Any advice about having children during grad school, from the perspective of (a) female grad students and (b) students without stay-at-home partners? I've seen a lot of "kids-in-grad-school" advice that's geared towards male PhD students with stay-at-home wives. I'm a female MD PhD student married to a male MD PhD student, and neither of us is going to quit our career. We are both willing to put in the time needed to raise a family.

I'm interested in hearing from the following perspectives (EDITED FOR MORE DETAIL):
(a) For women who had kids while they were in graduate school -- how did you decide on when to have kids? earlier in grad school vs. later? (since pregnancy can be very difficult for some women e.g. severe morning sickness, I think optimal timing could potentially differ depending on if the grad student is male or female.)
Also, how did you approach being pregnant in an academic environment? (i.e. did anyone harass you as being 'less dedicated'? I know this is not a reason NOT to have kids, but I'm just curious about it. Men who are expecting a child can keep it a secret. Women can't keep it a secret because everyone they meet including total strangers can see that they're pregnant after a certain point.)

(b) For men or women who had kids while they were in graduate school and did NOT have a stay-at-home partner - how did you deal with childcare? Reason for asking: if you have a stay-at-home partner, childcare for the bulk of the day has already been solved. If you don't have a stay-at-home partner, it's a very big issue.
So - what approach did you take? (e.g. alternating schedules between caregivers? nanny? au pair? daycare? relatives? friends? babysitters?)

This question is different from Advice for having children during graduate school  because the vast majority of those answers are written from male perspectives and from perspectives of people with stay-at-home partners.

What you end up doing is going to be very specific to your individual circumstances, but I can give you my two cents about how my wife and I handled this situation.  Currently, I'm a 4th year PhD student and my wife is 2 years into a MS degree with the aim to get a PhD.  We both hope to stay in academia.  We have two kids, ages 4 and 6 mo.

Our first kid came before either of us were in grad school, and our second came a year later than we had planned. Our decision was to have kids earlier rather than later because grad school is more flexible in terms of schedules than real jobs.  This really helpful when my wife was practically bed-ridden for a couple months of her first trimester with our second kid.

We didn't want to stick our kids in daycare full time, and we have no family around to help, so we came up with a switch-off schedule.  My wife works from 4am-noon (and some hours on weekends) and then we switch off and I work noon-6pm.  Then I work at night from home after she goes to sleep (early).  Our 4 year old does go to pre-school a few hours a week and the baby naps, so I can put in a few more hours during the day this way.  Of course, schedules like this depend on our advisors being okay with our hours, and for our work (me CS, her biochemistry), it works out. Depending on where you are and at what point (and structure) of your MD-PhDs, you might be able to do this.

One consideration is that by the time both of us are on the job market for tenure-track positions, both kids will be school age, which allows us to both work normal business hours.  Also, by the time I'm into a post-doc, our baby should be sleeping through the night.  Until that happens, caring for children is very draining and it does affect my productivity in research.

As far as I know, my wife did not experience any overt discrimination against her for being pregnant.  Her supervisor was generally supportive and understanding even when she couldn't work because she was too sick.  However, as with many medical conditions (e.g. disability, known mental health issues), you're sure to encounter at least unconscious bias for being pregnant.


How to check how fast the review and publication process in a journal I am trying to decide on the journal where I want to submit my article. Besides the ranking of the journal, what I care is the speed with which the journal review articles. OK, I do not accept a super-fast review process from any journal, but sometimes it can be painful to wait too long as many of you have already experienced.

I know that some journals shares information about dates when the articles was first received. I can use this information to make an estimation about the length of review process. But, many others do not share any information about this.

So, I wonder if there are some ways to have an idea to publish an article in a journal before submitting?

In mathematics, the AMS publishes an annual report in the AMS Notices with data on how long journals take from submission to final acceptance (in addition to other things).  The most recent edition of this is here.


International Student applying for a PhD in a university in Taiwan I am a student doing my Masters in India, and was considering doing a PhD (in computer science, specifically ML) in a university in Taipei, Taiwan. I went to their website, but couldn't find some of the details I was looking for. These were the questions (in no particular order)

Will language be an issue? Are we expected to learn Chinese? The website said that there are courses in Chinese and English, but nothing more. I wanted to know in terms of doing courses, communicating with the advisor and his other students, as well as writing papers.
What about food? I am a vegetarian.
Can i get scholarship there? From the govt or TAship/RAship?
What about the coursework which I will have to do in my PhD? How long would it take(duration)? And how is the workload?

I know there are many international PhD students there. I think you need not to worry about English use in the classrooms. However, you will need to learn Chinese to some extent in order to live in Taiwan. Not knowing the local language would cause you a lot trouble.
There are quite a few vegetarian food only restaurants available in Taipei. But, they are not cheap and may be some distance away from university campus.

Talk to the university about 3 & 4.

(I am local in Taipei)


Create journal database: is there any easy way to auto download all the citations of a volume or all the volumes of a journal? I am trying to create my own research database, the first step I do is to identify the journals that I need to read and refer to. The way I create the searching database is copying all the articles titles and authors one by one, or downloading the endnote citation format and input it into the endnote database. I found this process very time-consuming and wonder if there are ways to download all the citations of a volume/journal at one time or a few times?

Thank you!

Most journals deposit metadata at CrossRef, and CrossRef offers an API for accessing these data.

To access journal-level data, you need the journal's ISSN. You can find it on the journal's  website.

For instance, to access the metadata of the journal International Organization (ISSN 1531-5088), you can look at:
https://api.crossref.org/journals/1531-5088 (You should use a JSON-Beautifier to format the text).

Look at CrossRef's API Documentation to find out how to fetch the journal-level data you wish to get.

Just as an example, if you modify the URL to this one: https://api.crossref.org/journals/1531-5088/works?sort=issued&order=desc&filter=from-online-pub-date:2020-01&select=author,DOI,title,references-count - - then you will see all articles from the journal International Organization issued since January 2020, and for each article you will only see those metadata that you selected in the URL, i.e. the author name, the DOI, the title of the paper, and the number of references the paper contains.

Good luck.


Etiquette - send a copy of my new book to the department I earned my PhD within or to my advisor? I need some etiquette advice.  The book version of my PhD manuscript has just come out and I have a limited number of copies (8) from my publisher that I can give to family etc.  My dilemma is whether it is more appropriate to send a copy to the department where I earned my PhD or to send the copy directly to my supervisor, who has retired and is no longer teaching there.  The rest of my committee is still teaching in the department.
Any thoughts?
Thanks for the help,
Wendy

To the department. The point of publishing work is to share the knowledge with others. This will be more greatly achieved in your previous department where other professors and up-and-coming students can have access to your work. This would be better than your work simply sitting on your old supervisor's book shelf. Your supervisor likely knows your work and therefore does not need a constant reminder sitting on his or her shelf. Also, I never knew an academic supervisor who cherished having a previous student's work sitting on their shelf solely for sentimental reasons, which I think might be your motive.


Publishing a Corrigendum? I recently published a book chapter with my supervisor. I just realized that I messed up two dates in the chapter. For the first one, the original sentence is like "xx policy decisions were published in 2004", but the year should be 2015. Another one "xx policy will be abolished in 2013 ", but it should be 2023.

The chapter is now published online and in hardcopy.

I wonder whether it's necessary to submit a Corrigendum? The book chapter is about reviewing the current literature on a specific topic (not an empirical study). I worry this will affect my reputation.

For minor corrigenda (such as this), some scholars merely put it on their web site.  Likely many of your future papers will also have errors, so keeping a list of all of them in one place may be the best choice.


Include content in my PhD thesis from my paper whose content previously appeared in the PhD thesis of one of the coauthors of the aforementioned paper I would want to include content in my PhD thesis from one of my research papers. I am a coauthor of the research paper. The order of the names of the authors in the research paper is not based on the importance of the individual contributions, but it is alphabetical. The point is that the content of the research paper is in turn based on the content of the PhD thesis of another coauthor of the research paper.
Given this situation, I want to know to which extent I would be guilty of plagiarism if I include the content in my PhD thesis with references to both the research paper and the PhD thesis of the other coauthor.

Just be honest: Be clear who contributed what. (And follow institutional guidelines.)


Can you be dismissed from a graduate program for attending jury duty? From what I’ve read, an employer can’t legally fire you for attending jury duty, although they don’t have to pay you.

I’ve been called before but never had to serve more than a day.  However, a grad student friend of mine was called, had already deferred once before, and is concerned that if he has to serve for an extended period, it would set his work back so that he couldn’t graduate in time, and his department told him that he can’t request another extension.

Can you be dismissed from a program for fulfilling your civic duty?

This is in the US, and the university is public if that has any bearing.

* UPDATE * - I'm really glad that I asked this question.  Today I received a summons for jury duty, and I am to appear in court at the EXACT date and time of my defense.  It can happen to you!!!

