Can a PhD student transfer to another graduate school after advancing to candidacy? I am in a PhD program in mathematics, and I am in my last year in the program. This is the last year that they will fund me for. If I need more time, I will either need to pay the tuition on my own, or not complete my degree.

I feel that my advisor and department do not support me well. I am not going to go into the details, but if I had known better, I should have left with a Master's three years ago and applied for another PhD program. I was wondering how feasible it would be to re-apply into a PhD program at another institution. Keep in mind that I am entering my sixth year into the program, and I've already passed to candidacy. I realize that this may look bad on my part, that I've stayed at my own institution and at the last moment decided to leave. I am looking for advice and thoughts on this.

I realize that the reasonable thing to do would be to stick it out in my own program and try to finish, and if that doesn't work, then possibly try to apply somewhere else. One of my professors told me that it may be just as hard for me to get a postdoc as it is for me to be accepted into another PhD program. So I am curious if anyone has any experience with a similar situation. The reason why I am considering re-applying to grad school is that I feel that I may thrive at a different institution and have a better possibility of landing a postdoc or an academic job if I started all over.

Unfortunately, it's probably not feasible to start over elsewhere in the near future.  You can certainly try applying, and it might work out, especially if you have a really compelling explanation.  However, I think the chances are slim.

The basic question is how much progress towards a thesis you have made during your six years in grad school.  If you're close to finishing, then nobody will think it makes sense to start over from scratch in the same subfield (or even a related one).  At that point, you're not genuinely starting over, but just extending your time in grad school beyond six years.  In particular, continuing in a similar area will come across as a request for another school to provide the additional funding your current university won't give you, and that won't sound like a good use of money.  Most schools wouldn't give their own students a seventh year of funding, so why would they give it to a student from another university?

On the other hand, if you aren't close to finishing after six years, then starting over might make sense, but your track record will look bad.  You'll need to present a powerful argument for why you'll do much better the second time around.  In particular, there are people who have strong backgrounds and excellent grades but somehow don't end up succeeding at research, and the admissions committee will worry that you may fall into that category.  Taking a chance on a fresh graduate student will seem like a much better bet than admitting someone who has already spent six years in graduate school but been unable to finish.

So basically you're stuck.  Either you are too far along for starting over to make sense, or you have a track record of failure.

Of course it's difficult to say without knowing more about your specific situation, but I'd guess your best chances lie in two possibilities:

Even if you don't get admitted now, you might fare better in a few years.  As your previous time in graduate school fades into the past, you can try to make a case that you have increased perspective and maturity and a renewed desire to get a Ph.D. in math.  I don't know how likely this is to work, but at least it gives you a chance to explain that you have changed since your first attempt at grad school.
You could try radically changing your research area.  For example, from algebraic geometry to bioinformatics.  Of course this depends on being able to make a good argument for your change of interests.  You have to really demonstrate that you've finally figured out what you want to do, in the face of skepticism (many people will assume you are just flailing about looking for any chance to try something new).  However, it gives you a ready-made explanation for what went wrong the first time: you were trying to do something that in the end just wasn't suited to your interests and talents, but you've discovered that this new topic is a much better fit.

Whatever approach you take, I expect it will be difficult to get admitted.  It can't hurt to try, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.  My gut feeling is that it would be easier to try to finish your Ph.D. and then salvage your career (but of course I don't know enough about your situation to say that with any confidence).


Should I explain the type of a graph in my Masters thesis? I've conducted a survey for my masters thesis and would like to show the results as a box plot:

(The x-axis lists different skill / familarity levels, ranging from "none" to "expert")

Should I mention that this graph is a box plot (in the caption or the surrounding text) so that people unfamiliar with it can look up how to interpret this type of diagram, or is it unnecessary information and I can assume everybody will understand the type of graph just by looking at it?

Context is a computer science masters thesis in German at a German university.

You should use your caption to explain what the graph is supposed to be indicating. i.e. "Boxplot of survey data showing generally higher level of experience with SVN than competing technologies". This achieves both, and further supports the text of your thesis, rather than explaining to the reader something that should be completely obvious (e.g. "This is a boxplot of the survey data"). If you include the type of chart in the caption then it will help if someone is unfamiliar with that type of chart and won't take up much more room than typing "Chart of survey data showing..."

That said (and slightly off-topic), a boxplot doesn't seem to be the correct graph to use to convey this information. A boxplot should be used for continuous data. Here you have discrete (categorical/ordinal) data. Perhaps a barchart (with the different categories shown in different colours might work better)? I'm struggling to understand what the "lower quartile" between "Keine" and "Grundkenntnisse" means for google docs. Is that 25% of respondents had Keine experience of google docs? Very confusing! It seems like you've decided you want to use a boxplot and are trying to find a way to use one.

Let's say I want to know how many people have expert understanding of SVN, how do I determine that from your graph?

However with a bar chart... it's clear that (for example) 5 people who responded were experts


Citing a Book Chapter where the book is not yet published, and the bibliographic details are not known I'm trying to reference a book chapter (I have the title for this). But the book's title is not yet confirmed and neither is the order of the chapters, or the size of the book (meaning page numbers are not gonna be fixed to the A4 manuscript).

How would I go about citing this?

I have the chapter title, chapter author, publisher, location. That's it.

Any advice?

It may not be possible in all cases, but if you are preparing a manuscript for publication and there will be delays for review, you can give a tentative descriptive citation, rather than a formal one, marking the other work as "forthcoming". This will probably be fine for the purposes of review and you can correct the citation before final publication.

It might also be possible, in some cases, to contact the author(s) of the other work for their "best guess" as to these things and mark the citation using their words but as a "private communication, publication forthcoming". It is fairly common to mark some citations in new work as private communication, actually.

But it is possible that the work you want to cite won't, in fact, ever be published, so you need to be a bit tentative, both in the short term and possibly for final publication of your work.


Do you need a certificate to validate your publication? Background:
I got an acceptance at a conference and now need to register for it. They said that only the person who registers, gets the certificate and not all authors (we have 5 but only 2 primary authors).

Question: Is the publication in the proceedings (LNCS) alone sufficient to prove that you published the paper? Or does one need the certificate as well?
If required as to whom I am asking for, you can assume it to be a PhD (CS) admit panel in the US.
I am aware of this question: How to show proof of publication?. But my conference has no admit card associated with it.

Published conference proceedings suffice for proof of publication.


Should arguments based on the proponent's gender be used in a grant proposal? Recently I have reviewed a project from a female proponent. Among the scientific content there was a section about the under-representation of women in a specific field - saying that, on top of all the scientific justifications for the project, it should also be approved to support women in that field.

I know that in some countries, e.g. Germany, gender is often considered a tiebreaker as affirmative action in order to support women in science. However, in this case there is no such policy in the call guidelines.

Is this kind of argument appropriate in a grant proposal? Should it be a criterion to be taken into consideration?

This does not feel like something you as an external grant reviewer should really care about. The gender of the applicant may or may not be a tie breaker (or even a major factor) for the jury, but they will know which it is. If gender is a factor in the evaluation, they will also be acutely aware that the applicant is female, because either the system or an administrative person will have flagged the application as coming from a female applicant. No need to tell the jury that this is indeed a female applicant.

In consequence, I think you should simply ignore this part of the application. Keep in mind that as a reviewer, you are not deciding on the application - you are merely laying down the facts (e.g., related to the scientific quality of the proposal and applicant) so that the jury can decide based on their own strategy, criteria and availability of funding.

Side remark: note that even should you disagree with the notion that the gender of the applicant should play a role, you should resist "mentally subtracting some points" because the applicant even brought it up. It's not your place to decide if gender should or should not be part of the evaluation. If you would decide to judge the proposal more harshly to counteract a perceived undue advantage, you yourself quickly become part of the problem. Nothing good can come out of that.


Keeping advisees aware of literature When advising students performing research in one's group, what's the best way to make sure that they keep on top of the literature?

Is it best to forward any article of interest to the student?
Should we keep a list of journals the student should follow independently of me?
Are there other practices (reading journal, etc.) to make sure they stay up to date?
Is this something that can be pursued at a group level instead of on a one-on-one level?

As a current student, I find that the constant barrage of requests makes it very hard for me to keep up with the literature unless it is very pertinent to my staying afloat. Thus, reading should be tied to my staying afloat.

The most effective way seems to be a journal club with the advisor with the duty of presenting rotating between the advisees. As a side note, a journal club without the advisor falls apart rather quickly. There should be mechanisms to make sure that attendees actually read the papers as well as the presenter doing a good job with reviewing the prior literature. I've personally learned quite a lot in this format.

The other method would be to set up a system to share papers. Using an RSS feed is pretty effective along with using NCBI's email updates. Internally, Mendeley groups or Google+ work well.


