Applying for PhD programs abroad while doing one in your home country In September I am starting the second year of PhD in my home country. At the same time, I am also going to apply for foreign PhD programs in the same science this year. It has always been my intent to apply for PhD in a prestigious American or European university. The reason I didn’t do it one year ago is that I wanted to gain some more working experience and knowledge before leaving to work abroad. Now I feel that I’m ready. What is more, now I have publications and good CV with talks at conferences, short research visits and such things.

I would like to know, what is the general point of view on such PhD applicants as me? Should I mention in my applications that I want to do double PhD or maybe not even mention this at all?

I should say that applying abroad, I don’t intend to leave the PhD program I’m currently doing. I know many students who obtained their master’s degrees at my university and then applied for PhDs abroad and left to other countries and at the same time were accepted to continue our PhD program. Now they are doing double PhDs, you could say. Of course, their situation was slightly different at the moment of applying, as the universities that accepted them didn’t know if they were actually interested in doing double PhD. However, practically it doesn’t seem to make any difference now.

It's usually a bad idea to do two PhDs at the same time because:

A PhD is a full-time job, with some very intensive periods. One has to deal with enough stress already when doing one PhD.
It would unavoidably generate conflicts: sometimes your advisor no 1 will ask you to do something which will keep you busy the full week or month. What do you tell your advisor number 2, that you're on holiday? If your two advisors don't agree on the direction of your research, what do you do? What if one insists to have their name on a paper you did with the other?
Either you do your best on both, but then it will take you more time than doing only one, probably double. Or you do one seriously and you botch the other, but then what's the point of doing it?
Assuming you survive the two PhDs, at the end you can apply for a postdoc or industry job... Exactly the same as with one PhD, no benefit.


First author submits manuscript before final approval of all co-authors A first and corresponding author has submitted a co-authored manuscript after having circulated a near-final draft. She has freely accepted some comments of her colleagues' and rebutted others, but only shared the final version after submission. This is despite some co-authors specifically asked to view the very last version once more before the submission.

The manuscript is for a normal issue of a peer-reviewed journal. The referees' comments have been dealt with. All kinks concerning methodology, results and conclusions had already been ironed out. The remaining comments were of linguistic/stylistic/presentational nature alone and improved the readability of the paper appreciably. For example: removing repetitions, streamlining the content, splitting paragraphs into block of homogeneous content, and so forth. Let's regard these interventions as important for the standing of the paper --- see this guide of Elsevier's for a general appreciation of why linguistic editing is relevant to proper scientific writing. In other situations where 'heavier' matters of content might have been at stake, this post's concerns would hold nonetheless.

The reasons for not circulating the final version are a self-imposed deadline, tied up to office holidays, and the reasoning that the time for applying linguistic changes is over. This latter point is immediately questionable since the bulk of polishing takes place at the end of writing, almost by definition.

Within the authors' team, two lines of thought emerge as to whether the first author ought to share the final manuscript before definitive submission. Some say that the first author has the authority of moving on; others say that the first author should not submit without giving her colleagues the possibility of seeing what happened of the last remarks.

The journal's authorship guidelines are curt.
Note that the journal is not interested in authorship ranking that are internal to the group; it only deals with the roles taken by one author as correspondent.
Quoting the most relevant ones, these boil down to the following:

to be such, all authors must meet all of the following requirements a) providing substantial contributions b) drafting or revising the work c) giving final approval of the version to be submitted for publication;
the responsibility of the corresponding author is to dialogue with the co-authors and act on their behalf.

There is an interesting paradox in this formulation. A corresponding author will invariably act on behalf of people who have approved the manuscript, whether all collaborators have been asked or not. Those who do not approve are, or may fear to become, no co-authors. The first author can easily find leeway to disregard some collaborators, and move on with the submission with a malformed sense of entitlement. Co-authors may easily lose the aegis of the first author.

Say. The colleagues who demand a last glance at the final manuscript may face a rejection in the line of "co-authors only suggest, first author decides". This could be rebutted with something like "the first author is not fully acting on our behalf, though; she fails in acting as  corresponding author". Then, the challenge could be "you are missing the point on the way it works; she's the first author, do you really want to be co-authors?". The first author thanks and submits, some co-authors only see the show.
Further discussion is deterred by the fact that, once the manuscript has been submitted, the situation can only be reversed by summoning up the editor. This step might be felt as overly confrontational, and the authorship guidelines above may not help the editor much either.

My question is: does the first/corresponding author have an obligation not to proceed with submission of a manuscript before having given all co-authors the final say to what will be submitted?

An article should not be submitted to a journal (or otherwise distributed) without the explicit approval of all the authors. All authors can be held responsible for the contents of the article: errors or frauds committed by the first author can be blamed on the other authors as well. (Remember Yoshiki Sasai.)

This said, as a matter of convenience, some authors may give their go-ahead in advance and/or without seeing the last version, if they sufficiently trust the first author. Still, they should say it explicitly.


Funding for new faculty looking for advice on what factors do granting agencies such as NIH takes into account while funding new researchers.
I am set to start as a new faculty soon. My Post-doc was short because of the faculty position offer. I could not generate preliminary data for the research area that I am interested in for a million reasons nevermind. Please, can anyone advise me on how to navigate the grants? I am reading books on the subjects but they assume the ideal PI, the Ideal Postdoc with the ideal supervisor, and unfortunately, my situation is tight with limited publications and high aspirations.  Any advice will be highly appreciated.

Reaching out to senior faculty in your dept. will be of great help. Many schools have a proposal (or grant) development office that conducts seminars + talks for new faculty and new hires.


No pagination in Elsevier journals My paper was accepted in one of Elsevier's journal and it was recently published, but there is no pagination instead they have this "article number" for example "Volume 123, Article No. 212021" similar to those in some Springer and Royal Society journals. The paper is already included in an issue. I am wondering, does my paper officially published or not? Could anyone tell me how this policy is called? or where I can locate this policy in the Elsevier website?

Page numbers are going to go away because (i) stuff isn't actually printed any more, and (ii) page numbers are inconvenient in the publishing process because one needs to know how many pages the articles before the current one have before giving the current one page numbers. So the short answer is: You'll need to learn to cope with it.

In similar situations, I've used the following formats to indicate how many pages an article has:

  W. Bangerth: "Stuff more scientists ought to talk about", Journal of Important Research, article 12687 (24 pages), 2019.

or

  W. Bangerth: "Stuff more scientists ought to talk about", Journal of Important Research, vol. 24, pp. 12687/1-24, 2019.


Conference proceeding in a regular issue of a journal (pros and cons) I am a graduate student considering submitting a paper either to Bioinformatics as a typical refereed journal article or to Bioinformatics as a refereed conference proceeding. A webpage providing information about submitting as a refereed conference proceeding (https://www.iscb.org/ismb2018-submit/proceedings) states the following:

"Accepted papers will be published as conference proceedings in an open access, online-only, section of a regular issue of the Bioinformatics journal with an electronic version distributed to conference delegates. The proceedings will be available online approximately one month prior to the conference opening."

and

"Publication of the proceedings as an online part of the Bioinformatics journal will result in fully citable articles, indexed by Medline and ISI. See the conference proceedings for https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/33/14/i1/3953992 for an example of online-only publication by Oxford University Press."

As a graduate student preparing for a career in academia, I am unsure whether I should submit my work as a typical refereed journal article or a refereed conference proceeding. I generally feel that conference proceedings have less impact, but in this case, I would also be able to present my work orally at the conference.

Moreover, I am unsure how I would handle such a conference proceeding publication on my CV in an honest manner. Could it still be included as a "refereed journal article" on my CV or would it need to go as something else like a "refereed conference proceeding". I am unclear as the statement "Accepted papers will be published as conference proceedings in an open access, online-only, section of a regular issue of the Bioinformatics journal" seems to imply it can be considered a regular refereed journal article.

I would be grateful to hear any advice on this subject matter!

After the passage you quote it says

  ISMB 2018 provides authors of accepted papers an oral presentation to provide an oral summary of their work. All presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes including 3-4 minutes for discussion.

It seems like this organization has both a regular journal and a conference. If you submit as a journal article it would be a peer-reviewed journal article. If you submit as a conference paper it would be a peer-reviewed conference presentation.

In my field (computer science) these would likely be viewed as being the same in terms of prestige, but this is not true in most fields. Your advisor would be a good resource for feeling out how people in your field view conference papers vs journal papers.


How does a petty marijuana possession charge affect graduate admissions in math? I was charged with possession of marijuana earlier this year. In my state, it's not a crime, just a violation with a fine. Technically, it's not even a conviction because there's a diversion program that results in the charge being dropped after a year. The problem is that it won't be dismissed and expunged until after I apply for graduate school. So right now the charge is listed as pending.

