarivate Analytics was 118; by 1989, the annual number regularly surpassed 500.

Another article notes, however, that despite the overall dominance of physics, the first article to pass 1000 authors was actually a 2000+ author medical study.

None of the sources that I have found talk about any particular difficulties in publishing multi-hundred author articles, which does not surprise me. Many of the issues, such as assigning responsibility, already had to be worked out for articles with "mere" dozens of authors. Moreover large-scale collaborations are typically difficult to conduct (and fund) without already having effectively satisfied many of the challenges of peer review.  In short: while I don't have evidence for it, I would suspect that the early mega-collaboration papers were well received by journals eager to publish such high-profile and likely impactful research.


How can I claim ownership of my idea without securing a patent? I created a model for the pathogenesis of a neurodegenerative disorders that reveals a novel target for neurorestoration/neuroprotection. Can I patent the use of an existing compound for another purpose since I have reason to believe it would also act to target neurodegeneration in this disease?

To provide some background, I'm a recent Ivy League alum who hasn't been able to secure a long-term position in a lab (in grad school or as a job). I've done an extensive analysis of the literature and believe I've found a number of solid papers to support my claim but, of course, since my clout in research is nonexistent, I'm not sure what to do. My advisor who supervised this work is still saying we can publish the manuscript where I explained my model this summer but I'm afraid that if there's multiple people on the paper, some of whom are bigger names in the fields of biochemistry, neurodegeneration, and medicine than me, it'll look like it wasn't completely my idea.

Should I use a preprint server, a provisional patent (even though I can't afford the full $5000 patent that you need to protect your patent status.), or ask one of the potential co-authors directly what she thinks (she's huge in the field of neurodegeneration)? I'm not trying to sound self-important, I'm just really anxious to capitalize on my effort, which involved a lot of work, before someone else does. How important does someone have to be in molecular neurobiology for a new idea from them to be taken seriously?

You can't patent that.

  Can I patent the use of an existing compound for another purpose since I have reason to believe it would also act to target neurodegeneration in this disease?

No, you can't patent "the use of X for purposes of Y" abstractly. As this description of patentable matter explains it:

  A patent cannot protect an idea. Instead, the idea must be embodied in one or more of the following:

  A process or method (such as a new way to manufacture concrete)
  A machine (something with moving parts or circuitry)
  A manufactured article (such as a tool or another object that accomplishes a result with few or no moving parts, such as a pencil)
  A new composition (such as a new pharmaceutical)
  An asexually reproduced and new variety of plant.

If you developed a specific method to use compound X to do neurorestoration/neuroprotection of Y - then maybe you can patent it.

Instead of trying to patent - try scientific publication!

You need the anxiety to "capitalize on your effort". Like you, I have not been able to secure a position in academia - not even a temporary one - despite having a bunch of solid ideas which can be developed. So I can sympathize, at least somewhat. Still: You should not, must not, utilize the tool of patents - which is a legal mechanism for inhibiting scientific discovery and preventing the public from benefiting from inventions.

Instead, try to find the time to write a paper - albeit a "vision paper" rather than an empirical study - making your case. Perhaps publish it on arXiv before it's peer-reviewed, to "stake your claim" scientifically rather than capitalistically. It might help you find a source of funding for developing this idea - in a "start-up", an established company or even a scientific institution.


Can a PhD be crowdfunded? Is it possible to crowdfund a PhD, like crowdfunding business?

While I'm sure its possible I haven't been able to find any examples of funding an entire PhD. However, there are quite a few examples of people crowd funding smaller individual research projects. I think there are two main reasons for this cost and accessibility.

Cost

It is really quite expensive to fund an entire PhD. If we look at the costs of a PhD (in the UK) we get.

University fees: ~£4000 per year (~£15000 for non-EU students)
Living expenses/stipend: ~£12000 per year
Conferences/equipment/other stuff: ~£2-3000 per year +
approx £20000 per year for 3-4 years = ~£60000 (>$100,000)

Compare this to the average successful crowdfunding amount of $7000 and you'll see why it'll be hard to raise that sort of money and would require a very strong marketing campaign. Which brings us nicely onto

Accessibility

One of the things a successful crowd funding project needs is a good sales pitch. You need to have a very clear goal that will excite lots of people to fund you. Not many PhD projects I know could possibly fall into this category.

For conventional crowd funding you also need to give something back to supporters to make it worth their while. While I suspect this would be less true for crowd funded research there are many people who might like to support you but cannot/will not without the prospect of some tangible return.

What seems to be more common is to fund smaller individual projects for ~$10-20000. For example http://blog.gogetfunding.com/crowdfunding-statistics-and-trends-infographic/ although there are some bigger and smaller examples in this article http://www.onlinephdprograms.com/dollars-for-doctors-a-guide-to-crowdfunding-academic-research/


I was caught cheating on an exam, how can I minimize the damage? I got caught cheating in a two-hour engineering exam consisting of 100 multiple choice questions which was done online through the moodle e-learning software. I feel like my life is almost over.

Having not studied well and having no time to study, I decided to cheat. I know there are no excuses for cheating. Before the exam I dug up research about moodle exams, and it turned out you can take the exam anywhere you want to as long as you have the quiz password. Taking advantage of this, I went up to my engineering library and asked a close friend who was taking the exam to send me the quiz password before he starts.

What I had prepared:

Calculator (was not allowed during the quiz).
Printed material (consisted of more than 200 pages).
Google search engine (on a laptop ready to help).
Whatsapp (to ask questions for a friend who took the quiz last year).

As I sat down, I did the first 50 questions, suddenly the quiz froze and moodle told me:

  you are not allowed to take the exam from this location.

While I was leaving, one instructor responsible for the course (there are 5) came and found me. She accused me of cheating, took my mobile and made come with her to a huge office where two instructors searched all my mobile (took the name of my friend who gave me the password), and started talking to me, asking for all details of this crime. They took and confiscated my phone and looked at everything: Whatsapp conversations, all my emails, and images. The instructor took the mobile from my hand without asking me and kept it with her. It seems that the instructors are going to report me as well as my friend who sent me the password for the exam.

The university's Student Code Conduct said that cheating will result in one of the following: a Dean's Warning, Suspension, or Expulsion. If any of that happens, my future is over. A dean's warning will cancel my financial aid. A suspension would be for at least two years, and coming back would require a lot of work. An expulsion will be definite.

I've learned the lesson about cheating, now how can I fix this? How can I prevent the five instructors from reporting me? It's obvious that I should speak to them, but what should I say? What can I do? My future is almost over, but many of you are teachers and instructors here, what can I do to fix this?

EDIT: Wow, it has been almost 3 years. I would like to update on how I dealt with the situation.

Lesson: It was obvious to never ever cheat under any circumstances, and it was not whether you'd get caught or not.

Consequences: I received a Dean's warning but the financial aid wasn't revoked. However, I couldn't stay in the department as engineering was not for me and I was even ashamed to stay in the university.

