What should be included in a departmental email policy? I receive about 10k emails per year and send about 2-3k. In my department (the sphere I can influence) there are those who almost never respond and those who respond as soon as I have hit the send button. There are also those who send mails on weekends, in the middle of the night, seemingly expecting answers fairly immediately. The record was probably the mail that was send shortly after midnight on a Sunday night about stuff that needed to be sorted out by Monday morning. In short, different person have different views on how and for what email should be used. I should add that in my system, the university email is strictly not to be used for private emailing.

I am therefore interested in hearing about if and if so how one can establish an email policy which provides guidelines for reasonable emailing practices within a department.

I have heard about guidelines against sending mails from off duty hours, about avoiding disputes over email, and about reasonable (expected) response times, etc. but have so far failed to locate any good sources for such practices and guidelines.

Do issues like this really need a policy to govern them?  If someone in a department has a problem responding to emails in a timely manner, it seems to me that it would be better to counsel them directly.  Creating a policy for it may come across as passive-aggressive.

Corporations may have formal policies about how to answer email, and how to organize your desk, and how to change the toilet paper in the restroom.  But academics are used to a considerable degree of autonomy, and dislike being micromanaged.

My humble opinion.


Could it be a problem years later if I forgot to include some things in my thesis? I graduated 3 years ago with a MS degree and a thesis. I recently discovered that I forgot to include some data - tables and list of datasets. All my final analysis has been included. Can there be some problem about this in the future?
I have a couple of sentences such as : "For the list of datasets used in this experiment, see table xx". I do not have that table. I guess I was in a mad rush at the end and forgot to include those.

Can there be some problem about this in the future?

What sort of problems do you mean?  It could certainly inconvenience someone in the future if they try to build on your work and have to reconstruct this data.  I'd recommend writing to your advisor to send the additional data tables in case anyone could benefit from them, assuming you don't have in mind doing anything else with them yourself.  You don't have to describe it as material you forgot to include (although, in light of the edited question, there's no way of saving face since you referred to it in the thesis as if it were included).  Instead, you could reasonably say something like "While going through old files, I discovered some potentially useful material that never made it into my master's thesis, which I've attached to this e-mail.  Feel free to make use of it if any future students work on related projects."

On the other hand, you don't need to worry about being punished or having your degree revoked, assuming there was no dishonesty or fraud involved.  There's always more material you could have included in your thesis but didn't, and this is not relevant once the thesis has been approved.  Omissions or even mistakes won't invalidate your degree.


Is a graduate pathway program likely to help for admission to a masters in another field? Is it better than MOOCs or an internship for this purpose? I am a 4th year Electronics engineering student studying in India. I applied to Master's of Science in computer science programs (I wish to change fields) offered by 11 universities in the US, but my application was rejected by all 11 of them.

One of the important factors (correct me if I am wrong) that I consider is weak in my application is my background. I have no formal background (even though I have lots of informal background) in Computer Science (my university did not encourage Minoring in a second subject).

To address the above stated problem, I am considering enrolling into the "academic graduate pathway program"(by academic I mean that it is not intended to fulfil english language requirements, but to fulfil background requirements for the graduate studies in some field) which is basically an additional year before the Master's program where I will study all the required prerequisites for a Master's program in Computer Science.

The problem is that the cost is an issue. I will have to spend an year's worth of extra money before the Master's.

So, my question :

Is enrolling into the pathway program necessary (and if yes, how much) for improving my chances of getting into a Master's in Computer science program, or would taking online courses on coursera, edx, udacity ... be equivalent (by equivalent I mean would it benefit equally in the admission procedure)?
Hypothetically, if I get an offer for a 6 month research internship in a subject of my interest (Machine Learning - which is what I wish to concentrate on during my graduate studies), will the internship, or studying at the pathway program benefit my application more ?
Are there any other ways, specific to my case, in which I can complete the background requirement, without formally enrolling in such a program ?

My experience with interviewing/selecting candidates to enter a masters program (in social science, it may be different in computer science) is that the process can be highly variable, and candidates may be rejected for a range of reasons ranging from test scores, to a lack of experience, to not filling out admission paperwork properly, and, unfortunately, discrimination due to ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, etc.

Different programs have different mentalities toward admitting students, some programs might want you to apply two years in a row, because they decided that this is an indication that you are "more serious".

So... It might be safe to assume that your lack of background is the problem (particularly since you were rejected 11 times), however, the only way to know for sure is to ask the admission committees.

In my experience, graduate programs in the U.S. will NEVER tell you why you were rejected, because doing so places them at legal risk. However, they will respond if you ask them "What can I do to strengthen my application between now and the next admission cycle?".

With regard to how you can get experience - many faculty members I talk with don't consider MOOCs legitimate at this time. This may be different, depending on where you are applying. Personally, I would advise you to seek education at a brick and mortar institution, if you can afford to do so.

You mention prerequisites - in my experience this term generally refers to a course that is required to take another course. Thus, prerequisites are typically taken at the same university as a graduate program in which you are enrolled, as credits won't always transfer. What you are describing seems to be taking general coursework.

Unfortunantly, there is a hierarchy in higher education. In my experience it goes:

Research 1 Universities (ranked by the Carnage foundation)
Other universities
Community colleges
Online programs

With option one being the most prestigious and most expensive and option four being seen as the least prestigious, and also the least expensive.

In summary:
1. Ask the graduate programs what you can do to strengthen your application.
2. Engage in the behaviors that the programs tell you to.


Can I use a stamped arxiv paper as a proof of priority if it has been rejected? Sometimes arxiv moderators may not agree with content of a submitted manuscript. Although it's rare, the submitted manuscript may be rejected even if it contains novel or original results.

During submission the manuscript is stamped by the arxiv submission system with the classification and date of submission.

Can I use a stamped arxiv manuscript as a proof (priority of a physics or math formula, new method or some other idea) if it has been rejected? If yes, how this could be done? Can I publish the stamped paper online and claim it as an official arxiv document?

I recommend against it. You can put online anything you like and use it to claim priority, but if the paper is hosted on your personal website then you lose the credibility that the date stamp of an official arXiv-hosted paper comes with (since just the stamp itself would be easy to forge), so in the event of a priority dispute this would not be a foolproof form of evidence.

Also, as has been discussed in other questions on academia.se (can't look it up right now), people who are new to academic publishing worry excessively about their ideas being stolen by others. Especially given that your manuscript was rejected by arXiv, the chances of this happening are effectively zero. You would be much better off using your energy to write a good manuscript rather than worrying about datestamps.


Unresponsive advisor, job offer in limbo I'm in a rough place right now in the homestretch of my PhD, and I'm looking for advice. I've recently reached out to my advisor about this, but they are not responding to my emails, hence me asking this question here.

My advisor is on sabbatical this year (my final year of my graduate program). Three months ago, I sent my advisor a more-or-less complete draft of my thesis, and I have not heard anything at all from them since. No edits, no comments, nothing. In part, I feel responsible for this situation; I was slated to finish last year, before my advisor left, and now they are having to edit my thesis while on sabbatical. I realize that this is a big burden. I am not sure whether or not I have the right to be upset about how long this has taken as a result.

My main concern that I have is that I want to defend before September 1st, as I have an academic job that is set to begin on that date (contingent on me actually being awarded a PhD). In order to give committee members enough time to review my thesis and for my university to process the necessary paperwork, I will likely need to have edits incorporated into my thesis by the first week or two of July. Given how long this is taking, I am not sure if this is possible anymore, and I am not sure who is ultimately to blame here.

My main question is this: Is it out of the question for someone in my position to ask their new employer whether or not it is OK to defend their PhD after the start date of their new job? Would I most likely have the offer revoked if I do so? I realize that there is know surefire way of knowing without actually asking, but I'm looking for some advice before potentially shooting myself in the foot here.

I'm going to just guess that meeting your tight deadlines will be impossible with an advisor on sabbatical. So you need some short term action that will preserve your position.

You can certainly ask a new employer about starting before you have officially received the degree and they might be fine with that, or not. But it would be more likely to be a positive decision if they had some quasi official assurance that your timely and successful completion is not in doubt.

You might try one or both of the following. Ask your advisor for a letter, assuring the reader (your potential employer) that completion is a pretty much pro forma situation. "We need to dot some i's and cross some t's etc."

Go to the department head and get confirmation of the above and even his/her help in getting that letter from your advisor. The head might also include an additional supporting letter, confirming that your progress is on track, etc.

Many employers would be supportive as long as the situation doesn't seem like it will go on and you wind up ABD or unable to do the job you are being hired for. Of course, there may be some situations in which there are firm, legal, requirements that you get the degree before starting the job, but those are likely rare. But I'm assuming this is an industrial job, not an academic position, which might well have firm requirements to start.

Another option, perhaps, is to ask the employer for a delayed start date. But that request would also be positively supported by the sort of letter(s) mentioned above.


