How common is it to inadvertently "reinvent the wheel" in academia? When engaging in research, I know its a good idea to read lots of papers and talk to others about what has been done before and what is currently being researched to avoid "reinventing the wheel".  That is, to avoid researching/publishing a result that has already been discovered.

In fields where physical experiments are common, replication studies are necessary.  But in theoretical/computational research, originality is key and duplication seems to be generally frowned upon.  How common is it to inadvertently publish a finding that was already discovered?  What do you when you happen to find yourself in this situation?  Should you just scrap your work if your methods are too similar to someone else's?

How common is it to inadvertently publish a finding that was already discovered?

Far more common than anyone realizes or wants to admit.

Stigler's Law of Eponymy states that No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.  (Stigler's law was proposed in this precise form in 1980 by Stephen Stigler, who self-referentially attributed it to Richard Merton, but of course similar statements were made earlier by many others, including Stigler's own father.)  I wouldn't go as far as claiming that every scientific discovery is misattributed, but there are hundreds of examples.  Off the top of my head: Fibonacci numbers, Pascal's triangle, Gaussian elimination, Euler's formula (both of them!), Voronoi diagrams, Markov's inequality, Chebyshev’s inequality, Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest paths, Prim's algorithm for minimum spanning trees, the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the Gale-Shapley stable matching algorithm (for which Shapley recently won the Nobel Prize in economics), ...

  What do you when you happen to find yourself in this situation?

Be brutally honest, both with yourself and with the scientific community.

If your work has already been published, post a reference to the prior art in your web page listing your publications.  (You do have a web page listing your publications, don't you?)  If possible, publish an addendum to your paper.  Email anyone who has cited your paper already, giving them the earlier reference.  When asked to review papers that cite your paper, include the earlier reference in your report.  Become a walking advertisement for the earlier work.

If your work hasn't already been published, try to figure out which parts of your work have actually been done before.  Some of your results will appear verbatim in the earlier work, so you can't take credit for them.  Some of your results will be easy corollaries of the earlier work, so you still can't take credit for them.  But perhaps some of your results will take the old work in a new nontrivial direction.  Build on that.

Also, if your results were previously known in a different field, there may be some value in bringing those results to the attention of your research community.

  Should you just scrap your work if your methods are too similar to someone else's?

Of course not!  Now you have evidence that your methods actually work!  Push them further!


Is it better to submit a paper to a journal "normal" issue, or wait 4 months and send it to a more focused "special section" of the same journal? I am a recently PhD graduate student in computer science.

In the last months, I wrote a paper about an aspect of my thesis, with the collaboration of my former supervisor.
We found a call for papers for a "special section" of an important journal, that is a section focused on the data set we are exploiting.
The submission deadline was set to the end of November 2014, but surprisingly we just discovered that it has been post-poned to the end of March 2015. So a 4 months delay.

Our paper is ready and I don't know what to do with the submission.

I would prefer to submit it now to the "normal" track of the journal, to move on to new projects and close this. But my former supervisor thinks that it's better to wait and submit it to the March 2015 "special section", because he says we will have more likelihood to get it accepted, even if this will make our paper more outdated.

What should I do?

Submit it to the "normal" track now with less chances to get it published, or wait 4 months and submit it (more outdated) to the easier "special section"?

I would strongly recommend choosing the special issue unless you are studying something time sensitive due to competition (e.g., you have a known competitor who might publish tomorrow) or emergence (e.g. an ongoing natural disaster).

First, depending on how the journal works, you might not actually have any delay in publication.  Check and see whether the journal has a "just accepted" or "online first" section.  If so, then your article will not have to wait for a special issue package to become available and citable.  Instead, special issue articles will become available asynchronously as they are processed, and then packaged later.

Second, special issues, while they are reviewed no less tightly, have a specified audience that improves your chance of acceptance.  You can much more readily pass the "audience interest" bar that many high-profile journals apply, since somebody else has already made the case that work in this area is of broad interest. Also, because reviewers are picked with expertise in the subject, you are less likely to get a bad match with a reviewer who knows little of your subject.

Third, you are likely to have a higher long-term impact from the publication, as it is grouped in a package with others like it, where it will be easier for people to discover or seek it out.

Finally, in most fields, four months is just not a long time.  Finish your paper now, send it to the journal special issue before the deadline, and move on with your work.


How do I express a degree on my CV that I have completed but have not been awarded? I have completed all the requirements for an M.S. degree and have filed the appropriate paperwork. All I have left to do is walk at the end of this semester. I want to put this on my CV, but it seems appropriate to differentiate it from my Ph.D., which is (only) "In progress", and another M.S. which I completed a few years ago.

How should I express this on my CV? Should I say "Anticipated" or "Expected", with the date?

My question is different than Should one list incomplete degrees on a CV? because that question asks about a degree that was entirely incomplete, unawarded, and is not likely to ever be awarded. In my situation, the degree needs only to be formally awarded.

If for example it's a PhD which has been ratified but not officially conferred, you can write:

PhD (Discipline) Awaiting Conferral.


Words to avoid when talking to a blind student I am currently supervising a visually impaired student. I noticed that quite often I use phrases such as "from X, we can see that Y" or ask the student to "read paper X" or "you need to look at your maximization problem", etc.. Once the sentence hangs in the room I immediately feel awkward. The student is of course capable to perform what I mean. The student can understand that "from X follows Y", can "listen to paper X", can "revise the maximization problem", etc.. Nonetheless, I wonder what the guidelines in such situations are. Should I refrain from using these words? How would a student who is visually impaired want to be treated?

They want to be treated as normal - so phrases like “it can be seen that the result changes X “ are fine but “ take this and divide by this” are not if you are pointing at numbers for example.

One of my friends who is in a wheelchair will say "I walked down to..." it's just part of "normal" conversation...


Can you do an AND on Google Scholar alerts? In Google Scholar, you can create an alert, such as "neural networks", which will inform you any time there is an article related to "neural networks". However, suppose I am interested in neural networks applied to robot navigation. Is there a way to create an alert that will only inform you when both "neural networks" and "robot navigation" appear in the paper? Essentially, I want to do a logical AND on the search terms.

Yes, all of the typical operators apply.

AND is implicit so your alert query could be "neural networks" "robot navigation"


How closely to the deadline should I expect professor to submit reference letter on my behalf? I asked a professor to write a reference letter for me and he agreed to it; however, the deadline is coming up and he has yet to submit the letter.

As I am not experienced with the process, I wanted to ask if, based on your experience, it is typical for professors to delay submitting references to the last minute.

I find that the approach of most people I know people to letters of recommendation falls into two general categories:

Do them very quickly, so that you don't have to think about them any more.
Forget about them until nearly the deadline, and then submit them at the last moment or slightly after (once reminded).

Lots of people, including lots of professors, fall into category #2.  The question is, how do you make sure the letter is on time without being a pest?  To this end, I recommend giving three reminders:

A week before the deadline
1-2 work days before the deadline
On the day of the deadline

This balances respect of the person's responsibility (not too many) with minimizing the chance that a last-minute reminder will be too late.  It's the same sort of frequency that I use for reminding people about seminars and other things where you want to balance between awareness and annoyance.  One might tweak the formula a little, but the general principle of increasing frequency near a deadline is the key.


can one write a research paper which is based on his previous paper I presented a paper in one of the IEEE conferences last month. The paper is still not available in IEEE Xplore. The paper addresses the problem of detection and recovery of X in images. However, the recovery of X needs to be improved both computationally and quality-wise. Currently, I have figured out three different ways of improving the recovery of X. Each of these three recovery methods is better than the one presented in first paper.

Is it OK to write three papers demonstrating results with each of the new recovery results, given that the detection part will mostly be the same. Am I doing some sort of self-plagiarism here? Please help me understand this.

Further, if I am borrowing detection method from my previous paper, is it required to explain it in detail again or I can just write about it briefly and put a reference?

Writing follow-up papers building on previous work is not at all self-plagiarism. So long as there is a material difference in the main emphasis of the paper, you should be fine. In your case, it sounds like the original article was the introduction of method X, and the follow-up article or articles will be incremental improvements of method X and descriptions of a practical implementation.


Do we cite results in Arxiv which are obviously wrong? I am now writing up a math paper, and there is an Arxiv paper posted back in 2009 which proved a weaker version of my result. But I don’t think their paper will be published in any journal – their proof is clearly wrong. Since that is eight years ago, I suppose the author spotted the error already.

My question: Should I cite their result in my paper? Note that we are both using the same technique (introduced elsewhere), just that they overlooked a key technical issue.

Disclaimer: I have very limited experience, so what follows may not accurately reflect professional conventions. That said, from my limited experience I think it does.

EDIT: Disclaimer the second: the answer below assumes that you are correct, and also says nothing about what you should do besides what to write in the paper. Noah Snyder's comment below is absolutely correct.