What else can I do if a journal editor ignores my report of plagiarism? I am now drafting a complaint letter to the editor-in-chief of a technical journal, against an act of plagiarism committed by a famous researcher in my field. This researcher is apparently aware of my original work, written three years prior to his/her work. I've been having trouble with two of my own submissions to the same journal. I suspect this researcher may have intentionally sabotaged my review process by either offering unfair comments or delay the review process, while his/her own submission got revised, accepted and published in a whirlwind. Ironically, this researcher did actually cite my only published work, a conference paper, and at the same time pretended that he/she didn't know that I did it, and helped him/herself to do it all over again.

I am somehow confident about the objectiveness of the editor-in-chief, although it might be that the AE is also involved in this misconduct. But in case my complaint is unfortunately ignored, what can I do to defend myself?

Can I directly contact the superior of this researcher's institution to bring up the complaint again, hoping to have a different result?

Added later: for those who is unclear about what I mean and downvoted my question, please compare the difference between:

Reference [xxx] already did it. The result shown here can be found in [xxx].

and

Reference [xxx] mentioned it. But it is really me that first give the result.

Added much later: someone suggests that this might be an insufficient attribution. If you were in my place, what will you do then?

Suppose I am this famous researcher and I found out a nobody is not giving me sufficient attribution, will the situation be completely different?

Added much much later: Many thanks for all the comments and replies. I have drafted my letter of inquiry very carefully after taking the many suggestions given to me. Nevertheless I am prepared to eat the shxt...fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...

Now I think it is not true that the "game" is rigged for me just because I am a Chinese...if I received my education in one of the top universities in Europe or in the states, I would have a much lower chance of knowing people like this researcher in the first place...now it sounds like it is still because I am a Chinese...damn this life played with hard mode...

Given your addendum, what you are talking about is not plagiarism. It might be a case of insufficient attribution, but without seeing the papers and knowing the field it is impossible to tell.

You are guaranteed to fail in your efforts, and to make yourself look bad in the process, if you accuse this famous researcher of the wrong transgression simply because you don't know the difference between plagiarism and insufficient attribution.

As an aside, the fact that you don't know this difference makes me question whether you are able to objectively judge whether or not the researcher in question has violated the norms of your field. I'd strongly advise seeking advice from a trusted senior mentor before doing anything.


What is the role of a thesis supervisor at the MSc level I am a first year masters student just entering the first phase of my thesis research. I am the first student that my supervisor will be taking on so it is quite a new experience for both of us. Given the context of the relationship, I am curious to what extent a thesis supervisor ought to play in the development of the student and in contrast what are some tangible things I could be doing to contribute to this relationship as well to aid in my own development? My objective is to not have my hand held (too much) because I really want to strive for research autonomy eventually and produce quality research. I am however worried that maybe i'll spend too much time on learning something relevant, but not as crucial, to the research and not fully recognize that

A huge role.  Masters is a time to contribute to an established research project while putting in your own experiences to a certain degree.  Usually it is not the Master's students job to come up with a project, understand its research utility/significance etc.  Rather, that project usually exists already and the supervisor asks the student to move it forward, perhaps even support a PhD student in their work.

In this sense, your supervisor should be working closely with you, at least at the beginning, to make sure you understand what needs to be done and how to contribute.  This isn't to say that you're doing exactly what the supervisor says.  Rather, it is understood that a masters student lacks the depth and breadth of understanding of the field required to make a truly impactful, original contribution (usually!  Some are exceptional.  Point is that this isn't the expectation).

By the end of the project you will be the expert in your own contribution.  Your supervisor will guide your thesis and make sure that things like the claims and background section are adequate and truthful.

You should use your masters studies to explore the field and gain some of the breadth/depth required to understand if it's really the field you'd want to pursue if you were to do PhD.  If that is your goal, you should also use it as an experience to learn the basics of what research is and is not, what a contribution is and is not, and how the life cycle of a research project evolves.  If that is not your goal, then you should also focus on gaining skills and knowledge that you feel will help you in your future career.  Your supervisor's job is to ensure that you are given the freedom to explore these things within the context of the overall project.

If, for example, you want to learn about linguistics but you are working on a project in international development, that is probably not a good use of you or your supervisor's time unless you can link it somehow.  On the other hand, if you're working on such a project and you decide to study some of the history of the country your project is based in, then that is probably a good use of your time, provided you don't lose track of your main project.  Your supervisor, with regular check-ins, can help you to better understand if you are on the right path with side interests and will also help to steer you back toward your project if you are going too far off track.


How should I credit co-authors of a paper in conference proceedings I prepared myself? Suppose I've done some research as part of a (small) group, and this research has been published as a paper with all group members listed as co-authors. Then I go to give a presentation on this research at a conference, but I prepare the presentation and the writeup for the conference proceedings mostly on my own. Is it normal to list all the co-authors of the original paper as authors of the conference proceedings? If not, is there a particular way I should credit them in the proceedings, e.g. a footnote, or in the acknowledgments section?

I know the obvious answer is probably going to be that I should ask my co-authors how to credit them, and I will do that, but what I would really like to know is the most common practice, if there is one. (My field is particle physics)

The practice I'm most familiar with is that a coauthor is a coauthor is a coauthor.  Anyone listed as a coauthor on the title page of the paper should be listed on the title slide of any talk about the paper, and explicitly acknowledged ("This is joint work with...") when the talk begins.  Whether any of your coauthors helped you prepare your slides or the proceedings abstract is none of the audience's business.

But this attitude is clearly specific to my field, where papers only rarely have more than three authors.  It might not scale so well in fields (like particle physics?) where a "small" group may have 100 members.


What does this mean, "We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue"? Recently, after submitting a manuscript for publication, I received the following response:

  Your manuscript, referenced below, has been considered for publication in XXX: "Article Title"
  Unfortunately, this manuscript on a fundamental topic does not fall under the range of topics that are covered by XXX, which focuses on the applied physical sciences. We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue.

My question is, what is the meaning of the sentence "We recommend that you consider submission to an alternative venue". To me, it sounds like a terse "good luck with that!" sign-off. However, that's an odd sentence, as they usually just write "no" in those cases. Does this imply anything particular about my submission?

From what you've said by itself, it's ambiguous. That is, if your paper really is on a topic not usually covered by that journal, then their remark is completely bland, just meaning what it says. If, at the other extreme, you are pretty sure that your paper's topic is exactly what is covered in the journal, then, yes, their "recommendation" is just a polite form of rejection.

If you are a beginner at this, it is possible that your understanding of what your own paper is about may have some quirks or limitations, or you've presented it in a way that dis-served you, or you've presented it in a way that confused or mis-directed the editors/referee, etc.

For example, giving inappropriate/inaccurate keywords can get a paper sent to an inappropriate referee, who may think the paper is misguided, while if you'd given different keywords, a different referee might think it was mainstream and wonderful.

Similarly, unfortunate choices in title, abstract, and introduction can set things off down the wrong path. Getting an opinion from an experienced person about the actual appropriateness of your paper for that venue is necessary before it's possible to understand the situation.


What does a textbook look like while you are writing it? I've entertained the idea of writing a textbook for several years now.  The idea has taken several forms - a set of course notes that I provide as pdf, a text that is printed at my institution, or possibly a text that I propose to a publisher and (hopefully) get accepted.

This question is a practical one - when writing a textbook, what format is it in?  Is it just a big MSWord file?  Separate files?  Is there a specific "textbook editor" that people use?  For example, in books with separate sections for examples, callouts, definitions etc, I can't imagine doing that sort of layout on my own.  My guess is that the publisher figures that out for you.  However, the author has to indicate "box X goes here" doesn't he?  How does that work?

Edit: for clarity, the text will be used in a professional communications course for technical disciplines such as engineering.

Before you spend a lot of time on formatting, contact a publisher or two and see if they want to work with you and publish your book. If they are excited enough then they will sign you up. You normally talk to an acquisitions editor at this stage.

But each  publisher may have different preferred ways of working with your manuscript and it can affect how you work and the tools you use.

For the content of the book, work with whatever tools you prefer, but as you get closer to publication, the publisher will want its own formats.

Normally, for a textbook, you will be assigned an editor (in the sense of one who edits - a content editor). They will make suggestions about your wording and such. You will need to work with this person, using some mutually acceptable set of tools. It might be Word or something else. If LaTex is required, they might do that formatting themselves, and if not, will probably provide a required template for you to use. Even if they prefer Word, they will most likely have a template for you. Perhaps a required template.

You will have only limited control over placement of figures and other such things, and only limited control over layout. But the publisher will somehow prepare the manuscript for printing using its own preferred layouts: margins and such. They may even want you to use, or avoid, certain fonts.

I think that very few publishers will just print a photocopy of your manuscript. There is some processing done before production. So, don't obsess over formatting until you are working with a publisher.

Some publishers will want separate files for any figures (or even for chapters). High resolution images. Others will prefer to create the image files themselves. You may need permissions for any figures (or photos) that you don't create yourself. If the permissions need to be paid for then that may be your responsibility, or you may be given a budget by the publisher for that.