* UPDATE 2 * - Here is how I dealt with it.  I told my advisor that I had been called and asked if he would contact someone in the university administration to write an official letter asking to excuse me from jury duty on that day.  A few days later, I was given a letter to that effect.  The county I live in has a Jury Commission where you can go and "plead your case" to be excused.  I went to the Jury Commission and brought my letter, at which time they asked me when I would be able to serve.  I gave alternate dates (after my planned deposit date ;-) ), which they accepted.  The Jury Commission really appreciated that I had brought an official letter from the administration, as they had received excuse letters from doctoral student's advisors, and rejected them.  Having something from the university administration itself carries much more weight.  Thankfully, it all worked out!

Serving on a jury is considered a crucial civic duty - I think it would be extremely damaging for any university to directly or indirectly punish a student for serving on a jury.

That said, it is possible that an institution could disagree with how much jury duty impacts your friend. It would be quite another thing for a school to dismiss a student because they missed a specific date of class, but that is different than a project that is worked on over years. That is, they would not be dismissing them for participation as a juror, but for insufficient progress during all the other time they didn't spend on a jury, deciding that the time spent on a jury was not substantial enough to impact performance. Serving on a jury for 1 week wouldn't require a university to give another semester-long extension.

Assuming you are referring to the U.S.: it might depend on your local government, but it can be possible to defer more than once or to be excused entirely if the courthouse agrees. There is often a limit but in places I have lived it was not limited to once.

Usually the phrasing for getting deferred is something along the lines of "undue hardship" or "extreme inconvenience" which certainly applies to a graduate student nearing the end of their program.

If your friend can't defer and has to report, there are also at least some anecdotes and rumors that academics are likely to be rejected from juries for a number of reasons, though I am not aware of any social scientific study of this phenomenon. I would also add that long jury service for anyone is pretty rare - most court cases are fairly simple, and jurors may not even serve on a case if they are not selected or there is not a large number of jury trials during the time of service.

I am not aware of laws that protect grad students specifically, but this is really a question to ask a lawyer rather than Academia.SE. There might be local laws that effectively count grad students as protected employees, but I think it's likely to be a gray area due to the temporary and not-really-employee status of grad students. More likely, your institution or graduate school has some of their own policies regarding jury duty - I would suggest you or your friend consult those policies.


My peers are publishing high impact papers and getting awards or offers while I am struggling to write a decent paper. What should I do differently? I am a 3rd year PhD student in Canada. My research area is different than my labmates. However, they are publishing high impact papers at high rate  (2 per year), while I am struggling to get my second paper out. My first paper was in a low impact journal.
It is not only about the impact factor, their work is also more rigorous than what I am doing. Granted that my field of research is different (they work in modeling nanomaterials, while I work in simulation of a coating process), but I get super intimidated by their research output. My research area is not exactly aligned to my advisor's research expertise.
My seniors have gone on to become assistant professors in universities, in industry or are in prestigious research labs for their postdoc. They receive awards and accolades from the university and government, while I am struggling.
What should I do differently? I am working 80+ hours every week, but it seems I am not capable enough. My advisor seems satisfied with my work, but he is a hands-off kind of person, so I don't know if he even cares about my research output. Am I wasting my time with doing this PhD?

If you're working 80+ hours a week, it's possible that that's getting in the way of you taking time to get enough sleep, and/or to maintain a healthy diet, and/or to get a decent amount of exercise, and that in turn is adversely affecting your cognitive function and impeding your ability to produce your best work.  It might be worth trying taking your foot off the pedal a bit.


Can a professor teach mathematics and computer science? I assume this is nearly impossible in a university with separate math and computer-science departments, due to the way funding works (correct me if I'm wrong). However, I've heard that some small universities have joint mathematics and computer-science departments. In such a case, is it possible to get a professorship with the opportunity to teach both? Would I need degrees in both to qualify for such a position?

I don't know how common this is now, but about 15 years ago I was a visiting assistant professor in mathematics at a small liberal arts college in the U.S., a position that became available because, in trying to fill a tenure-track computer science position, no suitable candidates were found by late March or early April, and so the search was ended and a new search was started for a visiting math position, with one of the math faculty members helping out by teaching a couple of beginning computer science courses and one or two of the computer science professors teaching an extra class. In fact, I had consecutive visiting positions at TWO different colleges/universities back then for this same reason (no suitable computer science candidates were found for a tenure track position), and in each case the reason the visiting position was for math and not for computer science was due to the overwhelming greater number of experienced (in teaching) candidates that a math search would generate this late in the hiring season.

The same department tried again the next year, with the same result (I believe the other place I had a visiting position at was successful the second time), and the same math faculty member pitched in again, this time I believe teaching only computer science. Over a period of several years this faculty member transitioned to computer science, and has since written two textbooks in computer science. For what it's worth, I do not think this faculty member originally had much of a background in computer science (maybe a couple of courses as an undergraduate), but I believe this person had started being interested in computer science at least a couple of years before I was there.


Citing a source of a figure in a text I would like to know, if it is common (in a dissertation) to cite the source of a special figure also in the text. So for example I have the following sentence:

"Figure 1 shows the share of renewable energy in Europe for the year 2018 ."

In the text underneath Figure 1 I cite the corresponding source, like:
'Figure 1: Share of renewable energy in Europe for the year 2018 (Eurostat, 2018)'

Should the source (Eurostat, 2018) also be appended to the sentence in the text like:
"Figure 1 shows the share of renewable energy in Europe for the year 2018 (Eurostat, 2018)."

I'd appreciate every comment.

It is normally enough to cite it once. If it is clear to the reader there should be no issue. The caption is complete, with the citation. The text itself can read more naturally.

But this is just a style suggestion. Correctness and clarity are the goals.

Caveat: Some journal may have their own style guide, but you will be told of that as part of the review process. For a dissertation it is fine to say it once unless your advisor objects.


Revealing one's original ideas in job applications? Job applications typically require the applicant to describe their research interests (research statements). Would it be a worry that an applicant's work-in-progress/current interests would inspire similar works from the reviewer's side? If so, is it wise to describe these ideas, or better avoid doing so?

Regarding the application letter:

The aim of an application letter should be an invitation to a job interview. Keep in mind that an employer (within and outside academia) wants you to work on their problems.

You could try to spark their interest by stating something like "I have worked (are currently working on) some original solutions for the XYZ problem.", without going into details. When they are interested in the details, they can ask you in the interview.

Try to avoid elaborate descriptions of your current ideas. Not so much to prevent anyone from stealing them, but rather because they tend to distract from the primary goal of an application letter: to get invited for the interview. Just sufficient information to make them curious would be perfect.

Regarding the application interview and/or research statement:

When your current work is only partially related to PI's work it is not necessary or desirable to go into the details, and there is little chance of anyone stealing your ideas anyway.

When there is significant overlap, it might be wise to put a preliminary paper online (e.g. on Arxiv). In that way you can claim the ideas to be yours, and freely discuss them.


How to test my understanding of an academic paper? I am an undergraduate student in Computer science who has recently developed a very strong interest in logic and computability. I enjoy a lot reading academic papers but I am afraid that my understanding of them might be incomplete or skewed.

This question is similar to: How can I prove my self-studied knowledge? but my unlike the OP I want to specifically test my knowledge of academic papers and I have no one to talk to (other than Mathematics/Mathoverflow)!

There is some graduate courses at my University that are "seminars" where a group of graduate students with a professor discuss a new paper every week. It looks awesome and so interesting... but I am a first-year student and I don't want to come across as arrogant. What to do?

Academic papers deal with the state-of-the-art of the field, either pushing it or reviewing it. So, to fully understand them, you need a deep knowledge of the field.

Now, "fully understanding" them might be a bit broad statement. The key of the paper are the problem and the solution, but I put more emphasis on the problem. For, if you are able to understand what the problem is, why is it hard, its background (where it stands in relation to related work) and implications (how future problems are derived from it), you probably have enough subject knowledge to digest the whole paper. The solution is important, but not so much on a fundamental level as on a conceptual, i.e. you don't have to understand every line of a proof to get why a theorem solves a problem.

So, the first step is understanding the problem and the second "getting" the solution. If you want to be more strict with yourself, ask yourself after reading a paper whether you are able to think about the boundaries of the problem or solution, i.e. what could be done to improve them or what could be derived from them (not minding at that point if that is feasible or not).

PS: If you really are doing research in a field, you need to analyze the paper on deeper levels (check the references, the experimental setup, remember the proof from above and the one you read in another paper 3 months ago, etc.), but at your level, the above seems more than enough.

PPS: I don't see a problem with you joining those "seminars". Ask the professor if you could participate in some of them, at the beginning only by being present and listening. See if it suits you. Once you get the hang of it, you can actively be a part of the discussions. It may be hard to keep up, but that shouldn't discourage you. And you shouldn't strive for the level of understanding the graduate students are at, that'll come with time.


Have researchers any incentive to publish negative or confirmatory results? Negative results are sometimes seen as failures, and confirmatory results as lack of creativity, even though both kinds can be useful. Have researchers any incentive to publish negative or confirmatory results (put aside the cases when they are forced to, e.g. certain registered clinical trials)?

