How to apply for a research internship at the master's level? I'm a master's student doing research in the field of the cognitive psychology of language and I would like to do an unpaid 4-month research internship in a different university. I am preparing cover letters to send to different professors within whose projects I would like to work. I want to include in my cover letter a description of what I plan to do during my short internship, so I want to know what research interns usually do. How can they contribute to an existing research project?  Also, can I say that I want to learn how to use a specific research technique (like for example a neuroimaging technique) even if I have no experience with it?

Do you have any general advice on how to best ask a professor to accept me as an intern within their research project?

Networking is key--check out F'x's answer to this question. Find people in your university who are willing to recommend you to the other researchers in the field, whom you would like to work with. Take advantage of the connections your faculty members have developed.

Then write a killer cover letter. aeismail notes that a compelling 'cover letter' email was the only reason he even considered an individual for a research internship. Research the PI and tailor your letter to his/her interests and current project.


Why would a journal accept my previous paper for publication, but reject latest manuscript due to being "outside of the journal's scope?" I submitted a manuscript last year to an IEEE journal, and the paper was accepted for publication. I recently submitted a new manuscript to the same journal, but, this time, the paper was rejected, and I was told that I should submit to another journal since my paper was not within the journal's scope. The two papers both target similar applications. Furthermore, the second paper uses some work in the first paper, making substantial improvements at solving a much more difficult problem. Based on the reviewer's comments (and my own personal assessment), I do not believe that the work presented in the second paper was "incremental" in nature. Far from it. Two of the three reviewers gave positive reviews. The third reviewer, however, mentioned the "outside of journal's scope" issue and the associate editor and editor-in-chief both sided with the 3rd reviewer, and the paper was stopped dead in its tracks.

I'm scratching my head trying to come to terms with how in the world my first paper could be accepted by this journal, but the second paper focused on the same application space and achieving substantial improvements on a much more difficult problem (backed up with measured results) could be rejected. Any ideas?

Four ideas:

It was really out of scope last time, but they either

didn't notice and mistakenly accepted it, or
didn't have enough in-scope papers to fill the issue, so they accepted yours even though it was slightly out of scope.

They made a mistake and your new paper is actually in-scope. However, you won't win any friends or improve your chances by trying to convince them of this.
The journal has changed scope slightly in the last year, or is trying to change scope slightly now, or different editors have different ideas of what the scope is (as suggested by NateEldredge)
There was some small detail about the first paper that made it in-scope which the second paper lacks, which we couldn't possibly identify for you.


When publishing, should every author officially sign off on the final work? My PI often submits papers without waiting for feedback from all the authors. Sometimes this behavior is relatively anodyne. For example, I was once the second-to-last author on a paper and would have only been able to make minor suggestions to the work. Other times, I think he does not want to waste time—I am sure he would not phrase it this way—considering the opinions of junior people. For example, a summer student may collect some data, and he will write and submit a paper with that student as an author without soliciting his or her feedback. But in other cases, he will do this to a first author. For example, I have been working on a project, wrote the first draft, and now he just submitted the paper without even allowing me to read the final draft. He simply ignored my requests to read the final draft. I am not the only person to whom this has happened.

Is this ethical? There is a power imbalance, and the publish-or-perish mindset incentivizes everyone to play along. I'd rather publish than not, but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and demotivates me.

It's rude and obnoxious, but it's not illegal and depends on your relationship with the offender whether you want to try to do anything about it. I have a paper that I never saw before submission and whose conclusion I would have qualified in a different way than what was submitted and accepted for publication. I keep my eye on that group of people now so that it doesn't happen again. I never complained because I wanted to keep the relationship on decent terms.

It's not ethical, but calling the publisher and asking for a retraction is probably your only defense now that the article is published. That's not really great for you, and it will probably destroy any relationship you have with this person. Saying something about future papers can probably be done tactfully, but I'd still be careful.

What I don't see is how this demotivates you. Papers are being published with your contributions in them which will still contribute your value to future employers. If you had an expectation of author order, that should have happened before the writing was started, and really before the research was begun. That's a conversation that can still be had before other research continues.


How to read textbooks like you listen a lecture? When I hear a lecture, If the instructor is the kind I like, then I can easily understand what part of what I'm learning is important and the true crux of the ideas. Like I can pick it up from how the varying their tone , how loudly they speak and how many times they repeat an idea.
However when I read a book, I don't get that same effect. Each idea is stated only once and I have a hard time figuring out what is significant from what is not.
So, when self studying from a book, how do you know which part of a book is significant and important? Or is the described above just a feature of lectures?
Context subjects: Physics and Mathematics

how do you know which part of a book is significant and important?

It's all important. Since you mention physics, I'll use the example of Griffiths' E&M book, which goes into quite a bit of detail about waveguides. Many professors (quite reasonably) skip this material, as it is "less significant" than other chapters which discuss general topics like Maxwell's Equations, the Wave Equation, radiation, and relativistic electrodynamics. Yet, waveguides are an entire industry (of which Griffiths only scratches the surface), so I would hesitate to say that the discussion is insignificant or unimportant.

Or is the described above just a feature of lectures?

I think the real feature of lectures is brevity. By turning a long book (or a portion of the book) into 42 bite-sized pieces, it is easier to make sense of things. And once you've had 42 bites, it is easier to read the book and fill in the rest of the gaps. In the absence of lectures, then, you could instead treat each subsection as a "bite", and try to understand it in isolation.

Context subjects: Physics and Mathematics

The key to most physics and math courses is the problem solving. Many introductory students make the mistake of reading the textbook, making beautiful notes, memorizing the examples, etc., but their first time working on a previously-unseen problem is during the exam. In my experience, the ideal balance is almost exactly the opposite -- students should spend ~90% of their time working problems, even if this means they don't read much of the book. For self-study, this means that the availability of a solutions manual is an absolutely essential criterion when choosing a textbook.


Can I put an invited talk on my CV if the conference was canceled? I was invited to give a talk at an important conference, which has now been canceled due to coronavirus. Can I still list the fact that I was invited on my CV, with a parenthetical note? It's not the same as if I turned down an invitation or failed to show up. Obviously this is not really that big of a deal and I can accept it if that's not a suitable thing to do, but I'm trying to find a silver lining.

Yes. I had a similar experience where my agency restricted travel and did not allow me to present. In my case, I listed that the presentation was delivered by someone else who could attend.

Matching the style of your CV, I would write something like:

  Academic, F. My cool title. Awesome conference. City, State. March 2020. Invited oral presentation. Unable to deliver, meeting canceled due to COVID-19 outbreak.

Based upon personal experience, I will now be adding a similar entry to my own CV. Also, based upon some of the comments, here's why I would list an invited talk even if the talk was not delivered: The invitation is an honor in itself because it shows people recognize you, at some level, as an expert on a topic. Thus, the invitation has value besides simply delivering the actual talk.


Gender transition as a starting faculty member: a terrible idea? I'm a computer scientist at the point in my postdoc where I will have to decide soon whether to apply for faculty positions this fall or go to industry, in the US/Canada/UK/maybe Europe.1

But I've also recently come to the realization that spending half of my waking hours fervently wishing I had been born a girl could be a sign that maybe I should be doing something about that.

My situation is such that I doubt I would be able to really "pass" anytime soon, if ever. Even if I went all-out on transition immediately – which I'm not sure I'm ready for anyway – I can't imagine that I wouldn't be quite obviously physically trans at interview time and at least for a while afterwards.

I'd be fine presenting male through the faculty interview process and so on; my dysphoria is not particularly acute, and I have not yet started on hormones or anything. But I am certainly not willing to wait until tenure! I'm old enough already. (~30, but losing hair fast....)

Transition will obviously make life harder either in industry or in academia. But assistant professorships are not like normal jobs. Getting students, perhaps getting grants, perhaps teaching, and probably a million other things will all be harder in the midst of transition. It would also be combining two quite stressful experiences at the same time, and early-stage assistant professorships are not necessarily the most friendly job to the possibility of required medical absences / etc.

By contrast, my assumption is that a job as a researcher at some tech company will only provide the "usual" amount of discrimination and inconvenience, with probably better capability to handle potential medical issues, much more financial support for a potentially expensive process, and maybe fewer people I'll need to convince I'm a real person. A greater portion of these jobs are also going to be available in a major liberal city with the support structure for this process (and near my existing social networks for support).

And yet, ideally I think I'd want to be on the faculty market anyway.

So: how infeasible is transitioning as an early-career faculty member? Should I abandon this path for now and go to industry research instead, and maybe come back to it after a few years?

I'd particularly love to hear from anyone who's been in a similar situation, or to be pointed to examples of academic scientists who've transitioned before being well-established in their careers.

(This seems to be the only relevant question on the site, but is broader, and the examples of trans academics there seem to have all transitioned after already being quite established [except Lynn Conway, who (a) did this in the 60s/70s and (b) had to completely restart her career in "stealth mode"]. There are also a few on workplace about related situations for "normal" jobs, but I'm looking for academia-specific thoughts.)

