Is there any ethical issue which prevents me from paying high quality authors monetary compensation, to agree to write papers with me? I've recently started a PhD.  I'm having trouble getting high impact authors to agree to write papers with me.  Is there any ethical issue which prevents me from paying high impact authors monetary compensation, to agree to write papers with me?  I of course will obey any and all paper writing requirements, such as both must substantially contribute, etc...

Also, my original intention is that the monetary payments would be fully disclosed before the transactions, to all relevant parties, including my University, supervisors, opposing side in the final PhD, etc...

I kind of do the same thing with my daughter.  I hire a tutor, but ask them to help provide her with the required knowledge, but require her to do any and all actual work.

I think the other answers are way too nice. As for myself, I have never heard of such a insulting / distorted idea about what a PHD is. Do you want to buy yourself a PHD? There are countless diploma mills for that, so you could hang a useless paper on your wall to claim you have a PHD without doing all the necessary work / research yourself. Do you want to buy yourself an academic career by hiring established professors to write papers for and with you? That is even more insulting. If that was the case, every rich kid could tell his / her dad. "I want a PHD for Christmas. Buy me some high impact authors to write papers with me. Pleaaase..".

It does not work that way. And the fact that you are at the beginning of your PHD and you are even considering this, is even more infuriating for people who have busted their behinds to get a PHD (and some of the people in Academia SE still do to this day). Reconsider why you want a PHD and what you want a PHD for. I am mostly sure you want it for the all the wrong reasons and not because you actually want to do research. In that case, you should probably spare yourself the agony, because without a passion for research your PHD road will be a long, rocky one.

UPDATE: In retrospect, the tone of my answer is pretty hostile. Still, the upvotes showed that my initial reaction to the OP's question also expressed an important part of the Academia SE community. In this sense, my answer might still be useful if it makes the OP reconsider his "thought" of hiring "high-impact" authors to write papers with him, since such an action will probably cause much more damage to him than my "harsh" words.

Moreover, since we had a previous question about "Is it ethical to hire a programmer for ... my CS PHD" and now "Is it ethical to hire high-impact authors ... to write papers with me", I sincerely hope that in the future we do not get any other questions like "Is it ethical to hire a professor to write my PHD thesis if I still do the typesetting in Latex and all spell checking" or "Is it ethical to hire a professor to do my PHD defence, since I will still bring the pizza and the drinks".


How to write abstract for conference when you have no results yet? This situation is not uncommon; in my case, I have to submit abstract for conference in September by the end of January already. But the problem is I have no results yet. I'm pretty sure that in those 8 months I will get pretty interesting results. But..

How to write smooth abstract without reporting results?

I started something along these lines:

This and this is an important factor ...
However, few studies on this topic have been done ...
In our study, we compare this and this
??

Now the problem comes in point 4, where I should report some results.

How should I go around that?
What formulations should I use?
Shall I speak in present, future, or past tense? The studies are usualy written in past tense like "we analysed, we compared...", but in this case I would tend to present tense.

Thank you for your help. Examples are welcome!

P.S.: this is an interesting discussion however didn't give me actual guidelines of how to write it.

Don't write results you don't have. Neither in the present, past or future tense. Just don't do it. Yet, I agree with you that there are circumstances where you do need to write an abstract on on-going work. For example, many big conferences in my field now ask for abstracts to be submitted up to 10 months in advance of the conference itself! If you are a post-doc staying on a 12-month project, you want to present something but you might not yet know how things will turn out. So, two techniques I propose:

Just write about the methodology, and present your goals in a general way, without “predicting” particular results but insisting on the importance of the topic. That is, emphasize strongly your points #1 and #2, and then describe point #3 as you would your “results”. Things like:

  In this particular study, we compare the efficiency of methods A and B on given subsets of a reference database. We use a large number of different criteria for measuring efficiency, including …, … and … We also discuss in detail the implementation of subprocess X in method B, because its has not been specifically optimized in the existing literature.

I know it sounds vague, but that's the best you can achieve honestly, without pretending to know what you expect to find.
Bait and switch: if you have existing results in a closely related study, you can incorporate them as part of your results. Mix this approach with above, so that you have at least a few specific results to list in your point #4. Then, when you will make your presentation, just present your new results alongside the old (some people would remove completely the old results, but that makes it too much of a “bait and switch” for my taste). It is, after all, quite common for people to include newer results in orals/posters that they obtained after the original submission. It is not frowned upon, as long as you keep a decent agreement between the original abstract and the final content.


How does the CRediT system work? I'm preparing a submission to Royal Society Biology Letters, and they also require that each author's CRediT contribution is provided.
I'm not familiar with this (I usually publish in engineering venues that do not require detailed contributions), could someone clarify a few things?
There are four options for each category: lead, equal, supporting, and not ticking the checkbox.
Question 1
I'm assuming that not ticking a checkbox is a valid entry for "no contribution" for that category. If a category is not very relevant for the study, can it be skipped entirely?
Question 2
Are lead and equal mutually exclusive? Or can they be used to split contributions into three levels? Same between supporting and equal. (Author 1: Lead, Author 2: Equal, Author 3: Equal, Author 4: Supporting 5:Supporting)?
edit: in a bizarre turn of events, when I logged back in the CRediT accreditation was no longer in the system, and instead there was a field for freetext in which to write a statement of contributions, following RS's own guidelines. No idea what happened there.

Journals use a variety of formats for reporting author contributions. This content is like a conflict of interest statement—it's not typically evaluated as part of the peer review, but more a contractual reassurance in case of later concerns such as whether an author is added with no contribution.
I've used CRediT statements in several published papers. I don't know a citation for my claims below, but I strongly suspect:

Yes
Not mutually exclusive


Can being free of publication charge be an indication of being a non-predatory journal? Though some serious journals charge publication fee as well, to a certain extent, can being free of publication charge be an indication,
albeit not a sure indication,
of being a non-predatory journal?

Since a less known journal suffers from being confused with a predatory one, if I want to make some of my publications free from being belittled, would declaring the journals publishing my papers are free of charge be a wise action?

No. A journal that does not charge publication fees can still be a predatory journal.

Generally, the motivation for publishing a predatory journal is to make money. Since the product they create (the journal) is too low in quality for them to be able to sell subscriptions and earn revenue from readers, they often make money by collecting publication fees from authors.

However, predatory journals may also have reasons not to charge publication fees. For example, when starting out, they may offer publication free of charge in order to get authors to submit to them, so they can build up a publishing history to look more legitimate. As another example, an individual might start a fake journal so that he and some of his friends have somewhere to "publish" (for career advancement), and accept submissions from other authors without fee so as to make the journal appear legitimate.


May they delay for a long time the decision of a submitted manuscript of someone that already sent a paper which didn't pass plagiarism check? As I already shared in this question, I have submitted a paper in January
of the last year to a high-rank journal and they decided on my paper with reject and resubmit. I worked very very hard and prepared a revised version of the manuscript which significantly improved the paper with a near 50 pages response letter to reviewers.

Unfortunately, in this university which I am getting my Ph.D., they have an obligation that advisor, must be the corresponding author. Two students of my advisor, which I don't know personally, submitted a paper to the same journal a short time after the decision of my manuscript. After less than a week, journal sent a letter to my advisor which is also the corresponding author of their manuscript that their paper didn't pass the plagiarism check. By my investigation, I found out that they copy-pasted some parts of their introductory paragraphs from other papers. My advisor sent a letter to EIC telling him that this problem was due to not having plagiarism checker software. He is the second author in my paper and third author in the other paper and corresponding author for both of the papers.

I have now waited a long time for the decision of my manuscript. One of the professors in this university, yesterday told me that they may not have sent the paper to the reviewers and make you wait for a long long time. Then if you mail them, they will reject your paper. It is a punishment for your advisor. Otherwise, they will make you wait for 12 to 15 month just for punishment and then without review reject it.

It was a nightmare for me as I am under immense pressure for my job and my graduation. I agree that my advisor is an irresponsible and ignorant person. But I didn't do anything wrong. Just honest very very hard work.

May they delay for a long time the decision of a submitted manuscript of someone that already sent a paper which didn't pass plagiarism check?
Is there any such policies or behavior in journals?
What should I do?

The people who run good journals are (i) professionals, (ii) people. From the first follows that it's not professional or appropriate to sit on a paper for a year without sending it out to reviewers or making a decision as punishment. That's just not ethical. From the second it follows that the editor is probably not going to bend over backward to ensure the paper gets dealt with today instead of tomorrow. In any case, your characterization of editors as these kinds of vindictive monsters out to get you is incorrect -- that's not the kind of person who would be appointed as an editor.

Either way, there is nothing wrong with writing an email to the editor and asking what the status of a paper is. That happens every day, and it's part of the job of an editor to deal with this in a professional manner. So go ahead.


Where can I find industry postdoc hiring statistics for Canada? Could anyone help me with the data of hired postdocs in company and private sector in Canada? I want to find out the number and the rate of the industrial postdocs in Canada (including the postdocs in university, company, government, etc) in recent years, which is important to my research.