Do applications for a PhD in math ask about petty charges like this? I know some ask about felonies and convictions, but that doesn't apply here. I know if I were applying for law school or medical school, my situation would be very different.
How badly will this affect my application should this show up in a preliminary background check? Do math graduate programs even do background checks?

Do applications for a PhD in math ask about petty charges like this? I know some ask about felonies and convictions, but that doesn't apply here. I know if I were applying for law school or medical school, my situation would be very different.

No. The part of the application that faculty look at has nothing remotely like this.  If you apply to a public university there may be a portion of the application which is run through the university itself, so there is some chance that you might be asked about felonies. But as you say, you have not even been charged with a crime.  You would have to be asked something extremely specific in order to have divulge this: e.g. "Do you have any pending fines for possession of drugs?" I've never heard of such a question asked in any context.

  How badly will this affect my application should this show up in a preliminary background check? Do math graduate programs even do background checks?

No, math (and other "arts and sciences") graduate programs do not do background checks, so far as I know [I was involved with graduate admissions at my program for several years].  Assuming that this information were disclosed to the faculty: well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but to me this sounds roughly comparable to a moving violation in terms of its legal and moral seriousness.  In fact, some kinds of moving violations present a potential or actual danger to others; possessing marijuana really doesn't.  I would put it squarely into the "Don't worry about it" category.


Copyright statement (US Government) in acknowledgments - what to do as a reviewer? I am currently reviewing a paper, which has this statement in the acknowledgements:

  The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting
  the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States
  Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide
  license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript,
  or allow other to do so, for United States Government purposes.
  Source

As a reviewer, I could simply ignore it. However, it seems rather weird to me, since usually after acceptance you have to sign a form which deals with exactly this kind of right transfer / copyright etc. The editors and referees do not have any legal power over this anyway.

Does my role as a reviewer also include to mention this to the editor who should forward it to the publisher, or should I simply ignore it, on the risk that this statement potentially collides with the journal policies?

The article (i.e. its contents and references) are within your remit as a reviewer.

Checking copyright details and investigating any the legal ramifications will not be relevant to the review you should be doing.


Thesis project outside of advisor's expertise I'm working on a project outside of my advisor's experise. He doesn't have background in this area (he's not familiar with both the big picture nor the basic detail). For example, it's a machine learning project, and while the first critical thing is training data, he told me to focus on finding features. Also he's not consistent with the design of solution: sometimes he want it to be unsupervised, and when I mention training data he switched to supervised system.

I managed to do the work on my own, but without the advisor's guidance I couldn't go further. I can only go to the point of reimplemeting state of the art papers and add small modification to them. Whenever I present a new idea/working solution, he couldn't criticize it since he's not familiar with the field.

How should I resolve this situation ( ask for a coadvisor etc)? I absolutely love this project and am capable of working out the solution, just need better guidance from professor.

P/S: This project is one of the main project of my advisor since he gets funding from that.

Step 1:

Figure out if your professor is actually not capable of advising this project, or if you are just not communicating well. For instance, oftentimes when I hear that advisors are giving inconsistent advice, it just happens that the student often misunderstands what the advisor is trying to say (or the advisor is just throwing out ideas in a brainstorming style, which almost by definition means that some of those ideas will be conflicting - that does not necessarily mean that he does not know what he is talking about). For instance:

  it's a machine learning project, and while the first critical thing is training data, he told me to focus on finding features.

Focusing on the features first does not seem entirely crazy to me. Of course you'll need to find good training data for supervised learning at some point, but identifying the potential features is indeed usually a very early step in the process, afaik.

  sometimes he want it to be unsupervised, and when I mention training data he switched to supervised system.

It's a research project, he probably does not have a 100% clear vision of what exactly you need to do to make it work (nor should he). Maybe he is just throwing out ideas, and you are taking his words too seriously?

Critically question whether he or you are not understanding the project correctly. If this is the "main project he gets funding from", chances are that actually you are not understanding correctly.

Step 2:

If you decide that he actually cannot advise the project, and you can't do it alone, you can either get help or get out.

Getting help may include finding a co-advisor, but this may be difficult for various reasons (one being that most faculty are not overly interested in joining in ongoing, troubled projects of other professors for the dubious honor of being a co-advisor). Usually, it is easier to get the help of other persons in your lab more senior than you (postdocs, or even older PhD students), who have the necessary skills, and collaborate with them on your project. For this to work, you need to figure out what is "in it" for your collaborator (joined papers? something useful for their own dissertation / projects?).

If you are unable to get help, I see no other way than to get out, that is, change your project.


Change of email address in peer-review system My goal is to serve as journal reviewers as much as possible, and I have recently changed affiliation. I have published several papers using my old affiliation's email address which is now closed since leaving, but I have set up an automatic reply message informing senders of my new email in the Office365 system which is good for 1 year after account closing. I wonder what will happen if an editor finds me as a potential reviewer based on my publications and reach out to me using my old institute's email address. Do most submission systems (eg. Manuscript Central) handle automatic replies well? Do journals or editors typically take effort to research on reviewers' recent contact info before reaching out? Also I do have an ORCID account and a personal webpage, but as my name is very common I don't think it helps much in this situation.

It depends on how much time the editor is spending on the journal. When an invitation email bounces, the editor will receive an email. It's good practice then to cancel the invitation, because otherwise one could easily mislead oneself that the reviewer might still accept. If the bounce email includes a redirect, then it's a simple matter of changing the reviewer's email and inviting again. But doing this for reviewer after reviewer (an editor can conceivably have a couple of papers a day to handle, each of which needs 5+ invitations) gets tedious quickly. The editor might get tired, in which case a sufficiently motivated publisher can still pick up the ball ... but no guarantees. In your case the redirect will only work for a year, which might not suffice since the editor might be inviting based on your papers published over a year ago.
The easiest way to update your email is to log on to the system yourself and update your information. If you can't do this, emailing the publisher (the journal's full-time staff) is the next-best way.


Should my advisor know if I am auditing unrelated courses? Question : Should my advisor know if I am auditing unrelated courses?

Motivation : I am a PhD student in Computer Science and at times, I wish to audit courses which are not at all related to my thesis or research.

For instance:

For Fun : Italian Food and Art
For probable post-PhD jobs (but not related to thesis) - Econometrics, Quantitative Finance.

In general, my advisor is cool and won't mind the hour(s) I spend in the classroom. He allows me to work from home or wherever and doesn't care about "seeing" me in my office so long as I keep doing my work on time (which I do).

If I tell him about the courses, he unnecessarily might get freaked or worried and might question my intentions (which I can obviously clarify), If I don't it seems as if I am keeping something important from him.

In this case, you should let your advisor know, because the time spent in the classroom is time not spent in the lab. Since he's paying you for your time, if you will be doing daytime activities that will take time away from research he has a right to know about it. On a different note, depending on how auditing works in your university, there may be costs associated with your auditing the course, and he (or his grant) would be covering these costs.

Generally speaking, the more communication between you and your advisor, the better.


What should a student look for in an undergraduate thesis topic/supervisor? I am an undergraduate student (in maths) looking for a topic and supervisor for my thesis.

What criteria should I use to judge whether a project/supervisor combination will make for a good thesis and productive experience? Especially in the context of preparing for graduate school. (I thought about asking separate questions for projects and supervisors, but they seem to be so closely linked that it makes more sense to have them together)

Conversely, what are red flags/pitfalls I should look out for and how do I avoid them?

I am in math, and have some experience with undergrad research (from both sides), and there are lots of different ways you could have a good experience with undergrad research.  What would be good for you will depend a lot on your individual situation (mathematical maturity, background, independence, etc) and your goals (do you want to get a paper out of it? just get some research experience? learn something new? help your case for grad schools?).

For getting into a good grad school, what's most important is how well prepared you are in terms of background and how much potential you show.  This is evidenced by your transcript and recommendation letters.  Doing novel research or writing a paper is much less important (unless it's much more impressive than typical undergrad math research).  (Note: many undergrad theses in math are just an exposition of an important topic.  Some of these are very good.)  So in terms of grad school, the most important thing out of this project will probably be (1) what you learn, and (2) the impression you make on your supervisor, who should write you a recommendation.
For being able to get a paper out of it, research is never certain, but it's important that the project is well thought out beforehand.  More open-ended projects may sound interesting, and teach you a lot, but may not be conducive to having a finished project in the time available.  I generally find ones that involve some calcutions/computation have a higher rate of "success," in the sense you should at least be able to do the calculations, whereas projects that require you to develop some theory may just leave you completely stumped.  (Though some types of theoretical projects where you can follow the method of another paper closely also have high rates of success.  Conversely, try to stay away from projects of the form "look for pattern in this data.")  Hopefully you can get a sense of how well thought out the project is from the description; also knowing how successful the supervisor was with previous students may suggest this person gives high-percentage or low-percentage success problems (but if you're more concerned about grad school, where the students went for grad school is more important than if they published papers).
For learning things (which helps with grad school), a project where you have to learn some theory (even if just to do computations) is better.
Both to make progress and to learn things, an accessible advisor (say is willing to meet you once a week or so) is better.