There is certainly incentive to publish negative results: a good negative result that clearly establishes, "X is not possible" or "X is not true" can be extremely valuable.  I've published some negative results myself, and am proud of the work.

Negative results, however, typically must hew to a much higher standard of evidence than positive results, in order to distinguish between "X is not possible" and "I can't figure out how to do X." For positive results, showing "I can do X" automatically implies "X is possible," but the syllogism does not hold in reverse.  I think this is one of the main reasons why publishing negative results is so difficult. Also, it's easier for reviewers to argue with negative results, and harder to argue with positive: with negative, it matters strongly why they are negative, while with positive the "why" can be relegated to discussion and hypotheses for future investigation.

Confirmatory results, however, are much harder to justify in absence of an explicit mechanism requiring them, as for medical studies.  Typically, we get confirmatory results not directly, but indirectly through the development of new results building on the prior results: the prior results get confirmed through their use in the controls in the new study.


Internship report - any way to request discretion from reviewers for a to-be-published paper? I'm required to submit my internship report in my university. Since the work involved is a work in progress and is yet to be published, is there a way I can mention somewhere that it is not for reproduction?

I think it would be fair to say something like

  This report concerns work in progress and should not be freely distributed pending publication of the results

I also think it would be wise to talk to somebody in a position with insights into how the reports are handled. You may not be the first to have this issue. I am sure such reports are not circulated anyway unless specifically stated they will be from the beginning. But it is better to be safe than sorry so do not hesitate to ask around to get the necessary information you need.


Do researchers reuse benchmark results for existing algorithm when comparing with their algorithm? Unfortunately I do not have any prior research experience, therefore I had a few questions while I was studying papers on cluster analysis.

Can a researcher legally and with permission use the benchmark values of the pre-existing algorithm to compare with theirs? This question came to me after I noticed identical results reported in multiple papers for some population based cluster analysis algorithms. The different papers propose a new algorithm and then compare the performance of it with some other algorithms over some common dataset. I have noticed that, for some algorithms the values reported are an exact match. The nature of these algorithm is stochastic, and also the different authors claim to have run the algorithms different number of iterations and then use the mean. Therefore no two sets of run will result with the same mean, min, max and standard deviation.

My suspicion is either it is permissible to reuse the benchmark results with permission. Or a common benchmarking framework exists (still, how can two papers reporting using different number of iterations land into the same identical result?)

I have reproduced the work of the papers using Octave and benchmark is similar to what is reported in the papers, but is definitely not identical.

Also, how generally these are done? If a researcher has to implement 5 algorithms to compare, then do they implement their own and then verify and compare or request the version the author has used and then benchmark with respect to that specific piece of code to maintain unbiased experimentation?

[EDIT]

Quoting the results from another paper (with citation) is all right, but using it in the benchmark comparison table is something which is practiced in research?

Quoting the results from another paper (with citation) is all right, but using it in the benchmark comparison table is something which is practiced in research?

I would wager it is not done enough. It is certainly ok, even required, to compare your results to earlier work, and the more fair and unbiased you can do this, the better. It is perfectly acceptable to say "on the right-hand side of Table XY, we report the results for this problem previously achieved in [1]" (and then list them exactly as reported).

The one thing to make sure, though, is that when you want to say that you are better than a previous work, the comparison is actually fair. For instance, one sometimes sees papers where the authors use a long-running deterministic algorithm (which you need a map/reduce cluster to execute on) and claim that their work is better than an earlier heuristic approach, which was built for speed and on-line execution. Don't do that.


U.S. universities on-campus residence for International PhD students? I want to ask generally, do most U.S. universities offer on-campus accommodation for International Ph.D. students Who are married?

If the student is benefitted from scholarships {Free tuition and fees + 2k monthly stipend} will he/she need to pay an extra to use not-shared on-campus settlements?

Without any self-funding and other support, is the stipend enough to pay for it while taking care of food, health care, etc. at the same time?

If you do the following search on Google, you will find some universities that do: "married student housing for graduate students". But I doubt that most do and the ones that provide this service would be large universities. Housing isn't free, of course, but it can be priced fairly low. It is possible that it is market priced in some places and provided only for convenience, but I think that it is most likely subsidized by the university nearly everywhere it is offered.

I took advantage of this long ago so my experience is likely no longer valid, but the search will get you started. In my case it was very very low and included all utilities.


How much information should I divulge about on-going unpublished research at a conference? I'm developing a paper right now based upon some of my preliminary results, and I'm attending several conferences to present and get some feedback on my results from other experts in my field.  A thought occurred to me that because my work is yet to be published, I there is a potential for others to steal my idea and publish before I get a chance.

I'm probably over-thinking this, and there is little chance of it actually happening.  But I'm curious how frequently this happens in scientific domains.  Do people go to conferences to steal ideas?  If it does happen, how can I best prevent it from happening?  Obviously, I want to share my ideas with the world, but I don't want to lose a chance to take an idea into fruition.  What should/shouldn't I share about my research before it is published?  Should I simply wait until my paper is accepted before I go on the conference circuit?

Update:
My field is computational science (not to be confused with computer science).

This will really, really depend on the field you're coming from - or even the sub-field. Take two examples:

Mathematical epidemiology: If I present a paper with a nice infectious disease model, with the equations, the parameter values, and some numerical results, but I haven't tackled anything analytical yet, you could very well - if you could get all that down - beat me to publication.
Observational epidemiology: I could tell you everything about my study but, without access to the raw data, you'd have to go find your own multi-year hospital acquired infection cohort to study. Good luck with that. And if you still beat me to the punch? Well, I probably deserve that.

Generally speaking, for in-progress stuff, I present enough for people to know what I'm doing, comment on it, etc., but not enough to fully replicate the experiment without coming to me for more information. For example, some folks I'm working with struggled with whether or not to present a theoretical result without its implementation done yet, because someone could scoop us with the implementation. We decided for the audience I was presenting to, that was...unlikely. For another audience? They'd get the theory in broad strokes, but without enough information that the theory alone is enough of a springboard to run with the paper.


How to correctly cite a retracted paper? I would like to cite a particular paper that has been retracted, due to a specific error the authors have initially overseen in their analysis.
Because this specific error is the subject of my discussion, I want to include it as an example.
Now, how do I cite it correctly? For example, ...

Should the citation appear in my list of references?
Am I supposed to use the general citation format; e.g. Smith et al. (2000)?
Should I or am I actually allowed to mention the author's names?
Can I be brief and simply write: Smith et al. (2000, Nature, retracted)?

If you cite the study, then the citation should appear in the list of references.

The exact way to note the retraction varies based on the citation style (e.g. APA, MLA, etc.), as Nate Eldredge mentions in his comment. However, the basic convention seems to be to note the retraction in parenthesis, as an additional part of the original reference. For example:

Ricaurte, G. A., Yuan, J., Hatzidimitriou, G., Cord, B. J., & McCann,
     U.D. (2002, September 27). Severe dopaminergic neurotoxicity in
     primates after a common recreational dose regimen of MDMA.
     Science, 297, 2260-2263. (Retraction published September 12,
     2003, Science, 301, p. 1454)

This example comes from http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2013/01/retraction-action.html, which pertains specifically to APA.


Is it normal to have no publications after 2.5 years in a PhD program? Background: I started my Ph.D two and half years ago in engineering/computer science field. I was pushed by my supervisor into a direction which he thought would be good (He switched directions and he knows nothing about the field, just because there were better prospects for getting grants). I never felt connected to the field and he never received any grants to study it.

I switched a year ago to a subject that I feel passionate about and started reading lots of literature. I have done some work and submitted (rejected at first, resubmitted and waiting).

So now I have completed 2.5 years in the program and no publications at all. I even find it very hard to find new novel ideas in my field as it is been actively researched for 10 years and it seems to me as if almost everything is already done but that is a different issue.
I am afraid I won't get enough publications in time before the Ph.D time limit expires.

Question:
Is it normal to be 2.5 years into Ph.D and have no publications?

I was in the exact same situation (also CS) and I would say that it is both normal and cause for concern. So there's no reason to take it personally, or to start worrying about your abilities, this happens to many people, but it is a situation that needs to be resolved. From now on, your number one priority should be to get a paper, put everything else on hold. Don't worry about getting enough papers, worry about getting one.

You have something under submission, so the odds are you'll get it accepted somewhere pretty soon. However, if you don't, I would recommend trying to find someone with experience who can coach you hands-on. Find someone who can read your draft in detail and tell you what needs to be done. 2.5 years with no publications is usually a sign that the supervisor is not paying very close attention, and it may be good to find someone who can pay close attention to you, at least for a bit. Getting a paper past reviewers is a strange, dark art, and it really helps to get some intense supervision for your first attempt.

edit after comment: Two further tips to help your situation:

Idea generation is a skill and you can work on getting better at it.
[1 2 3]. If you're not generating ideas, tackle that problem head-on. Don't think of yourself as a non-creative person, and don't blame your subject: there are always exciting directions if you look hard enough.
Try to write a collaborative paper, ask a postdoc or a fellow PhD in your group to do some brainstorming, and to find an idea that you can work on together. That way, the work becomes less lonely, and you have at least one other person who cares about it. It might be a little scary to initiate something like this, but if the alternative is working by yourself for the next 2.5 years, you may consider stepping out of your comfort zone a little bit.