Mitacs provides information (data will need to be compiled) about number of fellowships, participating institutions, expenditures, and so forth on its reports page.

However, I do not believe that Mitacs has historically been the only source of grants. See this article in Science (2005) and this notice from the NSERC.


What are your thoughts on epigraphs in theses? I am wondering if there is a general consensus as to the suitability of epigraphs in a thesis, either a single one at the start of the document, or an appropriate quote to begin every chapter.

For example, at the start of a technical chapter describing some code, I could write

  Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald E. Knuth

I am lucky to have complete freedom over how I choose to typeset my thesis (Master's thesis in astronomy) and I like the idea of a thematic quote to begin a chapter. However, I am wary of seeming unprofessional or tacky so I am curious to get some more thoughts on the matter.

Well-chosen, non-frivolous epigraphs can enhance a thesis.


Postdoctoral fellowships/calls to work in Europe for scientists/mathematicians/engineers that are similar to Marie curie? I was wondering where I can find any information on the postdoctoral fellowships/calls to work in Europe which are similar to Marie Curie? I'm doing my
basic internet search on this, but don't seem to succeed that much. I'm especially talking about the fellowships that are offered in the areas of pure or applied sciences or engineering areas.

Any information, site or blog that you know of, I'd greatly appreciate if you could please pass it onto me.

Thanks a lot!

Listing what I know, but it won't be a complete answer for sure.

Germany has several opportunities for foreigners, including DAAD and Humboldt fellowships.

Italy has launched this year for the first time a call with name SIR; it is now closed, but maybe it will be renewed.

All of them are generalist calls, not aimed at a particular field.


If a PhD student is working slowly on a project, is it bad form to give the project to another student? I think my advisor may have done this to me.  Initially he hired a master's student to "help me" with the project and he told me I would be supervising him.  But now he wants the master's student to work on core parts of the project, and he says that since I will be busy this summer, the master's student might be the primary person working on the project.

I am thinking of quitting the project because it looks like I am being replaced.  Am I overreacting here?

"Being replaced" is not a good reason to quit.  Quit if you cannot perform your responsibilities.  Otherwise try to perform them.


Academic prizes and awards vs academic achievements What do PhD scholarship application forms mean by "Details of academic prizes and awards" and "Details of academic achievements"?

Are not academic prizes and academic achievements same things?

First note that "achievement" isn't an exactly-defined term and is at least somewhat subjective.

Academic achievement: An act or process which, when concluded, expands human knowledge or understanding of some subject by means of (academic) research; or alternatively, disseminates or improves in the dissemination of such knowledge in an academic context (e.g. via teaching). In some context this may also mean achievements in studying some academic subject matter yourself.
Academic awards: Awards given in academia or by academia, for academic activity (supposedly).

There is obviously some overlap between the two terms ("achievements" vs "prizes and awards"); awards are usually given to recognize or encourage academic achievements, or to compensate for the travail of making those achievements.

Example:

Presenting a research paper in a well-regarded conference is an achievement.
Your paper being recognized as the "best paper" for that conference is a borderline-achievement.
The "best paper" is an award (possibly including some money, gift or other perk).


Is there any way to stop the one-way brain drain from academia to industry? About 5 years ago, Jake VanderPlas wrote an interesting and in my opinion, crucial, piece on why many academic cultures are unsustainable in the long run, and will eventually be outcompeted industry if not totally collapse due to excessive brain drain.

His key argument is that desirable academic skills are increasing indistinguishable from desirable industry skills, the difference is that industry pays more, and produces vastly more interesting results with higher impact. Thus raising the natural question: why stay in academia? For instance, why would any post-doc earn 40k when they can earn 200k using the same skillset working at IBM, Apple, Google, Uber, Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo, Etsy, Ali Baba....this list is endless.

This brain drain  has been documented in recent articles such as:

"Big tech firms' AI hiring frenzy leads to brain drain at UK universities
High demand at companies such as Google could leave fewer talented scientists to teach next generation, academics fear"
"'We can't compete': why universities are losing their best AI scientists A handful of companies are luring away top researchers, but academics say they are killing the geese that lay the golden eggs"
"AI academic warns on brain drain to tech groups"

It seems the author's prediction has by and large came to fruition.

Key excerpt from the first article:

  With virtually the entire world utilizing the tools of data-intensive discovery, the same skills academia now ignores and devalues are precisely the skills which are most valued and rewarded within industry.

  The result of this perfect storm is that skilled researchers feel an insidious gradient out of research and into industry jobs. While software-focused jobs do exist within academia, they tend to be lower-paid positions without the prestige and opportunity for advancement found in the tenure track. Industry is highly attractive: it is addressing interesting and pressing problems; it offers good pay and benefits; it offers a path out of the migratory rat-wheel of temporary postdoctoral positions, and often even encourages research and publication in fundamental topics. Most importantly, perhaps, industry offers positions with a real possibility for prestige and career advancement. It's really a wonder that any of us stay in the academy at all.

Couple years ago I have read similar question being asked (perhaps precisely on this StackExchange), and at the time the common consensus was one of denial. A few prominent professors predicted that no such brain drain would occur due to historical tendencies they have seen in the students, in other words, a non-issue. But now it seems that the brain drain cannot be stopped, a quick survey of my fellow graduate students quickly revealed that none of them wanted to remain in academia after graduation.

Out of this denial and leadership vacuum in academia, a very insidious academic culture has developed: students would start a PhD degree just to take enough industry-oriented courses and then quickly leave for industry. I have personally witnessed this in many fellow graduate students.

So, once again, is there anyway for academia to stop or halt the one way brain flowing from academia to industry? What can academic culture change in order to attract bright and talent students to carry on with fundamental research?

You mentioned one answer (pay). There're others. I once communicated with someone who left his position as a professor at a major North American university. That surprised me since I knew the job was in high demand. I asked him why, and he responded:

  Professor positions in major research university in  US require
  generation of research funds - a process of writing your best ideas
  and sending them to funding agencies. The process of getting money
  from funding agencies is worse than the lottery. You spent a lot of
  creative effort in putting a proposal together and then most of the
  time it gets thrown into a garbage can. It is a general state of
  affairs, not just my experience. I just decided that I've had enough
  of that. When I spend time creating something I want it to see the
  light of day. So  I switched fields and now work in a very dynamic
  industry, generating new knowledge or writing products that are
  actually used.

  If any postdoc ask me for advice now - whether or not to go into
  academia - I would answer why would you torture yourself? There are so
  many fun jobs and are even better paying.

There's more. If a fresh PhD graduate stays in academia:

You live a nomadic lifestyle, hopping from one postdoc to another. This is not only bad for any significant others and children, but also a great hassle. Each time one moves, one needs new visas, needs to find accommodation, and so on. To add to that, postdocs offer no job security, and one is virtually always looking for a new job.
After that, if you're smart / lucky enough to get a permanent position, you have to generate research funds, which is unreliable (above).
After that, there's no guarantee you'll actually get tenure. If you are denied tenure, what are you going to do next? One is probably already >40 years old at that point.

Taken together, only the extremely passionate (or extremely masochistic) choose an academic career. For further reading I suggest these two articles which strongly shaped my view on this: Women in Science by Philip Greenspun, and Don't Become a Scientist! by Jonathan Katz.

Having said the above - why would a brain drain from academia to industry be a bad thing. It's simply market forces of supply and demand at play. If more people took the option to shift, there would be less competition for permanent positions. Less competition makes the academic path more attractive. Eventually things balance out. It's further possible for society to reverse the brain drain whenever it wishes, simply by providing more funding. If society doesn't want to do that, I don't see why academics should try to force it.


Is it ethically acceptable for university book stores to market homework help websites? A university bookstore, which is operated by a well known bookseller, is selling subscriptions to a "homework help and textbook solutions" website.  The subscriptions appear beneath the university logo and the words "University Official Bookstore."  If you select a course, the required books appear.  Below that, it says "Optional" and the subscription is listed.
This seems to imply the subscription is endorsed by the instructor, very probably without the instructor's knowledge.
Is this marketing by the bookstore ethically acceptable?
This bookseller operates over 700 campus bookstores.
Update:  The bookseller has changed the page to read "Bookstore Recommended" which seems more appropriate.

It’s helpful to approach the question starting from the following general guiding principle:
It is not acceptable for a university bookstore to engage in misleading marketing practices of any sort.
If the way the subscription link is presented creates an appearance of endorsement by an instructor, and such endorsement was not given, then the marketing is misleading. If this was done intentionally, then that is unethical.
If the link suggests the service is endorsed by the university but not by the instructor (or is simply offered as an optional purchase without the implication of any endorsement), it seems hard to argue that it is unethical, or at least hard to argue it is more unethical than any other link to a product that anyone puts on their website. It’s mainly creating the appearance of an endorsement by a specific instructor who didn’t give their approval that would be problematic.
I cannot be sure from your description that I would agree with your assessment that the way the information is presented creates such a misleading impression. But I might, or perhaps I’d agree that it’s sufficiently ambiguous as to risk misleading at least some students.