I think this is something that you need to do, to provide an accurate history. This doesn't have to be done "loudly" - I think a footnote would be fine (e.g. "A weaker version of this result was claimed in [people], but the proof given there is incorrect - they [thing that they do]") - but I think it's important that an accurate history of the result be presented.

In my opinion, this is true whether or not you knew of their work before starting/finishing your own; we all benefit from a clear discussion of the literature (and in particular this may do a service to others who read the 2009 article and don't notice the error at first).

This is assuming that the article in question is "serious" - as we all know, there are of course "articles" which are too wrong for the above to apply. I think my criterion would be: "Is this article something which a 'reasonable' mathematician, competent but not necessarily expert in the specific subfield, might take as generally correct?" Obviously this is subjective, but I think in most cases it's actually pretty clear which side of the divide a given article lies.


Contacting potential advisors before applying to graduate program - PURE MATH I have seen a few similar questions, but the answers are not usually specific enough to math, and it seems this is one of those things which varies heavily based on field. In many math programs, the student does not have an advisor until 2 or more years after being admitted to the program, so I'm really not sure how relevant contacting individual professors could be. Should I or should I not attempt to contact faculty with whom I would be interested in doing phd work? Do students who reach out to potential advisors generally have an advantage over those who don't in the admissions process, and are they more likely to actually end up working with the desired advisor?
Are there any cases known when contacting professors in this way has actually been harmful to a student's career? Suppose I have read some of Professor X's papers, and I like his style and the areas he works in, but I don't have specific questions about the papers -- then is there even a point in writing to him? Should I try to come up with questions for the sole purpose of writing?
If anyone knows of a post where these questions are addressed specifically for pure math, please let me know.
By the way, I am an undergrad in the US and applying to US math programs.

The expected behavior here is that you talk to faculty after you’ve been accepted to the program, not before.  That way you have more information to make your decision about where to go, but faculty aren’t spending a lot of time with students who aren’t going to be accepted.
Contacting a faculty member is unlikely to give you an advantage in admissions if you don’t already know them, what can give an advantage is if you have a mentor who knows faculty at the school you’re applying to and puts in a good word.  It’s not likely to hurt you either, as long as you’re polite about it, but you’re likely to get no reply or a short reply saying that they’re not on the admissions committee.  They’re more likely to be annoyed than to help, but in 9 cases out of 10 it just won’t amount to anything.


Dealing with a rejection from a journal I am a post-doc in economics. I know that rejections are quite usual but I feel very sad (I think more than necessary) because of rejections.
For a paper on which I worked for four years, I got two rejections since last year.
I already have two accepted papers but I am overwhelmed with a rejection that I received this morning and I am wondering whether academia is really a good choice to me. I know this is an unnecessary feeling. What to do in order to deal with these situations?

I read recently in economics a single publication in a distinct top-tier journal earns you professorship. Hard to understand for me as a physicist, but if it is really like this and I know the ratio PhD students/professors in economics is much much smaller than in experimental sciences (at least in Germany), then you have to live with the fact that the acception/rejection is more difficult/sophisticated and more lottery-like than in other scientific branches. On the other hand, your chances to get tenure are likely also much higher than in those. I hope this solaces you a bit :-)

And if you got 2 papers published already, you know there is nothing wrong with the way you write your papers in general.


What is the benefit of writing lecture notes for an introductory course vs using a textbook? Background: I am a junior university staff member, and I will teach an introductory course in linear algebra for the first time in a few months.

I see that many teachers devote time to writing lecture notes. To me, this looks odd. Whatever I can write will not be half as good as a well-written textbook. so my first choice would be looking for a good book, recommend it to the students, and stick with it as much as possible for my lectures. "Everyone writes their own notes" looks like a model in which there is a lot of needless duplication of work.

Why do people write detailed lecture notes for basic courses? What is the advantage with respect to following closely a textbook?

Are the two approaches really alternative, or am I misunderstanding the role of lecture notes? Should I do both?

As someone who's tried to do both, there are some very valid reasons to prepare "formal" lecture notes.

The primary reason why you'd want to create your own notes is that for many courses, a single good text is not available, and as a result, the instructor has to cobble together material from a number of different sources to produce a coherent set of lecture notes—or recommend that students work with multiple source texts. (Given the out-of-control nature of textbook prices, the latter alternative is unlikely to work out well.)

If you have a single-text class, it may not be necessary to provide students an additional set of notes, provided your lectures stick to the main text material. However, if you bring in alternative or additional topics into your lectures, you may want to include notes for those topics, and refer students to the textbook for places where you follow the "standard" outline.


"Everything in an encyclopedia is Common Knowledge" - actually true? One "rule of thumb" that is often given out by writing centers and tutors (for example, see the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning) is that anything in a general-reference print encyclopedia (e.g. World Book, Encyclopaedia Britannica, etc.) is "Common Knowledge" and never (or, at least, hardly ever) needs a citation in academic writing as facts do not get added to encyclopedias until they become generally recognized in the scientific community as true. The major exception to this is that one must cite if one quotes the exact text of an encyclopedia.

The Yale link above explains that Common Knowledge "...is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary."

To what extent is this actually true?

Is this mostly true with a few exceptions?
Is it partially true and partially false?
Is it almost entirely false?

To be clear, I am asking about general principles and best practices in citation, not any specific context. Contact your editor or instructor.

The statement can be true even if there are minor exceptions. For example, "This is true, except that orbital periods of celestial bodies must always be cited because SCIENCE!!!11!111!one, even if they were first measured hundreds of years ago and verified hundreds of times to within 0.1% of their accepted value today" or "This is really true 99.9% of the time, but there was that old case where an editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1990 had a momentary lapse of professional judgment and allowed a controversial statement on the mating habits of Bactrian camels to be printed despite the fact that it had been first published in 1988 and lacked consensus in the scientific community at that time" (I'm not saying that this actually happened, it's just a hypothetical example).

This question is about general knowledge that constitutes Common Knowledge across fields. There is a concept of field-specific Common Knowledge, e.g. where Boyle's Law is considered common knowledge in Chemistry and Physics and needs no citation but might require a citation if used, for example, in a Gender Studies paper. This question is not about such domain-specific Common Knowledge.

In response to comments, I am using the term "Common Knowledge" in its sense as a term of art in Academia for knowledge that need not be cited because it is sufficiently old, sufficiently well-reproduced, and/or sufficiently non-controversial that a citation would serve little, if any, practical purpose, not the sense of knowledge that most people on the street have memorized. For example, the fact that the typical habitat for the Venus' Flytrap consists of subtropical marshes of the US East Coast is Common Knowledge - the average person you meet on the subway or at the bar might or might not know this, but any decent encyclopedia will explain it to you, and you would be hard-pressed to find a botanist (or any scientist, for that matter) who would seriously challenge it.

Taking the statement “anything in an encyclopedia is common knowledge” at face value reveals it is obviously false. In the comments it was pointed out that half of Americans don’t know what century their civil war was in, but there’s also the fact that two thirds of people worldwide have either not heard of the holocaust or engage in holocaust denial. I recently was in a regional trivia competition with thousands of contestants where I had to explain to the organizers that one of their questions were wrong because they had confused density and mass. Virtually all of the questions on Jeopardy! are answerable if you knew everything in an encyclopedia, but even the specially trained contestants don’t know all the answers. Based on these examples alone, I think the idea that the majority of people know all the facts in most encyclopedias is nonsense.

I would strongly advocate for the idea that encyclopedias are irrelevant to the question of if something should be cited. Besides the fact that the vast majority of people don’t know most of the facts in an encyclopedia, there are other reasons to cite things, including:

Giving credit to the discoverer
Providing a link between your work and previous work on the subject
Making it easier for readers to find similar relevant articles.
Providing accountability for your positions. Sometimes encyclopediae are wrong, and the process of looking for a source would hopefully reveal your mistake.

Even if we pretended that it was common knowledge that every triangle-free graph contains an independent set of size Ω(sqrt(n log n)), all the above reasons to cite that fact would apply.


Two co-first author publications vs. one second author + one first author publication Hypothetically, which of these authorship scenarios would look better to the eyes of a potential employer in the academic world of biology/bioengineering from the perspective of author A:

Work 1: author B*, author A*, author C - moderate potential for impact

Work 2: author A*, author B*, author C - moderate to high potential for impact

*these authors contributed equally

OR

Work 1: author B, author A, author C - moderate potential for impact

Work 2: author A, author B, author C - moderate to high potential for impact

My colleague and I have a theorist/experimentalist relationship with a work that has since fractured into two separate works. The second work is more theory focused while the first is more experiment focused. We believe the second work has a more broad ranged application and has potential to be heavily cited.

Pragmatically, author A is close to finishing his PhD and, besides these two works, he has one first author paper.

First, I want to make it clear that I am not in your field, and do not know what relevant people's attitudes to co-first authorship are. In addition, answers and comments to What does first authorship really mean? suggest that they may actually be different between biology and biomedical engineering, so that might be something to pay attention to as well.

