Do citations of an edited volume of which I wrote one chapter count towards my own bibliometric indicators? I recently noticed that an edited volume of which I wrote one of the chapters is picking up quite some citations. Since the citations are of the entire edited volume, naming only the editors of the book, I wonder whether these citations also "count" for me?

I am wondering if those citations of the entire book can be added to my total citation count (and calculation of H-index etc)?

Let's split this into two different questions: 1) should citations of a "collection" book count as citations of an individual chapter in said book, and 2) will these citations count in any particular database.

Considering the first question, I can see an argument for and an argument against whether such citations should count.  In favor of counting, your work clearly is part of the collection, and if the collection has "citable quality" then your work is likely to contribute to that in some way.  Opposing this is the fact that "collection" books where each group writes a chapter independently are generally completely lacking in unity as a scientific work.  From what I have seen, citing such a book is tantamount to saying, "a bunch of people are working in this area."  I thus view a citation of the book as essentially equivalent to citing the ubiquitous "introductory review" chapter where the editors explain their vision of the field, then try to map that onto the collection of chapters they ended up with.  In short, I think it typically should not count as a citation of individual chapters.

For the second question: will citation databases agree with me, or will they count a citation of the book as a citation of you?  Well, that depends on just what sort of secretive sausage-making happens to be going on inside a particular database at a particular time.  From my personal experiences, though, I've seen chapters being treated separately, and the book as a whole being treated as a separate creation by the editors.  Take heart, though, that often means the editor's introduction will count as a citation for you!


How to encourage administration to handle plagiarism? I obtained my PhD about five years ago and immediately took up a postdoctoral position at a national lab in Japan to continue my research in computer engineering.

Over those five years I worked with the person who is now my supervisor, and trusted him in the same way I would trust any ordinary person, only to learn (too late!) that my trust was misplaced.

After working on a large project of his for about two full-time years, he forced
me to "leave the project". Now that the large project is nearing completion, I have since discovered that he has started to present my ideas and my work as his own.

The administration vacillates between feigning ignorance and admitting there is a problem but then claiming that they are powerless to do anything about it.

What can I do? What should I do - and why?

It is harder to deal with plagiarism in oriental countries than in the western world. It's even harder when your employer is a national lab.

To answer your question, how to encourage the administration to handle plagiarism?

There is something you need to know (I suspect you already know it to some extent), orientals tend to treat their faces much more seriously than anything else. This is the key.

Things may not be that serious as you would think. So far, he only presented the idea and the work as if they were his. But I agree that it's a bad sign. You need to deal with it as soon as possible before he goes any further.

Edit (I would like to argue that we do not have sufficient information to tell if plagiarism will happen or already happened.)
 End of Edit

From what you described in the comments, your supervisor seems to have personal issue with you. You might have some conflicts with him without you even knowing it. The key word face is the most probable reason I could think of. There is probably some cultural thing buried somewhere you would need to figure out if you want to resolve it. It may not be that serious as you think, could be just misunderstanding.

There is some different thinkings between oriental and western world. In the western world, people take individual ownership for what they think and do. In the oriental world, some tend to think the ideas and the works are products of the whole team/group. Thus, the head of the group would present the idea and the work as the head of the group. This could be construed as plagiarism in the western world

You said they are powerless to do anything about it. This is probably due to that thinking. I must say that changing a culture takes huge efforts and long time. If you want to talk to them to encourage them to handle plagiarism, you need to

  Talk to them politely, professionally and discreetly.


Introducing similar topic in two papers I've already published a paper on a topic (let's call it topic A). In that paper I reserved a chapter/section right after the introduction to introduce a topic C that is important to understand before presenting my research and results in the subsequent chapters.

Now I've started on a new paper on a different topic, topic B, but still related to topic A. The paper still requires the readers to have some knowledge of topic C I introduced in the beginning of the previous paper.

The readers of my second paper are not necessarily interested in my first paper, so should I:

Keep a section/chapter to re-introduce topic C? And in that case, I feel I can't just copy-paste the same text.
Just reference to the topic C chapter in the previous paper and skip it as a chapter in the new paper.

I feel like I should keep a chapter for it, but modify it to be adapted to the new paper. But still most of the information will be exactly the same.

Any suggestions for what would be appropriate to do?

(This is regarding an engineering field.)

Topic C is seemingly a prerequisite to topics A & B, therefore topic C must be introduced in papers that deal with topic A, B or both, to ensure that such papers are self-contained. That said, if topic C is standard, then there's no need for an in-depth introduction and a citation to an introduction will suffice.

It is unclear whether the introduction to topic C in the context of topic A will be the same as such an introduction in the context of topic B, because different aspects of topic C will be relevant. So, some differences between introductions are possibly when topic C is introduced in the context of topic A and when topic C is introduced in the context of topic B.


In experiments involving study participants, why are some studies allowed to only have a small number of test subjects? I noticed that in my field, studies involving testing with human subjects often only show a small number (N>=10) of them. While I understand that researchers are often limited on funding and time, I always thought studies like that would require a certain minimum of subjects far greater than that.

Different sources I found (e.g. this one p.3, this sample size calculator, or Wikipedia) seem to support that impression.

My field is audio signal processing, and the studies that caught my attention were about speech intelligibility, hearing comfort and other measures related to human hearing.

My question is:

Why do some studies only involve a small count of subjects when statistical theory suggests a high number of participants is required to make meaningful assertions?

(I assume that there is something I missed or something that got mixed up in my head, and I'd really like to find my error)

Although large samples produce more robust results, small samples are not completely devoid of usefulness - they're just more likely to be wrong. As long as the reader keeps this in mind, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with publishing these small-sample studies.

Further, sometimes you just cannot get enough samples to make an assertion with confidence. Examples:

GW170817 was a one-of-a-kind neutron star merger event. Since the rate of neutron star mergers isn't well-known, one could easily wait another five years and not get another sample (plus you'd need hundreds of samples to make the kind of statements you're looking for).

The Berlin Patient - there's no cure for AIDS. Even if this single case were a fluke, it's still worth reporting since it's a signpost telling researchers where to look.

Habitability research - The question of whether aliens exist captures the public imagination. Like it or not, we have to approach the problem from what we know, and we know only one planet with life (i.e. sample size of one). You could of course just decline to work in the field until we've discovered several hundred alien civilizations, but then you could be waiting forever. Plus with no idea what to look for, observational astronomers would have a much harder time finding these civilizations.


Leaving a Graduate Program in a Polite and Professional Manner I'm a first-year PhD student and I plan to leave my current program in order to transfer to another program next year. If possible I will also ask for a master's degree from the program. I am looking for advice on how to bring up the issue with the graduate director in a manner which doesn't "burn any bridges;" I do not want to leave the salty impression that I am deeply unhappy about their program. Maybe I'm just overthinking the issue.

The approach which I'm considering is to just be honest as possible:

The program does not match my interests well because there is very little presence in my primary field of interest. I have searched thoroughly. I do not yet have an advisor.
Some secondary factors are also marginally involved, for instance I have felt suffocated with the general location and climate, and moreover I would like to move closer to my family.
I've gotten admission to a program which matches my interests and location preferences significantly better, and they will give me credit for the work I've done here.

However, I believe that the issue should be handled delicately and non-bluntly for the reason that my current program has given me quite a bit of flexibility and awards, I finished my exams, and I want them to give me a masters. I don't want to be rude or dismissive of these.

So what would be a good approach?

This goes the same for those leaving jobs for similar reasons- the more you can explain how there are personal reasons for your transfer and do not emphasize that there are deficits with your current program, a professional academic will understand even if he or she is disappointed.

Remember that not all academics and administrators are always professional and that despite your best efforts he or she might not be understanding. However, being professional and cordial is the best you can do to take the high road.


How to decide which university to study for PhD I have seen many different research students that want to apply for a PhD or MSc program but they are so nervous about their choice. Sometimes they pay most of heir time, reviewing the websites of the universities, profiles of the professors and do their best to gather information and choose the best PhD program or university to apply for PhD but they are still nervous about their choice.
Some students only think that the universities with higher rankings are best to apply for and they miss some middle-ranked universities which are so good at their majors. This way, their chance to apply for those high-ranked universities is so low and they may lose two or three years preparing and applying for those university. While in the same period of time, if they had applied for that middle-ranked universities, they had higher chance of applying and in this period of three years, they would have finished most parts of their PhD program.
My question here is about these things:

To what extent a person should be realistic in choosing a university for his PhD program. A normal student may be more successful in a middle-ranked university than a higher-ranked university.
I think that sometimes, normal students lose their confidence when they study at high level universities, while; if they study in good middle-ranked universities, their academic output may be much higher and they will be a more successful person.
Does it worth that a person that has high chance to be accepted in a good second ranked university, wait for two or three years to modify his curriculum vitae and apply for a first level university?
Which one is more acceptable and appreciated? A top student at a second ranked university or a poor and not so much successful student in a very good ranked well-known university?