What happened next: I transferred to an ABET-accredited Computer Science institution and I graduated with distinction in 2.5 years. It was extremely stressful as I had taken 6 major courses (18 credits) in one semester, but I had to do it.

Future plans: I'm going for an MSc in Computer Science in St Andrews next year.

I've learned the lesson about cheating, now how can fix this? How can
  I prevent the 5 instructors from reporting me. It's obvious that I
  should speak to them, but what should I say? What can I do? My future
  is almost over, but many of you are teachers and instructors here,
  what can I do to fix this?

From the way you wrote this, it seems to me that in your current mindset, you have not yet learned the full lesson. I say this because the second sentence above seems to me still in the same mindset where you are trying to control and engineer a result to essentially beat the system and get something better than your own actions have generated. That is not full understanding of learning that that whole approach is not appropriate. You're treating the system like an adversary, acting in a victim mentality, and trying to manipulate your way out of it. You have some lessons to learn about humility, honesty, surrender, and building integrity from the ground up. I would suggest accepting those.

I would suggest it may help for you to consider you may also be wrong-minded when you think things like:

  If any of those happen, my future is over. A dean's warning will
  cancel my financial aid. A suspension, will be at least for two years
  and coming back requires a lot of work. An expulsion, will be
  definite.

The "my future is over" fear is what led you to cheat in the first place. As your professor kindly observed, you didn't need to cheat in the first place, and it got you into far worse trouble than doing your best would have. Indeed, I think your future looks darker if you don't take full responsibility now. I would be more optimistic about your future if you lose your financial aid and have to leave that university, but actually learn your lesson and continue at some other institution.

Your future will depend on your mindset, your integrity, and how you do your chosen field of work (including how you feel about yourself and how you relate to your work). These things are built upon each other like the bedrock, foundation, and upper levels of a building. If your mindset is full of panic, it will undermine your integrity. If your integrity is unsound, it will undermine your work. Seriously. This is practical and not empty moralizing.

So, realize that if you really want to be an engineer, you can do this, even if you need to go to another university. Even if it takes another 2 or even 4 years. Then, restore your integrity by being completely honest about everything and taking full responsibility for everything you caused and continue to cause. Don't try to cover anything up, make anything sound good, look good, nor avoid looking bad. You will feel a lot better about it all when you let go of resisting and admit everything. Your instructors know all about it, and will notice any attempt to make this better for yourself, so even if you were going to cling to being a desperate manipulative person, it would be best to surrender and fully admit everything, and be as honest as possible in everything you do. If you can really learn these lessons, then it may actually make sense to give you some leniency. If you're still resisting, then it wouldn't be doing anyone any favors in the long run, to do anything less than suspend you.

The good news is, this lesson is FAR more important than the engineering content you were studying.


Write a computer science thesis in native language or English? I'm a computer science student, currently at the Bachelor level. I'm also not a native English speaker. My native language is Dutch. This year, I have to write a thesis.
I've always been told at my university that whilst being a Bachelor-student all courses, assignments, etc should be available to us in Dutch, but we've had lectures in English before after an agreement with the professor.
Personally, I find it easier to write in my mother tongue (naturally), but maybe it's worth to go the extra mile and write my thesis in English. Also, all the research I've done so far, has been in English. So it's not really a problem for me.

Question:
Should a (computer science) thesis be written in English or in the writer's native language? What are possible pros/cons? Can it pay off to go the extra mile?

As was suggested in the comments, if you want to share your thesis with researchers in other countries, it is better to write it in English than in other languages.

However, I will go further than that and say that in the 21st century, English is the lingua franca of communication in most technical fields. If you want to participate in the wider technical community in a meaningful way, developing your ability to express yourself in English, both orally and in written form, is essential. Therefore, you should avail yourself of opportunities to work in English whenever practical.

It is still important to be able to communicate in your local language, but this is becoming less of an issue as time goes on: for many people, they do scientific work in English, even if their everyday workplace conversations are in another language!


How does copyright work on questionnaires with similar items? I have seen in certain types of questionnaires that the content is very similar, and that, possibly by coincidence, certain phrases are the same.

Let me give you an example: the organizational culture measurement questionnaires.

If one compares different questionnaires, you normally will find similarities in certain items and some may be exactly the same. This is not because a copy has been made, but because human resources has a general consensus on what things should be measured. For example, because everyone agrees that the leadership of the bosses should be measured, therefore we commonly find items such as:

My boss is a good leader

or with respect to the company:

I feel happy in this company

My question arises from this: Could an author who created a questionnaire claim copyright infringement by other questionnaires with similar or identical items, even if this happened by pure chance?

Copyright law varies from place to place, so a valid answer might depend on where you are. But in general, it is a good idea to assume that copyright law applies to everything. Basically if you write something (or create in another medium) you own rights to it. Some places you may have to register the copyright as was true in the past in the US. Most places copyright is a matter of civil, not criminal, law. But I think there are exceptions.

There are some caveats, however. Copyright doesn't prevent you from using something, only from copying it or obtaining a copy illicitly. There are a few exceptions to the general prohibition against copying, but they are a bit subtle.

The first is fair use, but that is a subtle thing. While there are fair use exceptions for some uses, including research, they aren't unlimited exceptions and depend on a "proportional" standard that can only be adjudicated by agreement between parties or by a court in a lawsuit. (Note, this is a US view, things vary around the world).

So, since you are doing research, you can depend on fair use up to a point, but that point isn't very clear. A few items out of a hundred is probably not an issue. How few? No-one can say in general. If the copyright holder objects, then you have a problem that will be expensive to solve.

However, another caveat may be more important here. You can't really copyright things for which there is only one basic way to say or write. So lots of things in mathematics can't be copyrighted because the "expression" is more or less immutable. Copyright doesn't "protect" ideas, only the expression of ideas. So, if "The boss is kind and gentle" is the idea, then there are only a few ways that that can be said in a questionnaire, so it is unlikely anyone would have a basis for a copyright complaint.

Unless you copy a lot of those kinds of things from a single source. Then the source is more likely to start to question your intent and might want to raise it in a lawsuit. My guess is that is pretty unlikely, but don't discount it altogether. You can get a bad reputation as a researcher for things that don't break any legal rules.

But you also need to consider the question of plagiarism. If you copy a bit and don't cite the source then you have a different issue, though it, too, may be covered by the "one reasonable form of expression" idea.

A claim of copyright can always be made. Courts, however, won't be supportive of frivolous claims, where only a small part was copied or the reasonable ways to express an idea are very limited. Therefore it is unlikely that a claim is likely to be made if things happen "by chance". A valid claim would need to depend on fairly clear evidence, especially given the research (partial) exception as stated in the law.

See especially the section on the four considerations used to evaluate fair use claims in the link above. I think the third one is what you need to be most concerned with:

  the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;

But, of course, if you need to repeat a questionnaire in its entirety, say for reproducing the research, you can always ask the authors for permission.

Moreover, if you reuse a questionnaire that you find in a copyrighted work that you have valid access to, there should be no issue as long as you don't reproduce that questionnaire in your own work. You just refer to the published questionnaire in your methodology section.