Once the manuscript is reasonably complete the acquisitions editor (or a representative) will probably send your manuscript out for review to a few people they trust. You will get suggestions for improvement of the text, possibly a lot. Especially for a first time author. Your book could get rejected at this point, but I think that is very unlikely. But you will be expected to respond appropriately to all suggestions, usually by modifying the text. This stage can be maddening for a first time author and there may be several rounds of review.

Once they have a printable version, they will send you galley proofs for your approval. These might just be pdf files and you can usually make minor edits, but a lot of money has been spent at this point, so too many changes will be problematic. But your prior work with the content editor should make this moot.

They will try to accommodate you, but you need to work with them as well.


Is it rude to ask an adviser at my current university to help me transfer? I'm an undergraduate looking into transferring from my current university to another college overseas, the application for which requires a letter of motivation detailing why I want to study there. The problem with this is that my reasons for transferring basically boil down to "this college is cheaper and seems to care more about its students than my current university".

My current university offers help with application essays for undergraduates applying to law and medical school, and I really think that this service could help me write a decent letter of motivation. I'm just wondering if it's rude to go to an adviser at my current university and essentially ask him to help me transfer to another university. I've met the adviser before and he jokingly critiques my current school quite a bit, but if I go to him for help, I will basically be talking to him about how much I hate his place of employment. Any advice?

You have think this matter in a practical way.
You should not tell your advisor that the reasons linked to your transfer are linked to the fact that you prefer the other one. In my experience, you should be diplomatic, focus on what is important, saying that this would be a good opportunity for having new experiences, specially in terms of academia. You should express your genuine will to grow as a student.

Moreover, I believe that you should not fear your advisor. If he becomes rude or irritated or whatever, it is not your fault because nothing justifies aggressiveness

So, this is a risk you will have to take in order to take a chance and try to go wherever you want to go. This is kind of the part of being an adult and dealing with stressful situations in life, specially in academia.

Good luck and don't waste your time overthinking this.


What are good practices for sharing protocols online We're beginning a fairly large effort to share the vast number of protocols accumulated in our lab and pushing them all to the cloud. Naturally, you don't want the knowledge of older graduate students lost when they graduate.

We have had experience with putting all of this information into OpenWetWare but there is a small but non-trivial learning curve with the wiki-format. Another possibility would be to create living documents with google docs and organize the links in a wiki format. Finally, there is always the dropbox method of having a bunch of files in folders. I was curious about good methods to create a repository of protocols.

Thanks to Stack Exchange, I've recently started to become familiar with Markdown and in particular its variants, including MultiMarkdown and Pandoc. These might be the ideal alternative, as they're very easy to master—after all, it's what powers sites like this one!—and yet powerful enough that it can handle most of your needs.

Individual users can write their protocols in a simple, easy-to-read text format, and then output that to HTML, PDF, Word files, or whatever. Then all you need is a master page to catalog everything, and a web site manager who's skilled enough with a command prompt to handle the conversions using one of those tools. The format's flexible enough to handle hyperlinks as well as graphics with a minimum of fuss.

The other advantage of having a text-based system is that it makes version control very easy as well.


A new model for publications where papers evolve over time? In the old days, software was shipped, then used, and eventually replaced or uninstalled. Academic publications are roughly the same: they get published, read and cited, and (for the most part) eventually replaced by newer results. However, while the way we create software has changed to where it now evolves, being updated regularly without uninstalling or fully replacing, publications have not. If you want to publish new results on a line of research you need to publish a new paper, even in cases where 80% of the theory or methodology behind it have stayed the same.

So I'm asking the question: does anyone know of a model where publications evolve over time, perhaps by being hosted and versioned on github or similar; where revisions can still get reviewed, but the authors can later change and extend their publication? Given the Internet, a model like that seems more appropriate to me. Publications could evolve over time from early position papers, to preliminary results papers, to conference style papers, to longer journal style reference papers, to books. Over the same time, the list of contributors could change and in particular, hopefully, grow.

Does anyone know of a publication model like that, either discussed in the library science literature or implemented in practice? I've looked at what some of the open journals do, but haven't found any model where publications can evolve.

Versioning of articles is supported by arXiv for exactly the reasons that you mention.  Each version of the article remains accessible and has a unique identifier, so when citing an arXiv document, it is best to use the version identifier.  A person following the link, however, can see that there have been updates since the referenced version, and use the updated information.

I'm not sure if any other publication venue offers this, though. I think that bioRxiv does, but it doesn't make it clear the way that arXiv does, and talks about replacing an article with a link to the final published version.  It's pretty new, though, and its policies may well be in flux.


As a tutor, should I encourage exploration at the risk of incorrect information? I am a junior undergraduate computer science student at a small engineering school. For the last term I have been paid as a teaching assistant for one of the more difficult courses in the CS curriculum. Because this is a small school, that means that I am basically a public tutor in our CS labs for about 10 hours a week and occaisonally help grade exams and assignments. I took the class earlier this year and did very well, but I am in no way an expert on the topic.

The largest part of the course is to write a small interpreter in Scheme. The students are given a starting point and are told conceptually how to implement most of the interpreter in the lectures, but the actual implementation is left fairly open. Because of this, there are quite a few valid ways to implement any given part of the project, and I do not think I could possibly learn all of them without dropping out of school to make this my full time job. The difficult part is that the advice I give to any given student depends heavily on how they have completed the interpreter thus far, and so I sometimes have low confidence that my ideas are correct.

I don't see a great way to avoid this without telling them to do it the way I did it when I took the class. I think that a strong point of the course is getting students to think about programming in different ways, and suggesting that my way is the best way seems to very directly contradict that. I also have low confidence in most of the students to tell me that I am wrong as they generally come to me at least a little bit confused in the first place.

As a paid assistant for our computer science department, should I encourage different solutions at the risk of incorrect solutions, and potentially at the risk of other students' grades? Or should I encourage solutions I am confident in at the risk of throwing out good ideas?

In the former case I don't feel like I am helping students in the same way that any of them are hoping for, but in the latter case I think I could just as well be replaced by a solution manual. I would like to nudge in the right direction as much as possible, but I don't always know exactly which direction is the correct one given several different thousand line projects in a single day.

Short version:

Encourage them, definitely encourage them.

Long version:

First of all I have to say that I am not familiar with Scheme, so in my answer I will assume an arbitrary coding project. Now, you have to consider that coding, especially a bigger project, is much more than just typing the code. As you said the class is quite difficult, I assume the students to have some experience already, so they should know it. Here, they can learn all the things that matter: A structured plan on what they want to code, good documentation of the code, time management, etc.
Be honest about what you can and cannot do, tell them that you will not look at a few 100 lines of messy code to find an error. Tell them for you to read their code and to look for errors in there, they should properly document it such that it is readable and understandable to an outsider. Tell them to differentiate between logical questions ("how to solve this problem?") and implementation questions ("I have this idea/algorithm, but I don't know how to call function XXX, which I need to implement it." ). Not only will this help you with helping them, it will also help them to look at their problems more structured. If a student comes to you and simply says "I don't know how to do this, tell me please." then don't just tell them how you did it. Take a little time to make a plan (on paper first maybe?) together with them of how this part of the program might look like, how to best do it, then let them implement it. If they run into problems with the implementation itself, they can come back again.

The same should go for errors in the program: You should not be the one to run tests, to do simulations or to input special cases in every last function to find the error. Tell and teach the students how to find errors, show them how to (if possible) narrow it down to a single function, maybe to a single part of this function (a good documentation of what a function or a code fragment is supposed to do helps here). In most cases they will find the error themselves, feel happy and motivated and go on. If they still can't find it, well, at least they can show you the wrong output that function F generates and you can take it from there and point them in the right direction.

It would be nice if I could stop my advice here, but unfortunately there is still one more point: motivation. The above might work well with a motivated student who knows what he is doing, who sits down at home to work on it and comes to you for help if needed. However, this is not the only kind of student. There are also students who are in the course just for a passing grade, who don't go to the lectures, who just want a step by step instruction on what to do to not fail and don't want to put any effort at all. If you don't have any of these in your class then congratulations, consider yourself lucky. But if you want to try an approach as I sketched above, you should consider such students in the plan and should think of what to do with them: Do you just tell them what to do? Do you let them fail the class? These points should be discussed with the instructor, as he or she might have own ideas on what to expect of the students. You should not just act on your own, especially if you might fail some lazy students you need his consent. After deciding on a plan together, make it public to the students, tell them exactly what you expect of them to do on their own before they come for your help, how they should properly prepare their project for you to be able to answer efficiently.


Should university administrators share official matters with students? Should the department share the departmental problems (financial, officials, political, etc) with the students? or it is official matter and none of their business?

For a more specific example. Imagine that students are complaining about the lack of teachers in specific topics. The department head tries to secure fund for faculty recruitment, but Dean refuses. Should the department head consider this as an internal matter between officials or should inform the students why he is not hiring teacher?

