Is a paper a statement of personal belief (disagree with PI's writeup)? EDIT: My field is cognitive science <- vagueness reflects broadness of subject area from social science through to basic neuroscience

Let's say some collaborators disagree on the interpretation and writeup for publication of their joint work. The rose-tinted solution usually offered is "talk it out and reach consensus".

Let's say one of the pair both is much more powerful than the other, and has no inclination to compromise. What then is the junior collaborator to do?

The fact there are not David and Goliath spats erupting constantly between PIs and PhDs/postdocs everywhere must be because

a) the situation has simply never occurred, juniors miraculously always agree with seniors, or
b) the situation has always resolved with consensus, PIs are always selfless, open and flexible, or
c) juniors capitulate silently, recognising both the necessity of conforming for their own immediate career and the apparent expectation of standing 100% behind something you had <<100% control over producing

It's the latter (italics) that I'm especially interested in and it marks the distinction between this junior scientists' dilemma and the ubiquitous "following stupid instructions angst" that all workers have.

In the non-academic working world the very practical and adequate solution usually offered is to state your concerns in writing and then meet the superior's demands to the best of your ability anyway. The goal is to distance oneself from the bad outcomes of the work by documenting one's own prior expression of misgivings, while respecting the chain of command. A further buffer against culpability for things imposed lies in the product of your work usually being "owned" by the company, not you / your reputation personally.

So somebody senior can make you produce a stupid product for the company to sell, and it is common (if not expected) that you might not have control over the final design, but you can critique and offer improvements, and if they're in writing you can point to them when nobody buys the crappy product. "I followed orders and I said this would happen".

The dilemma exists just the same for junior researchers - they get told to produce things and operate under a huge power differential. But they cannot disown what is produced in the same way. I have never seen a junior in a presentation come out and state "the experiment, collection and analysis was mine and is great, but this theoretical interpretation has nothing to do with me, take it up with my PI", for example. I suspect it would shock the audience because the culture is that every author backs every word of their collaborative output in a form of collective responsibility.

My question then is how can that collective responsibility be legitimate given the widely differing power between collaborators (especially the PI - PhD/postdoc relationship)? Is there some normative "out" that I've missed for the junior? Because if I'm right that (c) above is what happens, that means a big part of most juniors' induction into science is this coercion into complementing the emperor's new clothes.

It's a tough dynamic and there aren't universal rules. I'm not sure how to answer the original question because 'legitimate' isn't defined and the text rambles.

The central issue remains: how do varying opinions add up to a shared compromising publication in situations of unequal power? That describes almost every collaborative paper. There are many resolutions, including changing your mind based on new information. The bottom line is:

The shared paper requires compromise, and PIs have more power. Some of that asymmetry is appropriate and helpful to junior colleagues in the long-term. Some is not. If you're not comfortable adding your name to the best compromise you can find, then take yourself off the paper or don't publish it.

Also see: Can co-authors disagree in their own paper?


Moving a detailed literature survey in Appendix to reduce size of chapter? In my dissertation, I am solving a problem by using techniques used to solve another problem. As a result, I have to do two literature surveys for both problems. I ended up with a huge chapter!  - most of it is basically a literature survey.

I do not want my examiners to hate me when they find a long thesis, but I don't want to get comments such as: "Why have you not considered the work of X in your survey?"

Is it a good practice to move part of this huge chapter's survey to an Appendix chapter, while keeping a section that speaks about the general approaches followed in the literature?

For a thesis, you may as well include the full review. You've done the work, and a thesis typically has no particular length limit. Realistically, your examiners will probably just skim it anyway. I see no reason to move it to an appendix, though I also don't think it matters very much. If your advisor or university policies feel strongly, of course, do what they say.

When you publish papers based on your thesis, then you'll want to condense the review to focus on  the most important and relevant prior work.


Reivsion in ScholarOne: Where to upload the response to reviewers as a attached file? For the revision, I found there are two possible attachment places for the response document.
I don't know which one is the appropriate place for attaching the document. Please help me!

One is in 'Step 1: View and Respond to Decision Letter'. At the end of the page, there is a sub-section named 'Attach a File:'.

The other is in 'Step 3: File Upload'. Similar to the first submission of the manuscript, I think the response document could be attached as supplementary file below the revised version of manuscript.

So where is the right place to attach the document responding to reviewers comments?

It should be uploaded as your response to the decision letter.


Mathematics Ph.D program foreign language requirement I will soon be attending a Ph.D program in mathematics. I do not know how common this practice is, but the department has a requirement that graduate students must learn a foreign language and be able to read and write mathematics in that language. The three choices are French, German, or Russian. I personally have no preference on which to learn, but I was wondering if there were other reasons that would make one language more advantageous over the others in terms of a general mathematical career. Thanks in advance in any response.

While it may be true that, if one had to pick a single language in which to read mathematics, English would currently be the best choice, ... it is certainly not the case (as many people do claim) that these days there's an English version of anything worthwhile. True, it is possible to "get by" reading only English, but there are little problems now and then.

In particular, for mathematics, perhaps unlike computer science, things don't really become "wrong" or obsolete (although they certainly can become less stylish), and until about WWII the cutting-edge writing in mathematics was mostly in French and German. (Depending on the epoch, Russians often wrote in French or German, as did Japanese in those times. English was not the lingua franca... :)

So, for people in mathematics of roughly my age, it was necessary to have some reading knowledge of French and German to be professionally competent in those years. And many of the classics of those times have not been supplanted by English-language versions, and are still relevant at least as subtle background to contemporary work.

Also, though I don't make a hobby of tracking this, it is my impression that many French mathematicians in number theory and automorphic forms and representation theory certainly do write in French, and at a level and substance that is not at all automagically transferred to English-language writing. And many pieces in Seminaire Bourbaki, a wonderful resource, continue to be in French.


Accidentally addressed lecturer as Mrs instead of Ms I accidentally addressed my lecturer as Mrs instead of Ms in an email.

Should I send a follow-up email explaining it was a typo or should I leave it be?

Since requested multiple times in comments: The lecturer does not hold a doctorate or any other academic titles. She also did not specify how she prefers to be addressed before.

I have heard from women (in mathematics departments, in the US) that they prefer not to be addressed as Ms or Mrs.

The issue is that some students address their male professors as "Dr." or "Professor" but their female professors as "Ms." or "Mrs." Perhaps you don't do this, but I would still recommend "Dr." or "Professor" unless your professor encourages otherwise.

Indeed, I know of one female professor who tells students that she is happy to be called "Dr. X" or "Professor X", and happier still to be addressed by her first name, but requests that her students avoid "Ms" or "Mrs".

It should also be added that this in the US, and cultural practices may be different elsewhere.

I don't think it's necessary to send a follow-up e-mail, but since you are worried about it, I think it would be perfectly polite to write something very brief like "p.s. How do you prefer to be addressed? Is Dr. X better?"


Is there a standard to understand what plagiarism is exactly? Let's assume I learnt what plagiarism is on different websites such as university webpages, wikipedia, dictionary webpages, articles that can be reached Google Scholar, blogs, etc. and wrote about it.
As you predict my words, sentences, paragraphs will be similar or same what I learnt from them.
Is this considered plagiarism?
Is there a standard to understand what plagiarism is exactly?

The most commonly understood definition of plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own.
When writing general background for a thesis or article, it's possible that you present common facts and methodologies without citing every single detail, but even then it should be clear that this is not your contribution.
When whole sentences start to resemble previous work, you need to take a step back and look at what you are saying.
Are you briefly mentioning Pythagoras' theorem? Maybe throw the word "commonly" in there.
Are you presenting someone else's findings? Cite them.
For example "The equation is given by Smith et al. as ..." or "The dates are canonically given as 450BC to 430BC [1][14][22]."
When in doubt, cite. I've yet to see someone told off for providing references to their claims.


Trouble picking a major I am an incoming freshman and I am in a tight spot in terms of picking my major. I personally want to work with companies like Tesla and SpaceX who use code as a basis of physical things.

I want to double major in Physics and CS, but is that a good idea, or should I minor in one?

I do not just want to be a programmer sitting in an office coding all day, I want to build software that creates actual physical things like Tesla cars (fully electric car, everything from suspension to performance is powered by code). When I get a Masters, what would be most appropriate? A degree in Applied Physics or Computational Physics?

I believe that double majors are for the most part a waste of your valuable time. This is coming from someone who did a double major. Man do I wish I could go back in time and take out some of the boring classes I took just to satisfy the beuracratic requirements of my second major for more interesting graduate and upper level classes of my choosing (some of which actually being in that major's field) and more time spent on extracurricular research/internship projects.

My advice. Outside of the first major, take the classes that interest you. If that allows you to get a second major or minor, great! If you have to take a bunch of basic classes that don't interest you just to satisfy the requirements of the second major, don't do it!