Where can I apply for an internship in the renewable energy sector in India? I have recently completed my undergraduate studies in Mechanical Engineering and I am looking for research/intern opportunities in India in the renewable Energy field. The issue is that I do not have any prior experience in this field. Am I asking for too much or is there a chance for me?

Try to find trainships or internships on traineesearch.com for example. One of the biggest companies in renewable energy is Vestas which is present in India and had a Graduate Programme, but do to restructuring this got stopped (temporarily?). You however could check their job openings.
Certainly there are more renewable energy companies in India.


Rampant sharing of authorship among colleagues in the name of "collaboration". Is not taking part in it a death knell for a future in academia? I am a final year PhD student in chemical engineering. Since the start of my PhD, I was clear on one personal philosophy. I will put my name only on those papers where I have made substantial contribution. And I will put my colleague's name on a paper only if he/she has contributed substantially. That's what collaboration means to me and anything else seems fraudulent.

However, my group members frequently put each other's name as co-authors in their papers even if they work on completely different topics and have no contribution in the paper. Now, this is unethical in my perspective, on the other hand, they have 10-15 papers by the time they graduate which increases their chance to secure a postdoc position or a tenure track position.

My advisor says, granting of co-authorship is entirely up to the first author and she doesn't interfere with the process.

I have experienced similar sharing of authorship during my masters degree as well. Past PhD members or postdocs were given co-authorship in spite of not contributing anything.

I will be getting 4 (first author) + 2 (co-author) papers from my PhD, which is far less than my colleagues' output.

My colleagues often say that I should have been more collaborative (i.e. share authorship without contribution) as that would have increased my publication count and helped everyone. I simply can't see myself doing that.

Have I severely affected my chance of a future in academia by not taking part in the authorship sharing practice?

I can tell you from the perspective of a person who was on hiring committees that these kinds of ethical indiscretions are easy to spot and are not well received. To the point, we rejected several applicants because we suspected they weren’t sufficiently independent after graduation as they weren’t lead authors on enough publications.

First of all, word gets around. If a PI lets their group slap their names on random papers, hiring committees will take notice, and will not take these applicants seriously. Second of all, we ask questions! If you obviously know nothing about papers you coauthored (yes, it’s obvious), that reflects very badly on you. Finally, if I were you I’d emphasize that on the few publications you have you are the lead author.

That said, your colleagues can partly get away with this: publishing is a numbers game and I don’t know how hiring committees think in other places or fields.


Do admissions care about one's minor? If I am a biology major from a lower tier liberal arts school, and I wanted to make myself more attractive for future applications( ie: grad school, job listings), should I bother obtaining a minor in a related field?

In this case the minor I was attempting was chemistry, but my last semester of undergraduate school is one I want to be "lightish", so I can study for GRE's or hopefully line up internships.

Ideally, I would hope people see my chemistry minor as me having more laboratory experience than other biology majors, since while obtaining the minor I took mostly chemistry courses with their corresponding laboratories. And that laboratory experience maybe could land me in a laboratory internship of some kind. Or look attractive for potential graduate assistance-ships.

Sure.  How much depends on the field and the department; some places have fairly strict requirements for what you have to have learned in undergrad, and if a minor can hit some of those things, then that works.

However, in such cases, it tends to be less about the official minor and more about the coursework.  For example, if you're applying to grad school in a mathey field, getting good grades in linear algebra, differential equations, and real analysis will probably be a big help whether there's a math minor on your transcript or not.


Citing Data That Was Compiled From Many Sources and Then Summarized? (Updated) The Problem

The author of the dissertation (PhD) collected publicly available raw data from the websites of over 40 universities. The data itself spanned 40 years. After compiling the data into a spreadsheet, the author diced it and sliced it to create well-summarized figures and tables. For example, one figure is a graph of the number of hires over time; a potential figure is a map showing where the hires occurred. And a table shows the hires by name, year, and location. (Anonymity at this point is not an issue. All data are publicly available.)

The manuscript needs to comply with APA 7 standards. The APA 7, 6, and 5 manuals go into great detail with examples about meta analysis for experimental purposes, but nothing I read "clicked" for how to deal with this situation.

Based on other posts at this site, the author's summary is a type of meta review (not a deep-dive analysis as described by the APA standards). The purpose of the data is only to present the situation as it has been over time to put the background for a qualitative case study into context. Maybe you'd call it a demographics meta review or demographic meta report?

Potential Solution

Given that the guidance in the APA manual did not seem to fit this situation, my inclination was to suggest the following:

an appendix that lists the university names, locations, and URLs, with an explanation that the data shown in the tables and figures were compiled from data at the university web sites
figure notes and table notes that refer to the appendix.
a entry in the References for the manuscript author (i.e., the author citing himself because he compiled the data in unique ways).

The Question

Would the above potential solution be APA compliant?
If not, what is the APA solution?

Whatever the answer, it would be helpful to have a pointer to the page or pages in an APA manual (version 7, 6, or even 5) that support the answer.

What you have described is your data collection procedure, so I would put it in that subsection (within a methodology section). Describe the procedure of creating the combined dataset clearly, in a way that another researcher would be able to reproduce it.
There you can refer to all your sources, directly in the text, even though it is extensive. Then you should add the reference for each published dataset they've used to construct the large dataset in the reference list (which should be in the APA-handbook, see https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/data-set-references). I would not reference in the form of a self-reference to what is basically the current work.


Does telling students to take notes in high school really help them learn better? I don't feel like it actually helped me. I now sense long after high school that taking notes and reading them probably did not help. Now I understand why it could work. In theory, somebody who thinks for themself could use their own method of trying to understand the parts of a lecture they are interested in understanding, using a complex method writing down the results of what they figured out about their method of thinking and slowly improving their own method of thinking and writing. However, when I was in high school, I didn't understand why I was told to takes notes so I used linear thinking and just copied down what ever the teacher was writing on the board and then read my notes and I'm not sure it really helped.

The lecture is a very inefficient method of training.  Passive, linear, etc.  Working problems, reading texts, doing examinations is much more active and time-efficient.

If you really want to get max value out of a lecture, read the text ahead and work the exercises ahead.  The lecture then is refresher and an alternate viewpoint.  Your notes will only be of something unexpected (as the text is available and familiar for expected things).

P.s.  Of course, this as on oft written on topic and a Google search and review of the results would be a more active way to analyze it.  Rather than asking here or some other answer site.  Sort of analogous to the student in lecture, no?


Interactive poll during the presentation - worth the hassle? I recently attended a lecture where the speaker used piece of software to add interactive results to poll audience. As a presenter and/or audience - what is your opinion on added value of such exercise? Worth the hassle?

What are the benefits? What problems can it get you into?

In my particular case for example - you could answer via smartphone (app or website) or laptop (website), both of these had to of course be connected to Internet. So automatically - the poll excluded all those who didn't have this option.

When you say "lecture", I'm not sure whether you're talking about a one-shot talk (e.g., a conference presentation, an invited seminar), or about an ongoing series in a class.

While I personally have not taught this way, I know that there has been a lot of experimentation with having students answer questions during lectures with software in the way that you describe.  There, the idea is to have the students actually working problem as part of the lecture---essentially, a hybrid between normal and flipped classroom.  In at least some cases, this seems to work very well.

For a one-shot talk, on the other hand, I have a hard time coming up with non-contrived scenarios where I think this would be worth it.  Why would anybody be willing to install some random app for just one talk, and won't you lose time to getting them set up with it? What could you gain from an online poll that you couldn't get through a quick show of hands?  Once people have switched their attention from you to their screens, aren't you just encouraging them to check out and read their email / browse the web?  To me at least, the negatives seem to far outweigh the benefits.


How do citations get counted for a book and for an electronic book? I am very curious to learn how citation engines work for both books and ebooks. I assume that these computer engines (Scopus, the web of science, Google scholar) take the bibliographic data from papers, review articles and books, and somehow get a unique identifier for each bibliographic entry. Then they associate a counter to each unique identifier, and this counter is increased by one every time a citation is made. I'm speculating here as I'm by no means an expert. But if this is the case, then what happens for a book that is both in paper and electronic version? How is this unique identifier created (is it by the ISBN or by the DOI)?

The answer varies with the service you use. I only know something about two services:

Google scholar: It crawls the web to get a database of publications and citations (and it often counts something as publication which is not one, e.g. slides, lists of presentations…). I guess (but I am not sure) it also gets formatted data from publishers. It tries to identify similar publications (I have no idea how this is done precisely) and it also relies on user input (you can identify two things as the same by yourself if you have a verfied account and Google thinks that you are an author). In my experience, the database Google scholar is quite messy. Wrongly identified authors, lots of non-publications, double or missing citations.
MathSciNet is a service for publications in mathematics run by the American Mathematical Society. It gets data from the publishers and imports it automatically into their database. It has people to check the database, to identify duplicates (very rare, basically only reprints), to keep different authors with same names different and to identify authors who appear under different names or spellings. This is done by hand and also uses user input. As GEdgar points out: MathSciNet is very accurate and pretty fast to fix things.