I can not decide in this period of each persons' life, how he should make decisions. This also applies to other circumstances. For instance, working in good company with lower income or working in a not big company with higher level of income. Making clear how a person should make decisions like this may be so much helpful to me.

Choosing a place to do a PhD is a hard task, but one that needs to be completed before you start. I would call your attention to three main points that you need to consider to choose well.

First point is alignment of research interests, methods, and schools of thought. Different research groups have distinct ways of thinking even when looking at the same research topics, therefore, it is important to carefully look whether you fit or not with the research they do, and how they position themselves towards that research. This you can see in the research papers that are published (or not) by them.

Second point is the personality and ways of working of the professors and colleagues. The time you spend in a research group will shape the way you think about and approach research. In some way, you will level your conduct through the examples of the ones around you. For this reason, I would advise you to look for a group that works in an professional, collaborative, open, and ethically sound way (in your opinion). This you can discover by talking with other PhD students and with people that used to be in that institution.

Third point is what you want to do next. If staying in academia is important for you, it would be important that the group publishes in top venues in the area. If going to industry is a path you would prefer, maybe you should look for a place that already has many connections with companies, or that enables you to do some part of your studies while working in a company.

These points are the most important for me.

I do not think that you have to be in a top-5 university to be successful during or after your phd. In the end, it is all up to you. Of course the environment helps, but you will be the one driving your papers and manuscript, so it is up to you.

Top students will be top everywhere, but it is important that they have people around them that can recognize and foster their talent. Look for someone that understands what you want to do and that trusts you from the beginning to take it to another level.

good luck!


What words to describe "revisions" and "resubmission" to distinguish revise and resubmit versus submission to new journal following rejection? This question was motivated by a desire to have a clean set of terms to describe the life cycle of a manuscript from draft to publication from the perspective of the author.

I could say:

  I am "revising" my paper and "resubmitting" it.

Obviously, this could apply to (a) the situation where you have submitted a paper and been given the option to submit an updated manuscript (i.e., a revise and resubmit); or (b) you received a rejection letter and you are improving the manuscript with the intention of resubmitting the manuscript to a new journal.

I was wondering what concise language can be used to distinguish these two types of revising and resubmitting?

I personally tend to distinguish these words as follows:

"Revise" and "Resubmit" are reserved exclusively for updating a manuscript with the same journal.
Shifting to another journal is "Editing" and "Submitting again"


How to respond after co-authors revise rejected paper without informing first author? As we all know, it is common to re-work a rejected paper to improve the shortfalls of the paper.

Suppose one is first author on a paper, and it is rejected. Following this,

the other co-authors make some modifications/updates to the paper, and don't inform the first author
one co-author claims first authorship on the revised work, as he/she has done more work after the rejection

How should the first author respond after finding out about this?

A lot depends on the particulars of the situation, but the principles of academic honesty are pretty straightforward here, and an answer for the particular situation can be derived from those principles.

The basic principle is that every involved author in a work has a stake in that work and the consent of all authors must be obtained before a work is submitted.  Most journals actually explicitly ask about this, and the better run ones will send email to every author to inform them so that they have a chance to object.

Somebody who was once author, however, can become uninvolved in one of several ways:

The author may object to the nature of the paper and explicitly withdraw from authorship.
The author may stop fulfilling their responsibilities for authors, in which case they should be kept as an author but might have their position in the author list change based on how the manuscript continues to evolve.
The author may have had a minor role (e.g., in a many-author biology or physics publication), and choose to give blanket consent to whatever the primary authors believe is acceptable, rather than be involved in detail.

So the first thing to determine is, did the first author effectively drop out of their responsibilities?  As the lead author, a first author needs to discuss the fate of the rejected paper with the other authors in a timely fashion.  If the first author instead vanishes (e.g., changing positions and not staying in communication about the work), then it is entirely reasonable for the others to pick up the paper again.  The first author might or might not stay first then, depending on how the paper evolves, how much new experimental work is done, etc.  If there is a decision not to proceed, however, then anyone who changes their mind and wants to revise and resubmit needs to re-involve all of the authors again.

If it is the case that the others acted inappropriately, then the action to take depends on how important the paper is to the first author relative to the relationship with the other authors.  The range of options includes (from least to most bridge-burning):

Ask to be involved in further revision and authorship discussions (assuming the paper isn't already published)
Stop collaborating with the other authors (if the first author is aiming to be a career scientist, there will be many other papers with better collaborators)
Request a correction or retraction from the publisher

Scientists are people like everybody else, and have everything from stellar working relationships to innocent miscommunications to nasty misbehaviors.  Start from the assumption that there is an innocent misunderstanding, but if there is real misconduct involved, the best thing to do is to balance protection of yourself and warning of others as best fits your situation.


Is there any referencing style analyzer? As different journals and Conference proceedings have different reference styles, it is very much important to quickly identify the specific reference style they prefer.

To do this, is there any reference style analyzer which can analyze a given example reference style and give the name of the style?

Each journal will have a guide for authors that will specify the required reference style. That's the fastest, easiest and most reliable method.


Can I copy an image from another paper (that I am citing)? I am in the process of writing a paper on the results I have obtained recently. One of the steps where I have innovated is extracted from a paper published some years ago.

My idea for the paper was to compare the original method with my modifications and thus present the different results.

Is it generally accepted practice to simply copy the "results" image from the original paper (that I am extensively citing and discussing in mine)? Or should I somehow recreate it? (this last option is presenting some difficulties, as some implementation details* are not explicitely stated in the original paper and thus I cannot be 100% sure that my reproduction would be actually representative of what the authors originally did)

*: yes, we are speaking (also) about code

You have two different questions: one in your title, regarding coping an image, and another regarding the results.

Copying a figure:

It depends on the license of the paper. If it is appropriately licensed (as with a Creative Commons Attribution license), you generally can, as long as you indicate it. If it is copyrighted, you are in the grey area of possible fair use. In these cases, the safest option is to contact the copyright holders (usually the publisher) and ask for permission.

Another option is to contact the authors and ask them for the raw data itself, so you can plot it yourself (so you keep a constant style across the paper), or ask them to regenerate it for you.

Using results:

The results are not copyrightable, so you can freely use them. If Smith et al, 2007 report an accuracy of 91%, and you get a 97%, you can freely put the numbers next to each other.


How to spot a weak postdoc offer before you accept the position I would like to ask, how can you rule out some "weak" postdocs. I mean weak from a long term point of view - impact on your life, or career. For example, you can apply to positions where you will continue with the same methods you used in your current positions or you can apply to positions where you will learn entirely new skills. Or you can be the only one with your skills in the group etc.

What are the red flags to look out for in postdoc offers?

You should look at where your prospective superviser's students and postdocs end up after leaving them. Talk to these people if you know any of them. Also, look at the group publication list. Is the group productive? Do they have strong collaborators?

I have been told to use the postdoc to learn some new technique, or whatever. Your goal should be to make the most of what you already know. It's more important to improve your academic record than your knowlegde at this point. You will not be hired as a faculty based on what you know, but based on what you have published and where.

Having that in mind, try to see, given your current skill set, how good fit you are for that group and department. If you can collaborate with enough people, you'll get more publications. You need to have access in that department to people with similar background to yours. If that's not the case, you will be isolated, and your productivity will drop.

Some red flags I'm thinking about:

postdocs and students leaving before the end of their contracts,
postdocs and students ending up in poor positions after leaving,
not enough people in the group/department with similar background to yours,
poor publication record of the professor and postdocs compared to similar groups
lack of strong collaborators.


Submitting more than three letters of recommendation to a math PhD program I will likely be applying for PhD programs in mathematics. Several of the schools I intend to apply to state that they require ‘a minimum of 3 letters’. Presently, I have three solid letters from well known professors in my current institution, as well as a fourth letter from a professor from a different institution, with whom I’ve conducted research. Is it acceptable if I send four letters to these programs? Will it have any sizable positive/negative impact on the application? My main reason for sending the fourth letter, is because I feel it would highlight a specific research experience, and add credibility. Thanks!

The first criterion, of course, is that if a particular institution's application intsructions communicate that only three letters should be sent, then abide by that. For the ones that say "at least three" or the like:
To be honest, in practice it really depends on the internal details of each university's application storage system and how it lets reviewers view applicants' files—and this can vary wildly from place to place. At my institution, if you have four letters of recommendation, they will all be visible when I look at your file. In other places, their online portal might have specific spots for three letters and no more (I would hope such institutions would make it clear in their instructions that only three letters should be sent).
As someone who has reviewed graduate applications for nearly twenty years, I can tell you that if my file system allows me to see the letters, I will read all the letters if I am interested in an applicant. (Well, I probably wouldn't read ten letters … but certainly four.) If you have reasons to believe that the letters will offer complementary perspectives on your excellence, I would use them all.


