How to avoid a hostile takeover of first authorship during medical leave? A colleague has approached me with a tough situation. I'm unsure how to advise her.

She is a postdoc, and will soon take a month-long planned medical leave. Her adviser, a senior research scientist, has a history of reshuffling authorships of papers of his subordinates during leave, sometimes to make himself first author. She had previously hoped to have the paper in question in submission, but “serendipitously” some last minute data is unavailable. Adding to her suspicion, the adviser has asked her to deliver all drafts and all data analysis code before leaving.

Her question, which stumped me: how can she safeguard her present first-author position? I will meet with her at the end of the week (17th) and share this thread with her.

Some details:

This advisor has reshuffled authorship on several previous occasions of which I am aware. He has suffered no disciplinary action from the department in these situations, and has a reputation for working to damage the careers of those that work against him. The unit has a history of turning a blind eye in these situations.
There's very little accountability to be had within this unit. Pieces of proof like emails and widely witnessed public statements are unlikely to be actual safeguards.
The advisor really does control all the inputs and outputs. This is true even after her return: he may switch authorship at that point over any real or perceived failure.
My feeling is the successful path here will involve some clever way to move the power in the situation from his side to her side.
Certainly, she is looking for a exit from the lab. A solution will substantially increase the chances she can take this first authorship with her.
My sense from our discussion is that early drafts and data analysis already shared, but the most recent ones are not yet. That said, the entire situation seems to suggest a lack of trust on all sides.
The distribution of work put into the paper is roughly: 95 % by my colleague, 4 % by another co-author, and 1 % by the supervisor.

EDIT: This has concluded. She used several of the strategies here, documenting extensively. Her adviser remover her from the paper and sent it for publication within 48 hours of her leaving. Upon her recovery, which took somewhat longer than expected, she appealed to the editor and the department. Her adviser ended her postdoc position, citing insufficient funding, and responded to the editor (how I'm unsure). She appealed to the university, which did not intervene. She has had no additional communication from the journal or her old lab. She has left, in some disgust, for an industry job.

I would send an email along the following lines to the supervisor and copied to the person doing the additional piece of work. While not complete protection, this approach provides evidence and also makes it clear that the supervisor should respond if he doesn't intend to wait.

The draft article attached to the email should have a version number and date.

  Dear ...

  As requested, I have attached the latest draft of our paper, TITLE.
  It is saved at LOCATION, together with the data and analysis code.
  Unfortunately, I was unable to submit the draft before taking leave as
  planned because the data concerning XYZ was not available.

  I understand that OTHER-RESEARCHER is intending to complete his/her part of the
  analysis while I am on leave. I will verify that analysis and
  integrate it with the existing paper as my first task on my return in
  a month. I understand that OTHER-RESEARCHER is willing to draft that section of
  the paper, but as lead author, I want to ensure that it is consistent
  with the existing message and style of the paper. I would therefore
  prefer that the analysis is prepared as a separate document and I will
  integrate it myself.

  Assuming that no additional questions are raised by this final
  analysis, I expect to be able to circulate the complete draft within a
  week of my return for submission shortly thereafter. As the analysis
  has already taken NN months, I don't expect this delay to create any
  difficulties, but please let me know if you are concerned about
  waiting until my return for the paper to be completed.

Depending on the reason for the medical leave, it may also be appropriate to add a final paragraph:

  If there are any questions about this work, I am contactable during my
  leave at EMAIL


How to write a brief research statement for a postdoc application? Please give an idea about the ideal length of a brief research statement and its format. Should I write about the research that I have done in my Ph.D. or should i propose a new research idea for post-doc research?

The best thing to do is to try finding examples of research statements written by people in similar positions. Many people put their research statement on their website. From these you can see the style and length that is typical in your field.

Your research statement should discuss both the work you have done and the work you want to do in the future. It should also discuss the bigger picture that links these together.

Generally, less is more. People instinctively write long research statements describing all their work in detail. This instinct must be fought, as no one will read a 10-page research statement. For a postdoc, I think 2-3 pages (not including bibliography) is typical, at least in my area of theoretical computer science. Faculty-level research statements will be a bit longer.

Keep your audience in mind. (I.e. does the person reading this know your area?) Proof read and polish meticulously. And definitely ask other people to look at your draft and give feedback.

Good luck!


Unpublished research similar to mine I am a PhD student and I wrote a paper in the social sciences. The contribution of my paper is that it's the first non-North American analysis on the subject.

There is a working paper I found online from a doctoral student in another university, whose research is semi-similar to mine, and who looks outside of North America.

I am submitting my paper to an academic Journal. I have not cited the other students paper. It's been two years since they uploaded the working paper, and there is no sign of it published anywhere, and no update on the students (now a post doc) own research website. I tried to contact the author to ask if they intend to publish, I got no response.

I did not reference their paper in my research, because I don't think it's right that I should forfeit my contribution for an incomplete paper that doesn't seem to be heading to a journal and undergo peer review.

I am seeking opinions/guidance as to whether I am right. My supervisor has provided no guidance, and I can't find information on the internet.

You need to cite the paper only if you use it or depend on it in your research in some way. However, if you have a section on "Similar Research" then you should probably mention it there. You don't forfeit anything if your work was independent. For purposes of your degree, your supervisor will decide if you have made a proper contribution. For purposes of publishing, the editors and reviewers will decide on priority. Just because you don't cite it doesn't mean that it isn't known.

Independent research on a topic goes on constantly in the real world.

The worst case for you is that if you don't cite it and someone thinks you have plagiarized. But the real world situation is as it is. You can't change that.


Is it OK to add another author during page proofs? I am a masters student and recently I got a paper of mine published in a journal.
The paper contains my name and another authors name that helped me with some minor things. I didn't know that this paper was going to be published but after it did I told my professor about it and he said that the paper  could be part of my thesis. The problem is that for that to happen the paper has to only include my name and my professors name. After telling the second author about this he said that he doesn't mind if his name is replaced with my professor's. Can I ask the journal to do this during page proofs or is it too late?

This would be up to you, your colleague, the professor and the editorial rules of the journal - if you decide to go down that path, read up on the rules or ask the editorial team.

However, @polfosol makes a very important point in his comment, that to do this would potentially be unethical, primarily due to your co-author contributed directly towards the paper, your professor did not (I assume based on your question).  A major consideration is that this publication also adds to your current co-author's research profile, not just yours.

A possible solution to this is to write another paper, building on and citing the research in this published paper.

Another possible solution is for your professor to contribute to reviewing the proofs and having him added as another co-author - once again, if you decide on this, then you must check to see if it is alright with the journal (but this may also be stretching ethics a bit).