Of course, I do not mean organizational secrets. Most of these news spread among students through rumors and gossip. My question is: should a department head directly inform the students about problems? Or according to the common business models, an organization should not reveal its failures and problems to customers unless it is a must?

What is the appropriate scheme for treating students? (1) customers who get service from the university employees in return to tuition fee, or (2) part of the organization? Obviously, these are not solid categories, and I just want to express the issue.

I think a department should share information with students that can affect them. A non-hire of faculty doesn't affect students directly unless the students were recruited to the department with the promise of expanding in a certain area, and then this fell through.

But I don't know of a single department that would make such a promise to incoming students (and certainly not undergraduates).

On the other hand, if the department experiences a shortfall in funding that means that they have to change how they fund students, then these students must be informed as soon as possible since this materially affects them.

Apart from these cases, one can certainly make the argument that sharing relevant information with students helps foster an atmosphere of collegiality and gives the students a sense of belonging. Within reason...


Should a sessional instructor applicant submit a teaching statement? I'm currently a grad student and I was wondering if it is common (or good practice) for applicants to sessional instructor positions to submit teaching statements. The positions I'm looking to apply for do not specifically ask for one (instead asking for a letter of application, listing courses of interest), and it might seem like a good opportunity to also develop a teaching statement, but only if it necessary as I haven't yet taught a course and I'm not entirely sure what I would write about (I do have considerable TA experience).

I'm giving this answer from the point of view of philosophy, in the USA. I'd say that you should include a teaching statement in the packet, unless you are specifically directed to include only the materials they explicitly ask for. Don't bother with a research statement or some of the other junk that comes in a tenure-track packet. But this is a teaching job, and if I'm reading the above correctly, you don't have any experience as the instructor of record. So, what I would try to do is to write a short (1 page) statement that shows a committee looking at your packet that you are ready to walk into your own classroom and do your thing.

It is really hard to write a good teaching statement. It's going to be even harder without a lot of first-hand experience. Fortunately, there's no end of advice out there on the web. For example, this, and this are both helpful.


What criteria need to be matched to be able to distribute a research article openly? Distributing articles that are not freely available can get you into trouble. However, it is important to share and distribute knowledge.

If you are not sure about whether or not you are allowed to distribute scientific work (be it yours or from others), what are the main criteria that need to be met so to be sure that you have the right to share an article?

Under what conditions you are allowed to distribute a scientific work are governed by the licence terms under which that work is made available. Most often journals or repositories of other research outputs will have clear indications regarding reuse, redistribution, etc. Often, all rights will be reserved by default and only certain rights for reuse/redistribution, if any, will be explicitly stated. If no specific rights are stated then you have no rights to reuse/redistribute.

In order to distribute a scientific work where no rights are automatically granted you are required to contact the copyright holder to request those rights.

This is one reason why Creative Commons licences were developed; so that authors of works can be explicit about what reuse rights they allow so users are not forced to individually contact creators to request rights.

Even when a work such as a dataset may not have copyright protection in the strict sense (e.g. facts), it may well have database rights protecting the specific compilation of the data into a whole. It is important to request permission, especially where you are unsure of the restrictions that might be in place.


Handwritten keys and ADA compliance I'm a Math professor. I teach a face-to-face calculus course, and I'm in the habit of distributing handwritten quiz keys online.

I'm informed by a colleague that she believes that this style of distributing quiz keys (posting handwritten keys online) is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Can anybody confirm this, or weigh in on it, or let me know what they do in order to be compliant? I really don't want to stop posting keys, but I also want to (read, must) comply with the ADA.

ADA requires you to accommodate the students you have.  If you have a student who cannot read the hand written documents because they have a disability, you must distribute them in a way the student can access them.  Your disability services office should be able to advise you.

Providing searchable, typed documents would help some students with disabilities and also some students without disabilities, so it would be nice to do.  I recommend the universal instruction design approach.

A UID book


Costs of being an MS student in Germany I am an open-minded Indian student and I will be going to Germany to join the University of Bonn for my masters in Computer Science. I have planned a monthly budget of € 830 including studentenwerk fees, which the university noted me will be no more than € 350. Old students say that it averages to € 250 or something leaving me with € 580. Will that be sufficient for me to eat for a month at a Mensa (I plan to cook in the evenings though) or say maybe watch one movie a month or maybe take a weekend trip to Köln?

I've been living in Bonn for about two years now and have a monthly budget that is lower than yours (750€), but I find that this is more than enough for a relatively normal life. You should be fine as long as you live in a Studentenwerk dorm; I myself live in such a dorm and have to pay about 300€ monthly (a fee that includes both rent and utilities).

You also have to pay semester fees to your university, but that's just once a semester and it's not such a big deal (~250€ in general).

By the way, I am a scholarship holder, so I didn't mention health insurance as part of my costs; the DAAD is paying this for me. You should count on about 80€ for that as well.


Building a local database from Web of Science and Scopus search results I would like to build a local bibliography database (possibly with SQL) with the data exported from Web of Science (WOS) search results. I can export these online query results in a BibTeX file and process this file offline with my favorite scripting language.

Now, the problem is indexing the data. WOS provides each BibTeX entry with their own "WOS Unique ID" (often times, but not always, provides DOI), however, researchers' names are not uniquely identified. This is a problem because researchers often have different names in different papers and other BibTeX entries.

I really need the capability of indexing authors on my local database, to interface it with my scripting language. Ideally, WOS would allow exporting the query results datafile with some "author IDs". This would solve my problem, but can it be done for free? Is anyone aware of some other method I could explore to go about this problem? Thanks a lot!

Author disambiguation is a big problem in most plattforms / citation databases, and an issue in much bibliometric work. I don't think you will find a quick fix. Orcid (which WoS sometimes provides) is aimed to partially solve this, but depends on researchers actually having and using Orcid. Scopus currently has a better functionality in finding publications from standardized author records (i.e. "all" publications for an author, after their algorithm for merging authors have been applied), and this is also exported in e.g. their CSV format in the field "Author(s) ID".

See for instance these exported records from Scopus, with overlapping authors (and therefore author-IDs):

'Author(s) ID'  EID
24802234300;6602122539; 2-s2.0-84861411180
24802234300;55923304700;6603273826;6602122539;  2-s2.0-77955097159
16229637800;6602122539;24802234300;7003423871;  2-s2.0-51749084398

So if you want to build a local database from an online bibliometric source, which include some form of unique author ID, I think Scopus would be a better starting point. Web of Science has their own identifier included in exports (ResearcherID in the RI field) and Orcid IDs (OI field), but only for researchers that has those IDs, which is usually the minority (both across papers and within individual papers). One downside with Scopus is that there export does not include Orcid from what I know (at least not in the open web interface or the basic API), so it may be harder to integrate with other data sources.

Note however that all identifiers are not always included in all export formats (goes for both Scopus and WoS) so you should focus on e.g. csv-exports (which include the identifiers I mention above).


Business card for a student? I know there are quite some questions about business cards, but as far as I can see they are all about professors, PhDs, and so forth. I have finished my Bachelor's degree in Germany and I am currently taking my Master's (computer science).

Although there is a certrain trend in Germany (especially in STEM-related fields, even more in Startup culture) towards a more casual way of dealing with each other, there are still some things that are considered rather negative. I guess compared to other countries we are still kind of strict in our behavior, even in defiance of globalization.

One such thing is business cards for students. Albeit scientific degrees enjoy a very good reputation in a CV in Germany, students are often seen like non-professionals. It would be an exaggeration to say "school-kids"...but sometimes even in this direction.

Hence, many (business) professionals would not recommend business cards for students. Some even consider students with business cards as self-exposers and would disrespect them.

However, I am mostly talking to people in Academia (or sometimes human resources people). Since I have written my first publications, people started asking for my contact information at conferences (and sometimes at exhibitions, like CeBIT for example). Even though many of them are German, there are also lots of international people.

In fact I will visit a big conference in my field in Japan this year.

So I am wondering what "etiquette" does exist in other countries for business cards (as a student)?
Is it probably helpful to have some that you can hand out at events? Or is it considered rather negative (at least in business quarters), like in Germany?

First of all you mentioned that you already finished your bachelors. In Germany this is normally considered a "berufsqualifizierender Abschluss" which means that with your B.Sc./B.Eng. (at least "on paper") you are considered a trained professional capable of doing a job related to your field of study. So nothing "pretentious" about that.

When I was in the same stage (B.Sc. finished, M.Sc. in progress, also in Germany) I also had no business card and in hindsight it was bad to not have any. I was very often asked for a card at conferences or after presenting our work to potential or current industry partners. One older guy at a conference in Germany even got a little "angry" at me when i couldn´t give him contact information in form of a card because he thought it was unprofessional for students not to have one.

As suggested in an other answer just keep it simple (just your name, kind of your bachelors, department and contact info). Maybe your university even has a template or guidelines for it.
And if you worry to be seen as pretentious, just don´t spread them like flyers but wait for people to ask for them.