Is it unethical to ask for homework help on StackExchange? Sometimes when I have been struggling on a problem set for a while, I'll post a question on StackExchange, openly acknowledge that it's homework, and ask for hints (not the full solution).  Typically people give good advice and help me think about the problem in several different ways, and I end up learning a lot by asking the question.

Now the thing is, we are probably not supposed to ask the Internet for homework help.  But in my classes it is perfectly acceptable to go to TA office hours, where most of them will tell me the entire answer instead of giving hints.  Often I've seen TAs present the solution on the blackboard in front of about 20 students (because all the students need help on the same question).  We're also encouraged to "collaborate" with other students, who will usually tell you the entire answer instead of giving minimal hints to help you along.

Is it unethical to ask for homework help on StackExchange given that I learn a lot more than I would using officially sanctioned methods?

(If it matters, I post on math.stackexchange, and this is for classes like real analysis and abstract algebra.)

This might depend on your university's policy on cheating and plagiarism.

For our university (though the precise details may vary from course to course), you are allowed to use StackExchange to help you to understand concepts, but you are not supposed to use it to help you solve assignment questions.

We tell the students that if there is any risk that they may have read an answer or some code or whatever that might have influenced their answer, then they need to cite it. With a proper citation, they cannot be accused of plagiarism. We may, however, ask the student to answer extra questions in such a case, in order to demonstrate their knowledge.


Can theory exposition be a thesis? I'm an undergraduate student majoring in math, and ,as my graduation condition requires, I'm planning to write a thesis, but will it be okay to just write an exposition of the theory?

For undergraduate studies, you do not need to have publishable papers. Hence, exploratory thesis it is fine if you understand and do all the calculations, and perhaps you can also explore implementations in numerical programs.


How to use MeSH Qualifiers in a PubMed search string? I want to know how I combine a MeSH term with a qualifier. How do I create a search string on PubMed with it. The exact human readable question would be: All publications with MeshTerm "Locomotion" specified by qualifier "Physiology" and all publications with "Locomtion" not specified by any qualifier.

I am interested in the MeSH term Locomotion. As a search string I would write locomotion[mh]. The MeSH Browser tell me that one of it the qualifiers is physiology.

I can not find the word Qualifier somewhere in the PubMed help or in the available search fields.
I thought it is a synonym for MeSH Subheadings. But it doesn't look like.

Please see this two search queries which in my understanding should return the same number of results.

Even Wikipedia is on my side and say that Qualifier and Subheading should be the same.

MeSH terms are divided into descriptors (or main headings) and qualifiers (or subheadings). Each descriptor can have zero or more qualifiers. A qualifier cannot exist without being attached to a descriptor.

The difference in the number of search results you have observed is because in your second search "locomotion/physiology" [mh] you are searching for entries which have the locomotion descriptor and physiology as a qualifier of the locomotion descriptor. In your first search "locomotion"[mh] AND "physiology"[sh] you are searching for entries with the locomotion descriptor and physiology as a qualifier to any of the MeSH terms attached to the entry.

For example PM28410594 is matched by your first search, but not your second.


Should I worry about a referee who recommended rejection being offended if my paper is accepted? After submitting a paper for review, I received a letter from the editors containing a negative report and informing me that their (editors') decision was to reject the paper. Although the paper was about six months with the referee, it was clear from the report that she did not read it, just had a quick look and wrote a report, full of typos, mistakes and speculations about what the referee thought was in the paper (as she didn't read it).

I wrote a letter to the editor saying that I agree with their decision to reject the paper and would not dispute it. But I also expressed my opinion of the report, because I think it might help to increase quality of the review process. I had no intention to get the paper reconsidered, and even started to prepare a slightly revised version to submit it to another journal. However, they have responded that they would give it to another reviewer.

Now this situation is quite uncomfortable for me: I imagine how the referee will feel if the paper gets accepted and appears in this journal. On the other hand, the referee should be well aware of the (poor) quality of her work, so maybe she will not care.

The question is: should I care?

No, you should not worry.  Referees offer opinions.  The actual decision to accept or reject a paper rests with the editor.  The referee may very well be offended by the editor's decision to ignore her opinion, but that's certainly not your problem.


My supervisor is trying to "steal" my collaborators: what can I do? I work as a postdoc in Prof. X's research group. I have my own funding and work on my own topics, which are related to X's interests. X is an expert in experimental work and I do simulations, on which X lacks expertise.

X largely depends on me for the simulation projects to progress, including doing the supervision of students working on computational topics, who X cannot supervise directly since he lacks the required expertise.

I have a very productive line of collaboration with a group of researchers who are world leaders in this particular topic. X has been somewhat involved in our joint papers through me, benefiting from high impact publications, although he has not contributed significantly. My collaborators are mostly interested in working with me because of the expertise I can contribute to their own.

Understandably, X is trying to minimize his dependence on me. At the same time, he wants to keep collaborating with the top team on the projects that I have been leading. So he's contacting them to write proposals together while keeping me in the shadows. I have no problem with this, everyone is free to work with anyone else, except that my collaborators seem to be assuming that this is just a continuation of the work with me, and that I am involved. Awkward situations have arisen where one of my collaborators has cc'ed me in a reply to X's request to write a joint proposal, assuming that I was involved in it, while I was totally unaware of what was going on (since X has not been in contact with me about this). Another collaborator with whom I talked to in person recently was also very surprised that X had not let me know about this proposal, especially because he's promising to continue the research that I am currently leading and which is based on my ideas, codes, etc.

Incidentally, I am preparing my own project proposal (of which X is fully aware) for the same call. I will be listing the top team as collaborators and some of the topics will overlap with X's proposal. Since we will be competing in the same review panel, I am afraid that the funding agency or the reviewers will discard my application on the basis that the work is going to be done on similar topics and with the same collaborators as X's project and, since X is a professor and has a stronger overall profile, X will be better at taking the project to completion.

I feel that, in his understandable effort to loosen his dependence on me, X is trying to steal my ideas and collaborators, and in the process reducing my chances to advance my career. Is there anything I should or could do to solve this problem, such as letting my collaborators know that X is purposely leaving me out of these proposals? Or should I just concentrate on writing the best proposal I can and hope that the panel with agree that I am the right person to do it (this is my current strategy)?

Leave this place immediately and find better support elsewhere.

As a postdoc you're independent and well-aware of it. You have your own network of collaborators, reputation. You know your job better than others. Nonetheless, some bureaucrat who depends on you is openly sapping your career, and you find that "understandable" and believe there's a friendly way around so that everyone is happy. I think you hold all cards there.

My advice to focus completely on networking and finding a new place. The situation will not improve. Make use of the time and resources you have now to take the best advantage of your freedom to move and communicate. Why not move closer to your collaborators? It's fairly easy finding another postdoctoral position nowadays, visas, etc. There's no point in holding such bad ground.

Networking will also naturally broaden your horizons, through revealing other career possibilities which steer away from academic parasites. Whatever you decide, just don't allow some parasite to win a game where you hold the cards.


How to verify academic history and degree? TL;DR: How does one verify the academic credentials (degree earned, date of graduation) of an individual without their permission or knowledge.

I'm trying to verify the academic history and degree of an individual. I'm new to verifying academic histories and achievements, so understanding the process and responses below would be very helpful to me (and likely others in the same situation).

The individual states he attended University Maryland University College (UMUC) form 1992 to 1995, and earned a MBA degree. Its public information and published in his Linkedin profile.

I attempted to verify though UMUC's alumni services. The alumni service did not respond to my emails or calls. Next, I called the registrar at the University and they instructed me to go to degreeverify.org. degreeverify.org directed me to the National Student Clearinghouse.

I placed an order for the verification with the National Student Clearinghouse. It cost me 10 or 20 dollars. I received a "Thank you" email from them and an email address to use in the future (degreeverify@studentclearinghouse.org).

I believe I am getting a run-around from National Student Clearinghouse. After a few days, I sent an email to degreeverify@studentclearinghouse.org requesting the results. National Student Clearinghouse responded back "The verification results you received came directly from the school and they based their research on the information you provided in your initial request":

I have not received results or an answer from UMUC or National Student Clearinghouse. Additionally, the National Student Clearinghouse stated I should "fax or email a copy of the students transcripts or diploma for verification [sic]". That's what I paid National Student Clearinghouse to do!

I used National Student Clearinghouse's website "Contact Us" page to request their phone number so I could speak with someone. In addition, I made the same request via email. I have not received a reply to the request for their telephone number!

I'm new to verifying academic histories and achievements, and I surely don't understand the run-around I am getting from UMUC and National Student Clearinghouse. My questions are:

Why won't UMUC provide me with a Yes/No answer to the Verify operation?
Why won't National Student Clearinghouse provide me with a Yes/No answer to the Verify operation?
Why won't National Student Clearinghouse provide me with a telephone number to speak with them?
Is this run-around typical for folks who verify academic history and degree?
Do I have any additional options to to verify the academic history and degree?