The main point I'd like to make is that the nature of the papers can (and should!) matter - I would at least that to happen in my own field. Say if the more experiment-focused paper has minimal theory/modeling, and the theory-focused paper only uses previously published experimental data... Well, if the contributions look incommensurate (and remember that the journal might require author contributions to be clearly stated), people are going to see right through that co-first authorship - and that can reflect poorly on both authors. Even if the journal does not require a description of individual contributions, A would likely be asked about their individual contribution in a postdoc interview situation, for example.

Hence I would always suggest picking the natural/ethical author order over a strategic one. It's also generally better to get a paper out this week than having it delayed a month over an authorship order debate or prolonged strategic analysis... Co-first authorship should be considered if there are clear arguments for it on the level of an individual paper.

Now, overall I actually expect the two scenarios to have fairly similar outcomes (again with the caveat that I'm not from your field) - especially since I suspect C to be the advisor, who'd presumably write a fair recommendation letter either way. If pushed, I would say that the second scenario could hold a slight strategic advantage for author A, since A could appear to have a higher degree of intellectual leadership in the higher-impact paper. If it is more theory-focused anyway that may well be the case.


How should you respond to your teacher who cannot help you with a recommendation? I had a meeting with my former teacher in my former school.
While we were enjoying our tea and pan cake, I saw Prof. Nickname, and we invited him to join us. An hour later, after the tea, Prof. Nickname left first and was walking back to his office. I ran after him and asked if he had time to write a recommendation letter for me, and he told me that he was busy with his teaching and could not write the letter for me. I could see on his face that he felt so sorry about it, and I wanted to comfort him but I did not know what I should say. Given that situation, how would you comfort your teacher who could not help you with a recommendation?

"Thank you, I understand." ... and then let the subject drop.

Also, consider that the expression you say may not have been sadness that the professor did not have time, but discomfort with having to say no to a request in person.  In addition to possibly being true, "I don't have time" is also often used as a standard face-saving code for "No."


Online research projects Are there any research projects in mathematics,data science etc undergraduate students can participate online? Have seen something like that?
Well, I googled it and found something,but I need more information.

One option I can think of is in engaging in writing open source software related to such fields. You can gather experience in setting up goals and realizing them and you will work together with academics, students and hobby enthusiasts in the open source community.

A scientific/research project is often not very different to a open source software project with a experienced PI/group leader and PhD students, undergraduate students.

Github or scicomp/datascience/stats.stackexchange could be a good starting point or this citizen science register.


Is this plagiarism? - Copy paste with reference I asked a similar question the other day about plagiarism, but I have a slightly different case. Would you consider this plagiarism?

A source paper (Y) has text which refers to A and B and C.  Another author, X, copies a few sentences almost verbatim (a sentence of 20 or so words) and refers to it as (A, B, and Y).

So in Y, we have: Sentence 1 (A and B). Sentence 2 (C).

This is reproduced by X as: Sentence 1 (A, B, and Y). Sentence 2 (C and Y).

Is this plagiarism?

As already stated in the comments, this is indeed plagiarism. The additional information provided in the comments makes it more interesting, however.

Plagiarism is a form of scientific misconduct. Being accused of this is quite serious, as it covers such diverse acts as fabricating data and as here, having bad referencing practices. There is a substantial difference between these, and while both practices should be dealt with, perhaps discretion is advisable in a case like this? After all, a reference was made, which makes it a less serious case of plagiarism. My experience with this is limited, but have you considered that reporting it may also reflect badly on you, as it is a comparatively minor malpractice? Perhaps you should run it by any form of local ethics committee you might have as an anonymous case?


How to gain research experience after master program? I just finished an MBA in the UK. It included a research dissertation (about 18,000 words) and a research methods module and adviser to go with it. However, my adviser made it clear during my research that it was my project and my responsibility and not his. It was clear that he was happy to mark my dissertation but didn't want to be bothered by actually helping me to learn much about research.

In the end, I did the research on my own and got distinction on the paper, which I was happy about. However, now I'm thinking more and more about pursuing a PhD, perhaps in intercultural management, and I feel like a highly respectable school would not consider me because I do not have much research experience.

So, my question is: What can I do  to gain research experience, now that I've finished my MBA, with an eye towards getting into a good school for a PhD?

As I have read, publications will help a lot but I feel like I don't have the experience to do the kind of research to get into a good publications. I really think I need to build my research skills...and would like to know how to do that.

Another related problems is when doing business research (I get the feeling most people here are from the science/math side of academia) is gaining access to companies (to gather data) and I'm not sure how to do that without an adviser.

I have read this, this, and this question but I think my question is different from each of them.

I am only familiar with the UK system, but here are some points about getting research experience in the UK.

1) Find a supervisor for your PhD.

A lot of UK departments prefer to admit PhD students who has found a faculty member who is willing to supervise and has a research proposal written together with that member. If doing a PhD in the UK is part of your goal, you could start by looking at departments/people you want to work with and contact them as a prospective student.

Some patience is required as they might not be looking to supervise a student at the moment. But I have found that most are willing to give prospective students a research project to work on before admissions or while working on the proposal. In fact, all those who were willing to supervise me ended up offering me a research project.

2) "Cold calling" for projects.

You might find that some professors, lecturers, postdocs or research fellows etc are very happy to have students with the experience to work on their projects. You can try emailing people with a very short version of your academic CV, asking for research opportunities. I have successfully gotten projects this way too.

3) Official Internships/Studentships.

Some UK universities have official internships or studentships for someone to work on a research project for 3-6 months. These may not be advertised so you need to do point 1) and 2) or simply ask. I have successfully gotten these before and they were willing to at least help pay the rent (400-500 pounds I think) or given you a token sum. I cannot be more precise about the pay because I turned down the payment in order to keep my part time job. Do note that getting paid or being in an official position will come with the requirement/expectation that you report to work daily and stay in the office for some minimum number of hours.

4) General advice.

Academics are incredibly busy people, especially famous tenured professors. Also, they might have a steady stream of students to work with. I think I was quite lucky to get around 30-40% respond rate when emailing people asking for research experience. Most of them are because I am asking as a prospective student. So please do not be too disappointed that people don't get back to you. And don't spend all your time trying to get just 1-2 famous faculty to give you research opportunities.

You should be prepared to travel and meet them, paying for all the travel fees yourself. You should also not talk about reimbursement/payment first. In my humble opinion, you need to be prepared to work on a project for free, making it clear that you want the experience on your CV and a possible paper. Then, they might arrange for payment for you. It is your responsibility to show that you are serious and trustworthy and not a waste of their precious time.

I think it helps a lot (with regards to funding) if you are from the EU as funding in the UK is usually restricted to EU citizens.

I hope this helps.


Is there any major problem in applying to PhD program in US after getting BSc and MS in UK? I'm considering getting my BSc and MS in UK instead in US, since I prefer specialization rather than diversity in education. However, I'm not sure whether or not this choice will affect my chance to attend a competitive PhD program at an American university, since people who get MS tend to stay in UK to get PhD. This route may have the following problems:

I will have to take some extra courses in my grad school in US to make up for classes not taken.
I may be disadvantaged in admission because of differences in the educational systems in the US and the UK.

Considering these problems, should I rather stay in US to get BSc and MS? Or are they negligible? For me, it's the best if the time spent to get BSc and MS will be as short as possible. This may seem strange to people in US, but I want to consider the merits of education in both nations, so I can find the course of education which is the most suitable for me.

(I want to study molecular biology.)

Let me clear up an important distinction between graduate school in the US and the UK:

In Europe, the master's degree is generally a pre-requisite for admission to a PhD program.
In the US, the master's degree is not required for admission to a PhD program, and you normally apply to the PhD program with only a bachelor's degree. You can obtain a master's degree as part of the PhD program, but this is by no means a universal requirement. It varies between universities and even departments within a university.
In the UK, options are somewhat ambiguous. You can apply for a master's and PhD program at the same time, while others may require the PhD in advance.

Therefore, if you are admitted to an American PhD program, you will take courses in graduate school, because that is the equivalent of the master's phase in the UK.

Other than that, there's no inherent advantage of applying or attending bachelor's or master's programs in the US or the UK.


Is it better to publish a few papers in one journal, or one paper each in several (equally good) journals? Suppose there are several journals with the same impact factor.
Is it better to submit my papers to one of them or each time I finished a manuscript it is better to submit to an equally good journal that I have not published in yet.

I am early in my career and I already published two papers in the same journal and I am going to finish my third paper, which potentially can be published in the same journal as my previous two papers.

While I cannot state authoritatively that this is the case for all disciples, it is my experience that it does not matter.  Equally prestigious journals have equal prestige.  Moreover, while the reputations of the journals you publish in is certainly not irrelevant to your future career prospects, you should expect your work to be evaluated at a deeper level than just looking at journal names and citation counts.

If you want to pursue a research career, the people who will be considering hiring you are going to want to know about the substance and significance of your work.  What journals you publish in may be relatively low down on the list of things that they look at.  Hiring committees want to see clear explanations of why your work matters from your reference letter writers; and the committee members likely will read some of your publications for themselves and draw their own conclusions about the quality of your work.