How to quote a passage with a punctuation error? I want to quote the following passage (actually, the original passage as somewhat longer but let's consider this a minimal working example)

  Awareness of others, can address affective needs.

but the misplaced comma bothers me.

The common sic is not only often perceived to be impolite due to its overuse as a way ridicule the original author of a text, it also seems overkill in this case and – worst of all – it might not be clear that it relates to the tiny comma that comes right before but might be understood to refer to "awareness of others" instead:

  Awareness of others, [sic] can address affective needs.

A missing comma could just be put in square brackets itself as a way to more or less silently add it to the quotation without misquoting but the least distracting way to remove a comma that I could come up with is

  [Awareness of others] can address affective needs.

Of course silently dropping the comma would be even less distracting but it might also constitute a misquotation:

  Awareness of others can address affective needs.

What is your opinion on this? Is there a standard or otherwise widely accepted way to do this?

Just delete the offending comma. No one will accuse you of misquoting; if they track down the original quote and notice that you've made a minor grammatical edit, they will not dwell on it long.


Applying to History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) PhD programs? History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) is a relatively small field with a handful of PhD programs in the U.S.

Are their any resources on applying to HPS PhD programs and pursing a career in HPS?

HPS isn't a huge subfield of philosophy. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I'd guess there are maybe 5 or 6 jobs in the US per year in HPS. It's hard to tell partially because the field is quite diverse. Philosophy of Physics and Philosophy of Social Science are pretty different sub-subfields. So you should try to think about your interests more narrowly. Are you wanting to do philosophy of biology? Philosophy of Neuroscience? Or maybe you're really interested in the birth of modern dynamics at the turn of the 16th century? You need to think about what exactly you're interested in and then find the very best programs you can apply to for that interest. For instance, if you wanted to do Philosophy of Biology, the University of Wisconsin, Madison is a great choice, but if you wanted to do history of physics stuff, the program at the University of Pittsburgh might be stronger for those interests.

As a first pass, take a look at the Gourmet Report rankings in each of the Phil. Science subfields. But then go through and actually read recent papers by the key faculty at the places that end up high on your list and see whether they're doing the kind of stuff you want to do.

Finally, it would also behoove you to check out the placement data of every school you are considering applying to with a fine-toothed comb. The philosophy job market has been abysmal since 2008. (Not that it was that great before, mind.) So if your ambition is to someday become a philosophy professor, then you should really take a look at whether these schools are managing to place their PhD graduates and if so, in what kinds of places. Investigate the kinds of schools that the graduates land in. Are they the flagship campuses of big state research universities? Are they tiny religious colleges in far flung places? Are they elite small liberal arts colleges? Are they two-year community colleges? You need to really think about what kind of school you'd like to teach at because the experience of being a professor at each of these different kinds of schools is very different. Religious schools pay less. Community colleges and satellite campuses of state schools tend to have heavy teaching obligations. Etc.

If, like many but not all grad students, you want to end up teaching at a research school with PhD students, you probably would have to get into literally the best program in your subspecialty of HPS to be a competitive candidate.

Good luck.


Export Google Scholar search for fine-grained analysis Problem
I recently started to survey an algorithm described in a paper. I would like to include some variants of this algorithm in my survey.
One natural choice is to use "cited by" feature in Google Scholar. It could return a new search of the papers that cite the previous one (see below).

Since there are 1342 papers, it is not feasible to read all of them (even just abstracts) within short period of time. I made a heuristic for selecting "interesting" papers

Only read the papers that have more than some number of citations (say K).

which means I will only have to read papers that in turn have more than K "cited by" number.
Even though this heuristic is unfair for newly published papers, I believe it could indeed help me narrow down my scope.
However, the issue is Google Scholar does not have features to support my heuristic (something like advanced search supported by other databases might). So my problem is

How do I download the search results from my Google Scholar query with all the meta data, including "cited by" information.
If the previous point is not possible, is there another tool that could help me?

Could someone help me. Thank you in advance!

There is no API for google scholar data. They do that on purpose ...
 Here are links to some possible workarounds

https://pypi.org/project/scholarly/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04190-5
https://serpapi.com/google-scholar-api


Unsuccessful job search with an MS in Math degree My question is similar to this one

Career for a mathematician outside academia

but slightly different: what can I do with an MS in Math degree, if I don't continue for a PhD?

I wrote an MS thesis, spent about a year with a good research lab on campus, and have made good progress in research.  The feedback I've gotten from the lab directors has been pretty good.

The problem now is that I'm testing the job market, and currently nobody really seems to want me or value me.  They don't seem to care that I wrote a thesis or worked in a research lab.  And, people are taking a long time in getting back to me on the phone, on email, etc.

This is interesting to experience; however, how can I figure out which companies or industries will actually value someone with my background?

I've been looking for entry-level to mid-career finance positions, at banks and hedge funds -- nobody seems to want to talk seriously with me yet.

(I have a bit of coding experience but not a fully developed computer science background, e.g. I don't know anything about operating systems or compilers.)

For context: I'm in the United States :)

It's good you're wondering about this now, before you commit another 3+ years to doing a PhD after which you might face the same questions but after paying a much higher opportunity cost. Questions such as these are what I consider paramount to ask before applying for graduate study.

The good news is a Masters degree will open up at least some doors. There are things that you can do with a Masters degree that someone with only a Bachelor's cannot. The bad news is that there are fewer of these positions. Because you're more highly qualified, you can also overqualify yourself out of entry-level positions since the employer assumes you'll move on quickly and they would waste their efforts training you.

Regarding what you can do, I wouldn't usually start with which companies are interested, but rather which jobs require a MS math degree. A quick search on monster.com turns up results such as this and this. By extension the companies posting these ads are interested in you. As you look through the ads, think of all the things you learned that you might be able to apply to the requirements listed. For example you say you have coding experience. The Data Scientist job specifically asks for familiarity with SAS, R and Python. Do you know these things? If so, you're in business.

If after responding to lots of these ads, nobody still wants to talk to you, then chances are your application isn't very good. This could be because of your cover letter, CV, transcript, or a multitude of other factors. Talk to your alma mater's career center, if they have one, or ask on Workplace.SE. It's not that different from applying to 10 different graduate schools and getting rejected by all of them. Diagnose why, fix it if possible, and apply to another 10 graduate schools.

You can also look at jobs that require a PhD in math. If you find you like these jobs a lot more than those that only require a MS, that's a good time to think of doing PhD studies.


My Plan to Get into a CS PhD Program Some background:

I graduated 3 years ago from a big state research university.  I had an irrelevant sociology major and graduated with a 2.9 GPA mainly because I had no inclination that I would ever want to go to graduate school and thought it was more important to just make sure that I had a job to support myself and graduated on time.

After graduation I had a crappy office job for 2 years and took some random IT graduate courses which lead me to eventually get a job as a programmer at a large marketing firm for about a year and I got really interested in the more complex world of computer science especially computer vision, modeling and simulation.

Which brings me to now.

I will be beginning a CS Master's program this summer at a medium sized state university with a concentration in Modeling and Sim.  I plan to to the thesis option and I've already begun contacting professors about research opportunities.

My GRE score is 162/155/4.5 but I didn't study because I found out I had to take it at the last minute.  With some prep I think I can at least bring that up to about 165/160/5.

All that said, do you think that with my thesis, a publication or 2 and a stellar GPA my masters work would over-shaddow my crappy undergraduate career enough to get me into a good PhD program.

My dream department would be Caltech.  But I'd at least like to go somewhere reputable if I'm going to bother with a PhD.

Diversity note in case this helps my cause: I'm female, 1st generation college student, armed forces veteran.

TL;DR

BAD UNDERGRAD: 2.9GPA/unrelated major

If I do really well on my CS Masters program, get some research published, and get my GRE score up to like a 165/160/5 do you think a top program would ignore the transgressions of my youth?

Given how far away from your original undergraduate degree you've moved (several years' work experience, change in degree program, and so on), it makes it very hard for a PhD program to give your undergraduate transcript too much weight in the admissions process. You will also be able to stress how far you've come as part of your application, either in the statement of purpose or in a "other notes" section—and you should take avail yourself of the opportunity.

As for being female and a veteran, that will matter much more to schools than being a first-generation college student. (Being a female applicant in CS certainly can't hurt your chances if you're a qualified candidate.)