What's the reasoning behind GRE scoring scale? Is there a reason for it being 130 - 170, rather then 0 - 40? Is it to make it easier to use the value in some other calculation?

Yes, there are several reasons for the change. Some of them are:

Since the new scale does not superposes with the old one, you are able to differentiate them.
The old scale increases by 10, which could overestimate the difference between two scores. The new scale increase by 1, which helps to decrease the bias when comparing scores.
Another feature that helps to decrease the bias when interpreting results is the not obvious extremes, but still with a comfortable number at the middle of the scale.

Source


Is ProQuest a reputable company? What are the possible benefits or consequences of submitting my dissertation to ProQuest?

My university recommends submitting dissertations to ProQuest. I am wondering about the practices and academic reputation of this company, and whether or not it is in my best interests to follow the recommendation of my institution.

Does ProQuest support academic work? Do they charge exorbitant fees to access their content?

I don't think Proquest is really a publisher so much as just a repository.  They don't make any editorial choices about the material they host.

I don't have any information about their financials, but accessing dissertations through them is moderately difficult and expensive.  (I think getting a copy of a thesis from them is on the order of US$50.)  I think of them as the dissertation archive of last resort - I would only order from them after exhausting all other options (author's website, university's library, etc).

My feeling is that you might as well submit your thesis to them, since it is good to know that future researchers looking for your thesis would always have Proquest as a fallback option.    However, you should make an effort to make your thesis available through more convenient (and free) means as well.  Post it on your professional web page.  If your field uses arXiv or a similar open access repository, upload it there as well.  (Since you will presumably be publishing papers and/or books based on your thesis, check first that the relevant publishers are okay with having your thesis available for free online.  Probably the major journals/publishers in your field will have similar policies.)


Wikipedia paragraph in the Introduction section? The Introduction section of a paper is supposed to broadly introduce the topic.
What better beginning of a broad chapter than a part of the Wikipedia summary paragraph on the topic? Because it is free to edit worldwide, statistically everything is said better than some guy can say it.

I see the following options:

copy and reword
copy and cite
copy and reword badly i.e. explain in my own terms
study the topic for years, live healthy, then copy and reword into better form
something else

Which one is recommended?

You should write your own introduction so it represents what you are going to cover in your essay / report / thesis.

Just taking an introduction and referencing it to avoid plagiarism, will not usually represent your activity very well.


What to wear to a tenure track faculty Zoom interview (men)? This interview is at a liberal arts college and will be 15 minutes. Is it necessary to wear a suit to this sort of interview or is it okay to wear a dress pants, dress shirt, and a tie?
Update: There seems to be some confusion about what I mean by 15 minutes. I meant that the interview is scheduled to be 15 minutes long. This is a math TT faculty interview at a SLAC.
I appreciate the good answers that I received below. Thank you.

I hope this doesn't come too late to help you, but, for the possible benefit of future readers....
Let me suggest that appropriate wear for such an interview, assuming it is with faculty and possibly students, would be something like what you would typically wear to a face-to-face teaching session or lecture in that place. I don't remember ever wearing a tie to teach in a forty year career, for example. And yes, this might be somewhat less formal than you would wear to a face-to-face interview, but not necessarily.
For an interview with a dean or provost (which might happen at a small school) step it up one notch. A jacket over an Izod, perhaps. (I've dated myself with the Izod ref, I realize).
You need to project professionalism appropriate to your field and the position you seek, not formality. They aren't the same.
But there is another issue I'll mention for the ZOOM generation. Pay attention to the background of what is seen in your session. It is much better if it has a scholarly look (bookcases, say) than a messy room. And try to arrange it so that there won't be interruptions (family, pets, phones, ...) during the session.
Finally, note that this is a US perspective. There are other places that are more formal and others less formal than here. But if you consider what is typical dress for teaching (and/or research) in that place you should be fine.
If you are interviewing at a place with a different academic culture than what you are familiar with, note that many colleges and universities have  set of faculty pages with photographs. That can give you a guide as to what that particular faculty is comfortable with.


Can game theory explain grade inflation? According to wikipedia, grade inflation is the tendency of academic grades for work of comparable quality to increase over time.  That article also includes plenty of evidence for the phenomenon and lists some potential causes.  Has this issue been studied using game theory?  What game-theoretic models of the educational grading process exist that could shed some light on the forces behind this phenomenon?

One paper that looks relevant is "A Signaling Theory of Grade Inflation" by Chan, Hao, and Suen (2007). From their abstract, it seems like this is what you're looking for.

  When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good
  students or just gives easy grades, a school has incentives to inflate
  grades to help its mediocre students, despite concerns about
  preserving the value of good grades for its good students. We
  construct a signaling model where grades are inflated in equilibrium.
  The inability to commit to an honest grading policy reduces the
  efficiency of job assignment and hurts a school. Grade inflation by
  one school makes it easier for another school to do likewise, thus
  providing a channel to make grade exaggeration contagious.

Also check out "Comparative cheap talk" by Chakrabortya and Harbaugh (2005). From the introduction:

  Are such statements more credible than claims such as “they both look
  great” or “every student is excellent”? How much information can
  comparative statements convey? When does it make sense to withhold
  comparative information? And, are comparative statements still
  credible when the speaker is not impartial, e.g. when a professor has
  a favorite student, or a salesperson receives a larger commission on a
  particular product?

In particular, section 4.2 discusses "Recommendation games". They consider situations where an expert with private information can rank alternatives for a decision maker. Here is their description:

  In recommendation games we ﬁnd that the expert prefers ex ante to
  reveal a partial ranking rather than the complete ranking. For
  instance, if there are three students being recommended by a professor
  and the middle student is unlikely to receive a job based on the
  complete ranking, an alternative is to put the top two students in a
  group and not differentiate between them. As the number of issues
  increases, such groupings can be used more and more effectively to
  maximize the expert’s payoffs. The gains from partial rankings may
  explain why highly ranked schools often obscure the relative quality
  of their graduates, either by grade inﬂation as in Ivy League
  undergraduate programs, or by withholding grades from employers as in
  some elite M.B.A. programs

One of the conclusion they reach is that grade inﬂation "should be more severe when average student quality is increasing" so "grades should be more inﬂated in elite schools". Look into their section 4.2 for a detailed analysis.


Referencing and Plagiarism If a specific sentence is not in-text referenced but the website used is mentioned on the reference page, is it considered plagiarism?

Yes, it is.  When you omit the citation, you are claiming the text as your own. Any time you use the words or ideas of another you need an in-text citation which points to a reference that has enough detail to allow others to find the source.  If you are using the exact words, you also need quotation marks.


What happens if someone publishes a paper on your current PhD thesis topic This is not in any way relevant to me, I'm just interested. What would happen if you chose a PhD thesis to work on, and halfway through someone somewhere in the world who was also doing a PhD in the same field published their thesis, which just happened to be the same research that you were doing. Would your research still be considered since it was done independently? Does this happen often? Are there safeguards to prevent this from happening, like would you normally search the academic field to see if anyone else is working on the same topic? Surely that would be almost impossible to do?

A lot of it depends on how far along you are, your institution, your career goals, and to some extent whether its your fault or not. That is, you DEFINITELY need to search the literature to see if your topic was already studied. But sometimes, someone might just have the same idea because they are thinking about the same issues and reading the same existing literature as you are.

If someone scoops you, it's likely a lot of your work won't be publishable anymore. In some fields it might be possible to publish as a replication (with low impact) or it may be that if you look carefully there is some areas of non-overlap that you can run with. The issue of publication will matter a lot more if you want a career in academia: you need a strong publication record to move on to the next phase of your career. In that circumstance, it might actually be better to delay your PhD just to get some publications, unless you expect you can get a good post doc regardless.

If you are early in your work, even halfway, it may be possible to switch topics. It's also possible all you need is a minor shift. I got scooped. Twice. Both times it hurt, but both times I also realized that there wasn't anywhere near 100% overlap, and my work was still publishable, it just took some extra time to rework things, reemphasize novelty, etc.

Overall, though, your PhD should be awarded for the work you do, not necessarily whether the work pans out. Your institution shouldn't prevent you from getting a PhD if you have been scooped. Negotiating all these issues should be the role of your thesis committee. The thesis committee should be comprised of at least some relatively unbiased professors who can judge whether or not your work is acceptable. The point of the PhD should be to train to be a researcher. Sometimes being scooped is part of the learning experience.

(note: I am answering this mostly from the perspective of biological sciences in the US - of course there may be differences by field and location)


Why do we put so much weight on final exams? As we know from cognitive psychology that humans are most creative and learn things better when they are relaxed. I can also relate to this. I do much better in complex problem solving at home rather than in a test. Therefore, I have a hard time understanding why semester final exams are always given such importance and a student's knowledge is judged on the basis of these test results.
I think that what I have learned in 3-4 months can not be properly tested in only 2.5 to 3 hours. Why are exams in general are given this much importance when we know that test results do not fully reflect a person's potential?

What's the alternative?
Exams have been criticized since before I can remember, but if someone has come up with something better I'm not aware of it, e.g.