How harmful is it for a PhD student to work with a supervisor whose ambition is greater or lesser than that of the student? How harmful is it for a PhD student to work with a supervisor whose ambition is greater or lesser than that of the student?

I can imagine that if the supervisor aims much higher than the PhD student the experience could be nightmarish for the student (and frustrating for the supervisor). Similarly if the supervisor aims too low (something like: "Just generalize this theory in way X, that should be enough for a PhD") the work could feel meaningless and the time spent on it wasted, when more challenging and maybe even more important questions could deserve the attention and resources.

Background: I am interested in a career in research. I am worried that if I aim too low in my PhD project it will hurt my career afterwards. PhD takes years and so one would ideally make most of the years spent doing it. Some supervisors are more ambitious and knowledgeable than others. I would imagine that a PhD with a more ambitious researcher (with talent and education to match) would improve one's chances of a career in academia than with a less ambitious one. I have read that the best thesis is a finished one, but surely one should think about how the PhD helps to further a post-PhD research career.

Could the difference be great enough to justify changing programs? Even if the funding is good?

It does not make much sense to me to compare the supervisor's ambition for herself to the student's ambition for himself: the supervisor is probably older (more often than not, significantly older) and certainly more experienced and accomplished than the student.  If a student feels competitive with his thesis advisor in any direct way, something has probably gone wrong.  Students should take on advisors that they view as distinctly wiser and more knowledgeable in the main topic they're trying to learn!  (The notion of a student who is comparably knowledgeable and skilled as his advisor is something which appears in the premise of a question on this site at least once a month.  Strangely, I have never seen it in real life.)  "Ambition" isn't exactly the right metric, because it aims at the future, and some very successful, eminent researchers are not pushing hard for the future: they've done plenty already.  Such "big old dogs" can make great thesis advisors.

On the other hand, some advisors are much more ambitious than others in their expectation for their students.  This is an important thing to take into account when choosing an advisor, and too great a mismatch in either direction is going to be a problem.  For instance, it is likely that at some point in the relationship the advisor will say "I want you to do X, and when you do it you'll have a PhD."  If the student thinks that there is no way in hell that he is going to get anywhere near X it is worth a conversation ASAP, and if X really needs to be attained to get a PhD (probably not, by the way, but just for argument's sake) then the student should look elsewhere.  On the other hand, if the student can (or does) do X in a month or two and the advisor says "Great -- now you have a PhD!" then the student may want to start over with someone who is more ambitious on his behalf.


Remunerated consulting while being a PhD student The consulting activity, on the engineering field, would be tightly related to the research, and in fact would help to get the real-world data and reality touch to make it prosper.

Is it possible, in a big University (UC system, Harvard, MIT, Stanford or any other major college) to combine both activities?  Are there any general regulations to the matter or are they dependent of each institution policies?

In case it was possible, is there a salary cap for the total amount a PhD student can be earning?

One way or the other, you will have to disclose the activity to your university. I can't think of any obvious reason why your university would not allow you to do consulting work on the side. But in any case, talking to your adviser about it would be the correct first step -- she may be able to tell you what her expectations are if you are paid as a graduate assistant at the same time, but also what your university requires of you in terms of paperwork.


Resolving authorship when PhD student does most of the work on paper, but originally agreed to support another PhD student (first author)? I am a senior PhD student (in electrical engineering) who has been working on a project for approximately two years with another student (call him John, same year as me) and our advisor.

It was decided at the beginning of the project that John would be the leader of the research and I would help. Over the past two years, John's research interests have drifted away from the topic of the project, and he has increasingly lost interest in the project. This has pushed more responsibility on myself (coincidentally, my interests have drifted towards the topic). We published a conference paper on the topic (which had John as the first author even though I wrote the majority of it).

I raised concerns with my advisor about six months ago that I was doing more of the work. He listened and spoke with John that he needs to put in more effort. Shortly after I mentioned my concerns to my advisor, we were invited to submit the work to a book chapter to which we agreed (with the same author order, since John was still labeled as the leader of the project).

Over the course of the past six months, John and I have been writing the chapter. John has not been putting much effort into the chapter (John's written English is very poor and he is not detailed oriented at all, resulting in many equations being incorrect), so I have taken it upon myself to undergo the (very time-consuming) task of fixing the paragraphs and math. The quality of the chapter would have been very poor if it was not for my efforts.

I mentioned to my advisor in private that I basically wrote the entire chapter to which he responded that John's work was primarily in the theory. I know that John has not contributed more to the theory than I have. Furthermore, my advisor mentioned that John needs this work as a chapter of his thesis so he must be first author.

We are now a couple of days away from submission and I am feeling like I was exploited. I am sacrificing my own projects in order to finish this. Since my name is on the chapter, I have put in a lot of effort to make sure it is good quality. It is upsetting that John will end up getting more credit than myself. Furthermore, I am questioning the ethics of the fact that I wrote a chapter of someone else's thesis.

How should I proceed with this? My advisor has already seemed to make up his mind. Should I request/demand that a footnote be added that John and I contributed equally?

I personally find the "* authors contributed equally" footnotes to be supremely awkward, though perhaps you're in a discipline where they are common, in which case go for it....  And in this case you're arguing it isn't even true.  I'd say you're getting a raw deal, but the time to push back was earlier, when you could have argued for the appropriate recognition and then declined the chapter inclusion if you didn't get either the proper recognition or more work from your colleague.

My advice: treat this as a learning experience, be gracious, and move on.


My PhD thesis does not include a Literature Review chapter I am due to submit my PhD in a week and I am starting to panic over not having a dedicated chapter with a literature review. My topic covers different fields of study so I have added some literature review within the content of every chapter when that field is explored. Now I am worried because my thesis does not follow the standard structure.
Do you think it will help to make this clear in the Introduction?

This is a question for your advisor. What will s/he accept in your dissertation? If it is a acceptable to the advisor (and any committee) then there is no issue at all.

It seems pretty clear from what you write that you have, in fact, reviewed the literature, rather than just ignoring it. How you present your findings is, in a sense, just a matter of writing style. If it works, it works.

But your advisor may have veto power here, so make sure they are happy.


What to do when I’m not affiliated with an academic institution and submitting a manuscript? I am seeking to re-establish my research career after a 7-year career break. The first step involves submitting a paper to a peer reviewed journal which reports a study that was conducted 7 years ago. In the cover letter to editors that I have prepared, I point out that the topic remains timely, and I provide relevant references to illustrate this (which have also been used to update the paper).
Because I am not currently affiliated with an academic institution, I don’t have a university address to provide in the contact information section during the manuscript submission process. Any thoughts on whether this will affect my acceptance chances? Should I provide my current home address instead?