The use of phrase "per se" in academic writing Using expressions from Latin is a common theme in academia. Expressions like in/ex vivo, in vitro or in situ are very common in biomedical articles, since they are very concise way of expressing some concept. There are however other expressions which have pretty much direct translations in English, and in some cases not even much longer in number of words/characters.

I have heard conflicting opinions on the use of the phrase per se and wanted to get more thoughts and ideally a generally applicable guideline for authors?

Edit: just wanted to mention that this is not necessarily for my own writing, the inspiration for the question came from a manuscript written by collaborators.

I guess my advice would be to write in the way that seems most natural to you and gets your ideas across efficiently rather than worrying about the "word police."

If a reviewer objects then you can make a change, or not, as you see fit.

Clearly objectionable terms would be an exception, of course, but reviewers will point those out pretty regularly.

I think it is a fair statement to say that language rules evolved from language usage and not the other way around.


With editor after initial submission My manuscript appears online as " with editor" for 65 days after initial submission in one of the top journals in my field. Could this be because of the Summer vacations? Should I wait till 15 September  or should I send  immediately an email enquiry?

This can be for many reasons, and certainly one of them is that everything is slow because of summer vacations.

Another explanation is that the Editor cannot find qualified reviewers to evaluate your manuscript, or s/he found reviewers but they did not accept the request yet (again, possibly because of summer vacations).

I suggest to send a gentle mail to the editor (preferably using the editorial manager platform) to say that in case the delay is caused because they are unable to find experts, you will be happy to provide a list of those (be sure that you indeed have few in mind). Thank her/him for considering your paper for potential publication and wait. Do not forget to add in the loop your co-authors.

You do not need to wait more, 65 days seems a lot.


If I know how many questions I attempted/got wrong on GRE Math Subject test, can I estimate my score? I gave my Mathematics GRE Subject test yesterday ( 170 minutes). I attempted 42 out of 66 questions and feel I could do more if I had some more time. I lost time solving some questions.

Of the questions I attempted, I took my time and at most only 3-4 might have been attempted wrong.

Do I have chances of receiving a really low score? How can I estimate my score?

The official practice book for the Math Subject Exam describes how to score an exam.

According to this practice book, a typical scaled score in 2008-2009 for someone with a raw score of 41 (42 correct answer, 4 incorrect answers = 41 raw score) might be around 730, or 72nd percentile.

You can calculate the score for other possible scenarios following the procedure described in the practice book.

As for whether this is considered a "really low score," please see What is an acceptable math GRE subject score.


When should a faculty candidate notify schools about a competing offer? If a candidate has been notified that she is going to receive an offer from another school, at what point should she notify other schools at which she has interviewed? In particular, if it's known that the other school is on a much slower trajectory to make a decision—say, six weeks or more—what should a candidate do, either to determine if other offers will be forthcoming, or to expedite the process?

I think it depends on the deadline the offering school gave you. If it's after you expect to hear from the other schools, maybe waiting will be OK. If it's before, then you may have to light a fire under the slower schools. Also, there's a big difference between being "notified that she is going to receive an offer from" the first school and actually receiving it. I wouldn't do anything until you have the first offer in hand (or email).


Not grammatically strong I am an undergraduate student from India. English is my third language and I am not grammatically sound in it. How bad could it be for my career (in academia) and how can I improve on it.

Like anything that you need to learn, the key is practice. Reading alone won't make you a better writer. You need to write. Moreover, you need to get feedback on your writing. Of course, if you submit a paper and it is sound but uses poor English, the reviewers will often try to help, but their patience is limited. So, in some way, poor skills in the language of expression can hold you back until you improve.

I assume that you are also in a place in which it is easy to use your first and second languages, so English may not be in everyday use in your circle. But if you are in India, for example, there are plenty of competent English speakers around you. You can try to associate with them to improve your speaking skills. You can also, perhaps, find or create a small group of people to work together on improving your writing skills, giving feedback to one another. The writing needn't be scientific writing, actually. Anything will do to start. But in such a group you should all force yourselves to use English nearly always. The only exception would be to provide definitions of uncommon terms.

You can probably also find local classes in English as a Second Language (ESL) which offers help both in speaking and writing. The local secondary school might be able to help, for example.

Practice, practice, practice. Get feedback. Practice some more. Getting feedback is probably the harder part of the problem.


My professor is rigging data and plagiarizing. What can I do? My department head is manipulating data in his research papers and skillfully alters plagiarized text to avoid detection. I found this out while working with him on a journal article. I politely confronted him but he did not concede and I backed off from that paper. Later other professors confirmed that most of his papers are bogus and results are fabricated.

He mentioned once that the reason for choosing nanotechnology (which he is not familiar with) is that there is very little literature available and few experts to review the paper. He gets through the review process by using a plethora of statistical analysis results (with fabricated data) to support his claim and gets through (some) editors by using fancy terms like neural network and fuzzy logic. The irony is that he does not even know the underlying theory of whatever analysis he is doing. How do I know this? I uttered a few doubts and the responses were extremely poor. He uses Minitab and Matlab tools to get things done. He once jokingly told me that he gets a paper ready overnight. Maybe it was not a joke after all.

Reporting to the management is useless as they won’t listen to me. I cannot challenge his paper, because I barely know anything in nanotechnology (neither does he). Editors won’t take me seriously since he has considerable reputation due to articles in high impact journals. So what should I do? I could not tolerate his insanity and literature pollution.

[Edit 1] More info: I am about to graduate and leave the department for good. The paper in which I was involved was shelved because sometime later I pointed out to him that the hypothesis is fundamentally wrong. I still have the original manuscript he mailed to me from his unofficial mail id. Institutional routes are closed, I tried complaining about his poor lecture quality once (anonymously) and it backfired for the entire class. He has 15 years of experience, 20+ journal article and numerous conference papers. I don't stand a chance against him.

Update I will try to report this issue to retraction watch or through any other means possible. Still it is not possible to disprove his claims without repeating the experiment. Will update here, if there is any progress on this issue.

Your backing off reaction is the appropriate one: cease any form of association with him right away.

The description of your first-hand witnessing of him fabricating data is more than enough to ascertain his academic dishonesty. You don't need to know about nanotechnology to know that manually modifying data to make it pass a statistical test is idiotic and fraudulent. Also, experts in that field will assume the data are real when conducting peer review, so it's not something they can easily detect without repeating the (alleged) experiments.

His 'results' are unwanted. By publishing bogus science he makes people lose time and money, he's robbing legitimate researchers of their funding, he is adding noise that masks the signal. If you can afford to report his behavior please, do it. Depending on where this story takes place, you might lose a variable number of feathers in his striking back, but at the end of the day he is the one who is wrong.

Taking direct action to publicly expose his fraudulent behavior is risky for you, especially since he is your hierarchical superior. But, when he will get caught (because he will), if it is apparent that you were aware of his wrongdoings and still accepted co-authorship or credit for his publications, his bad reputation is going to stain your career. If you fail to prove your claim, it's your career that will be at risk. So, proceed with caution. Note that it is ethically perfectly fine to report scientific wrongdoings anonymously.