For reference, when I was a post-doc, I published the vast majority of my papers in a single highly-regarded journal, and it was never an issue when I was looking for permanent faculty positions.  I do not think the issue of having too many publications in a single journal has ever come up in the search committees that I have been on either.


Is it appropriate/wise to include personal/family reasons in a "Justification for Choice of Host" on a fellowship application? I am applying for a fellowship that would allow me to start an independent research group--something between post-doc and faculty levels.  Part of this application requires that I explain my choice of host university.  My question is whether I should include family reasons alongside professional ones in my justification statement.

The university I'm hoping to work at is strong in my general field, though the academic fit could be a bit better (e.g. more faculty with complementary interests, more labs with relevant equipment/resources I could use).  The main reason I'm choosing this university is because of family reasons: my partner has a good job at this university already, and since we have a small child together, I can't reasonably move elsewhere without totally disrupting my entire family.

After hitting the standard points (the strengths of the university and department, relevant faculty interests, professional development opportunities), should I also mention my family situation?

On the one hand, I'm worried that some reviewers might find it inappropriate for me to include personal asides.

On the other hand, I think including this aside is a good place for explaining why I have a bit of a gap in my CV (I took family leave and am looking to return to academics), and why I'm choosing a place that the reviewers may think isn't ideal.  My CV mentions that I took family leave, but of course this small line item could easily be missed.  I'd normally use my cover letter to explain my situation, but in this case cover letters get stripped before the application reaches the reviewers.

If it's relevant, this is in the UK, in the natural sciences.

Thanks!

I've been involved in a few searches where this issue has come up. Sometimes it helps the candidate, sometimes not so much.

When it helps: In trying to decide whether to bring a highly competitive candidate to campus for an interview. No one wants to go to the trouble and expense of an on-campus interview for a candidates who isn't going to accept an offer. Knowing that a candidate has compelling personal reasons for wanting to live in the area makes it much more likely that a seemingly over-qualified candidate will be taken seriously.

When it hurts: Any time it looks like location is the primary reason the candidate wants the position. It's great that folks want to live and work and retire in our town; it's not great if they're willing to take a job they don't particularly want in order to accomplish that. It's even worse if they aren't able to speak to the specifics of their "fit" with the institution much beyond "I really want to work here".

In your particular case, I'm not sure that there's any upside of sharing this information. Your reviewers are already going to know that out of all the host universities you could possibly choose in the world, this is the one you prefer. What they don't know is why this is your first choice. If they learn that it is due to your spouse's location, they may wonder what would happen if your partner gets a different job, or your relationship hits a snag. Those who sympathize with the host institution may also feel that it deserves someone who loves it for itself, so to speak. It will be better for you if they believe simply that it is because you feel that this is the place where you can do your most brilliant work—which is probably true, as it's hard to be brilliant when your home life has been turned upside down—for a variety of reasons including your "standard points". At most you might want to say that you are familiar with the institution, and feel comfortable there.

As far as signalling why you have an employment gap—are you submitting letters of recommendation? If so, perhaps one of your references could speak to this issue. That was how I handled my own parenting-related employment gap when I returned to the workforce.


The decoration of language in proposal writing I am a newbie to proposal writing although have been writing research papers for several years. After the rejection of my first NSF proposal, I am becoming aware that the proposal language is quite different from research paper language, where the later one emphasizes on its accuracy and objective, while the former one, according to my current understanding, needs more fine-tuning on the "tone and the sales pitch".

I guess that's where the decoration of language could  come into play. Could anyone shed some lights certain systematic approach such that I can train myself and master the needed skills? Or, is there any systematic approach that can quickly turn my research paper-style proposal by setting the mood and tone as a "sales pitch."

I am not a native speaker and that could be hard, I guess. Any suggestions would be appreciated very much.

While not quite the systematic solution you are looking for (which I don't think exists) here are some ideas. This is a matter of knowing your audience and a matter of practice. I suggest that you do a combination of all of them:

Review Grant Proposals. I warn I speak from the UK system so things are certainly a bit different elsewhere, but there exist a number of opportunities to serve as an expert reviewer for grant proposals. You may be at an early career level, but some granting bodies specifically seek out early career reviewers (e.g. the AHRC peer review college in the UK is one example). Contact granting bodies directly and ask to be added to their database of reviewers and when you are asked to review grants, pay very close attention, first, to the standards against which you are meant to review, and, indeed, what works on you...what type of writing in the proposals wins you over. Attend any training days etc that the granting body offers for reviewers. I do note that you are in the USA, but I've peer reviewed Fulbright and other USA-based proposals, so the opportunities are there.
Read successful grant proposals. Read a lot of them. Note the style and tone of the language. If you have a colleague or friend who has had a successful NSF, ask to see their proposal. Contact your University's research office and ask for copies of any successful large grants. You may think that this is crossing a boundary or that people don't want to share their grant proposals, but it is totally normal. I was successful at applying for a very large (€1.5mil) grant last year and over the course of the year I must have shared my proposals with 30 other scholars who wish to apply to the same scheme. I have done the same with previous successful grant proposals.
Familiarise yourself with the differences between granting bodies as this will govern the language style and tone you should use. Funding bodies that want to fund blue skies, high risk-high reward research tend to like language that fits the edgy nature of the grant. Funding bodies that prefer you to, essentially, know the outcome before you start like assurances and less "excited" language. When in doubt, you can talk to the grant manager about the motivation behind the grant and then think about how that might translate into your language.
Lean on whatever resources are at your University. That might be the research support office or equivalent. It might even mean an external consultant that the university hires to help develop and prepare grants. Make sure you know what is on offer and take whatever is available.

Good luck!


Students using the same flawed online solution sheet as the grading TA I am in a small electricity and magnetism class, and I have recently become aware of other students using an online solution sheet (on slader.com).  On the most recent homework, I (who didn't use the online solution sheet) got a significantly worse grade than I expected.  When I read the TAs posted solutions, I realized that he had made all of the same mistakes (the primary one being assuming that the parallel impedance formula is 1/(Z_1)+1/(Z_2) when it is actually 1/(1/(Z_1)+1/(Z_2))) and all of the exact same approximations as the online solution sheet.  It is clear that he basically copied from the online solutions.  What's worse, he marked many of my solutions wrong: both the ones where I had different (more accurate) approximations and the ones that were correct, but different from his incorrect solutions (the professor confirmed that my solutions are correct).

I'm guessing it isn't against the rules for a TA to use an online solution sheet, but the fact that he has been using the same one that many of the students are using means that this entire semester I have been at a significant disadvantage.  I have done well, but the class is curved so there's that also.

What do I do about this?

If the online sheet is incorrect and you suffered because of it, and if you have proof that the TA used that sheet, then you should point out to the professor of the course what has happened.

But, ask for a a comparison between your answers and those that the TA suggests. This will make it clear. The other students may suffer or not, but that is up to others. You have a right to a correct evaluation of your work and the professor should be made aware of online solutions - especially if they are incorrect and misleading students.

One set of students getting credit when they've broken rules and other students suffering when they have done the correct thing is the worst outcome possible.

You don't need to accuse anyone. Point out the online sheet. Point out the (matching) solution rubric. Show your own work and ask for a fair evaluation.


How to choose to which conference submit a scientific paper? Nowadays, in almost every scientific field, there are hundreds of conferences. Many call for papers emails fill our mail boxes.

Freedom of choice is great, but, how to choose to which conference send a paper?

Should I choose one...

based on the scientific relevance?
based on the scientific vicinity to your paper theme?
based on its prestige?
because of some official ranking?
because it provides the best food?

In an ideal world, you would like to choose your conference by their relation to your paper's main topic, and the possibility of impact to your field.

Now, you might be inclined to choose according to other filters:

Based on its "possible attendants", such as a highly-esteemed
investigator you might want to know and get feedback from, in a more
personal way.
Your own "travel experiences" (such as wanting to travel to a
far-away location, or to re-visit some beautiful place).
Most conferences consider acceptance as a "at least one of the
authors must attend and present their work" binding commitment, so
unless you are going with your college's support, you must
consider the ongoing rates on inscription, hotel rates and
added values (such as travel expenses or food, among others).

Some other reasons might apply, but your main filter must be to choose a conference in which your work is closely related to.


What are good database/grade book software? I am in the market for a (hopefully free!) grade book software and  would like to see some suggestions. This would be used for a math class and I am planning for many grades (15+) per semester.

In particular, if a gradebook has any features that make it stand out from other gradebooks or spreadsheet solutions, I would appreciate knowing that information.

I'm guessing this question will get closed, but there are many options (as earthling highlighted in the comment). When I taught high school, I invested in Easy Grade Pro and was happy with it. It is not free.

