How would you write an ethics approval for a study conducted on human data, when the dataset is publicly available? The dataset was not collected by the authors, but the study was conducted on a publicly available dataset. The source of the data is cited, but the source does not have an ethics statement itself. The data is heartbeat time series.

In general you wouldn't need ethics approval to use this data set; it would be covered by the ethics statement from the original experiment. Presumably the original data collectors had one, even if it's not referenced; if you want to be extra-careful, you should try to find the peer-reviewed publication associated with the data set, and look there for the ethics statement.
More generally, it's hard to see how you could be causing harm by using a public, already collected data set; you didn't have any interaction at all with the subjects! The exception to this would be if you had reason to believe that the original data set might not have been ethically collected, in which there would be an argument for not using the data even though it has already been collected. Practically speaking, though, if these are data collected in the last few decades, it's likely that the researchers were required to undergo ethics approval before data collection.
There are lots of edge cases here:

data that were unethically collected, either decades ago (Tuskegee/Nazis/Stanford Prison study/Milgrom obedience studies etc.) or more recent studies that slipped through the cracks of the modern research-ethics framework
data that are insufficiently anonymized
data that are OK in the jurisdiction where they were originally collected but not in yours

If possible, you should be careful and follow @DianaPetitti's advice by checking with your university's research ethics board; hopefully they will tell you you're good to go. (Although I absolutely understand why it is so, ethics boards are often cautious to the point of [researcher] frustration even when the probability of harm is almost vanishingly small.)
Disclaimer: I am not an ethicist and have not been involved in dealing with ethics statements with the exception of a few surveys and student evaluation exercises.

Tracking the source of the data back we get to Greenwald, S.D. (1990). Improved detection and classification of arrhythmias in noise-corrupted electrocardiograms using contextual information. Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/29206

We established a test database of 35 half-hour ECG records ...
[Some data] are from the MIT/BIH Arrhythmia Database ...
[Some other data] are from the AHA Arrhythmia Database ...
Tapes in the 800 series were collected for this research from long-term Holter records archived in the Beth Israel Hospital Arrhythmia Laboratory ...

This is admittedly a little disappointing; there's no evidence that informed consent was obtained, although from a practical standpoint it seems incredibly unlikely that these records could either be personally identified, or that any significant harm was caused in their collection. (This describes the data that are first presented in the thesis — for complete diligence you'd have to go back farther to the sources of the other two arrhythmia databases listed here and see what they say about sample collection ..)


How can multiple people grade assignments online so that different graders don't see each others' grades? this question is related to how you do your double blind marking for assignments, we are looking at the coursework plugin for moodle but are interested in how other other institutions do this. a specialist piece of software? paper? excel spreadsheets?

To clarify this would be two markers not being able to see the grades the other marker has assigned to the student, unless the grade is within a percentage.
This would be passed to a third marker if grades cannot be agreed upon.

This feature is currently not available in Moodle.

Please have a look at the link below.
https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Assignments/Grade_Assignments/Delegated_Grading

Trust this matches your requirement


Submitting paper when leaving academia? Is it a good idea to submit a paper when you are about to leave academia, say in the next year?

In my field (Mathematics), the review progress is typically very long (At the moment I'm waiting for the first review for almost a year). I do not want to receive a review while I'm in the middle of a new job (probably without access to other academic people, articles, books, etc.). On the other hand, I've done something which is worth to published somewhere.

Should I submit it? How can I improve the length of the review (e.g., by chosing the journal?)?

Edit: Some details: I'm about to finish my PhD and I have no co-authors for the latest paper who could handle big parts of revisions.

I would say, yes.

If the results are worth publishing, then the world should know about them.

That said, even if the paper is accepted, it is likely that you'll need to make minor or major revisions. If you do not expect that you will have the time to do this, then ultimately the paper will be rejected (or simply just vanish). So you need to consider whether you will, in 1, 2 or 3 years (or whatever the journal turn around time is) be in a position, mentally and otherwise, to address the review comments.

The other option is to archive the paper on arxiv.org and hope that interested people find the work – for the good of science.


Measuring the Effect of Public Relations on Scientific Journals Impact Factor? I’m looking at the correlation between communications outreach and a scientific journal’s impact factor/citations. I intern for a communications department at a University’s engineering school and we are trying to motivate more of our scientists to share their publications with us for media and press release. The biggest issue we have with convincing scientists to become interested in this is the lack of quantitative data that shows the benefit of us publicizing their journals. I’ve done some prior research and the most I could find was others acknowledging the lack of research done in this area and proposing that social scientists should look into this. Do you have any suggestions for further reading into this topic, either previous studies done, or potentially how to best go about this research on my own? Potentially what factors would be the most useful to compare between journal articles that we have/have not done press releases for, or if this would even be a useful measure?

First, a proxy for scientific communication may be seen in Altmetrics.
Second, Impact Factors are indicators based on citations.
Therefore, you could take a look at the numerous studies that have investigated correlations between Altmetrics and citations.
(By the way: It seems that one cannot find research on the direct correlations between Altmetrics and Impact Factors so easily; the reason behind that may be that Altmetric.com does not allow researchers to analyse Altmetrics on a journal-level, as far as I am aware.)


How should university employees address student breakups (and drama in general)? As I was writing and revising my personal statements, I overheared what was a rather nasty breakup outside of the window shortly after midnight.

I know that personal relationships are not my business in general, and in this case, my involvement was a brief but stern question to the young couple if everything was okay and if they wanted to discuss their issues inside the lobby of the building I worked at instead of the freezing cold outside. I also offered hot coffee or tea. The ulterior intention was to insure that there was no violence in what was an emotionally charged argument.

The result was that he flipped me off and she declined. I replied if she was sure; she said yes and they went off into the night.

With this said, my questions are:

Were my actions appropriate as a staff member of the university (who was basically about the same age as the presumed undergraduate couple ranging from 18–22 and myself at 23)?
Would my actions be appropriate as a graduate student and TA in general regardless of circumstance (affiliation in my group, unknown student in general)?
Would the same actions be appropriate for a professor?

In general I would say it isn't your responsibility as a professor/TA any more than it would be as a normal member of the public witnessing a potentially violent altercation.

If you supervise one of the students you could ask them, at another time, whether everything is okay, giving them them the opportunity to talk if they wish. Avoid getting too involved, you're there to assist the students with their studies and risking effecting the relationship - if your interference has embarrassed or upset the student they would be less likely to approach you for help with their studies (your primary purpose).


When did it become commonplace for data set providers to ask users to cite their paper(s)? Nowadays data set providers typically ask data set users to cite their paper(s) introducing the data set.  When did this practice become commonplace?

(Given what I read on this page, I feel the need to emphasize that I do not intend to open a debate around the usefulness of such citations.)

I don't see a logical distinction in citing used algorithms vis-a-vis data sets. Both seem perfectly natural to get cited. Both are an integral part in the results you are reporting in a paper and hence should be attributed.

You're probably thinking in terms of machine learning papers, where typically a new method has to be benchmarked on a large variety of data sets. While it may seem like overkill to cite each and every data set that was used, lets not forget that whoever provided that data also put in effort and deserves credit for it. Again, this isn't that much different from citing the competing algorithms you are comparing against.

(Academic) software packages should also get cited, or at least mentioned, when they are used. This isn't really a new thing, for example the old 4-clause BSD license essentially demanded the same thing.


Referee wants me to do more experiments, but I already submitted these results to another journal I submitted two articles to two journals as corresponding author in short succession. Now, I got back the referees' comments to the first one and I am facing a problem: A referee requested us to do more experiments and claimed that the article lacked experimental evidence in a certain aspect.

Actually, these experiments were already carried out, but were described in the other article that is more focussed on the experimental part of our studies (while the first one is more of a general proof of concept).

Obviously, I am facing a dilemma now: I don't think I can use the experimental results the referee requested in my first article, because I would be committing self-plagiarism. On the other hand, if I do not use those results, I fear the referee might reject the article.

A colleague suggested to tell the referee exactly that and show him/her the pre-print of the second article. But that does not really change the fact that my article seems to lack experimental evidence?

I could argue that these requested experiments/results are not essential to the submission. But I already kind of evaded the other big remark of the referee, thus almost changing nothing in my article. I feel this might be insulting to the referee, especially because I think he/she did a good job and really took time to review the article.

What do you guys think is the right course of action here? How do I argue my case best so that the referee is pleased? Could I cite the pre-print of my second article in the first article? Or can I reference in the article that there are experiments to be released in another submission that will handle the topic the referee spoke about?

I think the normal thing to do is to forward-reference the experimental results.

That is, you can briefly outline the experimental results as per the current referee's desire for more information, and reference it as "paper submitted to xyz journal, 2/9/2017."  Down the road, if the experimental paper turns out to be accepted before the theory paper, all the better and you can actually reference it as such.

As a caveat, it may also be true that either paper is too thin for separate publication, and the two should be combined into one. This sounds like what the referee is getting at. From your point of view, having one strong paper may be more desirable than two weak ones.