1 I don't really want to do another postdoc; I'm in the second year of my current one, with a professor who's relatively prominent in my subfield, and though it's been great I can't help but think that a second one almost anywhere else would be seen as a "step down." Doing multiple postdocs is also quite rare, though not unheard of, in my area. My current position is "term-limited" before another faculty cycle comes around.

How infeasible is transitioning as an early-career faculty member?

I transitioned as a postdoc back in 2013, so I did it.  Whether or not it's a terrible idea depends on many factors, and just plain luck.  I don't have experience in industry, so I can't comment much on that.  But I'm sure it's the same situation: it depends on many factors, and plain luck.
Travel
One thing that would likely be distinct between academia and industry is traveling: conference travel is the norm in academia.  This has two important consequences:

Surgeries for transgender medical procedures are not performed in most places, e.g., in Canada, there's only one clinic that performs GRS (in Montreal).  Different surgeons have different styles, and have different levels of experience.  To be able to choose one's desired surgeon (and get the most suitable results), one needs to be able to travel, which I expect is far easier in academia than industry.
For surgery, I organized to attend conferences nearby, which helped ease the travel costs.  My hormones are prescription-free in Turkey, so I stock up when I'm there.

Traveling is more difficult for transgender people, including security inspections, applying for visas, carrying medicines, facial hair growing during long flights, dilation, shared accommodation, and so on.  In fact, some countries have anti-debauchery laws.

I highlight some other important factors below.
1. Transitioning is personalized.
Everyone's transition is different.  For many people, transitioning is essential: they choose between transitioning or killing themselves.  Other people find it suitable to not transition full time.  Many people are between these two extremes.
Whether or not what you have in mind is "a terrible idea" depends on you: (a) how critical it is to transition, (b) your financial situation, and (c) your family situation.  And many other factors: religion, friends, disability, race, local laws, and so on.
2. At no point is transitioning convenient.
I doubt there will ever be a point where you feel now is the optimum time to transition.  At the very least, a huge amount of time gets eaten up with updating one's documents and medical care, along with simply learning how to dress and behave.
One point: If you wait, are you going to publish under your dead name?
My experience is that students mostly don't get involved in the transition.  If you stay focused on the material, so will they.  I would say family is probably of greater concern than students.  However, there's inevitably some complications: your reputation (good or bad) rubs off onto your students, and writing letters of recommendation can be a bit awkward.
Some people take medical steps (such as sperm donations, hormones, facial hair removal, etc.) prior to socially transitioning.  However, WPATH standards of care for various medical treatments have real life tests, which is relevant if you're intending to seek medical treatment down the line.  You need to establish yourself as your gender to get medical referrals.
When I've asked older transgender people, they only ever say they regret not transitioning earlier.  In your case, if you end up losing your hair, it could have significant and irreversible negative impact on your quality of life; you may want to consider starting medical treatment soon.
3. Transitioning takes place with incomplete information.
Whatever decision you make, you're going to make it without all the information.  You won't know how people will react in advance.  You'll make a decision without knowing which path is best.  And, regardless of what you do, you'll probably spend a fair chunk of your life thinking you made the wrong decision.
4. Don't overvalue being passable.
Being passable helps everyday activities proceed smoothly.  However, my impression is that if someone is making an effortful attempt to present and behave as a certain gender, one's gender will almost uniformly be respected (despite not being passable).
Setting a goal of being passable is risky; it is often not achievable, and it can be devastating to accept that oneself is not passable.
I'm mostly passable nowadays, but people still find out about my past through my prior publications.  Generally even if they find out, they act like they don't know.
Hormones make a big difference to passability (but they take time).  There's also surgery, such as facial feminization surgery, which is a major improvement, but it's expensive and a referral may be required, depending on the surgeon(s).
5. Unpredictability.
Transitioning takes time, and over time people's values change.  There's also a roller-coaster of emotions, a "second puberty" when one undergoes hormone therapy, and often dieting becomes important (which may mean a lack of energy to be productive).
Particularly difficult for me was belonging to a "boys club" (mathematics/computer science) while I was desperate to establish and assert my femininity.
People are unpredictable.  Just because someone has liberal values, and so on, doesn't mean they're going to be accepting.  Likewise, just because someone is conservative, doesn't mean they're going to be hostile.  The people you work with make a difference to your quality of life in general, and it's impossible to predict.
Task difficulty is unpredictable.  There's going to be things that turn out far easier than expected, and things that should be simple which are complicated.
Mental health is unpredictable.  It's difficult to maintain mental health as a transgender person.  It's possible to end up with depression and/or anxiety, eating disorders, and engaging in self-harm or suicide attempts.  (Every transgender person I've asked has a clear plan on how they would kill themselves.)  And even without being transgender, academia can be a rough ride mentally.
Relationships are unpredictable.  In addition to transitioning having unpredictable effects on your current relationships, hormones (if you choose to go down that road) are known to affect people's sexuality, which may impact if and who you marry, which may impact your career options.  Moreover, if you end up marrying a man, by default a husband's career is socially considered more important than the wife's, and it's considered the wife's responsibility to look after children (perhaps through adoption).
6. Other points.

Don't get lost in your transition.  It's common for transgender people to end up only thinking about their transition, and that becomes who they are as a person.  My impression is that this causes others to perceive you as "a transgender" rather than "a woman".  I feel it's best to develop non-transgender-related interests.

Work harder than expected.  Job security is a big deal for mental health, but on top of this, medical treatment is expensive.  So I encourage you to make sure your colleagues have instances in their mind where you have gone beyond what's expected.

Have ambitions beyond merely surviving.  It is hard to have goals when you feel like you're merely surviving on a day to day basis, but it's good for one's mental health.  Don't just constantly perceive yourself as a victim, but do something with your life.

Expect hiccups.  While deeply hurtful, you're inevitably going to be misgendered and deadnamed, have people comment on your appearance, have people scheming behind your back, and so on.  When this happens, it makes me paranoid (Is this what people truly think of me?).  Somehow, you need to continue to be productive despite this.  As you become more established, these hiccups become less frequent.


BAföG financial support for European students? Are European students (Italian more specifically) entitled for getting the financial support BAföG to pursue an MSc Degree in a German University?

EU citizens can get Bafög but you have to fulfill some requirements that link you to Germany, for example:

have been living in Germany for over 5 years
your parents or spouse is working in Germany
you have been working in Germany before

You can find the full list here: In german though

If this is not applicable for you, you can try the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Program) which has an extensive selection of scholarships for students coming from or to Germany.


How can I find out the commission rates for agents recruiting international students to the UK? Problem

In the UK, higher education providers often work with third parties called international agents to recruit international students.

In this system, an international student may request advice from an international agent. If they place that student with their client university, they gain a commission.

My problem is that I do not know whether my university is offering a decent enough incentive to international agents for them to promote us over their other clients.

What I've tried so far

To find out how much commission agents receive, I've tried:

Launching a survey on a LinkedIn group for higher education international recruitment specialists. This has had no responses
Googling the question, but I haven't found any suitable results
Searching on job boards, but the positions are often not advertised, as many international agent companies are small family-owned businesses

My question

This is a bit of a left-field question, but how can I find the commission rates for international agents when they recruit for rival universities?

Make a Freedom of Information Act request.  Anyone can do this.  If you are concerned about possible charges, state that you would like to be given an estimate of any charges that would be incurred prior to them doing the work (photocopying, etc.).


Should a statement of purpose for a PhD application be single or double spaced? I'm applying to several math PhD programs for the next fall term, and they all require a statement of purpose of 1-2 pages. However, none of them seem to give concrete spacing requirements. My statement is too long to fit under double spacing, but meets the requirement under single spacing. I've looked up this question but I've gotten mixed messages.

It probably doesn't matter, although you should review the application instructions carefully just to make sure they don't specify this.

My impression is that admissions committees don't care much about issues like this; certainly I don't care when I serve on these committees.  In particular, I have no idea how many applicants have used single or double spacing, since I've never paid any attention to this issue.

The purpose of the length restriction is twofold: to keep the committee from having to read unpleasantly long documents, and to keep applicants from feeling they have to write a lot.  The precise cut-off is not so important, which is why it is usually not specified carefully (for example, by a word count or detailed formatting instructions).

You may annoy the committee if it looks like you are trying to cram as much as possible into your statement of purpose.  If you use a 10pt font and tiny margins as well as single spacing, it will look like you are gaming the system and trying to write a longer statement of purpose than anyone else.  That's not the impression you want anyone to have of your statement.  However, I don't think single spacing is problematic in itself.  Just don't go overboard with space-saving tricks.  (If you use an 11pt font and standard LaTeX margins, you'll be fine.)


