Reviewer comments are in complete contrast about research article Recently my research article has been reviewed after first round of revision and has been sent back to me by editor. In addition, editor has written in a very clear manner that a thorough response and revision will make my paper eligible for second round of revision otherwise it would be a waste of time.
In the light of reviewer's comments, one reviewer has completely recommended the paper and didn't ask for any change but what surprised me the most was other reviewer comments as he hasn't recommended my article for publication. both reviewer comments are complete in contrast with each other.  for example, if first reviewer is telling that research article has explicitly stated its significance the other reviewer has stated that it is missing significance.

my question is, can i email editor to change this reviewer and request him to look for other reviewer although editor had told me before the reviewer in my field are not much in number. or just simply withdraw my paper from this journal?

Since it was the editor that said you need a thorough "response", I think you need to revise. It sounds like s/he is trusting the second reviewer. Think especially about the significance. It may be that it is there, but you didn't state it clearly enough.

I doubt that the editor will respond favorably to such an email. Just re-think your  paper and do a revision. You don't need to explicitly change it for any particular reviewer comment, but you need to consider what the reviewer has said and how you can improve it if possible.

It may just be that one of the reviewer (either one) has missed something, but you don't really know which.


Rebuttal limited to one page I recently submitted to a machine learning conference, and got 3 weak accepts. One concern was, that the work may be of limited interest. Therefore I went ahead and collected more example in the literature that were related, and found a bunch of them (most very recently, so I couldnt have included them in the original submission). However, if I want to include all of them, it takes more than half of my one page limit, and I don't have enough space left to address the rest.
How strict are these limits if it is only references that are over the one page limit?

Alternatively some of the other criticism is just typos. I could try to address them by just generally saying something like: 'Thank you for pointing out the typos, we have fixed all of them', without naming them separately. Would you recommend that, or could that be too brief for a reviewer (not acknowledging his work enough?)

You don't need to say much about simple things like typos. As for the other, if you go over the one page limit make sure than everything essential is on the first page. Even that is a bit risky if someone is a page limit fanatic. The best route is to say what you can in one page, mentioning only important things.

But if you think of it as a "response" rather than a "rebuttal" you won't get into an argumentative mode which won't serve you well.


Dataset of commercial binaries: release possible? For my final thesis in university, I have created a dataset of third-party applications for macOS. For each version of each app, the dataset contains the original executable, the original Info.plist file containing app-specific metadata and a couple of other files summarising the app's contents (file sizes, file names, ...). Almost all apps are commercial software.

I am looking for ways to release or make available (parts) of this dataset to the public. Due to copyright law, I probably cannot just release all data. What are my options?

Here is what I've been thinking:

I suspect I could release the dataset after all binaries have been removed. However, this reduces the usefulness of the data drastically. Would I also have to strip the Info.plist files as they are copied verbatim from the application bundle? Would I be allowed to include limited parts / metadata of binaries such as linked libraries, imported symbols, functions names, strings and the like?

Another option would be to invite researchers to contact me to get access to the full dataset. Would that be appropriate?

Am I allowed to create a service à la shodan.io, that offers an API for others to work with the dataset, without providing direct access to the binaries?

(We're not lawyers here, and this may be off-topic, but I've had similar situations and will hazard a response).

This all comes down to the license agreement of the software you are using. The license will specify:

whether you can distribute it
whether your code is considered "derivative" (or allowed at all)
whether you can make the software available as a service through an API.

It sounds like you are using commercial software, so the answers to the above are likely to be in the negative. If the license agreement does not prohibit doing what you're doing, it is likely OK to publish your code and give instructions for how to acquire the proprietary software and what to do with it after it's acquired; however, it sounds like in your case, there may not be a lot left after you remove the proprietary stuff.


How to maximize performance in social science PhD program? I am currently enrolled in a social science (management/information systems) PhD program, and I have spent a lot of time thinking/experimenting with how to maximize my performance. First I tried working 80 hours a week - this led to a hard time focusing, more time spent doing support activities (e.g. reading) rather than core activities (e.g. writing, coding etc.). Now I'm starting to settle more towards a 40-50 hour week that keeps me more energized the hours that I actually work.

I'm wondering, in your experience, what is the optimal balance of work/rest for graduate academic performance in the social sciences? Other factors that stimulate your academic performance?

I too have struggled at times to find this balance.  I'm coming from math and computer science (rather than social science), but I think the field matters less than the type of work.  If what you're trying to do is cognitively intense, then it's really important to be well-rested and to maintain focus.  In grad school, I often would bang my head for hours on problems without much progress.  Now if I work for 45 minutes or an hour with little progress, I'll go for a short walk, get a light snack, do jumping jacks, or play a quick web game; all of these are ways to reset my focus and attention.

Probably the single most useful skill I've learned is to be more aware of my current state (energy level, focus, sleepiness, hunger, emotional state) and try to choose work appropriate for (doable in) that state.  For more thoughts on this idea, I recommend the advice given by Terry Tao here: http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/on-time-management/


Appropriate attire for a graduate school interview in the US I was invited to interview at several graduate schools this upcoming February. All of the programs are in the fields of biochemistry and biophysics. What is appropriate attire for graduate school interviews? One of the schools mentioned business casual. Does anyone have any good suggestions? I thought about wearing a sweater with an oxford underneath. However, I will also bring a sport coat just in case.

In general, you want to look neat enough to make it clear that you are taking things seriously, but not so formal that you give the impression that you are overly formal or don't understand the norms.  Typically slightly overdressed is better than slightly underdressed.  Your goal is to have people not particularly notice what you are wearing, and instead listen to what's coming out of your mouth.

Standards vary slightly from field to field: in my experience, mathematicians tend to be the most informal and chemists the most formal of the STEM world (business students and liberal arts exist in their own separate universes, which I am less familiar with).

In general, however, I would suggest that men wear a sharp-looking long-sleeved button-down shirt, long pants, no jacket or tie.  For women, the rules are more complex (and I am less familiar, but am incorporating advice shared from experiences of female scientists who I know), but something at that same level of "business casual" is probably good; long-sleeve button down, or a sweater; avoid cleavage or anything that can be taken as sexy.  Unfair though it may be, pants are probably better than even a long skirt or dress for that reason.  Heels can help for height, but don't wear sharp heels or heels that make noise. Low to no makeup, as there is often prejudice against that (again, not claiming any of this is fair).
Make sure your hair is clean and presentable too; if you have long hair, you will probably want to tie it back (men and women both).

Contrary to all this: if you have a strong sense of style and good personal visual taste, you can probably make all manner of things work.  But make sure you're confident you can pull it off---if you can, you probably already know it.  For the rest of us, I just recommend making the clothing unmemorable.


Who is supposed to repeat experiments? A follow up to this question.

There is an issue in science with experiments not being repeated. I asked if PhDs can be done on repeating experiments and the answer is kind of mixed. Most PhDs aren't that. I don't suspect that professors repeat experiments often.

So, who is supposed to repeat experiments in academia?

The gold standard is blind, independent replication. However, this almost never happens because it costs a similar amount (of materials and time) and there is less benefit to the researcher who repeats the experiments, so there is little incentive. Next down would be independent replication by another group, then replication within the same group. The bare minimum is that the experiment be described in sufficient detail to be reproduced. For example, the 'Instructions to Authors' in the Journal of Infection and Immunity (which is fairly typical) states:

  the Materials and Methods section should include sufficient technical
  information to allow the experiments to be repeated.

Reproducibility is one of the most important issues when describing or reviewing a scientific paper (ref). Knowing that a result is less likely to be attributable to a chance combination of uncontrolled parameters, or a mistake on behalf of the scientist conducting the experiment or recording the experimental conditions, increases confidence that the result seen is a 'genuine' phenomenon. As Karl Popper, the founder of the scientific method, put it:

  Non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science.

(Popper 1959, The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson, London, United Kingdom.)

Unfortunately, most journals place a high premium on novelty and therefore it is more difficult to publish reproductions of previous studies, and when these are published they are often in less important journals. Funders, similarly, direct reviewers to score grant applications based, amongst other things, on novelty. This greatly reduces the incentive to replicate published studies - if you can't get funding to do something and you wouldn't be able to publish it anyway, it won't get done. Two other major and common obstacles to independent validation are:

that it requires the involvement of another lab with the same resources and skills, which might be very rare;
For experiments involving animals specifically, there is an ethical requirement to minimise the use of experimental animals.

The lack of reproducibility of experiments is a problem in most areas of science and awareness of this is growing. In 2012 this prompted the Reproducibility Initiative, where researchers can pay a fee for blind, independent replication prior to publication.

This sounded like a step in the right direction at the time but as far as I know awareness of the initiative remains fairly low, uptake has not been great and 'proper' reproduction remains very rare indeed.


Can PhD students patent their work I'm not aware of any PhD candidates patenting their novel work/product. Is it not ok to patent something you worked on?

