Why is my paper constantly being rejected despite supervisory team being very happy with it? I am in my fourth year of my PhD, a rather rocky journey which has involved my original supervisor being fired with little to no notice and various interruptions due to COVID.
I am working in the field of biological modelling, and both my former supervisor (an expert in the field but not very involved in my research) and my new supervisor (less of an expert, but very involved and a senior academic at my institution who has supervised dozens of students over multiple decades) are happy with my progress and never expressed any concern.
I have now tried a total of four submissions to different journals, and was always faced with a rejection. The latest, to an Elsevier journal, desk rejected after a few days. The previous rejected with rather disappointing feedback, lacking any substantial weakness or points where I could improve. (They even mentioned I didn't cite some key authors, of whom instead I had cited multiple papers...)
I am now worried I will reach the end of my PhD without publications, but especially without understanding what the core weaknesses of my work are. Even presenting my research at various symposiums nobody ever really raised any serious concern. My supervisor mentioned it might be because we are "outsiders" to the field, but that explanation doesn't fully convince me.
Any advice?

This can happen when a paper is sent to the wrong journal.  This may often happen with an inexperienced researcher.  A Ph.D. student normally could get advice from the advisor on which journals to try next.  When there is no one "very involved" with your research area to advise you, what to do?
Look for journals that have recently published papers on topics similar to yours.
After being rejected from a top journal, try a less prestigious one.  In the future, after you have more experience with publishing, you will be better able to judge what level journal to send your papers to.  But also note: if your papers are always accepted by the first journal you send to, then you are aiming too low.


Should I include extra information in quiz questions? I'm curious about the pros/cons of including extra flavor text in quiz/exam questions.

For example, which would be better?

What is the product of this reaction?
The following molecule is found in a marine plant species, and has shown to inhibit cancer cell growth. One possible reason is due to the following reaction of this molecule. Provide the correct products of the reaction.

I've jumped back and forth between the two options. One on hand, I think it is beneficial to have students learn to parse text to determine important pieces of information. On the other hand, am I primarily interested in their passage reading skills or the content of the course (I realize the answer could be both)?

I also want to consider english language learners in this. Does it make things more equitable for students if there is less text to process through to get to the "actual" question?

It is always a good idea to offer authentic questions or tasks for assessment. So, if this additional information is authentic part of the problem, it is good to include it.  For example, if you would put it in the Introduction section of your paper on the topic of the quiz, you can include it in the quiz.

However, from the reading point of view it makes it harder to process, particularly for language learners. Any unnecessary bits should be left out.

Ideally, you should find the right balance between these two contradictory factors.


I'm affiliated with two universities: do I need ethics approval from both? Currently I'm affiliated with two universities: Nankai University in China (postdoc) and Monash University in Melbourne (adjunct).  I'm attempting to apply for ethics approval for a research project involving personal data that people post online.  I'm completely new to this.

Q: Do I need ethics approval from both universities?

It would be substantially easier for me to get approval from Monash, simply because the forms are in English and the people I'd need to discuss it with speak English.

What actually happened: I applied for ethics approval from Monash.  They were fairly patient with me, being new to the process, and it took a bit of back and forth.  Nankai University matched the conditions and dates by Monash, so I didn't have to bother with filling in paperwork in Chinese.  (And the paper was subsequently published here.)

Yes.

Or at the very least, check with both Universities' ethics boards.

I know of one instance of a post graduate student who in a similar situation got clearance from one university, but not the other, and was forced to discard their results.


What is considered cheating in an open book exam? A common belief is that open book exams reduces cheating since all the information that a student would wish to look up is already with them. Open book exam therefore tests a person's knowledge and organization rather than memorization.

However, a textbook is not merely a set of references written by distinguished authors in size 12 fonts and high quality paper, it could also be used as a set of notes for students to scribe onto, whatever in his fancy.

This becomes highly problematic in courses where the material is often repeated year after year, such as computer science or computer hardware courses where students are not expected to remember say commands, or highly specialized mathematical formulas. In these cases, students will just jot down the solution to past term paper i.e. all the questions from 1997 - 2014, and do a compare and match when they receive their actual exam paper. After which, answers that belong to similar question will simply be jotted down. 100% accuracy with zero understanding.

This happens so frequently, I am completely confused by the very definition of an open book exam. Are students allowed to jot down notes (such as the solutions to past paper) in their textbooks in an open exam? What is considered cheating in an open text book exam??

In my experience, I've seen three versions of open book exam:

You can bring in a set of notes.
You can use any textbooks and notes you want, but no electronic assistance.
You can use any reference you want local or remote, except for asking other people to solve your problem for you.

As personal electronics become smaller and more pervasive, these are all effectively converging together: if you allow students any open book, then you have to allow the whole internet, and impose an honor code that requires students to not outsource their problems.

In this environment, my feeling is that the only way to run an open book exam is to be testing for mastery of material, rather than problem solving.  In other words: open book works only when the answers cannot be readily extracted from the book (or other resources), but only from the synthesis of all of the knowledge within.  There must be no single "right answer", but a range of possibilities requiring creativity.  Thus, cheating can be detected in the same way that plagiarism can, because every student should be producing their own unique answer.

The best and fiercest open book exam I have ever taken was in an algorithms class as an undergraduate.  The exam was six questions, each asking us to develop the best possible algorithm that we could to solve some curious problem based on the principles we had learned in the class.  We were handed the exam to take home and given 48 hours, in which we were allowed and encouraged to use any resource we wanted, except not to talk to anybody else about the problem.  It was brutal, it was terrifyingly hard, and it was the most fun I've ever had on an exam.  That, I think, is a standard to aspire to.


As a PhD student, how do I benefit from reviewing a book my adviser is writing? My adviser is writing a book for a course in computer science he will be teaching next fall and I will be the teaching assistant for that course. He wants me to review the book and go through the problems and give him feedback on both.

He didn't say that I will get rewarded or recognized for my work in reviewing the book or the exercises associated with it, but I am guessing that my name will be mentioned in the thank you notes section at the beginning of the book, as usual with most published books based on courses. So my questions are as follows

What benefits do I get from doing this review, if any?
Also, is this work considered part of being a teaching assistant?

You'll gain his trust, if you do a good job. You will also gain a deeper understanding of the material as you'll read it thoroughly not just to learn it, but also having to think about how the material is presented. Don't expect anything else.


I refused adding a gift author to my paper and my advisor threatened me that he won't let me graduate I am a phd student and I am writing a paper with my advisor, which is also part of my thesis. When we were going to submit it for publication, he asked me out of the blue to include in the paper the name of another phd student, who had just started a phd with him. This person had not done any work for my paper in any way. Once I refused, he threated me that he won't let me graduate, but I didn't cave in. Then, he started saying that this paper was no good and had to be removed from my thesis, otherwise I won't be able to graduate. If I comply and I exclude this from my thesis, can he steal it and publish it without my name? On the other hand, if this paper remains in my thesis, and my thesis is officially submitted, would he be able to steal it?
Update: Thank you all very much for your answers! The paper is completed, there isn't anything the new PhD can do to contribute. What I would like to know is if my advisor can take my paper and publish it without my name. Can he do that if my paper is included in my thesis?

It would be serious ethical misconduct for your advisor to try to publish your work under his own name. If you find that it has been done, a note to the journal editor or conference chair would have serious repercussions for his career. You could also, then, file a claim with the university, perhaps resulting in his getting reprimanded or fired. It is serious enough that few would be willing to risk the harm it would cause themselves.
However, that doesn't help you a lot at this moment. I've written in answer to many other questions here that it is very seldom profitable to fight with your advisor, even when they are clearly wrong, as here. In the end, you might have to yield on this in order to graduate and get on with your career. He holds an inordinate amount of power over you at the moment.
Let me suggest, however, that you might be able to defuse the situation if you can find allies among the students or other faculty to intervene in this on your behalf. It is hard to fight against powerful people alone. Even if someone else knows of your situation, a faculty member, it would, perhaps, make retaliation against you more dangerous for the advisor. In reality, they should let you publish with proper authorship and graduate based on qualifications. If they do anything else, then it would be appropriate to bring an action against them.
But, I suggest that you don't make a formal complaint based only on threats of bad action. Choose as you think best about the advisor's demand, and if he then takes action against you in any way, complain to whatever authorities are open to you.
You might be able, also, to find some middle ground, such as offering to help this other student in some other way than giving them authorship that isn't proper.
No one can promise that anything but submission will result in a successful outcome for you. Having a paper with a phony author is still having a paper, which is a good thing. It won't be your last paper. It likely, over your career, won't be your best paper. Don't let the short term considerations negatively affect your long term career goals, even if you have to submit to an unethical advisor. Get done. Get gone.