My Professor isn't submitting my reference letter On September 1st, I asked my professors to write LORs for a grad program I'm applying to and told them the deadline is October 12th. It's actually a rolling admission, but I said October 12th to get it in ASAP. My application isn't considered complete until they get all components of the application. Both agreed. I sent follow up emails: One on October 5th and one on October 12th as reminders. One professor submitted it and emailed me to let me know. The other still hasn't submitted it, so I sent him another letter today and he hasn't replied. He usually replies ASAP.
My friend once got a LOR from him and she told me he submitted her letter like a month late.
I'm really stressed out. I'm not on campus this semester so I can't talk to him in person. What else can I do?

My sympathies. Some people are ... to put it politely... procrastinators. The bad effects this can have on other people make me think to give such people a more judgemental label, but I'll not do it right now.
As a comment suggests: call them on the phone... send another email... and be prepared to ask someone else to write the letter.


Copyright and Plagairism Policy for Reviewers of a Rejected Paper I've read today a paper about my research field that seems similar to my submission (rejected) to a conference. It includes ideas, some scientific elements, and concepts but is not exactly a word-to-word copy of my work. I'm not sure this is plagiarism.

Could you guide me how to investigate this issue? Is there any way to find who had access to my submission in a double blind review?

I'm pretty sure that you won't be told who had access to your submission absent a lawsuit, which I don't advise. However, you might be able to instigate an investigation by contacting the conference chair (or program chair,...) of the conference you submitted to.

You could send both your own work and a reference to the other work you found to the chair and ask for an investigation. The chair knows who saw your paper and might be able to establish an improper connection if such exists. I wouldn't express it as a complaint or an accusation, but simply a request that the committee investigate.

However, even if such an investigation is undertaken, and it might not be, you might never hear the results. This could be true even if sanctions were applied to another researcher.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence in the history of the world of parallel research and independent researchers coming to the same conclusions nearly simultaneously. Newton and Leibniz parallel investigations that led to the Calculus is a classic example.

While we like to think that our thoughts are our own, it is usually true that we build on the shoulders of others. The giants that you had access to are also accessible to others. Your insights might be shared, especially in any field that is especially active.

I'll note that while copyright law varies around the world, your claim of copyright might be weak if your paper hasn't been published anywhere. This might be mitigated if you put an explicit copyright claim in the paper itself, but local laws will determine that.


Where does one draw the line to determine what is ethical to share and what isn't? I am starting to design my personal website and I would like to devote part of the site to sharing knowledge in the fields of Mathematics and Computer Science.

My main concern is determining what is ethical to share and what isn't.

I don't plan on publishing solutions to homework exercises or questions from my previous exams, as this seems obvious to me.

What I would like to share is the content of the individual subjects such as:

Definitions
Theorems
Examples (Those of which I create myself)
References
My personal interpretation of the subject matter

My concern is in regards to sharing definitions and theorems is ensuring I am not plagiarizing works from textbooks and professor's lectures.

Since there is only but so many ways to rephrase a definition before it loses its meaning, how much should I change the representation of a definition (or Theorem) so I am not plagiarizing how it appears in particular text?

My final concern is in regard to reference other sources of knowledge. Throughout my college experience, I am constantly looking for multiple resources to supplement my learning. For example, YouTube video series X does a really good job with an introduction to Linear Algebra. Would it be ethical to reference or add links on my personal website to YouTube video series X?

You can avoid plagiarism the same way you would in a research paper: by citing your sources! So long as you’re not just quoting the same sources over and over again, you can quote a short excerpt from a relevant source and cite it. It’s also worth noting that definitions of common terms, as well as equations, are not normally subject to copyright, because of the exact reason you mention: there are only so many legitimate ways to define a term or write an equation, which places a constraint on expressing them without using someone else’s definition.

As far as links go, there’s no reason you can’t cite what you want.


How common is it that professors have their students write textbooks? I keep hearing my teachers (high school and college) joke about how professors make their grad students write parts of textbooks for them.

For example, one high school teacher picked up a history textbook and joked that Spielvogel (the author) just made his grad students write all 1000 pages or so.

How common is this practice? Does this even have a grain of truth?

Amongst the number of professors I have known who wrote textbooks, I have never known this to be the case.  Of course, I have only a small sample...

I have however, known professors to trial run their textbooks on the students in the appropriate class.  I would consider this entirely reasonable and appropriate, as in many cases it would probably be more accurate to say that, in fact, the textbook is a condensation and evolution of the lecture notes of the course that the professor has been developing in any case.


How to reference a website article of discussion between two people, posted by a third? I would like to reference a website article at Point-Counterpoint: Additive vs Subtractive Rapid Prototyping that is a discussion between two individuals and posted by a third. I'm using Harvard British Standard referencing and it's not clear how exactly I should approach this situation.

In my references section, do I need a single reference crediting the poster, a single reference crediting both individuals in the discussion or separate references crediting each individual in the discussion? At the moment, I'm using the first option but I don't feel that it's correct.

It may be that an answer to this is a matter of opinion, rather than going by hard and fast rules, but I'd be extremely grateful for any help or advice with this issue!

I would include as much bibliographic information as possible, but as long as the reader can unambiguously find the article I think that would suffice, and to find the article you need the author.

In your bibliography:

  Gooch, J (2013) Point-Counterpoint: Additive vs. Subtractive Rapid Prototyping. Webpage: http://www.rapidreadytech.com/2013/09/point-counterpoint-additive-vs-subtractive-rapid-prototyping/ [URL accessed: April 2015].

In your text you could use something like:

  Grimm, in Gooch (2013), states...


Getting the best out of a book-reading exercise A doctorate involves plumbing the depths of a problem and often this involves a lot of knowledge breadth-wise in related areas. Though the latter is provided by coursework, education about a precise "tool" that a doctorate may need during solving his problem is unlikely to have been provided by the courses. Often the PhD may run into huge tomes of material which he has been introduced to by Wikipedia. Intuitively he/she may feel that somewhere in those volumes lies a theorem or an idea which can provide vital keys to solving his own problem. So I come to my questions:

What should a student do to get the best out of a book-reading exercise? The question in turn assumes the student has arrived by some means at the best book for serving his purpose.
There is a trade-off involved in reading books tangential to your field: you may spend a lot of time groping in the dark looking for a bounty which may never be there. How does one gauge the potential applicability of a book to his work? When does a student decide to pull the plug on such an effort?

Related Question: Skimming through a paper

First, I would like to comment on some of your sentences. Then I will answer to your 2 questions.

Often the PhD may run into huge tomes of material which he has been introduced to by Wikipedia: I am not sure that I understand this sentence well. Are you using Wikipedia for bootstrapping and then proceed from page to page in wikipedia, hoping to find something useful, or do you use another source of idea, but jump to wikipedia to understand in a faster way the entities/concepts you find in the first place ? BTW, in most cases I am not sure Wikipedia is something we should use at the research level. The quality is clearly increasing, but this is far from perfect, and some essential intuitions are missing sometimes (almost always ?).
Intuitively he/she may feel that somewhere in those volumes lies a theorem or an idea which can provide vital keys to solving his own problem. This sentence makes me think that you maybe focus too much on a specific problem.

Now, my answers :

When I read a paper or a book, I proceed the same way: First I quickly go through the whole thing (for a book, the whole thing is generally a chapter). Then I try to understand the key intuitions and results. At that point I don't try to understand how they are proven. Then I switch to other things. When I am thinking of a problem, or when I am on other concepts, sometimes a flash occurs and I have the intuition that something I have read can be useful, then I go back to the paper/book and try to totally understand the result. Here, this means more or less homework like in the old days ;)
Reading tangential materials is a necessity. I proceed as stated above, and to make sure that I will not spend all my time on this, I decided to always spend the same amount of time reading on other fields. For me this is roughly 1 day a week, which is 1/3 to 1/2 of the time I can use for research.


What are motivations for companies to fully fund your degree and how do you find those companies? I have heard the military can fund your M.S./Ph.D. completely, provided that you give them X number of years of service after degree completion.

But aside from providing X years of service after degree completion, are there other motivations for a non-military organization (companies or civilian government organizations) to fund your degree?

Here is what think:

Perhaps a company would be interested in fully funding your M.S./Ph.D. only if

you put their name at the top of all your published papers.
any patents that come out of your research are owned by the company

Are there more?

Also, how do you find companies or civilian government organizations that will fully fund your degree(s) and not require X years of service after degree completion?

1.  Companies sometimes fund research groups to get the benefits you've listed

  Perhaps a company would be interested in fully funding your M.S./Ph.D. only if

  you put their name at the top of all your published papers.
  any patents that come out of your research are owned by the company

When a company wants advertisement through publication or patent rights, they'll tend to fund a research group instead of an individual student.

In turn, the group typically claims their corporate sponsor in publications and often focuses research on topics that the sponsor's interested in, including sharing intellectual property rights.