Lately, I've been using a home-made Excel spreadsheet, which has been pretty easy to do, although I have a fair amount of experience with Excel. As F'x said, OpenOffice has a spreadsheet and it is free, and Google Docs also provide a free spreadsheet solution. You can also find pre-made Excel spreadsheets for grading, which you can tweak for your own use.

Another option is to see if your school has a gradebook built-in to it's student-database system. This is a nice solution because you don't have to transfer grades from one system to another, and the students have easy access to grades along the way so they can explicitly track their own progress.


How to tell my supervisor I won't use the data that a colleague prepared? I started a postdoc about a year ago. At the time of my hire I was told another postdoc was preparing the large dataset I would eventually use. In the meantime, I was to run some sample models and develop a method on some small test data.

Ten months later when I finally received the data, it was a mess of a spreadsheet (extremely long column names, no column names, typos, no documentation) and I also began finding errors in it immediately. For example some merged in values had been multiplied by 2 or 2.5 or 2.25. Nobody could explain what happened so I spent nearly 2 months redoing those values.

It gets worse. I started checking the other columns and realized some "no data" indicators had been averaged with measured values. This produced large negative values which should have been a red flag for that data. There were other similar sloppy errors in the data. I've tried to be extremely polite with the other postdoc but I'm not getting a lot of help from this person.

I've spent nearly 3 months cleaning up the mess and I continue to find problems. My budget is nearly up (I have about 3 months left) and I'm being asked to start writing and prepare a draft in the next three months. I worry there are more problems with the data that I'm not seeing because the person who prepared it did not have high attention to detail. It was also prepared by hand in Excel and not well documented or not documented at all. I don't want to put my name on something that uses data that is potentially full of errors, especially since I'm early in my career. I've voiced these concerns somewhat indirectly to my main supervisor and he is nothing but reassuring and even defensive of the data. Another colleague, not the one in charge of the project, agrees with me.

What should I do?

You have come across an important lesson in research: if the person or organization providing your data is not responsible somehow for that data being correct, it won't be. Collecting and preprocessing new data is an iterative process with lots of restarts as you discover that common techniques need to be adapted to the particular dataset. If someone just hands you data they didn't have to test or validate anywhere, what you get is their first failed result. If they touch the data to do anything to it at all, they almost certainly did so incorrectly; if there is a sign, they probably created sign errors; if they did any sorting, they probably did not sort the labels and values consistently, etc.

As for how to proceed, there's another unfortunate lesson here for anyone in a mentored research position: you should generally do whatever your supervisor wants. I don't mean behave unethically if they push you to. But to change your focus to doing the best with what you have rather than letting the perfect be the enemy of the "at-least-you-did-something". Honestly your supervisor probably has a better grasp of the big picture. I.e. getting a result out to show the funding agency you were productive, getting a notch on your CV, and such outcomes, are the critical ones. While a wonderful research result that drives the science world vertically is probably out of reach already. You can however adjust how you present the data in your paper, e.g., focus on the methods not the results, or put some mixed validation results and note not all of them worked properly, caution that your data may be flawed as one possible cause, and so forth.


When does a researcher become a computer scientist? When do you call a researcher a computer scientist? Are Master degree holders computer scientists? Are Phd degree holders computer scientists? Is there a certain level of experience after which the researcher will be called a computer scientist?

When do you call a researcher a computer scientist?

A runner is someone who runs; a writer is someone who writes; a researcher is someone who does research; a computer scientist is someone who does computer science.  So if you're doing computer science research, I will call you a computer scientist and a researcher, even if you aren't yet published, even if you work full-time as a plumber, even if you're still in junior high school.

  Is there a certain level of experience after which the researcher will be called a computer scientist?

No.  There is nothing you can do to make other people call you anything.

But to call yourself a computer scientist, the only requirement is that you are doing computer science.  So in that sense, yes, there is a certain required level of experience: More than zero.


How does one issue a call for papers on military history? A non-academic group to which I belong holds military history conferences a few times a year. We've discussed seeking presentations from graduate students, but we're unsure of the process. So, I have a few questions that might be answerable here.

Where would one publish a "call for papers" on specific areas of military history? (Our conferences are on Operation Dragoon and the Battle of the Colmar Pocket in WWII.)

What would be expected to be provided for presenters who are accepted? We're a non-profit, funded only by fees for the conferences, so have never budgeted for honorariums, lodging for speakers or their expenses. Would that be so uncouth as to inhibit anyone from responding?

Would sample presentation videos be excessive? We've had some presenters in the past whose style has been so dry and non-interactive that the audience became disengaged. So, before we would accept a speaker, we'd want to see video or a live presentation to ensure that they will meet our needs. Is this excessive?

How long a presentation would be acceptable from the speaker's perspective? I expect we'd be interested in presentations of 15-20 minutes, as the topic would be rather specific (such as a presentation on the actions of a single military unit rather than on the campaign in general).

Basically, I want to know if our expectations don't meet academic expectations, so we can decide whether to modify our expectations or decide not to issue a call for papers.

Some of your expectations fall within the norms and some may not. There may be some variation by field.

Having never organized a conference, but having attended and presented as several, these seem to be the norms I have encountered:

  Where would one publish a "call for papers" on specific areas of military history?

Anywhere and everywhere. Send emails (or snailmail) to the history departments at nearby colleges and universities. Pass the word along to other organizations with similar interests. Are you close to a military academy? Is there a military museum nearby? Those are other good places to find speakers.Make sure that all correspondence includes the soft deadline (i.e. about a week before your real cutoff) for submission, and the process by which an individual signs up to speak. Also, you need to make clear the type of talk you are expecting based on the audience. Should this be a talk for experts, for enthusiasts, or for the general public? These announcements also serve as advertising for your event.

  What would be expected to be provided for presenters who are accepted?

Generally, at large conferences with hundreds of talks, the travel costs are paid by the speakers. For a small conference, you may want to offer to reimburse some costs on a first-come-first-served basis, however, very few folks should be put out by lack of financial support. I would save honoraria for their true purpose: providing an award for someone and/or attracting a really big name.

  Would sample presentation videos be excessive?

Yes. The situation you describe is a known danger, but it is not normal to ask for videos. Your better bet is to send people to attend other talks by your speakers and evaluate them unofficially, but you should still let them speak. If you secure a big name in the field, you will attract an audience, even if said person is a horrible speaker. If you are attracting academic speakers and you have a nearby university, asks folks in the relevant departments if they know of good speakers and try to target those individuals.

You might get away with suggesting that individuals who wish to be considered for the keynote spot send in a short clip of them presenting elsewhere, but that would still be pushing it.

  How long a presentation would be acceptable from the speaker's perspective?

Depending on the number of speakers you hope to attract and the length of the conference, block off 30 minute or 60 minute blocks. 15 minutes is a little short, and you should only exceed one hour for keynotes/plenaries. Most academics would interpret a 30 minute block of time as 20 minutes of presentation and 10 minutes of questions and answers, which sounds like what you want.


Should I send a research recommendation letter to teaching postdoc position? I am a math PhD student, graduating this semester. I found a teaching postdoc that I would really like to apply for but I am confused by the ad.
They ask for a teaching statement but no research statement. The duties include teaching two to three classes per semester and some course development/improvement.

They ask for two recommendation letters, "at least one of which addresses your teaching."
I have two teaching recommendation letters that I am pretty confident in.
But would it be concerning if I don't have a recommendation letter from my advisor? I just don't see the benefit in sending a research letter for a position that doesn't involve research, but I don't know how these things are judged.

Any advice is appreciated!

It sounds like you are pretty dialed in.  My advice is to include the advisor letter.  For one thing they are explicitly open to some of the letters being non teaching.  And you have the teaching boxes checked.

Also, it still hopefully shows you in a good light: smart student, conscientious, etc.  If you could get your advisor to make some comments about any coaching, mentoring (or even personality suited to it) that would be a positive.  But even a straight research letter would still be fine.  Probably most of the committee did a research based Ph.D. so they know the world you come from even if the school is not an R1.

I would not skip the advisor.  That will look bad.  (If it is OK to send 3 letters that would be ideal...but I don't know the protocol.)


Make the readers [supervisor] understand the effort I put on data construction in an academically sound way In my Master thesis I use an alternative database, namely histdata.com which provides free tick by tick data (kinda rough data that need a lot of coding to be transformed but free). To the best of my knowledge this is the first time somebody has ever employed data from this database on a official paper. Usually tick data are purchased from independent providers for thousands of dollars/euros. Should I explicitly mention the fact that I used a free database data and my efforts to transform the data in a working form? Essentially I saved my self from a potentially heavy cost through some free data and heavy coding.

You are running into the age-old problem that, in research, you are reporting on results, not effort. Your paper (or thesis) is not a time sheet that needs to accurately reflect how much time went into which activity, but it should discuss your approach, results, and conclusions.