Without any contribution from my supervisor, is it reasonable to write my papers all by myself? Background: I am finishing up my PhD. I'm lucky to be at a good school and my PhD was funded by a competitive scholarship. I have published work from my master's in humanities as a solo author, and as a co-author, I have published a conference paper in CS. But I feel a tremendous amount of stress to have work published in my own field.
The problem I am trying to be resilient for is that my supervisor, who is very warm and friendly, has basically contributed nothing to my PhD. I ask for feedback and they say "looks good!", no matter what I've done. I plead for help from whomever else in my department has five minutes to spare, and I have gotten so much more care and feedback from these people (who are less senior, already overworked, and in objectively less in a position to help me than my supervisor is), although my supervisor is an author on my work.
I understand this hands-off approach can be a sign of confidence, but my very first submitted manuscript was recently rejected by a journal. My supervisor, who doesn't appear to know exactly what is in the manuscript, wrote me to say "don't worry, if we produce major revisions, we might still be able to publish!"
I got a lot of the constructive feedback I desperately needed from the reviewers, but I don't actually agree with the primary reason why it was rejected, which is more to do with theory/experimental philosophy. So I feel a combination of shame (it was a non-blinded review) that I made rookie errors that my supervisor didn't help me to catch, but also I bristle that my supervisor is so quick to accept the overall outcome, without having contributed or helped or potentially even knowing what the manuscript is trying to achieve. One of the kindly non-supervisors in my department who read it and gave me feedback said they disagreed with the reviewers (as regards the theoretical reasons for rejection) and that I shouldn't change, but should work in the helpful criticism and then submit elsewhere.
So, here is where I am at. I have suffered a large blow to my confidence, I have multiple PhD chapters that I am trying to develop into manuscripts all by myself, and I feel like I am clueless and overwhelmed by the amount of work that is. I am also worried this will make finding a post-doc very difficult. Since getting my first manuscript published has been hundreds of hours of lonely labour so far, I am starting to wonder if it is silly of me to think I can also produce all these other papers on my own.
My ultimate question is, how can I stay resilient and get myself out of this situation, and find my momentum again? It feels like I started my PhD with so much optimism and and I really love research. I know I could work in industry or government, but I want to continue in this field. I just don't know if I am failing to read the writing on the wall, or whether I need to change tactics, instead of just slogging along, by myself, writing naive manuscripts that will be rejected and continue to pile up.

@Lighthouse keeper made a very good point about finding a co-advisor. I strongly agree with the comment of @astronat, since the research doesn't always happen (doesn't often happen, never happens, shouldn't happen) in the closed system student-advisor. Finding a less senior but more responsive colleague to work with is a perfectly normal way to go, even at the end of the PhD.
Of course you can start with a frank discussion with your supervisor that you need more supervision/feedback/structure in your relationship. I've seen that work - PhD advisors often develop a mental image of a person that needs to be corrected: "this person will benefit from a liberty of doing whatever they like" is sometimes a great assessment, but sometimes it is a complete misreading on the advisor's part. Do note however that in such a discussion the advisor may become defensive, and even if he agrees there's no guarantee that they'll actually change their behavior. Humans are complex and so are supervisors.
In short - it's good to raise the issue with the supervisor as soon as it starts to bother you, but also not to rely solely on them changing their approach, and reaching out to other people (from fellow students to the faculty of other universities that work on the subject) to discuss your research.
But this is fairly general advice. To be a bit more specific (although you don't write, if the feedback you need is about language/experiment design/methodology/useful resources/books... so the following might not really apply) about your situation right now, I would suggest presenting your work at seminars/conferences (the pandemic at least made that easy - you don't need to travel to speak at a seminar anywhere in the world). You might get a fairly decent feedback, if you mention that you are preparing the presented work for publication (at the very least you may be able to find out who else would be interested in your research = where to submit it). Ask your colleagues and supervisor if they can set you up with their acquaintances in this way.
Lastly - but this is the main point of my answer - don't overthink it. I was alarmed by you writing about shame, because the reviews were non-blinded. I cannot stress enough that this is no reason for any sort of embarrassment: depending on the field it is already a win for a PhD to a) get to the review stage, b) get some constructive remarks out of the reviewers (instead of "me no like, reject"). I certainly would like to see how minuscule a percent of users here can boast that their first paper was solo and accepted outright. At this stage, for the most part, the publication proces is unfathomable and one rejection (several rejections) don't say anything about the quality of your work, needles to say - even less about your quality as a researcher. The advice "make revisions, submit elsewhere" is spot on.
Moreover, it is highly likely that the quality of your work will increase over time, and the corollary is that it won't probably be great at the beginning of your career, and therefore that should not be a reason to doubt yourself. That the people fail to acknowledge that we all learn how to conduct research/write papers/write readable papers in acceptable style and language as we go, and are not expected to start with inhuman levels of competence - is the single most common (and heartbreaking) reason people drop out too early from research. While it would be splendid to have an advisor that teaches how to be a scientist, it is so very often not the case and it's perfectly OK to write your first papers with a "how to write research articles 101" book in hand (in maths we have Jerzy Trzeciak's booklet published by EMS, and I am very fond of it).
So the second piece of advice would be to consult your colleagues if your field (or any adjacent) has such a book, they often have a copy:)


Suggesting Reviewers: How to find institutional affiliations Many journals recommend that authors suggest potential reviewers. They also often require the institutional affiliation to be listed. However, many researchers who have published in relevant, high-level journals do not necessarily have this information public and some are not affiliated with an institution at all.

How should I proceed in these situations?

How do you know of these potential reviewers in the first place?

If you know them personally, then you probably also know which institution they're in. If you don't know them personally but have read their papers which are intimately related to yours, then you can look at the first page of their papers to see their affiliation. If you read of them from books, you can still look at the title pages which should list their affiliation.

If they don't have affiliations, then simply write "unaffiliated".


Faculty advisor is leaving, any way to turn this into a good thing? Asking for a friend who is a grad student in a social science.

They have just finished their coursework and passed their quals. Upon entering the program, their faculty advisor suddenly left the department. After 18 months with a new advisor, this professor is also leaving. Neither advisor was great in that they were unresponsive. So my friend is not overly devestated to lose their second advisor.

Yet, since being abandoned by two advisors doesn't feel like a great thing, it still feels like a setback. Is there anything my friend can do to turn this situation to their advantage? I mean aside from being able to now work with a professor who is more supportive (should such a professor exist).

To be more precise, are you aware (or can you conceive) of situations in which a person who suffered a similar fate is compensated in one way or another (I don't mean monetarily)?

Edit:
PhD program is in the US. Second, my friend's age and stage in the program doesn't really allow them to start over in another program.

In my opinion your friend should talk to the director of studies or whoever is in charge of the PhD program. They should explain that their situation is far from ideal and ask for advice. The objectives of such a meeting would be to:

Appear on the institution radar as somebody who may have face difficulties due to these circumstances. This can help the institution anticipate problems if they can, and could make them more responsive in case of more serious problems at a later stage.
Take any advice that can be offered: this might include suggestions to work with a particular professor or any other kind of help.
If they already have an idea of somebody they would like to work with, make a case for it: the institution might encourage the academic to take them on.
Gauge the level of attention/care given to their problem: for example if it turns out to be difficult to even talk to the person in charge, it says something about how much the institution cares about their students.

In general it's a sign that your friend should not count too much on supervision in this institution. Maybe they can turn their attention and efforts towards collaborations with external researchers related to their topic. Depending on the institution response, maybe the positive perspective would be to embrace being autonomous and having more freedom to work with people they like.


Evaluating potential supervisors on the basis of past graduate student results I am lucky CS senior undergrad who has received offers from a number of good departments in the USA. I am currently going through the usual factors for evaluating departments and supervisors. In the process, I've noticed a common trend in advice: most of the advice that I've gotten has not mentioned looking at where most of the students end up (e.g. quality of the thesis, do they get post-docs, coding jobs, industry research jobs, etc). Most advice (that I have read) emphasizes, not unproductively, the adviser-student relationship and the supervisor's research interests. This observation has led me to several questions:

Is it appropriate to ask potential supervisors what most of their students end up doing and why? Is there some other way to talk about this with potential supervisors?
How much should this factor into one's decision? Obviously, a lot of what happens to me is up to me and luck, but also obviously my supervisor plays some role in this beyond helping directly with my research.
Is there an easy way to figure out this information? Anything better than googling lots of names?
Are there more qualitative ways of looking at this question besides just looking at bare results? (Given the relative scarcity of positions over time and the amount of luck involved, I am amenable to the argument that simple stats are useless here.)

It's perfectly acceptable to ask a supervisor what their former students are doing now, and I think the majority of supervisors would be more than happy to discuss it. They might even give you email addresses of their old students -- I myself have been contacted many times by prospective students of my supervisor and am always happy to answer their questions.

How much you factor the information you gain into your decision is really up to you, and depends a lot on your own motivations for doing a PhD and what you want to get out of it. For example, if you want to go into industry afterwards but a supervisor tells you that all of her former students are still in academia, would that influence you away from studying under her? Or if the majority of a supervisor's students are now in industry, how do you know whether they had to leave academia because they couldn't get a postdoc or because they really wanted an industry job instead?


Is it acceptable to ask a "temporary" lecturer for a reference? I desesperately need a reference. One of the modules I took in my masters was partly done (lab part) by a "non academic" professional. Is it acceptable to ask him for a reference even though he barely remember me ?

