Should I cite the reference if I have already cited it in the previous paragraph? For example,

  A [1] is a dataset for training the model.

I have cited once in this sentence.

Then in the second sentence somewhere in my paper,

  I would like to use A [1] as my experimental dataset.

Should I cite it again?

There may be field-to-field differences, but generally I think it depends on how far away "somewhere in my paper" is. If it is a just a few sentences away, in the same paragraph, then I don't think you need to cite again. In this context, it is probably clear that you are still talking about the first dataset.

However, if you are referencing it later in the paper, even in the next paragraph possibly, then I think you should err on the side of caution consider citing it again. I don't think that over-citation is as large a problem as some would say.

Lastly, there may be the case where it's clear that you will be using the same dataset throughout a paper. In that case, you could just make it clear that you anywhere you refer to "the dataset," it is clear what you are referring to. For example, "Throughout this paper we use the MNIST Handwritten Digit database [ref], and any reference to 'the dataset' or 'the data', will refer to this dataset." There is probably a less clunky way to phrase this.


Free ways to automatically get notified if new papers are published on ACM or IEEE? I'm looking for a way, tool or technology that allows me to define keywords and/or authors and/or conferences for which I want to be notified if a new paper is published on ACM or IEEE. I couldn't yet find a way to achieve that. What are my possibilities? It shouldn't cost any money.

I've had great experience with Google Scholar Alerts. To use them, go to scholar.google.com and search for any term. In the results page, you will see a link to Create Email Alert. Click on that and create the alert to send you notifications.

One very good use of this is to follow specific papers. For example, I have a star paper of mine that I'm currently extending and I like to keep track of who is citing this paper. So, I search for the paper on scholar. In the results page (just under the result for the paper I'm concerned with), there's a link Cited by 'n'. Click on that and you get results for only those papers that cite this article. Now, create an alert on this page. This way, whenever someone refers to this paper (and Google finds out about it), you get an email. Do this for all the important literature in your field and Alerts will make sure you are kept abreast of your field.

Never miss out on an important finding!


Use "parts" in a master thesis report I am writing a master thesis of about 80-100 pages and want to know a good way of structuring my document either using only chapters or chapters and "parts". f first wanted to post this question to the TeX Stack Exchange but realized that it was too philosophical.

As most thesis writers I use LaTeX and I have seen thesis templates that use \part (classicthesis) and ones that do not (master thesis template from a university). I think that classicthesis is mostly aimed at PhD thesis documents that are longer and will become a "book".

So when is it appropriate to use \part? Any specific document length in pages or number of chapters?

When you use \part then a page is cleared after the text. Is this a style that is used in American PhD thesis documents? Why is this done?

I have also looked at some textbooks and they often do not have something similar to part. Instead these books only use chapters. One of my favorite textbooks (Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach by Russel) uses parts but no actual pages that show the parts name. Instead they are only visible in the table of contents.

My two competing ideas are with and without parts:

   \chapter{Introduction}
\part{Concepts}
   \chapter{Background}
   \chapter{Related work}
\part{Methods and systems}
   \chapter{Proposed method}
   \chapter{Implementation}
\part{Evaluation}
   \chapter{Experiments}
   \chapter{Analysis}
\part{Conclusions}
   \chapter{Conclusions}
   \chapter{Future work}

So when is it appropriate to use \part? Any specific document length in pages or number of chapters?

It is appropriate when you feel it appropriate! Seriously though, assuming that there isn't any guideline from your university (otherwise, you probably wouldn't be asking the question), it's really a personal choice, the same than about the splitting chapter/section/subsection/subsubsection/paragraph. The structure of a document is there to help the reader, in particular for long documents. A part could be something that can be read separately (i.e., with no references to the other parts), or could be something containing some huge chapters; tt could reflect a chronological order (before, during, after), or a conceptual separation (theoretical, applied), etc.

In case of doubt, talk with your advisor!

  When you use \part then a page is cleared after the text. Is this a style that is used in American PhD thesis documents? Why is this done?

As @Daniel pointed out, this is a rather technical question, that is more likely to be answered on tex.SE.


Underscore in place of author in references I have recently seen author’s names being replaced with underscores in the references of two different works. For instance in Andrew Wiles’ Modular elliptic curves and Fermat’s last theorem:

In this case Ralph Greenberg is the author of On the structure of certain Galois groups. Why has his name been omitted?

Some citation styles allow you to use a long dash in place of an author name if the work you're citing has the same author as the preceding one. It's stylistic choice.


Harsh marking - is it worth complaining? I know that we have to be meticulous in pure mathematics courses, and I appreciate that. Comparing a particular course I took recently to the other pure math courses I've taken before, it appears that the marking has been unnecessarily severe. I had assignments which weighed 25% of the total mark, but the marker could almost arbitrarily pick what we would have had to specify in solving a problem. For instance, sometimes there were points in a proof for which it was not clear at all whether or not they should have been specified, since they were either evident (clearly, there were parts in which the marker was very fault-finding, not like in most other pure math courses I had taken) or were previously proved in class or in a previous assignment. The marking scheme was entirely up to the TA who marked the assignments, so that he decided which questions to mark or not to mark. There were usually 20 to 25 total marking points in each assignment, but some questions were deemed to weigh only 2-3 points, and the TA could easily deduct 33-66% of the mark for missing / skipping minor details of the problem, whereas the entire answer / main point was correct. The instructor had admitted during the course that either more total points should be introduced or partial points (such as 0.5) should be given, but that didn’t happen. Some questions weighed disproportionately many points, such as when in one assignment, which consisted of five questions and which was marked out of 25 points in total, one of the questions was worth 9 out of 25, and it was not the most time-consuming question. In the final examination, the marking style similar to that of the assignments was applied, and I’m convinced that it was too harsh.

I've discussed the exam results with the instructor, and I'm still convinced that the marking was not always quite appropriate. I also wrote an email to an advisor and he said that I could write a petition to reconsider the marking. But should I really do this? I feel that the department would not perceive such an action very kindly, and some talks in the department would probably follow. So I'm not sure if it's worth it.

Should I just move on and forget about this?

I disagree with aparente's suggestion that filing a petition is a good way to get the department to improve.

Generally speaking, an instructor has a lot of latitude to determine how grades are determined in their class.  You can challenge your grade by a petition, but whoever considers the challenge will be inclined to defer to the instructor's judgement, unless the grading was blatantly unfair or unreasonable (some universities use the standard "arbitrary and capricious"), such that the grade wasn't really related to the quality of the students' work.  A grading scheme that is just "too harsh" or "too picky" isn't likely to meet that standard.

It also isn't really a good way to bring the issue to the attention of the department, due to the adversarial nature of such cases.  If the grade is upheld, as I suspect it would due to the required standard of proof, people may tend to view it as "the instructor is right and the student is just whining".  It will also focus the attention on you personally, instead of on the fact that this is a general problem affecting many students.

I would suggest instead that you mention this issue in your course evaluations, and encourage other affected students to do the same.  Explain the issue in detail and as objectively as you can, keeping the focus on how this affected the quality of the course, rather than on how it impacted your own grade. If the department cares about teaching quality, this will encourage the instructor to work on this.  If they don't, then there is probably nothing you can do about it in any case.


Is a break-of-study a hindrance to getting a PhD? I live in a developing country. I want to go to USA for higher studies and plan to acquire a PhD there. But since I do not have enough money to go there, I need to have a job first to collect my money. May be the job is not relevant to my academic field of interest.

Are these types of break-of-studies hindrances to getting PhDs?

A "break-of-study" is not a hindrance per se. It has side effects (you get older, acquire a family, and so on), and some of these can make it a little trickier to get a Ph.D. In particular, you might find the answers to this question: Can one excel in graduate school with a demanding family life? very relevant in terms of the challenges of doing a Ph.D with a family.

But again, a break-of-study in and of itself is not a bad thing. Now if the job you are looking for takes you far away from your intended field of research, then you might have to explain your background on your application and somehow establish that you have a continuing interest and basic knowledge in the field (which may have changed since you graduated). You can do this by taking courses online, or by doing research projects on the side, and so on.


Terse definition of many symbols I'm writing an academic paper in the CS field. I'd like to define five symbols as tersely as possible.

Can I say this as the following using 'let' and semi colons? Like:

  Let $a$ be xxxx; $b$ be xxxxxx; $c$ be xxxxx; $d$ be xxxxx; $e$ be xxxxxx.

If answer is no, I would appreciate if you suggest a suitable and short alternative for an academic paper.

If you're in the "squeezing blood from a stone" stage of paper compression, trying to fit 10 pages of text into a 6 page limit or the like, then sure.

If you want readers to be able to understand what you're talking about, however, you typically want to give your variables a bit more space to breathe.  Definitions sections are typically very dense and hard going, cognitively speaking, and the more that you can present in a reader-friendly manner, the better the rest of the paper is going to be.  If each symbol is important and distinct, then it's worth devoting the space to explain each naturally. If you really do have a large number of not-very-interesting variables best explained by brief phrases rather than prose, consider using a table instead, which at least provides a clear and separate visual organization of the symbols.