This doesn't really work when a student's funded directly.  For example, most schools tend to claim rights to their students' inventions, which would prevent the students from being able to pass them to their employer (at least simply).  Additionally, there's little reason to have someone who's already an employee go to grad school to get 'em to do research; R&D departments can just do it directly.

2.  Reasons to pay employees' tuition

Tuition reimbursement's primarily synergistic, motivated by an alignment of interests.

This is, if you pay for an employee's tuition, that's a huge perk for them, and thus part of their compensation - kinda like health insurance and other benefits are.

And like other benefits, you might provide them to an employee instead of just paying the employee more because there's some sort of synergy.  In the case of education, it's often that you want educated employees, and by educating one who's already in-house, the result is an educated employee who knows the ropes and is invested in the company.

There're more factors involved, but they can get pretty situational.

3.  You can probably negotiate this benefit with many companies

If you want to go back to school, you're asking the company to incur a cost.  So just like getting a pay raise, you'll want to show them that it's in their interest to give it to you.

Hypothetically, say that you're about to leave the company and don't want to have to agree to stay after your education's complete.  Then, how do you make that worth their while?  That might almost require you taking a pay cut approximately equal to the tuition.  And it might even be worse, since you'll basically be telling your employer that you'll be distracted with a side-job (school) and then leaving the company soon.

On the other hand, say that you're a great employee and you want the company to fund an MBA done in weekend classes so that you can move up to management; further, you agree to stick around for at least 10 years after finishing the MBA.  That's a far more attractive offer, and a lot of companies would go for it.  Many already offer such options.

In general, you basically just need to discuss it with an employer like any other sort of arrangement.

Found a great article with advice on this topic: "How to Ask Your Employer to Fund Your Education", Investopedia:

  Discussing Education Funding With Your Boss

  Pick your degree/diploma or designation/certification
  Pick your course(s) and your school/college
  Create a list of ways your company will benefit:

  You will add new skills to the workforce.
  You will be more productive and therefore able to increase company revenue.
  You will be able to take on new assignments and generate additional revenue.
  You will be able to take on a leadership role within the company.
  Your degree/diploma will present a more professional image/give prestige for the company.
  You can mentor new employees and spread new skill sets to other employees.

  Anticipate questions or concerns that your HR manager might have. Try to answer questions in such a way that your answer leads back to a benefit for the company.

  Concern: time away from work. Response: night classes or online classes will fit into your free time, which will add new skills and increase productivity.
  Concern: company expense. Response: tuition may cost less than hiring and training a new employee with the degree/diploma/certification. Your education will make money for the company.

  Practice your Q&A and be prepared. Take your notes with you into the meeting with your HR manager.
  If your employer refuses, don't give up. Try again next quarter.

  -"How to Ask Your Employer to Fund Your Education", Investopedia


Responding to an unambiguously wrong referee comment I'm now replying to a referee. One of his points is unambiguously wrong. Moreover, without going into specifics, he spends a lot of time on that point and asks us to do something with our framework that it cannot address. This is not stubbornness on our part since otherwise we'd be happy to accommodate requests.

But I’m terrified of writing "This comment is wrong". Even if I thereafter go into some detail as to why it's wrong, somehow I fear a backlash which we know shouldn’t be a reaction of referees but often can be.

Does anyone have any advice?

One is allowed to, and in fact often should, respectfully disagree with parts of a review. However, stay a mile clear from the phrasing "this is wrong". Note that even if the reviewer made an objectively wrong comment, you need to respond with the assumption in mind that this happened due to an honest misunderstanding on his part, and not in bad faith.

Hence, a better phrasing may be:

  We disagree with Reviewer 2 on this comment. While we show that our framework is able to do A and B, it is by design not able to do C. We understand that this was not clear enough to the reviewer, and have rephrased our motivation to make this point more clear.

Note how this phrasing does not "give in" to the reviewer, but acknowledges that part of the blame about such misunderstanding lies with the authors. Also note that you do some text changes based on this review, which I have found to generally be a good idea. I have the impression just saying "the reviewer misunderstood; we are not changing the manuscript" leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many editors.

The reviewer may in theory still insist that without C, your framework is without value, but that really cannot be helped if your system just does not do C.


Does translating an article for a magazine require permission from the author? Is translating an article (that could be found written in a popular science magazine or online in a science blog or personal webpage say) for a public newspaper or an online blog ...etc, requires permission from the author?

Translations are considered a "derivative work." Preparation of a derivative work is one of the exclusive rights attached to the copyright holder.

If the article you wish to publish is not in the public domain or under a license that allows preparation of derivative work, you must get permission from the copyright holder to translate it. (Unless one of the copyright exceptions applies.)


Why haven't we hosted research publications as repositories yet? This just makes so much sense for several reasons:

Let's say I find errors in a very long research publication - A code repository like issue system would allow me to highlight this and notify the owner
Let's say I want to add to a research work incrementally in an effort to make it complete - A code repository like PR mechanism would enable me to publish my work and notify the author without "citing" the said work and having to mention all the details again.
Let's say I want to make updates on continued research and not just stop at one publications - A code repository like version control would allow making several releases based on work that could be published, moreover it allows maintaining a timeline of all releases for better clarity.

Every shortcoming I can think of can possibly addressed by treating research publications as repositories instead of standalone PDF documents.

What are your thoughts on this and has anyone thought of implementing this already?

Shouldn't one of the primary attributes of research be to enable collaboration after publication for the study of a subject?

Why haven't there been the tools to do that yet?

There are journals that do that. Here is one: https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/submitting.html

In some sense, arXiv.org is also doing that, allowing to version preprints. It doesn't use a "repository" in the sense of git or subversion, but it allows you to keep track of different versions of a manuscript, and that's really what is key: Any system that allows you what's in a paper at a later time must allow identifying and accessing a particular version of the paper.


Should I write a paper on open-source software I've built? I have been fairly active in the open-source software community with a few projects that have gotten some attention. However, my reputation in the academic/publications world is a little bit low and I'd like to improve that.

I've seen papers written for all kinds of things ranging from simple summaries of a given project, up to discovering new ideas.

I'd like to write a paper about a specific open-source software project that I've built but I'm puzzled whether it would be appropriate to write a paper about it. After all, not many important software projects were published in the form of a publication.

Edit: as a concrete example, this is one project I've built: http://lmatteis.github.io/void-graph/ - it can visualize RDF structures as a dynamic graph which can be saved in SVG and used in presentations or slides. Would you find this appropriate as the subject of a publication?

I had faced this exact situations a few years ago. I had developed an open source project, which went pretty popular and started being used by many corporations across the globe. Since, I was looking for strengthening my presence in academia, I planned to write a paper on it and sent to a decent journal. The result was rejection with a plethora of useful comments and suggestions. It took me almost an year to publish that paper in a reputable conference.

So, the lessons learnt were (and possibly applicable to you as well)

The expectations of research tracks is not only that your thing just works, but you need to justify how and why it works
There should be results (mostly analytical), to demonstrate that your technique works and hence can be used by other people referring/reading it.
You need to answer why your work is important and what it contributes to the field
Moreover, most conferences have or accept papers from industrial or application tracks, where you can describe your work in an implementation centric way (possibly giving you some leverage from nuances of research papers as mentioned above)


Tutoring, student does not pay I work as a post-doc and do 1-2 hours of tutoring each week (approved by the university), to keep on top on my mathematical and pedagogical skills. Usually, students pay me after each session, but one of my recent students did not pay me the first, or even second session. After that, I have not managed to get in touch with the student again (via email).

Of course, something could have happened, but I believe I am being cheated. What is proper action here? Should I contact the professor for the course, or perhaps the students main department? Or just forget about it?

This is a private business transaction between you and the student.  Neither the university nor the professor was a party to that transaction, so they'll have no interest in interfering, and it would be inappropriate to try to involve them.

Anyone who provides services to clients for money will eventually find that some of them don't pay.  You can see many examples, and suggestions for ways to collect, on Freelancing.SE.  To say more here would be off-topic, I think.  I'd just keep in mind that pursuing your non-paying client will require more of your valuable time - make sure it doesn't become disproportionate to the amount of money at stake.  At some point, the most cost-effective approach may be to just let it go.


Will similarity index in an unpublished yet accepted conference paper count after its journal version appeared online I submitted my conference paper to IEEE ICC. It took nearly 4 months in decision.
During waiting time, I also submitted its 2 extended versions to 2 different journals.
The conference paper met acceptance and I uploaded camera ready version, but the conference is yet to be held and therefore the paper is still unpublished.
Meanwhile, my journal papers also met acceptance and appeared online. Now, when I check plagiarism of my unpublished conference paper, it is 37%, higher than allowed. Previously it was 8%.
My question is will IEEE be able to publish or reject my paper at this stage?

While I think your intentions were good, you seem to have made a bit of a mess of it. I can't predict what a journal or conference would do about retracting acceptance, but if there is apparent self-plagiarism, they might decide to do that.