Can I take pictures from posters and slide presentations in a conference? If I do not ask for permission, is it acceptable to take pictures from posters and slide presentations in a conference by camera? Can I record a presentation?

In the US, audio recording is legal in some states (one-party consent states) and illegal in others (all-party consent states) without permission of everyone involved, so I wouldn't do it without asking. Some conferences or universities may have rules against it (so you could be removed from the premises of a conference or thrown out of a lecture by the professor), or you may find that the speaker finds it rude and confronts you or stops speaking. Neither is particularly professional behavior by you. In other countries, the rules probably vary even more. Also, just because it is legal, that doesn't mean that it will be seen as acceptable by the speaker or the audience.

I see audience members taking photographs of every slide shown at conferences all the time, but I find that speakers and audience members are frequently annoyed. When it happens to me as the speaker, I usually stop and offer to share the slides after the talk with anyone that wants them. That usually stops the photography and settles everyone down a bit.

Also, someone other than you owns the copyright in the slides or poster. I would avoid what is likely a copyright violation by photographing a slide or poster.

Edited to summarize: I wouldn't. People do it all the time. That doesn't make it OK. Get permission if you can or don't do it.


How do research papers differ from research articles? What is the difference between a research paper and a research article? Frequently these two terms are considered in the same category. So, what features distinguish these two terms?

Research article refers mainly to research published in a journal, whereas research paper refers to a research report whether it is a published one or not.


Finish my Masters or take a break year before post-bac? I am currently a graduate student in communications, with my B.A. in English and Creative Writing. I have been utterly dissatisfied with my graduate experience and have spent most (read: all) of this past year focusing more on my music (teaching private lessons, working with marching bands, and personal practice) than on my graduate studies. I am certain that I want to return for a second bachelor's degree in music education and follow that path.

However, I'm stuck with a conundrum here. I can finish the second year of my Masters and enter post-bac with both degrees, or I could take the next year to work and save up some money to help pay for my second bachelor's. (To give some figures, I currently make about $10,000 a year, which is enough to live but not have any savings. Working locally I could make anywhere from $25-30,000 a year, and the extra $15-20,000 would go directly into savings for the post-bac program.

I'm concerned how much backlash or academic penalty there may be after dropping out of a Masters program, though. Does anybody have a similar or comparable experience that they can share? I just want to take the right path here.

Thank you so much!

Don't stay in a graduate program you're not happy with. It isn't worth it if you can instead work toward something you're passionate about and can make more money while doing it and likely won't be judged heavily for doing, especially if you haven't even spent much time in the past year on graduate studies. At the very least, if you have a good advisor, discuss your options with them. They may be surprised to see you but will likely not encourage you to stay in the program if you aren't dedicated to finishing it.


What is the decision on my paper? I submitted the revised version of my paper to a journal. after two weeks the paper status changed from under review to reviews completed. and still remains in this state about 10 days. What do you think is the decision on my paper? Reject or accept?

What do you think is the decision on my paper? Reject or accept?

Decision pending. Likely, this means that the review phase of the paper is finished, and is currently awaiting a final verdict by the associate editor or editor-in-chief.


Can you get statistical data on research paper submissions and publications? For a class project in machine learning, I am considering building a set of predictors where the feature set includes information about the topic, keywords in the title, the authors, the date, etc., and the outputs are probability of getting published, expected citation impact, etc.

I would like to choose a single journal such as Nature for example.  Will it be possible to collect the necessary data to accomplish this? Anyone have tips on where I can find statistical data about particular research journals?

IMHO, this is unlikely to fly. Some journals might give you statistics on the number of submitted and accepted publications. But submission to a journal is typically confidential and as an author, I would be pretty upset if Nature revealed this information to someone else.

Where you might be able to do similar analysis is a site like arXiv.org. It's used heavily in physics in other fields as a preprint service, and there are usually notes where and when a submission is accepted to a journal. Keywords are also included. The difference is that not everyone submitting to Phys Rev necessarily uses arXiv.org.


When to update an Arxiv posting vs. creating a new post? I have a paper on the Arxiv which has recently been referenced in someone else's published work. I have since used the new work (of someone else) to significantly extend my current Arxiv work. Since my previous Arxiv posting has not yet appeared anywhere, I am sending the old work along with the extensions to a journal in a single paper. So my question is this: should I update the Arxiv listing for the previous paper with the new extended version as a revision or should I add it as a new paper?

I guess my worry is this: let A be my paper, B be the other paper that references A and A' be my extended paper which builds on some ideas from B to significantly extend A. If I post A' as a revision to A, then there is a weird referencing problem where B refers to my Arxiv post without knowing that A' builds on B. However, if I post A' as a new paper, then it includes essentially all of A in it (though presented in a more clear manner) and so there seems to be some duplication.

I agree with Mangara that there's no problem with updating the previous paper if your new version subsumes the previous one.  It's understood that results in preprints are sometimes improved before publication, and so this won't trouble anyone.  Furthermore, there are several reasons why you should (and not just can) do this:

It's best not to leave incomplete versions of the paper lying around, since someone may run across them and never realize there's a better version elsewhere.  For example, it's better if readers following the reference from B learn that there's a new version, rather than just seeing the old one and potentially assuming that's all there is.
Posting very similar papers can look bad, like you are trying to inflate your paper count with minor variations.  That's not your intent, but someone browsing through your arXiv papers won't having any way of knowing.  You might also trigger the arXiv flag for text overlap between your papers, in which case the similarity will be explicitly pointed out to everyone.

The comments field in your arXiv submission can help address the potential for confusion.  Whenever you make major changes to an arXiv paper, it's a good idea to explain in the comments what has changed, so that someone who has already read a previous version knows whether it's worth another look.  Highlighting the changes in this way will also help clarify things for readers following older references.


Can copyright prevent claims of self-plagiarism? So, I had somewhat of a thought experiment idea.

I'll be honest: I define plagiarism as misrepresenting who wrote (or provided the ideas of) parts of your papers. I don't believe you can self-plagiarize. If the goal of the assignment is to teach you something, and you already learned it in the past (by writing a paper that fits), I see no point in the busy work of making the current paper different enough just for the sake of it.

I realized that in the US, authors are granted a copyright to their creative works by default. (Even if few of them realize this or ever claim copyright to their works.)

Could a student use their copyright of their works to prevent (or at least seriously restrict and complicate) faculty's checking of self-plagiarism in the future? Couldn't the student just not grant the right to copy their works? If the teacher/professor hands graded work back, then they would have no copy left, and if they don't, they would have to share that one original copy with everyone who wants to check a student for self-plagiarism.

Personally, I have never (in 3+ years) had a case where I could reuse (parts of) a paper. I haven't yet had instructor specify that assignments had to be written for that assignment only. If an instructor did specify that, I would follow their rules. I would, however, try to convince them to change their mind, and this thought experiment might be part of that discussion.

First off:

  I don't believe you can self-plagiarize.

I'm afraid that it doesn't matter what you believe about the word or its definition. It is not the reuse itself that is considered here, but it matters that most other academics believe that unattributed reuse of one's own work is ethically incorrect. If you choose to do things that most others label "self-plagiarism," then sooner or later it will not go well for you.

Now, as for your idea about copyright: potentially you could in fact make yourself a pain for the faculty members who deal with you.  You don't even have to be right or sane about your argument, you just have to threaten to make a big legal stink.  You will then greatly complicate your professor's lives, but one way or another you will not prevail: most likely either you will lose the legal case or the university may simply decline to continue instructing you.


Should my bachelor's degree match the graduate program that I am trying to get into? I am an Italian undergraduate student of natural sciences, I would like to pursue a graduate program in the USA like a PhD or a MSc. Should I change my major in order to match the graduate program I will try to get into in order to improve my chances?

The graduate programs that interest me in order of liking, are:

Computer Science & Entrepreneurship (or other innovative programs with a scientific and entrepreneurial component);
Computer Science;
Oceanography/Marine biology;
Computational mathematics;

Rather than providing you with my opinion (I think you're aspirations are realistic), I think you should contact the admissions and academic advisers of your chosen post-graduate institution and ask them.

Ask them about your proposed course of graduate studies.

Ask them about how much course work you may need in order to "catch up" to other students planning to enter that major field of study.

I believe most institutions will allow you to start your post-graduate studies while you're still taking any undergraduate classes you may need.  The only way to know for sure is talk to someone at the University.


What can I do if my advisor wants me to keep working, even while I'm on medical leave for severe depression? I'm a Master's student right now. Due to previous incidents (What can I do if a student in my lab threatens to tell lies about me, and my advisor doesn't want to fire her?), I'm clinically depressed and currently on medical leave as a result. My adviser however, still wants me to do experiments for my thesis. I have 0% energy. I don't want to wake up, and I sleep 16-18 hours per day.