Possible career path for a pure math student I am a student of mathematics, pursuing masters degree at a reputable institution in India. My course is algebra intensive and my masters thesis is based on commutative algebra (until now, I have been learning about Hilbert syzygy theorem, free resolution and betti numbers etc etc). Also I am good at programming. I participate in online coding competition and regularly solve SPOJ problems. Recently I am working in revamping our departments website (We use Drupal by the way).

Areas that I am specially interested are, commutative algebra, group theory, cryptography and writing codes (C, C++, PHP, Python).

But let me tell you I have no intention of becoming a professor. I would love to be a researcher but not a professor. That is why I want to work in some R&D. I don't know what to do after my masters degree. People are saying that you should pursue PhD in Math, but I  don't know if this will help me or not. Data science seems really good and lucrative but I don't know whether I am fit for it or not. Or how to proceed from here to have a career as data scientist. I really do like cryptography and its link with algebra and number theory. So being a researcher in this field is also lucrative option for me. But I don't know what to do next. Thanks !

I'm glad that you're interested in further study. I'm actually not familiar with the Indian job market right now, but if you're not interested in academia, then in that case, here is what I would recommend:

Get a PhD in CS or Business (Computer Information Systems) - go to Data Science is a great career, even if you don't enjoy it that much, it is very lucrative as you said, and it is also pretty interesting. Information Security is a booming field, and is huge right now. You can also do this through pure mathematics, by getting your PhD in Math and specializing in computational number theory, while staying involved in InfoSec work (through internship, for example).

The academic job market in India, especially for Professors, seems to be relativity good at the moment, so it may be easy to get a job as one. I don't know this for sure though. It seems like this isn't an option for you though, so here is what I would say:

Do something like I suggested above (I strongly believe that Data Science is the way to go), and try to get into a reputable institition in India (if you plan to stay there), like IIT. Otherwise, there a lot of good institions throughout the world that you can look into. To become a data scientist, you need to apply to PhD programs in CIS/Business/CS, and join a research group that has a Data analytics concentration (talking in regards to my experience here in the USA). There's a lot of US Companies that have major offices in India, and Data is a big field now that is under-saturated currently.


How to explain an unofficial research sabbatical on my CV? Last year, I took 3 months off my usual paid work (in an partly related field) and just focused on research.  Although, I remained as an Adjunct for a university, this 'research sabbatical' was an unofficial and a personal decision. During that time, I was able to publish and submit several papers.

However, this leaves a noticeable gap in my usual work history of 'some related job + Adjunct'.  At this stage, the sabbatical is only 'covered' on the CV by the Adjunct position and does not seem enough of an explanation, as it does not seem to emphasise the research output I was able to achieve.  (please note - my concern is not the paid vs unpaid aspect of my work history).

I would like to indicate that I went on an unofficial sabbatical on the CV with particular emphasis on the research output, but are not sure how.

How can I explain an unofficial 'research sabbatical' on a CV?

Given that it sounds like the university was aware of your plans to come back and seems to have kept your original faculty position for you while you were on sabbatical, you don't have to list this as separate employment. Sabbaticals are well understood within the academic field; listing it separately is just confusing things.

You may want to put the sabbatical as a sub-bullet under your academic position on your resume just to emphasize that (1) you're a cool enough person that your university allowed you to take sabbatical (and held your position for you until you came back), and (2) you have experience doing research outside the university setting.


Is getting a GPA 7/10 worth asking a recommendation letter? I had taken a course in mathematics  previously and scored a GPA of 7 in 10. Presently I would like to take a summer research internship related to that subject and was wondering whether it was wise to try to ask him for a recommendation. The other courses I took were not in the field I want to do internship in (except one other, in which I am already getting a letter, but I need two). The reason for the low  grades was I messed up one of the exam due to lack of time, but I still believe it was one of the subjects I knew well enough. I am presently in my undergraduate third year. So what do you think is better,  not asking for recommendation because most probably he will reject it or atleast trying to ask?

You might increase your chances if you find another recommender that can say better things about you. Ideally, someone with whom you already did an internship or project, who would better know how you do research.

If you have not worked on any internship/project yet, it might still be better to ask a professor from a course in which you got a better grade. Maybe there are some basic/fundamental courses you took during your first year and whose topic is relevant for the internship.

If you still think that this professor is your best option, the argument "because most probably he will reject it" is not a reason to refrain from asking. Just go ahead and ask: the professor might agree or not, but you have nothing else to lose.


Blacklisted and cannot do the work I am interested in before, What I should do? As you may know, I have been working on a specific point of research during one year of my PhD. I am extremely passionate about that topic, because I found problems that can be solved and improvements for the system. For this reason, they did not like me. In particular, one collaborator always underestimated me and later persuaded my ex-PI that my work is doubtful.

Now, I am a research assistant in another distant country. The current PI knows my situation and takes advantage of me. They forced me to work on a topic way off from my background. Moreover, I was shocked to see that they don't have any experience and that there are hostile vibes between senior researchers, which bazzled me, besides the very low payment I receive.

Now, I am trying to apply for other projects, more similar to what I have been working on before. The dilemma is the collaborator is mainly involved in different projects by different research institutes. I have to confess they are the most dominant collaborator, and it is a very small circle. I am literally expelled and a pariah. Even if I tried to find funding for the project, I am afraid they will not approve of my work. I feel in a dead end. I tried to apply for other research topics too, but I failed. I am really passionate and see the potential behind continuing in this research line, it feels like I'm fighting against the Gods of this research line. I am totally hopeless. What I can do in that case?

Your current situation is troubling primarily due to non-academic aspects of your employment. You seem to be concerned mostly about academic factors, but let me try to refocus you on what is in my opinion more important: your safety and security.

You are in a foreign country (I presume), and you were forced into your current contract. You were in need of money and you signed an agreement which you find unfair and abusive. You feel insecure, you are not properly payed, and you are provided housing by your employer, whom you fully depend upon. This situation is short of what is known as modern slavery.

Academic aspects of your current situation are irrelevant and academic nature of your work is irrelevant too. Your current working arrangement falls short of basic requirements. While 350 EUR + housing may be appropriate level of pay in some third-world countries, the lack of security and forced nature of this arrangement are not acceptable.

My advice would be to get out as soon as possible. Ask for help in the consulate of your own country, if you need money or legal protection to get out.

When you are safe, please reflect on your experience and ask yourself a question: why do you want an academic work so much, that you agree to work in conditions which are worse compared to what you can get by doing a non-skilled work in your own country? What other (non-academic) career directions you can imagine for yourself and how could you learn more about these opportunities?


How does accepting a full time lectureship position at a top 15 University affect one's chances of future employment? I have recently seen several positions titled something like "Senior Lecturer in [insert field]" at top notch universities such as MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. The job description usually includes curriculum development for the department and advising undergraduates and early career adjuncts. The position is always full time with full benefits and usually has a fixed multi year contract with a high course load. Are such positions looked highly upon when seeking future employment? Ideally please answer the question for people with the following potential career goals (as I believe the answer would be different for each one, as I want this question to be valuable for as wide an audience as possible)

If the career goal is:

Tenured Professor at tier one research university
Tenured Professor at school that highly values research (but not a T1 research University)
Tenured Professor at a Liberal Arts college or state university (Wants some research but main focus is on teaching)
Tenured Professor at a purely teaching focussed Liberal Arts College or community college

I suspect that the position would be looked highly upon for career (4) and lowly upon (assuming you don't publish much) if career (1) is the ultimate goal. It is, however, unclear to me how these positions would be seen in an application corresponding to the middle two careers.

Lecturer positions tend to overwork you in courses such that research time is little to none.  If you really want a tenure track position at a university with a research focus or semi-focus, you need to continue publishing in quality journals.  If such is the case (in your scenarios 1-2), you may consider a postdoc research position instead.

If scenario 3 or 4 is your ultimate goal, get good teaching marks and recommendations is paramount and a lecturer position is ideal.


Hiring academics for very large industrial consulting projects - how to find an arrangement without full-time employees? As described in Hiring a faculty consultant, we need to hire a faculty consultant. The initial stages are perhaps only 100 hours, but subsequent stages may blossom to ten times that.

Will good professors be able to deliver that much consulting time? Would I be better off with a grad student or postdoc - could they deliver that much time?  Or with a less accomplished professor with more time on their hands?

One alternative we've considered is to hire a fresh Ph.D. looking to enter industry. The problem is that we are not ready to commit to a full time employee - it's only if we get good results in the initial stages (and our investors agree!). Is there a solution for this?

One last alternative is to work out a research arrangement, where the professor would direct some of their research towards our needs. They'd get to publish the papers (with the application details removed, but the algorithms there) and we'd get ownership of the IP and control over the research agenda. Is that an option?

Professors at all levels of seniority and accomplishment are very busy.

They have courses to teach, institutional committee service, and their own research programs.  Neglecting any of these for any length of time can have a permanent impact on their career.  Professors who are less accomplished or have fewer duties in one of these areas will typically have more in the others.