Oral exams would "work", except those would also be high-pressure examinations, and they are also very time-consuming. Furthermore, unless one records the oral exam, it would also be difficult to resolve grading disputes.
Homework-based assessment is vulnerable to cheating, since the student can get 3rd-party help with the assignments and it would not be easy to catch. Students can also work in groups, with associated problems (it's quite common for a few people in a group to do most/all the work and the rest just copy them).
Subjective assessment where the teacher simply assigns a grade to each student is vulnerable to biases (which is part of the reason why grading schemes and/or blinded assessment are common).
Finally, there's a school of thought that if you are unable to reproduce the learned material, under pressure, you haven't actually learned it.


Does a PhD by monograph make you ineligible to be a lecturer at a university? I heard that a Ph.D. by publication is better than the one by a monograph.

Does that mean academic positions are available only for a researcher who has a Ph.D. by publication? In other words, if she/he has a PhD by monograph then she/he cannot be a lecturer at a uni, where a lecturer need to have some publications,

I have never heard on a difference between the degree. If you've finished a Ph.D. in some subject, you have finished a Ph.D. on the subject. You've done the research necessary and was approved by your committee and the university's senate (or whoever approves it there).

Whether or not you get a job depends on the quality of the content of your dissertation, your reference letters, networking skills, and just plain luck with timing.

Even if we agree that Ph.D. based on publications is better, then the only difference is that it might give you a slight edge with regards to the content of your dissertation. But ultimately, it's about what's inside rather than what form it ended up in.


Will non-research but relevant extracurricular help me get into graduate school? I understand that joining a sports team or student council won’t matter at all for graduate school. However, what about internships in industry, competing in science/engineering competitions, or being a tutor that teaches high school kids math and science?

Additionally, what if you’re given an engineering internship, but it isn’t directly related to your desired research? For example, I’m interested in doing machine learning in graduate school, but I get an internship where I get to help in the development process of making apps from a relatively unknown company?

And also, I’m trying to aim for a top 25 research university, should I just maximize my time by just doing research? If I were to spend lots of time for an engineering competition, but I only reach the semi-finals, would that be a waste of time? Should I still add that to my application?

Sorry if I ask lots of questions. I tried searching all over the Internet, and I can't really find any answers. Thanks.

Yes. Participation in all types of scientific competitions is appreciated, even if not directly relevant to your research area. Even if you don't win them, participating in such events show inclination to scientific activities.

But if you know what you want to pursue in research, and you're able to do that early, it is definitely better than joining random scientific competitions and internships.


Is this a good way to finish a PhD current status conference? First of all sorry if I commit any mistake in this question, I read all the instructions but it´s my first one on this useful site:

I am finishing some diapositives for a PhD current status conference, and I thought about these image as the last one:

                                     **Thank you and...**

I know it is a good technique to end a conference by saying something intelligent, funny or nice in order to give the audience one last "good feeling" so a good impression is left, but I don´t want it to be seen as immature.

Thanks in advance to everyone.

A problem with that kind of ending is that the last slide tends to be shown the longest, because of the upcoming questions section, and it's somewhat distracting to ask with a funny picture behind. Something an instructor told me long time ago, for any slightly formal presentation, is to just show the first slide again (the title slide), so that you can answer questions with just the title of the talk behind you, avoiding distraction.


MAA Monthly vs. AMS Bulletin What is the difference between the two journals (MAA Monthly and AMS Bulletin)? Are they basically for the same thing?
I am considering writing a nice exposition to summarize some of my recent work. My results are closely related and should be of interest to a wide audience, but are currently spread across several papers in specialized journals.
Is there any difference in the expected level of technicality, or demand for formal proofs? In the article I would not want to give standard proofs, but only explain the key ideas and show how the results contribute to a broader theory.
Finally, what is the effect of having an article published in one of these journals? Will it be worth my efforts?

The American Mathematical Monthly (which is I think what you call the MAA Monthly; often abbreviated AMM) is an expository journal at a level slightly above undergraduate -- i.e., it is a journal for mathematical papers (and problems!) that most mathematicians can understand (as opposed to specialized papers written for experts in a specific topic).
The Bulletin of the AMS (short BAMS) is a graduate-level and research-level expository journal.
In theory, there can be overlap between the scope of the two: An exposition that is sufficiently elementary to be understood by undergraduates, yet sufficiently novel that it is of interest to researchers, could be published in either journal. (For example, various parts of combinatorics come to mind.) Also, both journals publish papers on the history of mathematics sometimes.
The American Mathematical Society also has another expository journal, called Notices of the AMS, but it does not directly compete with the AMM either; it is more focused on brief (proof-less) surveys for researchers than on anything suited to undergrads. It also focuses on contemporary issues of the mathematics community.


Co-authors on a study have cut communication, what can be done? During my first post-doc one of the primary researchers just dropped all communications. The upshot is that I have 3 years worth of research that I can't publish without his consent. He was initially keen to publish but when pressed to do his side of the papers he kept pushing the deadline & eventually ceased communicating altogether.

OK, so that happened & I moved on, I had no choice.

Unfortunately I find myself in a similar situations yet again. This time though the lack of communication is with a professor who, after coming up to a year, has not responded to my emails or phone calls. This again after an initial work division & publication plan had been worked out & agreed upon.

This time I do know that the prof is still working at the same place & is still collaborating with the same people but just not responding to me.

What are my options here? What would you do in this situation? I am considering Union representation but is that just going to be toothless?

I have been a post doc now for 5 years & I have nothing published in 4.5 years due to this kind of behaviour.

Ultimately, you can't make someone collaborate or communicate with you if they don't want to.  I think your only option is to either abandon the project, or rewrite it to remove the parts that your collaborator contributed and then publish it as solo work.  I don't see how union representation could help in any way.

I'm pretty surprised that this would happen twice, and would wonder if there's something about your interactions that might be causing it.  People usually don't voluntarily drop all contact with a collaborator unless something has happened that makes them uncomfortable to continue working with them - ethical concerns, abusive behavior, severe inability to communicate, etc.  If you have a colleague who works in the field, and you trust them to be honest with you, you might want to show them the history of your communications and see if they observe any red flags which you might not be aware of.

If you have any common acquaintances with this collaborator, they might also be able to give you some idea as to what is going on.

Normally I'd wonder if there is some involuntary reason for lack of communication - illness, personal problems, death, spam filters - but here it sounds like you've ruled those out.

Regardless of what initially caused the breakdown, I don't think your strategy of "weekly emails/calls for a year" was a good one.  I would probably send a maximum of about three messages / calls, with longer periods in between each, and the last one being an ultimatum of sorts: "if I don't hear back from you by date X, then I am going to do Y" (where Y could be stopping work on the project, or removing their contributions and proceeding, or whatever).  And then if they don't respond, you do Y, and move on with your life.  Persistence can be a virtue, but in this case I'm reminded of the saying about how insanity is when you keep doing the same thing and expect different results.

Another tip for the future is to have multiple projects going on with multiple different collaborators, so that if one of them falls apart (either for scientific or interpersonal reasons) you still have some publications.


How to check and correct editorial changes to a manuscript post-acceptance? A journal which accepted a paper of mine has made some alterations to the text of the paper as part of their editing process.  They sent me the edited version for approval, and I discovered that at least some of these changes are erroneous (for instance, one of the changes included a typo, and another was changing the spelling of a technical term incorrectly).  I asked for a list of all the changes made, and was told that this was "too messy" (I assume because the alterations to the text are mixed in with the changes to the formatting of the paper, which is a more standard part of the editing process).

At this time the journal is waiting for me to approve/make changes to the final proof before publication.

My question is how I should deal with this situation.  I feel like I have an obligation to be responsible for the contents of a paper published in my name.  (Though, if I'm mistaken about this, that would be a helpful answer.)

I can think of a few solutions, ranging from the tedious (compare the PDF files line by line to identify the changes myself), to the demanding (insist on a list of changes anyway), to the passive-aggressive (either withdraw the paper or add a sulky footnote disavowing responsibility for the unknown changes to the paper).  These all have problems, so I'd appreciate more constructive ways to approach the situation.

I've run into bad editing situations like this. In these cases, I've gone through the paper line by line, with a fine tooth comb. Yes, it is painful, but it is a  good idea even if the journal editors aren't obviously screwing up. (This can get doubly horrible if you have complicated formatting in your paper.)
You should bear in mind whoever is doing this is unlikely to actually understand what you are writing, and my experience of people doing this sort of thing is that they can be well-meaning and not too bright, so they can take it upon themselves to "correct" your manuscript, while not understanding what they are doing. Additionally, if you give them last minute changes to the paper, make sure to check they have applied them correctly. Are you the sole author? Can you get anyone else to help with this? It would make it less awful.

Your other ideas sound less viable. Asking for a list of changes assumes that there is someone there who actually knows what those changes are. My experience is that journal staff are often amazingly technically incompetent, and probably have never thought of using version control for example. though I'd love to hear about the exceptions. But you can certainly try to insist.

Your passive-aggressive ideas just sound bad. You don't want to withdraw your paper over an issue like that. And if there are errors in the paper, they will reflect badly on you, and nobody else will care.