There is no generic rule that PhD students can't patent their work. When they do, usually, the university or research institution has rules about who owns the IP of what's being done in their labs. My alma mater had a 3-thirds rule where the student, the supervisor and the institution all held a third of the IP.

I don't find it particularly surprising that only few students end up patenting their work. Patents are much less useful than good scientific publications when applying for academic positions or grants. It seems normal that the focus is set on the later.

Also relevant: patenting costs money to file and money to maintain. It only makes sense to secure future sales. Students rarely have the funds for this and institutions usually prefer to spend on other things more closely related to their mission. Most of the time the decision not to patent is motivated by the low potential gain vs. costs ratio.

Universities are usually a bit generous in what they accept to file, but then eventually drop the payments later on if it's evident that the work does not bring any profit.


Professor deviating from the syllabus mentioned apriori I am currently taking a graduate course which is a combination of two subjects and we have two faculty teaching it - call them A and B - one for each subject. Before my classes started, we had an orientation and the syllabi of all the classes were shown to us. In this case, Prof A explained to us the syllabus of both the subjects.
But later, when Prof B started teaching, they have deviated a lot from the syllabus. In particular, the topics that were shown to us in the orientation as the syllabus, were pretty much covered in the first couple of lecture and Prof B taught it to us as "background knowledge" (which we thought was going to be the content of the entire course.) Anecdotally, a lot of students are finding the course difficult due to this reason.
Prof B also hasn't provided us with a syllabus of what he is going to teach and we find out the topics on the day of the lecture.
So my question here is: Would it be appropriate to approach Prof B and let them know that this is not what we were expecting from the course? If so, how do I bring it up without coming off as confrontational? Should I instead talk to Prof A and let them know that the syllabus he presented is different from what is being taught?
[Prof B does us ask us during class if we're understanding the topics, but due to the online nature and it being a fairly large class, people haven't really spoken up.]

Yes, you can speak with both of them, but in the spirit of enquiry, not condemnation. There may be good reasons for it and you have a right to know such things. You especially need to know how much the testing/evaluation framework will follow the original syllabus. And a bit more lead time than "the day of the lecture" is useful for the best students who might be inclined to study ahead of lecture.
Some adjustments may be necessary in the course and your enquiry might lead to them, but it might also lead to a deeper understanding on your part of what is more important in this subject.
There might be a lot of reasons for a deviation, including an inexperienced instructor - or a very experienced one.
And you are in a better position to make guesses about personalities and the effect of an enquiry than anyone here. A reasonable person shouldn't take questions about the syllabus and the expected learning as confrontation.
And, of course, there is also the question of how much scaffolding the professors provide for your learning.


Is copying a sentence considered plagiarism? In writing a phd thesis, if a sentence is copied as it is and given proper references, then will it be considered as plagiarism?

Verbatim cited text is preferably put between quotation marks. E.g., Smith et al. (Smith 2008) state: "literally copied text goes here."

If you use quotation marks to indicate the verbatim copied text, it is not considered plagiarism.


Oral Defense for Hearing Impaired Student Does any one have an experience with a hearing impaired student undertaking an oral defense of graduate thesis? I have a colleague in my graduate program who is profoundly impaired in both ears (to the point that hearing aid is absolutely useless). He would be defending his thesis this coming July or August and concerned that he might be failed if he is unable to communicate well with the examining committee. Does any one have any experience and can advice? My colleague neither signs nor understand sign language. The situation happened recently and he is still trying to adjust. But he speaks quite well and normally, and can talk if asked something he hears and comprehends. And if it helps, the university is in Canada, although I can not find any laws, either Canada's or the University's, dealing with this specific issues. If you are aware of any one who had similar challenges and undertook an oral defense, I will appreciate anything you can share on it. Thanks in advance for your kind response

Almost all universities in Canada have a disability support services office.  You should contact them.  They will discuss the situation with the student and the examining committee and recommend a solution - probably something similar to what you have suggested in the comments.


Grant from private company - conflict of interest If a private company provides a grant for some research to be carried out but is hoping for a particular outcome from the research in order to take certain business decisions, should this be described as a conflict of interest?

I don't see this as a conflict of interest, but the issue itself is deserving of careful attention from both a contracts perspective and a scientific perspective. I would advise against any such funding source that puts restrictions on the publication of findings.  In particular, you state that the business is "hoping for a particular outcome."  Are you still allowed to publish results that are contrary to their expectations -- or, does the contract specifically state they have authority over what can and cannot be published. You will want your grants management officers to carefully scrutinize the contract.

Science is really about answering questions through an open, replicable and systematic process.  It is not about providing evidence for an expected outcome.  I think this type of funding will be more problematic than helpful for a scientific career.


Grad student overseeing (undergrad) student: how much to help? This summer I'm lucky to have an undergrad extending some work I did for my thesis.

The stuff I work on requires you to use complicated software, as well as strong familiarity with Linux commands. However, these have nothing to do with the work itself; it's just the "scaffolding" needed for us to do our actual research.

Since the start of the summer term, I've been encouraging this student to ask for my help they encounter difficulty with these "unrelated" aspects of the work. However, I'm wondering if this is actually counterproductive?

Here's the theory: though more frustrating for them, would it be better to force the student to "figure it out"? These are useful skills, after all, and maybe this will make their work more productive in the long run?

In other words, I have two opposite choices:

Trying to reduce the student's time spent on fiddling with Linux commands and our development software (at the cost of of my own time)
Forcing the student to become more familiar with these tools (but potentially running out of time)

What is the "accepted wisdom" in this situation?

This is focused on the educator aspect of it.

The goal should be to do as little as possible but help the student from getting stuck. Said another way, when asked for help, first try to figure out the crux of their problem and then give them enough of a hint (but not an answer) so that they can have an a-ha  moment and get some enlightenment. It isn't easy and it takes practice, but that is the goal.

Sometimes you answer a question with another question. Sometimes you "solve" a problem by giving them a simpler problem. Sometimes you just ask them to explain it to you as best they can. Sometimes you point them to a page in a book (or similar). If you give them answers they will start to depend on you rather than on themselves.

Listen, as they ask questions, to see if they have some misconception that underlies the current issue. If you can dispel those, there is a better chance that they can move forward on their own with more confidence.

So, if the student is to learn they need both reinforcement and feedback. Reinforcement implies repetition and should come from them. Feedback comes from you. But the work needs to be theirs. Answers have little learning value.

And yes, it is hard and takes practice.


How to cite Kindle books/ebooks when no fixed page numbers are available? I got the following info from the Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide website in relation to citing Kindle books or ebooks.

  If no fixed page numbers are available, you can include a section title or a chapter or other number.

I am wondering is there a preferred method of citing in this case?

I am history Mlitt student and have only recently started to use a kindle for research purposes. At the moment I use the loc (location) reference that is produced by the kindle in the notes text file you can download from it, that shows all your highlights/bookmarks, but I am confused as to the proper citation method as my supervisor queried if this was the standard way of citing a kindle. I have a copy of my history department style-sheet but it makes no reference to kindle editions.

According to the APA blog, the location number is actually a bad idea because it has limited retrievability. The blog also mentions that since Kindle's third generation, e-books have started to have real page numbers, you may try looking into that.

Another post on apastyle.org suggests that for materials that are not paginated, consider citing chapter number or chapter heading plus paragraph numbers.


Is it discrimination to hold someone from a minority or underprivileged background to the same academic standard as regular students? Suppose a graduate student is found to be noticeably or even significantly behind in overall academic and research competence. For example, they may have significantly weaker language and comprehension skills and technical skills such as using a computer or navigating the web. They may also be lacking other peripheral skills which are often important for graduate students. This may be indirectly related to being from a minority and/or underprivileged background where such exposure and opportunities to learn can be limited.

If he/she are held to the same standards as his/her peers when comparing their relative performance, would this be considered to be discrimination if his/her situation was known? On one hand, same treatment would be fair to his/her peers and avoids human judgement. On the other hand, one could argue that it is unreasonable to expect the same amount of performance when they are missing necessary skills and experience.

There was a comment that 'held to the same standards' was too vague. As a result I want to provide some hypothetical situations in which it is necessary to compare the performance of a student with his/her peers.

Suppose an advisor has limited funding for RA and travel opportunities. They want to provide them to students with the best performance either as a means of rewarding them or to provide a better return on investment. This would mean the graduate student in question would have little chance of obtaining it. Is this discrimination or an unfair bias?

Suppose again the average graduation time for a program is 5 years. However, due to the slow progress of the student (compared to their peers) they may be held for 6 or 7 years before being deemed ready to graduate. Is this a discriminatory practice?

You are asking two separate and completely unrelated questions. The first, which you posed in the title, concerns the meaning of the English word "discrimination". The answer to that question is very simple: no, treating all students according to uniform standards and policies without consideration of their membership in various ethnic or racial groups is not discrimination; rather, it is precisely the absence of discrimination. That says nothing about whether it is a good or a bad (or moral/immoral, ethical/unethical etc) policy, it simply answers the question of whether it fits the meaning of a particular word in the English language.