I have to present a poster in two weeks and data analysis is going nowhere I am a first year PhD student in Psychology and I messed up. I submitted an abstract for a poster presentation before I had results in my hand thinking I will have it all done in time for the actual presentation. My advisor was very encouraging. I started analyzing the data a week ago and I feel very lost. I have made some minor progress, but I don't have a real "story" to say about my research, and I am worried its a dead end. I'm not sure what to do. How intense do poster presentations get? What does a bad poster presentation look like? Should I back out of the poster presentation? Or should I go ahead with it in the hopes that I find some minor interesting thing to say?

Don't worry. Poster presentations often showcase early work that needs further development. Think of it as a beta test to get some feedback, in order to develop a complete product. Negative results are also results, and they help deciding future directions of work.

You could mention what you attempted to do/prove, and why that would be important. List out what approach/analysis worked and didn't work,. You could spend time understanding why those things worked/didn't work, and put those on your poster. Based on these learnings, you could chalk out some directions for future work.


One of the authors changed idea before submitting paper I have just finished a paper together with a number of colleagues and collaborators from other universities.
We were about to submit it but one of the authors does not agree anymore. His explanation is that, while he thinks the paper is fine, he has a new idea and does not want to publish this as it would make his idea ‘‘less original’’ (because some parts of his idea are already in this paper).
Mind that it would be difficult to  include his idea in the paper as while the methods are the same, the applications are totally different.
What would you do in this case?
I am the main contributor and another professor had the idea. He wants to cut out some other authors, including the professor who had the idea. He’s quite a powerful and famous academic though, that’s why I think he’s feeling entitled to do so.

Talk to the other collaborators who probably agree with you, and then take a unified front to tell him that holding several collaborators hostage is not ok.
Additionally, if part of his new publication uses a jointly developed idea which he intends to publish alone while blocking your joint work (that should be in the references of his planned solo paper), then this strikes me as borderline plagiarism. In any case, it’s very bad form.


Ways to demonstrate ("show-off") contributions as an undergraduate in research I am an undergraduate   CS  student at a US college. Before this summer, I contacted a professor in Game Research and was offered the opportunity to work with one of his PhD students. Currently, I am focusing solely on this opportunity. I wrote lots of code and helped the PhD student run experiments and collect data.

The best outcome of this opportunity would be a publication and a recommendation letter. However, I am only 50% confident that I will be able to get one of the two at the end.

Are there other practical ways for me to demonstrate my contribution (that can help with future applications)?

Any other advice would help too.

A recommendation letter is the way you get credit for this kind of work. I'm not sure why you think you're only 50% likely to get a letter out of this, it would be very unusual for a professor to be willing to work on a research project with you but to not be willing to write a letter for you.  As long as you're taking it seriously and professionally I think you should have close to a 100% chance of getting a letter out of it.


How to schedule homework? Many times topics in courses are week-aligned, i.e., topic1 is studied on week1 (say in lecture1 on Monday/Wednesday and then in TA-section-1 on Friday), then topic 2 is studied on week2, etc.

Say the semester is 10 weeks long, and that there are 5 homework assignment (1st assignment covers topic1 and topic2, etc.)

I wonder what is the best strategy to schedule homework assignments, given that deadlines should be (at least) 2 weeks after publishing a new set of homework.

I see several options:

Option 1.
Publish homework 1 (topic1+2) at the end of week2, with deadline at the end of week 4.
[generaly, publish HW No. i on week 2i with deadline on week 2i+2]

Pros: An assignment is published only after the students saw all the relevant materials and have full two weeks to work on it.
Cons: Students usually work towards the deadline. Then, they actually work on the assignment only towards the end of week4, when topic1+2 are already stale in their minds.
(Another issue, of secondary importance, is that the last HW may interfere with finals.)

Option 2.
Publish homework 1 (topic1+2) at the end of week 1 with deadline at the end of week 3.
[generally, publish HW No. i on week 2i-1 with deadline on week 2i+1]

Pros: The students exercise topic1+2 immediately after seeing it.
Cons: They have only 1 week to do the assignment; Students that try to start the assignment early may get confused since some of the material haven't been covered yet in the lecture.

Option 3.
Care less, do whatever.

Would love to hear your advice.

It's indeed an interesting question that I have wondered about myself a few times. In my case it is even worse because I am currently teaching a course that has lectures twice a week, so the scheduling gets even more annoying.

I am not sure if there is a silver bullet. My default nowadays is Option 2 - I publish homework before all relevant topics have been covered in class, just because otherwise it feels like the homework is ages behind the lecture. Another problem of your Option 1 is that the last in-class topics basically cannot be covered by homework at all. With Option 2 you only have like one class that can't be part of the homework anymore.

Of course, the ideal schedule in my opinion is Option 3 - publish all homework at the beginning of class and give students agency over how they schedule their own work. If you worry that students get confused because they don't know whether they should already be able to solve a given assignment, you can always note which lectures it refers to.


How do universities (particularly medium sized ones) plan their master course schedule? I'm a student at a university of around 20,000 students (using the semester system, just to be clear) and it's currently summer/fall registration planning time, a time for me which is more stressful than any of my classes, with all of the various requirements that must be met, especially since I must fit in gened, major, and honors courses in my schedules.

As hard/stressful as it is for me, it must be an absolute nightmare for the university. It's not a large enough school that they can just offer 20 slots of a specific course (this happens, but only for nearly universal courses like comp I), and the majority of courses required for my major are offered once per year, in one section only.

How on Earth do schools deal with the logistical nightmare that must be planning hundreds of courses while avoiding conflicts which would make it impossible to meet requirements on time and making sure enough slots for each course are open?

At my institution, this planning is done separately by each department, which reduces the number of courses from "hundreds" to "dozens".

In my department, it's done by hand, by the chair and a couple other experienced faculty members, with the aid of some spreadsheets.  They are familiar with the requirements of the degree programs offered within the department, and some of the most common conflicts with other departments.  (For example, calculus is taken by many first-year physics majors, so we try not to schedule it at the same time as the intro physics lab.)

Over time, various courses have settled into "traditional" time slots which are known to work reasonably well together, so we use caution when deviating from tradition.

This does mean that students with more unusual programs (double majors, etc) may find conflicts between required courses which can be difficult or impossible to resolve.   These have to be handled case-by-case; in some cases the department may waive or modify requirements that can't reasonably be satisfied.


How important are review articles to secure a tenure-track position? My field is chemistry and I have had successful postdoc experiences for four years. Next year I want to apply for a tenure-track assistant professor position.

My supervisor says review articles are very very important (if not mandatory) for a full professor position. Therefore, they can be impressive for an assistant professor application. He advises me to focus on writing 2 review articles in the next months instead of research works because this can increase my chance. He says 1 review article is more important than 5 research articles in a job application.

Considering the fact that writing review articles is very time-consuming. Is it worth of my time to focus on 2 strong review articles?

I will say, in Physics, I have never heard this advice. I will also say that I have never, ever, heard anything resembling "1 review article is more important than 5 research articles in a job application." I've been impressed by seeing a review when it is Nature, Science, or Rev. Mod. Phys. - though of course it often indicates the advisor's reputation, rather than the candidate's. However, I can also think of a few times when it makes sense to dedicate some efforts to review articles rather than original research, and I did end up writing one as I was applying for jobs.

1) You have been invited to write a review by a journal with a decent reputation in your field. Doing so demonstrates you are taken seriously by the field, and scientists care about your opinion.

2) You are a few months from a job/grant application, and you think you can write/publish the review within this time, but probably won't be able to publish a significant original research article before the application goes in. A review is better than nothing.

3) Your research plans for the future are focused on an emerging field, and your review gives you a chance to both plant your flag and emphasize how important that field is to a broader audience.

If all three points are mostly there, and there aren't other major holes in your CV/application (teaching, details of your research plan, grant-writing), consider it! Beware, though - I found out writing a good review takes more time than you expect, so Point #2 might not be a slam dunk.


What does “resident” mean in title like “resident mathematician”? What does resident mean in title like resident mathematician?

And what are the main subjects where resident is attached to a title? For example, does a resident statistician exist? Or a resident medieval historian?

What are the place where the mathematician resides? I think they are not universities but maybe hospitals or museums, am I correct?

For example, from Writing a successful thesis or dissertation: Tips and strategies for students in the social and behavioral sciences by Fred C. Lunenburg and Beverly J. Irby:

  Ideally, commitee members should supplement your chair's expertise. If your study requires complex statistical procedures and your chair is not a statistician, you may want to add to your commitee a faculty member who teaches your department's statistics courses. We call this person a resident statistician.

To pick up your example, a resident statistician is somebody who holds a position:

at a research institute (or similar) that does not focus on statistics,
that entails to consult other researchers at the institute on statistical questions.

I have never seen this as an official title or job description; rather the resident statistician is hired as a regular researcher or professor. Some resident statisticians perform their own research, while for others consulting is a full-time job. It may also happen that somebody is hired for other reasons and then morphs into a resident statistician because they turn out to be good at it, nobody else would do it, etc.

I use to describe myself as the resident data analyst of my current life-science research group, because it is good way to characterise (part of) my role in a few words.

Do not confuse this with artists in residence.