Make sure that all institutional reporting routes are inefficient before bringing the issue to another level. It is not clear in your post if you actually tried or if you just assume 'they won't listen to you'.
Since you provided the content of at least one paper, and know about its fake nature, if he submits the paper despite your protests, notifying the editor is a thing you could do. Editors will take you very seriously in reputable journals.
You can also take part (anonymously if relevant) in a post-publication comment on his papers, on websites like pubpeer.com or retractionwatch.com.


On citing "common knowledge" statements I am an undergraduate student with no experience at all.

If you are writing a research paper, that you are planning to submit for publication, how do you state that a particular statement/fact is commonly known to all and it's dicoverer/inventor is not known, and that there exists no research paper that introduced the concept but there do exist various books/websites that discuss the very concepts and a few derivatives of the concept?

I am not able to cite a particular statement/bunch of statements as I am not able to find any research paper related to that at all.

The particular thing in question is: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/161661/source-of-probably-the-most-simplest-math-trick

What should I do?

If you found a book that discusses the statement, and you really can't track down where it comes from (does the book cite anything?), then citing the book (with chapter/page numbers) is acceptable.


Further improving PhD thesis vs publishing as a post-doc I am a PhD student in mechanical engineering in The Netherlands, with four months left on the 4-year contract, writing my thesis. I have sufficient content to be able to submit the thesis by the end of the contract, as far as my supervisor and I are concerned. It is going to be a collection of papers that are either under review or have been published.

Although it seems the thesis can pass, I am not entirely happy with the whole as a body of work. For various reasons, I have obtained results relatively late in the process. I feel that a proper reflection and utilisation of these results would require 4 - 6 additional months, in order for me to be able to process and write it down.

Though there is funding, my university is generally not willing to extend PhD contracts. It would likely be possible, though, after submitting my thesis, to continue as a post-doc and work on publishing said results.

Up to this point, I have felt inclined to work on delivering a very good thesis, and considered working on it without pay for those additional months. Upon reflection, it seems that this is largely due to my emotional investment in the PhD project.

Is there any reason career-wise (I am still debating an industry or academia career) that it is better to work on my PhD thesis than to take the post-doc position and publish the papers after the thesis?
(Obviously, financially, the post-doc option is highly preferable.)

You can always revise and extend your old work. Make your dissertation work as good as you can in the available time and then move on. If the problems you work on are sufficiently interesting there is always room to continue.

Whether you continue the work with your advisor or not may be a question that depends on the expectations of your field.

Most doctoral students hopefully finish with a notebook full of problems that were interesting but couldn't be completed during the graduate program. The ideas don't die just because you graduate.


Applying to graduate program - propose research project? I am a rising fourth year chemical engineering student applying to graduate programs in statistical mechanics (condensed matter and biological physics) this fall. I have been working on research projects in two different research groups for the past two years, and will be submitting a manuscript (for my biophysics project) in a couple of months.

Some of the programs I will be applying to have advised students to contact the principal investigators whose research interests them before applying, while other programs do not mention anything of the sort.

I am wondering if it is standard practice for prospective students to propose a specific project (aligned with the PI's current research), or if I should simply express my interest in their work and leave it at that. Of course, if it is the former, I expect the PI to modify it as they see fit.

It is not standard in the US, since you are not expected to know enough about the subject to make a good proposal.  But if you can make a good proposal, it is helpful to do so.  Just be clear in your message that you are flexible, because the PI probably already promised a funding agency that they would work on something particular, and you most likely do not know what was promised.


The editor asks me to wait couple of days I have submitted my manuscript to one of the top-tier journal in my field. The reviewers' feedback was positive in the first round of revision; one reviewer favoured the paper and asked for revisions while the second reviewer did not read it because I did not adhere to the target word count of the journal. The editor then asked me to make an R&R. I submitted my revision and 5 days after the resubmission the dashboard was converted into "awaiting EIC decision". The editor discussed the decision with one of his associates and then asked me to wait for a couple of days to render a final decision. He did not tell me that it would be sent out for a third review.

My question is that why the need for days to render a decision after discussing the reviewers' reports with the associate editor?  Can anyone from the journal's editors explain this case?

Edit: The problem is that the status "awaiting for EIC decision" took around 15 days till I received an email from the editor that he was out of the disk and once he received on X day he would render a decision. At that day or the following day, he told me to have patience and waited for couple of days as he was discussing the reviewers' reports with his associate. My question is whether there was disagreement between the reviewers then he may assign another reviewer or what?

In general the editor makes choices as to how to best get a manuscript evaluated. If one reviewer did not return a review, it is only natural to ask for a new reviewer's opinion. The fact that the editor-in-Chief confers with another editor could mean that they confer whether or not the existing single review is sufficient.

As for time, I am not sure why you question a few days for a decision. Most editors do their work outside of normal departmental duties so finding time for discussing a particular manuscript can take some time and surely five days is not anything remarkable?

So from my view point, as Editor-in-Chief (of another journal), you seem to be very impatient and lacking insight in the everyday editorial business of a journal. I do not see anything strange about what has happened and I particularly do not see any reason for the editor to let you in to the internal work of the journal editorship.


Struggling to present results from long papers in short time slots Most of my work thus far comprises two rather long and detailed papers that rely on a common underlying framework. (I know this is not great for a young academic, but it is what it is right now.)  This framework is new and often misunderstood, so I find it is important to devote ample time to explaining it when I present my work.  Unfortunately, with time slots at conferences being rather short (~20 minutes), I often don't have time to present what I think are the really cool results from this framework.  I have been trying out various approaches and formats for presenting this work under time constraints and don't yet feel confident about it.

One thing I haven't tried is the following: glossing over the details of the framework and focusing on the cool results instead.  My concern with this approach is that I may not be taken seriously; there seems to be an unspoken norm in my field that young academics ought to present painful details in order to prove how smart they are.  However, I struggle myself to follow details, and if the main purpose of presenting my work is to entice people to read it on their own time, then I think that highlighting the cool stuff would be more effective in achieving this goal.

My question: is this approach (minimize time for details of framework; maximize time for cool results) worth trying out at my next conference, or would I risk hurting my budding reputation?

P.S. It may be helpful to know that my work, and the framework in particular, has a large mathematical component.

Attempting to fit the material of your paper into a talk is a common mistake: even for shorter papers, there is typically simply too much to include all of the significant details.

Instead, I recommend thinking of your talk as an advertisement for your paper. Your goal is to present enough of the key interesting material to be able to convince somebody that it is worth actually reading your paper.

Once you accept this as your goal, the length of the talk does not actually matter. As an exercise, you might even try making just a single slide for giving a two minute talk (as one might in a "lightning talks" session).

What, then, should you put into whatever time you have available? Think of the story of your work, as opposed to the content.  Your abstract may help you here.  As a starting point, I would suggest this as a general framework suitable for most talks:

Set up the problem, explaining why somebody should care about what you are doing.
Sketch the approach that you are taking, explaining why it is reasonable.
Point out some critical insights that were necessary to make the approach work.
Show your key results and explain why they are significant.
Come all the way back to the set up and explain the progress that has been made on the problem.