Just list your affiliation as "independent researcher" and use a valid email address that you expect to maintain. You should be fine. Scholarship isn't for employed academics only. It is the quality of the work that matters most.
The only block I could see is if your research requires Ethics Board (such as IRB in the US) prior approval.
For the submission process any physical address will probably do if it is required. But for final versions to be published I would seek advice from the editor. Perhaps a post box would be preferred to a residence.


Giving a talk on a paper whose authorship is not finalized I will shortly be giving a seminar presentation on a research project that I worked on with collaborators X, Y and Z.  We have not yet submitted our paper for publication, and one question we have yet to resolve is the authorship - it is not yet decided whether Z will be a coauthor on the paper.

(The reason is perhaps the reverse of what you might guess: Z doesn't think his contributions were sufficient to deserve authorship, but others of us think that they were.  We are still debating this with Z, and it will probably not be resolved before my talk.)

In my talk, I would of course like to give credit to my collaborators.  The usual way would be to begin the talk by stating that "this is joint work with [list names of coauthors]".  But I wonder whether to include Z in this list.

If I mention that this is joint work with X, Y and Z, then the members of my audience would normally expect to see Z as a coauthor on the paper when it is published. If we end up not including him as an author, they may think that something strange is going on - like maybe we improperly denied him authorship, or he withdrew from the project over doubts about its quality.

But if I don't mention Z, I will feel like I am denying him credit for his contributions.  And I think it would be inappropriate to explain to my audience that Z's authorship status is undecided - the debate is a private matter among us collaborators.

Is there a good way out of this dilemma (or maybe trilemma)?

Z's name, I am sure, will be on the paper as an acknowledgement at least, even if not as an author. With that in mind, you could probably quite comfortably put Z's name up as a contributor without worrying about misleading the audience.

In some fields, this is made easier by a tradition of having an acknowledgements slide rather than putting up multiple names as authors on the first slide. In this model, only the speaker goes on the title slide, and everybody else worth mentioning goes in the acknowledgements slide (typically the last slide, which stays up during questions), with no particular distinction being made between levels of contribution. If this is accepted in your field it can give you a neat manner of sidestepping the question.


My professor is using questions from other colleges for an assignment. Is this plagiarism? So I have noticed that there are exact solutions to the exact question I found on an assignment sheet for a unit/class that I am currently doing (the source is from another college's publication on their own assignment). My question is that: is my professor allowed to use this particular question (which is identical in every way, even the wording) in an assignment given to us? Does this not count as being academically dishonest on the professor's part? I know that if I use these solutions it is plagiarism, but isn't using this question in an assignment given to us without any citations or references to the original source, counted as plagiarism on the professor's part?

No. Unlike for students (who have to demonstrate their understanding) and for research (which has to demonstrate an improvement to the state of the art in the field) there is no expectation of originality in homework questions, and there is no ethical problem with having multiple classes work through the same problem set. There are even arguments to be made that it is a good thing for students to be judged on a uniform basis.

It would only be a problem if your prof represented these questions as his own work e.g. when highlighting his teaching contributions in his evaluation or in candidatures for a new position. As a student, you wouldn't be in a position to know about this.

There might also be a copyright issue if your professor did not ask for permission to use these questions. But there is no reason to assume that he didn't.


Does this ProQuest "docview" URL include a DOI? I am editing someone else's thesis. The references include ProQuest citations that look like this (where # = actual digits for an account):

  Anderson, L. (2012, Aug 17). Learning the game from the inside out. Sports Illustrated, 1.
  Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1040699841?accountid=#####

Is the number string that appears after .../docview/ the same as the DOI (digital object identifier) or something else?

It's not a DOI. It's probably a ProQuest-specific identifier.

First, it's not in the correct form: DOIs look like "10.1000/xyz123".

And as a rule, to check if something is a DOI, you can enter it into the resolver on http://doi.org

Here you get a "not found" error i.e. it's not a DOI:


Sending a second reminder to a professor about LORs, after the first reminder As graduate school application deadlines roll around this season, I believe this site would get a lot of questions concerning letters of recommendation, including sending reminder e-mails to professors about this.

My question is now what is the best approach to sending a second reminder to a professor concerning writing an LOR? A couple months ago, after having discussed my graduate school plans with the professor, they agreed to write his letter and have me send them the e-mail link to the LOR. I sent the first reminder last week, but they did not respond. And this professor is normally responsive in e-mails about other things, such as coursework and advising. I suspect the professor is beyond busy, and I hope that is the case; I just hope they haven't forgotten about the LOR or changed their mind about it.

I would like to add further that my two other recommenders have already submitted their LORs. I am still waiting on this professor now. Should I mention this in my second reminder e-mail to them, if I should send that second reminder at all? What should I be saying in the e-mail, to politely remind them for the second time?

Any input helps.

A week since your first reminder is somewhat on the short side - personally I would wait a couple more days (maybe two weeks since the last email) to send another email.

A week before the deadline is a good point of time to send a reminder. There is no need to state that this is a second (or nth) reminder. A short email, roughly of the form 'thanks again for agreeing to write a recommendation letter for me. I just wanted to quickly remind you that the deadlines are one week away. Please let me know if you need any more information from me. Thanks again for all your help, etc.' is sufficient.


How to cite that something is *not* on Wikipedia I am presently writing an article about a certain class of discrete probability distributions, and I want to mention that the distribution is relatively obscure compared to other common distributions.  As an indicator of its relative obscurity, I would like to mention the fact that this class of distributions does not have its own Wikipedia page, whereas other common distributions (e.g., the binomial, Poisson, hypergeometric, etc.) do have their own pages.

My question: What is the proper way to cite this evidence?  Presumably I will be citing the fact that I have performed a search of Wikipedia at a certain time, and that I found pages for various common discrete distributions, but no page for the one that is the subject of my paper.

What I am NOT asking: I am well aware of the reasons that academic papers do not usually cite Wikipedia as a source.  In this instance I only intend to cite it as an indicator of the fact that a topic is sufficiently obscure that no-one has created a page for it.  As such, I am not seeking answers on the general objections to citations to Wikipedia (which I am already familiar with).

I don't think one needs a citation for the fact that no citation exists. If you're identifying a gap in the regular literature, you can say something like 'to the authors' knowledge, no study of this kind has been published' or words to that effect and you don't need a citation to confirm that you are identifying a gap in the literature.

I find it highly unlikely that you would be criticised for wording along the lines of 'at the time of writing (possibly give date), no article exists on this topic at Wikipedia' and then maybe give a general citation for Wikipedia as a whole. As Wikipedia time stamps every edit to every article, this is something that could very easily be verified at any time in the future. I'm not sure having a Wikipedia page or not is the best measure of obscurity, but that's a different question entirely.