You can always email people there is no harm done, just ask in the email if they remember you (they might). They might not feel comfortable writing you one but they can just say that, it's worth a try!

Obviously respect their response whatever it is.

Also bear in mind that the reference is unlikely to be a strong one given the circumstances so you should try and contact academics you have had closer contact with first.


What is the recommender address and his/her title or position in graduate applications? I was trying to fill out the graduate school application for graduate school. However in the "recommender info" part it asks me to enter the address, city, institute and title or position but I wonder what they are? should I enter the university address? is title or position like assistant or full professor?
I would be very appreciated if anyone can help me with that.

Ask the person who will write the letter of recommendation what address they want you to use. I suspect that this university will send them a return envelope to use to submit the letter, so the address must be their proper mailing address.


Anxiety and depression about the future of my PhD study I did my master in one lab and am continuing my PhD here. My advisor asked me to do some research that he doesn't know, and is also beyond the domain of my current major. I have no other choices so I did some work in my master. Because I haven't gotten any professional advice on that kind of research, I am very unsatisfied with my previous work, but I graduated anyway.

Now I am becoming a new PhD student in the same department and same lab. And I'm facing the PhD qualifying exam. I've always been thinking about doing something new so that I can pass the qualifying exam. But since my advisor is still asking me to do the same kind of research and he's still not providing any professional help, I made very little progress.

Now the PhD qualifying exam is impending. On the one hand, I need to continue my research, which is still very hopeless; on the other hand, I have to review some class materials to prepare for the exams. And I'm still taking a class.

I feel so overwhelmed and am currently very anxious and depressed. Sometimes when my mood is very bad, I start to hate my advisor deep in my mind. My advisor wanted me to do that kind of research simply because he thinks that is interesting, but he actually does not know much about it because that is beyond his research area. Worse still, he is the kind of professor who forbids collaborations even among his own group.

Because the research he asked me to do is beyond my previous experience, I have to go slowly solely by myself. I have to take relevant classes and read papers that I usually find hopeless to understand. (Now it's much better, I can understand most of the papers.) What I found was that usually it took me a lot of time only to figure out that the way I was thinking simply didn't work. As a result, I wasted so much time in this way. I mean, I was just a master student before, should I master student be required to do that kind of things?

Now my confidence is running out. I basically achieved nothing in my master, and it will be very hard for me to even pass the PhD qualifying exam. Because the exam is impending, changing advisor is almost impossible, partly because my advisor will be the one who at least has power in determining whether I should pass or not.  Also, it is very hard to find a new advisor in my current university, both because of the environment of the department culture and my previous achievements on research.

Yes, everything is bad about me, but that's where I am. Any advice on helping me to get out my current dilemma will be appreciated.

My advice would be to find another advisor, maybe even a different university. If you are just at the beginning, then it is a good time to move.

There is very little worse than an unsupportive advisor.

But if you think it is possible to move, look among the faculty for one or two people who believe in you and can support and application elsewhere. With good support it may be possible to move even if you need to take the qualifiers and do poorly. Your advisor is probably not the one to help you.

Even at the same institution it may be possible to reset the clock on your exams if you move to a different advisor. Sometimes the department head can help and sometimes you just work through a more compatible faculty member.

But continuing on doesn't seem like it is going to be easy, maybe not even possible. Look to your options.

One good thing that has come out of it is that you have learned to read and understand the literature. That is an important and useful skill.

However, if you are overly stressed and seriously depressed, you should seek medical advice, and learn about stress reduction activities.


Is it the norm to allow professors from different departments on a PhD committee? Or is this the exception to the norm? I know that it's allowed at Brown - but I wonder if it's unique.

At many (most? all?) universities, a committee is required to have at least one professor from outside the department (other than the chair, if the chair holds a joint position).

Other requirements are to have at least one professor at rank higher or equal to the rank of the chair (the advisor).


How can one's career as a reviewer be ended? In this forum, I am reading this great question (What is required of a mathematics referee?) by a user with the name mathprofessor. There is an answer by a user with the name Buffy which starts with:

  Sorry, but if that's all you do, then your reviewing career is likely to be short, ending the first time you approve a paper that is revealed to have an error.

I am wondering now: How exactly can somebody's career as a reviewer end after some paper they reviewed is revealed to have an error?

Sure, the editor who assigned the reviewer may not assign them ever again, but how exactly are other editors (maybe from different journals) notified not to take them as a reviewer ever again? Is there some way the editor who knows is allowed to reveal the reviewer's identity? Or some higher authority they can talk to? Or how does that work out in practice?

Let us assume the following:
If the answer is field-specific, let us assume we are talking about math.
Moreover, as in the other question, let us assume there is no fraud going on -- the author made a honest (but big) error in the paper, and the referee was too sloppy in their report and did not note the error.

Additional question: Are there known cases where reviewers had to end their reviewing career because they did not notice an error? Again, I am assuming no fraud is going on.

Edit: I want to say that the user with name Buffy edited the answer in question and made a much weaker claim. This solves my confusion. Thank you very much, Buffy!

No, the answer is simply that @buffy is wrong.  In reality, editors work hard to find anyone willing to review a paper.  They will be hesitant to exclude anyone.  In most fields reviewers are anonymous, so only one publisher will know if a reviewer does a bad job.


When to use the abbreviations f and ff in scientific literature? As discussed in this question, the abbreviations f and ff can be used to refer to following page numbers. For instance, pages 45-46 can be written as 45f. This is quite common in German law, but I wonder if it is commonly accepted for scientific publications? I work in the engineering field, but I would be interested in a more general answer.

Further questions that come to mind:

Apart from page numbers, can these abbreviations also be used for line numbers and paragraphs (e.g. lines 10ff, paragraphs 3f? This would be useful as I am currently preparing a review of a paper and need to refer to specific parts of the manuscript.
Are there cases in which I should prefer specific notations, such as lines 10-23 instead of 10ff?

Working in STEM fields, I have never seen this form of citations. Instead, on those rare occasions where citations talk about specific locations in a text, people use explicit page and/or line numbers.

I thus suspect that if you used this form of reference in an engineering publication, it will be confusing to your reviewers and readers, and you will be asked to change them.


Most of the research I did during college took place in my classes. How can I leverage this when applying to grad school? A friend asked me to post this.

I am an Egyptian undergraduate student who is considering attending graduate school programs in statistics. I studied for a year abroad in the US at the University of Chicago and, during my time there, I realized that many US undergraduate students engage in research outside of their course work. This research can then be listed separately on their resumes in addition to their classes and provides evidence of their competency not only in classes but also in working in a research setting.

However, curriculums in Egypt are not designed this way. During my undergraduate studies, I engaged in research as well but this research is built into our coursework and is not separate. Therefore, unlike a US candidate (or perhaps other international students) applying, I have not had the opportunity to hold a research position because it is assumed in Egypt that our research experience comes from our courses.

My Question

I plan on applying to Ph.D. programs in the US. How should I present my research experience in my applications? What steps will I need to take to demonstrate that I have had significant research experience through my coursework that will make me a valuable researcher in programs that I apply to?

Research experience in classes should show up in recommendation letters from the corresponding faculty (and in your personal statement, but the former is much more impactful). If you've done high-quality and nontrivial research in your classes, then you should make sure to pick recommenders that can talk about and vouch for it.

In fact, research experience at dedicated RA positions shows up in pretty much the exact same way. Just listing an RA position on a resume does very little; the real value is getting a good recommendation letter from someone who knows you well and is familiar with your work.


Why have schools been discontinuing the practice of giving A+ grades? My high school and undergraduate college did not offer grades of "A+." At both schools, the grading scheme was this:

93–100: A

90–92: A–

87–89: B+

83–86: B

80–82: B–

(Grades below 80 were similar for the C-range and D-range.)

At my current graduate institution, A+ grades are given for grades of 97–100 and an "A+" appears on the transcript, but they still count as 4.0 toward the GPA, same as an A.

To add to the intrigue, the transcripts from both my undergrad and grad institutions have a line on the back stating a historical change in policy around A+ grades: My undergrad stopped giving A+ grades in 2006, and my grad stopped counting A+ grades as 4.3 toward the GPA in 1993.

Conclusion: The practice of granting A+ grades seems to be falling out of fashion.

But why? Did some particular event prompt this widespread change in policy, or is it due to a gradual shift in educational philosophy?

The problem with A+ grades comes when your grades are evaluated by your next institution - next level of education. In some cases at least, an A+ from one institution will be treated exactly the same as an A from another that doesn't offer the "higher" grade. But this propagates down the scale. Your A- grades are now considered B+ grades.

Another way to look at it is that an institution that offers A+ grades may be considered to have a 4.5 top end, rather than 4.0 (I know this has happened historically), which scales every other grade accordingly.

Aside from the scaling problem is just the hassle of having to reinterpret every student's grades.


Looking for conferences / journals with non blind peer review in computer science I was wondering if there are any computer science related conferences or journals that review their submissions publicly. So everyone can see what the authors submitted and what the reviewers responded with.
I was told that this will create bias between academics but I don't think that will be the case because if someone give a biased review then the community will see that and he will probably hurt his image.