I hold a PhD in political economy, and am outside academia; what route might I take towards researching for a PhD in canine psychology and behaviour? I hold a BA in a language and area studies (history, politics, social science) and a PhD in political economy (touching on social science), both from British universities belonging to the (research-strong) Russell Group, and I have been outside of academia for many years.

What route might I take towards the goal of researching for a PhD, preferably again at a Russell Group institution in Britain, in canine psychology and behaviour?

(I have read the help file, and felt that giving details of the fields was necessary in order to make clear what I am asking. Advice that is not specific to these fields is very welcome, especially if the size of the gap between them is similar to the size in my case.)

Given that you already have a Ph.D., can you network with anyone to meet a mentor in this subfield? Their personal advice could help you figure out which formalities you can skip and what skills are essential. Do they see your work as providing transferable skills to their field? Would they recommend that you need more background in lab work, psychological theory, or something else?

While it's not normally a good idea for people to try to contact unknown professors merely to ask for help preparing for a later application, you've been socialized into the norms of academia (especially within the Russell Group) and may be able to do so in a targeted and effective manner.


Would it be appropriate to ask depressed brother's professor to reach out to brother? My brother is severely depressed and has absolutely minimal support, in any form, from my family.  He's a very bright guy with no direction and no resources at home. After graduating from high school, he spent 3 years at a dysfunctional relative’s home playing video games, and finally enrolled in college after I badgered him the entire time in-between.

He chose not to enroll for the second year of college. He stayed at home playing games again. He "did not like" school except for one course, where he happened to have a minor friendship with a professor.  This professor nominated my brother’s essay for a departmental honor. My brother rarely has good news, and when he does he often does not voluntarily share it. So for him to offer this story up to me makes it stand out.

This professor almost certainly knows my brother has some sort of problems. There are cases when you can just look at someone and know; my brother is one of those cases. But, given that this prof nominated my brother’s essay for a departmental honor, I think that the prof at least somewhat believes my brother is capable of some sort of achievement (I think my brother is even brighter and more capable than me, but I know him differently).

I want to reach out to brother’s professor and ask him to inquire about my brother’s situation. Going to college is the best chance my brother has to break a generational cycle, but he does not know this, and he will not listen to me (I am only 3 years older than him, he may think I'm a similarly clueless peer). This prof, on the other hand, is a person who my brother might listen to. Presumably the professor also agrees with my assessment of what an education can do for a life. I sense that this idea might get backlash – e.g. this is not the prof’s responsibility, that it is rude to even ask, and perhaps if the prof cared he would have reached out on his own already. However, on the other hand, this prof probably went into this business with the hopes of changing the world for the better, and thirty minutes or an hour of his time might change someone’s life. Plus, he has no reason to know just how dire my brother’s situation is (there are plenty of loser-looking people with average to robust support networks – but my brother does not). I plan on contacting the prof, either via email or phone. What I ask you is for advice on how to tactfully and effectively make this ask.

The end goal is to get my brother back in school and to encourage my brother to build his own support network, and to know that it is impossible to succeed without one. I accept that I might get a flat out “no,” but for the sake of this thread let’s assume that he agrees to something small like a phone call or a coffee (I assume he is kind enough to oblige, plus he seems to have liked my brother somewhat). Also, how should I handle the corollary issues that my ask might raise? For example, I don’t want to make this prof feel like I am asking him to be a mentor to my brother or that this will create some enduring obligation. Moreover, I can’t expect this prof to know how to deal with people the same way a therapist would. Is it appropriate to suggest that the professor suggest therapy (which is what’s truly needed here) to my brother? There are more things that may come up, but for the sake of ending this post, I’ll end it here. Many thanks to you all.

"I plan on contacting the prof, either via email or phone. What I ask you is for advice on how to tactfully and effectively make this ask."

If you can wait until January, I would.  Your email would seem less intrusive after the break, I think.
I suggest you make a connection with the professor, and have a rather open-ended call, rather than making a particular request.  Trust the professor's empathy and interest in your brother to (a) perhaps ask if there's anything he can do, and (b) think creatively about what he could do.

The professor is a different person from you, and his relationship with your brother is different from yours.  He may have a different way of interacting or influencing your brother, that might not be exactly what you are imagining.  But if the professor is interested in getting in touch with your brother, I imagine you'll feel relieved and grateful, and won't mind if he doesn't take a precise Jazzie3-clone approach.
I don't know what the professor's reaction would be, but if I were in his shoes, I would go into a conversation with my troubled student with, again, an open-ended approach.
Sometimes it's helpful to go with a loved one to a regular medical doctor.  See this other answer.
Sometimes it's helpful for the frustrated person (you) to talk things over with a therapist.  This can be hard to accept, but surprisingly, it can be helpful.
Possible starting point for an email:

  Dear Prof. X,

  I'm Zak's brother.  He was really touched when you nominated him for a
  prize, and I was impressed at how engaged he was in your class.

  Zak isn't doing so well this year.

  I can imagine that with confidentiality rules, there's not much you
  can say, but it would still be helpful for me to talk with the one professor Zak made a good connection with.  May I make an appointment to come and see you?


Is a Master 2 Research (Europe) a University or Postgraduate Degree? I am currently applying for post-docs and for one of them, I should provide the "category" or degree/educational establishment where I have the choice between:

University degree
Postgraduate
PhD

My question is: what is the right category of a Master 2 Research (in Europe) ?
Is it a University degree or a Postgraduate degree ?

While I would recommend you to confirm, normally a 'university degree' is an undergraduate degree.

A postgraduate could be a postgraduate certificate, postgraduate diploma, or a postgraduate degree (which is a master degree)

I think you know what a PhD is.

In short, as master is a postgraduate (the middle of your three choices).

It seems a little strange because normally post-docs are post (after) doctorate (PhD).


If a potential professor said he did not accept any more PhD students this year, could I reach to another professor? I applied to a PhD program. I contacted one professor and told him that I would like to join in his research team. He replied to me that he was unlikely to take on any direct advisees this year. He also said:

  It is not necessary to be adopted into a specific research group in order to be accepted into the program; you can be accepted into the program, assigned an adviser, and then work with some other professors. I will keep an eye out for your application.

What can I do now? Do I need to contact another professor?

If this is the US, then it is common for students to be accepted into a doctoral program without knowing who their advisor might be. You will be assigned an advisor by the department initially so that you get course advice, etc. But that may not be the person you actually want to work with.

Once you are accepted into the program, you have some time to look around and match up with a professor who will be your dissertation advisor, dropping the old, temporary, advisor.

So, no, you don't need to contact another professor now in order to apply. Once you are accepted you will want to attend to that, of course.

Note that the practice varies by country, by university, and by field. What I describe isn't universal. In some situations you do need to know which research group you will be part of in order to be accepted, but the response you got suggests that the situation here is as I described.


Can I reference the abstract? I finished writing my internship report for a master degree. Now I am writing its abstract. Is it possible to mention a statistic study on the abstract and reference it in the bibliography or is this something bad to do ?

If this is just an internal document that will never be seen outside your own institution, it doesn't really matter.

For a document that will be distributed outside your institution, the abstract should be fully comprehensible even if that's all you see. It's quite common for databases to include only the abstract or for it to be much easier for people to see the abstract than the rest of the document. (For example, on ArXiv, each paper's "home page" includes the abstract but you'd have to download the whole paper to see the references.)  For these reasons, an abstract that says something like

  We build on the statistical analysis of [5].

isn't very useful.  This isn't so bad with a long reference style:

  We build on the statistical analysis of Smith and Jones (2005).

is better, especially if that is a well-known paper in the field but not everything builds on well-known papers and the reference is potentially vague if Smith and Jones wrote multiple papers together that year.

The best way to do this is to give a full citation in the abstract itself:

  We build on the statistical analysis of Smith and Jones (J. Interest. Res., 3(1):41–59, 2005).

Some journals forbid citations of any kind in the abstract but that seems to force people into the suboptimal "Smith and Jones" style.


How can I distinguish harsh treatment from my advisor from "tough love" and direct feedback? Usually during our meetings my advisor will complain a lot and tell me I am doing stuff wrong.  How can I tell if he thinks I am a bad student or if he is just trying to give me direct feedback?

Keeping this general so this question becomes a reusable resource.

He's probably giving direct feedback. If your adviser really hated you, he wouldn't spend the time in improving you.


Doctoral Advising: No Available, Appropriate Chairs I work at a regional university in the United States. Several years ago (before I arrived) our department admitted five years of doctoral students (approximately 50 students) as general admits to a distance doctoral program without assigning chairs.

Now those students are reaching comps and the dissertation. Four faculty left in the last year which is stressing our already over-capacity workloads.

Many students are interested in topics for which we have no faculty experts. We are going to hire a new faculty cohort in the next five years but there is no guarantee those faculty interests will match our students’.

Are faculty obligated to work with and graduate students we did not admit?

Is there a precedent for such a situation?