Depending on the details of your work, there may be some differences, but this may at least help you get started sketching things out.


What incentives have professors to teach a large class (vs. a small class)? I am wondering about what incentives professors have to teach a large class (vs. a small class). To put it differently, when a professor is assigned to a class, what motivates him/her to attract students to his class? I am looking for external motivations, not personal ones, such as willingness to share the class materials to as many people as possible.

I am mostly interested in the United States, but curious about other academic systems as well (at Mars University there seems to be none).

At my institution in my department, I think there are two major external incentives:

The number of teaching assistants is a function of the number of students in the class. Critically, below some threshold size n, a professor will not receive any teaching assistants.
Offering the class in the future may depend on enrollment in the present.

In some other departments,

Professors who teach classes with more than N students get double credit for that class, so if they typically teach 4 courses a year, they could instead teach 2 small courses and one large course with >N students.


Do PhD admission committees prefer prospective professors over practitioners? I am about to submit my application to a PhD in Statistics and I was wondering whether writing in the SoP about being willing to work in the industry to make a tangible impact would downgrade my application with respect to writing that I would enjoy being a professor in the future.
They already make clear that they prefer recommendations from academics rather than practitioners but I do not know what figures they expect to train (professors vs. practitioners).

Yes (but it's usually an unconscious bias, and not openly stated).
Many academics consider failing to become a professor actual "failure". An academic career is supposed to be a vocation. PhD students are supposed to be passionate about the topic, so much so that they'll want to continue to work on it after graduating. The best graduate students go on to become professors; the not-so-good ones are eliminated and "get a job" (because being an academic isn't actually a job!). The belief is pervasive enough that many academics who quit felt compelled to write blogs about why they're quitting and why they don't consider themselves to have failed.
Viewed this way, a prospective PhD student openly states they want to work in industry is a red flag. They've already ruled themselves out of being the best, they're likely to fail. Admission committees might not think this crassly, but they'll come up with the closely-related reasons "not passionate enough" or "applicant is not motivated by the subject, therefore when things inevitably go badly in the PhD they might drop out", both of which stem from the idea that the only way to be sure the applicant is passionate/motivated enough is for them to want to be a professor.
Granted not all academics think like this, but unless you are certain otherwise (e.g., you are applying to work under Phillip Greenspun, or the program description explicitly says they have an eye on preparing students for industry jobs), I think you should err on the side of caution and say you will consider an academic career even if you are almost certain you will join industry, or at least be non-committal about your future plans.


Is it more respectful to address a professor who is an MD as "Dr." or "Professor" in email? Thus far in my postgraduate academic career I have leaned towards addressing my (US MD) medical school professors who are MDs, MD/PhDs, or PhDs as "Professor", since we are not in a clinical setting. Today two of my classmates addressed one such MD as "Dr." in an email chain following my reply, as if to correct me (though maybe it was out of habit).

Was I less respectful than I could have been by addressing the professor as "Professor"? The latter title seems more prestigious in the context, but maybe I am mistaken.

The answer strongly depends on local culture. For example, for Germany there has been a similar question some time ago (Do german professors like to be called "Herr X"?). To make things worse, the culture might vary even between institutions.

I learned that in Mexico the "professor" is just the job description, while "Dr." is the valuable academic degree.

In the US, some professors in my field (medical computer science) are very relaxed regarding titles, others are not (but this is an outsiders view).

The easiest way is to ask a professor you can trust in your institution. Most will happily explain the common habbits and I assume you'll her some interesting anecdotes ;-).

In general, the most respectful way to adress a professor is "Prof. Dr. XXX".


how to ask help from an area expert and getting feedback? Actually I am doing my PhD in Computer Science, and it is advancing a little bit slow. I am convinced that I can use a technique to solve a problem in my research, but my supervisor is not very keen with the idea. Searching on an online course I found an expert in the area that uses this technique, and I would like to ask for his opinion and maybe advice.

The questions I have are:

How to write an email to this expert? I mean should it be a formal one asking beforehand if he would have some time to read the doubts I have, or should I just send an email with the question I want to ask directly?
What to do in order to increase the likelihood of receiving a reply from this expert? I know they usually are very busy people and that they receive tons of emails, so what can I do to make the difference so that he will answer it?

Before, I have sent some emails to other experts and I did not get any reply, except for one special case from a renowned expert in the field of Evolutionary Programming that was incredible kind and eager to answer in a very detailed way the questions that I gave to him. Any advice?

Start with a summary. Write a couple of sentences to explain the reason for your email and a rough statement of what it is you'd like help with. If your message is long and takes a while to get to the point then the expert is likely to get bored and lose interest.
Explain how you know of their work, and how it relates to yours. As @user3624251 suggests in their comment, a bit of massaging their ego will not go amiss, as long as it is not excessively fawning.
Be polite, but to the point. If you are too apologetic then you'll just come across as underconfident and unimportant.
State your problem as succinctly as possible. As you would on SE, try to make it as self-contained and well-defined as you can.
If you can't describe the problem in a couple of paragraphs or less, and/or the reply would require more than a few paragraphs, then it might not be well suited to an email enquiry and you might be better off trying to arrange a meeting. You could try finding out if there are any conferences coming up that you could meet up at. Or, if you can sell your problem as being really interesting, maybe the expert would be interested in collaboration.
Accept that, as you have already discovered, you will not have 100% success rate. However well you write the message, you may not even receive a reply, and that is not necessarily a poor reflection on you. But there is very little harm in trying, and some people turn out to be very generous with their time and advice.
Always follow up with an appreciative email if they reply in any way whatsoever!


Do you need to get permission to publish a quote or small excerpt? As an academic, my papers (I assume) have been cited. But only once do I remember a publisher, on behalf of a writer, contacted me to ask if they could reused (or republish) a chart I had created in one of papers - for a textbook. I gave them my permission and that was the end of it.

Now I am about to publish my first (non academic) book. I still have footnotes with citations, maybe 5-10 per chapter, but it never occurred to me to ask permission, as long as the citation was proper. The only time I asked for permission was when I printed a comic strip by a popular author.

So - for the other citations - do I need to get permission to publish a quote, or a small excerpt?  (for instance if a sentence with an industry fact or statistic).

Clarification:
I am asking about both citations (paraphrased in my own words) ... but especially quoted material.

Three examples:let's say an author wrote a book about blogging.

In the first case his book is organized into 10 chapters, each with a title that colorfully describes his tenets of blogging.  In my book, write:
Famous blogger Joe Smith, in his book "Blogging for Fame and Fortune" writes the 10 tenets of blogging:  (list follows)

Same example, except that, instead of chapter titles, inside the book, the author has the tenets listed explicitly.  In my book. I write something similar, quoting the list.
Same example - except in my book, I only quote or cite 3-4 elements of the list.

Which, of any of those do I need to get the other writer's permission (or his publisher's permission)?  Or is justy proper attribution OK?