Even a professor who is very motivated to work on your project may only have a few hours per week to devote to it.  One day per week would probably be a maximum.  Teaching schedules are often inflexible, so it may be particularly hard for them to visit your site, especially if it is far away from their home.

Senior people (tenured full professors) may be more likely to be able to make time for your project, but they also have lots of other interests.

One thought: you might consider approaching an expert who has recently retired.  They should have the time available, and may be interested in your project as a way to continue their work in the field and earn some extra income.  But they also may not be interested in working a lot of hours per week, and they may demand a fairly high hourly rate (as they're probably not in desperate need of money).

Keep in mind, also, that research by its nature is very hard to predict.  It may be difficult or impossible for your consultant to accurately estimate how much time they will need to solve your problem, unless it is so straightforward that they can solve it almost at once.

As far as fresh PhDs, note that a new PhD has just spent several years working long hours for low wages.  It may be hard to entice them with an offer of unstable, part-time work, unless you can offer some other perks like stock options or an unusually enjoyable work environment; startups are a dime a dozen.  Of course, a lot will depend on the overall strength of the job market in your industry.

Your third option ("research arrangement") doesn't strike me as particularly feasible.  A major reason for being in academia is the ability to choose the direction of one's own work.  I don't think you'll find many professors amenable to being told how to direct their personal research program.  They not only have to publish papers, they have to publish good papers which are novel, interesting to the research community, and spur further work in the area.  If your project doesn't lend itself to that, in the professor's view, then the right to write papers about it is useless to their career and won't be seen as a benefit.  Moreover, if they're going to work on your project as part of their own research, which is on their institution's time, then you can expect the institution to get involved in any IP issues, and they often have lots of lawyers.  Not to mention outside funding agencies.


Avoiding offense when asking about taking a course without watching lectures I'm a student in a part-time graduate program that is delivered online.  I had been hoping to enroll in a particular course that, until recently, was indicated as scheduled to be offered in the upcoming course period.  However, due to a last-minute change in who is teaching the course, it is no longer available online -- on-campus only.

In my experience so far in the program, there have been some courses for which I find the video lectures very helpful to grasping the material (e.g. computer security) and some courses where I've found the associated textbook / slides / problems much more useful and essentially totally ignored the video lectures (e.g. digital signal processing, linear dynamical systems, etc.).  I suspect that this particular course would most likely fall in the latter category.

Since I was very much looking forward to taking this particular course and don't want to drastically reshuffle my program of study, I want to ask the professor about taking the course remotely anyway and simply learning via the text, homework, and the online discussion forum.  (I would be able to occasionally show up in person for exams, etc. -- I'm local, but not close enough to realistically be able to attend lectures on a regular basis)  If he suggests that this isn't a great idea, I'd be receptive to that advice.  However, I'm worried that even asking the question might cause offense, as it basically implies that I consider his particular lectures to be unnecessary.  Is it a bad idea to suggest this kind of arrangement?

I doubt many people would take offence at only the suggestion. More so if you have a reasonable reason, such as sitting somewhere else in the campus.

And if the professor gets offended by that, you wouldn't be able to take the course anyway, so the damage control is in place (and honestly, you have learned of a professor you probably don't want anything to do with).

On a side note: the value of lectures vs slides and books alone depends more on the lecturer and available books than on the material itself. For example, if you look at any of my slides (regardless of the topic) without me talking, is going to be cryptic and uninformative, because I don't design them to stand on their own. On the other hand, if you have listened to my talk, they can be a good memory refresher of what I said.


Analysing papers and providing search Suppose I want to provide "smart" (AI, meaning extraction etc.) search over many published papers (specifically, biological) to simplify researchers' live.

Now, I have access to my university library that contains text of many papers from different sources, including those with payed subscription.

Is it legal to download all papers, analyse them and provide search without disclosing full text of the paper, only small part of text or image and with proper citation?

I do not see any problems with it as long as you disclose your methodical approach and as long as your university library's terms allow such a behaviour (which is doubted by Bryan Krause in the comments). Perhaps it is best to ask your university library just to make sure.
If the concerns hold, you could alternatively use open datasets of full-text scholarly publications. Just to name three examples:

The Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus (S2ORC), comprising 12.7M+ full text papers from various disciplines.

The Elsevier OA CC-BY Corpus, another cross-disciplinary dataset that entails 40k full-text papers.

CORD-19: The Covid-19 Open Research Dataset.


Should I retire early from my tenured job? I'm a tenured professor and like my job overall. I don't go to work giddy everyday, but I enjoy research, and usually enjoy teaching. I don't enjoy stuff like playing department politics or being part of a system that puts students into debt, but I don't think you can feel positive about every aspect of any job.

However, I'm also in the fortunate position of being able to retire early if I wanted (I'm in my early forties). I made some investments a while ago that turned out well, and they generate enough passive income to support my (modest) lifestyle on their own.

If I chose to retire from academia now, I'm confident there are other things I can do to fill my time. I'm not worried about being "bored."

However, given how hard it is to get an academic job and tenure, it seems crazy to walk away from it this young. I also worry that it would be impossible to go back to academia if for some reason I wanted to in the future.

So, would I be crazy to walk away from a tenured job if I don't need it financially?

If this was me, I would ponder on this question for one year, then make a final decision. Perhaps taking a sabbatical could help you know what you want. I knew of a colleague who took a one year unpaid leave to ride the country on her motorcycle. She returned for a year, decided that she really just wanted to retire, and retired officially at the end of that school year.

  So, would I be crazy to walk away from a tenured job if I don't need it financially?

No. If this is only about finances, there is no reason to keep a tenured position. The whole purpose of tenure is to provide stability in one's career. If you have obtained that stability via other means, I see no purpose in staying in the position out of some sort of perverse respect for tenure itself. I actually think that the issue of tenured professors not retiring when they should is causing a log jam at my former institution.

  I don't enjoy stuff like playing department politics.

Would your retirement lead to department politics? If your department chair is planning on you being around for yet a long while, I would give him or her plenty of advanced notice of your plans. If you abruptly left your position, it could cause some politics to arise. It also could lead to difficulty in the future if you do decide to return to academia.

  I made some investments a while ago that turned out well, and they generate enough passive income to support my (modest) lifestyle on their own.

I'm not privy to your finances of course, but it seems that you may be banking on these investments supporting you for 40+ years. That's a long time, I'm not going to lie. Projecting returns on investments 40 years hence is next to impossible. This depends significantly on how risk adverse you are. It also depends a lot on if you have a spouse, kids, pets, a house, a car, health issues, etc.

  I also worry that it would be impossible to go back to academia if for some reason I wanted to in the future.

This will first depend quite a bit on what your field is (history versus computer science). If you even spent a few years out of computer science, you could be passed by. History (or the like) is probably not so severe in this regard. If it would require any sort of "work" to stay current in your field, then what's the point of being retired? One other question that you would need to examine is, if the time came, what level of academia you wish to re-enter. Getting back into teaching by joining the staff of a junior college would be much easier than jumping into a tenured position at an R1 research university.


How are professors able to multitask? How are professors able to multitask seemingly well?
I see some professors are able to work on their laptops in seminar or other presentations, sometimes talk to the person next to them, and then still come up with a suggestion or question at the end of it which bemuses me.

As in many situations, more novelty creates greater cognitive load, while non-novelty creates essentially no load. A teensy bit of interesting novelty is little cognitive load, but/and can be quite provocative, depending.

Since relatively experienced people have ... experienced many things... few seminar talks would present much that is radically new, even if it is new to novices. So, even if it is not somehow made explicit by the speaker or by the senior members of the audience, 90% or more of any talk will be a recapitulation of known things... Yes, it is understood that this is mostly necessary, to set a common context for discussion, and that there is not any genuine novelty there.

Also, there is a self-referential aspect to the premises of the question. Namely, the people one sees multi-tasking happily are the ones who can do it. Those who prefer mono-tasking will not be seen multi-tasking. So there's a "selection bias", as well.

And, for me, as for many relatively senior people, I/we have seen many things, and even superficially novel aspects of a seminar presentation may be echoes of things we thought about 30 years ago, etc. Not that there's not progress, but that there are questions that have been pending for decades, and preying on our minds, so (hoping that our minds are still working well) it is not burdensome to hear contemporary progress, but, rather, a happy event. But, in contrast, novices of course have no reference to related technicalities they reflected upon 30 years ago, etc.

And, apart from a greater accumulated experience of ideas and facts, I imagine that a vastly greater experience of coping with novelty and confusion gives a great advantage. E.g., if a smart kid has never in their life before been seriously confused, it is a disturbing experience. And this is a serious issue for very-smart kids in most environments. Similarly for very-smart kids in most undergrad environments. Even up to a point in graduate programs... but/and all the worse to soooo belatedly (after establishing habits that cannot accommodate for this) discover that high-level science (etc.) involves a constant rain of confusion and exceeding-parameters. (For me, this is entertaining, yes, but for those who think that people can control/understand everything easily, and not be confused, it is often deeply disquieting, I gather.)