Edit:I have a stack exchange concept on my mind.

You are looking for conferences or journals that have open reviews, that is, the submitted papers are visible to everyone, as well as the reviews. Possibly, the reviewers are even known to the public.

There are a few such conferences and journals. The Semantic Web Journal is a computer science journal where all submissions are visible to everyone and reviews are made public. By default, reviewers are known, unless they opt out and be anonymous (although their reviews become public). Authors of rejected papers can ask to have their submitted papers and accompanying reviews removed from the web site if they want. This journal is quite successful and has created a trend in the area of Semantic Web research to provide open reviews in related conferences. The European Semantic Web Conference 2018 had open reviews.

This is not the only example of open review process. I have seen another journal adhering to the open review process, although I don't remember which one right now.

Studies on the respective merrits of open vs. single blind vs. double blind reviews seem to be inexistent or very limited at the moment. Studies comparing reviewing policies seem to be focusing mostly (as far as I know) on comparing single blind vs. double blind, ignoring the open review scheme. So it is hard to say whether it is beneficial or not. There are people who are strongly against open reviews (citation needed, but I talked to some of them) and there are people strongly in favour of it (citation needed, but I talked to some as well).

I am myself a supporter of open reviews. I reviewed papers openly. You can see my open reviews for the Semantic Web Journal there: review on ActiveRaUL: Automatically Generated Web Interfaces for Creating RDF Data, review on Semantic Web Machine Reading with FRED (first submission), review on Semantic Web Machine Reading with FRED (revised version), review on Semantic Web Machine Reading with FRED (last version), review on loomp - mashup authoring and semantic annotation using linked data, review on Survey on complex ontology matching. I would disclose all of my reviews if I was allowed to do so.

I made other open reviews that have been removed because the authors requested it.


Can I make a case for authorship if I spend two weeks running a series of repetitive experiments for my PI? I am a postbac working at a national lab. I have a project that is funded through an outside source, but my PI and postdoc informed me that they need me to spend the next two weeks completing a series of repetitive experiments they don't have the time to do for an alternative project. These experiments are required to satisfy the peer review criteria of the paper. Can I make a case for myself to attain authorship within the paper?

The short answer:
It does not hurt to ask, and a good mentor or PI will explain the criteria for authorship and their reasoning for why you have/have not earned authorship.  It is a teachable moment.

The longer answer:
Different journals give different criteria for authorship, and this is usually explicitly stated in the guidelines for authors.  In your question you mention that the experiments need to be performed to satisfy peer review.  If the article has already been reviewed for a particular journal (and perhaps now it is in a revision stage) then you and your advisor know which guidelines to check for their description of authorship criteria.  That said, it is a common criteria to require intellectual contribution (rather than simply data). If that is the case, and if you are very interested in this work, you could offer to help edit the paper.  However, if the paper has already been submitted, it can be challenging to add an author (for some journals this requires all other co-authors to sign off on the new addition).  If the paper has not yet been submitted, and the target journal is undecided, you really should discuss this with your advisor (which you should do in any case).  Personally I have worked for months on projects where I was not a co-author on the write-up when I was paid to primarily collect data.


Do I have to make someone coauthor if he/she solves a problem in StackExchange, asked by myself, which is later used in my paper? Suppose, in my research (mathematical) I have a critical step that I need to solve, and, due to various reasons I cannot find decent answer to that step by myself or by contacting friends or colleagues, so that I decide to post a similar but simpler problem to the relevant StackExchange (Math). Now, if someone comes up with a good answer that I can use to further my research, will it be enough to acknowledge the contribution of the author of the answer and citing that particular thread of StackExchange, or do I need to include that person as a coauthor of the paper that I might prepare based on that answer?

I emphasize here that the paper is supposed to be not all about that particular result, there are many other things, and that particular answer is useful, albeit critically, at an intermediate stage of proving some results in the paper. I personally feel that citing and acknowledging the contribution is respectful enough. However, I want to know what the standard norm is.

I have been in this precise situation. I wrote the manuscript to a reasonably finished state and then contacted the helpful SE person, asking if they want to be a coauthor and whether the attribution is sufficient. The attribution consisted of citing the MO answer and additionally naming them in the acknowledgements.

This approach has the benefit of maintaining or building a good relationship with the helpful person.

Remember that the typical norms of co-authorship include intellectual contribution, as well as writing or critical review of the manuscript, and in any case accepting the final paper. If you see their contribution as relatively minor, you might want to offer them the possibility to extend or otherwise improve the paper if they are interested in co-authorship.

If the contribution does not merit co-authorship, you can still cite it or acknowledge the (possibly anonymous) contributor on SE, if that is warranted. It is polite, but not required, to ask the person how they should be referred to, in any case.


After publishing many articles in the last few years, why does my work have few citations? During last 3 years I have published 17 articles, but I have only 15 citations (excluding self citation), which I find disappointing.

My articles have 100s of downloads almost every month.  They seem to be in  high quality journals: 2 articles are in Q1 journals (i.e., a journal that is among the top 25% based on avg JIF percentiles), 5 in Q2 journals (i.e., 25-50th percentile), and the rest in Q3 journals (i.e., 50-75th percentile).  I share my work on LinkedIn and upload them on arXiv as well, so I don't think  reach is the problem.  I work in the field of networks and security.

Does this mean that my work is not worthy enough?  Or I am missing something in attracting the research community to cite my work?

You might want to calibrate your expectations.

What predicts how many citations you should expect?

Journal impact factor
Time since publication
Number of publications
Database used for counting citations

In rough terms, the journal impact factor can give you an idea of how many citations you can expect to receive per year for a given article. Note that this is based on the relevant database. Google Scholar citation counts tend to be two or three times larger from my experience. Note also that the distribution of article citation counts are highly skewed. So many will get fewer citations, but hopefully as you aggregate over a body of work, central limit theorem will kick in. So it's a reasonable guide to a benchmark  how many citations you should expect over the body of your work.

Note also, the time it takes people to build on your work. So if you publish something late in 2014, it will often take at least a year for people to notice and start incorporating into journal submissions and for those articles to be published.

The basic consequence of this is that if all your work has come out in the last 3 years, and therefore much of your work has come out in the last year, then you may have to wait a few years to see the citations accrue.

How to calculate expected citations

So let's do some basic math.

Mean impact factor: Based on your stated quartile impact factors, I'm going to guess that your average impact factor per article is around 0.8 (e.g., top quartile is around 2 or 3+; second quartile is around 1.5; third quartile is around 0.5, based on discipline it could be different).
Mean time since publication: I'll guess 1.5 years, i.e., half-way between 0 and 3 years.
Discounting self-citations: Impact factor does not discount self-citations, but you have. So let's say 20% of citations are self-citations, especially early on in an article's life.
Number of articles: you say 17

So a very rough estimate of expected number of citations is:

expected citations = mean IF * mean time since publication *
                       self-citation discount * number of articles
 = 0.8 * 1.5 * 0.8 * 17
 = 16.32 (i.e., 16 citations)

A few caveats:

If you are using Google Scholar as your metric, then you should multiply expectations by a factor 2 or 3 (so that gives you an expected citation count somewhere around 32 and 39).
You could  get a more refined estimate if you calculated expectations for each article separately and then summed the expectations.
There is quite a bit of uncertainty about the timing issue. For example, with impact factor, the first few months often don't count and sometimes differences between accepted versus online access versus published with page numbers might make a difference.

So actually, that does not look that different from what you have.

Also, note that in theory, you could stop doing research today, and the formula would predict that 15 years, you could expect about 160 citations. As with all things, this depends on various assumptions. But if you are comparing your citation count to senior researchers who have been publishing for 20 years, then you need to really understand the fundamental role of time passing in generating citations.

More generally, citation counts per article and even on aggregate can be quite noisy and the underlying distribution can be heavily skewed. So the difference between being above or below expectations may be whether you have one or two articles that have really taken off in terms of citations.

Take home messages

If you are a PhD student or early career research where the vast majority of your work has come out in the last two or three years, citations will generally look small. Citations just take time to accrue. And the number of citations an article accrue per year is quite noisy.
In the first couple of years after a publication comes out, the impact factor is probably a better predictor of how many citations it is likely to accrue per year.
Based on the assumptions above, publishing in an impact factor 3 journal will on average generate 3 times as many citations as an impact factor 1 article, and 6 times as many citations as impact factor 0.5 article. While this is all an on-average thing, the point is that it is quite possible that your your two Q1 publications are equivalent or more important than your 10 Q3 publications, from a citation generation perspective. So if you view things from an impact/citation perspective, then this can inform your understanding of the quality versus quantity trade-off when publishing your work.

Generating more citations

That said, if your goal is to generate citations from others, there are all sorts of things that you could be doing.

Try to do great work and publish in high impact publications. When evaluating a quantity versus quality trade-off, give a lot of weight to quality/impact.
Advertise your work at conferences and online.
Attend conferences and network so that people get to know who you are and what you are doing.