How to ask "Do you have any projects for me?" to a professor (who is not your own advisor) Suppose that you already have an advisor and an ongoing project. Suppose that you are willing to get a "side gig" and that there is a professor you know at your school who is working in an area that interests you (which is not your main area of interest though).

How do you preface and then ask in a professional way the following question:

  "Do you have any projects on which I could work under your supervision/with your collaboration?"

Basically, it is about asking for a small "side" thesis project to a professor who is not your advisor.

As JeffE would say: "Ask it directly, just as if the professor were human."

  "Do you have any projects on which I could work under your supervision/with your collaboration?"

Sounds just fine.


Is it worth getting a masters in a secondary field as part of an interdisciplinary PhD? I'm in the process of making a decision with regards to graduate school and my number one choice is an interdisciplinary PhD program in Computational Science and Engineering. On the computational side of things I'll be focusing largely on data science, but I'll be looking to apply those skills to land use modeling. So effectively I'll be doing a lot of work in environmental policy.

My goal is to go into academia after my degree and as such I'm wondering if it would make sense to pick up a second masters in Environmental Policy as part of my coursework? Doing so would likely add a bit more time to the PhD, but would this make me more attractive as a candidate for a tenure track job afterwards given I already hold a Masters in Software Engineering?

When you are evaluated as a job candidate in academia, the first thing people will see is your PhD.  That will tell them that you know how to dig into a topic, get the background knowledge that you need in order to conduct the research you are interested in.

The next thing they will look at is your publication record.  Because of the peer review process, they will feel confident that if you publish in reputable journals on a particular topic, you know what you're talking about.

So if you're sure you're headed for academia, I think you will be fine just cherry-picking the particular courses you think will be most helpful for you in Environmental Policy.  (Although if you find that you're, say, only one or two courses away from satisfying the requirements for the masters, then I suppose you might as well finish it off.)

Think of how many PhDs veer off in a different direction during the course of their career!  They don't bother getting a new PhD in the process, because they already have one.  You can think of the PhD studies as the apprenticeship to do research, and the PhD as a driver's license which was issued in one state, but which you can use in other states.


How to get nominated for awards? I came to the US with my PhD classmate having similar backgrounds and took postdocs at two different universities. My research output is much better than him, but he has won three awards from reputable societies/organizations. Now he got a tenure-track position, but I was not even invited for an interview.

The point is that his PI nominates him for every possible award, but my PI never does. I specifically asked several times, but he doesn't care.

What should I do? Should I move to another group whose PI supports me in getting such credits?

"My research output is much better than him". "Better" is not well defined in academia. No one has grades: you can't compare an A to an A-. Instead, everything is "graded" more casually.

But this casual grade has nothing to do with how hard or difficult the work is. If you mean "better" as "I work harder, have more publications, and my publications use more difficult techniques etc." then I think you have the wrong definition of "better". In academia, "better" means your research is clear and interesting. Doing better in academia seems to usually be less about doing harder and more technical work, and more about picking the right problems to pursue and communicating the results well. This has nothing to do with how "good of a technical mathematician/scientist" you are, rather it has to do with how good you are at understanding what is interesting to a research community and clearly communicating results which reflects the interests of said community.

Your classmate is likely doing "better" because his PI is very interested in the results of his research. Others must be interested as well: that's why he got awards. You should look at his work and ask: who finds this interesting and why? See what you can learn about what his success says about the research community you are engaged in.

A good practice to do from time to time is to take a few papers from a high-impact journal and just try to understand why these are considered as highly impactful. What I have found is usually two things:

1) They have a really clear introduction which motivates this work as part of some larger research question which many people are interested in.

2) They are simple.

The first is pretty simple: writing clearly is important. "Selling your work" is important because if people don't know at a glance that your work is interesting, they will never dig into the paper to find out. The second point is kind of counter-intuitive. Academia tends to be very elitist about "being smart", but a lot of the most impactful work is actually relatively simple in its methods and arguments. One reason this occurs is because a simple result is easy to generalize to other fields: biologists can follow clear and simple mathematical results, but a more advanced mathematical treatment is a subject for mathematicians, meaning breakthrough mathematical models without all of the extra bells and whistles are the results which are most widely known and applied. But also, people more easily understand it and see all of the nuances they can add to it, generating a lot research interest surrounding the idea (i.e. you left something for someone else to look into!).

Of course, this depends on the audience. In mathematical journals sometimes very dirty mathematical derivations contain some of the most cherished results by other mathematicians. Knowing your target audience for each paper/presentation is the best way to make sure your research is read and appreciated.


What to select for "type of source" for a paper in Microsoft Word? I am currently doing my very first paper at university and am a bit lost with Word’s citation system.
What does a scientific paper (more specifically this one) classify as when it comes to “type of source” in Word?

This probably is a very simple question, but I am really having trouble finding an answer.
Here’s an explanation of my thought process:

It is certainly not a book nor a book section.
I don’t feel like it would count as an article in a journal or peridocal as from my understanding research papers are published as a stand-alone?
Conference Proceeding: I have no idea what that is, but I think it isn’t it.
Maybe a report? As it reports on findings that were made ... but I feel this is also not quite right ...
It is not a website.
I might use document from website, however this paper is available on several websites (at least through my Google Scholar search) that seem to have picked it up, however it was not originally published through them from what I can tell.
While I have it as a PDF, I don't think that is meant by **electronic source.*
Art: no
Sound Recording: no
Performance: no
Film: no
Interview: no
Patent: no
I have no idea what is meant by case. As in a lawsuit?
Misc is what I will pick for now, but I guess citing research papers in a scientific work isn’t something happening so seldomly that one would have to resort to misc.

The paper you link is not a journal article. It's published as part of a conference proceedings.

You can find the complete proceedings in which that paper appears here (link is to the SPIE page for the 1994 conference Telemanipulators and Telepresence Technologies).

To address some other points in your question, I cannot think of a legitimate research paper that was not published in a journal or conference. Publishing in this sense means putting the paper through peer review, an essential part of contributing to the literature if you want your work to be taken seriously.

Furthermore, conference proceedings are exactly what it says on the tin: proceedings (i.e. talks) from a conference that have been written up and published. Publishing in this way is more common in some fields than others, for example, in computer science, just like the paper you linked.


Why are recommendation letters crucial for scholarships or graduate admissions? I saw a question asking how to write recommendation letters and I wonder why this is so important? Why are recommendation letters crucial for scholarship applications for studying in Masters or research ? They should be more interested in the student willing to work hard and be loyal to the studies, not cheat, or plagarise or use unfair means to win. What will a recommendation do instead?