Usually you can use a personal statement or CV to show people that you are the right one for the job or graduate program you want. Degrees in Applied Physics and Computational Physics are close enough that it shouldn't matter if you do go the double major route (I'd lean towards applied Physics given your interests though, comp physics doesn't say much more than your CS degree already does). However, in my opinion if you are set on C.S. and are just looking to do something related to the physical sciences/engineering, I would get a C.S. degree and then take a bunch of physics classes that interest you and build a portfolio of physics related projects you have worked on. Maybe apply to physics REUs that sound exciting. Many schools have undergrad research projects on electric, hydrogen and solar vehicles, so look for those if thats what excites you, and if your university doesn't have them look for summer opportunities that do.

I'd say for at least 90% of students, a double major is a bad idea. I'd discourage it!

Note there are some cases where a double major may be a good idea. Say your first major is History and its your love and passion, but midway through school you realize that you likely won't get a good job with that major. Getting a second major may be important in this situation because the fields are almost complete opposites, but if the majors are somewhat related I still hold on to my general opinion.


How do STEM researchers know if their research is actually novel? I'm a high school student who's been working at a university lab as an intern, and this has been on my mind for a while.

The amount of scientific literature/papers in any field is obviously staggering. To me, it seems like there's no possible way to have read all of it. So, assuming I were a full-blown researcher/professor...

How would I be sure that my research actually does add something novel to the field?
What if there are papers that already address/refute my claim, that simply got buried amongst the masses of other papers that have already been published -- does that mean my own research is worth squat?

Thank you for all your help!

The honest answer is: you don't know, and thus the phenomenon of multiple discovery.  Sometimes this is simultaneous, and other times it is independent, as for example in the case of conductive polymers, which were apparently rediscovered and lost several times.

Now, in practice, you must do a reasonable literature search, and part of the training that one receives over time is how to figure out how large a reasonable literature search is.  It also helps to participate in conferences, where one becomes generally familiar with the thinking and knowledge in one's field.  Submitting one's own work for peer review and presenting it in talks also offers opportunities to be informed of connections that one was not aware of.

While this may seem embarrassing, in fact, as long as one is doing one's reasonable due diligence, it is not worth being embarrassed about.  This is because it's very rare for rediscovery to happen in the same context.  There's a staggering amount of literature out there, but the number of problems is even bigger, and so any given specific piece of work may actually have startlingly few people in a position to conduct it.

Thus, rediscovery in practice often heralds a new connection being made between fields. In this case, the recognition of rediscovery often opens up the "unaware" side of the interaction to be able to import and adapt results that were based on the prior work, thus rapidly advancing the new area in which those results are being applied.

In short: do your due diligence, but don't fear discovering you've reinvented the wheel.


What is the point of a cover letter in journal submission? Many journals do specify that cover letters are optional. From my experience, most people write cover letters in journal submission, but I am also aware that articles can also be published without the cover letter. Therein arises the question: why are cover letters written if they are not necessary for the publication process?  My guess is that perhaps it helps to prevent the desk-reject from the editor.

Prior to online submission forms, cover letters let the authors communicate information to the editors. Information I have included in covers includes:

Why the manuscript fits into the journal (if i recall correctly, Ecological Indicators explicitly requires a statement of what "indictor" you are addressing in the manuscript)
Potential reviewers and blocked reviewers
A statement that the manuscript is not under review elsewhere
Other pertinent information for the editor such as why the manuscript is timely (for example, perhaps you are studying a species that is under consideration for listing as an endangered species, and the information may be public, but not widely known)
Responses to reviewer comments
How I am meeting the journal's open data/open code requirements

With current online journal submissions, all of this information can be captured in online forms. Hence some journals either no longer require cover letters or outright do not allow authors to upload them. Conversely, I have seen other journals that still require cover letters.

I suspect journals use of cover letters depend upon the history of the journal, their current online publishing system, and the culture of the editorial team and office.


How do you "grow your own" post doc opportunity? I am a finishing doctoral student (graduation in ~7-9 months) and I would love to get an year or so of postdoctoral experience. I've come to understand that a postdoc is generally paid by funds created for the project (s)he is a postdoc for.

How should I go about "growing my own" postdoc opportunity? In other words, how should I go about soliciting for funds for research ideas? I know it is a rather daunting task. Although I have participated in writing several proposals (some of which were accepted), I have never been the PI or co-PI for any of those projects -- generally just one of the grad students working on it.

I am at a US university and have already taken at look at NSF's website.. Being an international student, I don't have all the options available to domestic candidates.

This is what I've thought of so far:

Come up with feasible research idea and approach advisor.
Discuss idea and possible collaborations.
Try to categorize it into NSF's or any other funding agencies categories.
Write a proposal in the summer and submit it during the next window of opportunity.

Any pointers, tips or funding agencies I might also look at?

Some background:
I am a PhD candidate in Mechanical engineering with emphasis on fluid dynamics, applied mathematics, energy systems and space systems.

From what I've seen, you've just described perfectly what many professors would view as the "ideal postdoc". As one of the main goals of your postdoctoral training is to gain experience writing your own grant proposals, your four steps are very close to what you should be doing.

The most crucial part for you will be finding a postdoctoral advisor with whom you get along. As is typical in research settings, look for someone with significant research experience who has a successful record of getting proposals funded. Given that this is your goal, this is possibly more important now than their publication record. You should be able to find this out by asking around the department and speaking to graduate students, and even just asking the advisor directly about their recently funded grant applications. Once you find someone, everything else should go fairly smoothly.

  1) Come up with feasible research idea and approach advisor.

  2) Discuss idea and possible collaborations.

You should do this both on your own and through talking to your advisor. Remember that one of the main factors driving whether a postdoctoral grant is accepted is previous experience of both the postdoctoral fellow himself and the advisor; consider ideas in areas where you have experience doing research and your advisor has experience mentoring.

While you can consider collaborations, my postdoc advisor told me that at most I should consider one other collaborator, other my advisor himself, as collaborative proposals are more complicated, both from a submission and administrative standpoint.

  3) Try to categorize it into NSF's or any other funding agencies categories.

Your advisor should already be aware of relevant funding opportunities.

  4) Write a proposal in the summer and submit it during the next window of opportunity.

I assume you wrote "summer" because you were thinking of a particular grant, but different opportunities have different grant submission deadlines. Again, talk to your advisor to see which grants the thinks would be a good fit for you, and check out their respective deadlines.


Does educational research productivity count as research productivity? I'm PhD student and I'll be graduating in May (next year). I've been getting into discipline-based educational research (DBER), including developing tools, running projects, a paper or two, and applying to grants. I do this in addition to my standard research. My DBER work is almost exclusively applications of what I develop in my (primary) research (quantitative biology).

My goal is a TT job in the future. Before going on the job market, I would like to know how hiring and tenure committees typically weigh discipline-based educational research: is it considered general research productivity, or does it typecast a candidate as primarily an educator (rather than a researcher)?

Different schools will weight publications differently. DBER research is often seen as less rigorous than other research, and often is less rigorous than similar research conducted by education scholars. (DBER often uses samples of convenience and has limited ability to randomize treatments; this still can generate valuable insights, and is often the limit of what active biologists (say) can make time for, so peer-reviewed journals are not going to insist on only the most rigorous methods.)

Beyond that, the fact that your primary research is closely linked to your DBER is very helpful. Grants that ask for the external impact of your work will look favorably on a record of translating your work into advances in education.


Applying for graduate school with uncertain GPA I'm currently applying for Ph.D programs (applications are due in mid December, my semester ends in early December, and I am applying for the Fall semester) and I am asked to list my GPA. I currently have a 4.0 GPA, but that might change in between the end of my semester and the due date for applications. My question is, should I list my GPA as 4.0 on my applications and let the school know if this changes? Should I list it as a 4.0 and not let them know, even if I end up with a B or two this semester (this feels unethical to me)? Should I just wait to submit my application after I've gotten my grades for this semester? I would like to avoid doing anything unethical or dishonest that would involve the admissions committee believing I have a GPA that I no longer have, as I understand they might not even look at my application until next year, and at that point, I may not even have the GPA that I said I had.

Submit your current GPA. Don't do anything else unless required by the school.

No one thinks you're going to know your final GPA now. Schools wants your current GPA to get an idea of what sort of student you are and will make their decision based upon that.

That said, a school may require future transcripts to ensure you haven't bombed all your classes and that you've actually graduated. Any acceptance you get will be dependent upon you graduating. Some schools might also only accept you pending your final grades. As long as your GPA doesn't drop too much (or you don't have a good excuse if it does), you're in the clear.

If you're still concerned you should contact the schools' admission departments, tell them you're still awaiting your semester grades and ask them if your current GPA is fine.


Quit a PhD program and transfer to another? I am currently enrolled in a PhD program in electrical engineering in Europe since 1 year up to now. I am not absolutely satisfied by the outcome of this year and the environment inside the institute. I really think I am wasting time here (my research is meaningless, changing topic time to time according to the willing of my supervisor) and my supervisor is not interested anymore in my research topic. Thus, I was thinking about quitting and transfer to another university.

However, I am worried about the references/recommendation letters, since if I quit I don´t think I can ask for recommendation letters from my current situation. Moreover, I am worried that other research groups would not accept me, because they may think that I am low on perseverance.