Your second question was about how graduate students from minority and/or underprivileged backgrounds "should" be treated, which I interpret as asking about whether the policy of applying uniform standards to all students alluded to above is a good or a bad thing to have. This is a special case of a large set of questions associated with the terms affirmative action and reverse discrimination. It is a controversial topic that has been and still remains the subject of a large amount of debate as well as litigation, and if you care to learn more about it, there's a large body of discourse on such questions that you can find referenced in the Wikipedia articles linked above or with a google search. It is a sufficiently complex topic that I feel I can't meaningfully comment on it in a short post, and in any case enough has been said about it by people who have given the subject much more thought than I have to make anything I can think of saying about it laughably simplistic and uninteresting.

To clarify, this answer expresses no opinion about what policies should be in place for treating graduate students from underprivileged backgrounds.


In Australia, possibility of transfer from a fixed-term Lecturer to a continuing appointment Recently I got a position as a 3-year fixed-term lecturer at an Australia university. I wonder if there is any possibility to transfer to permanent position? Or I would have a better chance if I apply to an open continuing position after working there?

Ask your head of school, but probably not.

Usually people switch from fixed-term to continuing within their university by

Attracting a large grant which requires that they be employed by the university.
Applying for an open position at their university.

It is not usually available as part of the promotion process.  I don't know every university in Australia, though.


Abandoning vs. further pursuing a rejected paper? My situation is as follows: I spent my undergraduate time at one university and recently entered grad school at another university (both of them in Germany, my field is theoretical computer science).

For my Bachelor's thesis, I worked (for about two months or so) on a topic that had not been considered at the time.

My former supervisor, although he proposed the topic, is not (at least not for the last 30 years) actively doing research in that specific area, which resulted in me ending up quite on my own. However, I could get some new results. They were, of course, not groundbreaking, but sufficient for the undergraduate level and the amount of time spent working on the thesis.

So we submitted the results to a (medium-to-low-ranked) conference in the subfield.
The reviews were quite mixed. Two were rather superficial: One positively and recommending acceptance, one negatively and recommending rejection (actually, the latter one was quite rude).

The third one, however, although recommending for rejection, was quite encouraging. The reviewer liked the idea of the paper, while the results we obtained did not suffice for publication at conference level but (his words) were rather suited for venues for work in progress, e.g. workshops in the area.

I actually agree with the third reviewer, for it would have been quite a surprise for me if a second-year undergraduate would have been able to produce publishable work on his own just like that, so I am not that disappointed.

My problem is that I do not plan on pursuing that specific subarea of research in the future and neither does my former supervisor. However, given that I ultimately aim for an academic career, I think it might be worth some efforts to get something published. Additionally, at my new university, nobody really cares about the area of the thesis, so chances to get some expert here to work with in order to improve the results are rather bad. This means that if I want something to happen, I would have to invest a vast amount of time and thoughts into a topic I don't want to pursue in the future, instead of entering new areas of research as quickly as possible.

So: Should I improve the results and finally get them published or should I invest the time for acquiring knowledge in a different area (and start publishing later) and abandon the work that has been done (giving away a possible publication) (w.r.t. the impact of the outcome on my academic career)?

However, given that I ultimately aim for an academic career, I think it might be worth some efforts to get something published.

This alone makes me thing that it may be worth the effort - attempting to enter an academic career becomes vastly easier with some publications under your belt. Don't be discouraged by negative reviews - more than one of my papers has gotten reviews back that are essentially "This paper is bad, and the authors should feel bad" that end up seeing publication.

I would continue to pursue your paper for at least another round or two of submissions, but given it's not strictly speaking what you're interested in, if it becomes a burden either in your classwork or in publishing something you are interested in doing (I had a paper become just such a problem) return it to the shelf.


Graduate math student migrating to engineering? I don't know how to start, truly, but lately I've been involved with some projects in pure mathematics and I've grown frustrated and disappointed. I don't think that pure mathematics is so inspiring; my intent is to move on to study some applied math but most teachers in my department aren't that dedicated to it. All I see are theoretical approaches to problems "that applied sciences may be interested some day".

By talking to a colleague of mine who is seriously considering moving on from Math to Physics, he told me of some engineering departments who might accept someone with a master's degree in their Phd programs. There are some areas I like that might have a connection with what is studied in some Engineering Phd programs, like applied ODE and Dynamical systems and I'd love to put some programming on what I do.

But every teacher I talked about this so far tells me to avoid this kind of migration, since it brings a loss of academic focus and it might be hard for me to find a job later as a teacher. There is no strong tradition in Mathematical Engineering as there is in other countries (I know that such courses exists in Italy and some other European contries).

So I'd like to know some thoughts from more seasoned students and researchers out there. Any advice is welcome.

The only problem with switching to a particular field of engineering is that you'll be missing a core set of knowledge particular to that discipline that will hinder your progress for a while.  For instance, you would probably do great in many electrical engineering sub-diciplines, but if you've never taken a circuits or signals course, you're going to be lost for a while before you can learn that material.

If you already have research experience, that will count for a lot, but I would suggest finding an engineering program that would allow you to take a few undergraduate courses during your first year or two in order to get up to speed.  If you find a professor that is looking for a mathematics-savvy graduate student to fill in the gaps in his/her lab, that might be the best way to get your foot in the door.  You've got skills that could be very valuable to the right lab, and if you use those as leverage to join a particular lab/research team, you'll be able to fill in the missing pieces to your new field and move forward with your own degree.


Should I tell a senior collaborator how disappointed I am? I was part of a small group preparing an overview paper for a special issue, and we missed a final deadline.  All except one of us completed our assigned tasks; the last person had not touched her files for months and was frequently unresponsive with no explanation. To complicate matters, she is a senior member of the community; I'm a mere postdoc, and other members are somewhere in between.

I'm confident I did everything I could to see this paper completed on time, as well as the rest of the cooperative group members.  I've mostly accepted the pending consequences with the journal and my reputation.  I'm also determined to not work with this senior member again.  But should I express my disappointment with her directly, or just cut my losses and move on?

From your description ("final deadline") it sounds as though there is no way to fix the situation with the paper. Moreover, you say have decided not to work with this person again (which seems reasonable).

So there is most likely no benefit to be had from expressing your disappointment directly. Frustrating as it may be, cutting your losses and moving on is the better option.


Referee selection : Why would an editor pass up inviting the most suitable referees? This question is related to this one, and is dual to it in some sense.

Assume PIs A and B publish a few key papers in what turns out to be a new mini-area. Their work is well received, and they arrive at similar conclusions using complementary techniques.

Several months later, A notices an in-press paper by C, which claims to significantly improve upon the work of A and B. The paper by C is substandard, however, reflecting an evident lack of understanding.

On alerting B, A discovers that C's paper was not reviewed by either of them.
A and B agree that C's paper makes a strong, unsupported claim, and that they would certainly have flagged it as problematic (as reviewers).

What reasons could a handling editor have for choosing neither A nor B as referees, given the high relevance of their work? Replies from people with editorial experience would be especially helpful.

Many possible reasons, although there is of course no way of finding out which one applied here (if any at all):

Editor E believes that, being big animals in the field, neither A nor B will have time to review.
Variation: E is a junior researcher and doesn't think that he has the stature to ask A or B for a review.
E is not on good terms with A and B.
E believes that A and B have some sort of personal problem with the author and doesn't want to put them into a position of a conflict of interest.
E has recently given both A and B difficult papers to review and doesn't want to overload them.
The author has asked for neither A nor B to be reviewers.
E simply has not paid attention to the previous seminal paper and so asked colleagues he knows are well versed in the general field.
E actually knows the field well herself, and so self-assigned herself the paper, plus a couple of grad students who should learn how to review papers.


Impacts of "professional advisors" for undergraduates In my department (math, US, medium-sized public university), the current practice is that undergraduate students declare a major when they enter, and are assigned a faculty advisor. The advisor is always a full-time faculty member, and will normally continue to advise them until they graduate.  The student meets with their advisor at least once per semester to discuss what courses they should take in the next term; the advisor is also available to help with degree planning, academic difficulties, bureaucratic problems, advice about careers and grad school, etc.

There is a proposal from our administration to change this by hiring a "professional advisor," a staff member whose full-time job would be to fill this role for each student's first 1-2 years.  (After three semester, they would be assigned a faculty advisor as before.)  The hope is that this will somehow help with "student success", i.e. retention and graduation rates, which are lower than we would like.

I am curious about the pros and cons of this approach.  I assume this has been tried at other institutions, and it would be interesting to know what effects were observed (either anecdotally or backed by research).

Possible pros and cons that we have identified:

Pros

Saves faculty time
Students may be too "intimidated" to approach a faculty advisor with their problems.  A professional advisor might be easier for students to work with.
A professional advisor could come in with special training or education on advising students, and common student issues.  Faculty advisors usually just have to pick it up as they go along.