Apart from that, I would say put some value in your general impression from talking to the potential supervisor.  If you have a chance to talk to former students of the supervisor, that could also be useful.


How to answer a professor's email? I emailed a professor about possible openings for graduate studies in a certain research group and he answered me like this:

  Your background looks great. Unfortunately, I recently recruited a graduate student. I have been working on grant proposals. If they get funded, I will have money to support more students. I will let you know, if plan changes.

How should i answer this email?

Is it polite to wish him luck? or should I send a simple thank you for reading my resume? or combining both and also saying that I "look forward to hearing from you" or something in that matter? It's really important for me to make a good impression.

(I am not a native speaker by the way)

You're probably overthinking this... The professor's response looks like a polite refusal. If I were you I wouldn't get my hopes up.

If you're really intent on answering I would just say something like "Thank you for your time, and good luck for your grant proposals." but I would get out of my head the idea that if I make a "good impression" I would have a chance of getting in the program. (If I really were you I'm not even sure I would answer, not out of spite of course, but simply because it would be an unnecessary email that would waste both my time and the professor's time... I doubt the professor would notice a lack a response. Though a "thank you" never hurt anyone.)


Do non-English academic journals pay for a translated paper? I am currently a PhD student in mathematics with a very strong interest in foreign languages (native language English), and I would be interested in translating math articles in foreign languages into English on the side.

Is this something that academic journals are generally willing to pay for? How would one go about finding work in this area?

I think you'd have a better chance of getting more reliable information if you go to popular online forums for translators like ProZ and TranslatorsCafé, where you can talk to professional translators and browse job ads. A very quick search already gave me one recent (but already closed) ad that seems to be looking for a translator for an academic journal:

http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/job146043.htm

  I am currently in search of French to English Translator with a mathematics & engineering background to translate an academic journal.

Also, AMS seems to have a list of translated journals here:

http://www.ams.org/msnhtml/trnjor.pdf

Anyway, there seems to be a demand for that kind of job, so you might be able to find a job if you know where to look. So, maybe the question is more about how to become a professional translator (and find jobs) than about academia.


Which articles don't need experimental results? I see that every paper which propose (present) something (new) (over existing methods) should possess an experimental result section and some tables and figures and numbers. Some papers may be rejected if they don't follow this format regardless what they are going to say. They may are needed for the evaluation of the method or comparison of it with the related methods.

I myself, when read some papers, based on the arguments in them, propose a new or more general techniques which covers their shortcomings. Or I may  propose a new formalism or tool which can be shown that is novel or useful.

However, providing some experimental results for them is not always easy. Some measures should be defined and samples should be gathered to get some statistics ( for something that you know works in practice). In fact some times, I don't know how can I offer such results or whether it is necessary or not.

Then, I would like to know which type of researches need those quantities and tables and diagrams?

Or in the other words, which articles don't need a results section? How can I write or put my arguments to show that it doesn't need further evaluation.

I give some examples to show my problems (first I should say my filed of study is computer science):

There are some grammar or annotation scheme to build a linguistic corpora for English, there is no such corpora for Persian, I justified a similar scheme for building such a corpora for Persian based on the language features, Should I provide (experimental) results?
I developed a software which filter a webpage and remove noise and reformat the content to enhance readability and comprehension for non native English speakers ..... I used the results of another article on reading comprehension which didn't implement a web tool for their foundings.. Should I provide (experimental) results?
There is an algorithm for converting a linguistic corpora specially designed for English language, I generalized it to cover some other languages and justified that with some arguments, should I provide results?
I proposed a formalism for extraction rules for a data extractor from webpages, I provided many examples how it works, and how it is more robust, understandable and easier to use and based on previous tools and methods and how it borrowed their features ..., should I provide (experimental) results?
......

In all the work you are giving as examples, you are essentially developing methods. Not giving any experimental or very strong theoretical evidence that those methods do what they are supposed to do has many negative effects:

It strongly diminishes the value of your work to the extent that you may have trouble publishing work that you could otherwise publish it in a high-ranking journal. Peer reviewers may very well demand that you report on the results of applying your method to some data and may reject your paper if you have no very good arguments for not doing so.

Publishing methods without giving such evidence is the exception and usually only done, if deriving and explaining the method makes for a whole paper and applying the method is done in a follow-up paper or if the method paper and the experimental paper are better published in separate journals. And even then, there is usally some short application to (often artificial) example data in the method paper.
It makes it much less likely that people ever use your work, build upon it or cite you. If I read a paper in which the author proposes a method but fails to show any application, I would strongly suspect that this is because they can’t, which in turn hints at something being very wrong with the method. I would be very skeptical about such a method and would be much less likely to use it.
It will be harder to get funding for your work or justify that you spent your funding well.
Whether you publish it or not, applying methods is one of the best ways to learn what demands and problems occur in reality, which allows you to develop better methods.
If you repeatedly do something like this, you may obtain a bad reputation due to the above.

How bad all this is, eventually depends on your field’s openness to theoretical work and how difficult its is to apply the methods and properly evaluate them. But as far as I can tell from my limited insight into the computer-science literature, I would consider the impact to be rather strong in your case.

Given the nature of your work, I expect it to be impossible to provide convincing theoretical evidence that your methods work. For example languages are notorious for exhibiting weird behaviour and having tons of exceptions. Thus only by applying your method can you demonstrate that your it isn’t rendered useless by peculiarities or special cases you did not account for.

So, to sum it up: Yes, it may be possible to publish your methods without experimental evidence that they work, but I would strongly advise against it.

If you strongly despise experimental work, I suggest that you team up with somebody who does this work for you.


What's the difference in responsibilities between a committee member, a co-advisor and an advisor in an PhD committee? What are the differences in responsibilities among them? Can anybody give me an example to elucidate that. Also why are non-tenured faculty more interested in a co-adviser role than a committee member role?

The advisor is the person who is formally recognized as the person most responsible for supervising the student's thesis research. A co-advisor is a person who also works with the doctoral candidate, but often in a secondary role (perhaps providing scientific but not financial support, for instance).

In my own case, for instance, I had two advisors who were fully equal in both supervising the research and supporting it financially. However, formally one of them had to be in charge of the thesis research—I believe they decided it by a coin flip.

The thesis committee is a body that convenes only sporadically (although sometimes on a regular schedule) to ensure that a doctoral candidate is progressing according to expectations. The committee—which usually includes the advisor and several other faculty members (or other advisors)—is also usually responsible for deciding when a candidate is ready to schedule a defense of the thesis and graduate.

As you can see, this is a very different role than a co-advisor, who takes on a much more active role in supervising and guiding the doctoral candidate's work. While a thesis committee member rarely is a co-author on a paper with the candidate, a co-advisor often will be. Consequently, it's much more useful for a faculty member to be a co-advisor than simply a committee member. (The latter role will not carry anywhere near as much "credit" toward a tenure case as being an advisor or a co-advisor.)


Intent behind Recommendation Letter requirement? What is the inherent idea of having a recommendation letter/ "letter of reference" requirement in academia, especially while applying to grad schools?

I understand that if the person giving the recommendation letter is a bigshot or even fairly well-known, people would be ready to take his word regarding the applicant's caliber.

However, if the person recommending is previously unknown to the university you are applying to (of course, they may use Google to dig up some information, or they may not want to), what weightage does his word carry? If I am on the other side, I won't be inclined to trust the judgement of a person whom I don't know. What I would want to do is to judge the caliber of the applicant for myself, but that's a separate issue altogether. (Judge yourself, or trust some metrics...)

Now, in general, if "the other side" is a decent enough university, it will have applications coming from all parts of the world. Then, situation no. 2 (above) is more likely than situation no. 1. So, what is the intent of having a recommendation letter requirement in the second case?

At a minimum, a letter of recommendation is no worse than, say, a Yelp review.  The person who rated Joe's Hamburger Shack 5 stars is a total stranger to you, but knowing that that person liked it is still more data than you previously had about how good the place is.

For a grad school application, there are few sources of concrete information.  Hard data like grades, GPA, and GRE scores cover only a fraction of the relevant qualities of each applicant.  It can certainly help if the admissions committee knows the recommender, but even if they don't, the mere fact that that the applicant is considered qualified by an active researcher at an accredited instituion is a significant gain over the other information available in the application.

Also, as Nate Eldredge mentioned in a comment, a good letter will not just state the belief that the applicant is qualified, but will give reasons.  These reasons, again, come from a person who is presumed qualified to evaluate them, and are therefore more valuable.