Practice makes perfect.


How does one properly indicate a translator's explanation of a word within a translated passage I have a paper with one or two multi-sentence translations from classical Chinese.  How do I explain certain things in the text that are assumed by the author but would not be known by modern readers? I have seen where a translator presents within his translation comments or explanations; however, I don't know the proper way to format and mark these.  Is it (xxxxxx xx xxxx x, tr.)?

Any time you need to give additional information for readers, and you do not want to interrupt the flow of reading, footnotes are generally considered the best way.

This is common for translation notes or any other information which the reader might need for a fuller understanding of your text.


Will taking unpaid leave hurt tenure process? I am in the last year of my tenure clock and will be submitting my tenure package this Fall.  However, I will not be able to teach on campus this Fall partly due to COVID-19 disruption (school closing means I will have to stay home with my children).  If teaching on campus is required (not yet finalized), I would have no choice but to take an unpaid leave.
Will taking an unpaid leave hurt my tenure process?
I did some basic research.  There are nothing specific in faculty handbook, nor can I find anything in the official tenure procedure book.

Taking an unpaid leave of absence would often factor into tenure decisions. I would begin a discussion with you department head today. Express your concerns. COVID-19 is a very unique circumstance. Surely they could find a way for you to teach remotely if you start a discussion right now.
If I was a department chair, I would be finding ways to accommodate my faculty. But I would also want to have that discussion as soon as possible.
What you definitely do not want to do is wait until a month into the semester to inform your department that you are not going to be showing up. (We had a professor do this a few years ago and he was obviously fired).


How to choose new advisor when advisor suddenly leaves in middle of PhD? I did research and advanced in the proposal, but suddenly my advisor left the university. They said that I must choose a new adviser. I know some general criteria about selecting an advisor. could you please mention some specific things that I concern in order to reach to best case. for example, his/her scientific background is important yet?

P.S: It differs from the following question, that is about general case, but in our question, assumed that we have a "semi-solved research".

Why would one choose a particular advisor, other than having shared interests?

I feel this is a difficult situation, with a number of variables that should influence your decision:

Is your advisor completely gone (e.g., in complete retirement, gone to industry, or even dead), or has he just left for a different academic post? If he is completely gone, you may need to find somebody to supervise you in your day-to-day research. If he has just moved on to a different university, it is possible that you want somebody to "formally" be your PhD advisor, but practically keep on working remotely with your old advisor. Whether you even want to keep on working remotely with your old advisor depends on how advanced you are and how well you worked with her/him beforehand.
Are you advanced enough that you can finish your thesis more or less on your own? That is, do you need an advisor or an examiner for your thesis? If it is the latter, then pretty much anybody who is sufficiently well-versed in your area could act as your advisor for the finishing sprint. If you actually feel like you still need a lot of input to get your thesis ready, it will be harder to find somebody who can and is willing to take you on midway. If you are advanced and your advisor is only moving to a different university, it should be reasonably easy for you to find a "local proxy" without having to adapt your research plan too much.
How set-in-stone is your research plan? Or, in other words, how ready are you to adapt to the research agenda of another advisor? Generally, if you really don't want to change your research, but you also feel like you still need a lot of input, it is likely that you will have problems finding a suitable new advisor. If you are happy to change research topics, finding an advisor should not be more difficult than the first time.
How does your funding work? That is, do you "only" need a new advisor, or do you need a new advisor and a new funding source (e.g., project, grant)? Clearly, the former case will make it much easier to find a new advisor. In the second case, you will need to be willing to change your research plan somewhat, as few professors will be ready to dish out grant money if the student is not actually working on their projects.
Are you a good student? Ok, this may be somewhat controversial, but clearly if you have been an overperformer so far, it will be substantially easier to convince another professor to take you on. Similarly, if you already have great publications in your research, it will be much easier to convince a professor that you want to continue working on this concrete research idea and not change to whatever other project your new advisor has in mind.
Are you willing to change universities? If so, maybe coming along with your old advisor is an option?

So how does this help you? In a first step, you need to reflect on all of these points to figure out what kind of advisor you actually want/need. Then go over the list of potential faculty that formally could serve as advisor. Think about how your collaboration with each of those potential advisors could work, and what you would need from them. Get in touch with the ones that seem most suitable (as you already study there I am assuming you can just send them a mail, or have your current advisor put you in contact), and discuss the issue with them. Select the one that (a) is willing to take you on, and (b) you feel is most consistent with your answers to the questions above.


Postdoc in reputed university vs Assistant professor in below average university I am a fresh Ph.D. scholar. I have applied for several academic jobs and recently I got acceptance for a Postdoc position in a university (world QS rank 71) and an assistant professorship offer in a university which is not among top 1000 university in the world but known as an average university in my subject area.  Being a fresh Ph.D. scholar what should be my priority? For both positions, the contract is 2 years. Which job experience, postdoc or AP, will give me better chance to get a better position after 2 years?

A good boss (both personally and scientifically) is everything. Try to find out where you will get the best (direct) supervisor/professor because that is where you will most likely be both happier and more productive.


Is verbatim copying of short technical phrases without quotes but with citation considered plagiarism? My question is similar to Is verbatim copying several paragraphs of text with citation considered plagiarism?, but
I want to ask about very short, concise wordings. As an example, I read a paper in which the author uses the following sentence:

  While in the above description we have specified a local algorithm as
  a function that maps local neighbourhoods to local outputs, we could
  equally well […]

Now, instead of copying the exact sentence with its grammatical structure, I
want to point the reader to this paper and briefly mention one of the
conclusions made in this paper. Consider the sentence

  author et al. [citation] show that a local algorithm is a function that maps local neighborhoods to local outputs.

The wording "function that maps local neighborhoods to local
outputs" is a verbatim copy from the original source. Of course, I could
replace this wording with something else that expresses the same, but I find the original citation very concise and I could not come up with a completely
different and equally concise sentence.

I always use quotes in addition to a citation to tell the reader that not only
the conveyed ideas and concepts, but also the wording, is not my own
intellectual achievement. But in this case, one might argue that a person that
has understood the ideas described in the original paper might come up with the exact same wording, hence the wording is not a result of the original author's linguistic style, but rather a direct conclusion of the idea he wants to explain.

Is it acceptable to use this wording with a citation and no quotations, or
should you always use quotes for verbatim-copies?

I disagree with the two existing answers (gerrit and Patric).

In mathematical writing, it is not necessary to put quotation marks around very short fragments of descriptive text where that text is the obvious and natural way to express the idea.  For example, if Smith has written a paper whose main result is

  Theorem. Every even number is divisible by two.

then it is perfectly acceptable to write

  Smith [cite] shows that every even number is divisible by two.

without quotation marks and without clumsy rephrasings such as

  Smith [cite] shows that all even numbers have two as a factor.

The significant intellectual contribution of the work you're citing is the theorem itself, not the obvious wording that they used to express it. As you say, anybody who understood the concept would probably choose to phrase it in that way, even if they'd never seen the paper you're citing. Mathematical writing would be completely unreadable if every phrase that had ever appeared before was put in quotation marks.  After all, Smith was hardly the first author to talk about even numbers – are we going to accuse him of plagiarism for not acknowledging that the phrase "even number" is a quotation from somebody else?


Where can I see the standard salary range for California State University Assistant Professor? Is there a website where I can see the standard salaries for recently hired tenure track Assistant Professors in California State University system? I am on the job market and almost in the process of getting an offer. I wanted to get an idea of what to expect and negotiate.

EDIT: it is California State University system.

I'm just assuming you mean California State University since it's the largest system among the states starting with "C", which can be found here:

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/california-state-university/

You can search individuals by name. If the university or university system is public, then the information for faculty/staff salaries is usually posted on some government or independent auditing site.


My dissertation is linked to arXiv but its citations are not found in Google Scholar! My dissertation has been cited in a few good journals, which Google Scholar indexes. I have added my dissertation to Google Scholar and Google Scholar has even linked it to the arXiv version of my dissertation, which I have recently updated. The issue is that none of the citations of my dissertation have shown up in Google Scholar. What could be the cause?

Google Scholar, unfortunately, makes no particular guarantees about either timeliness or accuracy. I find that it is best understood as a byproduct of Google's business model, rather than a proper fully-supported tool.

As such, it is not surprising that in my experience sometimes documents will take months, or even more than a year, in order to get properly sorted out by Google Scholar.

In the meantime, I would suggest to not worry about it too much: Google Scholar is not a definitive index, and should be used only to get a relative impression of the significance of a body of work, not to seriously evaluate bibliometrics.