Finally, most often I have seen two papers of this type published back-to-back in the same journal.  But even if this is appropriate here it sounds like it may be a bit late to go this route, unless you were to withdraw one and resubmit the pair. (BTW, If you do this, an explanation to all the editors involved should definitely be included in your correspondence.)


Transitioning from bioinformatics to wet lab? I had a very bad PhD experience in developmental biology. My project was supposed to be wet lab and it was, but I didn't learn a lot of techniques. At the end I got into bioinformatics and, because my wet lab data was not good enough, my PhD ended up being 70% bioinf, 30% rubbish wet lab.
Now I'm applying to postdocs and I get interviews, but every time I get rejected because of my lack of wetlab experience. I got offered a postdoc but it is a 3 year position working fully on bioinformatics (I didn't apply, someone in the department told my PI that they were planning on getting a postdoc, and they liked my CV).
I don't enjoy bioinformatics as much as I enjoy wet lab, but I need a job and I need it now. I was wondering if anyone has experience transitioning back to wet lab after such a long time? Is it possible? I won't gain any more wet lab skills so I'm a bit worried.

Learning wet lab techniques takes time and practice. I was a slice electrophysiologist in my "past life", and even now I expect it would take me several months to a year or two to get anywhere near my peak productivity as a graduate student. Maybe not every wet lab experience is as fickle as that, but I feel my colleagues in molecular biology have similar views.
Anyone who hires you as a post doc is taking on an unusual project for a post doc. Whereas a post doc is typically someone who comes in with a lot of expertise and is able to run things on their own, in your situation you'll likely need just as much supervision as an early grad student. Post docs are usually short-term, temporary positions. You may not be able to be productive on techniques you are learning during that window.
Computational skills are in high demand in biology, especially among those who have domain-specific expertise as well. Your best bet may be to find a quid-pro-quo where you can both contribute your computational skills (whether or not these fall under a "bioinformatics" umbrella or not) as a "give", and receiving some further wet-lab training as a "take". I am very confident that these opportunities exist, but they will be harder to find than a more traditional path. However, I think you may have more luck searching for this particular circumstance rather than applying to positions that are solely looking for a wet lab candidate. You'll have to decide for yourself whether this balance is worth it for you.
Good luck!


Minor editorial error during minor revision. Should I notify the editor or just correct it? I recently submitted a manuscript to a prestigious journal in my field. The manuscript is now under "minor revision" status and the reviewer only asked me to provide percentages in one of the table. The comments are positive and I think the overall chance of acceptance is quite high.

The thing is, as I go through my manuscript, I found one minor editorial error, that is, the supplemental materials are marked incorrectly (the supplemental material 1 appeared after supplemental material 2, not in the order of appearance. But the supplemental materials are correct, not missing or mismatched). It seems that the editors and reviewers are not aware of tis mistake.

So my question is, what should I do? There seems to be three options:

Correct this editorial error before resubmission and notify the editor in the cover letter. The decision letter has stated

  Do not make additional change unless absolutely necessary.

Correct this error anyway without notifying the editorial office since the error is quite trivial.
Don't correct this error now and wait till the copyediting process.

What would you guys suggest me do?

I don't want to leave bad impression on the editors and reviewers and jeopardize the chances of acceptance of my article.

Take option #1, correct it now and notify the editor. The decision letter did say "do not make additional changes", but that is almost certainly referring to changes that will need to be peer reviewed. This kind of minor change that no reasonable person will disagree with is not a problem.

If you're still worried, you can also do #3.


Where can I find good examples of personal statements [BSc, MSc, PhD]? In my country, there is basically no culture of personal statements for university admission. However, now I find myself in the need of writing a convincing one (note: my field is mathematics). I've been searching the web for some examples to get to know what an academic personal statement looks like, but unfortunately I couldn't find any good example.

So my question is:

  Could you point out where I can find some well-done personal
  statements from which I can really see what a good one is like?

I would appreciate if you could point out references to personal statements for admission to (a) bachelor degree, (b) master degree, and (c) PhD [indeed, I have to do mine for a quite peculiar purpose and for this reason I'd prefer to read examples from each of the above categories].

I think you will be hard-pressed to find actual statement of purpose on the Internet. The one submitted to the departments are destroyed after the application process because of obvious privacy issues. Generally the applicants do not publish their own statements for several reasons. Your best bet is to ask some people you know that might have written one and can send it to you.

Another option is to have a professor or a postdoc help you with your draft because they have probably been in committees routing through these statements and will have a good idea if you are heading in the right direction. There are many ways to write a good statement, you should be able to write a statement from the general guidelines that you can find in the other  answers on this website. After all the statement is meant to test your capacity of developing your ideas and your writing style.


How do I deal with a stubborn co-author who won't respond to suggestions? My research group is preparing a theoretical article in a field where author order matters (computational neuroscience), and it has to be submitted soon, as our funding ends soon. I am an author "in the middle of the list."

The first author (TFA) has made a first draft and started circulating it. Although results-wise everything is ok, the text is very poorly written (both in terms of English and general logic understandability). TFA is known to be not very responsive to even minor correction suggestions.

Our PI knows the situation but he started his PI career relatively recently and his management skills have not yet fully developed, as far as I understand it. He says that he will just rewrite the whole text in the end (as he did with a number of other articles before).

Technically I or another middle author could rewrite the draft completely to make it better. However I think it would make the first-authorship of TFA somewhat strange-looking, and in general I feel that there should be some better ways.

So the question is: how are situations like this typically resolved?

Rewriting the text doesn't necessarily qualify someone to be the first author of a publication. If you're using the intended first author's structural outline and just rewriting sentences, then I don't know if that's sufficient to usurp the intended first author's claim. If I were the PI, I don't think I would do that.

What I might do is place a note in the paper along the lines of "X and Y contributed substantially to the writing of this paper," where X is the intended first author and Y is the person who rewrote the paper.

Better still would be for the PI to work with the intended first author about the corrections that are needed, rather than just rewrite everything. Helping X to become a better writer will reduce the PI's workload in the long run.


If PhD programmes prepare the candidate for research, why do teaching positions require it? Example, example.

From the first example:

  The Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering invites applications for a full-time Assistant Professor of Teaching (Lecturer with Potential for Security of Employment (LPSOE)), comparable to a tenure-track assistant professor appointment. Professor of Teaching faculty are Academic Senate faculty members whose expertise and responsibilities center on undergraduate education and scholarly analysis/improvement of teaching methods. The successful applicant will be responsible for teaching both lower and upper division undergraduate Agricultural Sensing and Data Science lecture and laboratory courses (up to six courses per year) ... Qualified applicants must have a PhD in Engineering or a BS in Engineering with a PhD in a scientific field, preferably with postgraduate experience.

(Emphasis mine)

If this is a full-time teaching position, why are they looking for PhD degrees and postgraduate experience? How are these primarily-research degrees relevant to teaching?

In order to teach new ideas in any field, you have to (1) understand how research is conducted, and (2) be current on the state of research in the field. By allowing you to do original research, doctoral programs prepare you for both, even if you do not continue research activity.


should I fight to choose journal my work is submitted to? I'm a USA grad student in computational biology.  Starting 2 years ago, I tried to get paper X published, with very little feedback from my advisor, and after a year (!) in review paper X was rejected. Meanwhile, I was working on other projects, gaining experience, and drawing closer to graduation. My advisor then asked me to submit X to a kind of shady non-journal "proceedings" (he had some hook-up), and he didn't seem happy that I objected. Now, I hope to graduate in a few months, and with the benefit of my improved knowledge of science, I'm trying to get project X published again.  My advisor only cares about getting things out the door, not about the projects, and he has a connection to this Chinese journal (jmcb.oxfordjournals.org) that I never heard of. He is impressed  by their impact factor because that's how he is (I can tell they are gaming their IF.). He wants me to put it there, while I think a lower IF, less obscure journal would be way better. Additionally, it appears that very few institutions subscribe to this journal (my univ does not).

It's not a spam journal, but I never would want to submit there, and I feel that I should have some control over it as it's my work. But is it worth it to fight him on this, or should I just go along with it because he's the boss? I guess if it's easy to publish there, I should be grateful not to have to keep working on it after graduation? I do want to do a postdoc.

If the journal is junk, you should not publish there, period. So, the real question is: Is the journal as bad as you think it is or this journal is just not one of the top journals in your area but still a legit, reputable journal? So, confirm which of the two applies. How to distinguish journals has already been discussed several times in this forum. Check the editors, look their homepages if they mention their editorial work there, see who else publishes there and check some of the published articles.

In case this is actually a legit, reputable journal but still not top of the line, you should really consider if your work is actually as good as you think it is. It already has got a rejection and perhaps your advisor suggests some medium (and not top) journal, since he may believe your work might actually have a chance there. So, be open about this and ask him. What does he actually think about your specific work? Is it not good enough for the top journals? If he believes it is not, perhaps you should reconsider your stance.