Cons

Students will not work with their faculty advisor for as long (about 2.5 years instead of 4).  This will reduce the strength of their academic relationship.
Math faculty may be better qualified to help address academic difficulties in math classes, which are frequently encountered by first- and second-year students.
The professional advisor would not only advise math students, but also those in other areas of science.  There are concerns that the advisor could unduly influence students to change their majors away from math, which is considered a "difficult" major, if they start to struggle academically.  There are even concerns that implicit bias on the advisor's part could lead them to do this disproportionately on the basis of gender, minority status, etc.
Math faculty are involved in designing the requirements of the math major, and so are best qualified to advise students on how to satisfy those requirements.  Also, since they actually teach math courses, they would be better able to help students decide which courses would best fit their interests.

I wonder how these work out in practice, and if there are other issues we haven't thought of.

I've been to schools with both systems, so I'll give my perspective as a student:

The Third pro you list (a professional advisor being more specialized) is HUGE. Students get very frustrated when their advisor doesn't have the answers that they want, and in my experience, most of the questions that students ask are for administrative stuff, like, "How do I sign up for classes" or "Can I skip this prerequisite?" that a qualified advisor would be able to easily take off of your plate, and would probably be able to handle more quickly, which would improve the student experience.

Addressing the cons: You should not be concerned about an advisor steering students away from your program. That would be horribly unprofessional for them to do, so that would be something I'd wait for it to actually happen before addressing it. As for the fact that they might not be as qualified to deal with certain problems, it would just be a common part of their job to come and find information that they aren't qualified to give. The lack of a long-term faculty relationship is a real concern though.

Additional thoughts:
Providing a single point of contact for students is a very valuable thing indeed. A person whose sole job it is to listen to students and address their problems has always been very helpful for me, because I never felt like I was bothering them when I went to ask them a question, which is how I felt any time I was talking to my normal faculty advisor. It also makes it easy to know who to go to with a question early on. You don't have to remember your specific advisor, you can ask anyone and everyone will know who the advisor is, and be able to point you to them.


changing affiliation part of paper I worked in institute A as a researcher. Then I started my study as Ph.D student at institute B. The work in institute A was not related to my proposal provided for my Ph.D studies. I sent a paper related to my works in institute A and they publish it. In the acknowledgement part I mentioned my gratitude to institute A and also affilitation to Institute A.  I think that I should write my affilitation to institute B? Am I right? If so, is it possible to change my affilitation after publishing?

Your affiliation on the front of the paper should be Institute A where you did the work. However you should also provide a current address for readers who may wish to contact you. So simply add a footnote to the paper (often this can be on the front page) stating that your current address and email is is now at Institute B. Once the paper has been published it cannot be changed.


Master's in computer science vs Master's in information technology I have a BS in computer science and have been working as a developer for the last 6 months after my graduation. I am interested in pursuing a master's degree and I'm not sure which program, computer science or information technology, would open more academic and professional doors.

I will have ~3 years of relevant experience after completing any program and my job will pay for ~80% of my education.

What program have you taken, what doors has it opened? Has it gotten you interviews, or moved you up the ladder faster?

Take a look at the courses in the two programs at your selected institution.  You will likely find that the CS master's is more theoretical and the IT master's is more applied.

Then decide your own path.  Do you want to continue as a developer, do systems integration, or something else.  Map your proposed path to the program.


what are the best websites to do a Literature Review? I have just started my master degree. so literature review is completely new to me. I want to search for papers published in high-rank conferences and journal with high impact number. Apart from Google Scholar what are the other websites?

I should add this to my Question:
Thanks for useful comments. But unfortunately, I don't have access to the library.

I tend to use what I call a bootstrapping method for doing literature reviews. I start with a paper that is relevant to the topic area. I then work backwards and forwards from that paper. I pull all the relevant papers that the paper cites and use a website (doesn't really matter which one) to find all the relevant papers that cite the paper. I then repeat the process for each of those papers. As my literature search is nearing the end, I try and look at the webpages of the key authors in the area to see if they published something obscure.

The reason the website does not really matter is that by going backwards and forwards you are leveraging the literature searches that were done for all the other papers. As you are not searching for key words, but rather by citations, the search engine is not as critical. What matters is if the relevant papers are published in places that the search engine indexes. If something is not indexed in the major academic databases, is not referenced by other authors, and was written by someone peripheral to the field, then, unfortunately, the work will probably get missed.


Reviewer asks to add more references to already many references For a submitted review paper, I got a response from one of the reviewers: "More related references should be added". The thing is, I already have around 70 references, and as the topic is pretty specific, there are not many more references out there. I could probably find a few more after very time consuming search, but IMHO, the number of references is both sufficient and able to convey the point. Also the reviewer left literally only this one sentence on the issue and did not even make clear in which aspect the number of references are lacking.
I am still pretty fresh to the academic publishing world, and I don't really know how to answer this request. Can I simply decline the revision request? (the other two reviers did not critisize the number of references)

You could do the following -

Compare other papers in the journal and see how many references they
have put.
Extend references by multiple references for
one instance. Example: In deep learning there is a technique called
object detection. It has 3 top notch review papers for that field
(which I know of). Instead of citing one, I would cite all three in
this case. You could do the same in your case.
You could do what Prof Santa has mentioned in the comments.
Search for relevant references from your cited papers.
Cite the general stuff. Many a times, techniques used so widely, people don't cite them. You could cite them as well.

I think 70 is actually a lesser number cites for a review paper. They generally span between the range of 150-200 in the field I work in. Though I think it differs in every field.


Why do PIs say no to students working during grad studies? Professors in my department frown upon students working (part-time or full-time) during their MSc or PhD. Even extra TA hours are looked down upon...

The rent on-campus is ~$950/month and we are paid ~$18000/year. So there is enough money BUT the on-campus housing is very limited so students usually have to find off-campus res ... which is ~$150 more per month. Again, while I can make it work w/ $18k, I'd like some extra income to help pay off undergrad loans.

What is the reason behind saying no to students working while doing graduate studies? I'd like to understand the PI's perspective.

Does working while doing graduate studies affect the student's performance negatively?

University: top-20. Area of study: life science, computer science.

(Unrelated question: how many hrs/week should students put into their lab?)

I have the impression that you are pretty aware of the main reason why PIs tend to frown upon outside jobs - they take time and mental energy, and most PIs will expect you to commit as much as you can of both to your grad school project. Hence, working on the side will typically  affect the student's performance negatively.

There is also the added problem that outside jobs often provide unwanted rigid commitments, which tend to interfere with the somewhat unstable nature of grad school workload. It is exceedingly annoying for a PI if a major paper deadline needs to pass, because the student also had important duties at their day job that they could not get away from.


Can I have external people proof-read texts from teammates in a group project? I'm attending a seminar, where we've been tasked to read some papers, extract information for them, and write an essay about our findings. The lecturer has teamed me up with two other students for this assignment.

One of my teammates posted a draft of the introduction section for the essay. Upon reading it, it appeared to me more like a Vice article than a scientific paper, making it look like the student got the lecturer's statement wrong that "you are allowed to express opinions in an essay".

However, the thought occurred to me that my reaction may be caused by the opinion that the text voices. In other words, it may have been that the text appeared biased to me just because its opinion was not mine. I therefore gave the text to two friends of mine, and they arrived at the same conclusion as I did: The text was overly opinionated and did not provide enough proof for its claims.

Upon reporting my critic to my teammates, I have in turn been criticised for giving the text to external people without the knowledge and consent of its author. I do not concur with this statement, since I removed authorship information from the text before giving it to my reviewers, and since my reviewers cannot know who else is attending the seminar, so they will very likely not be able to deduce the identity of the author.

I call upon your moral judgment: Have I acted wrongly?

I assume that your teammate posted the draft to a place where only your team could access it. In that case, yes, you have acted wrongly.

Generally, you'd be expected to keep all research or project results from others at the level of confidentiality at which you obtained them. That means you have to get consent from the authors before sharing with anybody who didn't have access to this content before. That applies to project reports as well as later in your career to preliminary research results, manuscript drafts, or funding proposals.


What day rate should I set for consulting work? I am a final year social sciences PhD student in the UK. A professor reached out to me and asked if I am interested in a three-day consultant work for their project and if so, what my day rate is. I am definitely interested in the opportunity but I am not sure how much the day rate is as I haven't worked like this before (freelance consultant). Would it be polite to ask them to provide the day rate? Thanks.