Is it an uncommon situation? What do you suggest to do?

Thanks for any help,

(I realize this is a belated answer, so this is mostly for other readers, not for OP.)

You should definitely not be in a situation where you're doing research that is not meaningful to you, and are merely at the whim of your supervisor.

But - the point is not which university you are in. The point is what do you want to study as a researcher? Try figuring out what it is that you are interested in - then look for places where you could pursue this subject/question; and for potential supervisors/advisors for doing so.

If you focus your own interests, it might even help you make a stand vis-a-vis your supervisor rather than caving to what s/he dictates (Not necessarily; but maybe). And you might be able to arrange for having a co-supervisor - in or out of your current university - who shared your interest, or finds use in what you intend to study.

As for references/recommendations - that's a minor consideration. I mean, it's true that if you quit you might not get your current supervisor's recommendation; but you can't let that be a decisive factor, to the extent of staying and wasting your life like you describe.


Declining a fellowship opportunity for PhD research I applied for a fellowship with the help from a potential PhD supervisor back in October. I had to write a research proposal and personal statement. The professor helped me edit it, and build the research proposal. I have been notified I have passed to the next round of the fellowship selection, but won't know the final result until march.

Meanwhile, I have applied to other PhD programs. I have been offered a place at one rotation phd program, which is fully funded. I really like the program and would prefer to go there. This program is also asking me to send them my decision by the end of this week.

How can I go about telling the first professor I have decided to play it safe with a fully funded offer rather than wait for a fellowship I don't know I will win? I feel really bad because they put the effort into helping me write the research proposal and personal statement. I also don't want to be burning bridges and hindering my academic career.

Most questions on this site mention being honest and overall fast with my response. I wanted to ask my question, though, since I went through the process of applying for the fellowship with the professor, and I feel that makes the rejection a bit more delicate.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

You've pretty well answered your own question.  Be honest, and be swift so they don't waste time.  Simply tell them you received a fully-funded offer that needs an answer now, and can't afford to wait until March so you've accepted it.  Thank them for their time.

They'll understand, and be much more accepting of it now than they would be if you waited and let them put time and effort into considering your fellowship application.  Keep it simple and polite, then move on.

Also, congrats!


What are good strategies for not losing sight of the novelty and nontriviality of one's work? I would like to ask this community for help in finding good strategies for avoiding an aspect of my mindset that I don't much like, which I get when I've been working on a given project for a while - I begin to lose track of how novel and nontrivial the work is, sometimes leading to full-on crises of confidence in my work and, in bad cases, in my capabilities.

This happens to me once I'm rather deep into the project, around the stages of writing it up, defending it in correspondence with referees, and preparing presentations on the subject. (To anchor things a bit, I am a theoretical physicist working on analytical approaches in quantum mechanics.) In the initial stages of the project, and particularly at the times I have significant breakthroughs of either a technical or a conceptual nature, the elation and thrill of discovery will carry me a long way, and I end up building quite elaborate conceptual and mathematical structures that I am quite pleased with.

However, as a result of the familiarity that comes with using those initial breakthroughs over and over again, after some time they begin to 'flatten' in my mind as just regular features of my work, and the nontriviality of the tools I've built begins to wash out as the pains I felt when building them begin to fade into the distance. This is a version of 'familiarity breeds contempt', though maybe contempt is a bit too strong - it's just the over-familiarity that's the problem.

Now, this isn't really burnout, as this doesn't impact my day-to-day motivation to work or the energy I have to do it, and I continue to have interesting questions to work on and interesting answers for them. However, when I'm building a case for my work, particularly in writing, I find it hard to muster enthusiasm about the initial building blocks (usually the key advances in the work, particularly as perceived by an outsider) and to see them as anything other than well-trodden ground and everyday sort of fare. I know that it's because that's the ground I tread on every day, and that no one else does thus far, but it still impacts how I write about those tools and it makes it harder for me to present them with their full impact on the field.

I know that to some extent this sense of 'flattening' comes from the fact that as time goes on, I often find simpler routes to the results and tools of interest, and I know at an intellectual level that the existence of those simpler routes does not negate the effort it took to find the first one. That is, a result X that took months to understand can also be seen by spending a modest amount of effort building Y and then you "just add Z", but that still doesn't mean that the result is obvious to outsiders, and I know that the wholesale replacement of complex machinery for simpler tooling is also an achievement by itself. However, at a gut level, I still struggle seeing the result X in its full nontriviality, and it keeps flattening into just a trivial consequence of Z.

Moreover, I also have a good deal of objective evidence that the results are new and nontrivial, particularly in the fact that if I meet someone and walk them through the work, then the sheer amount of time it takes to go from baseline through the problem and tooling and up to the main results tells me that the material is indeed nontrivial, even after the simplifications. Similarly, the positive feedback I get in those situations tells me the work is worth its salt. However, that often lodges at an intellectual level but fails to register too much at a gut level of emotional handling.

I hope I've been able to describe this mindset sufficiently well. If nothing else, I would like the reassurance of knowing that I'm not the only one that faces this, but more importantly, I would like to know how folks with more punches under their belt handle this kind of situation, and what strategies I can try to regain an outsider's view of how novel and nontrivial my results are.

You are not the only researcher who experiences this. Certainly I personally also do.

It sounds to me like your question is whether these feelings of overexposure to your own work are:

pathological--the result of some psychological process which makes you feel disenchanted with your old papers, regardless of their actual merit--or:
simply accurate--that is, as time passes, you come to have a more accurate appraisal of your own papers.

You already have suspicions about which of these two possibilities is actually correct. Personally, I try not to second-guess my own negative feelings about myself, so here is a strategy which I have found totally avoids the need to decide between possibilities #1 and #2: by working on a massive, multi-year, very ambitious project which requires many, many papers to develop, explain, and "make good on", I find that my feelings of overexposure about my own old papers, my own looking-at-my-old-papers-and-immediately-seeing-everything-I-could-have-done-better, those feelings are overcome by my excitement for the future of this broader long-term project and the small piece of that project that each of those imperfect papers puts into place. Being able to say to myself "I wish I would have written that old paper more elegantly, or proven this stronger result," or whatever, these feelings are washed away by the feeling of "That paper, no matter how wretched and ugly, still allows me to carry out the next step in the broader project," and then I can live with having written it. Maybe this approach can work for you too.


Why does grade inflation seem to be so severe in the USA? A comment on this question on undergraduate admissions notes that a good college might get 10x more applicants who all have the maximum possible grade point average, than the college can admit.  (The rest of my question is based on the assumption that is is actually true.  If it is not, my question might be based on an incorrect premise.)  Coming from The Netherlands, this sounds strange to me.  We have a standardised test at the end of secondary school, and few people score average grades higher than 8/10 (passing is 6/10), with people scoring 10.0/10 being practically nonexistent (I seem to recall reading about one such student in the newspaper many years ago).  The overall average is 6.4/10 for the school category granting admittance to university.  For universities I don't have hard numbers but I would be surprised if more than 1 in 30 students score 10.0/10 in undergraduate introductory calculus. Most students seem to score mostly around 6–7/10, which I believe would translate to E–D in the American system, but I'm not sure.  Grades 6–10 are passing grades, grades 1–5 are failing grades.  My question is for pre-university tests though, the ones that are used to test if people should be admitted to university.

Why is there so much grade inflation in the USA?  Is there no standardised testing for whatever tests are used to establish the grades used for undergraduate admissions?  This system would make it very hard for Dutch students to gain admission to American universities, because getting the maximum average grade is virtually unheard of.

See also: Do price and value of degrees correlate much?

There are a couple standardized tests used for undergraduate admissions that are generally taken near the end of high school. The ACT and the SAT are the most common ones.1 However, they are only part of the admissions package, and a relatively small part at that (varies by school, but my guess is they get a weight of around 25% or less at most schools).

There are many reasons not to base admissions solely on a single standardized test.2 One of the biggest is simply that standardized test scores often test studying and resources as much as they test intelligence and preparation. There's already a huge industry built around SAT-specific test preparation, and it's very difficult to argue that this extremely-targeted studying is doing anything beneficial for most student's academic preparation.

Also, keep in mind that the US is a much larger country than European countries, and there is a high amount of geographical mobility among the upper-/middle-class. Undergraduate enrollment in the US is around 18 million; that's larger than the entire population of The Netherlands. Because there is a huge prestige factor in going to a top school, almost all of the top students from that huge population will apply to the same 5-10 top colleges in the US. Even if the distribution of scores is the same as a European country, the much larger applicant pool means that top schools are inevitably going to be swamped with near-perfect applications.

1: The number of perfect SAT scores is actually quite low (I am less familiar with the ACT). In 2014, there were only 583 perfect scores out of 1.6 million test-takers. Though if you consider only the two more-important sections, there were 1,922 perfect CR+M scores. Even considering scores that are basically perfect (say, 1550+), less than half of 1% of test-takers reach that level. Source. However, that 0.5% translates into Harvard getting probably 5,000 applicants with 1550+ scores, which is already over 3x their regular incoming class.
2: The wikipedia article talks briefly about some of them, but there's a huge literature debating the advantages and disadvantages.