How to publish under a Creative Commons license? I will defend my PhD thesis soon and I currently have a bunch of papers in a finalization phase. As first author of these papers, and as my work is funded with public money, I am very uncomfortable with the idea of giving my rights to a private editor, for ethical reasons. I would like to release my papers under a Creative Commons-like license or in the public domain (CC0?) but I want them to go through a peer-review process.

How can I do this? (And why do so few researchers seem to be concerned with these ethical problematics?)

Let me build upon excellent Wrzlprmft's answer, adding a few things:

there is a de facto open access standard license, and that is CC-BY. It is similar to public domain, and I'd strongly suggest not to use CC0, as you would waive also the attribution of your work. CC0 it is used for databases and data, where CC-BY licenses are trickier.
institutional or disciplinary archives as ArXiv are heavily used in some academic communities (eg. math, high energy physics) but they do not provide peer review. It is customary within those communities to archive pre-prints. You should try to understand the customs in your very own community: it's very important if you want to make the best choice (and if you want to foster open access publishing in your discipline).

As per your last question:
why do so few researchers seem to be concerned with these ethical problematics?

Because their priority is their academic career. Academia is built on personal, scientific reputation, and the current system (with Impact Factor and other scientometric indicators) is completely unbalanced towards old, authoritative closed-access publications that provide the "authority" a young researcher needs to gain reputation between its peers. You need to publish a lot, and in reputable journals. You will advance, get grant, get tenure on your publication (and citation) record.

Open access publishing (as a model) is relatively young, thus it is difficult for open access publications to gain the same reputation as those other journals; thus researchers don't want to publish there, thus the old, closed-access system survives.

Often, the rational, selfish choice of the researcher is enough for the ethical choice to be bypassed. Ignorance of alternative models (and ignorance of the intrinsic flaws of the current closed access system) do the rest.


Post-doc in Iran. Would you suggest it? Where are post-doc offers at Iranian Universities published? I am an Italian Ph. D. candidate in Linguistics and I am in my penultimate year. My research focuses on nominal structure in Southern Italian Dialects, Balkan and Indo-Iranian languages.

I would love to work on a post-doc in Iran. Does anyone have experience on doing one in Iran? Would it be considered valuable experience? I am afraid of stereotypes in general, even though here in Italy the situation is different from the United States and we have an overall positive consideration of Iran.

I've already traveled to Iran for long periods and I am about to go back this summer, so there is no questioning that I like the place, and that it would be good experience for my knowledge on the Indo-Iranian family.

Apart from these questions, does anybody know about how the hiring process for post-docs works  in Iran? I have made many searches, but most universities do not have a page for job offers.

Very long question. For now, thanks everyone for listening. -)

I would not suggest to anyone, unless it is the only possible option.

First thing, I think it would be hard for a western to live in Iran, considering the human rights violations of the regime, not having freedom of speech, restraints on women, homosexuals and alcohol and many others. Before seriously considering such a move, I would try to contact some westerners in the institution you're considering and asking about their experience.

Second thing, most of the universities in Iran are public and as you're considering a job, rather than just a research visit or a conference visit, it means you're being employed by the Islamic republic. This is a big difference.
This sole thing, may get interpreted as you being supportive of the regime and its actions, and can jeopardize future positions in the academia (US/UK/Israel for sure, and probably some other allies like Canada or Australia), and may lead to some visa issues/questioning in the future. It is true that there are many Iranians in the west, and Sharif University is a great university for undergraduate studies whose graduates continue moving to get education in the best US institutions, but those are Iranians, not people who had a lot of options where to do undergraduate studies and most of them fled the country without looking back the minute they can.
It might also disqualify you in the future to work in some work that might require clearance (if you consider doing state-department/security related stuff in the future, as you have extensive language knowledge).

You've mentioned that you studied Indo-Iranian languages, so why not look at some better places? India? Azerbaijan?
If you know some Arabic, there are all those branches of fancy US institutes in the Emirates and Saudi-Arabia? Maybe those have departments about Indo-Iranian languages as well? (my first point applies there as well, but my second point is not very relevant).

P.S. I'm pretty sure that even in Europe, the general consensus about Iran would be mostly neutral to (some) negative, most definitely I would not describe it as positive.


Is there any risk in mentioning a new faculty as a potential advisor in you SoP? I am applying for a program and I know that there is a new professor in the department. He is a tenured faculty and had been for many years at another university before he moves to his new position.

I like his work and had been following his publications for a while, and he just moved to this department. I was wondering if it's a common practice for the departments (in the US) to avoid assigning new students to new faculty or anything that would make the admission committee wary of admitting an applicant that wants to work with them. Is there any risk in mentioning a faculty so new to the department as a person of interest in my PhD application statement? On the other hand, is there any possible upside to that?

I don't see any negative aspects to such a request. If nothing else it shows that you have a focus on a particular area of research. But in the US it isn't really necessary, almost everywhere, to specify a doctoral research advisor so early.

I assume that a "new, but with tenure" professor in a department is well respected everywhere. People are seldom hired "with tenure" otherwise. Most incoming professors have some, probably short, probationary period with at least a pro-forma grant of tenure.

As to the suitability of the person as an advisor, you should also look at their history of producing PhDs. I assume he is experienced at that, and if not, then you should probably keep your eyes open before you jump.


What value does self-learning a course (or several) have in graduate admissions? I am an undergraduate student who hopes to switch my major from engineering to Physics. Although this switch is possible, I lack several crucial foundation courses in Physics such as electrodynamics and quantum mechanics in my transcript and I hope to offset this by self-studying, either by:

Going through a textbook, make notes for each chapter and attempt some of the exercises at the end of each chapter.

Or, go through the MIT OCW courses and attempt the problem sets, projects, exams etc.

(I am personally leaning towards the latter as it feels more organized and less overwhelming).
But whichever path I take, I hope to type up all my notes and solutions on LaTeX and post it publicly (mostly a GitHub repo). I realise that doing this is not even remotely as rigorous as actually taking the course at university and being graded for it, but I would like to try.
My question is, how do graduate admissions committees and potential supervisors view self-studying of this sort? Does it carry any importance?
Note: I hope to apply to graduate schools in USA/Canada/Germany. My research experiences are all in Physics. This question is pretty similar to mine, but this question is for a specific CS course, and I would like a more generalized answer.

Does it carry any importance? (to admissions)

Little to none.  Anyone can claim to have studied something independently.  If you want to increase your chances of admissions, you need to provide evidence that the admissions committee can easily check.  Your repository does not count.
You should, however, do sufficient self study that you are able to succeed in graduate school.  You may be required to complete graduate courses and to take qualifying exams; do start preparing for those things if they are applicable.
Successful research experience is more important; the purpose of a PhD is to do research.  If you have already done it, that is very convincing to an admissions committee.


How to obtain funding for independent research after graduating from undergrad? I just graduated with BS from undergrad and am employed as a research associate staff by a research team at the university.

I would like to ask for suggestions about how to obtain research funding for my independent project. Most of the funding opportunities are only available for registered students. I am not a U.S. citizen eligible for national grants.

I am working in the field of social science and human-robot interaction and have 2-3 advisors from undergrad research and courses who encourage me to carry on my undergraduate projects and are willing to provide advising. However, they did not specifically offer me guidance of how to resolve the need for funding. It seems like I need to take the initiative to present this research opportunity to them.

I'll make three suggestions, but these are a bit difficult to obtain.

First, if you intend to return to the country of which you are a citizen, then you might explore funding from there, since your skills would eventually benefit them. This is actually available in some places.

Second, you might be able to obtain funding indirectly. Suppose you can convince one of your professors to apply for a grant that will fund your research and permit him/her to support you under the grant, even though you are not a citizen. If you don't need personal support, but only research support, this would be much easier, of course. But you would probably have to do the actual grant writing so that your advisor(s) can submit it with little effort on their own. This, in itself, can be a valuable skill, though obtained with a bit of pain.

Third, you might explore private funding from some interested corporation. These have no real limitations, though the money might be relatively small. But if you have skills that the company might find valuable, perhaps you could work with them, without pay, but obtain a grant for research. I've done this sort of thing, but was in a different (more advanced) situation. In my case the grant didn't support me directly, but paid for such things as travel and equipment. But there might be legal issues that you would need to resolve through the university if you were directly supported.


Contacting a potential research adviser I wanted to know what the best next step is given my situation.  I have been interested in doing research with a professor, however after the initial response from him about setting up a time to meet he has not responded.  Given it was summer I assumed he was busy with travel and grant proposals.  Upon sending two more emails he did not respond about setting up a specific time.  As such, I went to his office.  He send he would send an email setting up a time.  How long should I wait to hear back with a response?  I understand professors are very busy, however there is a deadline to enroll in research credit.  I am hesitant in sending a "reminder" as I don't wish to annoy him.

If you think you are on the edge of being annoying, then it might be better to wait. But, you don't have to wait passively. See what other, backup options you might have with other professors and start a conversation there. Be a bit tentative with them, of course.