Your question seems to present the use of letters of recommendation as being orthogonal to the goals of selecting hard-working and dedicated students. This is simply a false assumption.

The purpose of letters of recommendation is to ensure the person making the selections that they are choosing qualified candidates who will satisfy the needs of the program. Anybody can claim to be hard-working, but how do you know this is actually the case? If you have several people, well-versed in the needs of research or advanced study in a given topic, telling you that candidate X has all the prerequisites and character traits needed to ensure success, you're a lot more likely to believe it than just to take someone's word about himself or herself.


How do I reassure myself that I am a worthy candidate for a tenure-track position, when department would likely have interviewed me even if I wasn't? I am a woman currently on the market for tenure-track positions. I will not disclose my department since I think this is not relevant, and I am about to describe a particular department in detail.

I have a couple of interviews for the tenure-track positions, and while all of them are from schools that I would happily be at, one interview is from my dream school (research fit, compatibility with colleagues, location, and familiarity are all important factors in my job search).

While doing my research on this school, I made the unfortunate mistake of reading the hiring policy of the university. The policy says that if there are no applicants of minority status (such as being a woman) on their interview shortlist, the hiring committee must go back to the applicant pool and find the best applicant of minority status and add her to the interview list, or justify in writing to the Dean why they did not find any minority candidates suitable.

Clearly the second option is tedious, and I believe that most hiring committee would rather throw in a minority candidate rather than trying to justify the lack thereof. I am the only minority candidate. Furthermore, this department has never hired any women through the proper channels. The only women they have (the percentage is in the low single digits) were all hired through spousal hires. This makes me strongly suspect that maybe I am the candidate that they begrudgingly added to the interview list to avoid the paperwork.

This knowledge is impacting me severely; even though I am preparing for my interview, I keep thinking that all of this is hopeless, and I wonder if it's already agreed on among the hiring committee that I will never be hired. I feel that I am wasting my time. And although I have never acknowledged that being a woman was a disadvantage, or even that I was subject to sexism up to this point of my career, this time, I know that the other white males who are interviewing are not having these worries, and I am intensely jealous.

How can I talk myself through this, and believe from my heart that I can actually get this position? I read a similar question on this site just now, and it seems that unless I believe that I can get this position, often the defeatist attitude will show during the interview and become self-fulfilling. It really is my dream job and I want this job more than anything else.

There are two things worth keeping in mind. First, while it might be the case that the committee is "forced" to interview a female candidate, it might not. You have no actual evidence in either case, and though it's tempting to assume the worst, there's no reason to, and there's absolutely nothing to gain by thinking the search committee doesn't want you there. So: spend your mental energy working on your talk, your research plans, etc.

Second, even if it is the case that the committee wouldn't be interviewing you if left to itself, the interview is in many respects a "blank slate" -- an opportunity for candidates to impress potential colleagues beyond what's evident on paper, and (of course) for candidates to fall flat and perform terribly. I've been on enough search committees to assure you that several of your fellow interviewees will do terribly, and that conversely it is not uncommon for committee members to say "I wasn't really in favor of bringing X to campus, but now having interacted with him/her, I'm glad we did."

This is all, I suppose, a long-winded way of saying "worry less, and always do your best!"


What about writing an abstract for a conference without having a research? We know it is normal to submit an abstract without having the result published yet. But what about an abstract where there was never a research from the author himself on the proposed topic?
Regards

In my experience, this it is reasonably common in some engineering and computational science conferences which are organized as minisymposia, which have only presentations, and no peer-reviewed papers or proceedings, when the authors are most of the way to a result and expect to achieve it. The abstracts are often submitted describing the process to date with the results not mentioned or only mentioned including the results so far. I won't say that there has been no research done at all, but it's pretty common in my experience to see partial results submitted as though they were complete. Some of the results are presented having only been completed the night before the talk or the morning before an afternoon session. There are no lies in the abstract but only generic or vague phrases about the results in the abstract, and the attendees come expecting to hear about whatever results are achieved between submission/acceptance and the presentation. I've seen all of this happen in computational areas where running a simulation or computational experiment the night before is sufficient to get the result or negative result to put in the last slides of the talk the night before.


Should I review a paper that violates the maximum length limitation? I am reviewing a conference paper that violates the maximum number of pages by more than 10%. I believe that this is enough reason to outright reject the paper.

However, maybe the authors would welcome reviewer comments anyway. But I do not want to waste a day's work, in case nobody cares about my comments. What is customary and ethical in such a situation?

There is only one possible answer: Ask the Program Committee chair. It is an almost-one-line mail:

  Hello Jeffy,

  one of the papers I've got to review for the ABC Congress doesn't fit in the page limit given, it's: John Doe et al.: Study of DEF in context of XYZ, link:
  http://sciencesconf..../link-to-the-paper-in-the-review-system

  Should I still review it or is exceeding the length itself a reason for rejection?

  Cheers, Tom

It saves troubles in the thing I think. It may be fine in some conferences (when the page limit is taken loosely) and may be a problem elsewhere (when it's strict for instance because the proceedings publisher is strict about it, or for whatever reason). You can't know this, there's the PC chair to know this.


Explicit request for collaboration/support in publications If I am publishing a conference paper and/or journal article which is about an ongoing, larger project, is it acceptable or even heard of to not only announce expected future work but also to explicitly request collaboration/support regarding said future work? — since the quality of my work (and the work of many others) is directly influenced by the amount and quality of the data available to work with, I would like to polish a framework which I use to collect data for a particular phenomenon of interest into one which is even more easily set-up and executed than it is now. Of course, this could also be then used for other people to easily collect the same sort of data... and so it would be nice if other parties interested in the work did so and we ended up pooling our data together.

I haven't seen this sort of implicit "I only have so much time to run experiments so it'd be totally awesome if you guys did it too", so I'm not sure if it's just not done that commonly or if it's not "a thing" at all.

I think it would be totally fine to request collaborations, and my colleagues and I actually did it in a paper. We wrote in the conclusions the following announcement:

The authors welcome collaborations from QHARS manufacturers to analyse further cases of practical interest.

Did it work? Yes, but we are in a small field and this probably makes it easier to collaborate.


Public dataset without license: what is allowed? Many public scientific datasets are accompanied by a license, for example variations of Creative Commons are used quite often. However, in many cases public academic datasets lack any licensing information. Here are two examples:

At PhosphoSite we find it is "created by Cell Signaling Technology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License", so permissions of usage are clear from the license.

Here is an other dataset where we don't see anything about licensing, not even a statement that the data is free to use for academic purposes. It only states that "can be downloaded", but what can I do after downloading? Can I redistribute it, modify it, sell it? From the context I suppose they intended their data for public use, they are happy if more people use it so they get more credits and citations. But this is just an assumption.