He still demands results, but all I want to do is sleep. I'm seeing doctors and psychologists, and all of them agree that I should take a break. I don't feel safe at the lab anymore.

In my country, people with mental illness are incredibly stigmatized. I don't know how to deal with this whole situation, and it's causing me undue stress.

My adviser wants me to work while I'm on medical leave. Actually, I did the majority of my experiments while in that situation, but I can't take it anymore. My physician knows this, and my therapist knows too. I never took my two medical leaves fully because my adviser still wanted me to work.

There is only one suitable course of action I recommend, as an advisor and a physician. Stop with anything that has a potentially detrimentally effect on your health and focus on your treatment (thus if you believe so also your MSc commitments).

Indeed, your work is likely contributing to your depressive symptoms (irrespective of the differential diagnosis between burnout and depression; e.g. Bianchi et al, Soc Psych Psych Epidemiol 2015).

Much more importantly, if you do not treat yourself now in the best possible fashion you might fail the treatment and even face substantial complications early or later, even life-threatening ones (e.g. Mann, New Engl J Med 2005).

I would definitely inform your physician that your advisor's attitude is likely a contributory factor to your condition.

Finally, notify any oversight committee at your institution, as individual or organizational issues impacting on your depressive symptoms could and probably should be addressed thoroughly (e.g. Theorell et al, BMC Public Health 2015).


Rules of thumb: when do you really hear good/bad news from NSF unsolicited proposals Things keep changing and trends evolve. I submitted my first grant proposal in January. The "external review began on" date shows as late March, which is date when the NSF panel met (it was on the NSF website). I haven't had any contact from them.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Some colleagues say that the sure rejects are informed within couple of weeks of panel meeting, then those that will definitely recieve funding, whilst the rest are in limbo until the official six month deadline (or even later).

Can anyone tell me what to make of it ?

I don't really have an answer to your question, but I can say that I think that the current political climate has resulted in delayed proposal reviews and notification for many federal programs. we submitted and NSF proposal back in December and from what I can tell, the review date changed from the original date and we haven't received any helpful feedback about when decisions will be made. This is my first NSF proposal - I usually submit to the NIH.

I had another grant submitted last November to a different federal program and they delayed notifications until last week (normally, decisions would have been made in February for that program). I wish I had a better answer, and maybe someone else can provide more insight. However, don't thin proposal reviews this year are "business as usual" and not hearing back at this point may not mean bad news. Hope this helps!


email asking professor for help I have been rejected by a particular university for MS two times now. I really want to get into it to work with a professor. I am thinking of emailing him to ask him what I can do to improve myself to become acceptable. I am trying to improve myself on various fronts that I can think of, so I would like ask him if I am on right path. I am a first generation student and I have no guide to ask, so he is that only one I can think of, to ask these questions. What would be the proper subject line for this? Right now I have "Help needed to improve myself" as subject. In the body, I will explain my situation and ask him if he could give me some of his time. What would be the proper way to proceed in asking for his help?

"Help needed to improve myself" sounds weird and spammy. I would suggest something like "MS application help", and make sure the body of the email is concise and to the point.


Are fixed-term research funded staff such as post-docs entitled to redundancy rights, such as severence pay at end of contract? According to Fixed-term employment contracts at gov.uk:

  Anyone who’s worked continually for the same employer for 2 years or more has the same redundancy rights as a permanent employee.

When ending a fixed-term contract specifically:

  If a contract isn't renewed, this is considered to be a dismissal, and if the employee has 2 years’ service the employer needs to show that there’s a ‘fair’ reason for not renewing the contract.

Redundancy rights include redundancy pay and a notice period, among other things.

Do those redundancy rights apply for research funded staff on fixed term employment contracts at universities in England?  My question covers both postdocs (Grade 6) and other research funded staff (Grade 7).

(There are also other rights, such as Any employee on fixed-term contracts for 4 or more years will automatically become a permanent employee, but those come with caveats already on the gov.uk page; my question is specifically about redundancy rights)

Edit: It appears this may depend on whether postdocs are legally considered trainees on a work-experience placement or not.  Since my question covers both postdocs and other research funded staff, the trainee-or-not status of postdocs would need to be established in order to answer the overall question.

Yes. If you refer to your contract, you will find it is a contract of employment (and probably explicitly states that you are an employee of the university*). Indeed, some universities issue permanent contracts, with a "we'll make you redundant once the funding runs out" clause, to their postdocs.

A few other points:

If you wanted to claim redundancy benefits, you would have to wait for the university to actually let you go. This prevents you leaving before the end of your contract, so will limit your ability to look for a new job in a timely fashion. The university could just shift you into another role to avoid the redundancy costs (especially if it's one you'll want to leave); although, hopefully, most wouldn't be that cynical.

(There's a possibility that they could also require you to apply for suitable, open internal positions, but I don't know whether they could seriously claim your failure to do this equated to leaving voluntarily.)

From your own link, there is no notice period on the non-renewal of a fixed term contract; so a notice period on non-renewal of the contract would only apply to people who, by virtue of over four years of service, have become permanent employees:

  Fixed-term contracts will normally end automatically when they reach the agreed end date. The employer doesn’t have to give any notice.

Postdocs are not students or trainees. Here's the definition of those two categories, from the Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002 (part 5, exclusions) (emphasis added):

  18.—(1) These Regulations shall not have effect in relation to a fixed-term employee who is employed on a scheme, designed to provide him with training or work experience for the purpose of assisting him to seek or obtain work...

  [cut, funding info]

  (2) These Regulations shall not have effect in relation to a fixed-term employee whose employment consists in attending a period of work experience not exceeding one year that he is required to attend as part of a higher education course....

  [cut, references to the acts that define a HE course]

The pay grade is irrelevant.

*Weirdly, I have seen employment contracts that state you're not (and not for self-employed contracting arrangements). I don't know why because a court wouldn't find someone not to be an employee just because the contract says so.


what is the best strategy to deal with a situation where a student asks all of homework problems on an online forum I teach a course, every week I assign homework. I put several hours to choose the right homework problems which cover the course material and permit them to be prepared for the exams.

I encourage students coming to my office hours and to ask all of their questions, I may also help them to solve the homework problems. During the class I normally give some hints about the homework's difficult problems (in any).

The homework load is (in my opinion) reasonable: 4-5 exercises, maybe 3-4 out of them are easy and maybe 1-2 is a little challenging. The homework has 10% point.

Today, to my surprise I saw a user who has asked all of my homework problems (including the easy ones) on math stackexchange. And all of them have been answered. Regarding the particularity of my homework problems and the time of posting the questions, I am sure that the user is one of my students, I am not sure which one.

To be precise I had not prohibited the students about posting the homework questions online as I was not expecting this situation.

My question is what is the best strategy to deal with this situation.

I am not sure what my opinion of this really is.

On one hand is asking on the internet really that different from asking a friend how to do a particular piece of homework, or even just looking up the method in a textbook.

Presumably you think that looking the answer up on the internet will not result in your students learning the material as well working out how to do it for themselves. The result of this is that the students will do worse in their final exams which are worth distinctly more than 10%.

You could give your students a gentle reminder of this at the start of the next lecture/course. Hopefully, they will listen to you and try and do the work on their own. If not, I wouldn't feel bad for them if they did poorly in their exams.

Some people may be concerned that not punishing this behavior is encouraging students to cheat and gain extra marks for their homework. I would say you are quite naive if you think students wouldn't ask each other how to do the homework anyway. It is very hard to police these sorts of things which is probably one of the reasons they have a relatively low weighting.

Personally, I would give homeworks zero weighting as this removes any incentive for students to try and improve their mark this way. The questions would probably still be asked but that is more because students don't like going to office hours.

While you probably could try punish the offending student under your institution's academic integrity rules, I think you will have difficulties identifying the culprit without significant effort and possibly underhand tactics from your part. Even if you could identify them I wouldn't for the reasons outlined above.


Can a 3 years PhD make an independent researcher ? Or how many post-docs after PhD to be an independent researcher? I am doing research more than 3 years. I was admitted in a 3 years program, now in the last months of the program. I fell I have a long way in the field to be an independent researcher. But most of the post-docs in my department and in my group don't seem to be in the direction of a independent research. Many of us PhD students and post-docs look like more high level technical staff.

As a PhD student, I think you are doing an original research, so should be developing a new method, model, formulation, etc so that you can solve many other problems or cases by means of your own formulation. Even, by your model, you should be doing some verifications and find results others found in their publications. So, during your PhD you are being prepared to do independent research.

I think becoming independent in every phase of life should be assessed based on the person's abilities and the outcome of his activities.

If the person can find/understand the things he has to do without help of others, consult his problems with others, does what he has to do to reach his goals and finally finish his jobs/projects and has an income; then he can be considered an independent person.