I'm beginning to wonder if National Student Clearinghouse is a legitimate service. I know National Student Clearinghouse is not BBB accredited. I discovered that after the run-around began.

Thanks in advance.

What you are trying to do is rather unusual.  In most cases where a degree needs to be verified (admissions, jobs, etc), the person doing the checking has the subject's consent, and normally the subject would just have the university send an official transcript.  In that case the university's "customer" is their own alumnus and they have some interest in being responsive.  In contrast, they have no particular incentive to be responsive to you, and so I'm not too surprised that the process they have is not particularly convenient.

That said, I don't see what you can do except to keep following up with NSC and using their support system.  Or, you could get your lawyer involved, and see if a letter from her can speed things along.

I would note that, while federal privacy laws allow universities to release "directory information" including dates of attendance and degrees, as far as I know, nothing actually requires them to do so.


How to deal with a lazy postdoc colaborator as a PhD student? I wonder how to politely handle the following situation as a PhD student. Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help you could provide.

I was working for almost one year in modelling some results on the work of another PhD student visiting us. He is supposed to be first author.

After a very hard and intensive work I got some positive results and we realized that part of his data was wrongly interpreted or wrong.

That student left time ago and returned to his home country and I sent him the results in order he could prepare a first draft. Aftersome times with no answers I wrote him again asking for the status of the draft but he had stopped because he was close to defend his thesis.

He became a doctor , continued in his lab, and I sent him the results again, as suggested by my supervisors.

After many times of asking him for a draft along several months he sent a document with many figures and almost no text or explanations. I've been kindly asking him to fill it with some information in order to work on something. However he has done anything for longer than 3 months. I feel he is not interested in publishing it anymore. He is always answering 'I will send you something'but no answers.

This work has been extending for almost 2 years already. Other co-authors and supervisors are tired of the situation but they seem not to care about. I have talked about this with the coauthors but not evolution has been observed. I am frustrated as it is been delayed so long and It is not my paper but my work. I am really worried.

Sometimes, when the expected first author of a publication abandons it, one of the others steps up to becoming the driving force behind the writing. If you understand the project well enough and care enough about the writing, that person might be you.

If you want to do this, you first need to talk to your supervisor and have them talk with the other supervisor. If they agree with the plan, then you don't have to wait for the non-writing author any more, but can go ahead with working on the writing yourself. Authorship order might or might not end up changing, but at least you'll be much more likely to end up with a paper.

Alternately, not all papers that are started get completed.  If it is not important enough to you to invest that level of time and effort, this might be one of those for you, and you may need to move on to completing and writing up your next project.


Are public lectures popular in USA? In Poland where I study, public lectures by professors from other universities are not common (maybe one or two lectures every semester in my faculty). I stayed one semester in USA as an exchange student. There were 2-3 public lectures every week in our department. It was surprisingly for me as many people even undergraduate students attend each lecture. More surprising, there were active discussions after each lectures, students asking questions and even follow the lecturer to nearby cafe to talk more about the topic. In Poland, a few people attend a public lecture. Some leave during lecture and some after lecture. A few remains for discussion and almost no one asks question.

Is it the regular practice in America that students actively attend public lectures as much as (if not more) than their classes? Even most courses I attended had a guest speaker in a session.

Public lectures are not generally required, but are one of the well-understood benefits of university education.  For most American universities, lots of interesting speakers come through and are widely advertised.  It's good for the university because it shows it's a place that such speakers find worthy of visiting, and for the faculty by giving them opportunities to interact and collaborate.

As for the students: if world-class speakers are showing up and talking about interesting things, why wouldn't students choose to attend the lectures that interest them?


Does TA experience for wide range of classes improve future job prospective? If other important factors (e.g. Research quality) are about the same, does an academic job* candidate with TA experience in many different upper division classes (e.g. Abstract algebra, real analysis and many other elective classes) have a better chance than a candidate with TA experience only in elementary lower division classes (e.g. Calculus 1 and 2)? How significant is this factor?

I'm currently one year into a math Ph.D. program and is mostly financially supported by TA work. During my first year my TA experience is limited to calculus 1 and 2 (single variable)-It's both the department's preference and my personal preference for a first year student. I'm wondering if it's a good or bad idea to keep it that way(I'll have choice either way). Does it worth investing some extra time to TA some more challenging classes?

*Here all post-doc. or faculty job, whether research or teaching orientated, are included, if your answer depends on the type of job, address it.

All else being equal, then more and more diverse experience is better. The problem is that all else will not be equal.

If you teach the same course over and over again, then that course will become better (up to a point) and you will have to invest less and less time in it. So you will probably get better evaluations and have more time to do other stuff like research, at the cost of having experience teaching a narrower set of courses. If you teach more diverse courses, you will show a more diverse experience at the cost of getting somewhat worse evaluations and less time for research.

However, in my field the differences between the two aren't that big: if you are new to teaching, you'll spent a lot of time preparing regardless of whether you teach that course the first, second, or third time. The improvement in quality will be there, but that does not necessarily mean that that will translate in better evaluations. The extend to which a more diverse experience pays off depends on what is expected in your sub-sub-sub-discipline. The person that is in the best position to advise you on that is your advisor.


Is there any difference between these two kind of researchers? I tried to ask this question on Physics StackExchange because it's about physicists but it wasn't the right section, anyway the argument can be extended to almost every subject.
I am studying physics at university in Italy but I spent some months in Sweden and I found some differences in the teaching method.
In particular, in Italy everything is essentialy based on theory, we study models, theorems and formal proofs, the exams are mostly oral, and we just see some appliations of what we study.
In Sweden it is different, there are less theorems, and everything is more applicative. There are exercises sessions but less 'critical thinking' (that's what I think).
Said that, I just wanted to ask if, in research, you can notice a difference between people with these two different academic backgrounds and if it influences their work/researches.
Are you more likely to become a theoretical physicist if you study in Italy (or any other uni with this teaching method) and less if you study in Sweden (or any other...)?
Please share your experience!
Thank you! :)
P.S. I am not judging if one method is better than the other, don't get me wrong

Some physicists teach more mathematics.  Some physicists teach more applications.  It's just a matter of university, teacher, and student preference.  Yes, the way you are taught will influence your career.
I do not think these preferences have anything to do with the country.  A large portion of physicists have experience with multiple countries.  And within a country, you will find quite a range of opinions about how to do things.


Is it okay to submit the revised manuscript well before the due date? Recently I received comments from two reviewers on my submitted manuscript as major revision. Both the reviewers have given a few major comments along with some minor comments. The major comments are something like this:

It is essential to analyse.
Please add some more explanation on this.
Please discuss with xyz method and check the difference in the results.
Why didn't you do it?

The due date is 45 days.

I finished the first 3 major comments in a week. However, I have planned to work on comment number 4 as my future research. I had also mentioned it in the manuscript before submission. But still one reviewer commented as "Why didn't you do it?" So I have explained little more about it (why am I skipping it here) in the revised manuscript.

Now my question is, can I submit the revised manuscript now? Isn't it very early i.e. 38 days earlier than the due date?

If yes, will it give a bad impression that I have another 6 weeks, still I am skipping comment number 4?

Note: The reviewer has not told me work on comment number 4. I am also not interested in including it in this manuscript.

Yes, it is fine to submit revisions early.
The timescale doesn't really come into it. Either the revised paper is good enough for publication, or it is not. The logistics of when you carry out the work and how long it takes are entirely up to you. The important thing is that, in your covering letter, you explain in detail why you have chosen not to follow recommendation 4.

In fact, submitting the revisions early could even benefit you. It will mean that the paper is fresh in the editor's mind, which could mean they are able to make an informed decision more quickly.

Note that if you did want to do number 4, but 45 days was not long enough, it would be very reasonable to contact the editor to explain this and ask for an extension.

(NB I don't quite understand what point 4 is asking, so it's possible there is some subtlety I am missing. This is Okay!! Why didn't you do it? What is "this"/"it" and what is meant by it being "okay"? I presume these are not the exact words that the reviewer used.)


Pretending pure math is applied math for grant funding It would be nice to make a case for funding pure mathematics projects strictly on their own terms, as good mathematics, but this is increasingly not the world we live in. Legislators and funding agencies want to see "useful" proposals, which puts anyone who does pure mathematics in the position of having to come up with (often tenuous) real-world applications for their work.

My question is: How do review panels perceive this practice? Do they really find largely hypothetical connections with applied sciences convincing? At what point does it become shameless BS that damages an application?

This won't be a direct answer to your query, but I hope will be useful advice. First, if you must do pure math and you must get funding to do it, then you have no option but to apply. If you don't apply, you don't get funded.