It is true that if not only the recommender but also their institution is totally unknown to the committee (e.g., a recommendation from Prof. John Doe at East Podunk Community College), the information may not be helpful, and could even be viewed skeptically.  But I don't think this is a common case.  Even if no one on the faculty personally knows or has collaborated with any professors at, say, Harvard, you can bet that it means something to have a Harvard professor recommend someone.  Although that's an extreme case, the same principle applies to other schools in varying degrees: even knowing that the school exists goes some way towards establishing credibility.

How much weight these are or should be given is debatable, but there is simply no other way to get the information in recommendation letters, namely a qualified professional's judgment of the applicant's quality.  It may indeed be that in some cases the committee views the letters as unhelpful because they are too vague, but if many letters are informative, then vague letters are already "bad" in comparison, and provide a means of winnowing the applicant pool.  Even in a hypothetical case in which only a few letters were helpful, the school doesn't really stand to lose anything by having them, and stands to gain useful insight that they can't get any other way.

Also, I would be interested to see some numbers on how often the admissions committee really does not know and has never heard of any of the people writing the letters.  An important thing to consider is that in many cases one or more of the letter writers will have been consulted by the applicant to get advice on where to apply.  Thus, there can be a self-selection process at work: professors know professors at other institutions, thus they advise their students to apply there, and then they write a letter of recommendation.  I would guess that this significantly increases the likelihood that some of the letter writers will be known to the admissions committee.  In effect, the same people are not only recommending the applicant to the school, but recommending the school to the applicant (by suggesting that they apply there).

A little edit: Based on your comments, it seems you are also worried about situations where, e.g., the letter writer is "biased" towards recommending the applicant.  There are two responses to this: one is that everyone knows that.  The recommender wouldn't be writing the letter if he were biased against the applicant.  The recommendation is not supposed to be "impartial" in the sense that it mechnically assesses some attributes of the applicant.  It's just supposed to be the honest opinion of a real person who interacted with the applicant in a real academic context.

More generally, there is simply no getting around the fact that virtually everything in academia operates on trust.  When you submit an article to a journal, the editor has no way of knowing whether you plagiarized the text, falsified the data, etc.  When you apply for a job and list dozens of publications on your CV, the search committee probably does not look up every single one ot make sure it really exists.  For better or for worse, academic procedures are built on the notion of receiving "credentials" that indicate you are to be trusted.  When someone receives a letter signed "Prof. John Doe, XYZ University", they assume that Prof. John Doe really is a professor at XYZ University.  It is of course possible to fabricate such credentials, but to handle that problem would require a complete overhaul of academia.  The basic reason people trust a letter-writer is because academics trust each other not to tell brazen lies about who they are, where they work, etc.  They understand that the recommender may not be totally objective in his or her assessment of the candidate, but they nonetheless assume that the assessment is made in good faith by a qualified judge; that's all that matters.


I believe a portion of a paper I am coauthoring is false I have mildly contributed to a research project which is now ready for publication.
However, I am convinced the treatment of the experimental data is wrong.

I shared my concerns with the PI of this project and shown him why I believe this was not correct. Yet, I only made him doubt and he still wants to publish it as it is. This treatment of the data is not necessary to reach the conclusion of the paper which still holds with more standard data analysis, but it looks less fancy. Now what should I do ?

should I go ahead and work on the publication ?
should I withdraw from this project (which is a side project for me) ?

On the one hand I still believe the conclusion of the paper is true and I could use an additional publication on my CV. On the other hand I feel it is dishonest to publish something which I believe is not true.

You seem to be giving two stories: you note that you 'still believe the conclusion of the paper is true' but you then note that 'it is dishonest to publish something which I believe is not true'.  If the issue is simply the handling of the data analysis (with alternative paths leading to the same conclusions through more or less fancy approaches), I might suggest a compromise. Add a footnote at the presentation of that analysis indicating that conclusions remain even under a more conservative statistical analysis.  If the journal allows, you can elaborate a bit there.  That way, you've solidified that you understand there are multiple approaches, but the conclusion is robust to that. This might be even more convincing.


What does awaiting reviewers reply mean? What does awaiting reviewers reply mean?
And how long does it take

"Awaiting reviewers reply" means that your manuscript has been sent out for review.

There is no set time for this to take. Reviews can be returned to the editor within a few days, or it may take a couple of weeks depending on the journal.


Do transfer students get left behind? I'm a student in the mathematics department that's close to graduation and I've TA'd a few classes and been around.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of professors in these junior and senior level courses seem to put transfer students on the back burner. Maybe it's because they didn't get to form early bonds with them in their freshman and sophomore years. They just don't seem to be treated the same or maybe just not as involved in classes.

One thing I can say for certain, though, is that our "Orientation Day" for transfer students is weak and petty compared to the one for new college students. Is this common for transfer students to sometimes get lost in the dust, unequal opportunities, or simply different treatment? Clearly universities have an interest and a phenomena does exist because they send out "Transfer Student Survey"'s all the time, so the colleges are aware that something is different.

It depends on the school. My undergrad institution, for example, went out of the way to try to pull transfer students into the fold. While I was not a transfer student, I worked closely with the orientation department and this was a big push on their part. However, it usually comes down to the individual student. I suspect that many transfer students are perhaps overly self-restrained upon transferring to a new school and thus don't reach out enough. So, as @RoboKaren pointed out in the comment above, transfer students are often left behind.

A great piece of advice I was given about college (and grad school) in general was "you're paying for it so get your money's worth." I admit this doesn't perfectly translate outside the US where you may not be paying for it directly, but the sentiment is the same. You're spending your time (and possibly money), so be proactive. Ask questions, make a concerted effort to get to know the professors, etc. Faculty probably couldn't care less that you transferred as long as you're interested and/or talented in their pet field. If you make a clear effort to do this, whether or not you're a transfer student will make zero difference.


Didn't Pass Final Course for Undergraduate Degree - Already Have Full Time Job Unfortunately I failed the last class I needed to get my undergraduate degree- even after walking on stage in front of my whole family. I emailed the professor back and forth to no avail and even applied to repeal the grade with the chair of my school (didn't work). This course is only offered during working hours for me and I don't think it can be done online. I am in panic mode and don't have a clue what to do at this point. Theres no way this is the first time this has ever happened to someone? Does anyone have any advice on what I should be doing? Thanks so much.

You're going to have to find a way to retake that class, or an acceptable substitute, if you want to get your degree.  So that's the starting point.

I would suggest you begin by speaking to your academic advisor.  They will know about possible options for retaking the class, or other classes you might be able to take as a substitute.  You can also ask about the possibility of taking an equivalent class through another university (which might include online options) and transferring the credit - but be sure to get the specific course approved by your university in advance.

Ultimately, you might have to consider rearranging your work schedule, or even looking for a different job with more flexible hours, in order to retake the class.  Which is more important to you in the long term, this specific job, or having a college degree?

(Another thing to keep in mind - if you were offered your current job on condition of having a degree, you would likely be obligated to inform your employer that you haven't yet graduated.  If that's the case, then going on with your current job and forgetting about the failed course may not be an option anyway.)


Is it always necessary to mathematically define an existing algorithm (which can easily be researched elsewhere) in a paper? I'm writing a paper which explores a new forecasting method. I compare the results with those of an existing algorithm as a baseline. Plenty of literature already exists on the existing algorithm, and the definitions for the new forecasting method already make the paper very math-heavy. Being in-depth mathematical definitions of the existing algorithm can easily be found, is it necessary to define it mathematically in the paper? Would it suffice to clearly describe what it does in English? Adding math for the existing algorithm on top of the math for the new one adds significant complexity for the reader. On the other hand, readers who want the full definition may have to research elsewhere which could lessen the appeal of the paper to peer reviewers. Any thoughts?

In my experience, most of the times, when someone tries to "clearly describe in English" what an algorithm does avoiding mathematical notation, the result is not as clear as intended. Ask yourself if that is the case also for your description.
Math exists precisely because it makes it clear and unambiguous to speak about combinatorial concepts.


Sign copyright agreement before paper acceptance? I am submitting a research paper to a journal and they asked me to sign the copyright agreement in favour of the editor before the paper is accepted.  Is this right?
And what happens in this case is if the paper rejected?

This is rather normal for non open-access articles in my field (Physics), however all journals I have submitted to until now had a clause that the copyright transfer is voided if the paper is not accepted or withdrawn. For example IOP’s copyright agreement contains the following sentence:

  In the event that the Article is withdrawn prior to acceptance, or is rejected, this agreement shall have no effect and no party shall be bound by it.

If such conditions are included, requesting such an agreement at an early stage seems somewhat reasonable to me, since it would be a waste of time to review your paper if you did not agree with these terms.

If such conditions are not included, this is a clear warning sign that the publisher may be up to nothing good. However, even with such a clause, problems may arise, as the publisher may just instantly accept your article.

For open-access articles (pay-to-publish), a similar situation holds, however, the copyright agreement usally requires less commitment from you, as you should retain most rights on your article (since the journal does not make money with being the only one making your article available). This not applying to the copyright agreement is another warning sign of a predatory publisher.