Other options that  may or may not go into grey territory:

Self-cite where appropriate. Some citations will come from others seeing how your work is being cited. By self-citing, you are providing a template, and further secondary exposure to your work.
Collaborate and co-author papers with leading figures in your field. When they publish without you, they may cite your co-authored work.
Think about what topics receive more citations and do work on that. Important review articles, meta-analyses, methodological papers with a clear recommendation, etc.


Is submitting papers based on classwork papers self-plagiarism? I have just completed a Ph.D. in May and have some papers I wrote for classwork that I would like to use to write articles for submission to publications.

Would this be self-plagiarism?  How do I handle this?

The problem with typical self-plagiarism is that a scientific work or part of it is published twice in a peer-reviewed venue. This inflates the scientific credit obtained for this work and wastes the times of everybody involved in the publication process.

Assuming that your classwork is not scientifically published (if it is, you should know), you should not commit self-plagiarism. To be on the safe side, I suggest to clearly reveal the history of your paper when submitting. This way, the publisher cannot claim that you hid something from them and they can decide themselves whether they have any problems with it.

Some further remarks:

If your work was published non-scientifically (e.g., hosted on the course’s website), this may conflict with the exclusive copyright wanted by some publishers. However, for most publishers, this should not pose a problem. Be sure to read the copyright-transfer agreement or similar thoroughly in this respect.
Your university may impose some restrictions on publishing coursework. You’ll have to check.
Be aware that whoever supervised your classwork (if anybody) may have contributed to it to such an extent that they deserve authorship. Again, this is something you have to check.


My admission is revoked after accepting the admission offer I applied to PhD program and gladly received official admission offer on the 29th of March. They guaranteed me four-year funding. I accepted the admission offer and was preparing for obtaining student visa.
I accepted the offer on the 13th of April, declining two admission offers from other institutions.
However, my application page suddenly changed that my admission is rejected. A staff of the department said that they decided to rescind my admission offer on April the 22nd.  What can I do now?
I received this message this morning:

My sincere apology for this unfortunate admission circumstance. There was a misunderstanding after the initial admission process, and the initial determination of "Deny" for your application made by our faculty was indeed the decision that should have been maintained. Later, due to a misunderstanding, we reversed the admission decision from "Deny" to "Offer". After this change was made, the faculty who had considered your application - and who denied your admission - confirmed their denial of admission due to lack of funding available to support you. For this reason, we needed to change your offer of admission back to the original "Deny" status. Yours was a very competitive application, and I am sorry to have to rescind our offer of admission. We therefore ask that you disregard our offer of admission and funding, which were made in error.
My sincere apology for this misunderstanding, and best wishes to you as you pursue other graduate program offers,

I would recommend the following:

Contact the other universities and ask if they might still be
willing to admit you (this might be the easiest way out). If the
answer is negative make sure to keep their answers for the later
points.
Write to the university that revoked the offer stating (in a
friendly tone) that you turned down other offers due to their offer
and that this situation leaves you (and them) is a suboptimal
situation. If the result of point 1 was negative then add this
information too. Ask them for a solution. If the mistake was made
just on your application then they might consider admitting you to
avoid a law case. If they wrongly offered to all applicants (e.g.
software bug) then they will not be able to do this.
If point 1 and 2 do not lead to anything then write to them a second
time threatening with a law case in order to cover your damages
caused by their mistake. But still in friendly words along the lines that you would prefer not to etc ... (Many people in the comments below suggest to skip this step and go for the lawyer right away "Never threaten to sue. Either do it, or don't").
Get a lawyer to discuss further actions.

Other points to consider:

How long was their offer there? If it was just there for 30 min it
might be different to being there for days and they decided to revoke
weeks after you accepted.
Was the offer conditional on anything?
Assume you win with the help of a lawyer - do you want to spend the
next 4-5 years of your life in this environment? I am not saying yes or no - it is just something to consider.


How much does the PhD degree name matter when landing in a job? I am considering doing a PhD in a great lab/with a great advisor (and already convinced the PI). But I got in another program rather than the supposed program with the name of my subject of study, e.g. EE/chemical physics vs physics. I was worried as a rookie whether this degree would put me in an inferior position in the future competition. Regarding the circumstances in academic positions or industrial ones, how much does the degree name affect job hunting?

In many cases it would matter only a little if at all. Many job offerings call for a degree in "X or a closely related field". Physics and Hungarian Literature probably don't qualify, of course.

But in any case your application for a job consists of more than just your list of degrees. You have a chance to tailor your materials to the job at hand and so can say (must say) why you are appropriate for the job.

However, there are exceptions. Some countries, notably Germany, have laws relating to the required degree for a job. Some professions, notably medicine, have expectations that are rarely ignored.


As a presenter, should I attend all days of conference? Recently, I have a paper accepted at an IEEE conference, and I am supposed to present my paper orally at the conference.  The programs have been released, and it is a four day conference.
I am supposed to present at the last day.

The question I want to ask, is that, should I also attend the first day (openning ceremony) as well?

A conference is so much more than just an arbitrary concatenation of presentations. It is a place you can meet researchers from different places who usually work in a similar field to yours. You can use the time to get to know new people, get to talk about new ideas, find out what others are currently doing in your field, and much more.

Therefore, if you have the opportunity to attend the conference more than just the day of your presentation you should.


What to answer an author asking me if I reviewed his/her paper? Suppose I review someone's paper anonymously, the paper gets accepted, and a year or two later we meet e.g. in a social event and he/she asks me "did you review my paper?". What should I answer? There are several sub-questions here:

Suppose the review was a good one, and the paper eventualy got accepted, so I do not mind telling that I was the reviewer. Is there any rule/norm prohibiting me from telling the truth?
Suppose the review was not so good, so I do not want to reveal. What can I answer? If I just say "I am not allowed to tell you", this immediately reveals me... On the other hand, I do not want to lie. What options do I have?

You could say something like

  "I am not in the habit of telling people whether I did or did not review their papers, sorry"

or

  "I don't feel comfortable answering this question."

Or you could defuse the question with a humorous answer, e.g.

  "I would tell you but then I'd have to kill you"

or

  "I don't remember, I always take an amnesia pill immediately after reviewing a paper"

or some similar kind of obviously nonserious smart-assery. None of these answers provide any useful information to the asker, and all of them convey some level of disapproval on your part at being asked, making it unlikely that the asker would press the case any further.


Bachelors thesis supervisor headed for emeritus; professorship won't be restaffed First off, I'd like to acknowledge that I am not sure whether this post fits here, as most discussions on here revolve around higher levels of academic life. Let me know/remove this post if it does not belong.
I am in my final year of studying computer science in Germany. I also study some maths on the side, and intend to complete my maths degree after obtaining my bachelors in CS.
I have found a broad field I'd like to write my thesis on (programming language theory in general or type theory in particular). There currently is 1 professor at our institute who has been doing research on type theory in a programming languages context for a long time, but they are headed for emeritus, which I've learned from talking to current and former students of theirs.
When I asked them about a thesis, their response was rather brief, and could be summed up as

If you can see yourself doing this more or less on your own, it would be possible. I'd recommend a review-style thesis, you don't need to come up with new results. Please look for articles yourself, I am currently ill.

While I know their health situation is none of my concern, I am wondering what would happen if they passed away while I'm working on the thesis (I suspect they might be chronically ill, for reasons I will not go into). Also, I don't know whether I want to put the burden of having to supervise me on them when they're headed for emeritus and possibly not feeling well overall anyways.
This situation I deem is much more common on higher levels of education, such as grad school, so I wanted to ask whether anyone here has had any experiences in similar situations.
I know their professorship won't be restaffed, so there won't be a new professor of programming language theory/type theory following their footsteps. This makes me somewhat sad, since that field interests me the most. There is also the option of external advisory (e.g. professor at a different university), but that doesn't seem practical, as I would need to find a professor (not just any faculty but a full professor) at my institute for assessment of the thesis (which there won't be any of once the current professor officially retires), and this would put a lot of extra work on every involved party (external professor, local professor, examination office, me); on top of that it's probably rather unlikely a professor from another university would supervise me, as I have gathered from other posts on this SE instance, and as I of course don't have any special research experience in the field to offer to them.
Also, I would like to ask whether you have a method of figuring out what to do. I know the basic questions to ask myself are

do I see myself coming up with a thesis topic and finding relevant literature on my own?
would I be fine with writing a thesis in a field I am less interested in but would have safe supervision?
should I even care this much, given it is just a bachelors thesis?

I should probably mention they have 1 PhD student who seems to be in the process of finishing up their thesis, but they don't seem to be willing to supervise students right now, at least that is the impression I got from a past correspondence.
Thank you.

You already gave a good summary with the three questions at the very end.
If you are very interested in the topic, already know a lot about it and can work on your own without much help, then go for it.
If I were you, I would sit down and try to figure out a topic for your thesis. If you have the impression that you have a reasonable idea then ask the professor if this is ok for him. If not, I would think about going somewhere else where you get more supervision.


How to cite an aside article in a bible MLA format I have an a NIV Arcaeological Study Bible and am taking an Old Testament studies course.  This bible has a lot of articles about archaeology and history alongside scripture.  None of the articles have the author listed.  There is a list of contributors, but there is no way to determine which author wrote which article.