Next, being devious isn't going to help you and will likely be recognized, as you fear.

However, on some time scale, all mathematics is applied. The time scale may be long, of course. In my personal case, it took about thirty years for someone to find an application for my "beautiful" but extremely arcane dissertation to find application. I'd predicted that it would never be done. But thirty years isn't very long, so that doesn't help you directly.

You work in some subfield of mathematics, of course. It might be very narrow and it might be a currently popular subfield, or not. But it is likely that others in the same subfield, or a closely related one, have seen applications of their work to some problems. If you can learn what those applications have been, you have the basis for a statement that "Advanced work in X has been known to contribute to Y as evidenced by (citation)". That isn't devious, or phony.

But note that "applied" is actually a continuum, not a discrete thing. Pure is pretty far to one end of the continuum, but it isn't disconnected from the other. But it will take some investigation on your part, and I suspect that you are good at that sort of thing.


Can we change our field of study for masters in canada? I have a bachelors degree in electronics and communication engineering and am going for higher studies. I want to change my field to computer science for my masters. Is it possible to do that for masters in Canada? I've been working as a software developer for an year now.

Yes definitely. Your master's field doesn't need to be in the same field as your bachelors degree in Canada. Although some programs may have specific requirements. Looking at the University of Toronto's website for graduate school in computer science (https://www.sgs.utoronto.ca/programs/computer-science/) the requirements are:

"An appropriate bachelor's degree with a standing equivalent to at least a University of Toronto B+. Preference given to applicants who have studied computer science or a closely related discipline."


Citing work with a publication year in the future I am citing this publication in my thesis using the author-date citation format. The article is fully accessible, however the Journal apparently placed it into an issue that will appear next year. Therefore, the citation information (BibTex) says that the year of publication is 2017. I find it a bit strange to cite future work.

When citing research articles to which year should the citation refer to? The year it appears in the Journal or the year it appeared (online)?

Most journals take as formal publication date the date it appears on their printed version. The online version is considered a pre-publication.

Thus, despite how weird it may look, it is ok to cite an article from the future (as long as it is accepted and in press or the online preview). Journals with only online presence would not have this issue or the time span might be smaller.

What is probably important is to provide the DOI of the article (if available) as this will make it easier for people to find its online version before and after it has been published on paper.

Edit: Just to add that the citation and its details is decided/provided by the journal and not by you.


Is material produced for a course considered property of the department? I was asked last year to set up a completely new course, far from my expertise (say, you work on differential equations but they ask you to teach general relativity). The department did not give me much space/resources to do so but anyway I did it very successfully and on a very short notice (based on student's evaluations etc.)

Does the department have the right to take all the material I developed and give it to a new instructor, say next year?
Do they need my agreement and do I have the right to refuse to do so?
Can I take the entire developed course in, for example, a new institution in case I move away? Or the department can claim that it was part of my paid job so it is theirs?

On an ethical level I find it unfair that I had to put an insane amount of work only for the department to come and claim my work and give it "for free" to a new instructor. But I am not sure if legally I can do anything about that.
For what is worth, I am in an academic institution in the Netherlands. I am assistant professor (UD) and, according to the rules (at least in my institution) my job is not to develop new courses, but only to deliver/maintain existing courses in the curriculum.

This is a question that really depends on local custom and policy.  At my institution, there's a clear policy that I own the copyright to materials that I produce for my teaching unless those materials were produced with extra institutional support (e.g. I'm paid extra to develop the course or the institution provides an instructional designer to help in developing a course.)
I'm aware that at many other institutions in the US, instructional content (course syllabi, lecture slides, assignments, etc.) are considered to be work for hire and owned by the institution.  This is very helpful when a course is frequently taught by contingent faculty.


When to label paper as "accepted" on your publication list? The title basically says it all. At which point in the refereeing process does it become acceptable to mention on my list of publications (e.g. the one on my website) that a paper has been accepted for publication at Journal X? Specifically:

is it OK when I receive word from the editor that the journal is "ready to publish my paper after a revision"?
is it OK when I confirm the final version of paper?
... or must I wait until the paper is actually published?

I'd do it when getting the final acceptance letter. Before that, you can say "submitted" or "under revision".


Saying "good question" during a seminar talk During seminars and talks, some presenters hear a question and compliment it by saying "Good question." Could this possibly offend the asker? Could this be viewed as a tactic to pretend being unfazed by a difficult question?

Or is it really a good psychological ploy to mollify the interrogator so that he/she is more accepting to the answer?

As an economist I can rant for hours about people's ulterior motives... as a speaker I can tell you that this reaction springs in me spontaneously, when the question has good timing with what I am presenting, meaning that it is a good opening for the next issue (or next aspect of the current issue) I was about to start speaking on. It makes a presentation rolling with the audience, and you cannot ask much more than that.


Don't PhD programs in Europe always inform the application result? Earlier this year I applied to 3 PhD programs in physics in Europe, and one (Germany) informed me they can't provide me a PhD position while the other two (Germany, Netherlands) didn't inform me their review status or decision. I afterwards sent them e-mails to inquire about the status but they didn't reply me.

Last month I applied to a PhD program in physics in Europe again. The program (Germany) doesn't specify when they will inform their decision and how they will inform the applicants. It has been 3 to 4 weeks since my submission of the application. I haven't got any of their notice and wonder whether they will eventually give any notice.

So is it a common convention of European PhD programs that they don't inform all the applicants the application status and those applicants who don't get any notice can just automatically assume they are not admitted? I don't like this way because the application is not an effortless process. To apply to a PhD program, I spend much time to check its research profile, including the publications of the principal investigators therein, to compose the essays they require. Therefore I expect each program I apply to informs me the definite result.

Yes, unfortunately this kind of thing happens often in Europe.

Some years ago I sent a candidature for the Francis Crick Institute (UK) and in the public notice it said explicitly something like:

  "We will contact the candidates we are interested in before the date
  X. If you do not hear back from us it means you were not selected."

I also had submitted a candidature for a Max-Planck program (Germany) and received a standard email. But with a note that explains why they don't give further informations about the candidatures:

  P.S. I have a personal wish: Please refrain from further enquiries. I
  am the only person dealing with 1000+ applicants and I simply can't
  answer such enquiries.

However, in Portugal they usually are very transparent with this kind of process. The candidates are seriated and they ask for every candidate to reply an email in agreement with the results. If the candidates didn't agree they have 15 days to complain. In the absence of a reply and a complaint, the process is put on hold for 15 days and then they atribute the fellowship.


When refereeing a paper, stating I am not an author of suggested literature When getting reports for papers submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, referees sometimes suggest that some missing items be added to the list of references. In my short career I have seen all possible cases, from honest additions that were clearly necessary, through border-line literature where one could cite any one of a long list of possible sources, to blatant cases of citation shopping where the reviewers ask for 10 of their own papers to be added to the list.

Here, I am looking at the problem from the other side (the reviewer side). I recently refereed a paper for which I suggested that the authors look at a very recent paper, authored by researchers totally unrelated to me, that touches on a couple of issues that I thought were very relevant. Since that paper is so new, it is likely that they were not aware of its existence. Because of all the misbehavior I talked about in my first paragraph above, I am afraid that the authors of the paper I reviewed might assume I am one of the authors of the suggested paper.

I know I should never disclose my identity in a report, but what about stating who "I am not"? Something like this:

  I think the authors should have a look at recent paper Nice New Paper, which might help with the interpretation of their results. This reviewer would like to add that he did not participate in said study.

In my opinion this would serve two purposes. 1) Clarify the legitimacy of my suggestion (I do not get anything from it) and 2) prevent the authors of the reviewed paper from suspecting it was the other guys who reviewed their paper and they are shopping for citations.

What are possible ethical considerations against this course of action from the points of view of editors and authors?

As a reviewer, I have suggested the authors to cite one of my papers only once or twice. I apologized for doing that in the notes to the editor, and remarked that I couldn't avoid it because it was really central. I wrote nothing in the blind notes to the authors, and I write nothing when I suggest papers from other people.

I do this because of two reasons:

I value anonymity of peer reviewers highly, and I prefer to avoid remarks that reduce it by unnecessarily providing additional bits of information. There are already unavoidable signs such as writing style and English mistakes, and I don't want to add more.
I believe it is the editor's responsibility to make sure that the referees are not citation-shopping. It can't be anyone else's, because they are the only person with all the information necessary to perform a check. So I have to justify my actions to him/her, not to the authors.

If, as an author or as a second reviewer, I noticed a very blatant case of citation shopping, I would consider it appropriate to write to the editor privately to suggest investigating. but this has never happened to me up to now. (Although there have been a couple of borderline cases.)