  And what are the main subjects where resident is attached to a title? For example, does a resident statistician exist? Or a resident medieval historian?

In my experience, resident statisticians, mathematicians, and similar are the most common, but I also know cases of resident biologists (in a biomathematics group) and physicists (in a quantum-philosophy group). I can imagine that a group investigating historical climate would have a resident medieval historian to investigate historical weather records.


How to make my CV attractive for a faculty position application? When reviewing hundreds of applications, search committees quickly look for publications and groups the applicant has worked in to make the short-list.

I had a successful but unusual career, working in industry, successful startup, and even extraordinary educational programs.

How can I make my CV attract to persuade the committee to stop by and find the significant of my uncommon works?

Most applicants for an assistant professor position will have a PhD and some postdoc experience, and (hopefully) a solid line of publications in their main research line.

It is unfortunately not universally agreed what constitutes a "successful" career. So, if you are several years past your PhD, as a search committee member I would want to see what you had done in the intervening time, and I would want to know it was relevant to what you want to do now. You need to be able to reassure the committee that you are still an active researcher, you are still respected by other academics, and that you are (or could become) a competent teacher. The problem with CVs is that just listing a job title does not quite convey what is entailed there. How would I know how to evaluate your "extraordinary education program" just from a few lines on the CV? (I'm certainly not going to look at it, I have 100 other applications to read through.) Are you up-to-date enough for university teaching?

The real place to make your case for this is in your research statement or cover letter. That is where you can explain your unusual background, presenting it as a strength that makes you stand out above other candidates. You can describe your industry experience, framing it in terms of how this has aided your development as a teacher-scholar, and you can describe the principles and outcomes of the educational programs you were involved in.

An additional strategy would be to ask one or more of your referees to discuss your background in their letter. It could be beneficial to the search committee to have an outside opinion, from a real academic, that someone who may look unusual is actually really good.

So, is there anything you can do for your CV itself? Well, make sure the list of publications is solid. That's among the best evidence for a search committee that you're an active researcher.


Research proposal for postdoc applications I am a final year PhD student in Physics applying for postdoc. Usually institutes ask for statement of research in postdoc applications. But one of them asks for a research proposal (less than two pages). I already have a four page long research statement. I was thinking of omitting my past research part (I'll not be working on my thesis related work in future). Can someone suggest me how to modify a statement of research to make that a research proposal.

My recommendation is to not modify your research statement, but just write the research proposal from the beginning.  It's less than 2 pages, so it's not that much work, and depending on how your research proposal is written, the result probably won't flow well if you just delete the previous work parts.


How to highlight the projects I was involved during my postdoc in CV? I had worked in several projects during my postdocs in past years. I would like to highlight them in my CV. My question is what could be the proper heading to highlight those projects. e.g. projects involved during postdoc

I would suggest a section entitled "Research Highlights". Then, point-wise, a single sentence describing the main research result of each highlight. Maximum impact would be firsts and records set, e.g. "First to measure the effect of X upon Y"; "Discovery of correlation between W and Z"; "Tightest limits set on parameter R", etc.


Why do graduate programs have comprehensive examinations (comps)? I'm about to begin studying for the comprehensive examinations (comps) my masters program (Computer Information Systems) requires.  I'm curious as to the point of even having them in the first place.  I'm not concerned about whether or not I'll pass my comps.  I know that I will.  It just seems like a lot of wasted time in both preparation and the fact that I'll have to burn a precious day of vacation to take them.

I could understand if, as stated in another post regarding PhD programs, we were required to take them after our first year of the program as part of a larger weeding out process.  However, that isn't the case.  We're simply required to take them before graduation.

In four separate exams, we're tested on the four core courses for our program.  Didn't I pass those courses already?  Haven't I already earned a satisfactory/passing grade for each course?

Would someone please provide my ignornant mind with some insight into the possible reasons why?  It feels like double jeopardy...  Thanks!

EDIT:
The exams are written by the same instructors who taugh the specific class I took.  For example, both Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith teach CourseX.  However, since I took Dr. Jones for that course, he is the person who wrote the comp for the course.  At least, that's my understanding of how they're written and by whom.  I apologize for leaving this nugget out.  I shouldn't write these questions while I'm sleep deprived...

The question is about exams taken at the end of a master's program. I have given such exams. In my mind, they make the candidate prove that they have mastered the material of the courses, which is a form of quality control. But the exams also have a few secondary goals in my mind:

By studying for the exams, students gain more understanding of the material, and come away better educated. The actual taking of the exam is less important, in a sense, than the time spent studying. If a student studies well, they should pass the exam.
The exams keep the faculty honest when teaching, because the faculty know their students will have to pass exams that will be seen by other faculty. Exams within a course are often not seen by other faculty, so the instructor is not as publicly accountable.
The exams help the faculty see what the students know, all in one setting. We can use this to revise courses at the departmental level if we find that many students have the same gaps in their knowledge.


How do i find top journals in my area of interest? How can you find the top journals in a scientific field? I am an HCI graduate student, but I sometimes write to industrial engineering articles if it involves ergonomics. Right now, I'm trying to understand what standing the journal "IIE Transactions" has compared to other journals in the field of industrial engineering.

I was told that the impact factor is not a good indicator to find top journals. What other indicators are useful for identifing top journals within specific fields, like industrial engineering?

There are problems with the Impact factor, but to find top journals in a field (as in leading/high reputation) the IF (relative to others in the field) is usually a good proxy. The problem with IF is mainly that it is a fairly poor predictor of citations to individual papers. Alternative journal rankings can be found at SCimago and Eigenfactor. However, I do not have any knowledge about HCI and industrial engineering in particular.

Beside @MatthewG recommendation to talk to your advisor, I would also suggest that you look at what you are reading and what journals the papers you are citing are published in. This is usually a good way to find suitable journals.


In general, how in-depth do graduate schools analyze the difficulty of the classes you take? For example, I am considering taking a proof-based linear algebra course that caters to math majors, when I could be doing a much lighter class focusing on applications rather than proofs.

Do graduate admissions look at your courses close enough to evaluate the difficulty of each one? To make things worse, not all more difficult classes explicitly say "honors" or emphasize that it is more difficult through the title.

Will graduate admissions care enough to look at it closely?

When it comes to linear algebra, there are two basic types of course, proof-based and more cookbook, that just goes through the procedures, manipulating matrices, finding eigenvalues, and so on.  (As you described in your question.)  I can't say whether a graduate admissions committee would care which you took, because:

It depends on what field you are applying for.  For example, if you are pre-med, no one will care if you can write a proof.
It depends on the approach of the university you are applying to.

However, I can answer a similar, related question:

How do colleges and universities evaluate the two types of linear algebra classes when making transfer credit decisions?

In this case, there is a clear distinction between the two.  If you took your linear algebra at College A, the institution you are transferring into, call it College B, will look at A's course description carefully.  If the course you took at A was primarily procedural, you won't get credit for B's proof-based course.  And if they don't have a procedural version, it will just come in as an unspecified elective.

Please feel free to specify your field and a particular university you wish to apply to.  No guarantees, but that might help you get a more useful answer.

Editorial notes (feel free to ignore): if you're interested in doing research in STEM, unless the proof-based course is very badly taught, you'd get much more out of taking that one -- even if you don't end up with an A.  Proofs are like green leafy vegetables -- they're good for you!  On the other hand, there are no prizes given out for completing a Bachelor's degree in record time.  Linear algebra with proofs is an important foundational course and deserves to be savored.


What is meant by the term "research interest", when asked to provide a brief description of research interests on an application? My potential supervisor has mailed me the following:

  If you would like to be considered for admission, please email the
  following (please send only pdf documents)

  copies of all previous transcripts, including undergraduate
  English language test scores
  a list of publications and the abstract of M.Sc. thesis (for Ph.D. applicants)
  a concise description (not exceeding one page) of your research interests as a graduate student (what is expected is not a statement
  of purpose).

I am confused about the term research interest here.

What should be in this document?

Trivially, your research interests refer to what you are interested in doing research on should you be admitted to grad school. For instance, in computer science, your interests might be in the human aspects of software engineering, in applying machine learning to the optimization of business processes, or in finding a polynomial-time algorithm for the travelling salesman problem (although I don't recommend the latter).

Note that your instructions specifically say that this is not the same as your statement of purpose. That is, "I want to do research to better mankind" is not a research interest, and neither is "I will do whatever my advisor wants me to do" or "I will do research that is publishable at top venues". The question here really is that you tell the admission committee what research content you want  to work on, why you think it is relevant and interesting, and what in your previous studies enables you to do that kind of research.

If you already have a potential advisor in mind, you want to look at what kind of research her or his current students are working on, and draft your research statement along similar lines (of course taking your own interests into account, but if your interests and the interests of your prospective advisor don't match, you should keep on looking anyway). It generally pays to be as specific as you can - even if you end up not doing exactly what you wrote in your research statement (most people don't), providing concrete details will indicate that you know and understand the work that your future advisor is doing, and that you have thought extensively about how you will fit into it.