And, if he is negligent about responding, note that he might also be negligent about giving you the guidance you need. So, other options are worth a look.

But, it is also possible that he is just a last-minute procrastinator sort of person, so be prepared to spring into action if you get a favorable response.


How to know whether a Faculty member has done good work or not I have completed my Masters in Pure Mathetics in India and I want to join a Ph.D. program in Algebra and Number Theory.

For that reason, I am checking the profiles of the faculty members of the different institutes where I can join.

But the problem is I don't understand how to judge the profiles of the faculty members and what are the parameters.

Should I look into the following:

From where the faculty member has done his Ph.D., is it from India or from abroad.
Under whom has he done his PhD
What are his publications? Where has he published them?

Though I can check 1 and 2 but how do I know about his publications?
How do I know that he has done good work in Algebra and  Number Theory or not?
It's not possible for me to know about all journals in Algebra and Number Theory as I have not done any publication before?

I really need some help as I don't want to join an institute where no good faculty members are available?

How to judge? Please help.

The institution and the advisor give you very limited information. Of course, a very bad person would not be admitted at a very good institution, but even god institutions and great advisors have mediocre students. The same goes for journal names. All but the top 10 journals sometimes publish mediocre papers, and some great papers appeared in middle ranked journals.

A better way to judge people is by looking at the reviews of their papers in MathSciNet or Zentralblatt. Citation numbers are easy to manipulate, so having many citations does not necessarily mean that you are good, but few citations are a bad sign. A good indicator is by how many different authors someone was cited. If you have many citations by few people, something seems fishy. You can also look at their most cited papers. If many of them are surveys, books, or pose many open problems, the citation number is exaggerated. Worse, if there are many self citations. Next, you should read the reviews themselves. Since you want to know what the faculty members are doing, you should do so anyway. The personality of the reviewer plays a role, but I would expect that every decent advisor has some papers that are praised by the reviewer. If all reviews are short summaries of the main results, the reviewer was either lazy or didn't find anything important in the article. Articles without a review are usually worse.

A big red flag is the use of predatory journals. Some people might be too innocent to see through this scam, but every half way decent research can be published in a real journal. Not necessarily a good one, but one which has actual peer review going on. On the other hand, publishing in a little known journal, or conference proceedings is not a bad sign, unless it is always the same journal/conference, or more than a quarter of all publications are of this type.


How does making notes of what you read help you in research/teaching? I have always refrained from making notes from my childhood. But now, my adviser wants me to make notes of what I study saying that it would be very beneficial for me in future. So, following his advice, I started making notes. But it turns out that it is quite boring and time consuming. And I feel that even if I want to look into something later, I can look it directly from a book. So, my questions are:

How does making notes help you in your research or possibly teaching?
What other pros/cons are there?

It's an old adage that "You don't truly understand something unless you can explain it completely to someone else". Writing notes effectively forces you to explain the topic to yourself. Oftentimes, when writing over notes from a class or from what you've read, the simple process of re-explaining it to yourself will clarify points that may have been confusing earlier.

For this purpose, I try not to write notes as I'm reading, but rather I'll read a section and them summarize that in my notes. Having read the full picture, I can then ensure that my understanding of the topic is more complete, and my notes should reflect that.

On a different note entirely, repetition enhances retention, and writing notes is at the very least doubles the number of times you'll see it (once in the book, and once as you write it), which should help your remember it that much better.


Is it unethical to add same environmental data such as temperature and salinity in two different papers? I have collected sea water samples from a location to study the microbes. The study is basically divided into 2; one is considering the total community and another one is specific to a particular groups. If I write 2 papers considering these two matters, can I use the same physico-chemical properties?

Researchers frequently have to decide how to publish journal articles from a large data set. When it is not possible to write a single, integrative article from such a data set, the issue of publishing multiple journal articles arises. Here is good article about the issue


Should I cite a paper for its literature review? Let's say I'm writing a report about sociological consideration of Aurora borealis in hipster communities. I want to support the value of my paper by showing that the way in which people consider Aurora borealis is a major and recurrent question.

I have found a paper saying in its literature review: "Aurora borealis have been written about for at least 4000 years, starting with Chronicles of a Minoan watching the sky by Ithurts Myneck (~ 2100BC)". So this is a perfect example of an information I want to report in my paper.

However, this paper turns out to deal with the physics of charged particles in solar wind - that means neither the scope of this paper, nor the scientific discipline it belongs to are related to my topic. Moreover, the reality of the book Chronicles of a Minoan watching the sky is evidenced by other means (i.e. this paper is not the only one that is talking about the book). But I cannot access the book to read it.

Question: I want to write in my report that Aurora borealis has been a concern for a long time, and prove this assertion by giving the example of the Chronicles of a Minoan watching the sky. Should I credit (i.e. cite) the paper where I found this information, even if it is not related to the core/added of the paper?

I want to give credit for the information I found, however, it is sometimes said: "When you cite a paper, you will be citing from [result] section. If you find yourself citing a paper based on something in the Intro [= literature review?] , you're just citing another citation."

There is more controversy on this topic than I expected, so I've done some further digging. The results of this surprised me!
Institution, Program, and Journal requirements
The rules of your neighborhood may differ, so you'll want to follow whatever more specific rules are given to you in your program. For example, Columbia College demands secondary source citation:

Indebtedness
You must cite any text you read that helped you think about your paper
even if you do not reference it directly in the text of your paper.

However, the OWL APA style reference gives differing advice:

Work Discussed in a Secondary Source
NOTE: Give the secondary source in the references list; in the text,
name the original work, and give a citation for the secondary source.
For example, if Seidenberg and McClelland's work is cited in Coltheart
et al. and you did not read the original work [emphasis mine], list the Coltheart
et al. reference in the References. In the text, use the following
citation...

So if you merely were directed to the original work, but then attained the original work and read it, there is not necessarily any need to cite the secondary source - but the guide doesn't prohibit it.
However, the IEEE has a stance as strong as Columbia, but in the opposite direction! As noted by York University in their IEEE style guide (page 5 of the pdf):

Should I use secondary references?
A secondary reference is given when
you are referring to a source which you have not read yourself, but
have read about in another source, for example referring to Jones’
work that you have read about in Smith. You should avoid using
secondary references and locate the original source and reference
that.

Murdoch University has an even stronger interpretation:

• IEEE style does not allow for the use of  secondary source.
• Locate the original source of information which is cited in a work
which you have read.
• If an original source cannot be located, it should not be cited.

Jeeze, no wonder there are so many different answers!
So it would seem there cannot be a one-size fits all answer - it depends. What is required in one field and style is forbidden in another, and optional in a third (and apparently even then people differ).


On Copyright permissions for references in an article I have written a paper in mathematics and the journal which I sent my paper has accepted to publish it. I have two references in my article, and they are like:

1- "The proof of Akranov can be found with some additional information in the book of Mikhail Kirkhov [1]."

2- "We can prove this using the Prime Number Theorem (see [2] pp.138 for the conclusion from the PNT)..."

My question: Do I have to obtain written permissions from the authors of the books [1] and [2]? Is this a copyright issue?

No, you do not need to get permission to cite other works. Citing works is the way you give credit for existing ideas to the people who originally generated or made accessible those ideas. (and it's a bit troubling that you are asking this at this stage - have you not cited other work before at any level?)

You often do need to get permission for copying parts of works, such as figures, but where it is actually necessary is a legal issue that depends on a variety of circumstances. See for example: Is it necessary to obtain permissions for copying figures from published articles in your proposal/dissertation?


Faculty (lecturer in UK) interview presentation - what to include around teaching? I have been shortlisted for a job interview later this month for a lectureship in a UK university. The interview will consist of a presentation and a panel interview.

As per the HR's email, the presentation should talk about how I can contribute to the school's research, teaching and engagement. My question is, what to include in the teaching part? I will specify the school's existing modules that I can cover. Meanwhile, should I suggest one or two modules that I can develop but are not in the school's teaching portfolio yet? Or should I not include this in the presentation, but simply wait until the panel interview bring up this?

I'd like to show that I have done some research on the school's teaching programmes. But I don't want to sound like I am challenging the school's existing programmes. The job description does not mention the development of new modules, either.

Any comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Congratulations for getting an interview for a faculty position!

  I'd like to show that I have done some research on the school's teaching programmes.

This should be highly appreciated. Interview panels are not only judging the quality of your research but also how well you would fit with them. They would be happy to know you have been looking into the details of how they operated the inner workings of their institution.

  But I don't want to sound like I am challenging the school's existing
  programmes.

Agreed - you should't challenge the status quo - that is way too early for you to do so. Not because you are too junior to come up with good ideas! This is a general rule in joining a new organisation: you need first to the understand the decision making process and find the influential people that will help you implementing the changes you suggest if you want to succeed. What you can do is to hint (you have only few mins after all!) at how you can add value (value here means original contribution both in terms of ideas and skills) to the current curriculum

  The job description does not mention the development of new modules,
  either.