In both cases, you should read the copyright agreement carefully and ensure the reputability of the publisher.


How to get others to understand that my first name consists of two words? I live in the UK and I have a foreign name of the form

Abcd Efghjk

where both words and the space are part of my first name. Due to common UK standard everyone usually assumes either that Efghjkl is my surname or, more often, that Efghjkl is my middle name and proceeds to omit it.

I am fine when people omit it in speech, as Abcd is an acceptable shortening of my name, but I really detest it when I receive emails starting with

  Dear Abcd,

instead of the appropriate

  Dear Abcd Efghjkl,

I usually let it slide whenever I know this is a one off interaction and point it out at some point otherwise.

Lately I have been at times adding a remark at the end of my emails:

  Just to let you know, my first name is Abcd Efghjkl, with the space. I know, it's crazy!

I would like suggestions on how to deal with this very common occurrence. I see two options, but feel free to add more.

Keep such a message on a need-to basis, in which case I am looking for suggestions to make it more pleasant. Especially, I am not trying to make the other party feel guilty for the misspelling. I am not mad, this is a minor mistake and it's comprehensible given the running convention in the UK. Ideally, if there was a graphical/non-confrontational way to silently point this out, I would resort to that.
Add a fixed message in my signature either with the same tone of the above or a little more formal. I am a little concerned that this might look odd and somewhat aggressive though.

Any suggestions?

PS: I write here as most of my daily contacts where this interaction happens are academics.

Edit: I am referring to my first name in the above, I do have a family name or surname as well, which in our notation and taking some suggestions from the answers, would be: MNOPQR.

I would make a point of signing my emails Abcd Efghjkl. If they don't catch on after recieving your reply, add a friendly PS just as you have been doing. It's your name and you are completely justified in wanting it said properly.


Where can I find statistics about papers (length, writers, etc.) Different fields have different writing culture. Some fields prefer single author papers, and others prefer group efforts. Some fields prefer a short paper with a survey of a new results, and others prefer longer and more technical papers.

Specifically I'm interested in mathematics (and its subfields, if such breakdown exists). Is there any way to obtain some sort of statistics as to how many papers were published, how long they are, and how many writers were involved? Some statistical analysis and trend-changes would also be very interesting to me.

Do these statistics exist for other fields? I'd be interested in also knowing how different is the publishing culture in mathematics compared to other fields (STEM, social and humanities).

Scopus can provide you with a statistical analysis of publications that it has recorded that match a query. It's behind a paywall I think, but your organization might have a login.

Using it is pretty straightforward;

If you want more information on the query format;

Then;

It can give you results over time or various filters etc.


Shall I tell my college professor that the reason why I am asking for a letter is I have to have a letter from college? I have graduated for almost two years so I have many other stronger referees; my college performance was not stellar. The only reason why I am requesting a letter from my undergrad profs is that the program I am applying to require one letter from college.  Do I suppose to tell the Prof this reason?

It isn't essential to give this information. Hopefully one of your profs will be happy to write you a letter. If you ask more than a couple of people and they seem reluctant, then you could mention it, but it probably won't result in the best letter possible.

But first choose someone with whom you did well and who might have a good memory of you. Ask as usual, and thank them as usual.


NSF proposals: What exactly is wanted in the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact sections? I have been looking all over for more information on what exactly should go in the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact sections of NSF proposals. So far I have found two decent explanations, one by the University of Arizona and another by the Director of Research, The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University.

The first says that Intellectual Merit is about original contributions the research proposed will make, while the second claims a similar thing. However, for Broader Impact it seems they are a little different. Unfortunately though i feel neither goes as in depth on the explanation of both as I would have liked. So I am still having difficulty understanding what they are asking for.

If someone could give me a more concise explanation of each section, that would be greatly appreciated.

If that is too much trouble a couple of simpler questions to answer for me are:

Is the Intellectual Merit section only about the goals of the current research or also future research that may come as a result of the current research?
Is the Broader Impact section supposed to be about impact in the scientific community, society, or both?

I suggest the first port of call for an explanation is with the NSF itself. For Broader Impacts, I would start with this Dear Colleague letter on the Broader Impacts Review Criterion.

  The NSF Grant Proposal Guide uses a series of questions to illustrate
  the Broader Impacts criterion: “How well does the activity advance
  discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and
  learning? How well does the proposed activity broaden the
  participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity,
  disability, geographic, etc.)? To what extent will it enhance the
  infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities,
  instrumentation, networks, and partnerships? Will the results be
  disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological
  understanding? What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to
  society? “

  These questions help to assess the potential of the proposed activity
  - beyond the research, per se - to benefit the Nation. Thus, the Broader Impacts criterion speaks directly to the mission of the
  National Science Foundation, “To promote the progress of science; to
  advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure
  the national defense.” (NSF Act of 1950).

For even more recent descriptions, review Chapter II - Proposal Preparation Instructions of the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide, Which includes these parts:

Intellectual Merit

  The Project Description must contain, as a separate section within the
  narrative, a section labeled "Intellectual Merit". The Project
  Description should provide a clear statement of the work to be
  undertaken and must include the objectives for the period of the
  proposed work and expected significance; the relationship of this work
  to the present state of knowledge in the field, as well as to work in
  progress by the PI under other support.

  The Project Description should outline the general plan of work,
  including the broad design of activities to be undertaken, and, where
  appropriate, provide a clear description of experimental methods and
  procedures. Proposers should address what they want to do, why they
  want to do it, how they plan to do it, how they will know if they
  succeed, and what benefits could accrue if the project is successful.
  The project activities may be based on previously established and/or
  innovative methods and approaches, but in either case must be well
  justified. These issues apply to both the technical aspects of the
  proposal and the way in which the project may make broader
  contributions.

Broader Impact

  The Project Description also must contain, as a separate section
  within the narrative, a section labeled "Broader Impacts". This
  section should provide a discussion of the broader impacts of the
  proposed activities. Broader impacts may be accomplished through the
  research itself, through the activities that are directly related to
  specific research projects, or through activities that are supported
  by, but are complementary to the project. NSF values the advancement
  of scientific knowledge and activities that contribute to the
  achievement of societally relevant outcomes. Such outcomes include,
  but are not limited to: full participation of women, persons with
  disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in science, technology,
  engineering, and mathematics (STEM); improved STEM education and
  educator development at any level; increased public scientific
  literacy and public engagement with science and technology; improved
  well-being of individuals in society; development of a diverse,
  globally competitive STEM workforce; increased partnerships between
  academia, industry, and others; improved national security; increased
  economic competitiveness of the U.S.; and enhanced infrastructure for
  research and education.

The Short Version

I think about it like this: intellectual merit is the "contribution" part of a potential publication or set of publications; broader impact is what administrators would like you to talk with the media team about so they can make a press release about how their people/funding are/is making the world a better place. In other words, the merit is the work itself and its findings, and the impact is what the effect would be on some defined portion of society if you succeeded in doing what you propose.

Both parts should be about what you are specifically proposing to do now (the thing the proposal will fund, and preferably with early results to support some claims), and should be deeply and believably connected to the research you are proposing. The farther out and more vaguely connected it is, the less compelling and believable it is likely to sound. "These findings could be built on to eventually obtain world peace in the next millennia" is not very compelling, for example.

Grandiose claims of widespread benefits must trade-off against believability and practicality. The more people you could help, in science and outside in general society, the better - but you should make the link very explicit and clear.

My source for the above is being involved with a few proposals in preparation, extensive reading of NSF program materials, preparing and succeeding with a fellowship proposal, and being involved with a few grant processes that were modeled off NSF criteria in the general area of technology/engineering/psychology. If you see any disagreement between my opinion and official NSF program materials, believe the NSF materials over me.


GRE Score advice: Should I retake the GRE? I took the GRE General earlier this year and got a 160Q/156V with a 3.5 writing. I am hoping to apply to mid-level ranked statistics M.S. programs (ranked 15-50ish), does anyone think that those scores are strong enough to be competitive or should I retake it? I'm having a hard time finding admission statistics aren't incredibly vague (Competitive applications have done well on the GRE..., etc.).

I know a lot of depends on how strong the rest of your transcript is, fwiw I graduated with a B.S. in Biochemistry with a 3.3 GPA and have worked in a biostatistics lab.

This seems to be a common question, and I think the primary question you should ask yourself is: will retaking the test significantly improve my score? If the answer is no, then I would not bother. Generally speaking, if you didn't have some extenuating circumstance during or before testing, such as a serious illness, I would not expect the change to be quite so significant.

Competitive applicants have good GREs perhaps as a consequence of the ability of the applicant, and are not necessarily competitive because of their scores itself. There are some other relevant answers regarding GRE scores. see: 1, 2, 3


Publishing as a IEEE letter vs article I am writing a paper and am planning to submit it to one of the IEEE journals. I wrote the full paper and then realized that it is possible that the particular journal requires experimental validation of any modeling results. It doesn't explicitly state this in the website, but this is what it seems like from reading multiple papers.