At times I've thought someone should start a site like ratethisjournal.org where people could discuss their experiences dealing with different journals.


Using acronyms as paper keywords I know that keywords do not matter that much any more, however they are still required by some conferences and journals. Is it a good idea to include acronyms in the keyword field that are not self-explanatory or should they be expanded instead?

Example: People might have heard of EU or NATO and know what the abbreviation stands for, but a few non-experts would guess what a "DoS attack" means, before explained in the paper. Should it be written as "Denial of Service attack" instead?

The intent of keywords is to aid in indexing so that your article can be easier to the reach of people who search for specific topic (DoS in your example). Hence, bear in mind the people whom you are trying to reach when selecting the keywords.

Certain journal publishers, such as IEEE, have a complete list of keywords you ought to follow. These lists are often updated to catch up with the technological trends of the time. It would be better to check for such a list with your publisher.

If you cannot find such a list, check out the papers that are published in the journal you wish to submit the manuscript in. Search for papers in your topic and see what sort of keyword they used that is similar to yours to get a better idea of what to include in your keywords section.


Israel and the Bologna Process I am just curious. Israel is not a part of Bologna Process.

So, I have two questions:

Why was Israel rejected a membership in Bologna process?
How is an Israeli PhD evaluated in Bologna member countries?

Why was Israel rejected a membership in Bologna process?

My understanding is that it's a formal matter:

  Israel's initial application to the Bologna process was submitted in January 2007. The application's re-submission in 2008 was rejected. The rejection appears to rest on formal-political grounds: non-European states cannot sign the Bologna Declaration and join the process; they may only observe the process and its implementation

The rejection was likely based on the 2003 Berlin communiqué, which states that a country needs to be a signatory of the European Cultural Convention to be eligible to join in the Bologna process:

  Countries party to the European Cultural Convention shall be eligible for membership
  of the European Higher Education Area provided that they at the same time declare
  their willingness to pursue and implement the objectives of the Bologna Process in their
  own systems of higher education.

This means that it's mostly members of the Council of Europe (not to be confused with the European Union) that have joined the Higher Education Area. There is a short list of exceptions, but Israel is not one of them.

How is an Israeli PhD evaluated in Bologna member countries?

That's a rather broad question... I'd say that an Israeli PhD would usually be viewed quite favorably, when awarded by a university of international repute. However, exactly how a foreign degree will be treated is going to depend on the Bologna member country in question, and the specific degree (e.g. medical degrees tend to be highly regulated). Usually it's down to the specific university/employer to evaluate your degree. Notably, Germany is rather strict when it comes to recognition of foreign degrees, but according to aeismail's answer here, Israeli PhDs are recognized as fully equivalent to "Dr." in Germany.


What is done about academics who do not do research anymore, or who teach badly? There are two loosely related questions here:

What is done about academics who do not do any research anymore?
What is done about academics who teach badly enough that it shows up?

I insist that I am asking what is done, in your department or institution (or in your country if it is uniform). I'll ask a separate question about what should be done. I would also like to distinguish between status (e.g. if you are talking about tenured faculty, please say so), and I am mostly but not only interested in tenured faculty.

Added: implicit in the question, as was mentioned in an answer, is the way an institution measures the research and teaching activities. Answers are welcome to describe the way these are measured to decide whether to take action, but please stick to what is actually done.

To give a little context, from 2009 there are recurring discussions about the teaching duty of academics in France, and whether it should be adapted to their achievements. I would like to have a broader view of the various answers actually given around the world to this issue.

The answer to both your questions will, from my perspective, be "not much". So this answer describes the view from my local point.

As a basis, university positions in my realm are teaching positions, 70% teaching and 30% for admin, personal development and research. The 30% is very quickly consumed by everything but research. On top of that one can "buy" oneself out of teaching so that the research time essentially is based on soft money. If you do not do research well, then no money comes in and your teaching load increases towards the 70%. So as long as you do your job in some way there is no mechanism for "correcting" a lack of research. On the other hand senior academics often get involved in higher and higher level administrative work at university, governmental, etc. level so a lack of research as such may be replaced by benefits gained in other ways. But, basically, a lack of research simply means teaching more.

If your teaching is very poor there is not much that can be done. Employment laws are very strong. The only way to sack a person would be if they, for example, drink at work, or blatantly refuse to accept orders from the "boss" (head of department etc.). It is also possible to remove someone if it can be shown that there is no need for whatever profile the person was employed under. I really cannot provide a detailed description of employment laws here but they make sacking people a difficult way out. Persons failing with teaching will most likely first be placed to do other duties. I have experience with one such person and it is hard to find tasks where this person can function and contribute.

So the "not much" is largely explained by employment laws in "my" case. The problem cases, which do not easily contribute in alternative ways, will cause lots of work for the department to find ways in which they can be made productive to the department. This will be successful in most cases but not so in the odd case.


How will my CLEP credits be viewed? I have taken 12 credits total in CLEP (College Level Examination Program) exams on order to bypass some general education requirements in humanities and basic sciences. I am in a program majoring in Physics and Engineering with a minor in Geosciences at a well-known state university.

My question is: How will my CLEP credits be viewed academically (i.e. when apply for grad school)? By potential employers? Will they be considered an asset or will they be seen as an inferior source of credits?

No one is going to care about your CLEP credits for general education courses.  Your grades in major courses, your standardized test scores, letters of recommendation, and any research experience that you might have are for more important.


How to find a new PhD advisor if relationship with current advisor is not working out? Currently I am not in a good relationship with my research advisor and I do not think it will be good as previously. So I decided to change my research advisor if it's possible. Would you guide me how I can find another research advisor? Is it possible to have two PhD advisor?

If you feel you must change your adviser, it is essential that you speak to the adviser before discussing the possible change within anyone else in your department.  It is best to be as honest as possible, since usually advisers are experienced in working with students, and do not appreciate an explanation that might appear ingenuous.  Also, your request could reflect poorly on your adviser if you speak to someone else in your concentration.  I would sit down and carefully make a plan of action to use in bringing up the subject. In addition, try to learn as much about your adviser as a person. For example, is he or she vindictive, intolerant, considerate, etc.  That will help you frame the way you approach the subject.


How to reference the results of Kaggle and other similar competitions in an academic paper? I'm working on a topic in machine learning, and along with formal published journal and conference papers, there are some different approaches which have yielded decent results in Kaggle - but these aren't published in any formal way, the top results are just listed on the kaggle leaderboard and the approaches are described in the discussion section of the competition.

On one hand I feel my review would be incomplete without brining up these approaches, yet I have no idea how to reference them?

On the other hand, I wonder if the lack of rigor that's typical when solving a Kaggle problem (lots of ad-hoc stacking and feature engineering,...) means the results can't be used as a reference anyway?

I have cited these resources before in academic work. Usually I cite them in a general and holistic way, not a specific way.

  Several of the results presented in this paper were inspired by the discussion and resources on the Iowa Housing Project contest on Kaggle.com [citation with URL]. These resources were invaluable in determining a new approach to fitting a random forest model as found in this work.

I would avoid citing specific solutions, as these tend to be transient and informal. Such generalities as the one I've given above provide you with a blanket cover for any code which might resemble code on Kaggle. Citations are usually done for two main purposes:

Provide attribution and recognition for a researcher.
Provide insight into the research processes of the author of the paper.

The anonymity and changing nature of resources on a site like Kaggle make it very hard to track citations attempting to accomplish the first purpose. Thus a general citation will at least give insight into how you wrote the paper and what though processes you went through.


How can I know if my thesis has enough and good results for a PhD? So I am doing a PhD for nearly 3 years now. I am self-funding my PhD, and I think I already have enough work for my PhD (in Mech. Engineering).

I have 4 papers already published in ISI and Scopus conference proceedings, and one journal paper submited. Apart from that, I have another 2 conference papers published.

In my country I am able to defend a thesis without a supervisor. I am thinking of dropping out and doing this due to the fact that my supervisor claims he needs 2-3 years to review my thesis.

How can I know if my thesis has enough quality and results quantity? Any tips on how to evaluate that? I would like to drop only when I have enough results. Or is there any thesis review service?

Programs vary in their requirements but I know of places where it takes a minimum of 4 years no matter who you are. If your fast, you sit and wait just because nobody can finish until they have been in the program x number of years.

I do not know if this is how things work at your institution. Given your track record and brisk publishing ability you might be moving too fast for your advisor and the tradition of the institution. His comment of taking 2-3 years might be an indirect way of saying "slow down" and "who do you think you are?"


How to describe the relation between a course instructor to his teaching assistant? How do you describe the relation between a course instructor to his teaching assistant? Is he the "teaching supervisor" to his TA? This is encountered during PhD application. Thanks!

It sounds like the question is that you need to fill in the "In what context have you known the applicant" box on a PhD recommendation letter.

If this is the case, then, for this particular point, I would not list "research supervisor," since this is clearly a teaching situation. However, "student" also doesn't make any sense. So, if there's no specific option which clearly satisfies this, I would check off the "other" box, fill in "teaching supervisor," and then explain the relationship clearly in the text of the recommendation letter itself.