That never really appears in job descriptions - and it's typically not in the panel's mind. That is why an original suggestion may be well appreciated - it shows you care about teaching, and you want to contribute there originally too. Only, try to do it in a way that shows a strong desire to contribute, rather than a willingness to disrupt.


How to find collaborators? Answers to my previous question made me believe that doing research almost exclusively in collaboration is (also) fine.

But how do I find collaborators. It is easy to find researchers active in a particular field. Given that I am a first year graduate student how do I persuade them to work with me?

Update.
There was a very similar question already. There are two parts in this question (the same as in mine): how to find and how to attract.

With the first part the answer is more or less clear.

As for the second part, the suggested answer assumes that the seeker has some "idea". This seems to be somewhat opposite to conclusions reached
in this discussion: it is hard to have an original idea while being a beginner.

Unfortunately, this will only apply to students and beginning faculty at larger institutions. Places with quite a few faculty members and, maybe with quite a few students as well.

But, at such a place, if you look around, you will probably find that there is a lot of collaboration already going on. You want to get connected to some of that in an area that interests you, at least a bit.

At some such places, senior faculty hold weekly seminars that aren't formal, but meet regularly. They will consist of the senior person, a few other faculty of various ranks, and a few students, usually advisees of some of those faculty. They are often organized around the main research interest of the senior person who organized and maintain it. People contribute ideas and discuss papers. Sometimes a member will be asked to make a presentation to the group (say half a dozen or ten) about some paper or some idea of interest. The key is people connected to ideas and to each other.

If you don't find such groups already formed, they may just be too small, with two or three faculty meeting in an office, or even at the coffee table, to discuss what they are working on and asking for advice.

If you don't find even that, it might be possible for you to form such a group, though in this case mostly students. Suppose you can find three or four other students with similar interests. Perhaps you've met them in class. Form a group yourself and go as a group to some faculty member and ask if s/he will "sponsor" you, by taking over the mentorship of your group. Perhaps they can give you some problem of interest for you to study together. Note that nothing formal needs to come from such a group, though it is great if it does. Think of it more as "expanding horizons" than as "goal directed". Before you start on anything serious, make sure you have worked out authorship issues. Don't neglect to be generous in that. In an ideal situation, these people can have a long term research relationship lasting beyond degrees.

If it is impossible to develop local relationships, then it is much harder. Being very social at conferences is a good way. Ask a lot of questions. Have coffee with a lot of people. Collect and distribute a lot of business cards, etc. The actual work of collaboration is a bit easier now with computer communication, but forming a compatible group is still quite difficult.


Congratulating professor to having moved to a new university? I want to get back in touch with a former professor of mine, who has now recently moved to a different institution. Would I, in my email, congratulate her for having moved to the new institution or should I just not mention it at all?

I am worried it could be understood the wrong way.

For what it matters: both the old & the new university are top 20 in the world, the new university is top 3 (in the relevant field).

If your relationship was all one-way, as professor-student relationships often are, then I would not mention it.

If you sometimes had casual conversations that made things more two-way, and you happen to know something that provides context to this move (for example, if this is a solution to a two-body problem, or you happen to know that the professor was hoping to move to a certain geographical region, e.g. to get in more skiing or hiking or snorkeling, or to support an aging relative) then sure, you could include congratulations.


Who should I ask for references when applying for PhD, after a 4 year break since graduation? I am a life sciences graduate from 2015.
After a career in the corporate world, I am preparing to apply to PhD programs in universities abroad.
As part of the application process, I am required to provide a certain number of references (usually 2 or 3).

Is it appropriate to approach my old college professors for references after a gap of 4 years? What things should I take into account if I am contacting them?

I agree with the other answers that you should ask old professors. I was in your situation after a break of five years, and while I felt awkward approaching people I hadn't seen in so long asking for a favor, the particular professor I asked actually did remember me and was happy to help.

I'll reiterative the general advice I was given (by a current friend who is a professor in another field, both of us in the US):

Try to get at least one recommendation from a professor who's had you as a student. Not having an academic reference would be a disadvantage, and having a recommendation that speaks to your ability to do research is an advantage.
Recommendations from industry are fine, normally your first choice would be an immediate supervisor. Your approach will depend entirely on your relationship with your peers.
Recommendations from friends typically aren't great, but if they're in the same industry as you, have collaborated with you on stuff, and can speak to your professional competence then they're probably good.


No response from Journal even after 3 Months of submission I had submitted a manuscript to an Elsevier Journal in February 9, 2016. Usually it takes time of around 1 week to get the manuscript number assigned something like XXXX-D-16-XXX and status changes from "Submitted to Journal" to something else like "With Editor".

However, after waiting for 1.5 months, it didn't change and no number is assigned. Hence, I mailed to the Elsevier support. They replied with as usual "we forwarded your query to journal manager...". I waited for 15 more days. I mailed again. No reply from journal side. The mailing happened 3-4 times with follow-ups and remainders, but, it was only from my side. Still no response from Journal.

I also sent mail to chief editors very politely and waited for status to come from their side. But, after 10 more days of waiting no response came.

I sent final mail stating that "We are withdrawing our manuscript."

Is this type of behavior expected from reputed publisher like Elsevier. One research student can't waste 3 months of time biting nail to get the manuscript number or a response.

Please do help with your suggestions? What should I do? Should I submit to another journal? Please note that I have not yet obtained the confirmation of my manuscript withdrawn from the journal.

This is not a duplicate question. I searched thoroughly academia.SE before posting question.

This situation is indeed not normal, and it sounds like you've hit your tolerance limit with this particular journal.  You've done your best to communicate, and now your paper has been withdrawn even if the journal has not recognized this fact.

Why do I say this?  The fact is, that until you've signed over a transfer of copyright to a journal, the paper is not theirs.  In the typical Elsevier publication process, you don't sign that transfer until much later, so your manuscript is entirely yours right now, not the journal's.  As such, you've withdrawn it and should do whatever you wish with it at this point (i.e., submit it to a better journal).

Now, it's possible that this problematic journal will do something else strange at this point, like send it out to reviewers despite the fact that you've withdrawn it.  If that happens, though it is not your problem.  If that happens and you find out about it, then hey, they've actually communicated with you, and you have another excellent opportunity to remind them that you have withdrawn your paper.

The only possible ethical problem is if they send it out for review, you get the reviews, and then you reverse your decision to withdraw the paper: then you would be changing your situation to having effectively done a parallel submission (to this journal and wherever you go next), which is almost always considered improper.  Stick by your decision to withdraw, and you are fine.


How can I do solid, publishable research without having a postdoc position? I just earned a Ph.D in Mathematics, but there are no available postdoc opportunities for me. What should I do?

After four years, I have finally limped and hobbled to a Mathematics Ph.D while working full time at other places - and at the ripe age of 40 at that. It is my second attempt at earning a Ph.D, as my first attempt ended in failure due to poor life choices a decade ago.

Now that I am finished with my Ph.D, I have discovered that I am more interested in research in general than I thought I would be. I am a realist - I probably have a middle of the pack dissertation at a school representing the middle of the pack in my discipline. However, as my writing developed, I found myself not really wanting to stop, and perhaps even do research in areas not related to my discipline.

Applying to a postdoctoral position is the most logical route; however, my family is here in our midwestern city to stay, my alma mater is the only reachable university with postdoc opportunities, and I permanently burned bridges when I left the program the first time. On top of this, I am currently employed full-time at a private nonprofit nursing and pre-med company, and although the choices of courses to teach are far more limited than they were even when I taught at community college, my current employer is wonderful.

To be very specific, given my history above, my Asperger's syndrome and my advancing age, I want to understand the best way to publish independently.

This is a good question but there may not be a good answer. Students who graduate from strong programs with multiple publications and strong letters of recommendation still have almost no choice about where they have to go to pursue a postdoc, and the same problem arises 2-3 years later for tenure-track positions (if they manage to get one). It does not sound like your family is OK with the amount of uncertainty that pursuing this path would require.

For example, even if you were the strongest student graduating from Harvard, to pursue the postdoc-then-tenure-track course you and your wife would need to be OK with (1) moving next year (2) to a location you don't get to choose, then (3) moving three years later (4) to a permanent location you don't get to choose. (If you're lucky, you might get to decide between a couple options, but none might be where you'd want to live.) Hopefully you get tenure there, otherwise you'd (5) have to move again after six or seven years.

My experience is with research positions, and the situation does become somewhat different as you move towards teaching-focused positions like small liberal arts colleges, or community colleges. But it still sounds like staying in your current position may be orders of magnitude better for you and your family than any other option.

One thing that stands out about your post is that although it's clearly and cogently written, it is vague about the key point of what you are looking for. Do you want a job where you teach stronger students? or more advanced classes? A job that affords you time for research? or which evaluates you on it? Or do you just want to do research and publish? I would suggest taking the time to think about what exactly your goals are; hopefully some of them can be achieved without changing positions.