I also came to know that it's possible to publish the article as a letter. I will have to reformat the paper and cut down the size by 1/3rd. It seems that the rigor of the data required to publish letters is a bit lax compared to full scale articles: Letter vs article, What is the difference between an article, perspective, letter, and review?

Do you think the requirements for publication of a letter is more lax compared to a full article?
If I were to submit it as a full paper, and it gets rejected because it doesn't have sufficient amount of experimental validation, will I still be able to submit as a letter?

In your question, you mentioned that you "wrote the full paper and then realized that it is possible that the particular journal requires experimental validation of any modeling results."

In other words, you seem to be missing a key piece of content in your manuscript that a full-length paper would be expected to have. And now you want to explore the possibility of trimming your paper down to submit it as a Letter, in the hopes that a shorter paper might help you to avoid having to do any experimental validation of your models. I could be wrong, but it seems that you might have the wrong idea about what a Letters paper is all about (at least as far as the IEEE is concerned).

Thus, before answering your questions, I think it will be a good idea to look at what the IEEE says regarding the Letter format, and what their intended usage is. [Also, since you commented on the possibility of submitting to the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems (JMEMS) in particular, I will incorporate that venue in my answer below.]

From the IEEE JMEMS site, we find that:

  The Letters format is meant to encourage rapid publication of original and significant contributions that are limited in length (three or fewer journal pages), but appropriate for early dissemination.

Further, from the same IEEE JMEMS site above, we find that those seeking to submit their Letter are required to do the following:

  All submissions to JMEMS Letters are required to include an accompanying submission letter that puts forth persuasive arguments supporting the need for rapid publication. Possible supporting statements for these arguments might be built using: 1) references to recent literature that illustrate how the Letter addresses an already existing and pressing problem, and/or 2) "impact" statements outlining timely ramifications of the work, and/or 3) clear arguments supporting the case that the Letter points the way toward significant and meaningful changes in previous technologies, materials, or designs.

Note that nowhere in the information above do we find that the Letter format is suitable for those authors who are simply looking to trim down their full-length paper worth of research findings because they do not have key pieces of expected content for a full-length submission.

So, let's get to your questions:

  Do you think the requirements for publication of a letter is more lax compared to a full article?

No, the Letters option should not be viewed as an easier path to publication. (Surely, if it were easier to publish in the Letters format, then everyone would do it.)

In fact, as noted above at the IEEE JMEMS site, authors submitting Letter manuscripts are expected to justify why their work should be rapidly disseminated, and this required justification is on top of having a manuscript which makes a coherent case for the research findings presented, is a good fit for the journal, etc.

  If I were to submit it as a full paper, and it gets rejected because it doesnt have sufficient amount of experimental validation, will I still be able to submit as a letter?

If you were to submit your manuscript as a full paper, and it was rejected, say, because it doesn't have a sufficient amount of experimental validation, I doubt that submitting it for consideration as a Letter would be successful.

Why?

For IEEE publication venues in which full-length papers and Letters are both handled by a single venue (e.g., the IEEE JMEMS), the full-length paper and Letter submissions are overseen by one Editor-in-Chief (EiC).

Thus, if you submitted your full-length paper and it was rejected on the grounds that your paper was missing key pieces of expected content, we have to assume that the EiC (for IEEE JMEMS, in your particular case) would already be aware of your manuscript's submission-and-rejection history.

Surely, any EiC at any journal of reasonable quality would view this course of action on your part as an attempt to "game the system," and they would thus frown on this strategy rather heavily.

Going forward, I suggest the following course of action:

If I've totally misjudged your situation, and your paper really is a good fit for the Letters format (as outlined above), then go for that.
Else if your manuscript is better-suited as a full paper, then either work on the experimental validation of your modeling results, or find another venue where such validation is not seen as a requirement for publication.


Is there a place for publishing ideas (no tangible results)? While working on my thesis in neutron imaging I got an idea for a new approach to data analysis, involving Machine Learning solutions that are not available at the moment (please note that I am a physicist, with little computer science background). I spoke about it with a few colleagues and I got good feedback, even if nobody wanted to collaborate on it (sounds too abstract, I guess). I contacted a few computer scientists, and nobody had time for this ;-)

I am now job hunting and I can't work full time on something where I need to start from scratch, but I still think it would be worth try to publish the idea somewhere (it seems none is working in that direction). Do you know if there is a journal or something similar for publishing suggestions on possible research directions in computer science and/or data analysis and algorithms development? Thanks

While you might struggle to publish something like this in a journal, in Computer Science there are other venues to look out for, such as conferences and workshops. These are smaller (and sometimes less prestigious) than journals, but usually with a tighter focus: you can often publish work-in-progress or position papers.

Edit: Some conferences are large, prestigious events, and will expect a substantial contribution to the field, so before you decide where to submit, take a look at past papers, and the sort of thing they tend to publish.


Can I study and obtain two PhDs in different subjects simultaneously? I am a student of LLM. After LLM I want to do Ph.D on Waqf family courts. I am also interested in doing a Ph.D on comparative religion from Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi. My doubt is can I do a Ph.D in both subjects simultaneously from the same university or different university, or is it necessary to complete in one subject and then pursue another. After all is it allowed to obtain two Ph.Ds.

Check the policies and regulations

Answering to your question hugely depends on the policies of the universities where you want to do PhDs and the country and education system where you are located. Some may allow you and some may not. Even, some universities may not also be interested in students doing simultaneous degrees. Moreover, you need to make sure whether your funding provider (if you are not self-funding) allows you to study for two degrees or not. So, nobody can give you exact information on this part of your question.

However, I have a general advice to you:

Don't run, Walk!

Take a deep breath and answer this question: Why do you want to apply for two PhD degrees simultaneously?

A PhD degree requires the student to spend most of his time studying and collaborating with his/her advisor. You may need to take some courses in each program, spend your time searching for topics and current papers and books, read them, find an original topic for your dissertation. Put all these huge academic chores besides to your personal life.

It is not a good idea to study two degrees even if the policies allow you to do so.

Don't leave your interests

However, if you are so interested in both subjects, you can apply for one PhD as your major research path and follow the other path as you second or minor research interest. Read papers and books about it. Even, in your free time, you can talk to a professor whose research field is near to your minor research path. Attend conferences, colloquiums and seminars about your favorite subject. Keep in mind that you simply don't need to obtain another PhD to meet your research interests.


Ethics of dissertation / thesis proofreading OK. Short version, I'm stuck on my PhD because of coronavirus. My university is giving me an extension to my thesis deadline, but I am going to run out of funding pretty soon.

I'm looking at marketable skills I can use to generate a bit of income to bridge the gap, and one of these is scientific writing. I know that there are plenty of people out there who have English as a second language, or who don't express themselves fluently and I think they'd be interested in proofreading / light copy editing. I absolutely don't want to become an essay mill, and I don't want to help people to cheat.

Can anyone advise me on the ethics of this? Where do the boundaries lie?

Thanks!

Proofreading and even light editing for proper language usage and understandability should not be an issue at all. You are not contributing to the actual work, just to its explanation. Advisors sometimes do this sort of thing.

I'll assume of course that the theses you read aren't fundamentally about the language itself. But proofreading a math paper, say, helping the author to find the right English or German or whatever words and phrases for expressibility is ok as long as it doesn't change the content or the ideas. I'm assuming, also, that the advice you would give is non-technical.

However, the best way to do this is to make suggestions to the author about places in the text that need improvement, rather than doing a markup. This aids the author in developing professional language skills and helps assure that you don't cross boundaries.

If you are in the same field then it is easy to go too far, so you need to guard against that.

I should note that some people take a very strict view about such things and would forbid it.


PhD advisor does not correct my writing: how can I get feedback? My PhD advisor did not provide any kind of feedback or correction on my writing for the manuscript we recently submitted.
My writing is good for a PhD student but for sure far from perfect.
Yet the only input he gave me was to suppress the exaggeration of our results, he implicitly called me a narcissist, and we finally agreed that I will not suppress the promotion of the accuracy of our results everywhere, but we will let our 3rd collaborator (another professor) decide whether we overstate the results or not.
The 3rd author didn't think that our results were exaggerated so we kept my version.
Still I didn't get any kind of feedback/update on the text I wrote as I expected!
Since the article was quite lengthy my advisor also wrote some parts of the 1st draft, which at the end I found myself "correcting" because the thoughts seemed to be scattered and not ordered in a logical order.
Since I am currently writing another 2 papers with him and eventually my thesis, I don't know where I can find feedback on the writing if he doesn't provide any (either because he can't or because he doesn't want). Yet I don't want my papers to be badly written because I didn't have anyone to advice me on that part...