Single application for several postdoctoral positions I just finished crafting an application's cover letter for a particular lab (if it matters, area of research can be broadly classified as computational social sciences). The situation is that they have several postdoctoral positions and I feel that I am a pretty good fit for either one of them (how modest ;-).

However, I think that it makes absolutely no sense to send three separate cover letters for each of the positions, as 1) they are affiliated with the same lab (and, even, one of co-PIs is the same for all of them); 2) the positions share a lot of subject domain areas (I, actually, expressed this point directly in my cover letter - I hope it will not be considered offensive or otherwise inappropriate).

Therefore, my two related questions are:

Would it be appropriate to submit a single application with a single cover letter to those positions, based on my points above, even though they are advertised separately?
Is it acceptable that my cover letter (that single one) is almost two pages long (including all appropriate vertical spacing and 12pt font size - trying to be gentle with the readers' vision)?

I don't think you can assume that one application is okay.  I can certainly imagine situations where the lab would want a separate application for each position.  Maybe they are going to be reviewed by different people or committees.  Maybe they have complicated HR procedures that you don't know about.  Maybe when reviewing applications for position X, they want to see an application that specifically addresses your qualifications for that particular position, and doesn't mention other things that are only relevant to position Y.

So the safest course of action would simply be to ask.

  Dear Professor MMM,

  My name is NNN, and I am a graduate student at UUU, working with professor SSS.  I see that your lab has some postdoc positions open; I believe that I could be a good fit for any of the positions XXX, YYY, ZZZ.  (Briefly explain why.)  Would you prefer that I send a separate application for each position, or a single application addressing my qualifications for all three?

This could also get you other useful information, such as "I think you would be a better candidate for XXX; for the YYY postdoc we are specifically looking for someone with expertise in BBB."


Efficient way to determine potentially good AI research groups in mainland Europe So I want to go about and compare different research groups for their standing, their potential for an exciting and fruitful environment etc. My field is Software Engineering with a heavy tendency towards AI in Reinforcement Learning. I'd prefer to stay in mainland Europe, more specifically the EU until the dust has settled on Brexit.

I googled a few times and found some answers. But as one person correctly noted, that is highly biased. I read "the best" several times and there obviously cannot be 5 number 1. While I don't need "1" everyone is obviously aiming to optimize their future and so am I.

In the past I have been looking at Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, Zurich, Amsterdam, Vienna, Munich, Karlsruhe, ...

Finally, I decided to go about it a little different and download a few papers to base my decision on the publication / research level of various institutions. So I got myself scrapy and downloaded 2600 papers from ECAI, IJCAI and AAAI. I got them all stemmed and indexed with recoll and thought about doing some kind of structured analysis on them to get an overview of citations, referencing, publication count, names, institutions etc.

Now before I spend a day on this: Has anyone else done this before? Is there some tool that helps doing such analysis already? And is it an appropriate way to get the quantitative side of the research quality of various groups?

This answer is coming very late, but just in case someone finds it useful:

http://csrankings.org/

This site ranks universities based on their research output in select top conferences in various fields, you could use this to narrow down your list.


The triangle problem I am planning to publish a research paper based on my internship and don't know in what order I must include the author names or whom to include in the paper. Professor A was the primary reason for me to join the internship, while Professor B is just my guide who initially didn't approve of me doing the internship but later started to motivate me. Intern C had helped me a lot to complete the project whose help has been crucial to me. All 3 actually told me to publish the paper and Professor B guided me with the websites and reviewing my papers. But Professor A also initially guided me with the paper. How am I to rank these people for the authors in the paper?

Prof A- Initial guidance with some ideas to improve my presentation and strong support without which I wouldn't even have taken up the internship

Prof B- Support only at the later stage to publish paper and reviewed the papers

Intern C-Can't imagine myself to have completed the project (based on which the research paper is constructed) without her.

Thanks in advance!

You wrote the paper, did the main research, hence your name should go first.

The interns contribution is crucial to this paper, she/he helped a lot, but was not so much involved in the writing process? Name her/him second.

Professor B help a lot with constructing the paper, writing, rewriting, reviewing, etc. Put her/him second to last. Indicate her/him as correspondence author, too.

Since professor A is the main initiator, I assume that the research you did is within his field. He might therefore be also the main correspondence author. He will probably also handle submission and other formalities with the journal. Put him last.

Final Order:
You, Intern C, Professor B,* and Professor A.*

In any way, the person who will handle the submission process, will probably also review this. Don't think too much about the order. In many cases it does not really matter, and most professors do not care too much about this, as they are usually named as correspondence authors anyway.


Referencing: Which one is more ideal? (cite as from cited or direct cite)? Well, while carrying out a review of literature for drafting a proposal I found like these in some of previous works (reports).

  Some benefits of the “certain thing” on xyz are  abc( person1, date) , cde( person2, date), fgh( person3, date) , ijk( person4, date)

and

  Some of the more researches in the field include ( person1, date;   person2, date;  person3, date;   person4, date).

Now If I have to include and cite those in my report, which one is better idea? Also, please notice the nature of contents being cited(benefits and previous works).

Option 1: Cite as “as cited in report X” which I read and have only one reference of that report
(pros: less references)

Option 2: Go to each report, study and include each one(cited) as separate citation in my report
(pros: may be, will look more detail investigations. But is it required in cases like this one?)

Which one should be more ideal?
So, what should I do? Any suggestions?

Like user49483 said in the comment, citing a review is considered very bad form. Basically, it is your job to read a lot (reading widely) and cite what is appropriate.

As one who marks papers, I definitely reduce students' scores for citing indirectly like this (and I see it all the time).

When you cite indirectly, you are saying "I know this is important because I am citing it but I did not read this important piece." JeffE said in a comment (which I cannot find) that not citing the original is actually you saying that you could NOT FIND it because if you CAN find it you MUST read and cite it (or something to that effect).

One of the many reasons to read and cite the original is because the third party (reviewer) might be reporting on the original work incorrectly. I saw this one time when someone said a famous author in my field had said something which did not sound like that author at all. So, I re-read the writing which was referenced and it was simply being mis-reported. If a reviewer mis-reports and you cite the review then you are showing that you do not have the proper understanding (and your grade should reflect that lack of understanding).

Is it more work to cite properly? Of course it is. Doing anything properly takes more time but we do it because it is the proper way and taking shortcuts simply leads to poor results in any field or study or work.


Take an exam unprepared vs Skipping it Which one is better? Taking an Exam with no preparation done beforehand or Skipping it altogether?

I have done the former (i.e take tests unprepared) a lot many times than the latter - so much that I have gotten sort of used to to it. I have observed that if I have insufficient time for preparing for an exam, I don't study as hard for it as I would have before adopting this practice.

My mentors are of the view that one shouldn't ever skip a test. That I'll learn more than just something at the cost of sitting through those hours of the exam.

Is this worth my current subconscious habit?Is it good to continue this if I find that the frequency of me taking half-prepared exams is increasing ?

PPS: I am talking about a Multiple Choice based exam with Negative marking present in it.These are sort of Practice tests for the main exam.

PS: This is NOT a debate or discussion. I Genuinely want to know which is better for improvement in academics.

Students usually decide this based on the consequences of each option. At some universities, you can retake failed exams but you cannot retake passed exams to improve your grade. In this case, it might be worth skipping the exam instead of taking it and "risking" obtaining a low passing grade that you cannot get rid of.

It might also be that you the rules give you only a couple of chances to pass this exam, so you do not want to miss this chance. Or that you do not care about the grade as long as you pass, so you might as well have a try. Or that past exams are not made available to students, so it might be worth for you to go and learn how exams in this subject look like.

If none of the above applies (i.e., if you know you will fail anyway and are only asking whether the time spent at the exam will be worth it in terms of how much you learn), I would say that those hours would be much better spent learning the subject or doing practice exercises on your own. Surely you will learn more by doing exercises in a comfortable environment (at home or at the library) than by doing the same exercises in exam conditions.


How to decide when it's worth investing the time to learn something new Background

I am 3 months into a 3 year theoretical physics PhD in the UK. Since I am fairly early on in my research career, there are many new ideas and techniques for me to learn, as well as the need for me to work directly on my research questions.

Either through reading papers or attending seminars, I often come across new ideas which seem interesting and conceivably applicable to my research. However, I find it difficult to decide whether to further study those ideas to more deeply understand them.

On the one hand, my impression is that it is important to deeply understand ideas to be able to apply them to one's own research. On the other, attaining good understanding usually requires a significant investment of time, and this is time taken away from working more directly on the details of my current research. In some sense, this could be seen as balancing short- vs long-term investments of time and mental energy.

My question is about how one should decide whether to invest the time learning new ideas now, or wait until they come up more directly in later research. Of course, the difficulty with research is that one is often not sure if or when a new idea will come in handy.

Question

What thought process do you go through to decide whether to spend time now in learning a new idea?

First of all, good luck on your PhD!