It is hard to say exactly what you should do now to protect yourself and also get everything published. What you should have done earlier, however, is to cite the earlier papers, even if not yet published, in any later ones. That citation makes any self plagiarism charge impossible.

I'll not again that the purpose of avoiding self plagiarism is to allow readers of your work to trace what they read back to the original source of the ideas, including the complete context of the earlier papers. To cite an unpublished work that has been submitted, just mark the citation as "to appear".

I don't know if it is possible to work with the various editors at this point to provide updated versions that correct the issue. If they allow that, then you should come out ok and also get the various papers published as usual. You should probably alert them immediately of the issue, providing an explanation (and maybe an apology for your misunderstanding), as well as corrected versions.

It would probably be good if you contact them before they make any decisions, but I can't say for sure. Their automated systems have already flagged your work.

For completeness, note that if you have no intention of publishing some work, then you don't need to cite it. Treat it as nothing more than an early draft of the later work.


Is it ethical to profit by trading on information in a research paper before it is published? This is a hypothetical question. Suppose I am part of a team that worked on a research paper, which when published, will likely have a substantial impact on one or more stock prices. The research may or may not be explicitly related to these stocks.

Is it ethical to profit by trading on the knowledge that the information in this paper will have such an impact?

Edits suggested by the comments:

Assume that any stock purchase is listed as a conflict of interest.
Assume that the research does not make use of any proprietary or confidential information which is not available to the general public. That is, this situation does not fall under the standard legal definition of insider trading.

I can think of several different cases:

Case #1: I do research based on interviews that shows fanny packs are going to come back in style. I buy a few stocks in addition to publishing my paper.

Case #2: I do research by mining a publicly available non-restricted social sciences data set that shows people will start drinking R.C. Cola more than Coca Cola. I buy a 10% interest in the company based on my research.

Case #3: As an unemployed geologist, I discover that there are major, high quality, and easily accessible oil reserves under west virginia and buy a large number of shorts on oil stocks before the research goes public.

Case #4: I work for a natural gas company and do research on their behalf and discover that their wells contain far less natural gas than previously thought. I short their stock and profit.

Case #5: I have access to private algorithms that can predict anything. I use these to figure out who the next Justin Timberlake will be and invest heavily in his company.

Case #6: I discover a tree found only in a small forest in France can cure cancer. I buy the entire forest (to monopolize the resource and get rich).

I don't see anything wrong with cases #1-#3. Trying to work our criteria without availing to ethical theories, I'd suggest the following questions to evaluate any hypothetical profit:

How much profit are we talking about? (a $20 bet? several millions dollars?) The smaller the less meaningful the simultaneously benefit.
Who was the research done for? If I have no obligations to others based on my research, then it's more likely to be in the clear. If I was employed or working on a grant, then I have obligations to my employer which may obligate me to act or not act in certain ways. Is my profit in conflict with these obligations?
Did my research depend on resources that I don't own or have the right to use?
Does my profiteering involve something that might otherwise be immoral?

And of course, on the research side, you have an obligation to disclose any material conflicts (but again, the size of investment matters -- we don't need to know about $100 bets, but we do need to know you have a controlling interest in a blimp company for your paper on the future of air transportation).

tl;dr if it's merely your research will impact some companies, then assuming we're not talking George Soros level amounts of money, there's no obvious reason why it would be unethical to benefit financially from your research.


Oral vs written exam - from a lecturers point of view? We are free to grade our students in oral or written exams. Obviously, if only 1 or 2 students take the course, oral exams (~15-30 mins) are the way to go from an effort minimization perspective (no exam creation, room reservation, grading, post-exam inspection/review), as well as written exams for like 1000 students.

Can anyone provide experience on the effort/benefits of oral vs written exams? Is there a magic number of students where this changes?

There's really no universal answer, but it depends on the university regulations and on your willingness to listen to students for several hours.

To give a personal example, I've been running oral exams for about 20 years. My exams, which are for undergraduate students (2nd or 3rd year), typically consist of a written test (2-3 hours) plus an oral exam with a duration of about 30 min for the standard exam or 1 hour if the student prepares an optional part (e.g. the presentation of a scientific paper or a presentation on a lab work). If you fail the written test, you cannot take the oral exam. You can be failed also at the oral exam too.

For me, the critical factor is the distance between two exam sessions because, given the rules in my country, the students who failed in one session should be able to retake the exam in the next one. Typically, in my university, the distance between two exam sessions at the end of a course is of a couple of weeks.

So, in my case, the magic number is of about 100 students, 150 maximum. Of 100 students, typically about 70 students come to an exam session. Of these, about 50% fail the written test, which means that I remain with about 35 students for the oral exam. Assuming that 1/4 take the optional part, I need 9+26/2=22 hours for the oral exams, which can be done in one week, leaving some days for grading and for rescheduling students who can have unexpected issues (illness, other exams on the same day etc.).

The benefits of oral exams have been discussed at length in the answers to this question, and I really cannot overestimate their importance in learning. See also this related question.


Is it reasonable for me to expect an official and timely response to my PhD application? I recently applied for a PhD position with a major university in Europe. However, I haven't heard back from them even though the dates for the interviews have passed. This somewhat provoces me since I've put a lot of work into my application (it feels disrespectful to not get back to me) and since it makes me unsure whether I have been rejected or merely forgotten. I've already got a response (possibly automately generated) that my application was received by them.

No, final decisions take a while. It is not the fault of the program, but rather an issue of funding. Programs tend to initially reject very few applicants. An applicant that seems weak on "paper" might get accepted if their proposal fits into a very narrow funding scheme that no other applicants are eligible for. There is no global rank order of the applicants, but rather the "best" applicant for each funding scheme is identified. Programs generally construct strategies which lead to the most funding. The strategy is constantly revised when the program finds out about successful/unsuccessful funding applications and whether the applicant accepts the acceptance. Basically the whole system is a nightmare for everyone.


Personal cover letter for visa application for TV-L 13 PhD Position I have been offered a Ph.D. position with a TV-L13 (50%) salary. I am in the process of applying for an employment visa (as I am a non-EU citizen). The work contract provided by the university is for a part-time scientific associate. I am unsure of what exactly to write in the personal cover letter (explaining the exact purpose and duration of the stay) for the visa application. Should I write about both the part-time scientific associate position and Ph.D. or only about the part-time scientific associate position?

I can only take an educated guess here, but the extra information that you are a PhD student can only be in your favour as it explains what you are doing with the other 50 % of your time and gives you additional good reason to reside in Germany. As this is a common situation (the vast majority of German PhD employments are like this), I doubt that anybody is going to bite your head off for telling the truth here.

That being said, the institution where you will do your PhD is likely to have some experts or other resources to assist you with this.


What is the difference between the promoter and the advisor? I am applying for a Ph.D. position at Netherlands and I see that there will be a promoter and an advisor. I have never seen such a title as "promoter". What is the difference between the two titles?

As far as I understand, in the Netherlands, only full professors may be appointed "promoter", i.e. the official advisor, the super-boss if you will. Other faculty members must apparently get authorization from the university (see comment).

So if you are going to be supervised by someone who is not full professor (e.g. associate/assistant professor), that person will be appointed as "(co)advisor", while a full professor will be acting as an official advisor/promoter and will chair the doctoral examination committee.


Is it possible to be admitted to CS PhD programs (in the US) with scholarship at age 18? I have a son (currently 16) who is a junior in computer science at a well-known university. We are Canadian. He is very passionate about AI research and has published several first-authored papers in highly ranked journals and conferences (top 1-5% in Scopus).

Given the competition in graduate applications in AI, does he stand a chance to be funded in CS Ph.D. programs at 18 (I cannot afford his graduate study)? Will his age be a problem to be admitted to top programs? Should he apply for Master programs first? He has a perfect GPA and GRE.

[For context: I am a professor of mathematics at the University of Georgia.  I've served on my department's Graduate Committee, which does graduate admissions, for about eight years.  From 2016-2019 I was the Graduate Coordinator, hence the faculty member most directly involved in the graduate admissions process.]

Regarding your son, you told us:

1) He is a junior studying CS at well-known university.  He has perfect grades and GRE scores, and he has multiple first authored papers in highly ranked journals and conferences.

2) He is 16.

To my mind, the first point is highly relevant.  In mathematics a student with that profile would probably get into some of the top PhD programs in the country.  I am confident that the same holds in CS. Moreover, in both of these fields, admission to a top program comes with full funding the vast majority (over 95%) of the time.

I am also assuming that since your son is 16 now and in his junior year, he will be 18 -- i.e., an adult -- when he starts graduate school.  Given this, the second point does not seem relevant to me.  Some people will find your son's achievements (even) more impressive given his age.  Others will have some concerns about the maturity and readiness of such a young student for a PhD program.  But when it comes to admissions and hiring, times have changed: in the last few years faculty have received much more training and specific instructions (including on legal obligations) regarding admissions and hiring than in years past.  Deciding not to admit a qualified student because of his age sounds like a discriminatory practice to be avoided.  Conversely, giving more weight to a student because of his age sounds like a discriminatory practice against the other applicants...also to be avoided.  A small number of committees may still be influenced by such thinking, but overall it should be the case that your son will be considered only on point 1) and I think that it will be the case.