Citations are how the academic world works. Any copyright law that I know of respects this system, and covers quotations under "fair use". Also, academics love to get cited - in the proper way. Presumably, they wrote the original source with the hope that they will get cited. Asking if they agree their text to be cited is as counterproductive as asking a supermarket employee if the peaches in the produce section, with the price tag on them, are meant for sale.

You still have to make sure that it is what academics understand as a "citation". That is, if you make a claim in your own words, you still mark it with a reference. If you reuse a snippet, you put it in quotation marks and mark with a reference. The boundaries between "a phrase" (you don't have to attribute it, because it's too short), "a snippet" (it is a quotation, you may use it as long as you attribute it) and "too long" (you reused too much to count as a quotation) are fluid. They depend on the actual length of the text copied, on the length of your text, and on the function of the text in both the original work and yours. Still, with something like 1-3 sentences (attributed!) you are typically on the safe side.

Images are a different beast. They don't "work" like quotations. Even if the author is not interested in pursuing copyright for them, their publisher may well do it. I don't know why this is the case, it may be because images are more salient than sentences, because they frequently contain too much information (often representing the core of somebody's theory), or because it used to be much more work to create an image than to type text. Anyway, the appropriate thing is to always get a permission to reprint images. You can even place a notice in the caption, for example "A concept for creating world piece, from [Smartass2016]. Reprinted with permission".

Bottom line, if you quote a sentence or two, that's OK, just add a reference and it is a proper citation. If it is an image, ask for permission. If it is something else, best to contact your publisher and ask for advice.


Are theses done in industry (French CIFRE) a disadvantage in academia? France has a mechanism, named CIFRE, by which a PhD student can be employed by a private company while working on their thesis. This is done in relation with a university or institute, which awards the degree. This is interesting for the student, as they are paid as a junior engineer and have an almost guaranteed industry position at the end.

I may have such an opportunity in the next year or two, in the field of machine learning/computer vision. I work well with my potential advisor and current team, and it's even more interesting in my case, as my past grades and school would not look very good on a PhD application.

If I choose to stay in that company at the end, I'm sure there won't be a problem. But I am not sure of what I will want a few years from now. I would like to keep the door to an academic career open, in case the thesis goes well, and I definitely want to keep good career options in the rest of Europe as well.

Problem

I have sometimes read that this kind of theses is only a good option if one wants to get better career prospects in the same company, and that CIFRE PhD students don't publish enough to be competitive in academia. I have also read that this could be compensated later by doing a good post-doc. These are just random opinions from forum posts, so I don't know what to make of them.

Part of the problem is that the company is small (though successful), the R&D team is very small (though they do interesting research), and I don't know if I would spend most of my time at the company or how many opportunities I would have of collaborating with people at the institute (a quite good one in France, known abroad).

Note that I might be able to get good recommendations, both from researchers who advised a small research project of mine, and from another in my current company. My grades also improved quite a lot near in my last semester, and I have a good justifications for the older ones. I could thus try to apply to "regular" PhD programs abroad, though I'm not sure how much these recommendations can compensate for old bad results.

Question

How should I decide if an industry thesis is the right fit for me? If someone knows about this specific kind of industry theses and their career prospects, I would like to hear about it too.

From personal experience, and from an academic perspective, CIFRE theses are a mixed bag. In some cases the company is essentially not involved at all in the thesis (e.g., they have no clue how to get involved, and are just doing it for tax optimization purposes, to keep a link with the university/school, or even out of courtesy to them or in exchange for other favors) and then the CIFRE thesis is basically funding for a normal PhD thesis with a company involved on paper (and then you'd better have good supervision on the academic side, like for a normal thesis). In other cases, the company sees the CIFRE mechanism as a way to get access to cheap qualified labor, and overload the student with work which is not always in their best interest (e.g., not publishable), at the expense of their doctoral work.

The expectations around the mechanism are also very different from student to student. Sometimes the student really wants to work at a company, and just wants a PhD to improve their career prospects. Sometimes the student really wants to do academic research, and this is mostly a way to secure funding (which might even be proposed by the academic advisor in they are collaborating already with the company). Sometimes there's real scientific value in a mixed project involving both academia and a company: that's the ideal case, but pretty rare. Sometimes the student is someone from industry which is already used to a high (aka, non-academic) salary and a corresponding cost of living, and the CIFRE mechanism is one way for them to do a PhD without giving up on their current salary. And of course sometimes the reason is that the student is not ready to choose between an academic or industrial career and wants to do something "in the middle" to keep as many options open as possible.

I don't know so much about this mechanism but from what I've heard, I would recommend:

Discussing with the academic advisor and company advisor to clarify expectations: are they thinking that they would work together with you, or that you would spend your time between them, which kind of ratio, does the company have precise tasks for you that would be useful to them, which role would they take, etc.?
Being wary about PhD topics that crucially require input from the company (e.g., if your PhD is about analyzing company data, but the company isn't really committed to working with you on this, you could be stuck)
Probably making sure that you like what the company is doing and would like working with them, even for non-research stuff; or at least clarifying that you won't have to spend too much time on this if you don't want to.
Choosing your academic advisor and topic carefully, unless you really plan to do most of your work at the company and don't intend to continue in academia afterwards.

Good luck!


Should I resend the emails if professor do not reply to my email? So I'm sending emails to professors right now (during summer break) to get letters. However, some just didn't reply at all, some replied to my previous saying "I don't know if my major is related to your field but you are welcome to ask me other questions" (Is this a no?)

So, what should I do next? Should I wait for them to reply to me? Should I resend? Should I draft another email?

Do not send too many emails-- this will undoubtedly annoy a professor who is possibly on vacation somewhere when they return to see 10+ emails from the same undergraduate(?).

As to your second point, that is absolutely a no. Why are you even asking professors with whom you are not close enough that they do not even think that your major is related?

I feel like you may have more major problems, but I would not send more than a couple of emails at this time. If anything, the fall semester will begin soon and you can approach any professors in person to ask for a letter.


Double publication & parallel submitting a same study as a Paper and Patent I have seen some discussions in this community about Academia vs. Market world. However, they couldn't satisfy my this question:

Assuming what is written in answer of Why is Paper Publishing and getting a patent completely unrelated? by @Anonymous_Mathematicia, I can submit my paper and file the same idea as a patent, in parallel. However, it seems that it will cause a problem: Journals normally ask authors to submit only the "non submitted to others" studies and ask them "not to submit it anywhere else before rejection/withdrawal". Now, there are two plans (only the second one seems reasonable but I mention both for covering the possible cases) (a) if I am submitting the journal paper before filing the patent (that seems dangerous), then will I have the right of filing it for a patent? However, for plan 'a', even if for journal it is okay, for patent policy it may be considered as revealing the idea and burning the opportunity! (b) If I have filed (or published) the patent before submitting the journal paper, will I have the right of such submission?

In other words, is a published patent besides its copy as journal paper considered as double publication?

In other words, is a published patent besides its copy as journal paper considered as double publication?