The copyright holder is clear in both cases, the permissions are missing in the second case.

I am wondering, if I write a software using this data, or I construct a more complex dataset including this data, what solutions are legally correct:

1: The software downloads the dataset at each user's own machine from the original source and processes it. However this is not always possible or not easy to implement.

2: Distribute a copy of the original dataset, or a modified version, with attribution to the original source. This is more problematic, I think, but I am not expert in law.

Asking for permission is an obvious solution, but in case of dozens of datasets, it is a tedious and long process to contact all the copyright holders, and wait for their responses. Also, some datasets are supplements of published papers. In this case, if the journal has a license, e.g. Nucleic Acids Research is published under Creative Commons, is this valid for these datasets?

This may vary by country, but in the US at least, the default terms (if no alternative is specified) are "all rights reserved", which means that you are not allowed to reproduce the work (the dataset), prepare derivative works from it, sell/rent/lease it, or publicly perform or display it. In particular, redistributing it to others is not allowed. In practice, the authors may be fine with it, but legally speaking, you're not allowed to redistribute the dataset in the form it was published in, without having explicit permission (which could be provided by a Creative Commons license, for example).

If you wanted to reproduce the dataset in a different form that conveys the same information, that may or may not be allowed. It would be up to a court to decide whether that counts as a derivative work or just a use of the underlying ideas, and a copyright lawyer could advise you better on whether your desired use is legally acceptable.

You are allowed to read the published dataset and use the ideas contained within it (i.e. the data) to draw conclusions. Copyright law does not allow for the restriction of those rights. I think doing an analysis on the data and publishing the results of that analysis (but not the data itself), as you would do in the process of writing a paper, is generally considered to be fine.


How to keep one's focus during discussions, meetings and lectures I noticed that I have more and more serious problems keeping focused, and despite my efforts to fix it the problem is just getting worse over time.

When I'm in a research-related discussion with someone, my mind easily wanders, and I won't be able to recall the last thing other person was saying so I have to politely ask them to repeat it.  Usually this is because I'm still thinking about the last idea they mentioned instead of continuing to listen to them talk, but sometimes it's just as if my mind just turned off for the duration of a sentence of two.

At least when I'm talking to one person, I can always ask them to repeat what they said or ask them to slow down.  But when it's a group discussion or a lecture/talk, this is not possible.  When I was an undergraduate and attended lectures regularly, I didn't have this problem.

Am I alone with this problem, or do others encounter it too?

What strategies can one use to improve concentration and comprehension?  How can I train myself to focus better?

I am very concerned about this problem as it affects my academic work and performance.

This is a common issue I have when attending a talk or discussing on some intense topic with a collaborator. Since English is not my first language, I also happen to spend some time mentally translating it to my internal language (which is a mix of many by now).

Personally, some mental homework and meditation has helped me focus. Looking at the abstract and author bio (if available) before the talk helps. Experience gained from attending more and more talks has also helped.


What is an “synthetic paper” The Wikipedia page for “Curry–Howard correspondence” has a section on ”Synthetic papers”.

What precisely is a synthetic paper?

Synthetic papers are sort of critical reviews that describe important concepts in, often, multidisciplinary fields. These papers are often structured and written in a (slightly) different way than typical reviews (or normal papers).

For example, the synthetic papers in your post describe important concepts that link together mathematics, logic, and computation.


Is admission standard for math PhD significantly higher than that for physics PhD? I'm a student at a small LAC, and I'm considering to apply to both math and physics PhD programs. In my school, which is top 15 but do not have large (20 students in each dep.) or well-known departments for either of these fields, students did significantly well on physics PhD admission than on math PhD admission. For math, many students go instead to master, and only one or two students can make top 40~70 PhD program per year. For physics, some students went to Caltech, Columbia, UCSB, and other high ranked programs in the last year, which was just as usual. A similar phenomena seem to happen not only in my school. Mathgre.com and Physicsgre.com list applicant profiles and admission results for each PhD program, and they show a similar tendency. For example, students accepted to top pure math PhD programs are exclusively those who got nearly 4.0 GPA, took many grad-level courses, had significant amount of research experience and come from an undergrad institution with renowned PhD program. On the other hand, students accepted to top physics PhD programs have more diversity in GPA, their undergrad institution, number of grad-level courses taken and amount of research experience.

What causes this difference? Or is my view wrong? If this difference actually exists, I think the following factors are among the causes:

Physics PhDs are funded more, and therefore more students can be afforded.
Physics PhDs have both theoretical and applied subdivisions, while many applied math programs exist as master's programs.
Math PhDs demand its applicants to take a significant number of grad-level courses, while physics ones don't.

Also, how about the situation when it comes to pure math vs. hep-th in the U.S.?

This is an attempt to gather some data supporting or refuting your hypothesis (or rather a slightly different one).  Ideally, we would like a direct comparison of admission rates at top places, but I could only find limited data on admissions rates, so let me start elsewhere.  At any rate, some of this data may be of interest.

The annual number of bachelor's degrees in physics is about 8000.
From the AMS's annual survey, this number for math is about 28,000.  This suggests there may be a lot more PhD program applicants for math.  However, I don't have data separating out which math degrees are on a math ed track (or similarly for physics, though I guess the numbers are much greater for math ed), and these people are unlikely to pursue PhDs.

What about actual numbers of PhD students?  I didn't see 1st year PhD numbers in physics for recent years but this slightly dated data puts it around 3000 new grad students in physics/astronomy (with about 93% aiming for PhDs), whereas the AMS annual survey has around 3600, and around 5000 if you include masters programs.  (Stats and biostats is separate with around 2000, I guess including masters.)  These statistics also say the number of physics versus math phd's awarded in recent years are pretty similar (about 1500-1600 for physics compared to 1400 for math).  So there may be many more "potential" PhD applicants in math, but both math and physics students seem to compete for roughly the same number of slots in grad programs.  (I don't know about how many of the PhD enrollments were domestic BS/BA holders, but we might guess the numbers are comparable as about 54% of enrollments were US citizens.)

So the above data tenuously supports your hypothesis.  Can we check this with some actual admission rates?

For physics schools, this website has grad school admission rates.  For top schools, the admissions rate seems to be around 10-15% (though Penn State seems to be an anomaly).  Unfortunately, I don't know such a nice tool for math schools, but a few math departments mention their admission rates. Northwestern is around 17% (about the same as for their physics program, 16.4%).  Notre Dame's is around 20% (a little lower than their 26% for physics).

These were all I could easily find and I'm afraid it's not enough to make any real conclusions, but I might speculate that top math phd programs are only somewhat more competitive than top physics ones if at all.  (And in terms of undergrad research experience, I would guess that's more common in physics than in math.)