No, do not ask the professor to choose a rate
Speaking as an academic who has recently obtained his PhD and who earns his living from freelancing and consultancy, I would not recommend bouncing the question back to the professor. If he/she already had a particular rate in mind, he/she would have said so at the time of offering the work.
Instead, I would advise doing your own research into the "going rate" -- in other words, what other freelancers of comparable credentials and experience charge for the sort of engagement the professor is proposing. Many freelancers have websites or online profiles, and these will sometimes give an indication of what they would charge. You may also want to ascertain discreetly how the work will be funded (is the professor paying you out of his/her own pocket, or does he/she have funding from another source, and, if so, what?).
In the last few years, I have charged figures in the range £70-£240 for a day's freelance work, depending on the "going rate" for the type of work, how much time and skill I think it will demand, whether I have to travel (and stay overnight away from home), whether the assignment is funded by a private individual or by an institution, how well I know the customer (and how much work I have done for him/her in the past).
Discussing the price
Deciding upon a quotation for freelance consultancy is tricky, especially if you are doing it for the first time. You could avoid committing to an exact figure too early by asking to discuss the project by telephone in the first instance. It is perfectly reasonable to say that you want to know more about what sort of work is required before quoting a day rate, and discussing it by telephone may allow you to get a better sense of what the customer wants. A reasonable customer will see this as a good sign that you are interested in doing the work and have a professional attitude.
When it comes to actually agreeing a price, always put it in writing (electronic mail is fine), reiterating what was discussed by telephone. That way, you avoid misunderstandings later.
When you give a quotation, you could qualify it with a statement such as "I am assuming that ____. Obviously, the rate would be different if ___." or "Based on what you have described, my day rate would be around ____, but I would need more details on ___."
General pointers about freelancing

If you are doing unglamorous but highly skilled 'grunt' work (i.e.: if it is a so-called 'support' role), you can charge more. This applies especially in fields/endeavours where the 'headline acts' work for so-called "exposure" or volunteer for a "good cause". Last month, I provided a highly skilled 'support'-type contribution for a project where the 'headline acts' were not getting paid, but where I did get paid. Basically, if your name is going to be a tiny footnote in the acknowledgements, you should charge more than if your name is going to be on the list of authors (realistically, a couple of days' consultancy work is unlikely to be enough of a contribution to qualify for authorship/co-authorship).
As a freelancer, you have no job security, and this should be reflected in a (significantly) higher day rate than for a permanent employee. A good analogy can be seen in mobile telephone service providers, where 'pay-as-you-go' costs more per minute/SMS/MB than a 'pay a fixed monthly amount for a fixed allowance', but would be better value for those who do consume relatively few minutes/SMS/MB.
As a freelancer, you are responsible for your own pension arrangements, and this should be reflected in a higher day rate than for a permanent employee (who usually benefits from employer contributions to a pension scheme on top of his/her salary).
As a freelancer, you are responsible for collecting payment and declaring your income to HMRC in a tax return (assuming you make more than £1000 from all freelance work/enterprise in a tax year). Making an invoice, chasing up payment, and doing your tax return are time-consuming administrative chores that a freelancer has to do but an employee does not have to do (then again, the bureaucracy of some big organisations is even worse).
Be careful not to underestimate the difficulty of the job -- it is awkward to increase your fee significantly above what you quoted originally (unless the customer has made substantial extra requests). Speaking from personal experience, I have often found myself wishing I had demanded more money for an assignment after realising it was harder or more time-consuming than I had anticipated.
As a freelancer, you are responsible for your "continuing professional development" in your own (unpaid) time and at your own expense, unlike a permanent employee (whose employer will cover the cost and allow the employee to do it during salaried "work hours").


Is it commonplace for students to feel anxious about graduation? So, I am but a semester away from graduating from college as a Computer Programmer in Canada. All is well in the grades department - I've completed all assigned work and maintained a ~4.0 GPA throughout the course of my studies. However, I still feel anxious and have a sense that I'm entering the workforce without the base skill-set requisite for success.

Is it commonplace for students to feel lost and/or potentially inadequate prior to graduation? Are these types of thoughts and feelings common among new graduates?

This is common. Any coming future you are unsure of will make you feel anxious. You know you can succeed in college because you have experienced it but you don't know if you can succeed in the workplace as you have not experienced it. You may be a more generally anxious person like me. I graduated top of class from my small state college and was super anxious about going to a well known grad school.

I've learned a few lessons since then. The best advice I can give is this: (1) Be committed to practicing thankfulness and contentment and (2) be committed to adapting and learning in whatever situation you face.

If you know that you can still recognize the good things about your future work situation and come from a place of humility instead of entitlement (which is easy to do even when you aren't a jerk) you will be more at peace with the future. Be thankful for the success you've had in college. Grow amazement of the possibility of things still going well.

And if you are committed to being flexible and finding solutions to things that aren't working out as well as you'd like, you will be more at peace with the future knowing that you have some power to improve things. You aren't going to know everything you need to know for you job. But if you know you can learn, that is enough.


How do I convince my school to allow me to double major? I am currently a second-semester freshman. For the last several years of my life, I've been pondering over what to choose as my major. My last two years of high school, I took university math courses, and fell in love with math. I didn't just fall in love, I gained a deep interest in it. Working on math problems is one of the greatest joys in my life. I seriously considered choosing math as my career and was perfectly happy with doing so except for one thing: I want something more tangible as my career. Computer Science is also fascinating and interesting to me, as well as Computer Engineering. I decided on Computer Engineering, but I will not be satisfied if I cannot double major in math.

This semester was the first semester in 3 years that I did not take a math class, and as a result, there is significantly less joy in my life. I miss taking math classes. I just declared my major as Computer Engineering and am now working on gaining permission to petition for a double major (this is the procedure for the university that I'm at). The problem is the university that I'm at. It is a pretty good university, but it frowns upon double majoring. This university seems to want the students to come in, and go out. Almost like manufacturing graduates from the incoming students, in four years time. Even worse, the Electrical/Computer Engineering department especially doesn't like double majoring, unless it's in language (which majors are practically designed for double majoring). This department has not allowed a non-language double major in more than 6 years.

Even with all this, I'm not accepting no as an answer. I'm already halfway to a math major, and I'm going to continue to take math classes. Having read The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, I'm taking inspiration from him that this is just a wall for me, to stop me if I'm not determined enough.

How can I convince my university to allow me to double major?

You can convince your university to allow you to double major by showing then a plan for the courses that you will be taking in the next semesters, so they can see that you have already thought about the future, and that you're not one more lost and undecided person. Also, as you said that you love Math, I would like to ask if you had good grades on those Math courses that you took. If yes, try to get help from professors, as they can make the path for the double major approval easier for you since they usually have more influence than a second semester student.

Since you said that your university sees itself as a box (the student comes from high school, enters the box and four years later leaves with the degree), you must try to find a way to show them reasonably that your plans are feasible. More than that, your logical arguments and plans for the future must be well designed and articulated. Furthermore, as I said before, try to get help from professors that know you and your joy for learning Mathematics.

As a double major student that recently gave up to other people's dreams and now is following his dream of studying Math and Physics, I wish you all the luck with your plans!


Conference reviews contains the whole range of ratings We have received reviews for a paper we submitted to a top tier CS related conference, which holds a rebuttal phase. The ratings we got are:

strong accept (expert)
weak accept (knowledgeable)
weak reject (expert)
strong reject (knowledgeable)

which covers the whole spectrum of ratings for this conference. There aren't any major technical comments, and reviews are mainly about the reviewer's taste of the model.

Does it happen often? Is there a way to present this scattering as a possible strength of the paper (being controversial)? Should we address this fact in the rebuttal process? Any tips for the rebuttal concerning this issue?

This happened to me twice. I think the rebuttal is only necessary for the rejections (1 + 2), or the weak accept? the strong accept requires no rebuttal. It's hard when there's no extensive comments. But when I did my rebuttal, I just targeted my response by reviewers (as in, I wrote separate rebuttals for each, and labeled them as such). If there's not enough comments to go on, can you write to the conference organizer asking them to solicit a bit more info? once I received a blank comment page, but as it turns out the reviewer made a PDF of his/her comments and it failed to attach. Not saying this is your case, but it doesn't hurt to ask.


How to best address authorship issues with PI? I am a postdoc working with the same supervisor who supervised my PhD thesis. During my PhD time, it was tacitly assumed that my work is his work too. It went as far as me doing the entire planning and execution of a paper and writing the first draft, while he later looked over the draft and made suggestions on what to expand and what to change. None of the suggestions were fleshed out. Yet we are the only two authors on this paper and he wrote in the author contributions footnote that he and I both conceived of the study, I did the experiments, and both wrote the paper.
Since the paper used some of his data as well as experiments funded by a grant given to him, I obviously cannot publish anything on my own.
However, now, in my postdoc function at the same institution, I find myself in a situation where a PhD student and I are doing a lot of work for a paper and there are two professors involved. My advisor and another professor.
The current paper grew out of another study for which I did all the experiments and coding with a lot of input from the other professor (not my advisor), while the advisor wrote the first draft. My advisor ended up as the first author, even though only the initial idea of working on the topic was his, but he barely contributed to the design of the study, nor does he understand the statistics used or the experimental design.
In this follow-up paper it is, once more, tacitly understood that my advisor will be first author and the other professor the senior author. The work, meanwhile, is done by the PhD student and me with some input and supervision from the other professor.
Is it possible to somehow broach this inequality in my/our position without destroying one's future?
Additionally, I'm getting more and more messages that sound like I'll be part of more papers where I'm clearly the only person doing all the work. Is it normal to have the lab leader as a senior author even though he doesn't contribute any work, nor any meaningful feedback (simply because the methods are not accessible to him)?
And also I've been getting signals that sound like if I publish my own work, not using the data gathered at work, I'd still have to run it by my PI, and possibly have him as a co-author. This last part is particularly disturbing. Has anyone ever been in a similar situation? How do you discuss these things?