Is it a bad thing if my Personal History Statement reveals my intention to immigrate? I am an international student applying for Computer Science PhD in US. Some universities I plan to apply to require Personal History Statement in addition to Statement of Purpose. I believe that I described my research interests, talents and motivation in my SOP quite well. I happen to be pretty "diverse" person as well, so I wrote about it in my PHS. The only drawback is that my PHS reveals some details of my background that may serve as a "red flag" of my lack of intention to come back to my home country after I graduate. I know this is not a good thing for visa approval, but I wonder what kind of attitude the university departments have to such students.

I received a lot of criticism for this approach. People say that I must not appear to be desperate and should avoid saying anything that is not directly relevant to my interest in Computer Science, but I believe that my history is an important part of my identity (and a chance for alternative funding sources), and I'm out of ideas of what else I can write about Computer Science that is not already mentioned by my SOP, Resume and recommenders.

So what would you suggest? Should I omit any details of my history that may raise suspision of my immigration intention?

People who get a Ph.D. and also try to immigrate are generally quite welcome in US academia.  The problem you may run into is that some people who just want to immigrate sometimes try to use a Ph.D. program as a visa source without having any real interest in a Ph.D., and then drop out when they find a company that can hire them.  This is understandably annoying to professors, who may have spent quite a bit of time, energy, and money on such a student, only to find the student has been disingenuous all along.  Thus, if you "smell" like such a student, you may find difficulty getting admitted.

If this is your intention, don't do it.

If you truly want a Ph.D., however, and the immigration is a separate desire, then I would advise you to just focus on the things that are about getting a Ph.D. Let your passion and your focus shine through, so that's the main thing that the professors notice.  Don't worry about trying to hide your desire to immigrate: if it comes out naturally as a small part of your statement, that's OK, since the professors reading it will likely be guessing you want to immigrate unless you explicitly say otherwise.


The professor takes me only if I continue up to finishing PhD. What should I do? Education in my home country is very expensive and getting scholarship for postgraduate studies is not possible because I have a poor BSc (low GPA, no papers, etc). So I decided to study my Master degree in a country with much cheaper tuition fees, so that I can make up for my academic record and getting an admission for PhD with scholarship in my home country. Unfortunately 'the custom' in the new country is like that the professors (would-be supervisors) are those who give the admission and they strongly prefer to take students who will stay for PhD as well. But I want to come back after finishing my Master degree especially for being with my family.

To avoid consequences and also ethical reasons telling the truth that I won't continue to PhD is a must. A friend of mine suggested this website. I would highly appreciate for any advice for the most suitable ways of approaching and opening up the issue with the would-be supervisor?

I would highly appreciate for any advice for the most suitable ways of
  approaching and opening up the issue with the would-be supervisor?

When you apply for a PhD, you will need letters of reference. Among them, the one from the supervisor is the most important. If you lie to your supervisor, it may be extremely difficult to get a PhD wherever you apply.

If you don't plan to pursuing a PhD after your Master, tell the potential supervisor exactly that. If he doesn't agree, move on until you find the one that agrees.


Talking to professors without attending that University I tried looking up the answer for this one online already, but I couldn't find something for my specific scenario:

I am interested in reaching out to a few professors in the field that I am interested in, Computer Science, in regards to some specific problems I might be facing in the immediate future.  However, I'm slightly unsure of how to do this.  That is, I don't attend the University they teach at and I do not have a college degree.  Does this make a difference of some sort or can I contact them without having to explain that I don't attend their University?  Is this something that I should even bother bringing up prior to speaking to them, or is it a complete non-issue?

I feel like if highly technical, learned people like professors are so easily accessible - completely free of charge - then I find the entire concept of attending college kind of hard to grasp.  Maybe I'm missing a basic underlying concept here.  Perhaps they would be under some kind of NDA in how much information they would be able to provide if it was on cutting edge research, or something else I might not be accounting for?  The entire concept of just e-mailing some of the top scientists in a given field strikes me as kind of odd, especially if I don't have to pay them for their time.

Okay, so this might sound a little bit too honest.

You can email them, and if you're sufficiently interesting or intelligent, they will write back. For example, if you asked things like "what is the best sorting algorithm? Can you explain why that is?" they probably won't respond, because it's boring. You have to realize that the professors usually also get a lot of "crank" messages (false claims to amazing results) to which they don't respond to. However, if you actually read and understood their research, and had something that you could contribute to, then they probably will respond. Your pedigree isn't extremely important, as far as I am concerned. It is true that the top scientists are available for free, but only if you are worth their time.

The university system requires the professors to talk to the amateurs that they normally wouldn't talk to (i.e. students). My university had a student who claimed to have proven P vs NP problem. Normally if someone sent me a proof of that by email, I'd have deleted it without reading it, but since it was a known student, the professors still looked over the proof (it was actually quite clever, albeit wrong), and the student was eventually offered a summer research position. So I wouldn't say that the university system is pointless.


What date should I put on a paper that I hand in to my teacher? I know that it is important to have dates on papers that you hand in to teachers. I usually put the date that I start the paper, but sometimes I change it to make it seem like I'm not procrastinating. I've also used the date the paper is due. No teacher has ever said anything to me or taken off points for how I have the date.

So my question What is the correct date to put on a paper?

Regardless of whether it is homework or any other sort of technical document, the correct date to put on a technical document is the date of its most recent revision.  If the history is important, other dates can be added as well (e.g. the submitted/revised/accepted dates on some journal papers).

As for your professors never saying anything... they likely had no reason or even ability to discriminate between the different systems you used to date, and it likely did not matter for the purposes of the class.


What are the key components of being an effective supervisor of undergraduate researchers? Quite a few tenure-track job ads I've come across recently have mentioned supervising research of undergraduate students as one of the position responsibilities specifically. I have had plenty of opportunities to supervise graduate student research activities, but have no experience supervising undergraduate research.

Personally, I never took advantage of opportunities to do research as an undergraduate (as an engineering undergraduate student, I was more focused on doing internships). So, unfortunately, I don't have any personal experience on "the receiving end," so to speak, to draw upon for what makes a good (or bad) approach to undergraduate research supervision.

My question:

  What are the key components of being an effective supervisor of
  undergraduate researchers?

If the field of study matters, this is in engineering (in particular, electrical engineering, and some of the job ads I've seen combine research supervision of both the electrical engineering and computer science undergraduates).

Somewhat related:

What are the main differences between undergraduate, master's, and doctoral theses?

I have had some pretty good success advising undergrads by:

Making sure that the problem is extremely well-defined. That is, don't throw them into the water and see if they swim. Think a lot about what the expected outcome will be, and what the foreseeable steps, challenges and problems will be. Yes, this is a lot of work and means that you could (almost) "do the work yourself" in the same time, but for undergrads you can typically not yet expect that you can just drop them a research question and see them run with it.
Have regular meetings. Make sure that there is progress, and if there isn't, make sure that you know what the blocking issues are. Don't expect them to necessarily come to you first with any issues. In my experience, undergrads often are a bit shy about asking for help, and sometimes get stuck on (for you) relatively easy problems unnecessarily.
Make sure that you would be able to do the project yourself given enough time. I know that this is somewhat controversial, but for grad students, I am perfectly happy to accept projects where I myself wouldn't know how to do every part myself. That is, I expect a grad student to be able to solve her/his own problems. For undergrads, I do not do this. I want to be able to help undergrads in a meaningful way if they get stuck, technically.
Conversely, make sure that the work is not just random grunt work. In my experience, the best way to make sure that the undergrad research project is not interesting for the student is by letting them do something that everybody else either considers unimportant or terribly tedious to do. Undergrads are not yet experienced, but they are still colleagues and not some sort of scientific minions.
Somewhat related: make sure that you are excited about the project, or at the very least be able to convincingly pretend that you are. Again, having the feeling that nobody cares about their project is a surefire way to make for a terrible research experience.
Integrate the undergrads into the lab. When there are talks, the undergrads are invited (i.e., expected to come). When the grad students are expected to regularly speak in the internal seminar, the undergrads need to do this as well. If there is a regular lab beer night, the undergrads are invited as well. If the lab usually goes to lunch together, the undergrads are asked to come along. You get the idea.
If at all possible, give them a fixed work place in the lab, and require them to be there at least some percent of the time.

To summarize, the best undergrad projects in my lab always worked on a well-defined project, which was still an integral part of the research agenda for the lab that others were enthusiastic about. On concrete example from my research: some members of my lab are currently working on benchmarking compute cloud providers. That typically means hacking up some automation scripts, deploying benchmarks, gathering some data, and analysing the results. This is rather tedious and error-prone work. Hence, I got a computer science bachelor student to build a web-based platform, which students could use to define, schedule and execute benchmarks using a relatively simple DSL (domain-specific language). The platform the student built technically wasn't terribly complex, but the solution worked well, tackled a common community problem, and most importantly saved multiple grad students a ton of time. We also published the tool as open source software and wrote a small paper about it, allowing to student to go to a conference to another continent. During the conference, a number of professors asked the student for details on his tool, and expressed interest to also use it for their research.