Even if it's not "distance learning", there is an obvious hazard in admitting doctoral students that do not fit into the capacity of the faculty. It's irresponsible to the point of immorality. Ok, but/and once they're in your program, yes, your program has an ethical and even moral obligation to serve them well.

There is the complication that, if the students are by-accident allowed to toooo freely choose topics, that it is manifestly infeasible to properly advise them. Someone "should have" explained this to them at the outset. In doing a PhD, "distance" or otherwise, one cannot choose a topic first, and somehow insist that the faculty in the immediate vicinity supervise it. (Nor, of course, is it sane to try to do a project independent of an advisor, or significantly outside one's advisor's expertise. It's hard enough to do a PhD project even when one's advisor is an expert on the topic.)


Version control for research and teaching statements Every time I apply for a job I write a new cover letter, research statement, and teaching statement. While each statement is personalized for the specific job, I tend to do a lot of cutting and pasting and little new writing (yes I have a whole collection of past statements). This seems like something that might be useful to keep under version control. how do people manage the different versions of the cover letter, research statement, and teaching statement?

My research and teaching statement have a lot of commented text (I write in LaTeX). This is because I amend each document specifically for each job application - as you do.

The detail in which I describe each topic changes depending on what job I am applying for.  I comment out text which is too detailed for the job to which I am applying. However, for other job applications, I might like to have that text put back into my statement, or write new text, to be perhaps commented out in a future application for a different job.

I now have documents with a lot of phrases from which I can "pick and choose", depending on the specific job to which I am applying, and amend appropriately. It isn't really version control, I know, but I find it useful to have a selection of wordings to choose from in one place so that I can compare and contrast things like the level of detail and the tone. This isn't particularly onerous as these documents do not total more than 2 - 3 pages in my case.


Is it appreciated to contact old phd advisors with updates on what you have been doing? I did my Ph.D. 2 years ago. After that, I moved into the industry where I am now working in a similar field. I like to think that they would be happy to get a mail every now and then on what I have been up to or if I bump into some interesting research questions. I have been sending them a mail once every 8 months or so if I had something to share (e.g. a job opportunity, relevant research paper) or just for giving them an update on my professional life. It does not seem to annoy them.
But is it generally appreciated that I reach out/stay in contact? Or is it strange that I still contact them now and then?

I always appreciate such messages from old students. I often wonder what they are getting up to. I don't think I'm unique in that, but some would, perhaps, not be as happy with "interruptions." But you will get a sense of whether you should continue it if you do this from the response.
Going back in person is also a nice thing to do if you get the opportunity. Not only for advisors, but also for old mentors that you think had a positive impact on your life and career.
If it annoys them, you will hear about it, or they will just ignore you. But I think it is a professional courtesy to keep people updated. Many of them have invested something in you and like to hear how the investment has turned out.


How to politely tell the PI I'm working with to use the vector format for images I have been working on a paper that is now ready for submission. I put a lot of time into polishing my figures in Illustrator, which are very detailed bioinformatics visualizations. I sent the figures to the main responsible PI. The PI has now sent me a draft of the manuscript, with the suggested arrangement of the figures. All in JPEG format. A scrutiny of the person's publication record implies that this is also likely to end up being the case for the final product. I realize that the paper has the potential to go fairly high in terms of impact, if appropriate work was put into the presentation. To be frank, none of the more respectable journals today will accept figures presented in this fashion, and if they do it would demand a lot more in terms of the underlying science than some PDF-using competitors might get away with. So, with a reasonable fear of triggering certain latent ego issues (which appear to be quite common among PI:s in academia), how would I go about convincing this fairly established and high profile PI (as an unsignificant Phd student) to fully switch to vector based figure layout?

From the comments I gather that you are afraid to criticise your PI for producing low quality images, which is natural.

I think that a good course of action here would be an e-mail where you tell your PI that your journal requires vector based images. Then you say that you know that he is a busy man and that you are willing to reproduce his images in Illustrator if that is okay with him (assuming the pictures are easily reproducable). That way he will probably thank you for going the extra mile and taking work off his shoulders.

I would refrain from telling him to make better pictures himself, because he has probably done it the same way for decades and it is hard to change such habits.

Good luck with your publication!


How to advise a student looking for an under-grad thesis topic? There are some good answers here on how to find an masters thesis topic, but I am looking for advice on how to advise undergrad students who are looking for a thesis topic. Finding a thesis topic is a little bit different at undergrad level because it is the first time. How can I best help a student find a good thesis topic at undergrad level which will help them to get into a good university for masters and/or PhD?

An undergrad thesis is not expected to be mind-blowing or even necessarily that original (see @Cape Code's response about Lit Reviews, often a great option). Look to make some incremental improvements on a paper you've read that really interests you. Maybe you did a project for a class that you did very well on and would like to explore a bit more deeply. Starting from scratch is quite daunting for an undergrad (even a grad student or professor).

The least successful undergrad theses are often the ones that tried to be too groundbreaking and in the end the author had nothing because they couldn't make significant progress. Most theses are good enough to be accepted, if you get the work done. They do not have to be publishable. You usually only have about 1 year to finish an undergrad thesis, while completing a full load of courses. This is way different from a PhD or even a masters thesis where usually more time can be devoted. This is your first time at research, so have fun with it and don't worry too much about the consequences.

Often an advisor might hand you a project to work on, but you should come to him/her with general interests and having already read some of their papers and personal website.


Do all US schools provide the same access to e-journal resources? I recently took courses from several different schools, with different semesters in different parts of the US. When visiting the schools' library Web sites, I noticed that each offered a similar "search all resources link" with a login, eventually leading to EBSCO. I expected the significantly larger and more expensive university to offer more "premium" access. I could not find any difference in the available results and down-loadable articles from one institution or the other. Do nearly all schools pay for nearly the same access? Can I expect nearly all schools to use EBSCO and the search results for electronic resources to be identical at each institution?

Short answer is no.

Although EBSCO appears to be ubiquitous, the level of access you can find across ALL schools definitely varies. As undergrads at a community college, my classmates and I would occasionally visit nearby university libraries just to access their larger online databases. Not only did they subscribe to more databases, they also had greater levels of access than my home institution.

Community colleges may be somewhat of an outlier in this respect because of their typically limited funding/resources. Across other institutions-of-higher-learning, you can expect greater similarity in the databases provided at the general level. However, many institutions, or colleges within them, will have a specialty focus and will provide access to journals specific to that specialty. Those specialty journals are not available across all institutions, especially those with limited funding.


If my research is addiction related, can I tell the professor I have first hand experience? I’m an undergraduate doing research in the bioinformatics department, and we are researching drug addiction. We are also attempting to incorporate the psychology cooccurrences (i.e. suicide ideation, anxiety, depression)  of addiction. Personally I have not experienced drug addiction, but I am very familiar with two different addictions (one ongoing) and the cooccurrences mentioned above.

A benefit of this has been that my first paper and project was very well received by the professor because I understood the subtleties of the topic. However, this also means I am mentally unhealthy.

I have always considered telling the professor about this, but I don’t know if this would be encouraged/acceptable, and if I would still be allowed to stay in this research area.

Any input is appreciated, thank you!

Yes you can.  Even may.

The question is should you?  What is the motivation? To brag your worldliness?  To earn pity?

I advise no.  Concentrate on learning the topic academically.  Let your personal experience enrich your learning but more as deep background.


Will a graduate student publishing in different disciplines confuse potential employers? I'm a third-year computer engineering PhD student. My dissertation topic is re-configurable caches (computer architecture) and my supervisor is a very nice person. I have four publications with him in well-known conferences in my area. But currently I'm in a weird situation. In my 2nd year I fell in love with computational neuroscience and started working on it with another professor in my university simultaneously with my PhD research. Obviously my PhD supervisor encouraged me. Recently I got two high-impact journal publications as a first author on cognitive neuroscience. I am very happy with my dissertation topic but also want to include my neuroscience papers in my résumé. I would like to try for faculty positions after the PhD. Do you think my résumé can create confusion among potential recruiters or will it show multidisciplinary research interests?

The only real danger you will have with prospective employers (presuming that you look for a postdoc before your faculty search) is that a potential advisor might be concerned that if you aren't engrossed in their research, you will seek out opportunities in other areas. If it's their money that's supporting your time, then you'd be expected to devote your effort to the line of research you've been hired to do, not what you'd like to do.

This is something that you'd have to explain in your cover letter in any case. But you'll need to explain—as you have—that your lateral move was encouraged and done with the support of your current advisor. Otherwise, it could be a concern.


Checking the content of research statement I finished Ph.D several months ago and planning to apply for postdoc positions. I am preparing my research statement. I would like to ask some experts to review it before uploading that. Is it ethical to ask my Ph.D advisor to study and review it? I do not know how and to whom can I send my research statement to check and review that before uploading for postdoc position.

Yes, your PhD advisor should definitely go over your research statement. Getting you a job is part of his or her job.

The people writing your recommendation letters should also go over your research statement and give you feedback. It will also help them write letters.