Hence, making your supervisor understand the effort [you] put on data construction is not a sound goal for a formal paper. I am not saying that your supervisor should not know how you spend your time, but this is an item for face-to-face discussion, not your thesis. Describe the data source, describe its properties (and, as a sidenote, I would not focus on the "it's free" aspect, but comment more on the quality of the data set), and describe the necessary transformations if they are interesting (instead of straight-forward but tedious, which most transformations seem to be).


What are best practices for designing publication-quality figures? I am a postgraduate student in mathematics. I am writing my thesis, for which I need to prepare some Matlab plots and figures. I had sent some plots to my supervisor, and he suggested to use black for the line color because most  journals want to make sure that plots look good when printed black-and-white.
I am curious to know some other advice for figures like line width, styles, colormap for surface and contour plots, the figures’ dimension, etc.

Someone general advice:

do a Google search. There are already plenty of articles talking about all different aspects of creating good figures, and they probably do a better job than my answer here.
experiment. Just create a figure and look at the font size, linewidth, color selection and arrangement, etc. If you have an average person's understanding of aesthetics, you should be able to spot issues in your figures. Print the paper out, and see if everything is legible.
imitate. Find papers in top journals and important dissertations, and see how other people create figures. I am not in mathematics, but if you look at Science, Nature or top journals in my field like Physics Review Letter, you should get a good sense of the elements in a graph, how to convey data and ideas effectively, and how to make a graph look great.
look up guidelines. Journals in my field often have a very specific style guide (like this), which can be a very useful reference. They can include things like "minimum linewidth is 0.5 pt" and "font size must be greater than 18 pt". They are generally good guidelines to follow.

Some specific things you can look into:

Don't be afraid to use large font size. They are probably not large enough.
using colors, and especially color maps, is tricky. There are many considerations that you may not be aware. You can easily find advice of how to use colors, and there are websites that help you select colors, so I will not repeat them here. Here are some discussions on colormap:

A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib
Rainbow Color Map Critiques: An Overview and Annotated Bibliography
Color Map Advice for Scientific Visualization
A survey and task-based quality assessment of static 2D colormaps

make things simple. Don't overcrowd your figure.
use annotations where necessary. A figure with adequate annotations will often explain itself, even without captions.

Additional resources:

Look up a book named "Trees, maps, and theorems" in which there is a chapter about figures. (I have been to a great talk given by Jean-luc Doumont about how to give a good presentation.)
Figure Design (MIT EECS Communication Lab)
Choosing color palettes (Seaborn)


Where can I find standard high school textbooks used in the US and UK? So for example, India has this government organization called The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). They produce their textbooks which are also available to download for free here, for the grades 1-12 for all subjects. From my experience they are one of the highest quality textbooks in India.
Similarly, where can I access such textbooks which are of the highest quality, and are used in the US and/or UK? I'm mostly interested in searching for textbooks for the grades 8-12. I want to get a flavor of what kind of education do students get exposed to in the US/UK and I plan on reading their textbooks for the grades 8-12.

In the US, at least, some of the states have lists of approved books. Texas for example has a list: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/19095
Maryland, or at least some large counties there, may also have such an approval process.
There are probably others. But note that some of the textbook selections in Texas are very controversial, as the selection board is sometimes dominated by creationists and other science deniers. So, use caution with this list and any other.


Are there ranking for Master's programs (sciences, subject specific) There are rankings of US universities and colleges:

overall,
for undergrad programs,
and for doctoral programs

But, I find nothing for rankings of Masters programs in specific subjects (like physics, math, etc).

Does my observation ring true with others, and if so, why is this? It would seem curious to me if undergrad and PhD programs were ranked but Masters were not.

Thank you,
Matt

I'd say, generally, rankings are often fickle beasts, so don't put too much faith in any specific one you come across. Depending on the publisher, ordering rules, etc, you may get very different rankings for each school. To your specific question though, it's a fair bet to lump Masters programs in with their respective doctoral program, at least if you're looking for some prestige comparison.

That being said, particular Masters programs can be better than others in certain aspects (like affordability, access to research, focus on industry, etc) that may run counter to the institution's prestige ranking. For those things, it's best to research institutions within your specific field rather than look for some published blanket rankings anyway.

As to why there is no blanket Masters ranking, it is likely related to what I mentioned above: Masters programs are often geared toward students with specific goals in mind. Undergrad and doctoral programs are each generally focused on well-defined tasks, providing a foundation and establishing research competency, respectively, and thus perhaps easier (more valid) to compare. In obtaining Masters degrees, students' goals can run the gamut of possibilities. Some people are looking for career advancement (e.g. MBA, MEng, etc), others are looking to make a pivot in their field, and still others are looking for something else. It's tough to compare these programs because,  with all the variables, you're really comparing apples and oranges.


How to revise the manuscript (one reject and one accept in first decision) and what could be the final decision? I just received a decision letter from IEEE ACCESS with resubmission option(first decision came in one month). The recommendation of reviewer1 is "Accept (minor edits)" and the recommendation of reviewer2 is "Reject (update and resubmit encouraged)".

Reviewer 1: Accept (minor edits)
compare the performance of proposed method with conventional methods are given in ref[] & ref[].

Reviewer 2: Reject (update & resubmission encouraged)
Comments came like grammar check and typo corrections are needs to be done...
some notations, abbreviations are need to be corrected...
Add expression for proposed technique and also explanation with performance cure...

I am doing revision on my manuscript as per advice given by the journal reviewers and going to submit ASAP....

If anybody has the similar kind of experience, please share what could be the final decision?....
Valid points are welcome & appreciated....

There is no real way of knowing what the outcome will be without seeing the feedback. It honestly depends on the primary reviewer. Depending on what the formal process is for IEEE ACCESS, either one reviewer will have the ultimate say, or both reviewers will have to agree on a result.

I've been in this situation a few times and it has gone both ways. Looking at your feedback summary, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the research which is always a good sign (I've had more than my fair share of reviewers simply disliking the premise of my research which is a complete non-starter). Ultimately, you need to work hard on the revision and write a cover letter that addresses each of their points.

The cover letter is a really important part of this process as a lot of reviewers will use this as the basis for their decision. Be sure to respond to each of their comments methodically, and clearly. Try to avoid using vague language such as "We've added more detail to the conclusion", but instead provide a clear description of the changes you made.

It sounds like reviewer two had an issue with the language used. If you've got any strong English language researchers in your department, it's worth asking if they are able to proofread the document for you. Services like Grammarly are also useful to improve typos and grammar. Make sure you emphasise how much effort you put into improving this when responding to reviewer two's comments. This may be enough to nudge the needle in your favour.


How do I respond to my professors email about recommendation letter? He is out of the country for sometime and his FIL is ill I have contacted my professor about recommendation letter for my applications to PhD programmes. He has provided letters for few of my application.

Right now I am applying to few more universities and have contacted him again to provide few more letters in support of my application. He responded by saying that he is in a different country and his father-in-law is ill. He said he would provide the letters once again when he is back in the country. How should I respond to his email? I feel bad about constantly bothering him about letters of recommendation.

Just say thank you and send best wishes for the health of his father in law. Nothing more is needed.

Three is no need to feel bad about your request. It is perfectly normal and natural.


Including desired rank in a cover letter for an open-rank faculty position? I'm an assistant professor in my fifth year and have decided to go on the job market this year.  Obviously I prefer tenured positions to pre-tenure positions, but I'm interested in either one.  Would it be weird to leave this ambiguous in a cover letter, that is, to simply say "I am applying for a position in your department" without specifying the rank?  It  seems to me that if I say I'm applying for an associate position, then some departments might say "oh, she's not ready for an associate position, too bad, we would have hired her at the assistant level", whereas, if I apply at the assistant level, I might be passing up opportunities for a tenured position.

I suspect this is one of these questions where there is no truly "correct answer" as you can't predict what's going on in any given search committee, but I think you're unlikely to do any damage by leaving it open.  At least my understanding of these things is that a department would rather hire you w/o tenure (note that this is not quite the same as the associate/assistant distinction) as it is less of a headache with the administration; you'll get tenure if they really want you, and don't think they'll get you otherwise.  I don't think it will matter much what you wrote in your cover letter.  Concentrate on making them want you, and then worry about what they have to do to get you.


How much weight does the tripos III carry for further PhD admissions? I am planning on doing a tripos III this year in order to explore my interests and improve on a few bad grades in my undergraduate coursework. I would like to aim for a top 5 Math PhD program.

I have heard that the tripos exams are after most of the admission period in the US. Given this, how much of a factor does simply attending the tripos play in getting an offer for a PhD?

If you are aiming for attending a top five mathematics department in the U.S. immediately afterwards, Part III of the Tripos plays almost no role.  It's not uncommon for students to do Part III, but often after already being admitted to the U.S. department and deferring for a year.  Occasionally someone who was turned down the previous year applies again while doing Part III and is admitted, either because their application looks stronger or because they have better luck.  However, attending Part III plays little role in this.  The bar for Part III admission is lower than for top five U.S. Ph.D. programs in mathematics, so merely being admitted is not in itself a factor.  The Cambridge academic year doesn't even start until October, so there's generally no useful way to get letters of recommendation from Cambridge faculty based on Part III: they simply don't have enough to say at the point at which letters are needed.  The net effect is that you are applying with letter writers based on the previous year, and the only function of Part III is demonstrating that you are doing something productive with your time (it certainly looks better than taking a year off, for example).