Does university location affect job prospects? My university is in Oklahoma and most companies are in east coast and west coast in the US. I am a bit worried if a PhD will be worthy from an average university with poor location. Should I apply to a college where there is a bunch of industries around?

Far more important than location is the quality of the program. You can get some measure of the program's quality by looking at the job placement of recent graduates. If they are making it out to the companies you are interested in, then you should be fine. If all the graduates are staying in-state, you will probably want to look to a different program.


PhD Interviews for CSE at US universities I am a final year Master of Technology Student studying Computer Science. I am planning to apply for PhD's in top US universities. But I have a problem of stuttering. I stutter a lot while speaking on phone or over the video chats, but very less while talking face to face.
Does PhD admission process in US universities for computer science disciplines involve interviews for international candidates? And if yes, I am very nervous, that I will fail because of my stuttering despite having sufficient knowledge.

Disclosure: I am myself a person who stutters the severity of which depends on the position of stars in the sky.

First, I want to point out, that stuttering is OK. In the same way, as not stuttering is OK. Discrimination based on stuttering should not happen, and all the common misconceptions regarding people who stutter (not confident, less knowledgable, less prepared, etc) are simply misconceptions. While there are still a lot of people who believe in them, the situation is getting better for people who stutter; in particular, in the USA.
Regarding the interviews for candidates (whether domestic or international): that highly depends. In some universities/departments, some professors would want to interview their potential students. In others, the students are not assigned a particular advisor until the 2nd year; thus, no interview. It is a rarer situation when an interview is conducted not by a potential supervisor themselves. However, the specific fields like MBA or medicine might have a separate "Interview" stage in the application process.
Thus, I suggest you find that information directly from the individual program you are intending to apply.
However, I would strongly advise not to be discouraged by the interview. You should be judged by the essence of your speech, its organization, logic, and particular answers, and not by "the occasional repetitions and blocks". While there is very little you can do about the stuttering itself, there are many things you can do regarding your preparation and the way you formulate your thoughts. That is important. Focus on that.
One of the very useful tools is a self-disclosure statement. One can provide it in a written form before the interview, right at the beginning of the speech, or both. For example, I can suggest something, as follows (which you should modify so it becomes yours):

Hello, [my name is XXX]. Sometimes, in my speech, you will hear blocks and repetitions as I do stutter. Please, feel free to ask me a question if something is not clear, I would be really happy to clarify on that.

That has several purposes:

explicitly allows you to stutter during the interview (or any other speech or speech-related activity)
prepares the other participants that you stutter
calls to action of asking questions if something is not clear

Consider using one if you feel like it.
With that, I hope that whether you have an interview or get to a program where no interview happens, you will succeed despite the stuttering. As research (which is why you want to do a PhD, I assume) welcomes people irrespective of their stuttering. It simply should not matter.


After Bachelor in Physics - Research? I'm finishing Applied Physics this month, and the next I will finish my other bachelor degree, engineering. I have many ideas for starting my own research (at the frontiers - not doing things already attempted) and I feel like it would be a waste of time to attend a graduate course, also because I learn more on books than from listening lectures.

In my specific case, I already started attending conferences since a couple of years and presented a poster at one of them. I'm interested in theoretical physics and the possible connections with biology.

Does it make sense to try for one year to do something on my own and see how it goes?

I think that people here sometimes get annoyed at me for reason I don't really understand, so I will explain: I read quite a lot of papers until now, so I have some idea of how it goes nowadays. I don't really want to pollute ArXiv with some utter nonsense, but rather the contrary. My aim would be to learn what I would learn in a normal course, by myself, more deeply, and not only basic things of everything. This example here shows some good resources. For example Feynman learnt calculus by himself, but better. In modern times there are many resources for self-teaching and something like Physics from a theoretical viewpoint should be perfectly doable and learnable from books on my own, like for programming or Biology. Anyway maybe this question is more suitable for Quora?

To be able to do meaningful research, "hav[ing] some ideas" is not enough. Also, graduate school isn't just "two years of forced learning by repetition". Many graduate courses are very resourceful and teach you the essentials to understand what has been done in the areas you're potentially interested in.

While it is possible for you to learn on your own and do high quality research, your picture of grad school doesn't reflect reality.


Why do so many people apply to so few PhD programs? Most of the schools that I've looked at for PhD programs in Computer Science have between a 9-15% acceptance rate.  I've noticed similar acceptance rates for other programs outside of computer science; yet almost everyone that I've ever spoken to has only applied to a handful of schools.  This just doesn't make sense to me.

Let's just say that each school that I apply to has ~15% acceptance rate, then if I only apply to only 6 schools, I have roughly a 63% chance of getting accepted to at least one (1-probability of getting declined everywhere).  That doesn't seem horrible, but if I know I want to do a PhD, I would like to have much higher odds, plus most of the programs are closer to a 10% admissions rate.  I understand that applications are costly both monetarily and temporally speaking, but having a 37% chance of not getting into any programs is pretty bad.  Whereas if I apply to 14 schools, I have about a 10% chance of not getting accepted anywhere.  Can someone please explain the thought process behind this?

Although, I like your way of analytical thinking, some ouf your assumptions do not hold:

Selection procedures of PhD programs are not random.
The selection procedure of one PhD program is not independent from other programs, as it is likely based on similar characteristics and markers in your CVs. (Maybe, there is conditional independence given 3, but that is problematic because the value of 3 is relative to the local distribution of 4.)
Your application profile does not change.
You do not know who your competitors are which may also vary between programs (and time).

Therefore, I would assume that people use their applications as measures to test the unknown distribution of the accessibility of PhD programs. Unfortunately, this accessibility changes every term/year because of different populations of applicants. Furthermore, information about the specific demands and requirements of PhD programs is limited because it is time-consuming to look them up and sometimes they are simply hidden. That makes it reasonable to concentrate only on few programs and draw convenient samples. If applicants fail, it is easier to adapt, as your application costs were moderate, and to finally accept that there were better competitors and go on with life.


Are grad school acceptance rates skewed? Take grad schools for instance. Their acceptance rate is 8%, or seems to be so. Basically, suppose you have 100 randomly selected across the USA grad school applicants. 50 don't know what to do with their lives, so really the acceptance rate goes up to 16%. Then the other 25 will be out for unusual circumstances, so roughly, there is a 33% chance, or 1 in 3 chance of getting in. (yes, even my numbers are a bit skewed, but reasonably better)

So is grad school really that hard to get into (If you are on top of your game)?

Acceptance rates are nearly meaningless as isolated numbers, for exactly the reason you describe.  They are averaged over the entire applicant pool, and therefore they imply very little about any particular applicant's chances.

If you are trying to estimate your own chances of admission, then you need more information.  If you attend a school that regularly sends students to a given university, then you can form a decent estimate based on feedback from faculty and comparisons with your peers.  Otherwise it's harder to predict.  At top grad schools, it really depends a lot on what your recommenders say, how seriously the admissions committee takes their letters, etc.  You may have a faculty mentor who can help you arrive at a good estimate, but you'll get at most a crude approximation from grades, GRE scores, counting REU publications, etc.

  So is grad school really that hard to get into (If you are on top of your game)?

For people who are genuinely on top of their game and have made sensible decisions about where to apply (based on their accomplishments), getting into grad school is not that hard.  They might not be admitted to their dream schools, but they'll be admitted somewhere reasonable.  On the other hand, thinking you're on top of your game doesn't imply that you are.

This makes it difficult to give universally applicable advice.  Some applicants should stop stressing out and have faith that it will work out OK in the end, while others need to start worrying and rethinking their plans.  We end up back in the same situation as with admission rate statistics: it all depends on your personal circumstances.


Is investigating a new technology a justification in itself? One of my PhD objectives involves an evaluation of the suitability of an emerging technology for deployment in geographical area (where it has not yet been deployed before -- mainly because it's new). I have been asked "Why evaluate this tech? Why not the others?"
I have found this tech to be significantly superior to the other alternatives in several parameters of importance (in the lab), which is probably already a good justification itself to proceed.
My question though is: The other technologies have been around for years and been fairly evaluated already. This tech is new and untested in this area. Is the fact that it is new a justification in itself for me to bias myself to it? Do I need empirical results to justify?
Isn't it enough that the results, good or bad, are a significant contribution since there was no knowledge before?

Usually, in life there are multiple options and methods to do things. Some are more common, others are rather uncommon.
Why are the uncommon ones uncommon? Sometimes they are just more inconvenient than the common ones for most people, so the uncommon option is not "catered for" and just falls behind, although it is perfectly fine. Other times, they have been tried and discarded a long time ago. In very rare cases, nobody really thought about it, although it is great.

It is similar in science.