So if I wanted to cite a specific article in this bible using MLA how would I do it?  Would it be like citing an encyclopedia?

If the article is titled "The Bible and Pseudepigraphical Literature", is this correct?

  "The Bible and Pseudepigraphical Literature." NIV Archaeological Study Bible. 2006. Print.

Or would it be done like a collection with the editors?

  Kaiser, Walter and Duane Garrett, eds. "The Bible and Pseudepigraphical Literature." NIV Archaeological Study Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006. 2041. Print.

Or some other way?

I've been looking here for help: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/

It is possible that your department at your university could provide some further guidance on this as they would possibly have a stylesheet developed that would deal with this type of publication.

That said, after reviewing the book at the link you provided and as per your question said it is impossible to cite the individual contributors to the book.

Because of these circumstances I believe the most appropriate way of citing this work would be as follows. Citation below is for International edition so you may need to amend based on what edition you are using.

  Kaiser, Walter C. Jr., and Duane Garrett. NIV archaeological study Bible: an illustrated walk through biblical history and culture: New International Version.. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2005. Print.

This is similar to your second suggestion but drops the article title. This should be appropriate as the articles in this book appear to be half page further information pop-outs rather than full scale academic articles.

A useful site as well as the one you linked to in your question for creating citations is Citation Machine


Is it ethical / legal for a PhD student to advertise that he is awarding PhD degrees to other students that pay him 200 USD/month? My question is based on the example of a startup.
I have come across a "company" which claims to be providing services in Quantum Computing. However, various features of this company sound fishy to me and even unethical and illegal in academia.
The company is called "Bikash's Quantum" which claims to be charging money from students in exchange of promise for 'internship'. And then spread this idea for earning more money by 'referring' to more students and presenting it as a money earning scheme (without any academic basis). According to my interpretation it is precisely the pyramid scheme in the disguise of an "internship" as the scheme asks a student to refer to this internship scheme to about 10 students each day where each new student will be charged 500 INR directly paid to this startup.
Next is the idea of awarding people with degree and making them pay for it. Even for a Ph.D. There is no idea of a scholarship or a stipend, rather on top of that the chosen candidate has to pay the fee. The question I want to ask here is more fundamental. The founder is in midst of his Ph.D. (see here & here). On top of this there is NO clue to what the company is affiliated with, in order to provide a legal degree (for BS, MS and a Ph.D.). And the payment options are quickly given even by a UPI address via the GooglePay app into a personal account. The founder is also heavily self-cited.
Is it legal to operate like this in academia? To award degree (not even clear from what affiliation)? Can a startup like this offer any desired 'degree' to anyone in exchange of money?
The main task done by this "company" is making the quantum circuits for various recent PRAs and PRL papers and try to publish them in Springer QIP journal. First and second year undergraduates are hired for this in exchange of money and they design these quantum circuits in IBM Quantum Experience environment.
(This admission information from the website was removed recently after a social media post was made against this company, and now is protected by a login. I had screenshots in my previous edits but was told to take them down, so I obeyed.)

This sounds like a straight up pyramid scheme. It may or may not be "legal" in your country but it's not a legitimate company. Run away from this.


Marijuana use and job/grant opportunities I am now living in a state (in the US) where marijuana is legal (for recreational use) and I'd like to be able to try it. However, I am concerned that doing so might effect my job or grant prospects as a current graduate student. In my field, students can intern for the DoD or NSA and my understanding is that smoking marijuana is a disqualifier for those kinds of positions.

Am I correct in this?

Are there any other grants or jobs for which this would be disqualifying?

Regardless of current policy, your career may be affected by policies 30 years in the future. Although the trend seems to be towards increased tolerance of marijuana, it is not possible to predict how things will be throughout your career. When I was a teenager US federal policy seemed to be moving in the direction of eliminating poverty and racial injustice as important objectives - see the "Great Society" programs.

You seem to be in a field that may lead to US government employment, or needing a US security clearance, or both. That makes you very vulnerable to changes in policy. The consequences of not being able to truthfully deny ever using illegal drugs could change in either direction.

You will have to make your own trade-off, but remember that you need to consider what could happen over several decades, not just what is happening now.


How to set bibliographic entry to display author only when applicable? I'm writing my bachelor's thesis with OpenOffice Writer. Most of my sources are websites, and the author or publication year is often absent.

With Writer's bibliography system, you can specify whether to display author, publication year etc. for a certain type of entry, eg. WWW document, but the same settings will be used for every WWW document (whereas I would like to have the author displayed when and only when applicable).

I know there are "user-defined" entries, but this system seems a bit clumsy, as you can't rename them from "User-Defined1" and so on.

I think MS Office Word has a better system, but I've heard that the open-source alternatives are just as good, so why buy it? I've also tried Zotero and Mendeley, but it seems they can't display inline citations in the [1][2] style, which I would prefer.

Would rather avoid using LaTeX/BibTeX, since they seem like overkill.

Okay, apparently you can get the [1] style in Zotero, but it's not installed by default.

Also, there's a "protect from manual changes" checkbox which can be unchecked in Writer. This way you can edit the entries in pretty much any way. It's far from ideal though, as manual changes are overwritten every time you update the bibliography.


Is it sensible to do two PhD's simultaneously? I have finished my master's degree in Physics (Radiation and Health Physics Option) with distinction, but I want a PhD in Medical Physics. My university does not offer that pathway and other universities are insisting I do a M.Phil. for a year before they will consider me for PhD candidacy I really do not have the energy and time to concentrate on the M.Phil. right now and I fear I might not make the desired grade.

I have an offer to do a Ph.D. in my area of specialization (Radiation and Health) and I need to make a decision on this. I am thinking of accepting both offers and in case I don't get the desired grade to move over to PhD in medical physics, so I can still have my PhD in Radiation and Health Physics and not lose both ways.

It sounds like you have offers from two different universities in two slightly different fields. If so, you will need to check with both universities to see if you can be simultaneously enrolled. My guess is that neither university will be happy about that, and especially the one that is providing a studentship. Even if it is allowed, you have to ask yourself what the advantage is.

A PhD is more about the research than the nominal department (or even university) that grants the degree. A PhD is all about gaining the skills needed to do independent research. Sometimes (maybe) a good way (or potentially the only way) of gaining those skills is to do two PhDs. More often a PhD with multiple supervisors will give you the necessary opportunities.

It sounds like for you that you want to start the first PhD and then switch to the second Phd if you do well enough in the MPhil year. While this provides some security, if the first PhD program is such a bad fit (either in terms of reputation or area of study) that you want that type of security, then the program is probably not a good fit for you.


I'm international PhD student and I may get terminated soon. Advice urgently needed Apologies if this is not the right place to ask this question, but I absolutely need advice.
I am currently third-year international PhD student living in United States on F1 visa and full funding. So far I have been performing quite well, I finished almost all coursework with good grades, completed most of other requirenments, and had pretty good standing with my advisor. However, for the past couple of months I have been struggling A LOT and unfortunately, due to different reasons, I was unable to pass my Comprehensive exam last fall. My dissertation proposal was a total mess, and unfortunately, it only got worse from there. In few weeks I have to submit new proposal which is still terrible, and today I found out I have to basically re-write everything from scratch. Moreover, I am not sure if I will be able to pass the part of exam which I failed in fall (although I do feel way more confident).
It is truly difficult to explain the shame and guilt I am feeling right now. Especially since my University gave me a chance. I do not want to quit, but I feel like I may get terminated. If I get terminated, I may have to leave the United States. This will destory me, especially since I have mypartner here. I know all of it may sound silly, but I am panicking right now. I though I will be able to push through this spring, but I have panic attacks every day now.
Therefore, my question is: What happens if international student gets terminated from the program? Do you believe, if I fail comprehensive exam once again, my department may give me once more chance? What would you do in my place? Can I still transfer/change my major on my F1 visa? Should I just master-out and apply for OPT? Is it even possible?
My university does not give me any specific answers. My advisor knows I am struggling, but not the extent of it.

How many chances to take a qualifying exam are extended to you depends on how much support you have in the faculty - how much they, or at least someone, believe(s) in you. I’ve seen people being counseled out after one failure, and others passing in their third try. Even if it’s nerve-wrecking, you should treat every exam as if it might be your last chance.
As to “mastering out,” if you went through the entire coursework and were given at least a second chance, they quite possibly would offer you to leave with an M.Sc. anyway, if it comes to that.
Finally, as to changing fields, that depends on how much work you have put in in the field you might be thinking about, and if you have connections in a different department. You could also switch advisers, but from what you write here, your adviser sounds supportive and not the source of your problems.
You’d probably have to leave the country if you’re here on an F1, but for now I’d focus on passing the field exam coming up.


Comparison of student involvement in research in different countries In the United States, a student who will successfully enter academia will do some research as an undergraduate, and then in graduate school focus mainly on research. (Obviously this is just a generalization).

My question is: how is this different in other countries in terms of how students are involved in research? In what ways at what ages? For example, the United states has lots of government funded programs where undergraduates can meaningfully participate in research. Are there comparable programs in other countries?