Typically there is no copyright problem, because there is no overlap in the text.  A patent consists of formal legal writing, and it generally does not use any of the text of the academic paper.  If you wanted to use some of the same text, then you would need to make sure the publisher of the paper did not object.  However, this is uncommon: academic and legal writing styles differ substantially, and they are aiming at very different purposes, so any substantial overlap would indicate that you are doing a poor job of at least one of the two (and you might as well avoid minor overlap so that you don't have to address the copyright issue).

Even aside from copyright, there is still the question of whether this is considered a form of double publication or simultaneous submission.  I believe the answer is almost always no: patents don't count as academic publications and publishers will not care or object.  However, it can't hurt to ask before submitting, just to make sure this is how it works in your field and for this particular journal.  It's also a good idea to mention the patent submission in your cover letter when submitting the paper, so that nobody could accuse you of concealing this information.  (I'd be shocked if it were a problem, but better safe than sorry.)

Keep in mind that very little of the academic content will actually appear in the patent application.  Academic papers are typically focused on experiments, data analysis, or theory, but these would not be included in the patent application itself.  Instead, it is a description of an invention and how it is used in practice, together with a long list of legal claims laying out which aspects of the invention are worthy of legal protection.  Academics could learn something from the description of the invention, but it in no way substitutes for the academic paper.


What happens if a conference doesn't get enough submissions? A fairly well known yearly conference is being hosted in a location this year. It turns out this location probably isn't the best and is impacting submissions.

Proceedings are being published in a IEEE/ACM/Springer book.

I thought to myself: What happens when a conference of this calibre does not get enough submissions? (after extending, and extending the deadlines)

Do they just stop the entire event? Or do they suffice with a crappy proceedings?

For a conference without integrity, it can of course simply accept whatever washes up on the shore.

For a conference with integrity, however, there is generally a good deal of flexibility in the structure of a conference program.  Putting together a program is always a delicate balance of talk length vs. number of tracks vs. plenary events like keynotes and panels vs. breaks, lunches, etc.  Thus, if the number of submissions is low, but still enough for a viable meeting, the organizers will simply end up with less papers and a more relaxed meeting pace.  You can easily flex the number of talks up or down by 50% in even a single track conference by playing with the schedule structure.  For a multi-track conference, it's even easier to scale the number of tracks.

If the submissions are very low, to the point where it is impossible to fill even a very relaxed schedule with reasonable talks, that's a different story. It's unlikely to happen all at once, because it would take a remarkable collapse to be down by 50% in a single year. In any case, societies like IEEE or ACM provide a conference with financial insurance, so that it will not be a complete disaster on a fiscal level, at least.  The next year, however, the society may no longer be willing to sponsor the conference...


Is there a lack of oversight of how professors interact with students? Why does there seem to be a lack of oversight when it comes to how professors interact with students?

For example, consider the following questions:

How to deal with an advisor who wants a "friendlier" relationship with me than I do?
My professor is rigging data and plagiarizing. What can I do?
My first authorship is being turned into co-first authorship, what can I do?

I understand that these situations are not typical, but why is this able to exist at all in the academic world? In all three of these situations it seems that there is a complete lack of oversight of professors went it comes to their interactions with student and it seems their students can do very little if they are being treated unfairly.

I ask this because in many ways, it seems that academia is much more objective and fair than the corporate world. For example, one cannot get a faculty position at a top school by interviewing well or because their friend heads the department. College admissions tend to very (perhaps, even brutally) objective.  Lastly, outright fraud and theft of one's work tends to be low compared to outside academia. I suppose my point of confusion is why does academia fail to be as strict and fair at the professor/student level.

To give some context to my question, I work in the software industry and I am approaching this question as a total outsider.  It seems like the academic world tries to do everything it can to be fair, but I don't (as an outsider) see this with the professor/student dynamic.

Much abuse in the academic world is directed against students. They are in an ambiguous position. They are often not considered working professionals, though in practice they are. I.e. they often teach and/or conduct research. They are usually not rewarded financially in line with their training and skills. They cannot easily move to another place till they have completed their degree. Also, they are more dependent on their mentor/supervisor than a working professional would typically be. And they are not accorded the rights that working persons normally are. Students are also less likely to complain because they need to have good relations with the faculty for their future careers. Often they are working with faculty members on projects. While similar situations/circumstances can arise outside academia, this combination is relatively unusual. The closest analogy I can think of is the institution of interns, who probably also endure abuse, though their stays are usually much shorter.
Anyway, this is fertile ground for abuse.

While this is not directly relevant, it's symptomatic that there is often much controversy/difficulty when students try to start Unions to protect their rights. This has been an issue for a good many years, at least in the United States. There was a famous case at Yale some years ago, for example.

Additionally, the institution of tenure is quite rare outside academia, though it exists. For example, judges have tenure. Tenured professors are hard to fire, and therefore are more likely to get away with abuse without consequences.

There is another issue, which is more speculative. But I'll mention it, anyway. This may also be country dependent. Foreigners entering Western countries, at least, are subject to employment restrictions. There is one notable exception to this restriction - namely educational institutions, which means universities in practice. This may not be universally true, but for example in the US, being a student is probably the easiest way to enter the country, and the main exception to the H1B work visa cap, the last I heard, were educational and non-profit institutions.

Anyway, in practice this means there are many foreigners in Western universities, both at a student and post-doc level, and of course at faculty level. Here I am only concerned about junior temporary employees like students and post-docs. In the US, at least, there is much institutional discrimination against such persons. They can't easily move to another job or university because of employment restrictions. Getting a non-university job is often very difficult. Getting employed involves an additional burden of paperwork. So, such people are, again, targets for abuse. This is not theoretical - I've seen and heard much to support this. Of course, foreigners get employment outside academia too, but for the reasons I have discussed, I believe the density of foreigners employed is particularly high in Western universities.


Why is it bad to judge a paper by citation count? I hear a lot from the experts that citation count is a bad idea as a measure of judging a paper. This seems simply counter-intuitive to me. I would like to know if any study has been done in this direction?