How to share computer code? I am writing a paper with my adviser.
Some of the key contributions of our paper include:

A computer simulation model of an inventory system
A set of simulation experiments and results to validate the simulation model
An implementation of an inventory policy which we propose
Simulation results of our proposed inventory policy and inventory policies which are currently used in practice

We want to make our computer code freely available to others.
The simulation model was written in the Java programming language so other researchers should be able to run the code on their own computers fairly easily.
By sharing our computer code, we hope that other researchers will develop inventory policies which they can test using our simulation model.
(Of course, it would be beneficial for us if they would do so and cite us in their paper!)

Question: What is a good way to go about sharing our computer code?

Where do I host the code?
Which software license should we "publish" the code under?
How do I make it easy for other people to run the code?

Answer to 1: Where should I host my code?

Depending on what your University offers you, you could choose to host it with the University, or perhaps with an open-source repository such as Github, Bitbucket, SourceForge, or similar.

Many of these services have a "paid" subscription option for private repositories if those are required.

Answer to 2: What open-source license should I choose?

This question is relevant because we're having this discussion right now within one of our own research projects. I happen to know a little about open source software, having researched it in the past and having taught a few courses on it.

Though there are a lot of open-source licenses out there, they really end up coming in two main families. They're either permissive open licenses (ex: MIT, BSD, Apache) or they are Free (GNU Public License v2 or GPLv3). Here's a brief lowdown by the Open Source Initiative

Permissive open licenses These licenses generally allow you to release your code and anyone can do anything with them that they want as long as they retain certain copyright information with the code. In reality, this has a number of implications.

Someone could take your entire code base, create a product with it, and sell it.
Someone could take parts of your code, put it in their own project (commercial or not).
Because the license is more permissive, you yourself could take the code, close it, and then keep under wraps any future releases so you can make money off of the code or hide it from the public.
Because the license is more permissive, you might generate more interest as a result. People may take code from other projects and use it to improve yours. On the flip-side, they could also make improvements for your source code and never share them back with you.

On the flip-side, the GNU GPL is a Free Software License that disallows you from doing certain things. In that sense, it's more restrictive, but does so for a number of ideological reasons.

If you release software under the GPL, you can't close-source it. Ever. It's going to remain in the open, and if someone asks you for the source code you are obligated by the terms of the license to provide it (if you host it on Github or another public repository, then you have already satisfied this requirement).
A company could take the code and make products with it and sell it (it's their right to do so), but they would have to do so under the condition that any source code that they write for the project is also released under the GPL. Because of this, a lot of companies who make a lot of money writing software don't like this because they have to continually release code to the public. On the flip-side, any cool stuff that they do gets put into the public under the GPL, so you could fold it back into your project and improve it. They can't take your code, improve it, and then never share it again.
If you happen to have used any GPL code in your project (let's say you took a few lines out of the Linux kernel or Git version control or whatever) then you'll have to release your code as GPL as well.

In the end, the choice of license affects more about how you want the software to be used (and the eventual community it might bring in). If you plan to commercialize the software, (and implicitly allow others to do the same), then you might want to lean BSD. If you don't want people to take your hard work and profit off of it without showing you the results, then you want to go GPL. If you don't care either way, then you could probably just choose one. I think BSD is popular in academia precisely because of the commercialization aspect (for example LLVM is gaining a lot of traction because of its permissive license).

Answer for 3: How do I make it easy for others to run the code?

You make it easy to run code by engineering it to be easy to run and by being extremely detailed with your documentation.

Packaging/distribution can actually be pretty hard and usually take more effort than most people would think. A good way to make the software easy to run is to test it on multiple machines. Make sure that you're not forgetting any of the libraries that you're using in your software project, for example, and when possible, try to use software libraries that are common and well-maintained. Use mainstream languages with easy-to-manage package repositories.

When appropriate, use installers, installer scripts, Makefiles (distutils, which uses automake/autoconf is better), etc. Even shell scripts are better than nothing. If you can provide binaries and/or an installer, that will make things even easier. The problem is that this is a LOT of work!

Accompany it with documentation. Ideally, the documentation will contain a description of how to set it up and run it, with descriptions of necessary packages/libraries, data that you might have to get, and what to type or click on. Usually, something called README or INSTALL will attract attention. Put the instructions on the web page as well, most of the hosting solutions also allow you to have web pages.

Hope this all helps. The hardest part of the process is by far Step #3 and most people don't get as far as to use good techniques like installers, automake/autoconf, and so forth because it's a LOT of work and development often moves faster than you can write documents. However, no one is grading you on your style so it's often easier to get it out than it is to clean it up and prettify it first.


Is it OK to upload thesis including published work to personal website? I think the question is simple, but answers may be quite different - I fear.

I have recently written my Thesis, which also includes some peer-reviewed published papers. As a general rule, is it ok to post the .pdf of my Thesis on my personal website?

If it depends on the journal and University where the papers have been sent to, what right should I be looking for on the journals website?

The Sherpa/Romeo database (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/) will give you all the information about journal policies concerning self-archiving.


Academic code copied by library author The papers I write contain all the source code required to reproduce results. I have written a series of papers that build on each other over the years. My intention has been to release an open-source libary that encapsulates all of this, but I have not yet done so.

Before releasing anything I was contacted by the employee of a large company. They have been using my techniques and have decided to release an open-source version of their library. Their library contains code almost exclusively from my papers, copied verbatim. They clearly acknowledge my work in the documentation of their library.

My question is whether I ought to ask to be an author of the library. While I didn't commit code to the particular repository of that library, I did write the original code in papers. I'm worried that I'm not getting credit due for the work I've done if I'm not listed as a developer. I don't want to upset the authors of the library because a large ecosystem now depends on what they have done.

In fact something great happened: Your research did have impact in the real world and seems to be useful - not everyone can say that!

When it comes to legal issues, things are usually complicated and will involve copyright issues (of yours and of the journal / publisher) as well as authorship issues. Those vary between countries and it will be difficult to give an advise without proper juristical background and line by line comparison of your publications and the library code.

But as I understood your question, you are more interested in the academic credit, and therefore I would suggest to contact the authors, tell them you are happy that your work is used by them, and offer to be part of the development team. You might add a phrase like it would be a pleasure to be listed as author of the library - an in most cases they will understand...


Are user surveys considered "human experiments" by the U.S. National Science Foundation? I'm applying for a grant to the National Science Foundation of the United States of America.

The grant is to fund our research in numerical methods for fashion. I want to conduct a survey where I show two images to a human subject. One of the images shows the original dress and the other one shows our simulation. Then, I ask them to grade 1-5 how good they think is the simulation.

I think this is quite harmless stuff for humans (beyond the trauma of our bad taste in fashion), so is this considered experimentation with human subjects for the National Science Foundation of United States of America?

In almost all circumstances you need IRB approval to carry out the "experiments" that you are contemplating. The reason isn't that taking surveys is, somehow, dangerous, but, rather, that the data you collect might be sensitive. Moreover the subjects of the survey might have privacy concerns and expectations.

So the issue is about the data collected. How will it be maintained? How will it be disseminated? Is it (even potentially) name linked? Etc. The treatment of the data implies some treatment of the subjects.

While there are a few exemptions to IRB approval, the best place to learn if your study falls under exemption is from the IRB itself. It is better to ask and be told that approval isn't needed than to make assumptions.

For your specific situation, the fact that you may be using human models as part of the materials introduces another aspect. An IRB will want to be assured that you have proper releases from everyone.

So, ask.

Since you are concerned about a grant writing process, rather than the experiment itself, it would be wise to run a version of your proposed experiment, not just the questionnaire, past your IRB so that you can assure the NSF that you have your processes in place.

The NSF policy


Do any academic institutions publish objective surveys of alumni satisfaction? Having seen some questions asking about the costs/risks/benefits of doing a PhD I wonder if any academic teaching organisations actually contact their students after graduation and seek structured feedback (qualitative and quantitative) about the perceived or actual longer-term costs and benefits of their degree (bachelor's, master's or doctorate).  And if so, do any of them publish the results?  My own alma mater have never asked for feedback (just contributions!).

Yes, here is an example.

A quantitative assessment of the 'long-term costs and benefits' is complicated by the subjective aspects of many parameters. For example, some individuals value salary over independence, other don't. But my alma mater, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) does objective surveys and statistics on alumni employment. These numbers should be interpreted knowing that answers are given on a voluntary basis and, the EPFL being modest in size, n is small.

Some examples of the results (for 2011):

"One year after graduation, MSc graduates who did not start PhD studies are employed at 90.9% by the industry in Switzerland. It took them an average of 9.5 weeks and 12 job applications to find a job (less than in 2010). Their average entry-level salary (in Switzerland) was CHF 77,967 in the private sector and CHF 76,591 in the public sector (slightly more than in 2010).

One year after PhD graduation, 90.5% of graduates have a job. However, finding a job was harder: they needed an average of 14.9 weeks and 19 job applications (significantly more than in 2010). Salaries are also lower than before, average entry-level salaries were CHF 93,716 in the private sector and CHF 82,720 in the public sector."