Identifying reputable journal indexing services I am part of a committee tasked to create a policy on creating incentives for publications of university employees.  Right now, the highest incentive award is given to publications in journals "indexed in Web of Science or Scopus."  I would like to rewrite the policy so that it is more general, that is, open to the possibility that there are other highly regarded bibliographic database and index services.  I am aware that there are many predatory journal indexing services, and I want to exclude these.

How do I define a reputable journal indexing service?

I think that there is a critical distinction to be made here between defining reputable indexing services and identifying such services.

I suspect that for most well-established scholars, it is relatively straightforward to identify whether an indexing service is reputable or not. For example, if you talk to a computer scientist, they'll point to DBLP, MathSciNet is a good one for mathematicians as noted in the comments, and PubMed is good for life sciences.  Random predatory anything is usually pretty easy to determine with a little bit of research.

In order to define "reputable indexing service" for the sake of policy, then, I would suggest that it is likely to be effective to have a process by which faculty members can request an index be considered and then a few internal and external experts in the field are asked to certify whether the index is reputable or not.  That way, there's not a formal definition enshrined in policy that might be evaded by technicalities, but instead some human judgement is involved.


Australian Honours degree for admission into European PhD programs I have currently completed a Bachelor's degree in mathematics in Australia and want to go onto do a PhD in pure mathematics in Belgium or Germany. I need to either complete my Honours degree next year at my current university or move elsewhere to do a Masters degree as my current university doesn't offer Masters. I want to stay at my current university due to having good research opportunities here, however, I am concerned I won't be admitted to a PhD program at the universities I want to go to with only a Bachelor Honours degree (4 years).

The universities I want to apply to require Masters for admission, however, state that degrees of minimum 4 years in length considered equivalent may be accepted. Upon contacting these universities with my issue, they essentially just reiterate the information already provided on their website, and it seems I just need to apply to the program to truly find out whether my degree will be considered sufficient for admission or not.

Does anyone know if Australian Honours degrees would generally be considered equivalent to European Masters degrees, at least in Belgium and Germany? Also, does anyone know if it is common for students to be turned away from admission to a PhD due to only having an Honours degree, assuming they have good results and research experience?

I can say some things about the situation in Germany, I know nothing about how it works in Belgium (Europe is diverse, and for this case, even Germany is diverse...).

The short, but not immediately helpful answer is: It depends on many factors. I would expect that most of the time you will have difficulties going for a PhD with a Bachelor´s degree in Germany. But a general answer if this will be the case is not possible. Every university and to some extent every faculty can make their own rules, and a supervisor who really wants you in her/his group can fight for your case. If you do not have such support, your case might be doomed to fail, or you will have to take so many extra courses that it would be easier to take a Master´s degree. Because the outcome of such a discussion (usually on faculty level) is hard to be predicted the people you contacted cannot say much more than what you found online. So you should find a potential supervisor who is convinced of you as a PhD student.

One of the reasons is that the Bachelor/Master system has no long tradition in Germany. Bachelor´s and Master´s degrees first appeared around 10-15 years ago within the Bologna process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process). In most cases, there was a hard transition from a diploma degree (without any 'intermediate' degree comparable to a Bachelor´s degree) taking 4-5 years to finish to a Bachelor/Master program taking 5 years in total. The old diploma programs were more or less copied to the new program. Therefore, it is still rather unusual to finish with a Bachelor´s degree only, and practically everybody going for a PhD has a Master´s degree. You come from another part of the world with another tradition, but this is what you have to understand for Germany.

You can be very happy that the Bologna process exists, otherwise it would be much harder for you. My father came to Germany in the 1970s with a B.A. which was unheard of, so faced difficulties more or less throughout his career. And to be honest: I, as an example for somebody rooted in German academia, do not know what an Australian Honours degree is and how it compares to a Bachelor's or Master's degree.


Will one flawed grade outside of my major from my freshman year affect graduate school? I'm an English major and planning to apply to graduate schools. My freshman year I originally planned to be a bio major due to pressures from my family. I had to take chemistry and biology, which soon enough turned into a disaster. I dropped chem, but since I needed enough credits to be considered full time, I was forced to keep with bio. I ended up with a D- in the course. If it wasn't my freshman year, I honestly would have probably done better, but I was having a rough time settling into college with homesickness and depression. Aside from that one hiccup, however, the rest of my grades are As with a couple B+. So what I'm wondering is would that badly affect my application or even receiving scholarships?

It is extremely unlikely that a graduate admissions committee/potential supervisor would look at your first year courses in any amount of detail. They are going to focus on the higher-level courses you take in later years, whether or not you do an honours degree/undergrad thesis, etc.

The only way I can see this affecting you is by lowering the overall average grade for your degree (measured in many places as a GPA). Many departments have a minimum GPA/grade requirement to be considered for admission to grad school. However, as long as you get consistently good grades for the rest of your degree, this little slip-up isn't going to matter much.


How to force a journal to address an associate editor's scientific misconduct? My manuscript, submitted to a high-rank and very respectable journal, has been rejected by a referee. From the referee's report one could make a conjecture that the referee is one of my competitors, whose results are far inferior to mine. A second referee also rejected my work by giving an absurd argument. It is not an emotional exaggeration, the absurdity of the second referee's argument should be obvious to anybody graduating a university. The editors agreed with such reports, despite the fact that all my arguments have been completely ignored by the referees. I appealed and my manuscript was considered by one of the associate editors. And now is the most interesting part.

The associate editor agreed with the referees and added his own argument against my work. But in this case his real name is known. He happened to be a very famous scientist. Knowing the name, it is very easy to find out his own works on the topic in question. Surprisingly, at the same time I submitted my manuscript, he (associate editor) published two papers in this and higher-rank journals where he stated exactly the opposite to what he wrote in his report to reject my work. Even after he had written his report, he continued to publish and give talks where he states the same point of view (which is the opposite to that of he wrote in his report). If my conjecture concerning the first referee's identity is correct, he is a coauthor of some of the associate editor's works and the associate editor just wants to help him to reject competing superior results.

I collected all these facts, presented them to the editors of the journal and accused that associate editor of scientific misconduct (because what he wrote in his report is a deliberate lie, supposedly in collusion with the referee, or even with both referees). After two months, I received a short message that the Editor in Chief will decide what to do in this case. Up to now there is no reply. It seems that the editors simply want to hush this incident up.

This journal is one of the oldest and most respectable journals in its field. Is there a way to change this situation and force the editors to report this incident and disclose the identities of the unfair referees?

I don't know the details, but from what you've written, I think your case is somewhat weaker than you think it is:

You can't be sure the first reviewer is your competitor. You can conjecture, but you can't prove it.
Even if we assume the second review is bogus, it doesn't mean the editor made a decision based on it. It's possible the editor is making the decision based on the strength of the first review, and simply included the second review because it's available.
You say that the associate editor published two papers at the same time you submitted your manuscript. I don't know what typical review times in your field are, but this implies the associate editor submitted his papers long before you submitted yours. In other words, he has precedence.
You imply that the associate editor wrote papers and gave talks that say X ("Snow is white") but rejected your manuscript because of ~X ("Snow is not white"). This sounds ridiculous and my feeling is that you're missing something subtle. For example, maybe the associate editor is saying "green snow is not white" which isn't contradictory with "snow is white".
It sounds like you are charging both the associate editor and the original handling editor with academic misconduct. This is clearly a more serious accusation than normal, because it implies both of them colluded. You're further accusing both editors of collusion with the reviewers. My gut feeling says at this point you're stretching belief. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it absolutely sounds unlikely and the burden of proof is heavily upon you.
Further to the above, you don't actually have strong proof. You only have suspicions (which is actually a good thing: it means the reviewer anonymity shield is working). What you've written is somewhat contradictory as well. You say that this journal is one of the oldest and most respectable in your field, and yet the associate editor has published two papers in even more prestigious journals.

If you're convinced your position is correct, I'd escalate the dispute, first to the EiC (which you've already done), and then to whatever is above (e.g. the publisher, the society that manages the journal, etc). Keep in mind however that these people cannot break reviewer anonymity, because that mechanism is in place precisely to prevent authors taking revenge on reviewers for rejecting their manuscript. In fact part of the reason the dispute is where it is is because the associate editor (naively? bravely? you decide) signed his name on the decision.

If nothing happens, my conclusion is: the more formerly-uninvolved people come to the same conclusion, the less likely it is they're all colluding against you, and I'd just submit elsewhere.


Can I be work on several project as a post-doc? I'm applying to a post-doc, with a specific project. I'm wondering how much freedom can I get as a post-doc.

I'm currently supervising a master student and I'm planning to supervise more during the post-doc. I'm also still collaborating with my PhD advisors and would like to do some extra analysis, on the side.

Having said that, I was wondering how much freedom do I get as a post-doc? I obviously need to work for the project I'm hired but I'm hoping to get some time to pursue other research interests and writing papers.

Would this be acceptable as a post-doc? Can I work on more than one project at a time?