The way I was explained it, the point of a PhD is to become super good at something. To do so, a shallow understanding of lots of things is oftentimes less useful than a deep understanding of one thing. This is just practicality: you need to graduate in X years with a PhD certificate. I would say 80/20 ratio in favor of deeper understanding of a topic vs reading something new, at least.

I would attend seminars anyway to keep abreast of what’s going on, and to learn how to speak about one’s work.


What am I being paid for? (postdoc) I am currently doing a postdoc in mathematics in Europe (staying vague for anonymity...). For various reasons I am seriously considering leaving academia at the end of my current postdoc, which ends in a few months. I have some teaching/supervision left to do, but very little. My postdoc is a more research-focused postdoc, but not within any specific project, I am free to work on whatever projects interest me.

For the last few months I have been feeling extremely unmotivated to do anything related to my research. No one seems to care whether I'm doing something or not and it will most likely not have any impact whatsoever on my future career outside of academia anyway. The coronavirus situation with the requirements to work from home obviously didn't improve the situation, as I lost the peer pressure of having office mates so I don't even feel the need to pretend that I'm working anymore. Yet I am of course still being paid, but it makes me feel quite bad to be paid for doing essentially nothing.

I guess I am looking for advice for how to feel better, either by regaining some motivation, or simply by hearing that it is ok to not do research (or any other kind of related work) if I don't feel like it. I'm not sure if it's a form of the impostor syndrome, but I definitely feel like a fraud for not working and still getting a salary...

Research is a very non-linear process, where long stretches of work may produce not much of value (even though you have learned a lot!).
If you're planning on leaving academia this presents a problem, because you might not actually produce anything before you leave, and it's understandably difficult to motivate yourself to work on something you plan on dropping midway through.
Therefore, I would advise you to focus on projects that are likely to pay off before you leave. Of course without specifics it's hard to come up with examples, but I'll take a crack anyway.

Find a colleague who can benefit from your expertise and help them out.
Reach out and see if you can give some talks about the research you've already completed.
Volunteer and take over some teaching from a colleague.
Expand your (digital) office hours.

Lastly, you've probably spent a good amount of free time doing research anyway, so I wouldn't feel too bad about taking the occasional workday off to do something other than work. (Perhaps figure out what you're going to be doing next.)


College / University level IT (instructor/professor) education requirements I live in Canada, and I have a dilemma regarding continuing my education. Currently I have a two year college diploma in "Information Systems", I am planing to extend that into a degree with in next two years. I enjoy development and programming side of IT. Currently I am happily employed at a marketing firm doing back/front end development.

I am not sure exactly how I want to attack my future, I would be the happiest owning or partnering with a firm like the one that I am working for now. However that may not be possible.

Since IT changes constantly and lot of young people coming into the industry are exceptionally good. There might be a time where I won't be able to cut it any more.

This makes me thing that I might need to possibly focus on acquiring education so that I could teach (programming) at a college or university level.

My question here would be does anyone know best way to achieve this? Do I need an eq. (Masters Degree in IT) or some sort of education degree?

Open to suggestions recommendations, some solid facts.

Thanks

The undeniable fact about the impeccable territory of programming is that some famous and very successful programmers on the planet have no official degree in either IT or CS, at all... So, one might claim that the interest would be the necessary condition for being a good programmer. Actually, official education would open your mind to integrate various but interconnected stuffs within the IT and CS realm to be a better programmer.

The case will be, considerably, different when one is eager to teach programming. Transferring the ideas to the novice people is tough enough, such that the trainer must be rather proficient and experienced in the target subject. Actually, an officially-trained programming teacher would access to more professional opportunities, because (s)he had been, probably, confronted with different aspects of the programming, such as fundamentals of the software engineering, web-based development, embedded programming, object-oriented programming, aspect-oriented programming, agent-oriented programming and the other paradigms, in a coherent manner. Whereas, above stuffs might be acquired by a self-learning programmer after spending a lot of money and time. Furthermore, people often tend to consign the training positions to officially-trained experts, because their degree could act as a convincing proof for their capabilities.

All in all, I think you better pursue an official degree (a B.A.Sc. or M.A.Sc.) to pave your professional way at the future.


Formal letters: is it okay to list your credentials in a long sentence? In the context of writing formal letters, usually it is required to mention person's credentials, e.g., their degree along with the dat on which the degree was conferred.

I was wondering if it would be OK if I wrote something with the format:

  <'degree title'> conferred upon <'name'> by <'the dept., college, university'> on<'data of the award'>.

Is it too long for a formal letter? You might also need to add opening words, something like:

  This is to further acknowledge that The College of Computer and Information Sciences at XYZ University conferred a Master of Science in Computer science upon Ms.Sara XYZ on 1st of July 2011.

Note: if the addressing language looks odd in the example, it is because the letter will be signed by the registration office.

A sentence like you present looks just fine to me: there's nothing wrong with being a bit formal in an official formal statement, and although the sentence isn't short, it's not too long and it's very straightforward to understand.


Value of having done applied math research when applying to PhD programs in pure math I will be a second year math under-grad in September, and currently doing an internship at applied math research institute. Most probably, I will come up with a research paper at the end of the internship.

However, my interest after my bachelors is to do PhD in pure math from a top math school.My question is this:

  Would the admission committee consider my current research since it is in applied math?

In addition, if anyone can suggest me some ideas on how can I bridge the gap between my paper in applied math and my interest in analysis, I would be extremely grateful.

P.S.: Here is a related but different question also of mine.

Would the admission committee consider my current research since it is in applied math?

Certainly.  In my experience, nobody cares at all whether an applicant's research experience is directly related to their proposed specialty in graduate school.  There are several points to keep in mind:

There are only a limited number of research opportunities available for undergraduates, so finding one on your very favorite topic may not be possible.  Nobody would hold this against you.
Some topics just aren't accessible to undergraduates in the first place (e.g., motivic cohomology).
Most applicants don't really know what they will write their dissertations on, even if they think they do.  Many will change their minds a year or two into grad school.
Undergraduate research in mathematics is generally not as deep as grad student research, and the specific things you learn are not crucial.  Instead, the point is to see whether you have an aptitude for research and whether you enjoy it.  For those purposes, the precise topic doesn't really matter.  (Unless, of course, there's only one thing in the world that you would like to study, but I would consider that sort of narrowness to be a problem itself.)


can I reuse Coursera material for my lecture notes? I have some doubts about reusing some material from Coursera for a set of lecture notes that I put online as part of the courses that I am lecturing. In some ocassions I use some Coursera material, mostly exercises that are based on source codes provided by the authors, and referenced them in my lecture notes. The question that I have is that if need to ask for permission, to the lecturer that is given the course on Coursera, to reuse his/her material or only with referencing would be enough?

Coursera's terms of service state that students can only access course
  materials for their own purposes; they are not meant to be distributed
  more widely.

Also they have

  Even if you are the creator of published content, you do not
  necessarily own copyright.

This means that you have to directly contact Coursera and ask the question from them.


Is it ethical for departments to have publication requirements for students This question and this question suggest that it is not uncommon/unheard of for departments to require publication by students (generally masters and doctoral) either to get credit for a course or graduate.

This seems to me like a way of off loading the assessment of students to peer reviewer, and therefore it seems ethically questionable. Is there a pedagogical reason to require externally peer-reviewed publication?

For an individual course (assuming a time-limited scenario, e.g. a semester, quarter, or even year), it's certainly ridiculous to have a publication requirement.  The timing is far too variable, and even the best researchers can have papers rejected or discover before submission that they've been scooped.  If it were possible to reliably publish a worthwhile paper within the timespan and amount of effort required for a typical course, then there would be a lot more papers published.

A requirement of submission is not as absurd, but still unreasonable.  I see no advantages over a mock submission sent to the professor teaching the course, but there are severe disadvantages: it can put pressure on students to make inappropriate submissions, and it can waste the time of editors and reviewers on submissions that may be withdrawn once the course requirements are complete.  My cynical interpretation is that submission requirements deliberately use the threat of professional embarrassment to encourage students to work harder, and that seems unethical.

The one scenario where publication requirements can make sense is for a degree program.  For example, some PhD programs require that a dissertation must be based on peer-reviewed publications.  Of course that's reasonable only in fields with a sufficiently rapid publication cycle, and even there I'm not fond of this idea personally (but I wouldn't call it unethical).


Research fellowship after undergrad helps with PhD admissions? Does taking a year off, to work as a junior research fellow or as a research intern, immediately after one's undergrad help with admission to a better MS (research track, not professional) /PhD program?
If it helps, the field in question is computer science, specifically at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning.

I don't see how it could hurt. The degree of added value most likely depends on what your background is prior to the year as a researcher. If you already have a very strong research background as an undergraduate, an extra year of experience will not help as much as if you have very limited research experience.

I suppose it also depends what you get done during that year. It certainly helped a former student of mine, who didn't get into his desired programs straight out of undergraduate. He took a year to work as an RA in my lab, wrote a first-author PNAS paper, and then was admitted into the top program in his field.