Poland

Below I describe the default setting as general as possible. Things of course differ across fields, universities and even faculties. I base my generalizations on friends' experience on other fields/universities/faculties. Of course, there will be individuals who could have had a different (exceptional) path.

This can be of course expanded into hundreds of pages, but being to detailed is not the point here.

People finish high school at the age of 19.
Regarding academic education - studies - nowadays the Bologna Process is applied in most European countries. This means that studies are divided into three levels:

Licentiate (not to be mistaken with bachelor's) - lasting 3 years (mostly attainable at universities), or engineer's - usually lasting 3.5 years (attainable mostly at technical universities). One studies a particular field from the very beginning - e.g., when studying physics, one does not have courses in biology (well, in general, as there is also biophysics, which obviously joins both) and vice versa, etc. It's common that this level ends with a preparation of a small thesis (under an advisor's supervision) - usually something between 10-20 pages - some might call it simply a student project. In most cases a few weeks of research is enough for completion.
Magister - in many aspects equivalent to master's - lasting two years, being a bit more specialized - for example having a licentiate in physics, one can pursue a magister degree in astrophysics, or condensed matter, atomic physics, particle physics etc. Theoretically, one should spend most of the two years doing research for their master's thesis, but usually people choose a particular topic halfway through, and start research during their second year. Especially that there are still several courses to complete; usually more during the first rather than the second year.
Doctor or PhD - lasting four years. During the first one or two years there are some courses, sometimes taught by visiting professors, or senior faculty members. These are usually about the field of expertise of the lecturer - and these can change from year to year if the lecturer changes, e.g. once it can be about accretion disks on black holes, but the next year will have a course on relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. Usually, but not always, there's a seminar that has to be attended throughout the whole studies, or some other minor courses that need to be completed. However, usually there's only one course per semester, and rest of the time is spent on research.

To sum up:

One mostly learns;
one learns a lot and starts to do research based on that knowledge;
one learns a bit, and does a lot of research.


Can you do research in same field as your diploma and another field at the same time? How liberal are institutions with regard to doing research in a different (unrelated) field than the person's diploma?

For example, if a person with a diploma in pure mathematics wants also to do research and programming in IT (specifically in XML), can he do it in his work time?

Does it makes sense to obtain a second diploma (Is Bachelor enough?) in order to be able to refresh the brain by switching between two different jobs during work time?

I'm doing my diploma as an electrical engineer and I will start a phd in operations research. So that's possible.

I think it is a lot about what skills you bring. At first, which skills can be useful for the institution where you gonna start. Also the question is, if your skills are enough for your special phd topic...

If you are a pure mathematican with no skills whatsoever in XML that would be hard. But if you attained some skills in XML on your "pure mathematics" path, it may be possible.


PhD or postdoc salary in Denmark according to the cost of living. Is it OK? I´d like to know if the average salary for a PostDoc and a PhD student is sufficient for a middle income expectations in Denmark.
What I mean for middle income is for the two of us (1 PostDoc and 1 PhD) to rent a 1 bedroom flat, spend in public transport, go to the supermarket without worries and travel on vacations once a year.

Cost of living is high, particularly in the Copenhagen area: rent, food, transportation, etc. But already with a PhD salary you will get by no problem and you will have plenty of extra money at the end of the month. Two salaries will allow you to rent a nice small apartment, so no problems. People with kids do PhDs in Denmark, so that should give you an idea, if you have no kids it's plenty enough.


Electronics Engineer Doing a Bachelor Thesis in Physics I am an electronics engineering undergrad currently choosing a topic for my bachelor thesis.

I  have always been interested in physics in general, and in quantum mechanics in particular. To make sure my attraction to quantum mechanics wasn't merely that of a layman reading about the cool properties of the quantum world, I studied as much textbook quantum mechanics as I could lay my hands on. I audited online courses offered by MIT and Stanford in addition to the studying I did from the best undergraduate textbook out there. And I was doing that parallel to my university engineering work.

Now I have the opportunity to apply for a bachelor thesis at a prestigious german university in the topic of Quantum Dot Qubits, which is, as you might have deduced from the name, a quantum mechanical topic.

But because physics is not my major, I had doubts about whether I am qualified to apply, so I looked at the university's undergrad physics curriculum and, not surprisingly, the Quantum Mechanics courses included titles that I know of but did not have the chance to delve deeply into. But I am quite confident (with a hope that I am not overestimating my abilities) that I can catch up to whatever I am lacking (which is not a lot - pretty much little chunks here and there) pretty quickly.

For the past couple of days I have been deciding back and forth on whether I should apply, with my leash being that ,whatever I have studied, I don't have as much experience as the physics students (I did not solve as much problems) to carry out the highly physical research that would be assigned to me. But I saw this post and this post, and after reading that "Bachelor theses are closer to literature reviews" I think my decision is going to be to apply after all and acquire the chunks of knowledge I am missing on the go. Would that decision be wise?

EDIT (Jan. 23, 2017): 5 months ago, I successfully completed my bachelor's thesis in the field of quantum information, and I got the top grade. I am currently applying for grad studies in the same research area.

There are two major issues here: on the one hand there is learning and mastering a topic, on the other hand there is writing a thesis merely.

For the former: quantum mechanics is a very delicate subject that requires a deep understanding of classical physics and analytical mechanics, not to mention mathematical methods as theory of operators on Hilbert spaces and differential equations. Learning quantum mechanics is also about understanding quantum mechanics: it is already difficult for people in the field and it will especially be for whom is from the outside. Moreover, there are different sub-topics areas that you may be involved in, and they may differ from what you have read around (quantum mechanics is not what people think it is).

You will certainly finish writing your thesis successfully, but that does not mean you will have majored and understood the topic well enough to continue doing research about it. A thesis on quantum mechanics is useful if you want to continue investigating the subject in your further career (as, for example, trying to switch to a master's degree in a more related physics area, like nuclear or solid matter physics, or even theoretical physics). Most depends on what you are planning to do afterwards. If you will continue on the engineering side it is advisable to work on a topic that will get you a job as engineer, eventually, otherwise you are going to end up with a science salad without being expert in either field, neither physics nor electronics, since you could have invested your bachelor thesis time otherwise.

This said, do apply for it. It is always good to at least have the possibility to decide, rather than regretting not to have applied; in addition, always go for whatever makes you feel passionate.


Why does the status "under peer review" change to "Awaiting Reviewer selection" after 2 months? I submitted my manuscript 3 months back. After a few days, the status changed to "under peer review". It was so for two months. Now the status is changed to "awaiting reviewer selection". It is totally confusing. what does this really mean? what is happening to my manuscript?

They might simply look for an additional reviewer. Sometimes this happens, e.g. if the editor couldn't make a decision based on the reports of the two initial reviewers. You could also write to the editor and ask what is going on.


Are Stack Exchange sites good pedagogical tools? It seems like Stack Exchange sites would be a great resource for real-world open-ended research-and-answer projects. E.g., as a teacher I might select one or several recent good questions from an on-topic Stack Exchange site and have students actually submit their answers on Stack Exchange. For more advanced students I might have them find good questions on their own.

It's sort of a free peer-review system.

But I am not aware of this having been done. Is there a reason?

(I have a particular interest in why or why this might not pass academic muster because the recently-launched Law.SE has a built-in lack of experts, and the only likely pool of expert participants would be students and professors.)

Clarification: It seems that some people are reading this question and thinking of Stack Overflow. I'm thinking more of Stack Exchange sites like Law, Chemistry, or Cross-Validated, where there are a lot of good questions that are hard to provide with good answers because of the amount of time that has to be invested in a good answer. If only there were a source of people not only studying those subjects, but also compelled to spend extended time crafting good answers....

Also, I was thinking first of graduate-level students, perhaps down to advanced seminar students in an applicable major. Not shotgunning something like this out to an introductory lecture.  (Although apparently you can use the latter approach to create your own SE site!)

as a teacher I might select one or several recent good questions from an on-topic Stack Exchange site and have students actually submit their answers on Stack Exchange

In the following, I will assume that you imagine this in a way that a teacher assigns a certain question to all students, and each student (or each of several teams of students) has to post an answer. As I will outline below, finding suitable questions could prove difficult, so using each question only for one student/team of students would probably be too uneconomical.

I would be opposed to this procedure:

For a homework question, submitting what you think could be a valid answer, if you are not reasonably certain, is fine. After all, you're "entitled" to an attempt at solving the problem. Actually, if you do not have any idea how to respond to a question, even an almost random guess is OK as a response to a homework question, if you see a small chance it might be at least partially true. And likewise, a partial answer is totally fine for a homework question, as you have to use your chance to show even the partial solution that you have found, if you cannot solve the whole task.
For a question on a Stack Exchange site, submitting any of the aforementioned "non-perfect" answers on purpose (especially on questions for which various more valid answers do exist) is unacceptable. Unless you are reasonably convinced that what you are posting is, in your opinion, a valid answer, you should not post it on a Stack Exchange site in a way that pretends to be an answer. Each posted answer takes time to read, and posting an answer that you know is quite likely wrong or incomplete (read: insufficient for the question) is simply disrespectful to all the people who take their time to read, evaluate, comment on, vote on and edit answers.