Can I present myself as a postdoc at a given institution if I have a supervisor, but no official appointment there? I have already finished my PhD at X university. I am now a postdoc at Y university and in collaboration with X university (by "in collaboration with X" I mean that I actually have two supervisors: one from Y and one from X).

Only Y is paying for me, and, I am currently working in the lab at Y university. But my affiliation is X and Y in the scientific papers. My supervisor at Y accepted that I also use the affiliation X.

As I am using two affiliations X and Y in my scientific papers, can I consider that I am a postdoc at two universities at the same time? Is it possible that I write in my CV that I am a postdoc at two universities even that X is not paying for me?

Any help will be very appreciated.

You may present yourself as a postdoc at X if, and only if, you have an official appointment at X, the kind that comes with an official title, effective start date (and usually an end date), and is documented in some kind of official document of the institution X - a contract, appointment letter, etc, signed by some official person. Otherwise it is simply not true that you “are a postdoc at X”, so obviously you shouldn’t say that you are.

If you have such an appointment (it sounds like you don’t), it would then be appropriate to list it in your CV. The best practice in that case would be to write your official title rather than “postdoc”, although if you want to clarify that the position is a kind of postdoctoral position, it would be reasonable to add this in square brackets or as a footnote.

Note that some official appointments are unpaid, so whether you are paid or not is not the main point.

Finally, everything I said above also addresses the question of whether it’s appropriate to represent X as an institutional affiliation in your papers (if you don’t have an official appointment, it isn’t; the institution hasn’t given you an appointment, which means they have not endorsed you as someone they are willing to have their name associated with on scientific publications).


Can I include a Table/Figure which is mentioned on the "discussion" section, after the Conclusion section? Can I include a Table/Figure which is mentioned on the "discussion" section, after the Conclusion section? I have a large figure, which is causing a big blank gap as I have to put it in a whole page.

Unless you are submitting to a journal that expects "camera-ready" copy, it doesn't matter. They'll reformat it anyway. Put it where it fits in the narrative, to make life easy for reviewers.


Is it possible to publish a deceased relative's unpublished work with them as the author? A somewhat distant relative has passed away and he had 2 papers he wanted to publish. He was a complete recluse in his later life, but not crackpot or anything (that I'm aware of). His field of study was physics. It's completely out of my expertise but it seems legitimate (if not necessarily relevant to current literature). I believe a good course of action would be making them public on the arXiv: the papers both seem essentially ready to publish and it seems such a waste to not make it public somewhere.

Is it possible to publish with him as an author on the arXiv? (I'd prefer not to have my name on it)

Any alternative publishing suggestions are also welcome.

It is possible for you to submit things to arXiv, even without your name on them, but do note that you need to be "endorsed" to submit to the site. That basically means that someone with a good submission history in the same subject category has to vouch for you by filling out a short form on the site.

Any professor or (probably) senior postdoc in the field that includes your relative's research should be able to serve as your endorser, if they are willing to put in the time to verify that the research is legit. Usually these people don't have spare time to spend on reviewing research from unknown sources, but maybe if you have a personal connection with one of them, you could ask. Or I guess you could try emailing someone at a local university, but honestly you're unlikely to get a response.

If you can't get an endorsement for arXiv, you can still submit the work to a journal that covers the appropriate research area. There's no endorsement requirement, affiliation requirement, or such to submit something to a journal. Figuring out which journal to submit to can be a little tricky, though, especially if you're not in the field. Again, in this case, it would be really useful to have a bit of help from someone who is.

Finally, if you find it too troublesome to submit to either arXiv or a journal, posting the work online in any form (on your personal website, in a document repository, etc.) is a perfectly decent way to expose it to anyone who wants to read it. Of course if you care about getting people to read it, that's again going to be quite difficult without having someone to vouch for you.

Something you could do is pop into the Physics SE chat room and see if anyone is willing to look over the paper. There's no guarantee that anyone will, and I certainly wouldn't expect that anyone there would be willing to endorse you to submit to arXiv, but you might get some initial pointers in the right direction, e.g. people could probably tell you what subfield of physics it's in. (Full disclosure: I'm a moderator on Physics SE, not that I think it really matters here.)


How to give a credit to the sources on the Internet in an acceptable way? I am a PhD student in mathematics. It happens to me that many times I see some very good mathematical ideas on the Internet and my research is influenced by these ideas. In general, the Internet sources are not considered as reliable and therefore not widely accepted in the academic circles. However, mathematics is self-verifiable and one can verify the feasibility of the ideas and the veracity of the claims.

I could try to find other references to the published articles and documents to reference them instead in my research. But why should I do that? Is that not a form of lying and a suppression of the credit where it should be due? My ideas were really influenced by the sources on the Internet not by the related references and I would like to give the credit there. How should I do this in an acceptable way?

How should you cite?
There is a format for citing web references for nearly any citation style.
In the MLA format

Last, First M. “Article Title.”Website Title. Website Publisher, Date Month Year Published. Web. Date Month Year Accessed.

In APA style

Author, A. (date). Title of document [Format description]. Retrieved from Website

You may leave out the author field when it is not possible to retrace the original author (as described here)
When should you cite?
If you were to refer a material that has sufficient information to be given credit for your work, then by all means you ought to cite it. But first, try to find the roots of the idea, if such idea has been published elsewhere before this web-page was published. On-line content is highly susceptible to contain plagiarized content. See if you could locate the original source. If found, cite the original source instead.


How to affiliate papers that I worked on both as a PhD student and as a postdoc? I have submitted my dissertation recently (in mathematics), and I have a position for a postdoc which I will start around October.

In the meantime, one of my friends and I have been working on some projects (some of which we began nearly a year ago), and prepare to write some papers. At least one of them we expect to finish over the summer, and that's fine, there's no hard choices how to affiliate myself there: I'm still considered a student.

But the second paper we have been working on is probably going to take longer than that before we are ready to publish it. So both of us will be moving on from our current university.

How do we decide which affiliation to use when we finally make the paper public? Do we take it as the affiliation at the time, or the one under which we worked the most?

(To clarify, none of our papers are directly related to either of our dissertations.)

This is a mathematics specific answer.  My understanding is that conventions may be different in other fields.

The primary purpose (in mathematics) of the affiliation on your paper is to distinguish you from other people with the same name and to provide a way for readers to contact you.  Therefore, you should put your affiliation at the time the paper is submitted.  Furthermore, if you change affiliations between submitting the paper and getting the paper proofs before final publication (which is likely to happen), you should make the change on the paper so that the published version matches your affiliation at the time.

You can (and in my opinion generally should) acknowledge your former affiliation(s) in an acknowledgement section.


Can I publish a report from a personal project? During the course of my post-graduation, a friend and I worked on a personal project in pattern recognition. I honestly am not hesitant to admit that although the technique has a decent result on a publicly available dataset, it is not publication worthy in any journal or conference of note (or so I feel), nor do I (my friend is unavailable now) have enough time or background knowledge in the field to keep working on it till it is.

Can it be published as some kind of academic report or something on a site like arxiv or academia.edu or something? I'm interested predominantly because I'm wondering if this online availability would lend more credence to it being mentioned in my cv - as opposed to merely mentioning it and not having any transcript available.

PS: The method was something we came up with. It was not implemented from somewhere else.

There are two different questions in here, one about personal projects and another about whether it's worth publishing a non-peer-review tech report.

For the first: there is no need for "official" blessing on any scientific work; I've published personal side projects just as happily as projects in my "proper" line of work.  These can end up being quite significant: one of my bits of side-dabbling, published in a minor workshop, kicked off my entire current line of synthetic biology research.

That surprising consequence also leads us toward the answer to the second: significance is where people find it.  If you've put work into something, and written it up in a non-embarrassing way, there's no reason not to put it up online in an archival format, whether arXiv, tech report, or some other low-impact format.  Symposia and workshops can be a lot of fun too, since they often accept things that are interesting but not expected to necessarily be high impact.

If a piece of work is non-embarrassing, what's the worst that can happen if you put it online?  Nobody cites it.  But you never know... your coauthor might end up building something more significant out of it later (happened to one of my side-publications), or it might get noticed by people who happen to be dealing with a similar problem (happened to another of mine), and collect a few citations or even unexpectedly many.

In short: there is never a reason to throw good work in the trash.  Put it online, and let the universe decide whether it's neutral or positive.


How to talk to PI about dropping out of graduate school? There are a lot of threads about whether people should drop out of grad school, or PIs forcing students to leave. My situation is a little different, some people might call this ungrateful, but I want to ask how I should actually talk to my PI about leaving the lab. How to start the conversation, and do it in the most professional and kindest way.

I'm in the first year of my graduate program, and my PI is extremely nice. Like to the extreme. To the point I've never heard any criticism come out of his mouth. I also thought I loved my project very much upon joining the lab. Everything was off to a great start. However, I have soon realized that this is one of those projects that will likely lead nowhere. I am not Edison, and I don't plan on failing 10,000 times before success. It will break me down. My professor is also not very good at mentoring. Nice, but incompetent in a way. He is a new PI and I'm sure will get better with time. But I feel like I'm his experimental subject, the one that is meant to fail so he can get better at what he does. He does not know how to lead me on, and gives me 100 different directions to try. I'm becoming very unhappy in the lab.