Communicate more directly with your advisor about your expectations: state that you are concerned about your writing and would prefer more feedback on it, and be specific. Are you concerned about organization? Word choice? Grammar?
If your advisor isn't a native English speaker, they may not be the best person to give you feedback on some of these; they may themselves make mistakes in grammar and word choice even with more experience writing papers. In that case, you can ask them for advice on who else in your circle might help.
At my own institution, there is also a writing center that caters to undergraduate and graduate students alike; they won't copy edit your work for you, but they'll help you work on proofreading and editing skills. Your institution might have something similar.
Beware also of the impostor syndrome: you might be overcritical of your own work, so don't be too skeptical if you get feedback that your writing is actually good. That said, everyone can improve their writing at every stage of their career, so don't skip opportunities to read about writing and find stories about how others have become better writers or discovered bad tendencies and worked to correct them.


Is it okay to get a letter of recommendation from my employer who is a scientist but not an Ph,D? I've worked for 3 years in the same field which I'm going to apply in. And my boss belongs to the same field too. He completed his M.tech.

I am taking three LOR's. Two from qualified Ph.D professors from my undergrad and one from my boss who works in research but is not a Ph.D.

When reading a letter, the specific academic qualifications of the writer are not that important, judging their knowledge is. You say he works in research, so presumably he can gauge your technical skills (unlike, say, some administrator that just handles your payroll).
Furthermore, if your boss has enough experience supervising people, he can give a better assessment than someone who only has had one student.

In any case, you already have two letters from experienced professors. A third from a more junior person that has worked closely with you is still valuable, and not everybody has worked with three different professors. So you are fine from two different perspectives. It is up to the reader if they want to ask for them, or read them, or not. My girlfriend, for example, gave both her supervisor and a postdoc for an industry research job, but they only asked the professor and she got hired.

One caveat: the recommendation letter culture in academia and industry is very different. Make sure your boss is aware of that. A letter saying:

  Eren has worked in my group in COMPANY with the title POSITION between 2015 and 2018.

may be what is expected in industry, but it is a field of red flags in academia because he doesn't have anything nice to say about you.


TA for the class versus taking the class? My Ph.D. advisor and I are trying to decide whether I should take his class this Fall or be the TA for it (I have not had this class before).

My question is, shouldn't one have already mastered the class material inside-out to become a TA?  It appears that my advisor expects me to "learn as I go." Is this usual?

Second question, how is the workload between the two? I'm thinking to be the TA, I will have to be a step ahead of the game and rather than doing the assignments, I will be designing the assignments (which requires more understanding).  Which would you prefer based on what circumstances?

Some classes are more about the skills than the material. For example, I was once a TA for astronomy 1, despite never having taken astronomy -- but I knew the math, physics, problem solving, etc., and so the actual "content" was trivial for me to pick up. I do not know what this class may be, but if you are a grad student in CS and this is an undergraduate CS class, it may be similar in that you already know how the "big ideas" and how to program, so it will be trivial to learn the course-specific content.

Being a TA can be more efficient. I assume the alternative is (a) TAing a different course, where you would learn nothing, and (b) taking this as a class, which would require doing the learning and the homework. Combining these into one activity could save nearly 50% of your effort.

Of course, you do have an ethical obligation to your students to be informed. Your graduate-level experience in this field combined with reading ahead will put you head and shoulders above freshman/sophomore students, even if you're not an expert in this particular course material. Conversely, if this is an honors course for senior CS students (for example), then it does seem unlikely that you would be able to offer them much guidance.


Arxiv substantial text overlap after breaking up paper I recently broke up an overly long paper A into two smaller, self-contained papers B and C, which I intend to submit separately. On arxiv, B was uploaded as a revised version of A, whereas C was created as a new submission.

C has been flagged has having substantial text overlap with A/B. My question is: could this refer to the older version A or does it necessarily refer to the current version B? In other words, does arxiv take into account older versions of articles when scanning for similarities?

While arXiv does not publish the exact details of their implementation, in their help section on overlap detection, they have to following notes that may be useful for you:

  Submitters can preempt the addition of a text overlap admin note by marking any known overlaps in advance in the "Comments" header (as long as the earlier appearance of the text has a coauthor in common): for example, "this article draws heavily from arXiv:x, arXiv:y," or "this article supersedes arXiv:z."

and

  A submitter who believes that an admin note indicating text overlap has been incorrectly applied to their article should contact arXiv moderation with a detailed explanation or justification.

In short: if you have sections that are intended to be in common between B and C, point them out in the comments, then flag for attention from a moderator.


Second master and phd in math after phd in mechanical engineering I'm currently finishing a PhD in mechanical engineering at a top 20 european university. However, during my PhD I realized that woking or even conducting research as a mechanical engineer is not something I'd like to do. My primary interests are in maths (partial differential equations) and theoretical physics (quantum mechanics, special and general relativity). These are topics that I've always found interesting and wanted to learn.

I want to get a master in math because what I'm missing is the mathematics needed to understand the theoretical physics problems. Moreover, I've always enjoyed (the small amount of) math and always wished to do more. I used a (probably not worth mentioning) small amount of applied math in my PhD, which is about numerical simulations using the finite element method in a self written code. Other than that I have no mathematical preparation but I have a master in mech. eng. with a good final grade.

I would like to restudy but starting over with a bachelor degree seems a bit too much and it would probably be too expensive. My questions are:

1) Can I get admitted into a masters program in mathematics at a good european University (preferably in Germany or France since these countries have very low tuition fees). It would be ok (as most probably needed) if I had to catch up by tacking additional bachelor courses, no matter how many.

2) What are my chances of being accepted for a PhD in mathematics if the master goes well?

3) How negative will it be for an academic career to have a second master and (possibly second PhD) degree?

My story is somewhat similar to yours. I did statistics, then switched to math as I found I love it. Here is my pathway in France. I didn't restudy the whole bachelor. I applied for (and got accepted to) the 3rd year undergraduate at a French uni. After that, I applied for (and got accepted easily to) the 1st year of master (aka M1) in math at a top French uni (as I got good marks). If my mark is good enough, I can apply for the 2nd year of master (aka M2) (in France, 1st year and 2nd year of master are seperated, you have to apply for both seperately).

So, for your questions:

I would highly recommend you to retake the 3rd year undergraduate (aka Licence 3) in math, and it should be sufficient for you to go further. As you have a technical background (and even better, at PhD level), it's not difficult for you to get admitted directly. The chance would be lower if you apply directly for the master in math because the math in France is highly theoritical, they would prefer someone with a math degree for the master degree in math. Of course, if you can show that you have done sufficient advanced math (especially topology, integration, measure theory, which are a must if you want to do PDE), then no problem. However, due to French-style math, I still recommend you to start from the 3rd year of bachelor rather than 1st year of master.

2) If your mark is good, you can apply for many masters at top uni (like Paris 6, Paris 11, which are strong in applied math, including PDE) or "Grandes Ecoles". Also your chance to be admitted to a PhD in math should be good as well. Applied math is, at least easier to be admitted than pure math.

3) Even though you have two degrees, they are quite closely related. So I don't see any problems with that. Actually I think you even have some advantages to others.


Should you correct grammar mistakes during peer review? In almost any paper there is an abundance of classical errors, such as omitting the "s" at the end of a third person singular verb. I am growing tired of painstakingly listing the page and line for each error. Is it acceptable to just write: "Please, have a native speaker fix your grammar?"

Usually the reviewer guidelines ignore the subject of grammar.

In addition to the others answers given, I think that is it extremely important to state whether or not you consider the grammatical errors to affect the scientific substance of the paper.

Usually, grammatical errors don't actually effect your ability to evaluate the science in a paper.  Even when phrases are fairly tangled or when a missing word makes a sentence say the opposite of what is intended, you can usually sort out what the authors intended, and judge them on their science, not their presentation.

This is an extremely important responsibility: do not judge a paper based on grammar and language issues.

Whatever grammatical issues you point out, be explicit that they are not the reason for your recommendation.  Some reviewers will play language police, and recommend a paper be rejected because it is "sloppy."  This is, in my opinion, inexcusable: grammar, no matter how tangled, can always be cleaned up, and should only be held against an author if they refuse to do such cleanup.

In those rare cases that things are so badly presented that you cannot understand the science, however, state clearly that is what has happened, and that this is why you are judging the grammar to actually affect the acceptability of the paper.


What is a Formulated CV? I am going to send my application to an organization and they have mentioned that the applicants should send us both tabular and formulated CVs.
Could you please walk me through this? What is a formulated CV? In what format should it be written? What information and in what order the information should be written?
I completely know the tabular format for resumes but I am new to this formulated CV.

As best as I can gather, a “formulated CV” contains the same basic information as a tabulated CV, but in narrative form. This allows you to explain anything that might look unusual in the standard tabulated form, and also gives the foundation an additional “standard” writing sample that can be more easily compared between candidates.