They also asked PhD graduates if they think their degree is 'useful for their careers':

29% said it was mandatory,
29% that it gave them significant advantage over non-PhDs,
40% that it was sometimes an advantage, sometimes detrimental depending on the employer,
4% that it gave them no advantage
whatsoever, and
1% had no idea.

Some more data on work satisfaction of PhD graduates:

                    very high    high    average     low     very low
overall sat.        21%          54%     23%         1%      1%
interesting job     19%          51%     24%         4%      1%
adequate training   22%          41%     22%         14%     1%
degree recognition  24%          38%     28%         9%      0%
salary              8%           29%     51%         10%     1%

Here is the link to the original document (in French).

Notes: translations are mine, 1CHF=~1US$, the MSc is considered the 'undergraduate degree', global unemployment in Switzerland is <4%, PhD studies are funded with a salary of roughly CHF 50'000 with negligible tuition, these are numbers for PhD in sciences and engineering, numbers for humanities are very different.


"I am looking for a job" on a student website, a good thing or a desperate sentence? I saw that some students, even from top schools and who are giving faculty candidate talks are posting a sentence like, "I am actively looking for a job in ..". Is this a good thing or only shows a desperate job candidate?

Your professional website is a summary of who you are and how you are currently presenting yourself publicly.  If you are openly on the job market, then it is entirely appropriate to be frank about that fact on your website: just present it as a piece of neutral information, rather than making a big deal of it.


How to describe computer skills in an application form? (Master's degree) In a part of the application form I was asked to describe my computer skills. How should I do this? Is mentioning them as a list (bullet points) enough, or should I be more detailed?

I'm talking about professional skills (e.g. programming languages)So should I, for example, list all the programming languages I know, or should I give detailed information (for instance, the duration I have been working with each language)?

Computer skills can be divided into several area such as Basic Skills (Windows, Office), Business skills (Mail, Internet, Communication) to more professional skills Programming, Administration, Database, Network, Consulting, but these are really big areas. There is also Academic Computer Skills where should be software regarded to academic world (Latex, Open Source....)

It is a really wide field, so maybe you should give more specific information about study programme for more information.


Is it Appropriate to Include Personal Correspondence in the Appendix of a Thesis? While conducting research for my dissertation, my collaborator and I discovered a mathematical error in published work and this error was confirmed by the author through personal correspondence. On the surface, it appears as a minor error, however it effects certain mathematical statements. The author of the work unfortunately has not published the correction in the errata for the work. It has been over a year now since our last correspondence.
The area of research I'm conducting is not widely studied so there isn't a large community of academics who are familiar with subject matter so this is unlikely to be something that will be checked by the wider community.
In the manuscript, I have written that we discovered an error and corrected it and that the correction was also confirmed by the author, and the only proof I have is email correspondence from the author. After I graduate, my email account will be shut down after a year. Therefore, would it be alright to include the correspondence I have as an appendix in the thesis in order to verify the statement I made about discovering the error and having our correction verified? The language in the email is formal and professional.

You can only publish email correspondence in your thesis if all people involved in the email communication agree.  Anything else is highly unprofessional and also unethical.
On the other hand, if you have clearly demonstrated that the manuscript had an error, there is no need to add those email.  You could write that this has been confirmed by the author and cite a "private communication".
Regarding the emails, there should be no problem to save the emails even if your account is deleted.


two body problem - tenure track and PhD My partner is currently interviewing for tenure track positions. I am a first year PhD students and We would ideally like to be in the same city. Ideally I would like to find a co-superviser to continue the path of my current PhD or find a new PhD that I like and start over.
When is the best time to mention this two body problem? ( It is not mentioned in his application)
What is a good way of phrasing it? The positions we are talking about are in the UK and Denmark.
p.s: Is it possible that mentioning the two body problem will reduce his chances of getting the position?

Two-body problems is something which is usually only brought up proper once you have the offer during the negotiations phase. Then, hopefully, your partner's future institution will really want to have them, and hopefully try to accommodate their wishes.
Of course, the room for negotiations at tenure-track level might be limited, depending on the place. But then again, giving a funded PhD position is a comparatively low effort/risk, as compared to giving a partner a permanent faculty-level position. So I would think that chances should be reasonably good, though it might of course mean that your partner will get less startup funding e.g. for PhD students (the university will ultimately look at the full package).
Finally, if your partner is being asked in the interview if there is a two-body problem, or generally about family-related issues with relocation, they should answer truthfully.
Independent of all that, it should also be a feasible task to find a new PhD yourself in the new place (unless it is very small), as PhD positions are much easier to get than faculty positions. So overall this might not be so much of an issue.


Advice: How to prepare myself for Adjunct Teaching I will be receiving my Masters Degree in MIS this summer. I have a bachelors in Computer Science.  I also have 3 years professional working experience. I am interested in teaching as an adjunct at community colleges. I have no training in teaching. I had an interview recently. One of the questions that came up was what is my teaching philosophy. I had no answer being that it was the first time had heard of the topic. My question is what can I do to prepare myself to be a better candidate for these positions. Do I need to take teaching courses or is there some reading that I can do to prepare myself. Are there any certifications for teaching at this level?

I am a biology education researcher at a large public university, which means I spend a lot of time reading about teaching techniques and analyzing student outcomes. I teach college biology courses regularly. I say all this to emphasize that teaching well is a difficult skill set in itself. Being an expert in a field is only tangentially related to being an expert teacher.

So, I am assuming that you not only want to get hired, but want to become a good teacher. I'll suggest three ways to become an effective (and hireable) adjunct.

Read a book on university teaching. Most are geared toward new faculty. Some examples are: Teaching at Its Best or How Learning Works.
Google for the journal on education research in your specialty. For computer science, it looks like Journal of Computational Science Education. Read through several articles to get an idea of what the current issues in teaching in your field are.
Get practice teaching. If there is a community college, liberal arts college, or university near you, email some of the faculty and ask if you can assist for free during recitations/labs and help grade exams. Effective teaching requires understanding how confused students think and lots of practice helping guide them over hurdles. There may be legal issues to overcome here, but hopefully someone will appreciate free support.

It's easy to Google "how to write a teaching philosophy statement," but a good statement requires you to have some teaching experience to use as examples.

To summarize -- read up, get practice, appreciate that this is a new skill.


Is informing your advisor about a community cause considered unprofessional? Background: I'm a PhD stident in Russia with an advisor coming from the US.

There are several community causes that are related or slightly related to academia; two that come to mind are Academics against the immigration executive order and Battle for the the net neutrality. Whenever I learn of a similar community cause, I'm inclined to send a personal email to my advisor, because

I feel it is important to know about these causes,
My advisor can take action and support them.

However, there are concerns that discourage me:

Academics are busy
My advisor might already be aware of the cause, in which case, I'm wasting his time
Emails that seek to support a cause may seem unprofessional, if not downright spam.

Is there a community consensus on how appropriate such messages are?

I don’t think that there is a norm for this kind of interaction, and I think that’s a good thing. Some people will be interested in talking about it with you, others will not. It wildly depends on who your advisor is and what they care about.

It sounds like the issues you’re talking about are issues that are in vogue in the US, a country you aren’t from and potentially have never visited. I would leverage that as a way to talk about it with your professor. Ask the professor about it casually. Say that you have been reading a newspaper or blog or something, that you heard about this political issue in America, and that you were interested in getting his perspective on it. Presumably you don’t know a lot of Americans, and it’s natural to ask one who you already have an established relationship with about it.

Bringing it up in casual conversation is a lot better than email, in my mind. There’s less of a chance for the message to get lost, and I know plenty of academics for whom that’s a major factor.


In Indonesia, are research grants extra income that go directly into academics' pockets? The average base salary for academics in Indonesia seems to be quite low. It seems likely that they receive various extra incomes that can be higher than their base salary; otherwise, they won't be able to survive. Are research grants one of these incomes? How do universities in Indonesia manage research grants?

I did my advanced studies in southeast Asia. One of my professors was from Indonesia. When I was talking to him one time he shared that when applying for a grant the researcher should put in a "consulting fee". This fee covered the researchers time.
I can't say if this is standard practice but it is first person testimony from the country.


When did it become customary to eschew gender pronouns in scientific essays? Anyone who's written a scientific essay knows that the use of he/she/him/her, etc are frowned-upon (except where necessary)

But where does this come from? When did it achieve (near) consensus? When were the guidelines first written by a major academic body?

While I don't know that there is one answer as to how this phenomenon came about (and I agree with you that it has gained traction in recent years), it has certainly been habit in some fields for a long time. Anthropology is an example of this, although I cannot find an American Anthropological Association style guide old enough that contains reference this (nowadays, AAA defaults to Chicago). My anthropology professors generally encouraged us to maintain gender neutrality, and the use of 'they' was considered an acceptable way to do so.

My graduate studies are in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and, as you might assume, gender neutrality is generally encouraged. At the risk of stating the obvious, the use of 'him' or 'mankind' in generalized reference to people is considered inappropriately sexist. There are some circumstances where I have seen exceptions made to this-- especially in literature about sexual violence. Older monographs about sexual violence commonly refer to abusers and perpetrators by 'he' pronouns and victim/survivors by 'she' pronouns (see Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft for an example). However, I have noticed that this is less and less true for books published since 2000-- probably the result of greater acknowledgement of male rape victim/survivors, as well as the occurrence of sexual violence among queer couples.