In academic world, the case does not change so much. If the student can review literature, read books and papers and understand them, find a new problem to solve, start to work on the problem and consult his problems with another person; and finally submit and publish his paper in a journal; then he should be considered an independent researcher.

Despite the thing in your question that you mentioned how many post-docs is needed to become independent researcher?; I don't believe a person need many post-docs. Even, some researchers do not have any PhDs and they do perfect researches. The important part of doing independent research is the art of problem solving. And this may be gained by no PhDs or by hundreds of post-docs! So, I encourage you to successfully finish your PhD, and try to learn how to solve your academic problems and how to get them published. After you graduate, you will be able to do research by your own too.


How to show a student the work done in the lab is the lab's (or is it?) Difficult to title this, but in essence, I am working on the premise that ethically, the work done in the lab belongs to the PI and the lab as a group.  So if there is another question that deals with this I have not found it.

In the case where a lab takes undergraduate interns or UROP positions, such that the undergraduate is not a student of the PI, how to inform them (as it is their first research experience) that the work they contribute to is not their own research to go and publish.

In a situation such that the student is put on a project and is guided to developing some code or doing some analysis (without their own substantial intellectual contribution, just development and applying standard methods), the student then leaves the internship or position.  How to make it clear to the student without some threatening way, maybe by showing some international/online standards that explain, they can not take the work they did and publish it on their own?

Likewise, how should the PI reasonably decide authorship, and explain that students authorship or lack of, due to insignificant contributions of the final work.

For example, on a given project, I may have 4 or 5 undergraduates over time interning and doing some develop, exploration, etc.  I want to be encouraging, and so I try to over emphasize the 'great job' they are doing.  At the same time, I do not want them to misinterpret this as them being given authorship.  In some case, I had an undergraduate that after awhile of working together, decided to drop everything and quit.  The student now seems to have an attitude that the work they had been doing is theirs to go and publish on their own (in some low quality journal, as it is just part of a larger project that they do not have all material for).

I think that you are not referring to the right reason why your former students cannot simply go on and publish the small projects they did under your supervision in lower-tier journals (or any other journal for what matters).

It's not that the work done in the lab belongs to the PI and the lab as a group, it's that you and possibly other people in your group contributed to these projects, at least by providing scientific guidance and supervision (I think the answer to your question is to explain them that bit).

As such, your former students cannot claim that the work is solely theirs by not mentioning you as co-authors and, as a corollary, cannot publish without your explicit consent.


Heard of Chamber of Chartered Java Professionals International? I'm Java course which they said to me that they can arrange a Bachelor's degree from "The Chamber of Chartered Java Professionals International."

I did a little research my own, and from what I can see, they don't really have any verifiable information to confirm their existence.

Is there such chamber that can give people a degree?
If they can, is it a reputable degree?

My course is covers regular software engineering, including generic languages and sometimes specific languages. I also submitted a few assignments, and projects to the institute that I'm following the course with. From what I understand, they can make them equivalent to their degree requirements. However, their reputation and existence remain mysterious and I chose not to rely on what the institute says, which of course, technically, is a business.

Heard of Chamber of Chartered Java Professionals International?

No.

  2. If they can [offer a degree], is it a reputable degree?

No.


admission in UK university for Masters/ PHD program I graduated with Computer Science degree from a Russell Group University(Leeds) in 2016. I managed to find my first job as a software developer 3 months after graduation. I am 2 years into my career development in the industry learning and developing software every month. I am considering going back to University to get masters degree or Phd. My dilemma is weather to go for a MSc in Computer Science or straight go into Phd. I don't thing I can learn that much more from a MSc course just because I can learn anything on the job or read the books at home. However I might have problem with admission straight into Phd because of my grades from my Bsc. I graduated with 3rd Honors degree. I needed to work through my bachelors to support myself which resulted in less time for studying. I have managed to learn everything in order to do my job very well as a software developer(frontend/ backend / best practices/ clean design). Will my industry experience be enough to compensate for bad grades in my Bsc degree when applying straight for Phd or they will tell me I need to do MSc first?

In many UK universities, a minimum requirement for admission to a doctoral programme is:

an upper-second-class or first-class undergraduate degree; or
a Master's degree.

And even if it is not a minimum requirement for admission, it is almost certainly a minimum requirement if you want a funded place.

Significant professional experience may mitigate poor prior academic attainment, but I am not convinced two years would be enough to compensate for a third-class undergraduate degree.

If you are happy to self-fund PhD studies, I suppose there is no harm in having a go at applying for a doctoral programme immediately (although I would recommend making at least one application for a Master's, in case nobody accepts you for a PhD at this juncture). But, if you want funding for PhD studies, you will almost certainly need stronger academic credentials than you have currently.


I was graded unfairly on a group project We had a group project that involved 4 people. 3 of us worked really hard. Personally, I feel I did about 1/2 the work. We had a Viva at the end of the project. I got nervous and did quite badly. When the grades were out I got a B, same as the guy who didn't really do much. I'm wondering if it's a good idea to ask the professor to consider re-evaluating my grade.

It is a good idea to ask. But you probably won't get a change in grade.

The "ask", however, should be about why the grade is lower than you thought it should be. Learn, if you don't already know, what the grading criteria was and how much each element contributed. The professor should be able and willing to answer these sorts of questions.

But it should also have been clear before the project started what the grading criteria should be and how important would be the evaluation of each part. It is possible that half the grade was assigned on the presentation.

Learning what happened gives you the chance to work on those things in which you were judged lower than the others. That is the real reason for asking.

If you really want the grade changed then get your teammates to advocate for it based on your contribution to the other part. But that will have to come from them, not just your claim of doing "half".


Regarding Phd in distance learning mode I hold a bachelors in Engineering from an Indian university and have six years of work experience in the software industry. Is there any foreign university that offers a PhD related to finance in distance learning mode?

To be honest, most PhDs can probably be (largely) conducted at distance. I live quite a way from the University at which I'm registered for my psychology PhD. However, you might want to try contacting the Open University http://www.open.ac.uk which is the UK's very highly regarded distance learning University. They do offer PhDs and I would assume that since they are geared up for distance work they might be one of your best options.


Is there something special about "City Universities" and do the municipalities somehow govern them? There are several universities with the title "City University". Is there something special about them, is it some kind of special model of founding, governing and developing the university by the local municipality/city/greater-city?

I am participating in the political party/movement and I see the need for some kind of focused higher education institution in our city for some demographics that is neglected by the central government and so - I have feeling that we can propose to establish our own city university to boost education in this special demographics. But are there "role models" for universities that are founded by the cities in the recent half-century?

In general, such schools don't necessarily have that close connection to the city government. The obvious example would be City University of New York. In that case, it was founded by the state government. Seven of the trustees are appointed by the governor of the state of New York , and five by the mayor of New York City. But all of those are with approval of the senate, which is a state level office. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_University_of_New_York#Management_structure .

On the other hand, the equivalent in London has a closer connection to the City of London (which itself is a complicated entity). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City,_University_of_London

I'm not aware of a specific city-centric model of the sort you want, and a lot of these seem to be developed on a case-by-case basis. Your best bet may be simply looking through a lot of these and seeing how they handle governance and other related issues and looking for what best meets your needs.


Can I put my NSF fellowship on reserve in order to investigate leaving academia? I'm currently a PhD student in mathematics at a well-ranked school. Unfortunately, after a few years of increasing frustration and self-doubt, I'm considering leaving academia and trying to start a different career.

I currently have an NSF graduate fellowship. As described in the information guide for fellows, one's "status" with regards to the fellowship can be either

Tenure: Tenure is the period of time during which Fellows utilize
the fellowship to pursue an advanced degree in science,
mathematics, or engineering...
Reserve: With prior Foundation approval, Fellows may reserve any
two years over the five-year period to use an alternative means
of support, or to engage in activities other than graduate study... (emphasis mine)

(There are also options for medical or military deferral. The full description of Tenure and Reserve status are in the linked document.)

Does this mean I can request to reserve my fellowship for the 2015-2016 academic year, using that time "test the waters" on another career, such that if I decide to stay in – or rather, go back to – academia, I would still have my NSF fellowship?

Of course if I do something like this, I would want it to be with my advisor's approval, though I haven't brought up this specific idea with them yet. Let's assume they are okay with it.

There do not appear to be any reservations on the purpose for requesting a deferral in the linked guide. You need to tell them in advance of filing the "Declaration To Utilize, Reserve Or Terminate A Subsequent Year Of A 3-Year Graduate Fellowship Award" and get their approval, but I don't think that there are many reasons for them to deny it. You might want to have something lined up like an internship, other job, or visit to a foreign university rather than just saying that you're taking a year away from studying. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter happens, too.

Edited to add: You need to start talking to your supervisor and eventually the NSF Program Officer in charge of your fellowship.