Are book reviews peer-reviewed? Are news articles peer-reviewed? A couple of simple questions:

Books are not peer reviewed in general. Are book reviews that appear in academic journals peer-reviewed? Since they represent personal opinions, I would think they cannot be peer reviewed.
What about news articles? For example, journal Nature has various short news focus and research highlights that discuss other peer-reviewed research articles in a broader perspective. Are those peer-reviewed? Due to time pressure, I would think it would be difficult to peer review these in time.

Book reviews, opinion pieces, and news articles are generally not peer reviewed.  That's not to say there's no review at all: editors read and approve these contributions, and they may request changes before publication if they feel it is necessary.  It's even possible that an editor would ask for an opinion from a third party.  However, peer review (by an external expert) is not a standard practice for these sorts of articles.

  Books are not peer reviewed in general.

Books can be an intermediate case.  Acquisitions editors often solicit external reviews of book proposals or manuscripts, to decide which ones to accept and how they should be revised.  However, you are right that the level of review is generally not as comprehensive or detailed as it is for journal articles.


How can I publish my thesis? I have a written thesis, as my Final year project. I have submitted in university.

but now i want to make it professionally mine.

I want to publish it some where but i don't have such kind of experience before. I am total Rookie in this field.

Any Expert Opinion?

Note: Thesis in About "Handwriting Recognition "

Publishing the thesis "as is"

Your first option to to publish the thesis as it is now, without any modifications. This is usually the easier thing to do. Assuming your thesis in in PDF format, you can just upload it to your own website. Another option would be to upload it to a repository such as figshare.com, where it will also be assigned a DOI and it will be easier for people to cite (and discover?).

Making a journal article out of it

This option will be harder, but will also probably benefit you much more. I'm assuming that you know how a journal article looks like, so now your job is to make it look like one. The technical aspects may be challenging at first, but they are pretty straightforward. Every journal has a "guide for authors" section where they instruct you exactly how and where to submit the article. What format to use, how to draft the figures, what citation format to use, etc. If you are not sure which journal to publish to, I suggest that you look on the citation list of your own thesis and see which journals published articles similar to yours. One of the reasons that this option is harder is because you have to convince the editors and reviewers of the journal that the article is novel, important, well written and worth publishing. The article will be subject to peer review which will require additional time and effort from your side. It is a lengthy process and can take several months.


PhD four years ago; can I publish a paper from PhD work without my supervisor's name? I did my PhD 4 years ago. I was not comfortable with my guide but I concentrated on my work, and I successfully completed the PhD. But I published a little work with his name as correspondence author. But now I am in good position in another country, so I need to publish my PhD work without his name as co-author. If I publish a paper of my PhD work without my supervisor's name, what will be happen? Are there any legal problems that will be raised?

You have left at least two important things unanswered:

Has your supervisor contributed to your work? (How contribution is measured depends on the field you are working in, it could be through "real" intellectual contribution, feedback, funding, ...)

  But now I am in good position in another country so I need to publish
  my PhD work without his name as co author.

Why do you need to publish without his name as a co-author?

  If I publish a paper of my PhD work without my supervisor name, what
  will be happen? Is there any legal problems will raised?

If he has contributed to your work, there may be several legal problems such as   fraud or copyright infringement.

If you are sure that he has not contributed in any way to your thesis (which is unlikely) then you are fine to publish on your own. Otherwise you should talk to him and ask him if he thinks he has made a significant contribution and wants to be your co-author.


Including many pages of serialization code and generated source code in Master's thesis? I'm working on my Master's thesis in Computer Science. Shortly, I am "drawing" a diagram, which is then serialized and from the serialization I generate some source code. So, my question is not about the code of my application, but about the code generated by it. I think we can call it the result of my app.

I want to include an example of what output (source code, although I will also include the intermediary serialization) has my app for a certain input (a diagram). I mention that this would mean many pages, maybe a total of 7-10. Should I include this in the part related to the results or maybe in an appendix? Or is there a more suitable place? Or should I not include anything at all?

Short answer: put your code in public repo, and cite the repo in your paper.

Long answer: Any academic document you produce is supposed to be readable and useful to your readers. Try to put yourself in a reader's shoes and imagine how you feel reading through a 7-page long autogenerated code? Is is a pleasant or useful experience that you would like to repeat one day?

The modern technology allows us to use much more than just a text on the paper to present our research outputs. Although a short pieces of code may be extremely useful and appropriate in textbooks or some articles, the long code and auto-generated code really does not belong to the paper. It should be kept in a public repository, where it really belong, and used as a working example, which people can download, modify and execute, not just enjoy it aesthetically in a pdf file.


How to get students engaged in more basic topics in programming? I have been teaching various subjects in programming for a couple years. What I struggle with most is getting the students engaged in the basics - the first few lectures.

For example, it's simpler to come up with a design pattern or a hands-on project when you are talking about intermediate or advanced subjects like database connectivity, security, networking, and so on. There's so much more to work with in those later topics. Where I have trouble is with the absolute basics - the data types and basic logic statements. It's hard to think of a sample project that is simple enough to build without getting too advanced too quickly, but still enough of a challenge to get them experience with the basics.

I get a lot of comments from students saying that they learn the material better when there is a hands-on project to do, yet for something as simple as data types, this is difficult to come up with.

Class Setup: It is a professional setting and I have been given two different formats to use. One format is an hour lecture with an hour lab or coding exercise afterwards, once a week, and the other is a condensed workshop format where students watch videos on their own about the material and then they come to a workshop for Q&A about the video content, and then we spend most of the time on a lab or exercise. The videos take the place of lectures, that way we have more time in class for in-person interaction and Q&A during hands-on project work. The workshops are two hours long, and take place every three weeks, and the videos they watch cover material from three of the subject units from the standard format.

Class Scope: As for the class topics, the class is on Java and we go from the very beginning, primitive data types and logic, for those who have never used Java or even studied programming, then we move on to object oriented design, logging and string processing, collections and streams, working with input/output, exception handling, working with tools like Eclipse and Maven, writing test code, and by the end of the class we go through database operations, security and threading, web services, and more advanced language topics like generics and lambda expressions.

Audience: The audience varies pretty widely but everyone has at least a bachelor's degree in a technical field, most of them in computer science or CIS. It is as varied as your average IT workplace would be.

Does anyone have any ideas, or know of a coding project (of any size) that would be effective at helping students grasp the more basic subjects (like data types, language syntax, and logic), and yet interesting enough to keep them engaged and want to finish it?

EDIT: As suggested by eykanal, I reverted this question to its original form which is specific to computer science. I understand that when a question concerns graduate level pedagogy as this does, it is still on-topic.

EDIT2: I've added more information about the class setup and audience that I typically work with.

We basically made a one dimensional battleship game just to start with, then converted it to 2D and talked about data types and arrays and such, then converted it to an object oriented design, then upgraded it to have saved games (for I/O and exception handling material), etc.

Create games that apply some basic concepts.  You'll need a progressive set of games.  Start out by setting up your game board (homemade is fine) and your paraphernalia.  Your student will prick up his ears right away.  Explain the basic concepts needed to play the first game.  The game should be exciting but quick.

Each set of paraphernalia should have a number of variant games that can be played with that set.

Suppose a game involves converting a decimal number to Base 2.  You don't need to explain in detail, prior to playing the game, WHY computer scientists are interested in Base 2.

Many games will involve rolling one or more dice and then doing something that requires applying some technique.

Example: each player will, on his turn, roll five 0-1 dice (each side shows either a zero or a one).  These five digits define a five-digit binary number.  Write down the number you've rolled.  Now figure out what that number is in Base 10.  Say the answer is 12.  Move your guy 12 spaces on the game board.  Set up your game board like a simplified Chutes and Ladders, to make it exciting.

Edit #1:
Responding to the new version of the question.  It is tempting to want to give students the background information needed before giving them a hands-on project, because from a teacher's point of view, that is the most efficient way for the learning to take place; but sometimes it's useful to throw something at the students and let them flounder a little.  Then you'll have their attention when you explain why something didn't work, and what's really going on behind the scenes.  Have you ever tried that?

Edit #2:
You could ask the students to program a simple game, and then have them try out their neighbor's program.


What to do when a manuscript is still under review after 14 months? withdraw? I have submitted a manuscript to a journal, but after 14 months they have not given me any answer while I have sent email to them many times. Now, What can I do?

(I only received  a revision 12 months ago, and after I sent the revise version of the manuscript, I have not received any response. Also, a mailed them many times to everyone who I can find his/her email,  but no response. It's current status is under review.)