Your supervisor's conduct is blatantly unethical.  The current relationship is harming your career.  You need to find a new job.


What it feels like as a PhD student in math or computer science in the US I am currently an undergraduate in Canada, but I am interested in math/comp sci PhD in the US. I heard that an academically supporting environment(the environment of the school? of the department?) in PhD study is very important. Also, I heard in some schools, PhD students don't like helping each other, because they think they are competing, which is a sign of bad experience. In some other cases, the adviser might be unhelpful or even selfish. So how can we choose a university/department/adviser to ensure a good study experience? If you are a PhD student, do you like your department? I like any personal experience or examples.

This is not really an answer but a (somewhat) relevant anecdote that's too long for a comment. About 20 years ago, I chaired my department's graduate admissions committee. The college had a requirement that new graduate students whose undergrad degree is from outside the U.S. must participate in an orientation before the start of their first semester of enrollment, to acquaint them with various aspects of life in the U.S. and, in particular, university life in the U.S. We could apply to an assistant dean to have specific students exempted from this requirement. We had admitted a student who did his undergrad work at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, not Belgium), and I requested that he be exempted form this orientation requirement.

I thought (and I still think) this was a no-brainer, but the assistant dean wanted evidence, meaning information from people who had taught at the University of Waterloo. So I had to write (with some embarrassment) to a few of this student's instructors, asking them for the necessary information about similarities and differences between Waterloo and Ann Arbor.

One of the responses ended with a sentence that, I think, summarized the situation very well: The only thing the student will have to get used to in the U.S. is the absence of Tim Horton's.

End of anecdote.

We now have Tim Horton's in the U.S. So I suggest you think about U.S. universities the same way you'd think about Canadian ones.


How to tell professors I am not interested in working with them right now, but might want to, later? I am PhD student who was (and still am) trying to find an advisor. Over the summer I contacted many professors, and started small 'trial' projects with them. Since people respond at different times and move at different paces, all of these projects started a few weeks apart, towards the end of the summer. I very recently decided I want to focus on one project with the professor I liked best and want to politely let the other professors know that I no longer want to work with them on their projects. I had not met these other people more than thrice (in three weeks), and had only got to the point of finishing reading a couple of their papers. None of these professors was/is paying me for research, either.

Here's the thing, though - the professors who I don't want to work with are the ones who are willing to take me right away, because I have the skill set they want in their groups. The professor who I want to work with wants to 'test' me for a quarter, so there's always the chance that he might eventually reject me. I however do want to give it a fair shot, since I loved his work, working style and personality the most (we've met twice so far, and both were technical meetings).

So coming to the point, I want to have the other professors that like me as back-ups in case this particular professor is not sufficiently impressed with me by the end of the quarter. How do I convey that to them without pissing them off?

You probably know your professors better than anyone on here, as you have interacted with them. Different people respond to rejection in different ways, and this can be a delicate matter.

However, you did note that the professors that you don't want to work with were all responsive to you, which may indicate that they are invested in students. In my experience, faculty who are invested in students want them to do well, and understand that students' research interests will not always perfectly mirror their research interests. Getting a Ph.D. is a long, difficult process, and your professors have gone through it themselves! Thus, they likely know the importance of selecting a research area/advisor that will work best for the student.

My personal advice: Be honest with the professors that you don't want to work with. Tell them that, while you are interested in their research topics/methods, you found a faculty member whose research interests are highly congruent with your personal interests and long-term career goals. You can also tell them that you feel scared that the other faculty member won't take you on, which could open the door for you to directly ask them if they are agreeable to you coming back to work with them, should your relationship with your first choice advisor not work out. Express your appreciation for their responsiveness and for them giving you a chance to work with them.

Some faculty may respond negatively to you, and they may view you as being unreliable or untrustworthy, since you are leaving the projects. I would hope that your faculty will be understanding, if you are able to be open about the situation.

Best of luck!


Does working for a prestigious company help in a PhD application? Does working for a prestigious company help in a PhD application? For example, suppose one does interesting work while at a prestigious company. Would this help an application?

The short answer is "probably." The long answer is "it depends."

Admission to a graduate program is almost solely dependent on how well you impress that department's graduate admissions committee (assuming you meet any minimum admissions standards: grades, GRE, etc). If they attach value to your work in industry, it'll help you out immensely. If they don't, it probably won't hurt you.

This Kaplan page outlines the general process.


I believe fellow TAs are giving students answers and inflating their tutorial average, what should I do? I am first-year graduate student doing teaching assistance for an introductory calculus course.

The course is taught by four instructors, with 12 teaching assistants in total and I am one of them.

Each instructor has three assistant underneath him or her and I am associated with one of the instructors along with two other TAs.

At the end of each hour long tutorial, the TAs will conduct a 20 minute mini-test. Each test has two computational questions selected by the professor. The test questions are related to the lectures prior to the test, and the time prior to the test is for the TAs to review concepts in the lectures and do some examples and exercises from the book. The exercises are drawn from the same source as the test questions, but they are obviously not supposed to overlap in any way.

I don't have strong evidence, but I believe that the other two TAs (who have been  doing this course for longer than me) are giving the student answers, and their students are outperforming those students in my section because of it.

What aroused my suspicion was when I graded the tests from their tutorials. We grade these tests on a rotation. There have been 9 tests so far, so at this point I have graded three of the tests.

What I found is that the students of their sections will give perfect, textbook solution like answers. All the students would make the exact same assumptions, almost as if all 30-40 students are copying from one another. In my section, the students struggle with their questions, sometimes not finishing them. When they do provide answers, there is a large variety of responses as expected of a calculus course. Therefore the students in my section have lower averages.

I don't believe that they are giving students answers directly. Some students would have sounded the alarm by now. What I suspect to have happened is that these TAs are doing the test questions during the tutorial and mixing them into the reviews. This would explain why so many students would follow the exact same procedure, yet still making some mistakes.

I wonder if these TAs are gaming the system. The system being the TA reviews at the end of the semester. These reviews are internal and are used to promote or select future TAs. I also feel bad for the students in my section. I feel that they are being cheated by the people who are supposed to instruct them.

I don't have firm evidence, but I fear that the professor is also in on it. When I first observed this large disparity between student performance, I mentioned to the professor. But there was no reply. Therefore I am afraid of talking to her about this. I am new to the school therefore I don't have anyone I can trust.

What should I do in this case?

Is it possible that the other TAs, by having done the course before, have a better overview of the kind of questions asked in the exam (based on those of previous years), and therefore are better able to train students for those exams? That would explain the facts as well, without anybody consciously in the wrong (and it is always worth to explore such possibilities).

I can also understand that your professor is not actively doing anything about it as long as the difference is not too big. Some TAs are better than others, some groups are better than others, there is always noise and some differences between groups are to be expected. I was a TA for several math courses where we would grade weekly assignments of our own groups (that counted for 10% of the final grade, next to a 90% final exam). I would grade harsher than other TAs and my group's average of the homework would be lower than that of other groups. However, my group tended to do better at the final exam, I believe in part because they were pushed harder to make an effort. What I mean to say is that worse intermediate test results don't say everything.

Unless you have hard evidence that your fellow TAs are 'gaming the system' I would be hesitant to attach too much meaning to the present facts. If, besides this, their manners are unpleasant or the group atmosphere isn't right, the easiest solution would definitely be to avoid them by not TAing the same course next year.


Why is the date left out of some academic papers? Being somewhat familiar with referencing of academic papers as a source, it has struck me as odd why authors would leave out some date on their paper. The date could be the day the author completed the paper on or submit date or published date etc.
Certainly it would be of help to others who would want to reference their work?
So, does anyone know if there is a specific reason why certain authors leave out a date on their papers?

There is often a substantial delay between when the author finishes a paper and when the paper is actually published. The author may not be totally aware of the publishing date. This is why the authors do not include the date.

The date is generally found in/on the book/proceedings that the paper is published in. This is the date that should be used for referencing a paper.


Would tenured professors who are charged with a crime generally be fired? What's the usual (North American) universities' practice on dealing with tenured professors who have been criminally charged?  I've encountered two scenarios indirectly that could make some professors in some legal trouble.