A new technique can be groundbreaking. Or lost time and effort. The problem with this is, if there are enough well-established ways to do the same thing then you at least need to point out some flaws of these technologies that yours might not have (to make it similarly convenient). Otherwise, you are re-inventing the wheel, maybe even a very complicated to use wheel (that might have been discarded previously, as failures are unfortunately still rarely published you wouldn't necessarily know). You need at least one valid answer to "But why would we need this instead of all of the other methods?"


Is a Masters Degree mandatory to gain entrance to a PhD in US I have been working as a Research Assistant in a university for 2 years under the supervision of a supervisor who has a doctoral degree.

I have fair knowledge about research and a first class for my Bachelors Degree. I wish to apply for a PhD in United States.

Is it possible to secure a PhD opportunity without a Masters Degree?

No, in a rough manner...

There are a multitude of Ph.D. programs, presented by US universities, within which the M.Sc. degree would not be as a mandatory factor for entrance the target program.

As a matter of fact, direct transition from B.Sc. (first-class or 4-year one) to Ph.D. would be a research plan for the future action within the academia, where one often seeks a M.Sc. degree for the participation within the industry.

All in all, you better check the admission requirements of the target programs, by case, to realize the necessity...


What to do if predatory journal won't withdraw paper after acceptance? Last year, I’ve started an independent research in hopes to be published one day.
Fast forwarding a year (a couple of weeks ago in fact), I have finished my manuscript in which I was planning to submit it to an open access journal called Journal of Emerging Infectious Disease with OMICS. At the time, I did not know that OMICS was a predatory journal (after seeing Beall's list) and I’m at the final stages before it get published.

To clarify, my manuscript has been accepted for publishing BUT during that time, I found out that it was a predatory journal and requested that I retract my manuscript from this journal.  I did not sign anything or pay anything to OMICS. What happened was that they sent me the acceptance letter saying my manuscript got accepted for publishing. They gave me 48 hours to request any changes to the final project of the manuscript before publishing. In that 48 hours, I found out that they were a predatory journal and messaged them accordingly. At this point, I did not sign anything entailing that I sent copyrights to them or payed any fees and it's not published yet.

They advised me that they have made the DOI and it is impossible for them to retract. At this point, I did advise them that I will not approve anything going forward and that they appreciate my request to retract from the journal.

Given the story that was mentioned above, I was wondering if you have any advise on going forward and if possible, see if there is a possibility that my manuscript will not be published in this predatory journal? I was extremely shocked that these type of practices by journals existed and extremely glad I caught this before accepting anything to be published. I greatly appreciate any advise you will give and hope to hear from you soon.

There are three issues here.  Have you signed a publication agreement, have you paid them, and has the paper actually been published yet?

If all three have happened, then you are probably stuck.  Retracting a published paper is a big deal, since it involves
changing the permanent scholarly record, and you can't do this just
because you regret the choice of journal.
If you have signed and paid, but the paper has not been published yet, then legally they have the right to publish it but you may
have a chance.  An ethical publisher would not publish a paper over
the last-minute objections of the authors.  (Of course the publisher
would be legitimately upset with the authors if there wasn't a
compelling reason for the withdrawal, but they wouldn't insist on
publishing anyway.)  Unfortunately, there's no reason to expect that
a predatory publisher will behave ethically, but it can't hurt to
ask.
If you have signed but not paid, then you have some leverage.  Legally they may be able to demand payment, but actually suing you
would be more trouble than it is worth.  They probably don't want to
publish the paper without being paid, so you may be able to negotiate
a withdrawal.  On the other hand, it's conceivable that they would
publish the paper in order to strengthen their legal/ethical case for
getting paid.
If you have not yet signed, then there's nothing they can do, since publishing the paper without your permission would be a
copyright violation.  You should be polite but firm, and they will
have to accept that you have withdrawn the submission.


How can a layman easily get the consensus view of what academia *thinks* about a subject? I'm a total layman, but sometimes I have really random specific questions, like What does science say about the transfer of learning, or what is the distribution of different of sexual fetishes in the population, or what do we know about how English warbow training evolved, etc.

Honestly, I'm a total noob, sometimes I find interesting things in google scholar by using it kinda like google but usually, I don't. If I'm very lucky a science journalist has written something on it, but often they don't and even when they do they can totally mislead, especially the popular ones.

Good question! If you are a total layman popular scientific magazines or blogs like the Scientific American from Nature Publishing Group or scienceblogs.com are a first source to spot which kind of views are represented in the community. Articles therein are mostly written by current or former academics and scientists with educational background in a scientific branch and contact to universities and researchers. And they skim the most important articles in the primary literature or visit conferences in their branch. But don't rely on single articles, always compare several sources, but the necessary background to understand such articles is often lower as a broader audience is focused by those publishers.

From there you could dive deeper into the scientific primary and secondary literature over Google Scholar/Books by searching and reading review articles that summarize the longer or recent past of a distinct scientific field. In the best case such review articles are written by several authors. In scientific fields like for example dark matter physics you will not be able as a layman to get a picture how much percent roughly believe in the current paradigm or an alternative theory. Searching on Google Scholar with intitle:"name of theory/paradigm" might give you some hint how much researchers work/favor alternative theories and open questions.

(Hand) Books written by several leading scientists in a field are in general a reliable source, though often not covering most recent developments in a distinct field. Textbooks will often need a solid background in distinct underlying theories (consensus on these?), even for academic graduates and interdisciplinary researchers in a field. I think a total layman cannot understand them and textbooks are often written by experts of a distinct view/theory, not of competing theories, and not the main spot to discuss alternative theories, rather journals.

Concerning life sciences, published meta studies that analysed and evaluated the data of many published smaller former studies that refer to a distinct scientific question like for example "dying of bees" are a good first source. So here we have to distinguish between views/theories and data. But, if meta studies show that the data amount is too low or contradicting other data, then there can be no consensus concerning a distinct question.

If this all doesn't help you, skeptics.stackexchange.com is a very good site to ask which theory/cause is currently favored by the majority of the scientists or what the data favors. But like Scholarpedia and Wikipedia you cannot be sure the answers or articles are written by scientists with educational background in the related field. But as a layman, I think it is rather important to know if the majority agrees, are there ongoing discussions, is the scientific community in a field split up, what is the current paradigm and how much research is ongoing on alternative theories and open questions. Popular scientific magazines/blogs normally cover such questions. If you are interested in more details, asking on a related scientific sites on Stack Exchange is another option to get often a discussion/answer by several scientists or students in a field.

I agree with the comments and want to explain that one major problem with finding a "consensus view" in the scientific literature is that basically it is the job of scientists to try to falsify the current paradigm/theory/consensus, especially when there exists a strong consensus, but the theory is incomplete or doesn't explain everything sufficiently. But one also has to distinguish here between theories and facts/data. If you ask for instance if dark matter can be the only add-on to explain rotation velocity of stars in galaxies, then most astrophysicists would currently favor this explanation/view, though there are also astrophysicists who work on alternative theories/explanations. Those might get also attention (more than they deserve) in popular scientific magazines and this good from my point of view to foster falsifying theories. You could also ask is there a consensus on the general relativity theory and likely most of the astrophysicists would say it is currently the best theory we have before a unification of all physical theories. There would probably be a bigger consensus that space-time is a physical entity than general relativity is the final theory because, again, there are few theories in physics that have a "final" tag. The evolution theory in biology is maybe not perfect and covering everything, especially genes and epigenetics, but mutation and selection is the paradigm I would say 99% of biologists agree with. For climate science, to my knowledge, most in the community (>90%) agree that the data in conjunction with theoretical simulations points to human-made global warming. I show these examples to explain to you that there might be a strong consensus on data rather than a theory concerning a distinct question. In popular scientific magazines/blogs this difference can be more undermined than in scientific journals or books.

The minorities are and have to be covered in popular science, maybe also in a stronger kind than their alternative theory/view is really represented in the community. So if you really want to know if the majority believes in one theory, if there is a consensus, always check several of above sources like wikipedia, popular scientific magazines and blogs! You can also make a poll among scientists on consensus on data and/or theory, and Stack Exchange is maybe the best place for this currently, if you chose sites with a high density of scientists or expert/layman ratio frequenting it like mathoverflow.se or cstheory.se, stackexchange sites like physics.se are too much diluted by laymen for a poll to a mainly scientific audience.


Does being a member of IEEE make it easier to publish in the transactions? We are in process of finalizing a draft for submission to a good venue for publication (Comp. Sc.). I have never published in IEEE Transactions, though I have a paper under review with one of them. I note that the majority of the IEEE articles have membership details besides the author name.

Questions:

Do you need to be  a member of the IEEE in order to publish in one of the transactions?
If not, do reviewers perceive articles submitted by non-members less favourably?

Note: I am already a member of ACM and its specialized groups. I don't see any reason to join IEEE just to add something with my name in the article.

Simple answer: no. I'm not an IEEE member and none of my coauthors are, but we regularly publish in the IEEE transactions.