It's quite common for postdocs to work on different projects at the same time, but this has to be agreed with the PI who is funding you.

In my experience, there is a general understanding in academia that contracts are not strictly limited to the project being funded. For example, postdocs are often expected to apply for funding and this is rarely officially included in the scope of the project. Another very common case is publications: the potentially long process of publishing a paper sometimes overlaps with the next contract, but in general PIs are fine with letting you finish papers related to your previous contract.


Should list my advisor as an author on a paper I wrote alone? As a part of my PhD project, I wrote a paper. When my supervisor read it, she said “it is perfect and complete, go ahead and publish it yourself because I cannot contribute more to it”. She really meant it and tried to do me a favor.

However, I still think it can be more beneficial for my future to have her name on my paper. Should I insist to have her as a coauthor or it might be useful in the future to have all the credits of a good paper?

You should be a sole author for two reasons. First, your supervisor did not contribute to the paper. Some journals actually make you write out what each author accomplished, so you would be at a loss there anyway. Second, a sole-authored publication will demonstrate that you can work independently, which looks great to faculty search committees! When you are on the market, they want to hire people who will become independent researchers. You are demonstrating that by sole-authorship! If you want to publish with your supervisor because she is well-known in the field, my suggestion is that you talk with her about an additional paper project that both of you can work on.

On a side note, your supervisor might have described your paper as "perfect and complete," though this is only one reviewer's opinion. Though the paper may be at a stage for journal submission, please be prepared that the 2-5 blind reviewers may have different opinions about what is "perfect and complete." You still may get A LOT of revision requests from them. I'm sure you did a great job, I just don't want you to get discouraged if the reviewers end up being more critical.

Best of luck!!!!


undergraduate research experience should go for 'depth' or 'width' in terms of graduate application? I am now going through my 3rd undergraduate year, and I am now feeling like I want to change my research direction. The current direction is yet the only direction I've dug into. But one factor is making me hesitate whether to make the move: the graduate application is less than one year away. I don't know whether changing a research direction is a wise choice at this point, i.e. I am wondering should I go for 'depth' or 'width' for my undergraduate research experience. Guys, any suggestions?

As long as you have something, than that is good enough.  You will be working on a new problem during your Ph.D. and it will be very different in the amount of time spent (full time, versus an "extracurricular").  Your grades, test scores, and letters are more important.  Nobody is expecting you to be an independent researcher at this point.  They are much more interested in scientific potential than results when rating undergrads.

I would do what you like the most. (Life is short and then...)  But if you force me to vote only based on your application, then spending more time on the initial problem and getting a publication (or more pubs) is the higher return on your time.


Professor using student paper as an example of what not to do in class? So a professor used a grad student's paper (anonymously) as an example of what not to do or what she doesn't want to see in the papers. The student was blindsided as the student wasn't notified that his paper would be used as an example, the student hasn't received a grade yet, and was not giving any corrections.
What would be a good way to handle this situation?

This sort of behavior by a professor is poor pedagogical technique and, in many cultures, poor etiquette.  It is not misconduct and it is not rule breaking.  If you are a student and a professor acts this way, you can criticise the behavior in any anonymous teaching evaluations.  Otherwise, ignore it and move on.
Receiving criticism, including bad quality criticism, is part of academic life.


Can I use the sentence "Most of the references in this paper" in my paper? My paper was accepted with major revision and the 2nd reviewer pointed in a comment that the problem I'm tackling in my paper is not obvious or as important as I'm thinking it is...

Yet, almost all of the references I used point out that this problem is a major drawback! And it was the main motivation to the others (most of those papers were published in the last 3 years, Q1 journals in scimago, ex : IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, some cited up to 200 times)...

So just for the sake of this reviewer, I want to point that most of the references in my paper show that the problem I'm trying to solve is a real one.

So should I write :

  The problem X was reported in [ 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8..., 15 ]

Or is there a nice way to say :

  In most of the references in this paper, the problem X was reported and was the main motivation...

Or should I just try to convince the reviewer in a separate motivation letter?

I would use the first option. If you know the papers which back your position, name them. Maybe not all of them, but three to five. Choose the papers with the most explicit wording and/or the authors with highest reputation in your field.

Note, some citation styles allow to write the list of cited papers more compact, e.g., [1,2,4-8,..15].


Why do some publication venues add the degree type next to the author name? I've noticed that some publication venues add the degree type links to the author name, like MS, PhD, MBA or  MD. What's the point? (example)

It depends completely on the journal's editorial criteria.  Some journals will expect that the degrees are included (see JAMA) and some will not (see Research in the Teaching of English).  Professional ego will not come into it -- the journal will want to maintain uniformity from article to article.

Academic cultures differ as to whether degrees are typically appended to names.  In the academic culture in which I spent 30 years of my professional life, use of the "Ph.D." was seen as unnecessary -- if one identified oneself as "Associate Professor of English" or "Professor of English," the Ph.D. was assumed.


Applying for scholarships for PhD before I know where (and which country) I'll be accepted I am applying for multiple economics PhD programs in the US (Harvard, Princeton, etc), and for MPhil (research master) programs in the UK (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE). for the academic year starting Sep-2017

I want to apply for scholarships as much as possible, but I'm slightly confused by how this works. I've read some stuff online, but I'd want to do a sanity check here at Stack Exchange to make sure I've got it right.

First of all, is it normal for US Graduate Schools to pay the complete tuition fee for PhD students? The Harvard website says: "Economic students receive full tuition and stipend support while they are enrolled and making satisfactory progress toward the Ph.D. degree." I almost can't believe this, since the US has a reputation here in Europe to have very high tuition fees. Do I understand correctly from this statement that Harvard Economics PhD students don't have to pay any kind of fee to the university for the full 5 years, or am I missing something?
If the above is true, does it even make sense (and is it acceptable/normal) to still apply for extra-university-scholarships for those universities?
Third question: Since I'm applying to roughly 10 universities (in 3 countries), I don't know yet where I will be studying. Is it advisable (and acceptable/normal) to already apply for as many scholarships as possible, even though I don't even know yet where I'll be studying?
Is it true that the optimal strategy for obtaining a scholarship is to go through websites like scholarships.com, internationalscholarships.com, and apply for all scholarships for which you are eligible? Or would I be missing something?

since the US has a reputation here in Europe to have very high tuition fees. Do I understand correctly from this statement that Harvard Economics PhD students don't have to pay any kind of fee to the university for the full 5 years, or am I missing something?

I am a graduate student of economics in continental Europe, so I do not have a first-hand experience about the US or the UK. However, my general impression about the field is that those very high tuition fees are more relevant in undergraduate degrees and professional non-PhD degrees (such as MBA, terminal applied MSc, etc.) and not much about the PhD path.

I do not know for sure about the Harvard PhD funding policy, but your interpretation is certainly plausible. The general expectation among the PhD students is to receive some funding, and actually having to pay tuition to the school (in addition to not getting any living subsidies) seems unusual (and inadvisable).

The passage below from the econphd.net guide supports my impression that actually paying tuition  should be more of the exception than the norm for PhD students.

  Economics departments give considerably lower fellowships than business schools or science departments. Worse yet, some people will be admitted without fellowships and a few end up paying tuition. But it is commonly understood (although the department may not be willing to explicitly guarantee it) that all students who stay on beyond the first one or two years are funded in some manner. Often teaching assistantships are part of it, but many programs also reward academic success with scholarship money.

  Generally, the best and most competitive programs offer the most generous funding – MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale admits can expect to get a package of, perhaps, between $ 16,000 and $ 20,000 per year (with tuition waiver).

That said, I believe there are also externally funded PhD students (who receive funding from governments, other research institutes, grants, etc.) Having your own funding may help in the admission, but I do not know the process or how normal it is.


I have an (UK) ordinary degree in mechanical engineering. Is it worth the paper it's printed on? I've had absolutely no luck with job hunting. After months of applications, I've only gotten two interviews (both last year, before the pandemic), and the jobs I got interviews for weren't even vaguely engineering jobs (one was just CAD doodling, the other was basically tier 3 customer service)

I understand most people have honours degrees, so the fact that I can't say I have a 2.1 or whatever is an obvious red flag.

Is there any future down this path? Is this really such a huge red flag for employers that there's nothing I can realisitically do to make myself employable in my field? Is there even a grad programme that would take me so that there's a chance I could get a degree that doesn't seem so worthless?

It sounds like you're under the impression that fancy degree = job. That is incorrect. Fancy degree is nice and all but it's only the first cut. You will need to back your degree up with actual job search skills as well as technical skills.

For the former, this isn't the right Stack Exchange (use The Workplace). Read up on all the CV-writing, cover-letter writing, interviewing techniques, etc, that are necessary to get hired. Also be sure to make use of your alma mater's career center, if they have one. They'll have not just job listings, they will usually have counselors who will help polish your CV.

For the latter, I hope you didn't slack off during the degree because there's no substitute for it. If the interviewer asks, "here are two vectors, what is their sum?" you need to be able to answer because if you can't, then the rest of your CV is called into question. Make sure you know the basic coursework, and if you can keep up-to-date with the latest news in the field, even better.