As for publishing: the academic publishing industry in mathematics is not so hard to deal with. The difficult part is finding a problem to work on and proving a theorem! Once you do that, given that you have a PhD in math you should be able to look at papers on the arXiv to see the style in which math papers are written.


Statement of purpose for PhD admissions In the statement of purpose, I have research work that's in progress and will be part of a manuscript to be submitted likely after applications season.  How should I go about describing my current research and future research goals?  I feel I would necessarily have to go into some details about my work with our research group, but I wonder if there is then a risk of getting ideas scooped by the admissions committees.

First, as  Caharpuka says, make sure to discuss this with your supervisor / PI and any other collaborators who are involved in your research.  Ask them about how much detail they are comfortable with sharing, and show them a draft of your statement before submitting it.

However, in general, you want to give enough details so that it is clear what you are working on.  You want to show that you have a deep understanding of the overall project as well as your specific tasks.

It is pretty unlikely that an admissions committee member would try to scoop you.  First, it's generally agreed that student / job / grant applications are confidential, and it would be highly unethical for a committee member to use such information for their own benefit.  Second, researchers usually don't lack for ideas of what to work on, so they don't need to steal them; usually the limiting factor is the time and resources to work on the ideas they have already.

So, err to the side of more details.  The risk is small, and it is far outweighted by the benefits.


How to address reading courses in cv for Phd application for pure math? How to address reading courses in cv for Phd application for pure math? I can only think of listing topics we covered in the course. But that seems to me very pointless since professors know the major topics of most math courses without reading that. However, I think independent readings are important experiences for math students, they definitely deserve a place in my CV.

It would be helpful to list the topics you looked at, and their sources. Even "standard" courses, with standard names, vary wildly depending on the choice of textbook or other sources, and depending on the instructor (who may be the author of notes or textbook for the course!)

Similarly, "reading course in X" tells far too little, just as saying "standard course in X" would. Prior to the enforced uniformization of applications to our grad program, as occasional Dir of Grad Studies in Math, I required applicants to not only tell the course name, but also, even more importantly, the (title and) author(s) of the text(s)/source(s) for the course. Reading courses treated the same way.

To repeat: the standard catch-phrases/labels of course names absolutely do not describe the content... so, yes, please do give more details. These details are not at all implied by the general, vague, cliched titles.


Doing math research without lecturing Is it possible to become a research mathematician without lecturing duties? I couldn't find any information on this.

The answer to your question is yes: there are research-only career pathways for mathematicians. One way of achieving this is to secure a job in a research-only institution, e.g. Max-Planck Institute in Germany, Academy of Sciences in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, or one of many government research labs / institutes in the USA.

Looking for a research-only career in a University can be much more challenging, if at all possible. This would usually imply buying off your teaching duties from a sequence of successful grants, and supervising many PhD students (which also involves a fair amount of teaching).

I can also recommend this article.


Recourse for patently unfair make-up exam? I am a senior finishing dual degrees in chemistry and mathematics and missed an exam in an upper level chemistry course due to a brief hospitalization which was fully documented. I was granted a make-up exam by the instructor along with a few other students. Our exam was 14 pages long, five pages longer than the original, and incredibly difficult in comparison. Several questions were structured in such a way that knowledge of very obscure and minute details from the 800 plus lecture slides and 200 plus pages of text was required. Without exaggeration, the make-up was perhaps 5 or 6 times harder and significantly longer for the same amount of time. I have no doubt that I failed and will be lucky if my score is even 60%. What actions, if any, should I take? I plan to talk the instructor when my grade posts, but I doubt that is going to get me anywhere. After spending at least 48 hours studying in the last two weeks, this feels very defeating.

Given that exams are difficult to create, especially make-up exams, it is just possible that it will work out when the instructor sees the results. I doubt that it was any sort of 'retaliation'. Wait for the grades and have a conversation.

It is too early to take action until you see the actual results and their effect.

Let me note that for some sorts of exams, writing intelligently about the problem is enough. If the problems are especially difficult then it may not really be possible under exam constraints to find a proper solution. But if what you write is "sensible", and demonstrates that you have the required knowledge, it may be enough, depending on the person interpreting the results. In any case, it is pretty much impossible to treat the results as "equivalent" to those of the normally given exam. A sensible instructor will recognize this.


Is there anything a student could or should do about a professor who gives lectures so dry that less than 10% of the class turn up? He's clearly a very nice man, but his delivery is reasonably monotonous, and his lecture material is reams and reams of definitions and rules.

I make sure to attend every lecture, and try my best to concentrate, but do find I have had to use other sources (generally online) to be able to answer the questions he sets.

All my peers that I have asked, say they find him very boring.

That you asked the question shows that you feel that there is something that you can do, and that you somehow should do something. However, the question lacks motivation. The lecture is boring - OK. Many things in life are boring. Here are some different motivations you may have (certainly not an exhaustive list):

You would like to have better lecture for yourself to facilitate your learning. That's a good motivation. Especially, you can bring this point across without judging the lecturer or the lecture. Focus on what you experience and what you perceive. Note the difference of "I can not focus for the whole lecture." and "The lecture is boring."
You feel with the students not coming, think they skip the lecture because they find it boring, and wish they would have better opportunities for learning. Note that students skip lectures for all kinds of reasons. I myself skipped lectures because I did not like the lecturer (although the lectures were anything else but boring), because the lecture were indeed boring, because I did not like the lecture style (e.g. it being to fast and reading from a book suited me better), because I was just "not in the mood" (although anything else was OK with the lecture). But it seem that you checked the premise. Then here be sure to stick to the facts when formulating your suggestions/feedback. Note the difference between "The students find your lecture boring." and "Other students I talked to agreed with me."
You want to help the poor lecturer. Also a valid motivation, but quite tough to deduce some action here. First, it's hard to be sure if the lecturer really wants help or could do something.

So, there is no general advice in this situation. Some points to consider: Do not judge persons, do not blame anybody. Describe your experiences, suggest changes that would help you. Be prepared that nothing will happen and do not insist. Think twice before involving a third person.


Thoughts on Student with Bad Grades in Easy Courses and Better Grades in hard courses I have a fairly weird transcript. I took two harder upper-year courses at the second-year of my undergraduate degree. I spent a lot of time working on these courses because I was fascinated by the course material and got A+'s in both of them. I did poorly in one lower-year undergraduate course and got a B+.

How will this reflect on the student for graduate admissions?

The comments are a bit surprising to me. I had several Bs and 2 Cs on my transcript (overall GPA 3.57, though my major GPA was more like 3.8), and I got into a very good engineering graduate school (US top 10) for my PhD. Maybe my admissions process was special in some way.

Some things to think about:

At many schools (see comment), nobody can tell from your transcript what the class average was for the course you got a B+ in (or any other course)
Nobody can tell that you got a B+ because you were bored

If you want to bolster your chances, stop slacking in the "easy" courses. Find some undergraduate research opportunities. If you did so well in your graduate courses, those professors might be worth approaching.


Are comments considered publications The journal Science has two sections for submission, Research articles and Commentary.
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/prep/gen_info.xhtml

Under commentary, there is a section for 'Policy Forum'.  Unlike 'Education Forum' there is nothing explicit about research related to Policy.  If one submits (not invited) a manuscript to Policy Forum, is this considered peer reviewed publication? Is there a difference in citation both in format of a citation and if it is common to cite a manuscript published in Commentary?

In general, a "Comment" is always a publication. However, your question is whether it should be listed in someone's publication list, presumably along side peer-reviewed articles. I believe the relevant criterion, as mkennedy suggests, is if the comment has itself been peer-reviewed. When yes, it can go in the regular list; if not, then it should presumably be relegated to a "additional publications" list or something of that type.


Do all accepted students in top-tier engineering programs get invited to interview before getting admitted? I'm an (international) electrical engineering applicant applied to some top-10 graduate programs in US (say, MIT, Caltech, UCB, etc.). As I check the entries of "thegradcafe.com" every day associated with the programs I've applied to, there are many entries which declare interviews with some POIs. So far, I have received no interview requests from any target school. Thus, I'm a little bit both curious about the importance of interview and anxious about the interpretation of such a lack of interviews in my case. To be specific, are all admitted students to top-tier engineering programs invited to interview before getting admitted? In other words, should I expect to be rejected if no one invites me to any sort of interview?

PS. If it helps to clear the situation, I'm currently an M.A.Sc student at a well-known Canadian university. So, both my university and my supervisor are pretty famous to the research community of my field.

Not all graduate programs in the US have (official) interviews at all.  In particular, except for Caltech, I'm not aware of any US computer science graduate programs that regularly interviews applicants before making admissions decisions.

There are a couple of sporadic exceptions, which are almost always handled by phone or skype:

Departments sometimes interview non-domestic students to check for English fluency, especially if their TOEFL (or equivalent) scores are missing or borderline but the application is otherwise strong.
Some individual faculty arrange informal interviews with prospective students before deciding whether to offer funding.