I also know that some WGSS writers explicitly refer to neutral third person references with 'she/her' pronouns, specifically in defiance of the academic tradition of using 'he/him' for neutral third person reference (e.g. "A doctor might tell his patients..." or "A police office is expected to holster his gun..."). A similar logic is used in defense of new words like 'herstory' instead of 'history,' especially when the material focus on/deals primarily with women. Indeed, I have seen pushback on the use of 'she/her' in this way on the premise that it, too, is sexist. The debate around this is very complicated and probably not going away any time soon.

I have seen folks (including on english.stackexchange) attribute the invention and/or rise in 'gender neutral' pronouns-- and even the invention of 'they'-- to the feminist movement, but even a brief foray into the history of the English language upends that argument (see my second reference). There may be evidence that gender neutral language is coming into greater usage and popularity in the 21st century thanks to feminists, but thus far I have only encountered the anecdotal.

Outside of WGSS, I have seen writers switch between 'he' and 'she' for generic third person in a single piece of writing. For example, Bruce Perry does this in his book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, although some people may consider this to be a less formal piece of writing.

None of the major style guides for humanities and social sciences (APA, Chicago, MLA) explicitly endorse 'they' as an acceptable third person singular pronoun (read more here). In fact, Chicago actively discourages it. While APA encourages 'gender neutrality,' apparently it considers 'they' to be 'too informal' for academic writing.

In reference to your last question about guidelines, you may want to look through this page, which gives examples of gender neutral pronoun suggestions in chronological order, dating back to 1792! As others have argued (again, see my first reference), the use of 'they' is not some new-fangled trend, but actually has a long and complicated history. (An oft-cited, 400+ year-old example comes from Shakespeare.) So-called 'grammar nazis' who refuse the use of 'they' on the grounds that it is 'ungrammatical' may be surprised to find that the debate around the gender neutral third person in English is over a two hundred years old-- older, depending on who you ask. This doesn't stop some of them from being outright offended at the lack of subject-verb agree (or at least this is the most common objection I come across). Others argue that it strains their linguistic faculties to use 'they' as a gender-neutral third person singular (see linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet's chapter "'What's in a Name?' Social Labeling and Gender Practices" in The Handbook of Language and Gender [2003] for more on the 'awkwardness' of 'they' as third-person pronoun).

On a more personal level, I have a lot of feelings about the issue of 'they,' because I go by they/their pronouns. I have encountered a great deal of hostility in my day-to-day as a result of this. People have made all kinds of arguments to me about why it is wrong or why they can't cope with my pronouns. On a sociological level, it would certainly make for an interesting study.


Look for a second advisor while on the first, any advice? Due to incompatibility with my current advisor, I am currently looking for other advisor on his back. Any advice? I am so scared that what if he discovers that I'm looking around. Now I have tried to set up new email account so I can deny everything if things get ugly. Any people have the same experience, can you share your trick with me please? It is pretty much a very dangerous covert mission.

I don't see anything dangerous or necessarily covert about looking for another advisor, and I'm puzzled by things like using a new e-mail account you can deny was yours.  (Are you planning to make contact under a fake name?  Pretend someone was impersonating you if your current advisor finds out?)

You don't need to be nearly so worried.  It's completely reasonable to switch advisors, and I know plenty of people who have done it without any trouble at all.  You don't owe your current advisor anything, and there are no good grounds for anyone to object.

Of course you could cause offense if you are tactless.  Don't tell your advisor "I'm switching because I'd prefer a competent advisor."  But there are plenty of reasonable excuses.  For example, you could say your interests are developing in ways that are a better fit for an advisor with a somewhat different specialization.

Fair or not, your advisor is probably not happy to be working with you either and may actually be relieved when you switch.  In comments on other questions you have expressed a fear that your advisor will badmouth you to other potential advisors.  That's possible, but you could also run into the opposite phenomenon: sometimes an advisor who is frustrated with a student will try to convince other faculty to take on the role of advisor, since then the student will be someone else's problem.  (The less cynical version is that the student may get along better with an advisor with a different personality.)

I'd recommend keeping two things in mind:

You seem very interested in criticizing your advisor.  Now is not a good time for that, whether it's addressed to your advisor or to a potential replacement.
You seem worried that you are doing something underhanded.  If you act nervous and suspicious, people may suspect you are up to no good.  Looking for a new advisor is not doing anything wrong, and you may get a better reaction if you treat it straightforwardly and calmly.


Does your Alma Mater and U.S. News Rankings Really Affect Future Job Opportunities? I'm in the process of trying to decide on which graduate program to attend.  I am pursuing a Master's level degree in Computer Science in hopes of furthering my web development career.  I would love to be able to teach web development/programming at a community college someday after getting a few more years of industry experience (teaching requires at least a Master's degree).  Previously I taught secondary science before transitioning into web development.

I've been accepted to the following programs:

Boston University - Master's in Computer Information Systems / Web Application Development  (U.S. News ranked #51 nationally)

Brandeis University - Master's of Software Engineering (U.S. News ranked #31 nationally)

University of Bridgeport - Master's of Computer Science (not ranked nationally)

I keep going back and forth in regards to which program I should choose.  University of Bridgeport seems to have a good curriculum and it looks like it will be cheaper (I may get a scholarship), but I'm concerned that it's not viewed as a "top" school.  I would be happy to pay for a more expensive school if it helped provide greater opportunities in the future.

Do you find that going to a "better" school has affected your resume to the point that you may have more teaching opportunities after school?  I realize that a certain school won't earn me the actual position, but having a highly regarded school on my resume MAY lead me to getting more interviews.  Any insights are greatly appreciated.

Thanks and have a good day.

Here are a few points.

1. Industry Jobs

IMHO, "brand" is more important in the industry than in academia. E.g. in general, the HR department is more likely to forward a CV with Harvard on it. Also, people in the industry are probably not able to understand the academic content of your program.

2. Similar Questions

How does the ranking of a university relate to a future career in mathematics?

University rank/stature - How much does it affect one's career post-Ph.D?

Although these are for PhD programs, there might be interesting bits in there with regards to industry.

3. Look

It might be helpful or informative to look at the CVs of the companies or positions you are interested in. This might give you a clue if only the "branded" universities are hired or if there is a wide range of backgrounds. E.g. with regards to mathematics departments, if you look at the CV of professors, a lot of them are Ivy League or MIT, Stanford etc.

Personally, I would pick the most "branded" program I can get into.


Changing Research Groups I am still early on in my PhD. I have not passed my comprehensives (or even began studying for them yet), but I have finished my courses. Over the past year, I began working with a group that I initially felt was a good fit for me. At the time, they were the only ones working in this area in our department. However, as time has gone on, I have realized that my professor has absolutely no idea about my field and their relation to it is completely from a different angle (hardware vs software). They are unfamiliar with the conferences in my area, acceptable standards, state-of-art work, etc. In fact, the other day I was told that everything my professor knew about my area was learned from me. Originally, I thought they were active in this field, but actually they are in a COMPLETELY different field altogether. Recently, we hired a new professor that I am certain is in my field (publishes in the conferences of my field, etc.). I have decided to switch and begin working with this new faculty member. Is this unusual? I am very scared of my current faculty member and have heard horror stories, who by the way,  is a retired professor (emeritus) but still can advise me.. but at this point I don't think I want it!

I would say that you would be better off going with the new faculty member. The question now is "How do I switch?" If this emeritus guy does email (which some of them are so old they do not. Although it sounds like you maybe are in Computer Science, so hopefully the guy uses email) I would write a brief email to him explaining why you are switching. This avoids a face to face if possible. Then unilaterally switch groups. I would take care of any introductions with the new advisor in person, however.

Much of this also depends on things like if you share an office with people in the uninformed group, how large your department is (If you have 40 profs in the department, you can fade away. With 4 profs, not so much), etc.

I switched drastically in what I was studying (Algebraic group theory as a MSci student to applied statistics as a PhD student) and there were a few eyebrows raised. But, it was ultimately my career. And people in my department came to accept it. It is SO much better to have a good research group than to have a placated advisor. Do not put yourself through that.


Is having a personal blog that addresses controversial political topics possibly damaging to an academic career? I am a Ph.D student, and I've been considering for some time starting my own blog as a hobby, to write mostly on philosophical/political topics that interest me; these are definitely not related to my field of research (at least, not most of them). As it happens, some of the topics I want to address are controversial, and much of what I would write could be interpreted as being offensive to one group or another.

Let's assume I want to look for a tenure-track position, and later on get tenure. Ideally, I hope everyone would agree that such a personal blog should not alter in any way my case for obtaining the position. In practice, I am concerned that the existence of such a blog could be used to attack my case for the position (and later on, my case for tenure) on the grounds that the opinions therein found are "offensive" or even "hate speech" (as might be interpreted by some very sensitive people in these modern times). More subtly, one imagines it could cause some decision-making persons to develop an effective bias against me, which would probably have a negative effect.