I was an ejournal senior editor for four years. Although few of them are really professionally acceptable, there are numerous confounding factors that can cause a break between an editor and authors. These include unanticipatable reviewer declines, lingering sponsoring institution policy changes including threatened journal cancellations, journal management system breakdowns, and of course, gross editor mismanagement.  A submitting author should hold a journal to a published timeline (including any extensions the editor requests and the author formally accepts) and withdraw their manuscript quickly for resubmission elsewhere if that timeline or negotiated extensions) isn't being met. This withdrawal should be written (electronically is fine) with copies to the Journal editor AND the Department Head of the sponsoring department/institution. An acknowledgement from either is to be welcomed but not necessary to terminate the relationship and allow the author to move on. When resubmitting elsewhere, an author may be requested to submit evidence of previous submission termination. I only made this request once (out of 300 manuscript submissions) and it was willingly supplied.


Who should I ask to write a letter or recommendation I am applying for tenure track faculty jobs and postdocs.  I am setting up my letters of recommendation and I am struggling on who I should ask. I have one strong letter from my advisor, one decent letter from a professor but I am stuck on who I should ask for the third letter.  I think I have three options

Person A is someone I worked with recently and the work I did for them funded my PhD.  They are not a professor and do not have a PhD. This job involved a lot of practical work and could have led to some publications in journals (think higher ed research, while my phd is in statistics).  But it ultimately did not - we did have some conference presentations.

Person B is my Master's advisor from four years ago. They are a tenured professor- and could speak well of my work from four years ago.

Person C is another professor from my department but I don't think their letter will say a whole lot.

From the link below it seems like person B would be a better choice as they are tenured and familiar with research I have done. I have asked person A for a letter, and they unexpectedly sent it to me. While it was very complimentary - it seemed better suited for an industry job rather than an academic job.

Who should write a recommendation letter?

The two key criteria here are

Familiarity with your work (research, teaching, service). You want them to provide details for how promising your research is, how you would work with colleagues, how you'd teach and mentor students, and so on.
Familiarity with academic work (tenure-track or tenured professors > other kinds of recommendations). From the perspective of credibility, someone who is familiar with the positions you apply for will be more readily believed when they recommend you. Also, they'll be more likely to mention details that speak directly to the position you'll serve in.

Based on these items, person B would be best suited to provide a recommendation for you. They are familiar with your work from some time ago, and hopefully you've kept in contact enough that they'd like to provide a recommendation. (Writing them a precis or summary of your recent work will undoubtedly help, as they could also write at least a little about how you've performed since your Master.)

Person A's helpfulness would really depend on the position you apply to. A's letter is riskier because some hiring committees may question the applicability of the letter on the grounds you mention - it may make it look like you're more interested in industry work. Person C is right out - a generic recommendation letter does you fewer favors, as the impression might be, "Wow, that person really didn't like the applicant."

For other readers or for future planning: if you haven't had anyone observe your teaching, try inviting a letter writer to do that. Teaching may or may not be a central focus of the positions you apply to, but having someone able to speak more about your teaching may provide you with that third recommender if you only have two faculty members who have close knowledge of your research.


Is it unreasonable to expect students to read the lecture notes before attending the first class? The new semester will be starting in a few weeks,
and I will be teaching a course which starts on the first day of the semester.

The goal of the course is to teach students
how to use the R programming language to clean and analyze data.
I will teach the course using a flipped classroom format:

To save time (both my own time and students' time),
I will record video lectures and write lecture notes,
which I expect the students to watch or read before each class.
It should take the students about 1–2 hours to watch/read before class.
The class meets 1 time per week, for 3 hours at a time.
During the class time each week,
students will be in the computer lab,
where they will complete data analysis tasks on the computer.
During the class time in the lab,
students can ask me to clarify any questions they may have.

Question:
From the second class onward,
I will be expecting students
to watch the lecture videos and read the lecture notes before coming to class.
However, is it a good idea to have the same arrangement for the first class?
In other words, is it unreasonable to ask and expect students
to read the lecture notes for the first class
before coming to the first class?
My plan is to post the lecture notes online,
and to notify students that they should read the lecture notes
by making an announcement using the course LMS system.
(In my university,
students are automatically signed up to the course learning management system
when they register for the course.)

Some clarifications:

What types of students will be taking the course?

The course is a course for undergraduate students,
with most of the students are in their 2nd or 3rd year of study.
Is the course listed as a lab or as a lecture course?

The course is listed as a lecture course.
I am teaching in the business school,
where lab courses are extremely uncommon.
I believe that courses which are taught as lab courses,
say by teaching them in a computer lab,
are still listed officially as lecture courses.
Will I be giving the students too much work?

In my university, courses meet once a week, for 3 hours at a time.
My plan is to give students either some notes to read and/or videos to watch,
which they should do before class each week.
This should take about 1-2 hours of time each week,
which seems to me to be quite reasonable.
Students in my university take 5 courses a semester on average,
which is 15 hours of class time each week.

In my opinion,  yes it is unreasonable.

Disclaimer: I am a student in the Netherlands, different universities and countries might work differently.

In all the courses I've followed I can't remember a single one that expected me to prepare for the first class. Usually the first half of the first lecture of a course is dedicated to explaining how the course works, what is expected of you, and anything else related to organization. Most students, including myself, usually don't even register in the online environment where the teaching material is posted before the first lecture.

You could argue that maybe this shouldn't be the case, and that students should be more diligent. And naturally, it is up to you whether you want to take this view and potentially punish students who didn't prepare. Practically though, most students are probably just going to miss it, or skip it.

If you do decide to have students prepare for the first lecture, make sure to clearly note this in the course guide/emails/online announcements. And also note the potential consequences for students who do not prepare.


H-index: Any quantitative (or other) measures on how well h-index actually measures scientific productivity? I am wondering if there have been any sort of rigorous/meaningful study about how well an h-index measures the scientific productivity of a person.  I am wondering how much stock I should put into the h-index, both as a personal measure and a measure of those around me.

Besides the convincing argument in Moriarty's comment to the OP there is also a formal argument that the index is particularly meaningless. The Notices of the AMS recently published "Critique of Hirsch's Citation Index: A Combinatorial Fermi Problem" by Alexander Yong, see here http://www.ams.org/notices/201409/rnoti-p1040.pdf

Roughly: The h index is about half the square root of the number of citations...

More precisely: For an author with N citations to his paper, the h-Index always lies between zero and the square of N. Now assume that these citation are distributed on a number of papers and all partitions occur with equal probability. Then it turns out that the estimated h-Index is then about 0.54 times the square root of N. In the article it is quoted that Hirsch himself has observed that basically all h-Indices he looked at were in the range of 0.45 and 0.58 times the square root of N. Yong also states that, especially for the highly cited people in math, physics, computer science and statistics only very few people have an h-Index above 0.54 times square root of N (and they are never more that 5% above that). The article contains much more data but only for famous mathematicians such as Field's medalists or members of the National Academy of Science and it is really worth a read.


Lecturer giving automatic top mark to the first person to submit A friend of mine is studying biology at a UK university and told me about this situation that happened last semester.

An assignment was set on one of her courses, and as the deadline date approached, the lecturer sent out an email stating that the first person to submit their assignment would be guaranteed an automatic first (the top mark available).

She felt this was unfair (what if the first person to submit rushed their work and completed the questions poorly, yet were rewarded for their haste?) but due to the intimidating nature of this particular lecturer, she did not say anything.

My questions are:

Is rewarding the first submission purely because it was the fastest common practice in UK universities (or elsewhere)?

and

What can be done by the student to prevent this situation happening again?

This type of marking is a clear deviation from every set of marking guidelines I have ever seen. Intentionally introducing procedural irregularities is something that can get faculty in trouble. This is something that can and should be brought up to the director of teaching. If that fails you can talk to someone in the student union. You could also get in touch with the external examiners when they come to visit.

It is unlikely the director of teaching would reveal your name when discussing this with the lecturer. If you are really worried, drop a note in the DoT's mailbox with the module number, lecturer's name, and a description of the problem. The behaviour is easily verified so the DoT does not need your name to follow up. The problem with being anonymous is you will not know what happened.


Role of a Senior Editor I have submitted a paper to one of the IEEE journals. I had to choose a Senior Editor.
What is the exact role of the Senior Editor? As far as I know, the Editor-in-Chief assigns an Associate Editor who determines the reviewers but not sure about the role of Senior Editor. [Whom do typically people refer to by just "Editor"?]

Also in my cover letter, by mistake I mentioned the name of my chosen SE instead of the EiC. Should I contact the journal to modify it or just wait for their response?

Different journals are set up differently. Some journals have an editor-in-chief who assigns an associate editor who assigns a member of the editorial board. Others have the journal office assign an editor who assigns the reviewers. Yet others could let the authors choose.

It sounds like you've submitted your paper to a journal using the last model. My guess would be that the chosen editor will be the one handling your paper (unless she declines). So don't worry about it and let the process run its course.

About the roles of all these editors, the word "editor" has many possible meanings and it's not really possible to tell without insider information what everyone does. Editor-in-chief is generally the highest-ranking position, and is responsible for everything published in the journal, but beyond that anything goes. "Managing editor", "Senior editor", "Consulting editor", "Assistant editor", etc - they could all be doing the same thing. It all depends on how the journal is set up.

Finally, about the salutation, I wouldn't worry about it. Chances are the SE will be reading your cover letter. If it's the EiC (or journal office) reading it instead, they're not likely to take offense.