Outside computer science, some US engineering departments do regularly invite PhD students for on-campus interviews before admission, but I think this is more the exception than the rule.  In particular, as far as I know, none of the engineering departments at my university (which is highly ranked in most engineering disciplines) do this.


Gamified course: how to deal with the massive amount of grading needed without using specific software? I've been trying to give gamification a go for a while, but I'm struggling on how exactly to implement it.

I teach an introduction to programming course, and as I'm part of a team including a couple other teachers and we have too many students, our course is usually divided in two parts: one teacher explains the concepts and then I help students solve problems and exercises. That is 2 classes a week. When the semester is about to end, we have an exam (actually, 3, as the students have 3 chances to pass the exam). No additional activities, no projects, etc., as we usually have about 50 students to grade each semester.

I'm already trying a flipped classroom approach by providing videos they can watch at home before they come and try to solve exercises during my class, but still would like to add some gamification. However, I'm struggling on how to propose this to the rest of the teaching staff.

I've read a couple of books on gamification, watched videos and read about other teacher's experiences online, and I pretty much have an idea of what I'd like to do, and one of those things is replace grades with "experience points" and levels. The more XP points you get, the more levels you gain. Students that reach a certain level will pass the course.

The problem is: how are XP points awarded? In most cases I've read about, every activity is awarded XP, be it exercises the students solve, youtube videos they have to watch, projects they make, quizzes, etc. The thing is: how do you grade (or award XP) all of that? If every activity has to be reviewed by the teacher it would add a huge burden on the staff. Also, when students do their regular exercises, as they are so many, it would be impossible to give them individual feedback on each exercise, so those would not earn them any XP.

Maybe some online quizzes could help, but with programming there's a limitation there, it's not as simple as throwing multiple choice questions (at some point they will need to be coding). I know there are a couple sites that offer programming challenges with automated tests, but then there's the thing of knowing which student actually attempted to solve them, and which ones succeeded (I should add that I really need to keep my gamification proposal at $0 budget, as I know there is no way the administration will pay for software licenses or any equipment other than what we already have).

I thought of a scenario where the teacher would be some kind of "game master" and the students are trying to level up their characters by defeating "monsters" (exercises) and maybe working in guilds (peer reviewing their work). I pretty much even have a story created and some other details I'd like to add. But I can't do any of that unless we increase a good deal our work time so we get to grade students on many more activities other than just the 3 exams we already have.

So how does everyone else deal with this amount of grading?

I'm a former gaming engineer (many years ago), now college CS lecturer. Personally, I resist attempts at "gamification" of courses -- in short, it seems to me like a corruption of the gaming concept, and something that weakens both sides of the enterprise.

It sounds like you're struggling to get your arms around a desired major overhaul of the course. I think that many "reform" proponents would suggest that you take smaller steps, trying out some small single component in a course, assessing how well that works, and then iterating. Also consider: Will future courses use this gamification approach? Or should you be preparing your introductory students for the expectations of "normal" college courses with which they will be interacting in the future?

My top suggestion, as a first step, would be to work in some programming assignments which the instructors do manually grade throughout the semester. Feel free to make the assignments fairly simple and standard; directly from the book is fine. Have programs that take obvious input and output some kind of deterministic result -- write a simple batch file to compile and help test the functionality. Run them through an automated plagiarism checker (Stanford Moss). Also read the code and give feedback/points for proper style. I do this for ~8 assignments per semester, ~25 students per section. If you have double the students, then maybe halve the number of assignments.

Personally I think that you've got to commit to some kind of personal assessment of actual code for a proper programming course. Students that don't get that and wind up in my programming 2 course very much struggle at that level. Yes, this is more work than just one or two exams alone. But if students can't write code, then you should probably fail them, and if you want to think of those grades as your academic "gamification", then maybe that will help you out.


What are the conventions for indicating programming variables within text? From my thesis:

  In this method, the get_config_value function is used that is defined within the PyWPS API.

How should I format the "get_config_value" variable?

It should be formatted differently than the rest of the text, but I don't know what the conventions are.  Using italic or bold fonts doesn't look right to me.

It is common to typeset code with a monospaced font (a font whose characters have all the same width), like get_config_value.

If you're using LaTeX to write your thesis, you can use the command \texttt for inline code. For clarity and flexibility, it's probably better to define a new command, e.g. \newcommand{\code}[1]{\texttt{#1}}. You can use the listings package for longer pieces of code.

For other typesetting systems or word processors, check their manual.


The importance of finding potential mentor before applying for a postdoc I am going to apply for a competitive European research grant as a postdoc. How does finding a potential mentor in department help me to get postdoc position. Does it really increase my chance to give my application a priority?

It is in general a good idea, not just for your chances but to ensure you will find a productive or at least welcoming group to work with.

The impact on your success chance I think depends on the country of choice: in some countries (e.g. Italy), postdoc calls are advertised as a public competition with a committee that should judge your CV impartially.
In other countries, a professor may hire a postdoc on his personal funds and choose the candidate of his own will. In the latter case having at least some prior contact may be strictly necessary.


Team conflict in a large research project I am an undergrad working in a large research project (1 PI, 5 grad students, 15 undergrads). The project has 5 main facets, each of which is the primary responsibility of a single grad student. The undergrads are distributed as: 7, 3, 3, 2, 0. I am part of the 7 undergrad team.

Now while the grad students are the "leads" the PI treats us all equally.. because some grad students came in after the undergrads started the project (is the case for my team, I have been involved longer in the project than the grad student who is the lead).

The problem is there was an email sent by me, written rather quickly, and the grad student twisted some of the words I said. Sent a team wide email to the undergrads in my team, the other grad students, and the PI suggesting some malicious intent on my part.

Should I explain my side of things in an email? Or wait until the meeting the PI has called for? I want to do this before people start forming their own conclusion, but I'm not sure if I should wait or not.

I said: "not everyone has put in the same amount of effort in this project"
which was twisted as if I said: "I did all the work, no one else did any work" (i.e. the most extreme interpretation)

Deal with the issue head-on: send an email apologising for the ambiguity and saying that you weren't trying to be critical or suggest others weren't pulling their weight. That you wrote the email in haste and didn't phrase it well as a result.

Don't wait for others to draw their own conclusions. It's very easy to misunderstand a terse email.

It's probably also worth talking to the grad student in person, if you haven't already done so, to make the same points and defuse any ill feeling.


Can someone clarify Hamming's notion of important problems in relation to modern academia? I was reading the transcripts of a seminar by Dr. Richard W. Hamming. In this, Hamming goes on to say the following statements:

Explaining why one guy was successful while the others weren't as much successful.

  I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table
  mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask
  themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?" If you
  do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important
  work. But the average scientist does routine safe work almost all
  the time and so he (or she) doesn't produce much. It's that simple. If
  you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important
  problems, and you should have an idea. Most great scientists know
  many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20
  important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when
  they see a new idea come up, one hears them say "Well that bears on
  this problem."

Now my question is:  If I ask myself the question, What are the important problems in my field?, how should I expect to get an answer to this. Is it by deeply diving into literature and finding loopholes that exist. And even if I do find something worth working upon, how do I know it's an important problem of the field or a trivial subset of some other large problem?

I am sorry but I am unable to get myself a clear picture of what exactly is meant here. Will anyone please help me out with ideas.

Many thanks.

What are the important problems in my field?, how should I expect to get an answer to this. Is it by deeply diving into literature and finding loopholes that exist. And even if I do find something worth working upon, how do I know it's an important problem of the field or a trivial subset of some other large problem?

I would interpret this statement not so much as trying to look for "loopholes" in the literature, more as trying to identify what the core problems are that are holding back further advancement in your field, and what would need to change in order for them to become tractable. This requires you to deeply understand the existing work, so as to learn what exactly needs to change for your field to really jump forward.

However, I should warn you - Hamming’s approach is certainly a high-risk-high-reward one. If you implement this, you will almost certainly have to invest quite some work detailling and understanding a large number of difficult problems that you will in all likelihood make no progress on during your lifetime. Really important problems invariably don't have a straight-forward solution (or, in many cases, no solution at all), so even if you bring yourself into the best position to attack them in the right circumstances, there is little guarantee that these circumstances ever come to pass (or that you are the first to recognize if some recent development in the field makes one of "your" open problems tractable). That said, if you manage to address even one really big, important problem, your impact will indeed be higher than what you can achieve in decades of incremental research.


Should I mention reimbursements for financial expenditures when first contacting tentative speakers for a workshop? I am thinking of organizing a workshop in my field and am currently in the process of looking for potential speakers. Some of these I'll be contacting for the first time ever by email. The speakers I am thinking of targeting are a mixture of experienced academics and relatively inexperienced/first-timers, such as postdocs.

Clearly we will cover travel and accommodation expenses for the speakers. Should I mention this up front in the first email, or can it be perceived as rude to do so? Is it usually taken for granted that invited speakers don't pay for travel and accommodation?

If you intend to cover expenses, I would suggest saying so up front.
Some invited talks cover expenses and some do not, so it's important information to include.