I do not know of any study in this field, but I have a hunch that the following points apply (without any particular order, just numbered for convenience in the case of comments/replies):

Opportunity for citation: A paper that presents the ultimate answer to a problem is probably more valuable than a paper that presents just an unfinished attempt at solving the same problem. Yet, the latter is much easier to build upon (because it still leaves obvious extension points) and thus might be cited much more frequently.
Meaning of citations: There is no rule that a paper needs to be cited positively. If a paper has an obvious flaw, this may give rise to a number of other papers that just cite the flawed paper to point out what they are about to prove wrong or do better.
Citation scope: Referencing a paper does not mean referencing the whole paper, or its core finding. A reference to a paper might mean that the whole paper is pointed out as related work, or it could just mean that the second half of a particular statement in the introduction section is pointed out as related. A citation can well point out a remark that is completely marginal to the referenced paper, but that the citing author deemed to explain the fact in question particularly well, or that made a particularly recent mention of an old topic (to show the topic is still of interest).
Not all citations are equal: The question whether something is or is not cited hinges on its relative relevance compared to other citations, based on the available space left in the current paper format, not on the global importance of the work.
Citation habits differ: Even within one (sub-)field, citation habits differ wildly between conferences and authors. This is in part due to different paper formats and length restrictions (see previous point), but also simply because some authors are much more willing to throw in citations every now and then than others. Such habits can even vary for a single author, based on "strategic" considerations for the intended final target audience of the paper.
Citations can be transitive: Authors occasionally face situations where they can either list several examples of related work, or cite a single overview paper (e.g. a state of the art report), to give an overview over some basics or otherwise related topic. The latter case is clearly more space-efficient and possibly more helpful (as the overview paper is designed to give an overview while at the same time conveying the information somewhat in-depth, which often cannot be done in a single sentence of a related work section), but does not increase the citation count of the works referenced in the overview paper.
Papers are not atomic: There is no "natural" clustering of research questions, solutions, works and experiments. How many or how few findings go into/are allowed in a single published work is mostly a matter of style and personal preference of authors and program chairs. With that in mind, any particular finding may be presented in a single paper (which gets N citations), or split up into N papers (each of which may get only one citation). Thus, while the number of citations in this example may give a hint about the importance of each of the single written documents, it does not say much about the importance of the actual set of research questions.
Citation count is not normalized by field/community: As correctly pointed out by Cephalopod, '"What constitutes many depends on the field". Groundbreaking work in a narrow field might never get many citations.' Likewise, fields where publishing small bite-sized papers at a high frequency is common naturally amass a much larger total amount of citations than fields where publications are very seldom and, when they occur, cover a large amount of progress, discussion and findings.
Citation tweaking: As any metric, defining such a single factor for measuring performance, citation count is prone to abuse. If an author suspects citation count to be beneficial, there is an incentive to self-cite (or cyclically cite each other within an institute), and possibly even break up publications into smaller parts (related to the practice of salami slicing) to have more opportunities for those extra citations. As it can be assumed that some authors are already doing that, this renders citation count even less reliable as a quality indicator, as the "training data set" that would be used for comparison is already skewed.
Citation count ≠ citation count: The citation count itself is not a reliable measure to start with, as different sources will provide different citation counts, depending on what citations (and what kinds of documents that contain citations) are counted:

Citations in a book can be counted by chapter (point in favour of this: If each chapter is written by a different (group of) author(s), every chapter has its individual list of citations), or for the whole book (point in favour of this: A book tends to have a certain focused topic, and - more so than e.g. conference proceedings - all chapters tend to follow a common "narrative", so some central works are likely to be referenced in various chapters).
If possibly predatory journals are included, a variant of item 9 can ensue in which citations in less reputable sources (that are counted nonetheless) are bought, as pointed out by ff524.
Citation counts can include citations from totally legitimate works, which are nonetheless of a vastly different status compared to peer-reviewed publications. For example, Google Scholar sometimes seems to count student Bachelor and Master theses and other documents created while studying if the university's digital library that provides a copy of every such submitted document happens to be crawled by Google.

External factors influence selection of cited works: If there is one particular finding in one particular work that is appropriate to cite, there is no question that that particular paper will be cited. However, often enough, things are much more vague - there are various eligible papers that allude to the same statement in different ways, and it is not at all clear which one is preferrable to cite. At this point, external factors that are rather arbitrary can directly influence whether or not a work is cited. For instance, the older paper might be cited to show the original finding ... but the more recent paper might also be cited instead to show that the topic in question is still of interest in recent works. The older paper might be chosen because it is the original reference, or the more recent paper at the more highly-valued venue might be chosen to make the reference stronger, or yet another paper might be chosen because it contains the more comprehensible explanation. Lastly, depending on the citation style, even space may be an issue - if an author is fighting for the last few lines to stay within the allowable page limit, at least in APA style, a paper by Li et al. has an inherent advantage over one by Miller and Bowman, one by Miller and Bowman has an advantage over one by Erdenebileg and Papadopoulos, and one by Erdenebileg and Papadopoulos has an inherent advantage over a paper by Russell-Rodriguez and Pennington-Kiesewetter.


Is it unethical to accidentally benefit from online material in a take-home exam? Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I was taking a physics class which had a peculiar exam arrangement: on Tuesday, the professor gave us a take-home portion of the exam which would be submitted on Thursday, but on Thursday, there would also be an in-class portion of the exam with a different set of problems.
In my case, I remember working out the solution to a difficult problem on the take-home exam throughout Tuesday and Wednesday. I had a solution, but I was unsure whether it was correct. Some equations didn't seem to make sense. At the same time, I was also preparing myself for the exam on Thursday. As usual, I read the textbook, but I also was in the habit of consulting other websites to help me whenever the textbook wasn't enough.
While doing this, I accidentally stumbled upon a Wikipedia article which explained the solution of a similar problem to the one I was working on in the take-home exam. It was not the same problem, but the general method used was sufficiently similar so that I immediately realized that my approach to the problem on the take-home exam was probably correct.
Perhaps the most ethical thing to do at the time was to stop consulting the Wikipedia article immediately. I have to confess that I didn't do this exactly: I couldn't help but glance at it a few more times. Coming across that article made me confident in my approach to the take-home problem, and it drove me to scrutinize my previously written solution more deeply. This led me to discover a simple algebraic mistake which I had made in my own solution, after which my solution made sense and was surely correct. In the end, I never copied anything directly from the Wikipedia article, but I cannot deny that reading it helped me realize my own mistakes.
On Thursday I handed in my work on the take-home portion, and did well in the in-class portion as well. I never told the professor about the incident. Internally, I reasoned to myself that when I came across the Wikipedia article I was not trying to cheat on the take-home, but simply preparing for the in-class exam.
Years afterwards, however, I started to have doubts over what I did was completely ethical. I did not exactly cheat - in the sense of copying solutions from the Internet - but I was indeed "inspired" to become confident in my existing solution because of something I found on the Internet.
Was what I did dishonest? Unethical? Did it rise to the level of cheating that should have been disclosed to the professor? Or was it just a fortunate accident, the product of an odd exam arrangement?
(Note that the professor did not have a clear policy on consulting materials other than the official textbook from Tuesday-Thursday during the take home portion of the exam. While it was generally considered cheating to search out solutions on the Internet for specific problems on a take-home exam, I did not consider it unethical to look up online resources when studying a course and preparing for an in-class exam. In this case, I was doing the latter and accidentally stumbled upon material which was more similar to the former. The fact that there was a take home exam occuring right before an in-class exam resulted in a gray area.)

I suggest that you don't lose a lot of sleep over something that happened several years ago. While you may have crossed a line, your description suggests it wasn't a bright line. Assuming your description is honest, you started out (probably) appropriately looking for alternate explanations of the material, not solutions to the problem at hand. But, rather than the internet it might just as well have been a different textbook.
But if it bothers you, then, assuming you are an academic, make sure that your own students get more explicit advice about what is and is not permitted.
It would have been better, of course, if you had pointed out the situation to the professor. But let the past be the past. Make the future better than the past if you are able.