Here the first scenario.  When I was an undergraduate student, a colleague told me that his ex-girlfriend called because she discovered a stalker near her home.  When he visited her to assess the situation, they bumped into the alleged stalker at the stairs of the apartment building.  She asked him to call the police.  He recognized that the alleged stalker was one of the professors in his department.  He did not report the alleged stalker to the police because he's afraid of repercussion.

Fast forward a few years.  Here the second scenario.  One of my friends dated a tenured professor.  The relation was abusive.  He (the professor) hit her badly that she called the police.  His mom begged my friend not to press charges because she's concerned about her son's future.

TL;DR: In theory or practice, would universities fire the professor who have been criminally charged?  I've asked several tenured professors casually with at least one of the scenarios.  They all agreed that nothing bad would happened to those professors even if their wrongdoings were reported to the police.

Criminal acts are certainly a reason to revoke tenure.  In fact, this is probably one of the most common reasons.  It is possible to terminate the employment of a tenured professor as soon as the university learns that they have been charged with or suspected of a criminal action.  (This happened at my university: it was an extreme case.)  Terminating employment because of a criminal charge is obviously a quite precipitous act to take: I would be surprised if a university did this in any situation except one in which they are sure that the faculty member will/would be found guilty of the charge.  A tenured employee who was fired because of suspicion of criminal acts and was later found innocent of these acts would have, in many cases, a heck of a lawsuit against the university.  (Untenured employees might as well...)

The things that "you heard" sound a little dopey to me, honestly.  Tenure offers some measure of job security.  It does not confer any defense against or immunity from criminal acts.  Getting convicted of domestic violence is "something bad happening to the professor", right?  Not being able to carry out your duties because you are incarcerated is a sufficient reason to fire a tenured faculty member!  In the scenario with the "stalker" it is so unclear what happened or what was reported to whom that I would not be comfortable commenting on it.  Nevertheless, one can certainly imagine circumstances in which a tenured faculty member could be fired for stalking even without a criminal conviction.


PhD manuscript with grammatical errors and informal phrases I have made a very good contribution in my PhD and just graduated two years ago from a top university with honors.

Today, I revised my PhD manuscript and surprisingly found several grammatical errors, informal sentences that I don't feel comfortable with now, and honestly also found two technical errors (they are correct in my published papers but not in my PhD manuscript). I am really disappointed, and feel like "I don't deserve to be graduated from a top university" with a PhD manuscript that contains a lot of grammatical errors and several informal things.

When I wrote the manuscript, I was happy with the informal things I added, but today I feel really sad by having them in my manuscript since I think they decrease the reputation of my work.

Although that after my defense the committee gave me one month for the minor corrections, but I don't think I have really benefited well from this opportunity. Is this normal? Any suggestions?

Ok. Let the past be the past. You weren't perfect then, you are better now. Maybe not perfect yet, but neither am I, or anyone. The very fact that you can recognize past errors is a sure sign that you are now better at this than you were as a novice scholar.

As the comments note, there is little chance the problems will be noticed, or even that they will matter if the are noticed.

There is a phenomenon among writers that is worth noting. Many people, writers of all kinds, sometimes feel embarrassed by their older work. Even poets. It is a sign of growth, not of failure.

In Tai Chi we say "One day's practice, one day's progress."

A couple of additional thoughts.

It is immensely difficult for most people to proof-read their own writings. You tend to see what you thought you wrote, not what you did write. An external review is a great way to improve any writing. See, for example Ezra Pound and the drafts of The Waste Land.

Also, you would be in far worse shape if you ignored past errors and insisted, insisted, that they were PERFECT.


Citing a book vs citing the original paper Books often have great overviews of topics and can cite dozens of papers in a single section or chapter and the book author typically cites the original discoveries of many others besides himself.

Is it ever appropriate to cite a book alone, or should I always cite the original papers?

Does it matter if my use of the the material is a brief reference to a broad topic I'm building on vs a specific paper?

Is the number of years that have passed, or perhaps how common the knowledge is in the field a factor when deciding to cite the book or the original paper?

Does the answer vary by field? If so, in my case I'm typically working with robotics and computer vision papers.

I think it can be appropriate to cite a book, exactly because they can provide a great overview of a topic. I can think of a some cases in which you can cite a book. First of all, you may want to point the reader to further background material of your field of research (say, in the introduction of a paper).

Another example: Say you are in -some research area- and you want to use something that is common knowledge in -other research area- citing a book may be helpful because they can contain more background and better explanations.

Finally as you already mention, if the result is very old finding the original paper may be hard (for both you and the reader). Furthermore the exact phrasing of a results changes somewhat over time, so it may be more difficult to read.


How to get past being tagged as overly curious and unfocussed? I am in a reputed PhD Programme in Computer Science. In the prior part of my PhD I was focussed on applicative research but during the course of time I developed a keen interest in the theoretical reasoning behind algorithms and methods. I would have liked to prove the correctness of my work theoretically along with the experimental results. Since I didn't have a very strong fundamental background in mathematics, I developed a habit of asking "why" behind every assumption made in any topic. For example: I had a 15 minute long discussion with my lab mate on why the sample event space for calculating probability consists of a null set and what does it mean.

Our lab has weekly presentations by various students of my lab about their research topics or something else, focussed towards people who don't know anything. My obsession to understand the fundamentals have probably led me to be able to ask questions even upon topics not remotely concerned with my field of study. And I do ask questions (I don't know about the quality of questions since I am mostly not very well versed with the topics being presented). I somehow also have a habit of being able to relate things from various fields of study, so after or during the presentations I am usually able to find the connection between my and the other person's field.

Due to this, my advisor (occasionally and in a positive manner) and other people have started tagging me as overly curious. A few students make fun of me behind me, saying why the hell I can dive into discussions with people working in String theory when I don't have to work upon it.

Though I am producing results (coding, studying and teaching the same to my co-authors) and mostly the one who brings new ideas to the table, I am mostly taunted as being unfocussed by my lab mates when I just try to discuss about some random idea during coffee or lunch break or try to know about a new project initiated in other labs. Earlier I chose to address their concerns and accepted that maybe I have a problem, but with time people even question my focus when I just express my wish to attend an advanced Algebra lecture (an hour a week). This hasn't killed my curiosity but has led me to question my abilities and is affecting my self-confidence. I am an excellent team player, but due to continuous taunting I prefer working and hanging out alone (against my nature) since I think I am negatively impacting others' work.

My questions are:

Does it make sense to attend these weekly presentations whose main aim in my view was to develop a habit of asking questions?
Is wanting to know about other people's work, even from other domains, considered as lack of focus?
Is there something called "overly curious" ?

Answers to your questions are dependent on the culture you are in, and how you, personally, want to cope with the norms and values of that culture.

For example, in some cultures, it is possible to be labeled "overly ambitious" if one voices the ambition to be the "best X in the world", or even "the top X in our country".  This doesn't apply to the US, where open ambition is rarely stigmatized.

Also, be aware that your class mates and lab mates may be taunting you and make fun of you as a way to cope with their own discomforts and insecurities. Such reactions are hardly useful or informative to you as you develop your skills and capabilities in a way that suits your disposition and inclinations.

Here are my answers to your questions:

  Does it make sense to attend these weekly presentations whose main aim in my view was to develop a habit of asking questions.

Yes, this is perfectly fine if it doesn't take away time or energy from your other work and doesn't delay progress in your PhD program. As my (well-regarded) adviser says: "Intellectual curiosity is very valuable in academic life. It is not widely distributed and it is hard to develop if you don't already have it".

  Does wanting to know about other people's work; even from other domains considered as lack of focus.

No, not in and of itself.  This is the way of the "polymath".  You might just start telling people: "I'm a polymath, or aspiring polymath.  This is what I do."  Also, you might read some biographies of polymaths.  They will give you inspiration and insights.

  Is there something called "overly curious"

Curiosity is only excessive if it distracts from the focus necessary to develop depth in your specialty, or gets in the way of getting meaningful work done (courses passed, papers published, etc.).  PhD is about depth, so if your curiosity keeps you hopping from question to question where you develop only a superficial understanding, then, yes, it is excessive.


Where to publish a laboratory manual? My Problem
Generally, my problem is that I have put a great effort on a laboratory manual and I would like to publish it. Specifically, I am would like to publish a stand-alone laboratory manual for an introductory control-theory  course.
I would like to have my manual peer reviewed and published. Where could I submit my laboratory manual for the purpose of review and publication?
Anecdote
Let me start with a personal anecdote, I have taken a hand full of courses in control theory throughout my academic career. Without exception, I feel that only at the end of the courses did I even have a clue about what I had just done and how come. I believe that a solid, stand-alone laboratory course could ease passage for students.  I had looked for on-line available laboratory manuals for my undergraduate course. I found many were available, but not that meet my needs for one reason or another. I have largely felt that the authors are missing a compelling and pithy narrative that weaves together the material for their audience. Rather, its a series of tasks to undertake.
Regarding Peer Review
Peer review has many advantages as compared to just posting the lab manual on a department website. Though publication might not be possible, perhaps there is a internet site where a project might be submitted for review, or offered as the basis of a collaboration. In such case, if the process was open and juried, then there would be some measure of peer review (I imagine that this is similar to how projects like linux are done). The end work of this project might simply be a book registered with the library of congress.
Regarding Publication
Publication also has many advantages as compared to just posting on the internet. Mainly though---at least for me---I'd like that a user could easily obtain the manual, and meaningfully cite the manual (e.g., while preparing laboratory reports).
Perhaps I could post it on Arxiv? I have just looked and see that there are course notes posted there. However, this alone seems to miss out on peer review.