On the other hand, I have recently been offered a job. A good one, one that I can make a career out of. I don't feel that I will ever love this job, but it is the smartest thing I could be doing. However, this means that I have to drop out of my program and leave the lab first. As you can imagine, I do not know how to have that conversation with my PI, just given how nice and encouraging he is. He keeps telling me that I am doing great work, but I am just so tired of the way things are going. He is also a new PI and need prelim data for grants. Which makes me feel worse about this because I feel like I'll be leaving him to the dogs...

So long story short, I haven't completely decided to go through with this, but if I was to, I had a few questions:

How should I start the conversation? I'm actually at a complete loss for what to say
Is there anything I can do to not ruin the relationship? I really respect him as a researcher, just not a mentor, and would hate for him to hate me... Although maybe this is too much to ask for
Am I doing the right thing? If I was leaving a job, I wouldn't think twice about it, but for some reason leaving academia seems like I'm committing a sin...
Any other suggestions for when I have the conversation with him?

Additional info: one thing I forgot to mention is that he is also very busy. So although extremely nice when we do talk, we've barely spoken for the past month with only one actual meeting...

One of the points I see in the above message, is that these feelings are so far entirely with yourself. I can of course not know for sure, but it seems to me at the moment that you have not talked to him about this yet.

You say, for example, he points you in 100 directions. I can empathize with that, surely, but do you know if he is doing this on purpose? Is he aware of this? Have you spoken to him about this?

I would say that the best way of opening this discussion is to actually open the discussion by telling him about your feelings. Perhaps he is willing to do things differently, perhaps he is actually afraid to be guiding you too much. All these things are now uncertain.

In any way, if you discuss these things (respectfully, aimed at improving the situation for the both of you), he gets to know you are not quite happy. If you decide to leave he knows you were not happy.

Also, I would like to agree with 101010111100, in that doing something that makes you predictably unhappy is a huge red flag.

Good luck!


When do you use superscript affiliations and when not? I am submitting a paper to a journal. This journal allows authors' affiliations to be indicated either with superscripts or by listing the authors from each institution on its own line. I am trying to decide which of these to choose.
I normally submit papers with superscript affiliations because this is less wasteful in terms of space. But, the layout of my current paper is amenable to both formats (the author order doesn't matter, and this alternate format seems clearer). My experience is mostly with LaTeX with the revTex class, so it's just whether the "superscriptaddress" is listed in the beginning of the document or not.
In the absence of guidance from the journal, what factors should one consider when deciding which style to use?

If many authors share the exact same affiliation, use the superscript form.
If one or more authors each have multiple affiliations, use the superscript form.
If authors come from departments whose names indicate distinct disciplines, and these multiple expertises are relevant for the multidisciplinary aspects of the paper, do not use the superscript form.
Use these rules as rules of thumb, not as ironclad rules. In the end, this is a matter of personal style and opinion.


How do I cite this old postcard? https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47de-036a-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

I would like to block-quote this postcard in APA style. The web site has prepared references citation, but it doesn't use the author's name which is clearly shown in the image itself. And if I'm not supposed to use the original author's name in the references citation, how do I format the in-text citation?

Forget for a moment APA style and ask what a citation is: A way for a reader to find the source you used so that they can check themselves. APA and other styles provide sort of a general format to do this, but the essence and end-all is not that you slavishly follow the style, but that you follow the spirit of making a resource retrievable with the information you provide.

In the current context, that means that whether or not you provide the author's name doesn't really matter: Knowing the author doesn't help anyone find the postcard. So just go with what is suggested on the website to cite the document.


Tenure-track reference letters: previous supervisors versus outsiders I remember reading in The Professor Is In that the tenure-track references should be from external members, not only your past advisors/supervisors.

That book is written aimed at social sciences, maybe, so, for Computer Science, in Canada (and the US), how important is it really?

I imagine that it would not be a dealbreaker for a rockstar, and that exactly how much impact would depend on the case/institution/competition, but what can I expect the impact to be?

It's a lot harder to have non-advisors write letters for a tenure-track application in most STEM fields, largely because of the more direct connection between projects, funding, and supervision in STEM fields versus humanities fields.

In the applications I've reviewed as a hiring committee member in engineering, pretty much every letter came from either a PI or co-PI of a project the applicant worked on as either a graduate student or a postdoc. If there was a letter from an "external" member, I don't recall seeing it. However, it certainly wouldn't hurt if such letters were available, so long as it's a helpful letter of recommendation.


Conditions for uploading IEEE publications to ArXiv Having a paper accepted at an IEEE conference I would like to upload it to ArXiv. From the FAQ:

  Can an author post his manuscript on a preprint server such as ArXiv?
  Yes. The IEEE recognizes that many authors share their unpublished
  manuscripts on public sites. Once manuscripts have been accepted for
  publication by IEEE, an author is required to post an IEEE copyright
  notice on his preprint. Upon publication, the author must replace the
  preprint with either 1) the full citation to the IEEE work with
  Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) or a link to the paper’s abstract in
  IEEE Xplore, or 2) the accepted version only (not the IEEEpublished
  version), including the IEEE copyright notice and full citation, with
  a link to the final, published paper in IEEE Xplore.

I am not quite sure what this exactly means. I have the latex source for the document I submitted to the conference. What modifications do I have to make in detail?

Do I have to add an extra page with "IEEE copyright notice and full citation, with a link to the final, published paper in IEEE Xplore". Where can I find the IEEE copyright notice?

I suppose I am not allowed to change any of the content, but what about the template? Do I have to use the format I submitted to the conference?

You just need to add appropriate header/footer information about the copyright. If you have used the IEEEtran LaTeX package to prepare your paper, then there is a standard means of doing so detailed in this TeX.SE answer.


Authorship when PhD project given to new post-doc? I'm in the mid stages of my PhD, working on 3/4 of the components of a major project in our group. A post-doc has just started working on the remaining 1/4 using protocols I established (to keep our work comparable). My supervisor has now reassigned a lot of my original work to the post-doc, and let them re-optimise protocols independently.

Now it's looking like I will have no authorship for the majority of the project, as the post-doc modified my protocols (which were meant to be consistent between us) and has taken over the bulk of my project.

What can I do to ensure I still get first-author publications out of my PhD? I have spoken with my supervisor who does not want to discuss authorship 'at this stage' and has been known to publish in the past without consulting other members of the group.

Thanks

First things first: I fully agree with Buffy and whoever else that this sounds like a very dodgy situation. A supervisor reassigning work and then 'not wanting to discuss authorship at this stage' takes an enormous amount of agency away from you as a PhD student. That has to be demotivating and frustrating. You could indeed look into transferring to another supervisor.

If you want to stay with this group, the project sounds like a co-first authorship to me. If you've done 3/4 of the project already, that seems fair even if the postdoc will optimise some of your results. Since taking it up with your supervisor wasn't really fruitful, talk to the postdoc and make sure they see this project as a shared first publication as well. After that, stay involved by discussing results, , asking what you can do to help, helping with troubleshooting etc. Make sure you know what stage the project is at and especially when writing starts, help with that. Obviously if you can improve on results, that's a bonus, but just staying involved should come a long way.


Can I Publish Research if I work for the company? I will be doing some research for a company I am about to start working for. The company is small and provides animal assisted interventions in schools. They want and need ways to measure the children's progress. I have suggested a validated measure and agreed to help with research and analysis.
Am I able to write this up and submit for publication?
I have a masters in Psych and been through the publication process before (although unsuccessful).
Basically I am worried about conflict of interest (I suppose it is in my favour to show positive results) and ethics as I am no longer affiliated with a university.
But I know there's a shortage of research in this area and I want to add to it.
Any suggestions are very welcome!
Thank you in advance

Two important things to consider...

A) It's up to the company. If they approve, then you can possibly write it up. If they disapprove, you cannot.

B) Human subjects research must be conducted under proper ethical controls - some sort of institutional review board has to approve of your human subjects research ahead of time, or certify that your research does not need full review.

These research regulations do not apply to certain types of data that are not considered research. For example, if a teacher is assessing the efficacy of their own lessons, and they don't plan to disseminate the results, it is not considered "research". Similarly, market studies, customer satisfaction surveys, etc, are all not "research" from a regulatory perspective.

Therefore, it's possible that your study is completely okay if it's just used internally, but not okay to be published without taking steps like obtaining proper informed consent from the research subjects and getting prior approval for the study.