How to find only the papers that cite a particular article in an important way? I'm having the following problem: There is some interesting paper (in machine learning) which is cited by 180 other papers (according to Google Scholar). From these 180, I want to find the papers that build up heavily on the original paper. I mean, not the ones that just mention the original paper briefly and are not REALLY related to it, but the ones in which the original paper is one of the, let's say three, main references.

Now, obviously I cannot read 180 abstracts/papers now. Any clever and experienced ideas? I'm a PhD student.

Thanks!

1) Ask your advisor.

2) Scanning 180 abstracts to find the most relevant ones can be done in under a day if you're efficient about it (most can be excluded within the first two sentences of the abstract if they are not relevant).


Who actually is a Post-Doctoral fellow? Many of us often talk about Bachelor's and Master's students, PhD students, researchers, professors, and postdocs.

But, do we know what we actually intend when we say "Post-Doc"?

We all know that a Post-Doc is a person who, after finishing his/her PhD, works for one or two years as a scientist in a scientific research group. Beyond this simple definition, I would like to know what you think about Post-Doc roles inside a laboratory and a group.

What is actually a Postdoc fellow?

Is he a debutant researcher? Or is he just a ultra-super-student? Or is he half a super-student, and half a researcher?

What is a Postdoctoral fellow supposed to do?

What do you expect from a Postdoctoral fellow?

There are many formal roles that generally fall under the category of "post-doc":

The simplest is as a post-Ph.D researcher working with a faculty mentor and doing their own research
Some postdocs have a role as "lab manager": they help with advising students.
In addition, if given an appropriate title, a postdoc (as "visiting/research faculty") can write their own grants or collaborate on grants that might support them.
The limit of the above is a pure soft-money position that is not "supervised" by a faculty member. Such faculty are also often called 'research faculty', and may be many years away from a Ph.D
In wetlabs, a postdoc role might also be as a lab technician or lab manager, handling supplies, tech work (making knockout mice for example).


Organizing data and files Over the last four years I did a bunch of experiments (biotechnology, protein purification). Some of them are more valuable, some of them were just poorly designed (e.g. temperature not controlled, etc.). Some of them turned out to be important one year after I collected the data.

The data is highly heterogeneous (microscopic images, ELISA, SDS-Page, HPLC of various suppliers, settling velocity, filtration tests etc.; formats are doc, tex, xls, txt, csv, tiff,py, ipynb, png,pdf and proprietary formats like leica`s lif format)

Usually, I started a new folder on our network drive for each task (like afm_particles/2015_01_13_particle_1). Over time I gathered about 50 Gb of heterogenous data.

Usually, I do not alter the data in place, but load it into an Ipython notebook and do the calculation and plotting with python. The calculation files are stored in the same folder as my data. I have a file called INFO.txt in every folder with a brief description of the data within the folder, experimental conditions etc.

Usually, I know where I can find my data, but recently I wanted to change a plot for my thesis and spent about 15 minutes searching for the right sub-folder. In the end I searched for the name of the file and found it. A colleague of mine quit his job a year ago, and if I wanted to reproduce his experiments, I would have to invest several hours in order to find the specific file containing the raw data (hopefully with physical units stated somewhere).

We do write quarterly reports and paper-based lab journals (some more thoroughly than others). However, navigating through my own data is challenging. Not to mention someone else's data.

How do you handle heterogeneous data collected throughout a project (3 - 5 years) ?

Have you found a solution satisfying for both, people who have to document it and people who might continue the project ?

It would be great if I can browse the collected data without going through all the subfolders. For example by some form of index with information for each folder like: title, short description, usefulness of experiments, worked out as expected, totally crap, totally different than expected but interesting.

Are there tools capable of such a thing (Linux, Windows) ?

I have been using a very simple system and am very happy with it:

have one projects directory
have one private directory
have one life directory

Inside these directories, I create one new directory per year, for example projects.2015.
Inside this directory, each new sub project gets its own folder that starts with the date at which I begun this new project, for example 20150902 rendering performance analysis. Everything related to this project will be placed inside this directory, no matter when it is done.

When your projects get too complex, you can always add a text file describing the content of your files in more detail, and place this file inside the projects.2015 folder. However, do not place anything else in this folder! Only folders starting with a date and maybe one file giving more information.

This system has worked for me for about ten years and I see the following advantages:

very easy to implement
does not depend on software that may or may not be available in 5 or 10 years
works on Mac, windows, Linux, etc
can be backed up easily, for example by placing your files on your cloud storage folder
future ready: when I started online backup, for example, did not exist yet and we do not know what will exist in the future; but system will probably be compatible.
very comprehensive: chances are you will remember what year and maybe what month you did a specific project, so it will be very quick to find your stuff.

Finally, if many projects contain a similar structure, stick to an identical organization of your data. Whatever your structure, sticking to a system will make it easier to retrieve your files later. For example, inside your folder 20150817 afm study 1055nm grating and any other measurement folder, you could have the following sub folders

00 notes
01 code
02 raw data
03 processed data
04 plots

Personally, I often use numbers because this orders the list of items in my desired way and because in Unix, Mac, etc, I can just type cd 03[tab] and the system auto completes.

Whatever you end up choosing as a system, my recommendation is that you look for something trivial to implement that does not slow you down. The more trivial the logic, the more likely you will stick to it over the years and benefit from the ordering you have.

Have fun


Why professors spend most of their time to write proposals than doing research? I have been working in academic career in several years. I have noticed that almost all professors spend most of their time to write proposals?

And to my surprise, they are not working on research papers. This is reflected by the fact that the number of technical papers with first author (single author) as a senior professor is decreased quite dramatically.

My question is, therefore, is there any hidden (but valid) reason for this?

I'm a bit puzzled by the word "hidden," since I don't think the answer is at all hidden -- in fact, I often discuss this with my students. Why spend lots of time writing proposals?

(1) It's expensive to run a lab! At least in the U.S., a graduate student typically costs ~$50k/year, which includes tuition and overhead costs that the student doesn't see. Postdocs are ~$100k/year. Equipment and supplies are not cheap. The sum of all this is a lot of money.

(2) For a variety of reasons, it's hard to get money. The success rates for proposals at NIH or NSF are around 10-20%, meaning that most proposals don't get funded. Certainly more than 20% of proposals are very good -- at least based on my experience on grant review panels. Writing a proposal that's at least very good takes a lot of work. Writing N such proposals so that enough get funded to keep one's lab afloat takes an even larger amount of work.


Should I refuse to be named as co-author of a low quality paper? During my bachelor I did a research internship in another country for a few months and contributed to a research project which is now, a few years later, going to be published. The research is in a specific field of computer science, but the responsible professors' main interest is focused in another STEM area. So now his grad student approached me and asked if I would review the paper. I read it and I think the quality is not good. There are many writing errors, the papers to which the results are being compared  are quite old (around 6 years) and the datasets used to evaluate the algorithms are from the 90's. This is quite old in a fast growing field like computer science. The techniques which were used are correct, as far as I can judge, but not new.

I know that the professor and his grad student are no experts in this field but I now pursue my masters degree in this specific field of computer science. I recently learned about more modern approaches and I think that their methods are not worth being published in a paper. I wasn't experienced enough to notice this when I was with them in this internship. It would also be too much work for me to fix all these issues I named.

Now I wonder if it could give me, as a computer scientist, a bad reputation to  eventually  co-author a paper which (I think) is outdated and poorly written. Can I decline being named but allow them to publish it? On the other hand, if I would be named as a co-author, this would be my first publication and maybe this would count as "better than nothing", or people would acknowledge the fact that I contributed to some okay-ish research in my early bachelors. I am not sure yet if I want to pursue a career in science or in the industry.

First, if you think the manuscript is not worth submitting even after major revisions, or in other words, if you as a referee would recommend its rejection, then the answer is clear - you shouldn't be coauthor.

However it seems that you evaluate the manuscript as ok-ish, and the main concern is that its content is somehow outdated. I would do what your old group asked you to do: review and possibly improve the paper. Do this to the maximum extent you can - given the fact that your are likely busy with other tasks and research - and then leave the main responsibility to the first author and your old group.

After all, you are still a young student / researcher. This paper could be your first entry in your publication list, and some more time and more papers have to come before you get concerned about your papers being all of the very best quality. A published paper normally cannot be too wrong, and various journals can accommodate different quality or differently tailored papers. So perhaps try to influence also the choice of where to submit, especially to avoid a non-ending revision phase.

At this stage of your career, you can only benefit from a published article. To those who read it, it will show that you actively entered the research of a group even when you were younger than now. To the rest of the community, it will be just a publication. And that is better than no publications.

The main point is how much you can improve it, and if there is space for it. As a "publish as it is" decision seems to be highly unlikely, you must be prepared to work on it further. But again, leave the responsibility to the group from which the research originated.

See it as an opportunity to publish, and not as an annoyance.

The above applies to a salvageable manuscript. For a better and definitive answer I should be a specialist in your field and evaluate the manuscript myself.