How do I justify dropping out of a Ph.D. program in my personal statement? I am in a Ph.D. program for the past year and a half and I am very disappointed by the level of work, the agenda, and the graduate school. I want to apply for a new Ph.D. and have told to my professor that I will drop out in May, so that he has time to replace me. My question is how can I justify my dropping out correctly to the professors I want to contact to start a Ph.D. with, or in the personal statement of the applications.

Just give them the reasons you stopped. If they think your reasons are good they might even consider your choice as positive instead of negative - but as usual everything depends on the person you are dealing with.


Talks and Workshops at professional conferences like PyCon and various un-conferences How do you present talks and workshops that you have conducted at various open source events and professional conference and events like un-conferences, in your academic CV and application form for PhD?

Also, do they have the same standing as those organised purely by academic institutes?

List them the same way as you would any other talks.  They may not have the same standing in terms of content, but they show that you have practice grasping new material and presenting it, which is important for Ph.D students and graduates to be able to do.


Does an unpublished document you upload to ResearchGate count as prior publication when submitting to a journal? On ResearchGate, if you upload something like a thesis, and then it says publish resources, does this mean the thesis becomes properly published in the sense of the usual requirements of journals that there be no prior publication of the submitted work?

I ask because I’m drafting thesis chapters into journal articles and did not choose to publish the thesis as a whole work in order to do so, so I want to make sure that by clicking publish resources I am not actually publishing the copy I’ve uploaded, I’m just making it publicly available? Does this mean it becomes published despite it not technically being a published work? (If so, I’ll just remove the copy I uploaded).

The problem is less ResearchGate and more your field. As far as I know, ResearchGate, unlike Academia.edu, does not claim copyright or commercial license for your uploads; and they refer to their upload service as more self-archiving than anything else. That said, different fields and different publishers have different attitudes toward what it means to be prior publications.

In Mathematics (my field), for example, almost certainly no journal will count uploads to pre-print repositories or online social media or your own webpage as prior publication.

In fields like Medicine and some subfield of Biology, the rules are much stricter, where sometimes too-detailed conference posters can count as prior publication when it comes to journal submissions. Wikipedia has a listing which shows, e.g., journals of the American Society for Microbiology having this type of strict pre-publication rule.

So the only general advice for your question is: consult the website of the journal to which you intend to submit your articles.


How to mention a recently dead scientist? I would like to mention in an article a scientist that passed away in 2015 and was universally recognized as a pioneer in his respective field. Since many knew him personnally, I would like to mention him respectfully, such as 'the Late Dr. XXX' or 'Honorable Dr. XXX'.

I am afraid it would be unethical, especially considering that many other authors that I mention are also gone (but few people really knew them) ?

I would strongly advise you against that idea. A well written article has to remain objective. Your relationship with that scientist is not a matter of any importance in the research you are describing in the article. Even adding qualifiers to the name is a bad move in my opinion, as you would be imposing your judgement to the reader.

I know this might seem a nice gesture in the moment, but the article is here to (hopefully) stay, and this type of personal/temporal address will become even more irrelevant to the reader.


Presenting a mathematical model at a technical conference I am supposed to present my work at a technical conference with mostly software/network scientists or engineers and my work is centred around a mathematical model, a MILP, and the related performance evaluations with it. I'm a little confused about whether to present the mathematical model in its full detail (with all the constraints) or just explain using bullets about the constraints in the model and completely skip the mathematical notations.

I find it really hard to decide either of these options and I would love to know your experiences in presenting your work to someone not related to that field. I've observed at some presentations about some of the audience being a little bummed out or not showing much interest in it. But, it would be foolish on my part to presume that whole audience is averse to math. So, I'd like to strike a fine balance between both these themes so as to not to disappoint myself and ensure the audience understands the content. Some of your comments or real-life experiences may come in very handy for my presentation. Oh, and btw, I use beamer for preparing my presentation.

We can be sure you do not have more than 20-25 minutes for your presentation.
As you implied, in such conferences you have to satisfy the novice audience along with the most professional one. So it is highly recommended that you try to present for all of the audience in proper time limits.

In my opinion, SOMETIMES it is necessary to get into some details in order to show the professionals what you did (in reputable conferences mostly). Also you should not make your ordinary audiences bored. So you can show the beginners the big picture such as ideas, examples, etc. (not so much detail) and in some few slides you may want to show some details for your professional audiences, though you do not have too much time for that and you should consider the time limits seriously.

All in all, do not stick in details you give a fair chance no one will care about it. But it does not mean you should skip every detail. Also, try to use your colleagues ideas and feedback in your PRE-PRESENTATION practice about these matters. In my opinion, they are the most reliable resources for us. I myself, really care about my friends and colleagues comments before my presentations or even my paper submissions.

And finally it might be worthy to take a look at How to Present a Paper at an Academic Conference. Moreover, It is great to know that you are using LaTex for your presentation.


How to cite a method that I describe in my paper since it is not standard in my field In one of my PhD papers I am using a statistical model that is not known in my field, and many readers (including my PhD supervisors) will not be familiar with it. I therefore dedicate a subsubsection of the paper to describing the method. Essentially I restate the mathematics of the original paper and describe how certain variables and parameters ought to be interpreted for the research question under consideration.

In light of recent PhD thesis plagiarism scandals in Germany, I try to be extra careful to make sure the audience understands that I am not claiming any original authorship over the method or even the presentation of the mathematics (which by nature of similar) in my own paper, but merely include because it will be difficult to understand my work otherwise.

How would you recommend going about this?

This subsubsection will be 2-3 pages in a paper of roughly 20 pages (excluding all tables and references)
Not describing the method accurately and simply referencing the original paper and ask the reader to look it up themselves, seem like a less appealing solution right now.

I suspect you're overthinking this. I would just write something like:

II. Related Work
A. Statistical Model
Our work uses a statistical model from X et al [44]. As this model is of fundamental importance in our work, we will present a thorough summary of their work in this subsection.
...
B. Something Else.


The title postgraduate researcher I have seen the title postgraduate researcher in a couple of peoples Linkedin profiles for roles in the UK. The people listed only had masters degree before showing. What is this position formally, is it just someone who has not completed a PhD? Or are these official positions in subjects like astronomy?

AFAIK, postgraduate research would, equally, be known as both Ph.D. and post-doctoral programs. Graduate studies do cover M.Sc. programs, there. Therefore, whatever after that would be named as postgraduate. So, one might assert that a postgraduate researcher could be either a Ph.D. candidate or a post-doctoral fellow.

Of course, theses definitions are highly flexible and even interchangeable among different universities, even in UK.


Social media vs. academic career After an incident where a complaint has been submitted against my private social media profile by students (with whom I had no interaction, nor were my posts directed towards) I felt attacked in a way I didn't feel before. Since my research is the most valuable thing to me in my life, I decided that my reaction will be to shut down all of my social media interactions and kept quiet for the past half a year. I am considering the cons of reopening my social media accounts and would love some input.

When closing my accounts, what scared me the most was the idea that a part of my life that has nothing to do with research, would interrupt my academic reputation, which is hard enough to build on its own as you all know. Weighing out the different possible outcomes, I felt like I prefer focusing on my research than being the Rosa Parks of crazy posting online.

Things became most awkward when at some point, I felt like I was forced to explain myself to faculty who come from a different generation, with different perception of the nuances of social behavior now days, which is already a stereotypical issue in the field I come from to begin with. This made me very frustrated. I found it very uncomfortable when I tried to explain the situation to some professor whom these students approached in order to file an official complaint against me, and this Professor didn't even want to hear me out. Although our relationship has normalized since, I figured out that the more provocative social media interaction I take part in, the more I would find myself in the position of needing to explain myself to people without some necessary background or motivation to understand where I am coming from. This has led me to stop all of my social media interactions immediately after "the incident".

My advisor, which I absolutely adore, both as a researcher and as a human being, has advised me strongly against engaging in social media in any form since. He told me that time and time again he has seen people suffering from negative effects on their careers, and that it is not worth it. However, I do not feel like he necessarily knows all of the aspects in which I gain value out of participating in social media interaction, and besides, I should have the right to live my own private life outside the academia. My advisor says that as a T.A. in a university I am "half a public figure" and this forces me to some unspoken social code of behavior. However, I am not sure I am very fond of that unspoken social code. I understand why it is absolutely important to be sensitive and politically correct within the confines of the classroom, and when interacting with peers, students and superiors, but where is it said that choosing a research career implies that I must be PG13 within the confines of my own social life? Would you feel like you would personally want to opt out of having research interactions with someone that has a provocative YouTube channel or Twitter accounts? Do you feel that it is necessary for me to suppress my desire to express myself creatively online in favor of an academic career?