Job searches are not easy. Unfortunately, you'll have to help yourself, because society doesn't owe you a job and nobody else will be able to help you pass the interview. On the other hand, they can be done: after 8 months I'm pretty sure many of your cohort will have found a job, and if they can do it, you can too.


Why did most US Universities switch to semesters I recently meet someone attended a US school still using the quarter system.
I've heard several theories, the most popular being that the semester system is easier for university to administrate.  I've also heard it is so the university breaks will line up better with K-12 school break schedule.

No one has ever explained to me why semesters or more efficient, or more family friendly.  I only know 1 person educated with the quarter system in the last 10 years.  Is there a reason most US universities adopted semesters?

There are arguments in favor of both semesters and quarters, but these seem to be inconclusive. (In the U.S.:) In fact, in the 1960s and early 1970s, many places were on semesters... but there was a fad of switching to quarters, so many switched. Then, in the 1990s, there was a fad to switch (yes, "back") to semesters.

So it does not seem to be that it was eventually discovered that semesters are better. Nor that quarters are better. Plausibly semesters are easier to administer, since there're fewer registration events per year.
On the other hand, students seem to like the shorter "marches"...


Where to learn the 'real' funding threshold for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship final project selection Recently, I received the preliminary result for the MSCA-IF-2016 (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship) application, and I learned that I am in the 'reserve list'. I wonder if there is a way to learn the updated funding threshold, which can help me make a better guess regarding my position in the 'reserve list'.

Thanks!

I recently contacted my national contact point. They were able to inform me on the size of the reserve list and my position on that list.

Best


Best practice when summarizing (not reviewing) research literature I recently started my PhD program and have already accumulated a vast amount of papers on my to-read-list. I never had troubles reading and remembering content of academic papers, but this pile is giving me headaches. So much so, that the comment and note functions of my reference management software (Zotero) does not seem to be sufficient to keep track of all the information.

Previous attempts to structure key findings in all this literature have resulted in fragmented lists that just add on to my confusion. I also tried mind mapping applications but feel like there must be some kind of best practice on how researchers structure and extract information on a larger scale (~150 papers).

EDIT: My goal is to quickly gain an extensive overview of my current field of research and its neighboring constructs, including unanswered or potential research questions, hypotheses that were previously investigated. What tools are commonly used beyond reference management software?

I'm aware that this questions has no objective true answer, but find it nonetheless important. Thank you!

I would let your specific publication needs (from your work) and researches drive the literature research.  Don't try to get a big overview of all research.  Once you have done a Ph.D., you will be the world's expert in your thesis and have reasonable expertise in a growing circle around it.  But don't expect to have encyclopedic knowledge of a whole subspecialty.  Even older faculty have their "spikes" based on their actual research careers.
Don't take so many notes and don't use a note taking system.  Instead use a filing cabinet and paper copies of publications.  Sort them into some category scheme (does not need to be MECE).  If you take notes on a particular paper, just do it in pen on the paper or on looseleaf that you attach.  At the end of the day, don't try to have some perfect retrieval and synthesis system.  Instead read for what you need at the time and then file the paper in your file cabinet.  Come back to it when needed.

[Note that second readings of papers often give different insights.  You are a different person (more sophisticated, better able to extract things) a couple years later into your Ph.D.  Also, you may be looking for different things later.  Don't expect or try for perfect comprehension the first time.]
Occasionally get the references to the refence (all or many of the citations for a journal aticle).  Don't do it all the time and draw the line at some point of moving backwards.  The point is to just get some feel for types of papers (datapoint versus review, technique versus results, etc.)
Become familiar with some encyclopedic references.  For instance in solid state chemistry the following are very valuable:  Wells Structural Inorganic, West Solid State Chemistry, Greenwood and Earnshaw Chemistry of the Elements, Phase Diagram for Ceramacists.  Consider to buy some or get your PI to do so.  Or at least find out wher held in library (ask for them to be pit on reserve).  Note, you won't read them exhaustively.  But you'll likely do more than just targeted searches.  Occasionally wander down into the Mandelbrot.
While SE likes some generality and you will get responses from different fields, it is helpful if you can give a little specifics also.  That way you may get both general and specific advice.  I can't tell if you are doing history or psych or business or physics.  Experimenter or theorist.  Little bit of info/perspective on your situation also helpful (2nd year student in 4 year Ph.D. or the like). Do this in a light fashion so you don't get accused of a too personal question.  And so more general responses are welcome and helpful to future readers.  But still...give some more info so better targeted advice possible.


When applying for a PhD, is it okay for one letter of recommendation to come from a PhD student? I am currently a Master's student and planning to apply for PhD. Now, I have directly worked with two professors for research projects. Unfortunately, those two are the only professors I have taken more than one course with too. With no other professor I had two or more classes so they do not know me well. I could be able to convince one of them to write letters for me. But surely that's gonna be a canned recommendation like "I taught him this course and he's got an A". Besides as an introvert, I am not memorable at all. I don't drop by during office hours to have small chats or ask many questions in the class.
On the other hand, I have a PhD student in my research group. He doesn't have the credentials or experience, but he can write a more personal and accurate recommendation letter for me. I have worked with him closely and he can give his opinion from both our personal and academic interactions.

Edit: just to be clear, the two professors I have worked with already agreed to give me LORs. I need a third letter.

Edit 2: I have another option. I have worked as a TA for one semester. The instructor can give me an LOR. But he is neither a tenured professor nor a Ph.D. degree holder himself. So I am not much sure about this option. Is it gonna "hurt" my application?

Edit 3: I collaborated with the PhD student before and we are co-authors of two papers.

You could do this, though it might be questioned. It would be best if the PhD student has some supervisory function in your group, rather than just a "fellow" student. The letter from the student should make your relationship clear so that someone reading it knows whether they should follow up with you or not.

But you can also, as an introvert, work to increase your own visibility with the faculty so that this need not recur. Many of them are possibly just about as introverted as you are.


Is it an advantage to be a resident of the state in which you are applying to PhD programs at state universities? I just moved to a new state (California) for a temporary job and am planning to apply to graduate school (physics PhD programs) at state schools here. If I want, I can establish residency here; this would be somewhat expensive and a take a bit of time, so I have not been particularly motivated to do so. I had assumed that since my tuition would be covered anyways in a PhD program, there was no advantage to being in-state. However, my supervisor raised the possibility that it might be to my benefit when applying to California grad schools to be a California resident; is this true? Does residency have an effect on PhD program admissions at state schools?

I had assumed that since my tuition would be covered anyways in a PhD program, there was no advantage to being in-state.

There's no financial advantage to you.  There might be one to the department.

I believe that one common arrangement is that the department's budget is charged for the normal amount of your tuition, whether in-state or out-of-state.  Although it's just money moving between internal university accounts, it makes a difference to the department.

I went to grad school at a University of California campus, and there was a rule that if you had come from another state, you had to establish California residency within your first year, so that the department only had to pay the out-of-state rate for one year.  So if you plan to attend a California university, you'll likely have to go through that bureaucratic hassle eventually anyway; might as well get started now.

Being in-state also means that the department gets to pay the lower rate from the beginning, so you'd be a bit cheaper to support than an out-of-state student.  I don't know whether departments actually make this an explicit factor in admissions, and I would guess that they don't, but it could make a very slight difference at the margin.


I don't want to do research (First year tenure-track faculty) I'm currently in my first semester as a tenure-track faculty in a small liberal arts college. I also finished my dissertation and defended about 5 months ago. While I'm grateful that I've got a tenure-track job as a newly minted Ph.D., I'm struggling to do research at the moment. Of course, I've been busy adjusting to the new lifestyle, but honestly, it hasn't been bad at all.

So, to cut it short, making time for research or lack of energy isn't really the issue for me. I consistently have at least 3-4 hours of writing time everyday. I think I'm just burned out from research after finishing my dissertation. When I sit down to do research, I spend hours doing nothing on my computer. I can't get myself to focus and write. I thought resting for 3 months after my defense was enough, but this state of unproductivity in research makes me very anxious.

Sometimes, I even think that I might not be apt to do research anymore. Is this normal? What was it like for you? Does it get better? How do I get over this?

Added:

Thank you for your answers. They were all helpful to read. I know I'm not the only junior faculty suffering from a burnout after getting the degree. I've seen more people taking at least a year off after they finish than continuing with productive research. I needed to acknowledge that my 3-month break was not enough. I'll take it slow for now. I need to find my passion for research again from within, and it will happen soon.

Another problem is that I still haven't quite figured out what kind of scholar/teacher I would want to be. I'm not sure if I want to pursue my career in an R1 university or a teaching school. I come from a very large R1 university and didn't want to live a research-oriented lifestyle that would make me work 70 hours a week. And at that point, I was already burned out from my dissertation even before I finished it. But now that I'm in a teaching school, I miss the environment of intellectual conversations and academic discussions. I'm not sure if I'll be content in teaching-focused environment.

How did you guys decide or know which environment you wanted to work for?

You may be suffering from burnout. You've been running at full speed for well over 20 years (K+12+4+7). You may just need a break.