Thus my question in the title. I am looking both for personal experiences that people have had, and for some statistical data that may answer the question or a closely-related one (such as, does non-trivial political participation affect academic career? etc.)

Let's start with this: as a professor you will be in a position of power over quite a few people. Part of the job of being a professor is to responsibly manage a number of employees and respectfully interact with students. If you really did (recently) practice hate speech, then that does legitimately disqualify you.

However, when this becomes an issue you will probably never hear about it. Think about that from the position of the hiring committee: They have a number of applicants, most will be somewhat suitable for the job, but one will be stronger on one point and another stronger on another. So there are so many ways in which you can justify any decision. So when you do write down the justification, you will choose the one that will give the least problems.


Can principal investigators use leftover grant money to take a vacation with their families? Can one use leftover grant funding to take a vacation?

Or does leftover funding get returned to the funding agency?

For reference, I am asking about research labs in American universities.

Without knowing the actual laws or seeing the grant proposal, I think I can pretty definitively say no, you can't do that. If it is noticed, it would likely generate an audit of the entire grant. In an extreme case (NSF funding) it could result in jail time as fraud or embezzlement.

However, if the grant is from some private party, the rules might be very loose, though I doubt it.

However, if the topic of study in the grant were somehow related to leisure time or such then what seems like a vacation might actually be research. (We should all be so lucky.)

What happens with unused funds is likely spelled out in the grant itself or in the regulations of the funding agency. They might go back to that agency, or perhaps remain with some other institution.

But vacations? No. Pizza night for the research team, maybe. Unlikely.


On writing a review (i.e. summary) for a problematic (published) paper I am trying to write a review on a published paper for Mathematical Reviews. The paper proposes a generalization of K-theory. Its main definition is fundamentally problematic. So the rest of the results are worthless. Therefore, I cannot write a brief summary of their results, because it means that I did not understand the mistake. On the other hand, the abstract of the paper is very concise and misleading, so I cannot recommend it as the review to MR either. Besides, I do not want to spend too much time to explain all the mistakes and errors in the paper (it is not my duty as a reviewer!). Therefore I was thinking to write to Mathematical Reviews and let them know about the situation and deny writing any review for this paper. But before doing that, I was wondering if there is a better solution for this problem?

P.S. For those who are not familiar with Mathematical Reviews, I should add that MR asks mathematicians to write brief reviews on papers (book, etc) that are already published and these reviews are available at mathscinet. So, these reviews are different than referee reports.

Your review should do three things (not necessarily in this order). It should tell the reader what the topic of the paper is, perhaps including the authors' main "theorem". (This presupposes that the paper is clear enough to have a topic; I've reviewed garbage that didn't have a discernible topic, but I gather from your question that this is not the case here.) It should make it clear that you think it's wrong. And it should give enough information about the error to allow people in the same area to understand why you think it's wrong. (Once you've explained the essential error, it's not necessary to list a lot of other errors, unless you think that doing so would help the reader or make it clearer that the paper is wrong.)

It is especially important to indicate accurately just how bad the paper is.  For example, is it nonsense, or is it just wrong, or does it give a possibly correct theorem but with inadequate or erroneous proof?  You can save potential readers of the paper a lot of trouble by making the situation clear.


What to keep in a presentation intended towards invited collaboration? I have been invited to an University to make a presentation. Main focus is to share my works with the faculties and attract for possible collaborations with them. I am wondering a step or slide where can to convey my interests for possible collaborations? What should be the context of that slide?

Any suggestions or help will be highly appreciated.

I am changing your question title from "What to keep in a collaborative presentation?" to "What to keep in a presentation intended towards invited collaboration?"

Note that they already have followed you for a while or probably had an informal chat with you in a conference or meeting. So, they know what kinds of work you are doing. Just keep the following:

Broad topics of research works that your lab is doing
Possible sub-topics under each heading
Recent outcomes under each sub-topics.
Your Lab (research students, post-docs, peers ...)
Your Lab (environment available, required if that university is interested in sending their student for short-term research)

Total 15 slides is good enough. Depends on time they have given you. This would suffice, I guess.


How to subscribe to journals so that I regularly receive only the Titles and Abstracts without necessarily the full content of the papers? How can one subscribe to a non-open access journal such as "Nature Reviews Drug Discovery".
The subscription will be to have the abstract of the latest releases.

For a full-fledged subscription with access to all articles, look for the 'Subscription' section of the website: https://www.nature.com/nrd/subscribe. Usually, researchers are affiliated at a research institution so that they can get access to the journals through their institutional subscriptions (usually through university libraries).
However, it seems that you would be content with the headlines and abstracts of the latest articles of that journal. I see at least five possibilities for you to stay up-to-date with that journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery:

Regularly visit the journal's website.
Register for their e-mail
alerts (through this link).
Make use of their RSS feed
(here - use a RSS reader for this purpose, such as Feedly, which you can also use on your mobile phone).
Follow the journal on Twitter (here is their account).
Program your own
app to stay up-to-date with that journal by using the
(machine-readable) CrossRef API (access it with the ISSN of that journal - the
link would be this one).


Are there general guidelines for including code in a research paper? I'm a beginning researcher trying to write a research paper , so please bear with some of the really basic questions I might have. I've already looked around for some help online, but the websites I found were vague.

My program is written in perl. Should I include my code in the paper? If so, is there a maximum number of lines? Will people expect me to include all of it in the paper (either in the appendix or in the body) or can I just write out in text the general idea of what it does?

In general, I would never include code in the "main" paper outside of computer science or applied mathematics. There are very few cases where listing code explicitly would actually improve the quality and readability of the paper. If it is necessary to include the code, I would do so as part of the "Supporting Information" which many journals allow you to include alongside the main publication. I would then describe the features of the code as words in the main text.

Even in CS and math papers, I would still only put pseudocode in the main article, and would save any listings of actual code for the Supporting Information.


Asking the Managing Editor for Manuscript Update I submitted the 3rd and final revision of my manuscript last 3 weeks ago, however, it is not yet sent for review. I know that sometimes manuscripts take time to be reviewed but this one is quite strange for me. For the past 2 revisions, the paper was immediately sent for review. The last submission (R2) was only reviewed by the Associate Editor and has a very minor comment. I am hesitant to ask the Managing Editor about the progress of my manuscript. How long should I wait before I could email and ask the Managing Editor? Any advice.

3 weeks is sufficiently long to ask for an update, especially if precedent indicates the manuscript is sent for review "immediately".

I can't tell from your description who to approach, but presumably either the managing editor or the associate editor would be OK.


What to do about fee from publisher for withdrawing unpublished accepted manuscript? I had sent my manuscript mistakenly to two different journals and both journals are ready to publish (not yet published) my work which is not possible. So, after knowing their impact factor I requested one of the journals to withdraw my paper. They had just sent me the review of my paper and for withdrawal they are demanding $500 as a penalty. It is difficult for me to decide what to do.

There is wrong on every side of this situation.

First, a journal demanding money for withdrawing a paper is suspicious in the extreme. I have never in my life heard of such a practice from a legitimate journal, which means that you were probably duped into submitting to a predatory (junk) publisher.  If this is the case, you should definitely withdraw the paper and refuse to pay the money, but they may not let you: a dishonest publisher may simply publish your paper without your consent and send you a bill.  If this happens, you can try to fight it, but you may end up needing to withdraw from the other journal instead and simply write off the paper and/or the $500 as a learning experience.

And what will you have learned?

Never dual submit a paper: it is scientifically dishonest, wastes everybody's time, and seriously annoys any legitimate journal.
Never submit a paper to a journal that you haven't thoroughly investigated to determine that it is not a shady fly-by-night predatory publisher.


What is the status of foreign cloud apps in German universities? From what I heard, in German universities there is a push against foreign cloud applications such as Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Github, and even Doodle. The DFN offers some alternatives, encouraging (or forcing?) university staff to switch to them.
Could someone inside the German system describe the state of things in more detail? Are there web applications that one should steer clear from when working in a German university? Are those just recommendations? What platforms are affected? What are the alternatives suggested? Are they all self-hosted open source applications?
I tried googling, but I found little information about it around.

It not surprising that there is little good information on this issue available.
As has already been written, this is all about the European data protection directive GDPR ("DSGVO" in German). It contains a number of measures that should enable users to protect their personal data.
The law defines some guidelines that include the right of users to only have their necessary data processed. As a relatively trivial example, it would be problematic to require students to submit their date of birth with their exercise sheet solutions. The law also defines minimum requirements for offloading data processing tasks to subcontractors and the right of all users whose data is being processed to demand to know what data of them is stored. Also, data needs to be protected according to the state of the art. In case of violations, fines can be issued by federal(?) authorities.
Now while these rules seem useful, they are highly problematic when requiring students to use certain services: There is normally no contract between the university and doodle.com about data protection in place, so asking the students to use doodle.com is probably problematic....but I'm not aware of any court ruling on this. Then, the Safe Harbor agreement between the EU and the US is not currently seen as sufficient to guarantee that the European rules are met. Oh, and is data protected according to the state of the art? That's pretty hard to tell.
All in all, the situation is complex enough such that universities try to insource as much as possible, at least to DFN level (German research network - essentially the network service provider of the universities). However, when other options proved to be infeasible, some universities decided to use Zoom and the like anyway, which bears a certain risk. The Microsoft Cloud may be unproblematic, depending on what level of data protection Microsoft guarantees.
In a less-than-100% legally clear situation when there is a lot at stake (Corona led to a need for teleconferencing/lectures), some may decide to take some risks when the alternatives do not seem to work. And this leads to a very fragmented landscape.