You've presumably picked these speakers to invite because you really want them there.  Stating in the invitation letter that you will cover expenses will let them clearly know how much you value their presence.  In particular:

Senior scientists, who often get a lot more invitations than they can accept, will know to take you seriously because you are actually offering to pay their expenses, and they are much more likely to say yes.
Young scientists, who often have had few such experiences, will likely feel flattered and important and be very likely to say yes.

Don't make a big deal out of it (that could make you look inexperienced and desperate); just note towards the bottom of the invitation that you will cover all reasonable travel expenses. That is signal enough.


How to successfully train myself in multiple "meta" areas of my discipline? I am at the beginning of my academic career (first "professor at uni" job after PhD). My official obligations are pretty standard: teach, do research, and faculty-related admin stuff.

Now, I have my area of research specialisation. However, on top of this, I have an ambitious goal to form myself in these meta topics (meta in the sense that they are not about changing my area of specialisation within my discipline, but rather about complementing and improving my general standing as a scientist and teacher):

philosophy of my science [which might imply some basic formation in wider philosophy of science and perhaps philosophy in general]
history of my science
educational/teaching literature [for improving teaching methods]
critical thinking methods [to improve research, debating skills, and to foster in students]

The list I gave is not exhaustive, but take it as a core.

As a further restriction, consider the fact that

my memory is fragile, and I mostly learn and retain through "learning-by-doing" [so just reading a book might not be enough. I need to do something with it, e.g. teach or research or form habits]
I want to have a life outside my job [i.e. any investment must not consume all my free time]

Given the above, the questions are, based on your experience:

is something like this feasible?
if so, how best to proceed? For instance, would you study all topics in parallel, or start with one, "finish it", and move on? Would you go DIY or take a course?

Since you learn best by doing, I would suggest a few basic techniques that will allow you to learn these materials and retain the knowledge over the long-term.  The important thing is not to overload yourself with too much disparate information at one time, and to also make sure you are doing enough to solidify each important piece of knowledge before you move on to something else.  Look at this as a long-term goal --- aim to gradually build knowledge gradually and in a "deep" manner, where you solidify new knowledge as you go.

Start with what you know, and let yourself wander outward: I would counsel against attempting to learn a large number of meta topics at once.  The difficulty with doing this is that those topics might not have obvious connections for you, and that will make knowledge retention difficult.  Instead, it is often useful to start with a topic that is of immediate interest to you, which gives rise to broad meta-questions to which you do not already know the answer.  It is commonly the case that aspects of your discipline border on to other disciplines, including broader issues of philosophy of science, and so there are often a lot of obvious questions at the border of your own knowledge.  By answering these, and connecting it to your existing knowledge and work, you can move outward and solidify your knowledge at each step.  Pick a topic on the border of your existing knowledge, and focus on that, but allow yourself to wander into its connections with other topics as you get to the margins.

Since you have not mentioned your area of speciality (or even the broad field you are in) it is not possible for me to give examples that are applicable to you.  So in substitution of that, I will give you an example of my own previous learning.  I am a statistician, and when I was learning probability and statistics in detail as a grad-student, I learned a lot about the mathematics of "random variables", which are a certain kind of mathematical object.  There are some natural philosophical questions arising from this.  Is there actually such a thing as randomness in nature?  If not, does that invalidate the foundations of probability theory?  If not, why not --- i.e., why would it make sense to have mathematical "random variables" if there is no randomness.  If there is no randomness in nature, then what is "probability"?  Those inquiries led me to the literature on philosophy and probability (plus determinism, indeterminism, compatibalism, etc.), which led me to other broader methodological issues in epistemology, and to learning the approaches of a number of broad schools of thought.  One question naturally led to another, until eventually I had a good meta-knowledge that I could connect all the way back to practical issues in my subject matter.

Learn the history by learning about individuals, and remember interesting titbits about them: Just as it is useful to learn broad subject areas by starting with individual questions and working outward, when learning the history of your science, it is similarly useful to start with one person who developed something you find particularly interesting, and then gradually expand outward to learn about more and more people and groups.  Also, avoid just learning about the contribution of each person to your field --- try to augment this by learning some interesting things about each individual that will help you remember them.

For example, I have learned a lot about the statistical contributions of Ronald Fisher, but I also try to remember him better by familiarising myself with his contributions in genetics and eugenics.  No matter how much I might forget about Fisher, it is very easy to remember that he formulated the "sexy son hypothesis" in genetics.  That is not something that is super important to understanding his contribution to statistics, but it is an interesting thing about Fisher that makes it easy to remember him.  Similarly, I remember William Gosset by the fact that he worked at a Guinness brewery for almost all of his career.  When I teach introductory statistics to students, I often mention this little titbit, and whenever I have occasion to drink a Guinness, I will usually bore my drinking partner half to death by bringing up Gosset's work on the Student-T distribution.

Write about the things you learn, even if it is not an academic paper: In some instances, there may be opportunities for you to incorporate what you learn into your publishable scholarly papers.  Unfortunately, the large amount of effort involved in scholarly research means that this is not usually a feasible method of broad learning on a wide range of topics.  For that reason, it is worth establishing some other avenue for you to write about what you have learned and present it to others.  This could be writing articles or posts on a website or blog, answering questions on one of the StackExchange websites, giving presentations to colleagues, or incorporating what you learn into your lecture materials and teaching it to students.

Some researchers keep expository notes on things they are learning, and personally, I find that the easiest and most effective was to do this is to start writing up "partial papers" in the form of a scholarly paper whenever you get any new idea while learning a new subject.  These can be expository papers that might or might not become substantial enough to warrant an academic publication, but in the meantime, they function as useful expository notes collecting and organising your thoughts on a topic you have studied.  I have written hundreds of these partial papers, and most will probably never get turned into full published papers, but they are there on my hard-drive to allow me to look at my own exposition of an idea or area of analysis that was interesting to me.  By framing the exposition as something that might one-day be an academic paper, I also put it in an organised manner, and save myself some work if I want to develop it for publication later.

Incorporate what you learn into your teaching: When you have learned a new thing that sheds light on your subject, try incorporating this into your lecture notes and adding it to your lessons to your students.  Teaching is often a very effective method of learning, and it can be useful to solidify your knowledge.


Is it advisable to apply to graduate programs after the deadline has passed? I committed to a decision to attend graduate school starting the semester of Fall 2017. I made this decision around mid-December. I started applications 2 days ago and to my surprise, many of my schools had deadlines of December 15th or January 5th.

I don't feel I badly managed my time. This was just when I felt comfortable committing to this direction in my life. I took the GRE about 5 months ago so that 'future me' wouldn't have to worry about it if I decided to attend. I also saw that some schools had an admission deadline of March 1st, so I figured most universities would follow this pattern it would be ok if I stopped focusing so hard on work and side projects to enjoy the holidays with my loved ones. I'd rather not wait an additional year to attend grad school.

Is it (generally speaking) worth my time and money to apply to these programs so far after the deadlines? Fall 2017 is 8 months away after all. I feel I should still have enough time to get my name into the figurative hat.

You could try contacting the graduate administrator for programs you wanted to apply to, and ask them if it is too late to apply. I would consider doing this before I'd start throwing hundreds of dollars in applications to programs who wouldn't consider my app at all, anyway. However, most programs I've dealt with have online applications that are all marked as closed and won't allow any new applications, even if you wanted to apply, if it is after the selection date.

I don't personally know anyone who has tried this, but I suppose the most it will cost you is a polite email.

In all honesty though, I really don't expect anything other than a "you are welcomed to apply next year" response. A few graduate programs with deadlines in December have already made their decisions, some have contacted students for interviews, and some haven't started reviewing files (but admissions has still been processing their files, ensuring everything is attached, etc). Those that haven't started may still not allow any new applications.

You can ask, but most likely you will need to consider alternative plans, such as looking at programs that have spring admissions, dates that haven't passed, or just waiting until fall of 2017 to apply for fall of 2018. Good luck, regardless!


Review asks me to demonstrate "what is the new thing done"; what should I write? The referee has asked to demonstrate ' what is the new thing done" so that the paper will be accepted. I feel, though the fundamental theory is same for the work, the experiment at various machine is carried out and result is being published. So what should i write to the journal for convincing the matter.

First, it is important to clearly arrive at a conclusion that shows how the manuscript contributes to our unerstanding of the matter at hand. The referee apparently thinks your paper is lacking in this respect.

Second, in most journals it is not up to the referee to decide if a papepr is published or not, the editor(s) decide based upon recommendations from the referees (usually more than one). So is there a second referee? and if so what did that person say?

You should revise your manuscript and think about the conclusions. Make them clearer as suggested if you think you can. Such comments froma referee usually mean that the manuscript is not as clear as you may think and it is necessary to critically view your work and see if you can improve it. If you cannot, you should provide a note to the editor to meet the criticism of the referee which should entail why the improvements cannot be made. That would make a decision on the faith of the manuscript easier and more clear to the editor (which I suspect is involved).