Edit: One qualitative issue for why you're seeing what you're seeing could be that top schools in math get lots of applications and if an admissions committee isn't familiar with a department, it doesn't know how to evaluate a transcript or the letters of recommendation from there, so it will tend to play it safe and accept students from places it's more familiar with.  This is one reason why it's very helpful for students at small, relatively unknown schools to do programs like REUs (or a master's first) where a letter writer from there can compare you with a wide range of students.  That said, I know many people who have gone straight from small, relatively unknown schools directly to top math PhD programs.


Masters thesis if course credits have expired I was enrolled in graduate school from 2000-2002 but did not complete my culminating paper before departing for law school.  I always wanted to complete the paper and the degree.  I have now encountered an problem that I suspect would serve as an excellent topic for completion of that degree, if I had encountered it prior to 2010. I was in an urban planning degree program.

Is there any way to revive the courses on my transcript and complete a paper to complete the degree? If so, through which institution if my original institution deems my previous credits expired.

Alternatively, what would be the best means to work with someone to do the research and writing to get the paper into a peer-reviewed journal if I am not enrolled a a university?

Could you challenge the exam in all of these courses? If not, then you might have to retake the courses. To answer your question about ways to work with someone to do research without being enrolled in a university you can approach the department asking if you could be a research assistant. Its not too common so you might have to try multiple times, but my department has one researcher who has never been enrolled at my university.


Web Service to fetch article citations I am trying to find a way to search for all the citations contained in an article. What I want to do is create a workflow for my research where:

I have a pool of articles that I have already read.
I want to find a new article to read, based on this pool of articles, so I find all the citations of all the read articles and calculate the most cited article, which is the next article I should read (obviously skipping articles that I have already read).

But I have been unable to find a way to automatically download all of the citations of a specific article. Is there no way to do it? even payed?

There seems to be no service or tool that let's you download articles in bulk. This is probably so because most journals do have zero tolerance for bulk/automated downloads. Automated downloads are some times (may be most of the times) an attempt to infringe the copyrights.

For example, ACM Digital Library ToS has this restriction.

  Under no circumstances are the following actions permitted:

  Using scripts or spiders to automatically download articles or    harvest metadata from the ACM Digital Library. This activity is a serious violation of  ACM’s DL  usage policy and will result in the temporary or permanent termination of download rights for the subscribing institution.

That being said, irrespective of the field of research, here are some services (free and paid) that offers you a list of citations / cited by articles (other than the journal's webpage for the article).

CrossRef (some services are paid ones)
Web of Science (Paid)
Google Scholar (Free)
NASA ADS (for astronomy and allied fields. Free)

While ACM provide free Cited by list, IEEE provides this for subscribers/members.

Also please note, from NASA ADS FAQ

  In addition, references may be incomplete due to our inability to
  match them with 100% accuracy (e.g. in press, private communications,
  author errors, some conference series, etc.). Anyone using the
  citations for analysis of publishing records should keep this in mind.

which is true for any citation / Cited by lists.


Can I refer my sibling for a PhD position under my supervisor? How should I approach this? I am an international student who is completing a master's degree. I am very happy working with my professor at the university. I am a good student. My professor and I have some successful projects and publications.
My sibling is looking for a Ph.D. position, and since my professor is a very reliable person, I would like him to start a Ph.D. under my professor's supervision at the same school.
He told us to introduce good students to him. I am wondering if it would be awkward if I directly ask my professor to hire him as a Ph.D. student. If so, how should I ask him? What is the best approach? Is it ok to ask this?

I would worry a bit about asking the professor to "hire" your sibling. On the other hand, telling the professor that your sib is looking for a position in the same field and would like to meet them to talk about the possibilities would be entirely appropriate.
If the two of them, without you, come to some understanding it would be better. And even if that isn't possible, the prof may have some good ideas for your sibling to pursue.
So, I'd suggest a somewhat less direct approach.


PhD students publish without supervisors – how does it work? In my field (experimental physics) the supervision of PhD students works roughly like that: freshmen come to the lab, they are given tasks, then they do experiments, discuss the results with their supervisors, do more experiments, discuss more, and then at some point they start writing papers about their results. There, of course, both PhD students and their supervisors are co-authors on papers, often together with other internal and/or external collaborators.
I've been working in a few countries, and the system was always more or less like that. I do understand why it is functioning this way: in a relatively complicated field of knowledge, a new PhD student is absolutely incapable of writing a paper which would stand up to the standards of the respective scientific community. So the student gets supervision as to which experiments are interesting to do and which not, how to do the experiments, how to analyze results, how to present them, etc. In return, the supervisor, at the very minimum, publishes a paper and gets the work done (and published), as it was described in the funding proposal from which this PhD student is paid. I mean, it is not usually referred to as a deal between a student and a supervisor, but if everything goes well it's a win-win for sure, and it's all pretty obvious, so I am not even sure whether I should have written it in so much detail.
However, surfing through Academia SE, I found a number of questions from PhD students about whether they should publish papers without their supervisors, and, surprisingly, a significant number of answers encouraging them to do so, in the spirit of: “It’s your PhD, how are you supposed to work independently if you can’t publish a paper on your own”. From this I conclude that there are at least some places where this is indeed how the system works, so PhD students publish papers without their supervisors as co-authors. And so, I wonder: How is this system supposed to work long-term? What would be the motivation for supervisors to actually accept and supervise students, if they don't even get a publication from this student's work? Supervision, if done properly, takes quite some time, so as a research scientist, I'd rather spend this time on my own work which will be published under my name, rather then help other people publish their papers.
I can foresee an answer that goes like, it is a sort of moral obligation of a scientist to "raise" PhD students, and he or she should not expect anything "in return", not even a publication. Although some people might indeed share this belief, it would be very naive to build the entire system on moral grounds, so I am sure there is something else.
Update. I would like to quote @AlexanderWoo: "Mathematics is weird is that standards for authorship usually differs in an advisor-student context than outside of one. There are definitely contributions that would merit coauthorship if one were not the advisor of the other author but does not if one is the advisor." Sounds bizarre but again, what do I know.