To a publisher
Publishing a laboratory manual for an undergraduate course is in some way similar to publishing a textbook, which in some ways similar to publishing any other book.
Publishers publish books. In some cases, when they expect that there is going to be  a profitable market, they pay authors for the books they publish, and in other cases authors (or some institutions) cover the costs and either hope that the books will sell in sufficient quantity or receive the books and distribute themselves. In your case, the latter situation is likely - if you'd want to publish that manual, someone (perhaps your university department) would have to cover the full costs of doing so and would get the published manuals to distribute to students and potentially other customers.
Your university may have a publisher subsidiary (it's not that uncommon) who are involved in publishing academic material, if so, it would be worth talking to them.
However, that generally won't be treated as a peer reviewed research publication; it's plausible that it even won't be peer reviewed at all.  Preparing and publishing educational material can get you some "points" in various academic evaluations, but that's a different category than peer reviewed papers with novel research.


Does PhD work experience (scholarship was tax free) count in Postdoc Salary contract (TVL-13) in Germany I did my Ph.D. from Germany where I received a tax-free fellowship, and now I got a postdoc offer in Bremen with salary range TVL-13. The 'Stufe' depends on the previous experience of the employee, but since I was not paying tax and was on a student visa during my Ph.D., will my previous research experience count in this case?
Would be great if somebody could answer.
Thanks.

In general, no. The previous work experience you can claim for a higher entry point on the scale needs to be relevant for the job for which you are applying. There are very general rules about this (since the TV-L covers everything from dishwashers to head physicians) so there is some leeway in interpretation, but the basic assumption is that the duties of a postdoc are different enough from those of a PhD student that experience as the latter does not count for the former. Time in education (which a PhD counts as) are also explicitly excluded by the regulation.

It might be possible to claim that even as a PhD student, you already performed duties of a postdoc (independently organizing tutorial sessions for a large class, say, or managing the IT needs of your department), but the usual case for a higher entry point is if you previously were on a fixed-term contract of, say, five years where you received your PhD after year four. Then you could claim the last year as previous experience for a postdoc position at another university.

EDIT: See also my previous answer to a similar question. In short, you need to distinguish between times which must be counted by law (which your PhD experience definitely doesn't fall under) and times which may be counted if argued for specifically, e.g., with arguments as in my second paragraph.


Could I continue in my preferred field whilst working on a post-doc in a different field? I am coming to the end of my present post-doc position which is in a fairly narrow area, one that I am deeply interested in pursuing further.  I am struggling to find a new role in the same area.

What are the implications for someone in this position when i) taking up an unrelated post-doc role, or ii) working in industry until a suitable role comes up?

Some good answers so far, but I would like to extend my original question to:
iii) What are the implications were I to accept a role working in field A, and continue to publish work in field B.  I assume in this instance I would naturally discuss this and only proceed if my primary investigator were happy with it, for example, but could there be other implications/considerations?

There are many whom I know have done their post-docs in a field far different from their primary area of research and work. I don't see this as a problem. Post-docs and PhD dissertation may also widely differ from person to person. I have not seen such a phenomenon affecting their career.


Is it appropriate to attend a class one is not registered for? Is it appropriate for a student to attend a class s/he is not registered for?

I am a CS student and I am almost done with my degree, but there are some very interesting electives that I will not get to take and I would love to simply attend those courses any way.

Is this inappropriate to do? Should I ask the professor's permission first?

I am not sure what my school's policy on the matter is, since I could not find a single source on the topic online from them.

In the American system, this is called "auditing" a course. Auditing means that you are attending the class but are technically only listening (auditing => auditory => listening) to the material and not sitting for exams or handing in homework assignments. You can audit a course formally (which often means that this is listed on your transcript) or informally in which you just sit in on the lectures/discussions. For the former/formal, see your local university guidelines. This answer deals with the latter.

Permission of the instructor in all but the larger lectures is always a good idea unless your university has an open classroom policy (as with many European universities). The instructor may have different rules. For example:

In larger lectures, I do not mind auditors (of any ilk) in lecture but they may not attend discussion sections since those are for the paying students.
I allow graduate students to audit my graduate seminars but with three rules: a) They must attend all of the sessions; b) they must do all of the readings; c) they must not be a 'dead body' but must participate in the seminar discussion.

Note that the university itself may have rules on auditing which the faculty member may ignore (for example, I do not mind if local community residents audit my lectures even if they are not registered as auditors through the university).

This is different from PASS/FAIL (also known as CREDIT/D/FAIL) which is another alternative in which you take the class but are allowed a lower level of participation.


Relevant math courses for theoretical physics/applied mathematics? I'm finishing my bachelor's in physics and for my masters, where I have a few free choice courses (~5), I'd like to take math courses that would be relevant for a future as a theoretical physicist or applied mathematician.

Rigorously (as in taught by mathematicians) I've had Calculus, Calculus in R^n, Complex Analysis, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics and just a small overview of differential equations. I've had more math in physics courses but not in a very rigorous way.

I'm setting my eyes on the following courses:

Ordinary Differential Equations
Partial Differential Equations
Group Theory
Stochastic Processes
Functional Analysis

Are all of these relevant? Which others could be added to this list?

Although the name is not explanatory, a course in "Lie theory", or "Lie groups and Lie algebras" would be very helpful: this is about the influence of large-ish (certainly not finite) symmetry groups, such as rotation groups ("orthogonal groups"...), and more.

Also, "functional analysis" is very hit-or-miss, depending on what one wants. What a potential physicist would want would be "operator theory", especially "unbounded operators". Also, probably, "distribution theory/generalized functions", to be able to cope gracefully with things like Dirac's delta "function". (E.g., to not be at the mercy of semi-ignoramuses who'll happily rant about the non-existence of such a thing, and/or insist on describing it in ways which horribly obscure its utility and sense...)


How to avoid plagiarism when working on an idea not developed from a student who quit the PhD program? I am doing a PhD in economics. I had an idea on an issue of my interest. With making some research, I found out that there was a previous student at my university, who did not finish his PhD, but he made an unpublished paper on the idea that I had, which has been presented at a conference, and it is not a working paper which is registered to any database.

Probably I will do something different, but build my stuff purely on this idea, but do I risk to make something just slightly different from his stuff? In this case, is it plagiarism and also unethical? How should I handle this case?

It is easy to discharge your ethical obligations here: you treat the unpublished paper like you would any other source, i.e., citing it carefully and making sure not to rewrite sentences or rehash ideas without explicit attribution (include direct quotes if necessary, and probably don't include too many of those without a very compelling reason).

As you point out, the more serious risk is that you are starting thesis work on a problem on which someone else did a substantial amount of work on (though you worked on it independently) and that you may come out with little which is essentially new.  You're right that this is a risk: it's a risk for all thesis work everywhere.  Again my advice is to not treat this any differently than work that has been published: clearly you need to go substantially beyond it, or you don't have a thesis.  Whether the prior work of this other person shows that this is a fruitful area for you to continue in or whether it is evidence that all the good stuff has already been done is one of those tough calls that your thesis advisor should help you with.

Finally, of course it is a shame if two people have done good work on something and neither of them publishes it.  If it turns out that you do your thesis work on something else, then as a separate project (or perhaps better: a later project), you may want to explore a publication which is a synthesis of your work and this other person's.  Offering him coauthorship would be appropriate, but if he is really out of academia then it becomes a service to the profession for you to publish the work, while accurately conveying its provenance.  It's just that that kind of publication would probably not meet the requirements for a PhD thesis (and even if it did, it would not be a good launching of your career).


Research article inspired by a question on MSE? This question has been migrated from the MSE.
I am writing a short research article that was inspired by a question posted on the Mathematics Stack Exchange. Is mentioning this in the article viewed as unprofessional/undesirable?
I specifically mention in the introduction that the paper was motivated by an MSE question and provide a citation to the question but am not sure how an editor may view that. Is this a generally acceptable thing to do?

Assuming that you weren't the original source of the question, then it is entirely proper that you mention and cite it.
Interesting mathematical questions can come from anywhere and from anyone. But if you are inspired by the thoughts of another person, then hey should get credit for that.
Ideally a citation should point to a real person, though anonymity on SO may make that impossible.