There are some further issues with your suggestion:

Stack Exchange answers are public. As soon as one of the students has posted a good solution, nothing will stop other students from copying any information from that answer. You may still be testing your students' skills, but not the skills at solving the problem, but the skills at individually presenting a ready-made solution they found elsewhere.
While votes on the Stack Exchange network indicate quality of the answers to some extent, there is no guarantee that this measurement works reliably for each answer. In particular, when there are many answers, my hunch is that most of the lower-ranked answers will never be read, while the top-ranked answers will be read repeatedly and receive ever more upvotes. To some extent, the same applies to comments, where the Nth answer is less likely to receive any helpful coments than the first one.
Many Stack Exchange sites are not friendly towards duplicate answers. Exact reactions vary from site to site, but on various of the sites, the answer that proposes a certain solution for the 5th time might get harsh comments and even receive downvotes simply based on the fact that their answer does not contribute anything new.

Therefore, I do not unconditionally agree with the statement

  It's sort of a free peer-review system.

It is a free peer-review system in the context of people voluntarily submitting posts for "peer-review" who want to submit something based on various preconditions (perceived good ideas, ...). The "peer-reviewers" spend their effort because they expect to read posts by exactly these people, people who thought they have good enough ideas to post.

If you remove those preconditions, you are, in a way, abusing the system. You are adding considerable workload for the peer-reviewers, who will have to dig through loads of submissions by people who did not think they have a good enough idea to post, but who posted primarily because it is their chance for completing the homework task. This, in turn, might reduce the willingness of those peer-reviewers to invest much effort for the respective Stack Exchange site in the first place and thereby worsen the experience for all users of the site.

After talking about the answers, I also have some thoughts about the questions. You wrote

  as a teacher I might select one or several recent good questions

and

  For more advanced students I might have them find good questions on their own.

Both of these can be problematic, as they are not guaranteed to yield good results. This is largely coupled to the fact that various Stack Exchange sites have strict policies against duplicate questions. These are fitting to build a consistent core of Q&A-shaped knowledge on each topic, but it also means that sooner or later, the less exotic (read: case-specific, or otherwise unusual or not too generalizeable) questions on any given topic will all have been asked. Asking new questions on the topic that are comparable without getting closed as duplicates can be come nearly impossible, whereas the task of finding interesting questions gradually gets reduced to checking a ready-made list of core questions on a given topic that gets circulated among students.

In summary, I think it is not a good idea to use any Stack Exchange site for "free peer-reviews" of student submissions. What is realistically feasible, though, is to use questions from a Stack Exchange site you deem appropriate and ask students to submit their own answer to you, and then check all the submissions. This will still preserve the real-world connection by the actual Stack Exchange question without burdening the users of the Stack Exchange site in any way.

As another note on this topic, from a privacy-related perspective, I am very skeptical of requiring any student to use a third-party service outside of the university's realm of control as a part of taking a class. Asking them to register somewhere (possibly, if they so choose, with a fake address, etc.) to retrieve software required for the class might still be OK, but I would never require a student to register with a third-party site (even one that I personally quite fully trust, like Stack Exchange) to upload anything that sheds a light on their performance as a student.


How to prepare a ten-minute presentation for a PhD interview? I've got an interview for a Ph.D. position and I need to give a ten-minute presentation for my recent research. I have completed two projects and right now I am doing another research which has a close correlation to the advertised position. These three projects have no correlation. I would like to present the last project I am working on, but unfortunately, I have a few results to exhibit. So I do not know how to present an unfinished project. Should I follow the outline like background, purpose, methods, and results? And any tips or advice for the interview?

Ten minutes is like "no time at all". You can do very little. However, it is likely that the hiring committee is much more interested in what you will do in the future, related to their general concerns, than what you have done in the past.

So, I'd suggest you mention, briefly, the past results but stress the work in progress and the possible benefits if it pays off. The committee can explore your past work in publications, of course, but the work in progress and contemplated, needs to come from you. Look to the future, not the past.


What quality do top schools look for, besides normal requirements? In his answer in How do you get a bad transcript past Ph.D. admissions?, InquilineKea says:

  By the way, elite private schools (for whatever reason) tend not to have GPA cutoffs. If you're a student with a low GPA applying for an elite private school, you probably have something else in you that's extremely unusual, since very few students with low GPAs apply to them.

Sooo, what exactly are they? I guess, you are thinking this right now:

  Research ability. Number of papers. Period.

But that's nothing new for me (do I miss something?). I'm looking for the extremely unusual things that he mentioned. Googling around, I don't see much information given for grad students, only for the undergrad. In an answer in Quora, a women who self-claimed to used to interview applicants to MIT lists four qualities (again, for undergrad):

  Deep intellectual curiosity and a passion for learning that goes far beyond the norm.
  Self motivation, tenacity and grit.
  Lack of arrogance.
  A burning desire to attend MIT above all other schools, and can explain why.

Do those unusual qualities ever exist? How heavy are they in the final decision? And where should I represent them? In the emails to the professors, or in the SOP to the adcom, or just in my website? Or should I just stick to the research ability?

Graduate admissions is very different from undergraduate admissions. A lot of what you may read online about undergraduate admissions does not apply to graduate admissions.

(Traditional) applicants to undergraduate programs are understood to be (generally) young. They haven't had much of a chance to prove themselves yet through meaningful accomplishments. So in undergraduate admissions, it is not uncommon to look for intangible "qualities" that speak to a candidate's ability to be successful in areas that they haven't yet had a chance to prove themselves in. That's just because many highly qualified prospective undergraduate students don't have many tangible achievements (simply due to lack of life experience, not lack of potential.)

In contrast, applicants to graduate programs have more experience, whether academic, life, or professional experience. Prospective graduate students are simply not nearly as "unknown" as prospective undergraduate students. They have had more of a chance to collect some meaningful accomplishments. Thus in graduate admissions, tangible achievements weigh far more heavily.

So while motivation, curiosity, etc. may be useful qualities for a graduate student, admissions committees are interested in what you have done (which may show that you have these qualities). They're not interested in having you tell them what qualities you believe you have.

Sometimes if a candidate lacks academic achievements but has meaningful achievements in other areas (e.g. entrepreneurial), these can help. (That may be what was implied by "you probably have something else in you that's extremely unusual".)


Is using a rhetoric element plagiarism? Let's suppose a paper uses an interesting rhetoric element to present idea A. So let's say it says "Wise men have had the brilliant, although not fully correct idea that A". Is it plagiarism, to say in a different paper (even different discipline) concerning (completely) different idea B something similar, like "Wise men have had the brilliant, yet slightly wrong idea B"?

My intuition is no, because plagiarism is the process of presenting ideas as ones own. As long as the rhetoric element is not the idea in itself (lets say a poem) it seems to me it cannot be plagiarism.

In my opinion what you are suggesting is brushing up against plagiarism.  Done just once as you suggest, it will surely not be a problem.  But if this is an example of something done more systematically in your writing -- or is indicative of the way you look at borrowing others' ideas and words -- you may in fact have a problem down the line.  Certainly I see room for improvement.

Plagiarism is the act of using someone else's ideas or distinctive language without sufficient attribution.  So your explanation as to why you are not plagiarizing is not really convincing: the language was distinctive enough for you to want to copy it.

Now you have taken a rather short "rhetoric element" and changed it a bit, from

  Wise men have had the brilliant, although not fully correct idea that A

to

  Wise men have had the brilliant, yet slightly wrong idea B

I think it's an interesting question why you changed it.  Did you change it because you didn't want to copy too many words verbatim, or because the second one reads as better to you?  It's not a trick question: both impulses are good and ought to be taken further.  You feel less bad copying a smaller number of words, so keep going with that: keep going until the first six words are no longer identical, at least.  In terms of reads better: experienced writers know that anything can be be made to read better if you put more time and work into it.  A main task of a writer is to come up with language which is (i) original and (ii) optimized for the subject matter, and in really effective writing these two goals are confluent and mutually beneficial, not antithetical.

What piece of writing is really so good that it needs to be repeated as is from one situation to another?  (That's not a completely rhetorical question, and there are a few positive answers, but they are few.) Since you are writing about new ideas and new work, you should (the vast majority of the time) find that new words are more appropriate than old ones.

In the case at hand: I don't find "Wise men have had the brilliant, yet...." to be rhetorical gold or anything close to it.  If I am honest, to me it sounds like the kind of hackneyed academic writing that young students sometimes use earnestly and older students and veteran academics either mock or use ironically.  (And a tip: that the brilliant and wise are men is going to be noticed in a negative way by some.)  I suggest that you practice slinging your own phrases: soon enough you'll be able to do as good and I hope much better than this.  (I thought about showing you half a dozen similar phrases to indicate it's no big thing, but I decided not to because I don't know the intellectual content, and choosing language divorced from content is part of what I'm criticizing.)

Good luck.  For further reading about what it's like to encounter many short passages of your writing coopted with minor changes, I recommend this piece.  (And to gain some respect for the complexity of these issues and remember not to be too critical of others, I recommend this piece.)