Rejection would also fix the issue. Although I always tried to avoid rejection even as coauthor, I don't think it should be your concern at this stage. Nobody will know except the referees, and even they won't blame or remember you.

edit: I want to make clear that the recipient journal should not be a predatory one, or one with such a low reputation that is not worth working to publish therein. The above answer assumed this.

Also, above I wrote " A published paper normally cannot be too wrong, and various journals...". Beside that "normally" means what should be the normality, this doesn't mean that errors and, even worse, frauds, have no room in literature. It must be seen a concern for the whole community and is not related to the OP situation. If the manuscript will be accepted, it will most likely stand as an acceptable paper, indeed. Not to say that the manuscript is in the hands of the OP. With this respect, the paper cannot be too wrong already. Otherwise there wouldn't be this thread.


Study technique for courses that involve reading and understanding research papers? Previous quests for the ideal study technique usually led me to "solve problems" (mathematics courses) or use spaced repetition (+ e.g. ANKI) for courses which require at least some level of memorization.

Now I'm taking courses which require reading (and understanding) research papers and I'm not sure about the best way to study. Should I print out quizzes for each paper? Or just read them again and again? Are there study techniques specifically for "paper-based" courses?

My strong suggestion is that you write and keep notes on the papers you read. There is some evidence that hand writing the notes is superior to typing them for learning purposes. The goal is to engage the mind more fully in what you are trying to learn and note taking is a good way, especially if you don't have exercises to solve.

But even better is to summarize your notes a bit later. You can do this by entering your summaries onto electronic media for saving and later searching.

But one thing that is worth considering is to take your notes in a way that allows you to later extend them as thoughts occur. This is much like a "research notebook" in which you record yet unsolved problems and your thoughts on coming up with solutions. These problems might just be thoughts that occur to you as possible research areas but that you need to defer for the moment while you do higher priority things.

But the key is to fully engage the mind. For most people reading isn't enough. It works for short term retention but not well enough for long term learning. Writing is a better mechanism - especially writing by hand.


Should I consider quitting my Ph.D. after 6 months? About my background:
I finished my master's six months ago with a cum laude in Europe (A tier 1 university) and my research was very theoretical and I did invest a lot of thought into it. I like it a lot. Even though it was challenging, I was motivated. Therefore, I like to research a lot, I really do.
Because of my dedication, I was approached by my professor for a Ph.D. position. He listened to my interests and gave me some advice and some facts. According to him, people don't consider hiring people for a Ph.D. in the area I was interested in unless they have a solid background.
Then, he offered me a Ph.D. which is not related to what I did in my masters. I would say it is more applied than fundamental. I didn't do all courses related to that topic before to understand it fully. He promised to change the topic a little bit so that it fits my interests.
I did a literature review and I found questions to solve. He assigned me a daily supervisor who works under him. Let's call him DS (Daily Supervisor). I had heard not very good reviews about him earlier. People under him tend to finish their Masters and Ph.D. later than they originally are supposed to. He doesn't have a hold of concepts when it comes to research but at the same time has a lot of ideas that are scattered all over the place.
He confuses me all the time. When I came up with my research questions more towards my interests, he really tried forcing me to consider finding questions related to the more applied stuff and more towards its application side which is not my strong point because simply I don't have a solid background in it. Both the main professor and DS had some clash of ideas.
I am a direct person and if I don't like something I complain. They did find a direction for me and again promised that I would do something of my own interests after a year.
Now. I feel like I am trapped. My main professor is very considerate. I am thinking of asking him if I can do a post-masters here instead of a Ph.D. and do some TA work for the next six months and I will ask him to recommend me for some work abroad related to A for my next Ph.D.
The main professor still thinks I am creative, I have an analytical mind and also he trusts me. He may consider writing me a good recommendation. However, I may really hurt his trust that he has in me. Although I am really grateful I have this position and I can repay my loans, I am always in a position to complain. And, practically he reviews my results for the papers I want to write. It may affect it significantly and I wouldn't have any papers before I apply somewhere else.
I am really confused about what to do. The more I want to make the communication with my prof and DS transparent, the more they get me confused and I feel like a very bad student even though at the back of my head I know I was a cum laude student. Please give me your feedback on what you would do if you were me.

First of all, put aside your cum laude moniker. You are not in undergraduate anymore, you are in graduate school, and while you were miles ahead of your peers before, you now find yourself in a mix of your intellectual peers. This should be expected.
Second, there is no reason to be shy about raising your concerns in full disclosure to your advisor(s). The alternative is that you eventually leave anyway, so why not be brutally honest?
Your 'confusion' may stem from a lack of clear direction and path forward.  You can mitigate this by forcing yourself to write down you academic goals, and devise a plan to meet them, within reason given your advisors' interests and capabilities, of course.
Most of these things can be solved through communication; but unfortunately in higher academics communication can be difficult.
If you decide to go a different route, just make sure it is for your reasons and not those that are circumstantial.


What to do when my course-mates are making up research results for a class paper? My course-mates and I have a scientific paper to do for a class and, despite having had almost 3 months to do it, no one has done anything (or at least tried to do anything) on the research, and now they're starting to fake the results of the research (which hasn't even been done), and I know that this falls under scientific misconduct.

Since I'm planning on moving to another college (not related to scientific research, because this is not what I want), what should I do in this case? Should I stay in the project or should I ask to have my name removed from the authors' list?

First of all the term partner is a bit confusing here, are you talking about course-mates or colleagues?

Otherwise ask yourself whether or not you want to be associated with forgery, regardless of whether or not you intend to enjoy the fruits of the action. As an analogy, would it be OK to help with forging counterfeit money just because you don't intend to use the fake money to buy anything with it?

Then there are different levels of taking distance from the act; you can either:

blow the whistle on the data-forgery, which is what I would strongly advocate for if this work is supposed to be published on a peer-review journal, or
just ask to have your name removed from the report if it's just coursework. That way you avoid having a fallout with your "partners" and still maintain some level of plausible deniability.

The first option is important in the case of a scientific publication, because data forgery on a publication is not only cheating and ethically wrong, but also is potentially harmful to others who might try on to build on your research results. That aspect is obviously not as important if the paper in question is just a hand-in assignment for some course at the uni.

The second option isn't really the most ethical alternative, and might still be problematic (e.g. if someone questions why you insist on being removed from authors list).

Bottomline is you can't have your cake and eat it at the same time.


How bad is a B+ for master's application? I have had at-least two to three B+ in each semester of engineering but in third year when I feel sick I ended up getting 4 to 5 B+ in the two semesters of third year. Some of them in core papers like AI, Databases, compilers, Design and analysis of algorithms etc., I am from an unknown college in India where people very rarely score A+ in any paper, Even if they do it's only a single paper per sem. Most of the time people end up with one or two A and 3 ~ 4 A-. I got A- in most of the theory papers and A+ in labs(Everyone gets A+ in labs) and final year project(which is rare). The grade ranges is exactly identical to what people use in the US. Also we have to take 6 theory courses each sem and 3 labs related to those 6 courses.

I am currently shortlisting colleges according to my interest for spring and I was wondering if I have a shot at any of the 20 ~ 50 ranked colleges in US for MS?

GPA is not only the major criteria for master's application, there are many other things that will make your profile good. More specifically for masters application, GPA weighs upto 30-40% of consideration and the rest goes with your GRE & TOEFL scores, SOP, LOR and publication/research interests.

Upto my knowledge, yours is a good profile. Your GPA will definitely qualify for most of the universities, just start working on rest of the things. And don't compare GPA with others in your class, no one cares about it especially US grad schools.


How can I make the introduction of a paper more "scientific" and less "popular"? I am a master's student about to start writing my thesis. After I wrote my research proposal, my advisor said that when I write my thesis, I should make it less "popular" (I believe he referred mainly to the introduction, where I presented the field and the subject in a rather detailed manner and broke it down in a way that average people could understand why I am proposing to do this research) and more "dry" and "scientific".

So I'm assuming he means that I should strive to direct the text to experts (as scientific publications usually are), and not begin from the very beginning of the subject and not "build up" the introduction too slowly.

The problem is that I always feel that I DO need to explain the background when starting to write a new piece, as each text stands on its own and should be complete in itself. I need to find some way to set the stage on one hand, but not too tediously on the other hand. I guess this is part of the art of writing, which develops through experience, but I was hoping someone here could offer some helpful ideas to achieve this.

I found this question and its answers related to my question and interesting to read, but that doesn't answer my question.

This is a common issue when inexperienced people write their first papers. It's tempting to write down everything that went into your personal understanding of a subject, rather than just starting from what's known and focusing on the new things you did.