First, check your department and college expectations for tenure. Talk to newly minted associate professors about their experiences before tenure. You may have to only do a modest amount of additional post-dissertation research in order to clear the tenure bar at your institution. At a small liberal arts college, it could be a book based on your dissertation and a few peer reviewed journal articles combined with some college service and not pissing off your colleagues ("collegiality").

This is eminently doable even if you take off your first year to recharge your research batteries by focusing on teaching and a recovery of some modicum of sociality.

Finally, you might ask if your university welcomes you taking a leave of absence to do a postdoc somewhere. A writing fellowship in the Berkshires can do wonders for mental health as well as ones’ publications list.


How will the success of my previous projects affect future funding? I have two funded projects. One works great but the other is terrible (probably wrong postdocs and PhD students). When I send future proposals, my history is evaluated against the overall research output, right? There is no factor indicating one of my projects has failed, right?

I have two options:

Let the weak project fail and focus on the successful one to improve my overall research output. Then, I have a strong record of publications for the future proposals.
Use some funds from my successful project in the problematic one (e.g., hiring more people) to save it at the cost of sacrificing the successful one.

By the way, I am an assistant professor of chemistry (close to promotion) and the projects have been funded by European schemes, if it matters.

While a common practice, that would be fraud.
Less fraudulent would be to bill everything that 'counts for both' to the stronger project, to conserve money to get the weaker projects done. (Equipment, staff meetings, etc).

For you, depends on how your department weights grants brought in vs. papers published. If they value grant money more, that you've damaged your chances of getting more is not something your should reveal, while papers are something you can play up.


Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Research Council) international post doc - criteria I'm currently working on finding some funding opportunities for a post doc project. I'm currently in my final (4th) year of my PhD in Uppsala (Sweden) studying evolutionary biology. I'm looking to do a post-doctoral project (in the UK).

Vetenskapsrådet - the Swedish Research Council - offers a fund for International Post Doctoral positions of two years abroad and one year repatriation in Sweden.

I am struggling to find any information about qualifying criteria, can anyone offer some insights about who can apply and what can be applied for? I have two questions right now...

1) Is it required that the PhD must be attained before applications are made or can I apply before being awarded my PhD?

2) Is the fund open to people without Swedish citizenship?

It appears this information is made available on the webpage once each call for applications has been issued.

On this webpage here you can find this year's call for applications. Or you can visit vr.se/inenglish and follow the links to Research Funding > Apply for Grants > Call for proposals > Closed call for proposals, all past funding rounds are listed.

The last round of applications closed on 2 September, so you'll have to wait until next year. It looks like you need your PhD before the closing date. I can't see a specific mention of citizenship as a requirement (you can always email the research council).


How do I handle a mistake in a mathematical proof that does not invalidate the main conclusion of our paper? I recently found a mistake in a mathematical proof of a result I published in 2016. In a nutshell, a subtle error led me to claim that two conditions were equivalent. Unfortunately one of the two implications is not true. Luckily, the main result of our paper relies only on the correct implication so the main conclusion of the paper is correct. How should I handle this?

The most important step to take is to contact the journal and tell them that you wish to publish a corrigendum to your article.
Journals have systems in place for making the existence of a corrigendum clear to readers who search for the original journal article. (So does MathSciNet, by the way—which reviews journal articles, not arXiv articles.)

When people cite articles, they cite the journal versions (when they exist, such as in this case). Therefore people who are reading a future article that cites your journal article will believe, quite reasonably, that they will be accessing the best version of the scientific record if they go to the journal article. A correction on a personal web page or the arXiv does not accomplish this important contribution to the scientific record, causing all kinds of problems (as user124672 mentioned in their answer).

user124672 also makes the valid point that publishing in a venue where somebody disinterested in the article has version-control power over the article (that is, editors of journals) is very important for establishing what is and isn't the definitive version of the article—which is again crucial for the scientific record. A corrigendum is the process by which an author can convince an editor to use their version-control power to update the definitive version in rare circumstances (and the rarity, and necessity for a disinterested party to agree, are features and not bugs of this system). Precisely because authors can update their arXiv and personal web page articles any time they want, such updates cannot ultimately be considered trustworthy in the careful, scientific sense.

By all means, also correct the arXiv version (with a clear explanation of what has changed), as well as the version on your personal web page—but only as supporting actions to the crucial one, which is to correct the scientific record by updating the journal article itself.

(One could imagine a world where later articles cite arXiv papers even when journal articles exist, and where arXiv has some structure in place to prevent frivolous author updates; in that hypothetical world, one could reevaluate the relative importance of the above steps. However, in our actual world, where citations are invariably to stable journal articles, I stand by the above statement.) (One can also reasonably criticize the limited-access and even financially predatory nature of many mathematical journals—I have done so myself—but that discussion about the optimal relationship between academia and capitalism does not alter the facts above.)


What is the point in publishing a paper in a workshop rather than in a conference? At first glance seems more interesting to submit your work to a conference, but a lot of people are still interested in workshops.
Which is their motivation?

I have also heard that to use your new material in a workshop paper is "a waste". How true is that?

Which are your criteria to choose your paper target?

Thank you.

In my research area (software engineering), points why people submit to workshops include the following:

Lower barrier for acceptance: Some works are inherently hard to get accepted at top-notch venues, for example, because they are hard to evaluate properly. A paper that was rejected multiple times at higher-level venues might eventually end up at a workshop, so that the authors can still make a (albeit less valuable) publication out of it.

Publication strategies: Some researchers actively try to build a prolific track record of many small (including workshop-level) publications, rather than a few big ones. While it's debatable whether such strategy is best for advancing science, and even for convincing a selection committee, there are certainly some associated benefits, for example, plenty of opportunity for self-citation. Strategic publications may also be used to show an association between two authors (to convince a grant committee that they can work together well enough to write a paper), or to establish an association between the authors and the topic (to show a grant committee that they have some early work in the field).

Getting feedback: Sometimes, people have a nice idea, but are stuck in an early stage of implementing this idea. Workshops are a perfect opportunity for gathering feedback, since they (i) are designed to enable a focused discussion (small audience, specific focus), (ii) usually have a faster review cycle than conferences, and (iii) sometimes allow for short discussion or problem statement papers.

Opportunity to visit the host conference: Workshops are usually embedded into the ecosystem of a larger host conference or conference series. When a researcher wants to visit the host conference, but didn't get a paper accepted there, a workshop paper can be their entry ticket. (It's usually easier to get a conference trip funded if you have a paper at the conference or one of its workshops.)

Warm-up publishing: When joining a new field, a group of authors might want to get accustomed to the associated community to understand their culture, values and standards. Workshops are particularly suitable for this purpose due to high acceptance rates, interactive formats and the opportunity to visit the host conference.


When do I let other places I applied to know I have an offer? I currently have a job offer, but I have had two other campus interviews.  The other search committees often mention that I should update them on my job search.  I am not sure what this means exactly.  Of course, if I know that if I take another offer, that I should let the others know. What I am unclear on is if I have an offer, but no offer yest from the other institutions, should I let them know about this?  Or do I wait until I have an offer from them to say anything?

It's in your interest to inform the other two departments that you have an offer and the date by which you need to respond to that offer.  You can say this without naming the first institution or the salary that you've been offered.

This way, they have a chance to speed up their process and make you a competing offer before the first offer expires.  If you don't tell them, then they'll simply continue with their search process and you might end up being forced to accept the first offer before the other two institutions have completed their search process.


Will advanced knowledge help my undergraduate research? Possible Duplicate:
  Overlearn in undergraduate College- good or bad idea?

I'm about 0.5-2 year(s) ahead of my course plan* depending on how you see it, but I don't want to waste my time so I want to self study stuff beyond my syllabus. I'm a Physics major freshman now, and I plan to get into research in my sophomore.

Let's say I have self-studied lots of Math/Physics stuff in my freshman year, and get into research in my sophomore. Will knowing advanced stuff give me an advantage in my research? (one of) My goal is to have a good grad school application

Here's a related question I asked previously on overlearning in college Overlearn in undergraduate College - good or bad idea?

*I was preparing for Olympiad so I learn Calculus and Introductory Physics. But I don't get to skip courses in college. So I'm relearning stuff all over again.

I can't think of a single situation where having more knowledge than expected or required was ever a bad thing...

You will have to "suffer the system" here and there, that's a sad but simple fact (just because you say you know something, does not mean the schooling system will believe you. Nor should they--truth be told, most of the time you actually do learn something from courses you thought you mastered).

Anyway, always talk to your teaching assistants/professors about this. Work them a bit, see how flexible they can be. Often, you'll find that some could not care less if you come to class or not, as long as you pass the exams and do all the practical work required to pass the course. Others, unfortunately, will have mandatory attention and the likes, that they consider holy. Going against them and their reules at all costs is pointless and will cost way too much time and effort. Just sit out the classes.

In time, and when your approach is indeed successful, it will get easier and easier to pull off.