(this is from a US perspective; rules might be different elsewhere, but there are likely to be similarities and it's something you would need to investigate)


Would it hurt if I mention somewhere in my application package to a phd program that I applied to the same program? I applied to a phd program last year and was not offered anything. This year, I would like to take a shot at that school once more. I thus wonder if it would do me good or bad or neither for me to mention somewhere in my application package that I once applied to the program? The school does not ask applicants to reveal such information in their online application system
(so that I think the present question is differentiated from this neighboring question Reapplying to same PhD program....

Suppose doing so is tacitly expected and otherwise the applicant could be considered trying to cover up something. Then what is a judicial way to describe the situation?

Moreover, could an admissions committee of a very competitive program somehow really remember who applied before and who is fresh?

It's not standard, in my experience, to ask applicants if they've applied before.  (For one, this only applies to a relatively small percentage of applicants typically.)  Therefore, if they don't ask for it, they shouldn't expecting this information, and there's typically no reason to provide it.

Looking at your application, they may or may not remember you, depending on (i) if it's the same people doing admissions, (ii) how many applicants they got, and (iii) how much your application stood out.  If they don't already remember you, reminding them you were unmemorable last time won't do you many favors.

The only situation in which you might want to say something is if you were in contact with a faculty member who wanted to admit you, but for whatever reason they couldn't accept you.  In this case, you can just email that faculty member to let them know you're applying again.


The meaning of "if any" in journal print charges description I saw the following in a journal homepage at  http://www.pphmj.com/journals/jpanta_author_information.htm

  Print Charges:
  To defray the publication cost, authors are requested to arrange print charges of their accepted papers at the rate of US$ 40 per page from their institutions/research grants, if any.

I don't understand the meaning of if any in the above sentences. I have a paper with no grant. Should I pay any thing?

In my field (political science), a non-open access journal that charges publication fees clearly raises a red flag. But apparently publication fees in other fields are common for subscription-based journals (see comments). It might be just a coincidence then that Pushpa Publishing House is a predatory publisher that appears on "Beall's List".
Don't publish with this journal.


How to write a good essay for phD application? I have completed my Bachelors of Engineering and I now want to purse my PhD in Computer Science. I have written essays for my Masters application before and I am familiar with the context of those essays. How different are they from PhD application essays? And how should I proceed with writing my PhD application essay?

First, I would recommend reading some of the requirements from schools you intend on applying to. Most schools have very similar requirements, but it may be worth looking at the schools that you are most interested in attending before you get started (page requirements, etc. can deviate from school to school).

Since you are applying to PhD programs you will want to be addressing the questions of "What makes you an individual well suited to research in computer science?" and "Why should institution X accept you?"-- this will involve talking about your past achievements, what made you want to pursue a PhD in computer science, what type of research you want to do, etc.

As far as definitive strategy goes, there are numerous routes you can go (I will leave a couple of links at the end of this post). One that I would recommend is to write the majority of the statement such that it can be sent to any institution (i.e., is not institution specific). Set it up (as far as continuity goes) so that your last paragraph is why you want to attend institution X. This way you will only need to re-write the last paragraph for each application you send out.

Here are some helpful links I found:

Sample Statement for MIT

A post on SoP w/ Example

An article with some examples

Hope that helps!


Is it ok to have a paper with no academic citation but just think tank and investigative journalism? I'm writing my first paper for a conference about an issue enquired just by think tank, investigative journalism, ONG and United Nation Agencies but not directly from academic research.

So, is it correct to present that paper with only collateral academic writing?

If your research concerns a specific subject for which all presently published material comes from think-tanks and news articles, then it is perfectly legitimate to cite those sources as your main source of literature.  However, while this may be true of the specific issue you are investigating, it would be extremely unusual for that issue to be so unique that it cannot be put into any broader scholarly context in any field of academic inquiry.

For example, suppose you take some extremely specific topic -- e.g., you want to investigate the effect of fluctuating prices of bananas on the eating habits of rural families in Peru.  Perhaps there is not yet any academic literature on that topic, but there might be news articles from time to time that talk about farmers when banana prices go up or down.  Even so, if you were writing about that topic, you would probably discuss the specifics within a broader academic context with some economic theory, social science, etc.  So you might augment your discussion of the specific topic by noting that shortages of bananas in other parts of the world cause consumer prices to increase, and this increases profits to banana growers, which gives them more disposable income, etc.  There would be plenty of general academic literature (e.g., general economics literature) on those phenomena that are not specific to banana-growing in Peru.  By citing literature on these general phenomena you would augment your specific topic by placing it in a broader context.

If you are unable to find any scholarly literature that could put your issue into an academic context, you are implicitly telling your reader that your issue falls outside the scope of all historic scientific and academic inquiry, and there is no avenue of academic research that could shed any light on your topic.  Are you sure that is the case?


Good source for pre PhD level papers/dissertations in Mathematics I am looking for a good source to get my hands on some pre PhD level maths papers/dissertations, because I want to get a better feeling what is expected. (i.e. BSc and MSc Dissertations)

My department is unfortunately not at liberty to make MSc Dissertations available for copyright reasons, so I am stuck with asking individual people. In order to get a good overview I'd really like to get my hands on a much bigger selection of papers though, so I'm looking for a good online sources.

Your best source of such information would be to look for electronic repositories that are at least partially "open." The openThesis repository offers one such source, and you might find some information on sites like academia.edu.

An alternate source would be to look at individual school's repositories. For instance, MIT's DSpace offers copies of many recent MIT thesis and dissertations, which can be previewed by anyone, although you need to be a member of the MIT community in order to be able to download and print documents from the site.


Applying for research assistant (What can I speak about?) I will be applying for a research assistant position under a professor at my college (master's program). I have an interview with her on phone (competition will be stiff, many students have applied). What should I be talking about? How do I put forward to her that I can manage my time well between studying responsibilities and research? More importantly, how do I show my eagerness for working under her and towards the research work at hand?

This will be my first time - giving an interview for a research position and I don't know what I will be questioned about or how do I impress my interviewer.

I've been interviewing students recently and there are three questions I ask myself after talking to the student:

Motivation. Is this person independent and able to solve problems on their own?
Overlapping research interests. Is this person genuinely interested in the type of work that I'm doing?
Technical ability. Is this person going to be able to complete tasks without being hindered by a technical limitation?

It is difficult for me to accurately answer these questions from a short interview, but you can learn a lot from just talking to someone. My advice for you would be to figure out how you can honestly answer those three questions for the professor. Some things for you to brainstorm about: Have you read some of their papers? Have you worked on any class projects or side projects that may be relevant? What do you want out of the position? Do you have an interest in publishing or going on to a PhD?

Of course, there are other factors at play. Can the student communicate well? Will our personalities clash? But those are mostly out of your control.


Getting rid of first degree to apply for second I finished my PhD a while ago but, long story short, got screwed over by my department and wound up entering industry rather than continuing my academic career as I had wanted. My degree and background are in pure math, which industry really doesn't care about (and I'm not interested in the NSA or finance), and thus I don't see any way of moving from industry into academia. I've considered getting a second PhD, but that raises the obvious question of why the first one wasn't enough, and I'm unlikely to get into as good a program coming in from industry as I had immediately after undergrad. (My argument would be that I would have done fine if I had had a different department or even advisor, but there's really no way of proving that, or even politely discussing it, in any sort of application.) What I want is a place where I can do research and churn out papers in my field to build up a nice CV for future things, and that idea doesn't seem feasible outside of a postdoc or grad school. I can't get the former, so my thought was that I could go through grad school a second time.

So, here's my question: Can I somehow revoke or renounce my degree? It's not useful to me; and in retrospect, I should have quit or transferred instead of finishing. (I did try to transfer at one point but wasn't able to arrange anything useful.) It seems easier to go from industry to grad school than from grad school to industry back to something academic again, and it certainly looks weird to apply for a second doctorate a substantial amount of time after the first. Obviously I don't want to lie and claim that I never got a PhD in the first place, so is there some way of officially getting rid of it and forgetting it ever happened? What I want at this point is to start over from scratch, and I'm not sure how to arrange that.

Don't throw out something you already have. If your goal is to do research and write some papers, then you can in essence do that in your spare time. If you're good, people will want to collaborate with you and mentor you whether you're a graduate student or not. In other words, I don't see the reason why you want to go through graduate school a second time -- having to take all of the classes again, take qualifying exams again, etc. All of that  doesn't help you in your goal, for which you are already qualified because of your previous PhD.

Of course, it may be that you want to go back to be a grad student because it usually also includes a stipend, health insurance, etc. But you can get that from other sources as well: You could do research in your spare time, or simply have a part-time job so you have more time for research. A good part-time job may in fact pay no less than a grad student salary.

A particularly useful choice for a part-time position would, of course, be within a math department itself. For example, you could seek to be a lecturer in a math department, where you teach let's say half of the usual load, for half the salary, leaving you the other half of your time for research and paper writing. This would also give you access to professors with whom you may want to work, and you would likely be able to audit courses for free if you're already a member of the department.