Imagine if you looked up a recipe for a pie and the first 80% of it detailed the history of wheat cultivation, how wheat is made into flour, the way the tablespoon and teaspoon were defined as units of measure, statistics on the average consumption and enjoyment of pie throughout the 20th century, and so on. Imagine if you looked up the text of a new regulation and it started with "This law could be passed in our state legislature because, in 1773, the Boston tea party...". Imagine if a car repair manual started with the history of the wheel.

It's important to tell the public why science is important and why your studies make sense, but a paper isn't the place to do it. It's also not the place to give a full exposition of every technique you used. If you must, just put references to review articles or textbooks.


Why does Google Scholar provide a different number of references when sorting by relevance versus date? I've noticed that sorting by date, and relevance has different numbers of results.  Why is this?

Edit: Here is a reproducible example:

Here is "foo" sorted by date (15,000 references)

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?scisbd=2&q=foo&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

Here is "foo" sorted by relevance (300,000 references)

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=foo

(I'll repeat an earlier answer of mine, which is relevant here, although the question is not a duplicate. Nevertheless, the question itself is relevant. Why are you interested in how many Google Scholar results a particular search yields in the first place?)

The "approximate" ("about") number of hits Google reports is completely worthless - in all Google searches. To see why, look at this number on both the first and the tenth page of Google hits:

First results page

Tenth results page

When I just did this, I got "approximately 15,200,000 hits" reported on the first results page... but only "approximately 96 hits" on the tenth page.

Given the opacity of Google's search algorithms, which likely have a lot of sampling built in, it's not overly surprising to me that you get surprising results even if you only sort your results in a different way.

In addition, your results will probably vary depending on your search engine bubble (another reason why this number is useless).


How do schools have the same number of each week day? My school is currently on a 14 week schedule where we're supposed to have 14 Mondays, 14 Tuesdays, etc. each semester.  Because of various holidays, that's harder than it sounds, and so we have a couple days that have to get adjusted; for instance, tomorrow is a calendrical Wednesday, but an academic Monday.

This has some drawbacks: some students have outside commitments (for instance, jobs) which don't shift just because our schedule does, and because the modified days always happen on short weeks, compliance is limited.  (For instance, it's already hard enough to get students to stay around for classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but it's really hard to get students who have class on Friday to realize when they make Thanksgiving plans that Friday classes meet on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.)

How do other institutions deal with this, and are there any particularly good solutions to it?

Make up days at the end of semester

The solution that I saw used is that for certain subjects, where one of "their" days fell on a holiday, the semester was one week longer, i.e. the break was shorter. Your described solution was not considered feasible - transferring a Friday class to Wednesday would fail because (a) there would be some students who have also chosen the Wednesday class and would have to be in two places at once; (b) there might be also a similar collision for lecturers who teach multiple classes and (c) there weren't enough facilities to host all the usual Wednesday classes plus all the usual Friday classes at once.

Skip them

Another reasonable possibility is to reduce the number of lectures. If it's known well in advance, it's no problem for a lecturer to take a course that usually is split in 14 lectures and teach it in 13 - and they can shift part of that material to extra reading and homework in the "empty" week where the lecture doesn't happen but students do have the rest of the week available.


How do you respond when students submit the wrong assignment, but you only notice after the deadline has passed? I occasionally get students who submit their assignments, but I only notice that they've submitted the wrong assignment when I begin grading. I can think of three possibilities to explain this:

They made an honest mistake
They are trying to buy some time to submit their assignment by making it seem like an honest mistake
They didn't do the assignment at all and are trying to get some kind of credit

Sometimes I allow students a few hours or 24 hours to resubmit the correct assignment (is 24 hours too long?). If they don't, then I usually assume they haven't actually completed it. Other times, I'm just tempted to give them a zero.
The student in question submitted an assignment that was submitted previously in the semester.
Is there a better way that you know of to confirm whether they're being honest or not?
By the way, I'm looking for a general answer that can apply across multiple situations. In this specific situation, due to many different factors, I decided to allow the student to resubmit. She resubmitted right away, which seems to demonstrate it was an honest mistake.

The fact that you're left guessing at unknowable motivations suggests a deeper problem to me.  I always found guessing games like this very frustrating when assignments are due; giving students the benefit of the doubt sounds harmless... unless you're a student who scrambled to meet the deadline, while your peers took advantage of the professor's good will.  This is especially true if the class is curved.
The policy I use now leaves my opinions completely out of it:

Give clear due dates and turn-in proceedures
Give students a "budget" for late assignments.  I like to give three 12-hour tokens they can use at their discretion, no questions asked.  If they turn something in late, I automatically use whatever tokens they have left to cover the time.
Anything beyond that requires an issue serious enough that we're probably involving academic affairs as well.  Things like serious illnesses and hospitalizations, for example.
Anything turned not turned in on time, or within the scope of one of their "late tokens", gets a daily penalty added onto the score.

That way you're never faced with trying to ascribe motivations to what students are doing, and the rules are laid out clearly for them, which I find students like.


Reference for annual journal subscription costs paid per university? Is there any resource that lists how much each university pay in journal subscription fees? I am mostly interested in US universities (E.g. Harvard: $3.5M/year in 2014, MIT: $4M/year in 2006 for science and engineering journals alone), but still curious about other countries (e.g. French universities paid 172M EUR/5years to Elsevier, Finnish research organisations paid a total of 27 million euros in subscription fees in 2015).

There is, in fact, a resource with the information you asked for, for institutions in the United States.

Detailed information on individual academic libraries' expenditures (by university) is available from the National Center for Education Statistics in the United States, as part of their Libraries Statistics Program.

The data from these surveys, including the individual responses from each university, are available for download in plaintext format at this link. The most recent year available is 2012.

To take your example, according to that data, Harvard's expenditures for library resources in 2008 included $9,248,115 for serial subscriptions. In 2012, this number was up to $16,391,638 (the most of any library in the survey).

If you're interested, a set of related information on amounts paid by selected public universities to specific major publishers can be found in

  Bergstrom, Theodore C., et al. "Evaluating big deal journal bundles." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.26 (2014): 9425-9430.

(see especially the supporting information for the latter.)


Cite related work from same year as defense? Suppose I do the research for my thesis from 2013 to 2016, and do the write-up of the dissertation in 2016.

If during write-up in 2016 I discover new related work (published during 2016), is it eligible to put it into the related work section of my thesis? Or should this related work have already existed in the beginning of the thesis to be part of its related work?

Of course, you should include anything that is relevant regardless of when you started your thesis.

I have even seen dissertations that cite work that is unpublished or still under review.


Conference Registration Fees are so high, is it normal? My colleague research paper got accepted at a conference named (International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications http://www.cloud-conf.net/trustcom18/). They claim that the conference is A-Ranked according to core2018 when you check it as IEEE Trustcom. Is it correct that this conference is A-Ranked conference (http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/790/)? is it really the same conference or they are taking advantage of this misunderstanding?

Also, I got shocked when I noticed that the student registration fee is $1095.00 for regular research papers. The full accepted paper has only limited 6 pages in length to be included in the final proceedings. My research paper is 12 pages.
The program committee wants to charge me $150.00 for each extra page. This in total will be around $2000.00 just as registration fees.

Is it normal too?

is it really the same conference or they are taking advantage of this misunderstanding?

I am not in the field of security, but yes, this appears to be the right conference. Your advisor should be able to clarify with certainty.

  Also, I got shocked when I noticed that the student registration fee is $1095.00 for regular research papers.

It's quite expensive even in comparison to other conferences, but it's the same ballpark as other IEEE conferences, so (unfortunately) this seems to be the direction we are heading to. However, I cannot help but wonder if you did not check the prices prior to submission?

  The full accepted paper has only limited 6 pages in length to be included in the final proceedings. My research paper is 12 pages. The program committee wants to charge me $150.00 for each extra page.

Yeah, that sounds pretty terrible. I would be interested in why the community does not push back more on what certainly appears to be a shady "hidden cost" model that is unworthy of a good academic conference. I know that some other conferences allow one or two extra pages for additional charge (which, frankly, is also ridiculous in times of Web-based proceedings), but limiting the "free" number of pages to 6 (clearly too little for most scientific contributions) and then letting the author pay for the same number of extra pages to get to what is the normal length of full conference papers (10-12 pages) seems completely fishy.

I would complain as well, but realistically there really is not much that you as a student can do (aside from withdrawing, and you probably don't want to do that).

To give you some more context, it is unfortunately true that academic conference are very expensive and that they have only been getting more expensive over recent years. To me it subjectively appears to be the case that IEEE conferences are particularly prone to overcharging, but this may just be my impression. Some communities have started to push back on this, though. For instance, one of the main promises of a current candidate running for the position of SIGSOFT chair is to reduce the price tag for SIGSOFT sponsored events.