Is undergraduate research worth it? I'm studying Bachelors in Computer Science.

I've taken a course this semester where the professor requires us to write research paper inorder to complete the course. High quality papers from this course are published in journals like Springer.

So I was wondering - how will undergrad research effect my application for masters or my career further down the road?

In every program I've been involved in, undergraduate research in some form has been considered a positive, and often the most compelling single piece of an application (the other being letters...especially letters discussing undergraduate research).


Special professor titles? I have noticed several special professor titles and I was wondering what are the exact details behind them. For example:

  Stan Franklin, W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor

I am guessing this is some sort of award but what type of awards come with a title like this? Are these internal or external? Does it last forever or is it tied to funding and then no longer applies?


Rescinding offers of admissions I got some admissions offers from Ph.D. programs in the United States. In the near past, I worked as a research assistant for a professor. The advisor was completely unethical and abusive. All his past students without exception say bad things about him: he writes negative letters of recommendation to his students even after agreeing to write strong letters and in some cases, he did send negative letters un-invited to schools that accepted some of his M.Sc. students. I am very happy now that I left him. I mentioned in my CV that I worked as a Research Assistant but I did not back it up with reference letters of course. In case this professor finds out that I received offers and tried to contact these schools, is there a possibility that they might decide to rescind their offers?

All his past students without exception say bad things about him: he writes negative letters of recommendation to his students even after agreeing to write strong letters and in some cases, he did send negative letters un-invited to schools that accepted some of his M.Sc. students.

Short of a serious, substantiated allegation of research misconduct, we would take a letter like this to be weird and immediately disregard it (with a few choice comments about the professor involved --- in a small field I suspect we might already know that this professor has some issues).

If an offer had already been sent out, it wouldn't be rescindable based on this. I'd wager to say that this is probably the same case across all public North American institutions.


Including co-authored work in my thesis One of the contribution chapters in my PhD thesis (computer science) is a work (paper) that I was actively involved in but the experiments (simulation etc.) was carried out by another co-author. After talking to my supervisor I decided to include this work as one of my contribution chapters but without the results (plots, etc.). Know I want to write a paragraph at the end of the chapter to justify why I did not include any results, clarify my contribution and also refer to the paper where they can find the results in and my name as a co-author.
1- Does this look like a good approach?
2- This is what I am planning to write:
The experimental results have been omitted from this chapter to maintain the originality of this dissertation as the experiments have been carried out by other co-authors. These results can be found in [paper x].

You seem to be concerned that inclusion of experimental results will mean your dissertation isn't original. Yet, you could include such results whilst alleviating your concerns. For instance, you could present experimental results and explain that those results were carried out by your co-author. You could also include a fresh analysis of those results or (with attribution) regurgitate existing analysis. This approach ensures your dissertation is self-contained and surely provides the reader with a better understanding.


Should you go for computer science if you aren’t interested in it? I am from India and am preparing for the JEE exam for admission to engineering colleges in India.
I am very much interested in physics, chemistry, biology, and maths. I am not interested much in computer science. But my family says you can only get a job with BTech in computer science but will not get from BSc in basic sciences. I have done C++ and Java as well before. I just don’t find them as interesting as basic sciences. How should I choose my career in engineering and need to get a job after BTech?
I am very much interested in behaviour of light, cells, electricity, and time.
They also say that from electrical engineering, you can’t get a good job after BTech.
Also, if I understand a concept clearly, I am very good at relating it to real-life examples.

The situation in India may vary from my experiences, and the situation in times of a pandemic may vary from my experiences. Therefore, it is unclear how definitive any answer to your questions can be. But these are my two cents:
You should not go for any major that you're not interested in.
A degree from any of the fundamental sciences sets you up for many interesting jobs. From my math class, every one who graduated and wanted to find a good job, did find a good job.


How much do you agree with Elon Musk statement that non one is going to read your publications? I have seen a public video on youtube where Elon Musk gave his opinion about academic publications: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA_2v0d9Gzs
He stated that most academic publications are pretty much useless and no one ever reads them.
I personally relate to his point of view and understand that he was not generalizing to all research produced, but at the same time he has a valid good point.
Is Musk correct in his assessment?
Do you feel that your research is having/will have some impact in the world?
If according to some metric (to be defined) most of academic papers are useless and that nobody will ever care of your published work, then what is the point of wasting the best time of your life by pursuing an academic career where the chances of getting a permanent position are very slim?

Well, for starters, Musk is just trolling. I think he does that often enough that people should recognize it for what it is. The statement has a bit of truth and if you exaggerate it enough you get to his statement.
A more accurate portrayal is that most academic publications have a very small audience. Not all, but most. The audience is other specialists in that sub field to which the paper applies. The paper might be very significant to half a dozen people worldwide, but of little interest elsewhere.
Some papers, on the other hand, have a lot of influence. And some of the lesser papers are what eventually enable the big ones.
The publication of his ideas on the Calculus by Leibniz were pretty important and have had a huge impact, and not just on math. Einstein's work has also had a big influence.
If you were to create a graph of the importance of papers vs their numbers, I think it would be pretty skewed. But that is irrelevant if it is the small steps, accumulated over time, that make the big steps possible.
So the "useless" is an exaggeration. And the "nobody" is an exaggeration. The result is just a troll. Smile and enjoy the workmanship of Elon the Showman. But don't neglect your research.
And none of Musk's business ventures would be worth anything without the research that led to the technology they use.
That said, at the moment, it is a pretty poor marketplace for academics. A lot of that is political with too little consideration given to the long term importance of education generally. And, of course, to survive in any competitive environment you have to work hard and get results. If you don't love research and the field you work in, then do something else. The rewards aren't financial for most of us.

To add a personal note. My doctoral dissertation (classical real analysis) was incredibly esoteric, though quite nice in its way. I predicted at the time that no one would ever find a practical use for it. I was wrong, though it took ten years or more before someone found an application. My later work in CS had more of an immediate impact.
And, my gateway into academia wasn't easy to pass through. I graduated at a time when no one wanted to hire mathematicians, since there was a glut due to the race to the moon. My trajectory would have been entirely different had I finished three years earlier. But, life is good. I'm not sorry that I stuck it out.


What is the difference between digest and extended abstract? Conference asks for digest not exceeding 5 double-spaced pages to be submitted.
Up until now I had to submit only one page of extended abstract.
What to put in digest? 5 pages are quite a lot of text; full article with double spacing in single column is almost 10 pages long.

Why some conferences ask for extended abstract and some for digest? Does this tell something more about the conference or it is just the chairman's and reviewer's preference?

Conference format varies. Some conferences ask for more than just a short (up to one page) abstract, but something like a short paper containing some of the preliminary results. Some ask for a short abstract, screen the abstract, and ask for a full paper which will then be reviewed before the conference starts. Some others ask for an abstract and only ask for the full paper once the conference is concluded. I believe this is more of a tradition of that particular conference rather than the preference of the chairmen or reviewers.

It is important not to exceed the page limit, but make sure that you are not way below the limit.


Why do potential supervisors not reply to my emails? I have contacted so far 5 supervisors for my master program that I want to enroll in ( applications open late September and admission January 2017) .

I emailed various faculty in the most polite way possible. Introduced myself, showed that I am interested in pursuing a research career in their field, talked briefly about my achievements  but only one supervisor replied. I am not sure why is this happening ? I have attached my transcript ( I am not a high GPA student but I received excellent grades for my thesis and seminar courses).

I emailed them this week ( and one hardcore researcher last Friday)

what could be the reason ?
note : I am intending to apply for the biomedical engineering program (one I really want to pursue) , most students have engineering undergrad however , I have a biotechnology degree. Could that be the reason? the department said my biotechnology degree is acceptable for that admission purposes.

I don't know if this applies to you, but it might help: I receive quite a few e-mails from prospective graduate students. I am looking for new students, but I delete most of the e-mails that I receive without reply. My reason is that most of the e-mails are obviously form letters that are sent to multiple professors with no indication that the student knows or cares about my own research interests. If they didn't spend the time to assure that I might be a personal match with their interests, then why should I waste my time replying?

I don't know if this is your case, but I do recommend that you spend the time (up to 30 minutes per professor) to get to know their research interests based on their websites and their publications on Google Scholar. Only e-mail people whose topics seem similar to yours. (This might eliminate several professors.) When you do e-mail, one paragraph is all you need: you just need to explain directly to the point how the professor's research interest match your own.

Of course, I can't guarantee that anyone will reply you if you do this, but when students do, I always reply them and enter into a serious e-mail exchange. Actually, even if the student's interest doesn't actually match mine (or they pointed out an old research area that I no longer pursue), as long as I see that they made a sincere effort to know my research (again it takes up to 30 minutes per professor), I always at least give them the courtesy of a reply (though I can't guarantee that anyone else might).