Whether it's a good idea or not, that depends entirely on how fast you can learn. No matter how good it might make you feel to know so much more than your peers and to be able to skip so many classes, and get into such high-profile research, the time you spend studying should never cost you your social/networking/extracurricular life. In time, the stuff you'll have to master will also become harder and harder to learn. Before you know it, sticking to this approach blindly will cause you to you spend all day and all night, all year round, in some dark corner of some smelly attic. And that, is never a good idea.


Is it possible to get a PhD by writing only review and survey papers? Suppose that a PhD (in engineering) student has 3-4 review/survey papers in their domain, and has received more than 500 citations in total. In a situation like this, can they pass the oral defense and get the PhD degree without a research paper?
What I want to know if review/survey papers can compensate my lack of research output. Any examples and stories that I can refer to?

It is possible to get a PhD without writing any papers; the formal requirement is of writing a thesis, and many people do just that. So I think the formulation of your question is a bit misleading.
But cutting to what I think is the actual intent behind your question rather than the specific choice of words, the answer is almost certainly that you cannot get a PhD without doing original research. Just making expositions of research already done by others, no matter how detailed or how many citations you get for them, is not what a PhD is about and wouldn’t satisfy the requirements.


Is it OK to put a paper on the arXiv after it has been published online? Suppose that a paper has just got online in a journal without any previous submission to the arXiv. But the authors have spotted some minor typos and are also not satisfied with the typesetting of the online version. Can they put a newer version of the paper on the arXiv that contains some typesetting edits and minor corrections of typos?

This will depend on the terms and conditions that the journal published the paper under (and theoretically on the legal systems of the US and whichever country the journal publisher operates from). These conditions could range anywhere from "the publisher now owns the copyright, and you can't publish the paper anywhere in any form without their say so", to "put their typeset version up online anywhere you like". These terms should have been included or linked to when you signed for the final publication.

On average though, provided the publisher is willing for you to put out preprints, they typically want it to be your last version, not their typeset version, in which case there isn't likely to be any additional issue with the kind of differences you appear to be talking about.


Naming inconsistencies in booktitle fields of BibTeX entries provided by IEEEXplore Why are the booktitle fields of BibTeX entries provided by IEEEXplore inconsistent in the following way:

@InProceedings{
...
booktitle={2009 International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs},
...
}

and

@InProceedings{
...
booktitle={Image Processing, 2004. ICIP '04. 2004 International Conference on},
...
}

Is there a specific reason for that? I've come across both styles in references. I think (if I understand https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecitationref.pdf correctly) the IEEE itself prefers the first variant. I do as well. What are the reasons others use variant two and why does IEEEXplore emit styles the IEEE does not encourage?

Update:

It seems like IEEEXplore is in fact simply emitting the names of the conferences. So the question becomes why the conference name is slightly changed almost every year (except for the year, obviously). See also http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome.jsp?punumber=1000349 for an overview (click on "more history").

In general, the quality of Bibtex entries produced by the IEEE website is low. For instance, they do not properly escape capitals in titles nor diacritics in author names, and they do not identify names and surnames correctly. See for instance the Bibtex for this paper (found searching at random on their website), in which they did two of these mistakes and even forgot some HTML character codes in the title.

So it does not surprise me at all that there is also this inconsistency. I don't think they even bother checking, they just spew out whatever is in their database as a raw string. They put zero effort in them.


If I buy a research article, will I get any potential retraction statement or erratum free of charge? If I buy a research article, will I get any potential retraction statement or erratum free of charge? Or will I have to spend additional money to obtain access to it? I see that some retraction statements are behind paywall, so I wonder whether the people who bought the article also cannot access it free of charge.

I like the sentiment behind the question, but in my experience this depends entirely on the mechanics of the journal.  If they replace the older version of the paper by a newer, corrected version -- and one may well think that they should never do this for anything other than publication errors on their part -- then your access should convert to the new paper.  However if the corrigendum is a separate paper, then it's a separate paper: their online system doesn't know the difference and will charge you for it.

(It is not inevitably thus, of course, but journals would have to update the "sell pages" of their older papers to automatically point to the corrigendum, at least.  I have not seen this.  If anyone has, I'd be interested to know.)

One might regard this as the proof that buying journal papers individually out of your pocket is simply not a reasonable practice.  I certainly recommend against it.  If you need a paper and don't have institutional access to it: that's what friends / colleagues / collaborators / inter-library loans are for...


Reference letter from third world country I hold a 5 years "specialist degree" from a university in Belarus and I'm going to apply to a Ph. D. program in engineering in US. I have several problems regarding my reference letters.

The professor who was my Engineering Project adviser and who taught several important courses in my group for two years can give me strong a reference because my project was the best in the department. However:

He doesn't know English.
He is currently retired.
Professors in Belarus seldom have personal e-mail addressed and neither does he.
He doesn't have publications in English.

Any ideas how to solve these problems? Translate the reference, put it into an envelope and then ask the professor to sign envelope as required? Will the reference be even opened and taken into account?

First, contrary to the optimism of some of the other answers, you should not expect that the university you're applying-to will translate a letter sent to them. At my university in the U.S., the traditional requirement was that a "certified translation" be made-and-paid-for by the student.

At the same time, the tradition in applications in the U.S. for many years is that the student does not send the letters of recommendation (and/or translations) themself, but has either the faculty send them, or some secretarial staff. If you send paper mail and include such letters, they will most likely be considered "compromised" and invalid...

Your recommender's having an email account is not so important, as perhaps having internet access to upload an electronic file (scanned letter and translation and certification-of-translation, or PDF letter and others directly electronically), since the default process is more-and-more purely electronic.

Some application systems seem to default to sending an email to the recommenders, asking for an upload, and additionally asking for other information. I shudder to think how these systems could be made to cope with cases not fitting neatly into the designers' (often ill-informed) design choices.

(Indeed, the most recent "upgrade" to my university's over-arching software system makes certain things essentially impossible, ...)

The degree of complication will vary from university to university, and you'll need to be very pro-active to make sure that the certification of translation is adequate, and that paper-mail really arrives, if your recommender cannot manage to send email.


Faculty leaving to get a second degree, see training, etc. Is it heard of in Academia? Is it possible for a faculty to take leave for 1 or 2 years to go and learn some new technologies in order to broaden their research area into a more interdisciplinary area?
Imagine you are working on statistical and computational modelling of cellular dynamics, now you want to go and learn experimental technologies in order to generate your data, validate your results, etc and basically turn into a dry lab/ wet lab instead of a totally computational lab. Is it possible to be funded by your university in order to go and do some self-improvement which would eventually lead to dramatically better research outputs in the future even though it may cause a hit in your short-term output? Something similar to sabbatical leave but not exactly that, as sabbatical leave policies are not funding your goals during the leave and might even stop you from your regular compensations.

I am especially interested in Canada and the US.

The most common way I have seen this occur is through collaboration.

Rather than starting from scratch learning like a student in another professor's lab, the faculty member would start a collaboration with someone at the same or another institution. As part of this collaboration, it is possible to trade and learn skills from each other.

Especially in the situation you describe, it sounds like you have skills that are directly useful to a potential collaborator who has the wet biology background without the computational side, and such a collaboration could increase rather than decrease your productivity.


Approaching someone outside my department for work experience I am a masters student at my university within the school of mathematical and science.
Within this school there are two departments, the maths department and physics department.
These two departments are very close and tight knit especially at the postgraduate level.
I am within the mathematical department.
Within the physics department there are many professors that are part of a world leading research group at a top experiment and research centre in the world.

This research centre offers work experience/ internships.

I want to ask these professors for work experience at this research facility.

How can I approach them and ask them for this?
How long shall I wait after the start of term to ask them?

Why not? Worst case, they tell you "no".

Just make sure you are able to prove you have the requisite skills and background, and willingness to come up to speed fast.


Email to two academics of differing familiarity I am sending an email to two people: Prof FirstName1 LastName1 and Dr FirstName2 LastName2. The former has a PhD and is officially a professor (with tenure, if that matters) with whom I am not intimately familiar. He prefers to go by Prof or Dr LastName (I have no problem with it). The latter I have worked with for a few months now and strongly prefers not to be called Dr (much less Professor, as he isn't one; he does research and lectures but the institute at which he works does not grant that title). Instead, I call him FirstName2 as he has instructed me to do. The two are of a similar age and experience (as far as I know).

My question is, when emailing them, should I say "Dear Prof LastName1 and FirstName2," or a more formal (but possibly upsetting) "Dear Prof LastName1 and Dr LastName2," or something else altogether? Furthermore, what would be the most polite thing to call each of them in a meeting where both are present? I would like to respect both of their preferences, but not respecting FirstName2's title seems like it could be taken the wrong way (i.e. insulting).

I ended up going with "Dear all," even though there are only two people in the email but I am wondering what the most polite way would have been (for future reference).

"Dear all" sounds perfectly fine to me, and using plural is an easy way out, especially if not all the recipients have a honorific. "Dear professors/ colleagues/ both" are other options, although in that case one of the recipients would not like the first one. For two recipients only, using both names as @vonbrand suggests is fine but I would avoid it for more than two.