Quick publication in a good journal VS long fight to publish in a very prestigious journal. What's more impactful at the beginning of a career? I'm the first author of an article which, according to my advisor, has some chance of being published in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. This however would probably entail a long peer review process and possibly waiting for months just to get rejected. A different option would be to send the article to a weaker, but still good journal and probably publish it there quickly.
Normally I'd go first for the harder option and only then try the easier one. I am however still doing my MSc and this would only be my second article, where in the first one I'm the fourth author. Therefore having a publication in a good journal would be a big improvement to my current CV and it would boost my chances of receiving a profitable scholarship next year, i.e. it could mean high short-term benefits. On the other hand, a publication in the prestigious journal could make my CV stronger in the long run and serve as a large benefit in future stages of my career that I may not be fully aware of just now.
Now, I know that put this way my question is too subjective. Let me therefore rephrase it: what is more impactful on one's scientific career, especially at the beginning (even before starting a PhD): having more publications in decent journals, or one or two but in really reputable ones?

Given that you aren't yet in a doctoral program and so have some time left in your student career, a long review process doesn't seem like a huge issue. Normally I'd give the old advice "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Even being under a long review by a top journal is a plus and you can point to it for most purposes.
No one can predict however and you take some chances either way. Nobody guarantees quick review or eventual success. Nobody serious or honest, anyway.
If your advisor thinks it is a top quality article, then that is probably good advice.


Responding to emails from strangers outside academia asking you advices I work as assistant professor in a STEM field. I have been receiving a large number of emails from professionals, usually from government organisations and companies, asking for various advices and information.
One example is about asking me which software product is currently best at accomplishing the task X in the Y setting. These are usually short emails which take no more than 10 minutes to process (reading, searching, and replying).

I think I have responded to over 100-200 such emails so far, and now I am at a point of asking myself whether it is worth to continue. Academics do a lot of uncredited and unapreciated work, but I feel that this is especially pointless and even harmful. Initially it felt good to be an internationally recognized expert in academia and industry, which is very encouraging and important for an early career researcher, but now I am evaluating whether I should start ignoring them.

I am here to ask opinions and experiences of fellow academics on this matter. When I think about disadvantages and advantages of replying to enquiries, these are…

Disadvantages:

They take time. Each may take less than 10 minutes, but accumulating a large number of emails means lots of time that could be spent on something else.
They entail responsibility: I don’t think that I get anything by giving a correct answer, but once I give a wrong answer leading to a bad decision my reputation can be put at risk.
They don’t seem appreciated in industry. I never got any follow-up or feedback on what happened later. Replying never led to anything for me. Also, I don’t think I learned much (only in 10% cases I learn things like “Oh these people are working on that, cool”, but that’s usually it)
These things don’t go on your CV (let’s be frank).

Advantages:

They can help building one’s reputation as an expert outside academia
They can extend one’s network
They can lead to a relationship bringing new projects (never happened to me personally)

Alternatively I was thinking about starting a part-time consulting service, but it doesn’t look viable.

So the question is it worth responding to emails from non-academic strangers asking you advices?

Why don't you start a blog? An FAQ and a few posts might be enough to address the vast majority of questions without costing you a ton of time.
You can then refer any inquiries to the blog. In time its popularity will grow and people might go directly to it instead of sending you emails.

You can highlight you research, grow your professional network, lead to collaborations AND save time by not having to answer the same question a million times.


Should one cite during university exams? As the title suggests, it's not a usual practice but should one do it? All I know that one can study for an exam and simply write the answers needed in order to succeed, no one tells us to include the names of authors of the ideas we memorized to write (except rarely).

In most technical university exams, there is no expectation of citations since the concepts are typically "textbook-level" material and thus established as part of the "common knowledge" of a subject.  Such information is rarely cited in the scientific literature, as it taken to be part of the shared background knowledge that has been so accepted as to no longer require explicit crediting.  For example, Newton is almost never cited when discussing basic physics.

In a literature or similar humanities course, on the other hand, the subject of an exam may explicitly be discussion and analysis of ideas presented by others. In this case, one would be typically be expected to at least informally cite the people whose ideas are being discussed, e.g.:

  Rawls' theory of justice, while more sophisticated than the simple utilitarianism of Locke, is considerably more difficult to comprehend"

Full formal citation, however, is typically both impractical and not useful within the scope of an exam.

Where business courses fall on this spectrum will depend on the course: when discussing case studies, I would expect informal citation to be appropriate, whereas an operational research and statistics course would more likely fall into the technical end of the spectrum where there are no citations.


Does disability impact on prospects of employment in academia? The impression I get in my field of research (theoretical chemistry) is that candidates for postdoc and more permanent research positions are judged partly upon their publication record. I suspect this is true of other fields, particularly the sciences.

I suffer from a long term chronic illness which means currently I cannot work full-time. I manage 75% of full-time hours  working on my PhD currently, so while I am well enough to do research, I am not well enough to do as much as I'd like. I am concerned that, should my health not improve, this will prove problematic as I try to move from being a student to an employee. My academic output would likely be less than an able-bodied person in the same position. While it may be of the same quality, there would be less of it.

There is legislation in many places that prevents discrimination against disabled people, but I suspect this would not apply where candidates are being judged based on previous academic output. My worry is that because academic employment seems so performance/output-oriented, I will be left behind, even if my work is of good quality.

Thoughts and experiences regarding how disability is treated in academia, particularly with regards to selecting candidates for a new position, would be greatly appreciated. I would also welcome advice on how to mitigate the possible issues arising from this.

I was initially unsure whether to post this, as it would be possible for potential employers to identify me from this posting. However, I think this topic is important to discuss and there are potentially other PhD students in the same situation as me.

Self-identifying a disability at some stage during the interview process is usually in your best interest. Being upfront with a potential employer can make all the difference, especially because of the legal protections it affords you in most academic settings. It's also important because then expectations are properly set at the beginning of the process, rather than having to "adjust" later on.

Additionally, many application processes (at least in the EU) allow for self-identification of illnesses and handicaps that could "slow down" one's career. This allows one to "lengthen" the eligibility clocks for many programs. This helps to ameliorate the problems you mentioned of being judged against a cohort that has had more time to work.


What to do when you get a grant and move to another institution My general question is; let's say that you are PI and apply individually or jointly with other research groups to a grant, and you get it. After some months, you move to another institution; can you generally "move" all the money and resources you were awarded with or should you abandon them?

The question goes for H2020 projects or any other national or international funding schemes (NIH, NSF, UK, etc)

And in particular this goes for H2020 projects.

This happened to a colleague of mine for FP7, I assume H2020 will be pretty much the same. Essentially, you have two options:

(1) Find a proxy to formally finish the project on your behalf. That is, find somebody at your current institution with a high enough status that he is allowed to take over the project without much administrative quabbles (e.g., a senior professor), and formally hand over the project to him when you leave. You will of course still do the actual work - the handover is just a formality. Of course this requires a significant amount of trust and goodwill (on both sides), so you better be good friends with the person that proxies for you. As long as you both are at the same institution, the administrative effort of this solution is not too high.

(2) Officially transfer the project to your new institution. This requires an amendment of your DOW (description of work), and the sanctus of your new institution, all partners of the project, and the european commission (i.e., of the PO and the responsible lawyers on EC side). This will take long - expect the entire process to take possibly a year or so. Additionally, there is a chance that some negotiations between you, your old institution, and your new institution are required (e.g., to answer the question to what percentage the overheads should be transferred to the new institution). H2020 proposals are good money for universities, and you should not expect your old institution to let go of such a project easily.

Edit: Clearly, option 2 is only available if your new institution is also eligible for H2020 funding.


Buying Internet hosting from an academic institution Back in the nineties, before hosted servers were readily available, some Internet companies like Yahoo and Google got started in universities, using the institution's servers and Internet bandwidth, moving out when they went commercial. That would seem to need a pretty big jump, going from zero income to enough to pay e.g. five grand a month for a T1 line in one shot, which would seem to create a strong need to find venture capital.

Suppose the founders of such a startup, in a university in the nineties, wanted to bootstrap, so they made a suggestion to their host institution: we want to experiment with going commercial, finding ways to monetize our startup, with small amounts of income at first. We can't reasonably use your facilities for free once we go commercial, so can we pay you for continued hosting, some amount that should be a lot cheaper than getting a T1.

Would such an offer be accepted? Is there anything I'm missing?

Within the United States, universities help startups in many different ways. This includes "internal" startups that are created by students and faculty as well as "external" startups that are created by university outsiders but receive support from a University.

Google initially had an "exclusive licensing partnership" with Stanford. As noted in a Wall Street Journal Article, this deal paid off well for Stanford.
Academic researchers and students can be encouraged to do technology transfers and "commercialization" of research. This can be within the University or outside of the University. For example the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation got started because the University did not want to help support a professor's efforts to sell his research. As another example, Texas Tech has an Office of Research Commercialization to help within the university.
Universities can also have incubators such as Univeristy Research Park in Madison, WI. Incubators such as these can help startups overcome the hurdles you mention.