It should be mentioned that the faculty has revoked the complaint against me and has told me that their official response is that it is not anybody else's business what I do online. However, I do feel like there is room for extra care in such a gray area topic. I am curious to hear your thoughts on this quite personal contemplation.

Often, people confuse the protections of the freedom of expression in various forms as protection from judgment by others rather than protections from government (and sometimes employer) sanction. In a free society, you have the right to express the things you want to express on social media (with a few key exceptions), but you do not have the right for that expression to not influence the opinions others have of you.

It seems like you've run into conflicts based on not knowing the boundaries of this principle. Therefore, stepping back from social media seems like good advice from an academic perspective.

You'll have to weigh for yourself whether this advice is too stifling on your personal expression. Some types of expression may be too valuable. However, if you make that choice you have to understand that it comes with consequences.

Social media is not a venue through which you get to have a pulpit without taking a risk. You can reduce the risk through anonymous accounts or by sharing among friends rather than the general public, but things you post on Twitter are no different in principle from things you stand and shout on the street outside your university buildings.

I personally am not opposed to working with people who speak their mind publicly, but there are certain things, such as those that are racist or sexist, those that are homophobic or transphobic, those defending or supporting certain types of crimes, etc, that for the sake of my own expression I will not tolerate. Just as some will choose to use their freedoms to express those opinions, I will use mine to avoid working with them as long as I'm within the law.


How important are reference letters when it comes to postdoc hiring decision? At what stage in the hiring process are they considered? Context: I am planning to apply to a US lab.

Many universities have mandatory requirements for letters of recommendation (LoR) for a postdoc position, and that's the main reason they ask you to submit LoR. There were some PI who interviewed me told me this and also told me that they wouldn't even care what my referees would write about me. They were willing to hire me immediately after they have three letters of recommendation. If you have solid credentials as a researcher, I think your LoR would not matter much. However, a terrible remark on a LoR would also significantly influence the hiring decision.


math job market statistics Looking around online, there are some statistics that foretell doom for PhD students; some examples of this:

the number of faculty to retire in the next 10 years is at the lowest in 30 years.
the number of PhDs awarded is around 100,000, while the number of professor positions open is around 16,000.
there has been approximately 40% budget cut for math between 2008-2011 (but there was a hiring freeze put on most state universities in 2009-2010, if I remember correctly, so this may not be entirely accurate).

For more statistics, see this:
http://marccortez.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/phd-job-crisis-640x4627.gif
The creator of this argues that the number of grad students and postdocs is way too high, while the number of professors is on the decline.

I think that this is not true for math. Postdocs are considered to be a mandatory part in our career (and postdoc positions are quite competitive!), and while many people do a second postdoc, I rarely see people with more than two postdoc experiences. Also, there aren't so many adjunct positions; some postdoc positions are called adjuncts, but these usually expire in 1-3 years. So I would like to know the real statistics. In particular, I want to know these figures for last year (percentages with respect to the number of PhDs will also do):

the number of PhDs awarded (all figures from here onwards applying just to the US)
the number of PhDs hired as postdocs at PhD-producing institutions
the number of PhDs hired as tenure-track professors at liberal arts colleges
the number of postdocs finishing
the number of postdocs hired as tenure-track professors at PhD-producing institutions
the number of postdocs hired as tenure-track professors at liberal arts colleges
the number of postdocs hired as postdocs at PhD-producing institutions

To summarize, I would like to know how harsh the funneling process is in math; I know from experience that many grad students leave academia without obtaining a job as a postdoc. Is the same true of postdocs? How about the tenure-track level?

Almost certainly the best information you'll find is from the AMS Annual Survey: http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/annual-survey.  I don't know that it will answer all your questions (in particular, it's mostly focused on newly graduating Ph.D.'s; it doesn't track where people end up after postdocs), but if the data isn't in there, probably nobody has it.


Is it ethical to apply different criteria for graduate admissions based on country of undergraduate study? We have undertaken a small statistical study of M.S. students in our department, including their application information and their eventual performance in our program. The goal is to develop criteria for making admissions decisions for new applicants based on their likelihood of success in our program (as predicted by the performance of recent, similar students). I won't get into the details of the methodology.

One outcome of this study was that different attributes predict success for students with undergrad degrees from different countries. For example, for applicants to the program from schools in country X, but not schools in country Y, undergrad GPA is correlated with the  students' GPA in our program; for schools in country Y, but not X, GRE scores are correlated with the student's GPA in our program. (I'm simplifying a lot here.) A "toy" example I just completely made up to illustrate is shown below:

(of course, for real applicants the criteria and the relationships are more complicated)

There are many possible reasons for this: for example, we could think that the grading system is more consistent in X so undergrad GPA is a better predictor there, and in X students study "for the exam" so the GRE becomes virtually meaningless as a measure of knowledge. I could speculate, but I don't think it would be helpful. The bottom line is, we find that different factors predict student success among different populations.

Therefore, if we wanted to admit students based on their likelihood of achieving a certain GPA in our program, we would apply an undergrad GPA cutoff for students from X, and a GRE threshold for students from Y. (Again, this is vastly simplified from the criteria our study actually suggested.)

Is it fair to apply different criteria to students with undergrad degrees from different countries in admissions decisions?

Does the answer change if this would significantly skew the admissions decisions in favor of a particular country of undergrad study (because statistically, applicants to our program whose undergrad degrees are from X have done much better than those with undergrad degrees from Y).

My concern is that we're effectively saying, "Students with undergrad degrees from Y with a GRE score < T will be rejected, but students with undergrad degrees from X  with GRE < T may still be considered for admission (pending other criteria)."

On the other hand, if we ignore these statistics and reject students with undergrad degrees from X with low GRE scores, we are rejecting applicants even though we have no valid reason to believe that they won't do well in our program.

To those who doubt the results of the study:

When I say the study is "small" I don't mean it isn't statistically significant - just that it was not designed to be generalizable beyond our applicant pool. (This is the same reason why I won't give too many details about the study - I don't want anybody to read it and try to generalize from our results.)
As we know, the sample size is not the only factor that determines whether a given effect is significant. We found that the results are significant, given the sample size.
The results also seem "sane" (which of course is subjective). It's not unexpected that undergraduate grading standards (and the standard-ness of grading standards) differ by country; or that different educational systems and cultures prepare students differently for standardized exams like the GRE and TOEFL; etc. The specifics of the results (i.e., which criteria are good predictors for which undergrad country) are consistent with what students who studied in those countries have told us about grading standards, student culture, and exam prep. So, we really have no reason to doubt them.

I'm going to advise against.

You say your sample size is small. And honestly, unless you hired a professional statistician, I have doubt the analysis was carried out properly or shows exactly what you think it shows. Good statistics are hard to do.
Assuming my google results are truthful, National Origin is a Protected Class in the US. You can't discriminate against people because of it. I assume this is an american institution as you talk about GRE, but similar applies in other places. EDIT: OP has since clarified a misunderstanding of mine - the judgement is based not on the student's country of origin, but the country of the school they attended, which makes me less certain this point still applies.
You're department is actually, seriously proposing to say to people "Sorry, while you have the same official qualifications as another candidate we accepted, we're rejecting you because of your country of origin"? I mean, really? Whoa. Just stop and play back how this kind of justification would sound in almost any other circumstance. Think about how the press will make it sound when they (inevitably) get wind of it.

SUBSEQUENT EDIT

So, this question interested me, and I've bounced it off a couple of other people in my lab. Their main concern seemed to be that grouping by country was just to coarse a measurement, as every country has its own mix of good and bad schools. The basic idea, though, didn't seem to elicit the same gut reaction as it did from me.

Moreover, I've googled and found at least two examples of courses that vary their requirements based on country of origin, so there is precedent:

https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/for/international-students/is-entry-requirements/is-minimum-overseas-entry-requirements.html

http://sydney.edu.au/business/futurestudents/postgraduate_study/pg_coursework_studies#app_req

So maybe I've got this wrong, and should just be ignored. At any rate I'm no longer sure it's quite so clear cut.


Can I publish a review article if I only have a Master degree? I read many articles about specific area and I feel like I can write a review article. So, is that ok if I only have a Master degree? can some journals accept that? (I will be the sole author)

So, is that ok if I only have a Master degree?

Yes.

  can some journals accept that?

Yes, but...

... the journals that would accept it might not be exactly the reputable ones. Reason: an MSc student is typically not educated enough to be able to write a good review paper unless there are other outweighing circumstances, for example vast industrial experience, a senior supervisor closely looking at the paper, etc.

Keep in mind that some journals ask for a cover letter in which you may have to justify why the main editor should bother caring about the paper at all rather than moving it into the (electronic) trash bin.

Still, if you have several weeks of time for writing, why not trying and sending it to a small, initial-stage journal? You might be disappointed by the reviews you get, but it would be an experience for you. Please keep in mind that you might get requests from the editor(s) of that journal to review other papers.