Is it a common practice for reviewers to recommend their own papers in the review? I am reviewing a paper on a topic on which I have published some work previously as an author. While going through this current paper as a reviewer, I felt I could recommend my paper on the similar topic, which addresses a particular point better than in the paper I am reviewing. My question in this regard is whether in such conditions it's a common practice for a reviewer to recommend their own paper?

This is a delicate issue.

On the one hand, a reviewer is most familiar with their own work, and will certainly know if their work is relevant to the paper that they are reviewing.
On the other hand, it can feel like a crass "citation for publication" trade.

The way that I typically approach it is to only recommend citation of my own work if I am also finding it appropriate to recommend citation of other related work at the same time.

Put another way: if the hole in their literature review is "me," then I find it likely that I'm wishing they cited me because of personal bias and my own ego.  If the hole in their literature review is "me and a whole bunch of other things like me," then I find it likely that it's a legitimate gap and it's OK to recommend my work as part of the set of things to fill said gap.


Cite Repository in manuscript: GitHub link "https://github.com/User/Code" VS zenodo link I come with a simple question.

I need to cite my GitHub repository on my manuscript, and so far I have been inserting both my GitHub link such as https://github.com/User/Code, and the doi with Zenodo.

Now someone brought up the question on why I should use them both, and to be honest I didn't have the answer, so I ask you. Why I should use one versus the other. I don't think I really need them both, or yes?

Thanks a lot for whoever will be able to shed some light on this with some background on the choice.

Best,

Pier

GitHub can change in the future. You could push new stuff that changes the results you got and published. At the very least you should package a release and link that instead. I really hate methods sections that are just "this is my github repo no I've never heard of comments why do you ask".

Zenodo doesn't change. That's the point. It's locked in.


When can asking a question during lecture be offensive? During my masters, I used to ask a lot of questions in class and during the lecture. Whenever I had a doubt I used to ask questions. It was my habit which my undergraduate teachers inculcated in me and inspired us to do so. However, here, in my masters, I got the impression that this is probably a bad habit as professors tend to think that I am asking my questions to test them. Ultimately, it was proven to reflect badly on me.

I am about to go to another institution going for my PHD. Since then, I have changed my habit and I haven't asked a single question in the last several lectures. Instead, I wrote my questions down in my notebook and later read books or Googled them to search for answers.

Is this really the right way?

How can I ask a question such that the professors shall not think that I am somehow mocking them?

Asking questions is a good thing, but you need to make sure that the questions you ask are appropriate. The best thing to do is judge for yourself whether or not a majority of the audience might be interested in your question.

An example might be that the lecturer has made a mistake, or has forgotten to define something in a mathematical derivation. In such cases, perhaps you could whisper to the person next to you for a quick second opinion.

If a concept has been neglected or poorly explained, then you should ask for expansion or clarification if you think that most of the class will be in the same boat.

These aren't always easy judgements to make. If you're uneasy, save the question for after class. You can also simply ask the lecturer if he or she minds you asking questions, or your classmates if they thought your question was a good one. Good questions enhance the learning experience for everyone.

The bottom line is that most good professors like to have some interaction with the class. Many students audience don't like to say anything, so it's often up to just a few students to ask any relevant questions. But more than one question every ten minutes or so can start to get tiresome for the lecturer, so unless it's a tutorial class you shouldn't turn it into a Q&A session.


Examples of harmless mistakes (on purpose) in submitted papers Some paper reviewers feel the pressure to criticize something in order to appear competent. Sometimes they feel this pressure due to huge blank form fields for criticism in the reviewing system. As a consequence, they sometimes criticize wrongfully. Fully recovering from wrongful criticism during review is sometimes possible, but not always. This hurts the research community.

A while ago a saw advice in a video to have harmless and rather obvious mistakes (typos, inconsistent notation) on purpose in the manuscript when submitting for peer review, in order to avoid the aforementioned problems. I don't recall the details, nor who gave that talk.

Are you aware of such videos/articles, or can give examples of specific "diversionary tactics"?

Note that I'm only asking about specific example tactics. If you want to discuss (dis)advantages of choosing to use them at all, please open another question, and I'll be happy to link to it.

Edit: This question isn't about the pros and cons (see above). Many answers so far are as if I asked about the pros and cons (which I didn't).

Also, I'm not saying "I plan to do this, try to stop me". I just want to find the information that exists about it.

Note that I mean harmless mistakes. Also, they are fixed before publishing even if not asked to.

A related technique from programming is called "a duck".

The psychological phenomenon is called "Parkinson's law of triviality".

You're not the first one to come up with this idea.

In case it's not obvious, I recommend against doing this:

Having stupid mistakes in your submission makes you look stupid.
It wastes the reviewer's time.
It wastes the editor's time.
If all the mistakes get through the review process, it wastes the reader's time deciphering what you means, and also makes you look stupid again.

Just don't.


A paper split in two parts - how to cite it in CV? I recently cowrote a paper which came out somewhat long: 40+ pages. We uploaded it to arXiv in this form, but afterwards decided that it would be preferable to publish it as a series of two papers. (It was a natural decision given the length and the fact that it naturally splits into two weakly interacting parts. On the other hand, there is arguably some added value in having a combined version of the paper available somewhere.) At this moment, one of these parts has been submitted to a journal, the other one is still work in progress (the introductory sections need to be written almost from scratch).

What is the best way to record this on a CV/publication list at this point? Of course, it goes without saying that arXiv preprints are not nearly as important as published papers, but it seems it would be honest to own up to all of my writings in some form.

Options I see:
a) Just reference the preprint on arXiv, and worry about the rest when the other papers are accepted,
b) Mention both the preprint and the submitted paper with an awkward note explaining what is going on (perhaps this should also involve uploading the half-paper to arXiv).

(If relevant, my field is pure mathematics, I'm a PhD student about to graduate. I do need an up-to-date CV.)

Option (a) does seem to be a better choice at this point in time. Later, when one of the parts are published, it would be better to list only the published article instead of the preprint. If you are concerned about the visibility of the other part of the work, you may upload a preprent of just the other part to make sure there are no overlaps in your publications list.

Once both papers are published it would make sense to only include those articles without the preprint entirely.


Is it a wise decision to email graduate professors my provisional certificate of bachelor's degree? I am a prospective MS student. I am considering emailing graduate professors expressing my interest to work as research assistants under the professor's supervision.  Now I have a provisional certificate (no statement of expected date of result publishing) of my bachelor's degree, and I will get the main certificate of my bachelor's degree in the month of May or June. But the application deadline for graduate program is March and April. Is it a wise decision to email graduate professors my provisional certificate of bachelor's degree?

I wouldn't include it in the initial email. The initial email should just be a few sentences where you show that you know what kind of work they do, and try to convince them that you have something interesting to add to the group. I would attach a short CV with your predicted graduation date, but not the provisional certificate.


Should citations on PowerPoint slides be shortened? Are there guidelines or best practices for adding references to a research PowerPoint presentation?

For example, should I put the full citation at the bottom of the slide?

  Liu, J., Rinzler, A. G., Dai, H., Hafner, J. H., Bradley, R. K., Boul, P. J., Smalley, R. E. (1998). Fullerene Pipes. Science, 280(5367), 1253–1256.

If you have even a couple references, this slide starts to look really busy.

I've seen quite a few presentations with truncated references (just first author, journal, year), like so:

  Liu, J., et al. Science (1998)

Is this shortened reference alright? It looks cleaner on the slide, but at the expense of the ease of the viewer locating a reference. Any other solutions? If it makes a difference, this would be for the engineering/science fields.

I would strongly recommend against putting the full citation at the bottom of the slide.  The problem is, when you are actually presenting, it will both a) make the slide look very busy as you note, and b) distract people away from the rest of the slide.  Another problem is that few people will actually be able to copy down the citation (unless you linger on the slide for a very long time).

Truncated references deal with all of these problems, generally giving just enough information for a quickly scribbled note that will give the reader the ability to track down the cited paper with a little bit of work.

In addition, however, if you will be making the slides available for others to read at their leisure, there are two other good places to put references:

A "bibliography" slide at the end, before or after where many put the funding/acknowledgements slide.
In the "notes" field associated with the slide on which the truncated reference appears.

This is especially good when dealing with funding agencies, who like to pull slides out of your deck for presentation to their own higher-ups.