In summary: your son has an excellent profile that will most likely lead to multiple fully funded offers at prestigious CS programs in the US.  (By the way: yes, he should apply directly to a PhD program.)  You do not need to, nor do I think you should, do anything out of the ordinary because of his age.


Documentation control to prevent plagarism I am current working on a research paper with a few other members. Are there good online documentation control tools where work contribution of different members can be tracked?

You could host the paper in a git repository and get a transactional log of who contributed what at what time. Google docs also stores a revision history, and allows concurrent collaboration.


Does academia have a lazy work culture? I'm a rising sophomore at a top US university, and I've become really fascinated with the world of academia over the past year -- so much so that I'm considering doing a PhD after I graduate and entering it myself. But there's something about academia that bothers me.

I'm doing a summer internship at a research center at a university where I'm in the company of several PhD students and post docs as well. I've noticed that the work culture here is a bit lazy. I understand that academia isn't the most "organized" area (unlike the corporate world), and that one great thing about academia is the flexibility you get to do your work however you want. For instance, I've spoken to professors who say they do most of their work at night -- which, obviously, is impossible in a regular job. But I've observed this getting translated into laziness. People will only come in to the center for 3-4 hours a day, and sometimes not even every day in the week. I also see people often passively sitting on their computers and not really actively doing their work.

I completely understand that academics are less "robotic" than people working corporate jobs in that they don't follow the same routine every single day, but it just seems to me that a lot of people lack the drive, intensity, and seriousness that I see in my romanticized version of the world of academia. Thoughts?

Different areas of work look differently. A mechanic, a tailor or a miner perform visible physical operations and deliver an objective and measurable result by hour. Compared with them, office work may seem lazy: people sit at their desks, they are not sweating, can have toilet and drink breaks whenever they want, etc. Also, the result of their work seems less tangible: we do not see goods or materials produced, only papers, and looking from outside, we often can not understand how good the  result is without taking their manager's word for it.

Academic teaching and administration work is very much like office work in a company. Teaching-focused colleges and universities often seem very similar to corporate organisations (with one important difference that they have  less support  structures and security for academics).

Academic research work seem even less organised and the results seem even less tangible. People either appear sitting at their computers idly (while they are in fact thinking on the problem), or stay at the whiteboard scribbling unreadable equations (still thinking on their problems), or stay at home (thinking about their problems). If you look around, you will see the result of their thinking process (e.g. a computer or smartphone in front of you, as well as many many others). But the results do not jump out of their heads in the same visible way how an ore appears from the mine.

Corporate culture portraits an idealised worker as an energetic, serious man in suit. There are many, many problems with this idealised picture, for example, the fact that it is relatively easy to make such an appearance without any real skill, knowledge and desire to produce a meaningful result. Academia, partly, shares this problem: there is an idealised image of academic (a person excellent in everything, highly introvertial but excellent in communicating complex ideas to different audiences, etc etc), which has little to do with the real academic culture. Many academics visibly change their behaviour when they have to present their results for promotion or appraisal. However, in their natural habitat, they still focus on solving their problems in the way which is most effective for them, do not act to impress you or match your expectations about how this process has to look.


Is it socially appropriate to ring up a professor whom you have corresponded with briefly by email? A couple of weeks back I sent an email to a professor in a University in my home country with whom I have never known on any personal or professional level. My intention was to seek potential collaborations with him as a recent graduate with a BSc should I return home.

He did replied and to which I responded. One of his question to me was whether I am happy to collaborate without being paid to which I replied, "Yes, I am happy but I am only able to work on any project outside of standard office hours due to foreseeable industry commitment".

Since then, I have not received any replies.

Would it be appropriate for me to ring him up?

I don't see any problems for you to call him.

If you want answers quick, this is the best way to achieve it. If you feel a bit uncomfortable calling him, then I suggest that you "ping" him with re-sending your last mail or that you ask him if he can reply from the previous message.

Teachers at my university, some have their phone number (Both private and work, though private is not mandatory) listed at the university website so that students can reach them outside of working hours if it's urgent.

So having students call them is nothing new and shouldn't be a problem.


What is the name for "academic fights"? There are several kinds of academic fights:

Two researchers may have different interpretations or modelling approaches to the same dataset. They claim that the other party is wrong in their publications.
Two researchers claim that they did the same thing first, not citing the other's work
Two researchers claim that the other party's research method, data collection process, and coding methods are problematic.

What are the names of these fights? How do I find recent examples of these fight?

To my eyes, your examples fall into two very different categories.

When researchers are in conflict about who did something first, that is typically known as a priority dispute. When the stakes are high, these can be extremely bitter: see, for example, the fight over the discovery of Haumea or the fight over CRISPR patents.  The problem here is that it's not really a scientific dispute at all, but rather a historical or societal dispute, and scientific methods cannot generally help to resolve it.

On the other hand, when scientists are contending over a technical question, ultimately the fight will be settled by nature and not the scientists (even extreme political pressure can only defy reality for a limited time). When considering low-intensity conflicts, this is so common that I'm not even sure that it has a particular name---it's just a natural side-effect of the scientific method. Get any two scientists in a room together and you will find that there are things that they disagree about and are would be happy to see settled one way or another by additional evidence.  When they are larger and more persistent, they typically end up being called something along the lines of a debate (e.g., "the nature vs. nurture debate") or a controversy (e.g., "the Hopi time controversy").  In this case, ultimately there is usually some truth to both sides, and the ultimate resolution is often actually a reframing of the problem.


How to evaluate undergrad CS programs when eventually aiming for PhD? My daughter has a strong interest in theoretical computer science, and she has just been  admitted to several different universities as a freshman.  She is just a bright student, not a genius, with a bit of research experience in cryptography and randomness stuff, and a semifinalist in a couple of national competitions.   She intends to continue graduate study in theoretical CS, or a closely related subfield, after finishing her undergraduate degree.

Given her strong interest in eventual graduate study, what criteria should we take into account in choosing where to enroll as an undergraduate?  How can we tell which undergrad programs best prepare their students for graduate school?

Although I'm sure you already realize this, you shouldn't let a laser focus on your daughter's professional development control her choice of which school to attend.  (Influence, sure, but not control.  And yes: HER choice.)  Given your daughter's background and experience, she will likely be very successful no matter where she enrolls.  I've seen very successful theoretical computer scientists come from a huge variety of undergraduate programs, not all of which were associated with strong graduate CS programs.  It is at least as important for her to find a place where she feels (and not just is) supported and challenged, both by her faculty and her peers.  Otherwise, no matter how strong the department is on average, it won't be a good fit for her personally.

There is absolutely no substitute for a personal visit to each campus, if you can manage it.  Let her drop into the comptuer science department, get a feel for the community vibe, sit in on a class, talk to a professor or two if she can, hang out in the dorms.  Meanwhile, you go somewhere else.  Go'way.  Shoo.

But if you really want hard data, I recommend that you—or better yet, your daughter—directly contact the computer science departments at the schools where she's been admitted, describe her experience and her goals (which should make them very eager to attract her), and then ask questions like the following:

How many students graduated from your program in the last five years?
How many / what fraction of those students are currently enrolled in strong computer science PhD programs?
How many / what fraction of your current undergraduates are involved in research with your faculty?
How many of your faculty do research in theoretical computer science?
[The Hail Mary:] Would you mind asking one of them to contact me?  I'd like to ask some more questions.

Beware the answer "I don't know", or qualitative waffle like like "quite a lot" that really mean "I don't know".  Ask for numbers.  Ask for examples.  Channel your inner Cuba Gooding Jr: Show me the data!

Your first contact will almost certainly be answered by someone on the administrative staff, who may not have the data you want at hand.  Be prepared make an appointment to speak over the phone (or Skype or whatever) with the director of undergraduate programs or another faculty member.  If you do speak over the phone, try to keep your conversation short and to the point; these people are very very busy.

Don't bother asking admissions officers these questions; Chances are very high that they just don't know.  You really need to contact the departments directly.

Another good place to look is the list of current and past winners and runners-up for the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate award, which specifically recognizes undergraduate research.  A significant fraction of winners did their undergraduate research in theoretical computer science.  Also, a significant fraction of winners were not enrolled in departments with a top-10 graduate program.

But as Anonymous Mathematician notes in a comment, you shouldn't take the CRA list too seriously; some departments are more interested in awards like this and push hard for their students to be selected.  The fact that some prominent departments have few or no students on this list may reflect a disinterest in this particular award, not in undergraduate research in general.

[I'm a theoretical computer scientist at a top-10 CS department; I serve on my department's graduate admissions committee.]