I published two single-author journal articles during my PhD in a field where a PhD student publishing without their supervisor is uncommon. So uncommon, in fact, that I can't think of any other examples in my subfield.
My case is probably unusual in that by a few years into my project, I was far more of an expert in the subject than my supervisor. My former supervisor is a bit of a generalist, so this is not unusual for them. At a certain point during my PhD I started disagreeing strongly with my supervisor about what to do, which is when I started working more independently.
I actually would have been offended if I were required to put my supervisor's name on either paper, as they had negligible intellectual contributions to the papers and were even harmful to them in my opinion. My supervisor made it quite clear that the work was my own, and even stated so during my defense. (They already had tenure so I don't think they needed their name on the papers, though this could be a factor in other cases.)
From my own experience I can say there are advantages and disadvantages to publishing without one's supervisor as a PhD student.
Some researchers will have greater respect for a student who has published independently. I've been pleasantly surprised to be treated as an authority on certain subjects during my PhD. I admit that those people might just be nice all around, but I didn't see most students getting that sort of treatment.
Unfortunately there are people who are suspicious of more independent students. One reviewer brought up the fact that I was a PhD student publishing without my supervisor in their review, as if such a thing were something to be suspicious of. They did not elaborate about what they found suspicious, but in my response I wrote that they are welcome to ask the editor to contact my supervisor if they believe I had not credited others sufficiently. I've also been warned to emphasize successful collaborative work on my CV and cover letters when applying to jobs, as some people will assume that I'm hard to get along with if I work independently too much.
I personally prefer to work more independently. I think the current research environment incentivizes collaboration far too much. I see a lot of groupthink/lowest commmon denominator type thinking in much of heavily collaborative work. Good ideas are avoided too often simply because they are unfamiliar to most people whose approval is needed. Good research often comes from unfamiliarity.
That's not to say that collaboration is often bad, just that it's too often bad. I fully agree that certain projects are impossible without collaboration. But given the choice, I'd bias my own work towards what an individual can handle, which I think is more than most believe.


What's Adjunct Proceedings? I came across a paper today:

  Plink It: Paper-Based Links for Cross-Media Information Space Jurgen
  Steimle, Nadir Weibel, Simon Olberding, Max Muhlhauser, and James D.
  Hollan. Adjunct Proceedings of ACM Symposium on User Interface
  Software and Technology, 1969-1974, 2011. (PDF)

I am curious: what does Adjunct Proceedings mean? The paper's style and format looks quite different from Computer Science papers that I used to read. Could anyone explain this to me?

Large conferences have "main tracks" where the normal papers are received, peer-reviewed and published/discussed in the traditional format. In these conferences there is more and more often the tendency to provide researchers to write "cutting edge" research, that should not undergo the formal peer-review process, or simply the acceptance rate has a clearly lower bar than the normal tracks of the conference. This second type of papers will be published in the "adjunct proceedings".

One would then have two sets of proceedings, one where the normal papers are, and the other one where more experimental papers are. This separation has got a reason: the program committee of a conference wants to keep the two types of papers separated, since the papers in the normal proceedings will be cited more often than the ones in the adjunct proceedings


How can I improve my research experience for PhD application? It's well-known that many grad schools (especially top-ranked) require some research experience from prospective students and consider this as main criterion for accept/reject decision.

During undergraduate study I was working on my research (hadn't finished it - had solved just one particular case) - but can't say it was great research. Now I work as software developer in subdivision of national Academy of Science. My position requires only coding, no problem solving (there's no projects here requiring any fundamential research).

How can I make any research (better related to my field of interests) without being undergrad or MS student, without working in lab. Can I simply choose interesting problem (e.g. my undegrad problem), work hard to solve it and then refer to that in research statement? Who should write letter of recommendation in this case? Or I must have any advisor (who can verify my results and then write recommendation letter for me)? Can it be unofficial advisor (just researcher I know well)?

From my experience, there are three reasons why potential advisors want to see undergraduate research:

Show that the student cares enough about research to actually have participated in research during their undergraduate years.
Student is at least somewhat familiar with the ins-and-outs of performing academic research in a university setting.
The quality of the performed research may give some indication as to how "good" of a student the candidate will be.

If you perform research yourself outside of the university settings, you'll provide a strong showing for (1), nothing at all for (2), and given that you're unlikely to publish anything, nothing of much use to the advisor for (3).

To that end, I would try to get a job as a research assistant before applying. (I'm not sure this position exists in all fields.) This is usually a paid position, and will give you an experience to work with research, help run a lab, learn about academia, and and even possibly work towards being acknowledged--or even possibly a co-author, although that's unlikely--in a paper. It should help your application significantly.


Best-practice models for "research" code? I have been a professional software developer for a number of years, I'm also an academic researcher - and my research has involved lots of software development.

I sometimes feel as though my industrial experience has been a hindrance in my research, as the goals of writing software in a research context feel contradictory to the goals in industry.

In industry, code needs to be (ideally): maintainable, bug-free, refactored,  well-documented, rigorously tested - good quality - best practice says that these things are worth the time (I agree).

In academia, the goal is to write as many quality research papers in the shortest possible time. In this context, code is written to run the experiment, and might never be looked at again (we are judged on our papers - not our code). There seems to be no motivation to write tested, maintainable, documented code - I just need to run it and get the result in my paper or whatever ASAP. Consequently, the "academic" code I've written is poor quality - from a software engineering perspective.

The problem is that I either spend too long making (unnecessarily) getting my "research" code to industry-quality, or I publish work based on "bad quality" code, and I feel like a fraud.

My career progression is dependent on me writing "bad" code!?

The "craft" of software development is a huge subject - but where is the best practice for academic research? Nobody writes unit tests for conference paper code!

Does anyone find them in a similar situation?
Does anyone know of formal methodologies for "research" code?

I think the key to understanding research code for industrial software engineers is to accept that you are typically not building a product. You do not have customers as such. You are building software to prove a point.

As such, the majority of code that you write as a researcher is more akin to the throw-away prototypes and mockups that you (in industry) often write in the early phases of a project. As you are certainly aware, even in industry these mockups have quite different properties than the final software. They primarily need to:

Have exactly the features that you want to show to the customer. Not more, not less. Typically, all the boring standard features for the domain are omitted.
Need to get done quickly. Both you and the customer know that the prototype will be thrown away anyway, so it does not matter whether the code is maintainable.
Need to be easy to extend and adapt, optimally live during the demo.

Essentially the same properties are also useful for most throwaway research code. You do not want to build features that you do not need. You do not want to waste time writing e.g., maintainable code if you know that it will not be maintained. You want to use an environment that reduces the amount of boilerplate code and setup, and which maybe auto-generates a lot of code for you that is "good enough" for your demonstrator (Ruby on Rails and its scaffolding features come to mind).

  My career progression is dependent on me writing "bad" code!?

No, it depends on you writing code fit for purpose. Just like in industry. In industry and academia nobody applauds you for software qualities that are not needed. Try to reconsider what the point of the code is that you are writing. If you plan to release your code as open source software and you expect it to be picked up by other people across the world, then go nuts - use all the engineering techniques you have also used in industry to build the best product you can. If your goal is to evaluate this one algorithm or principle for your conference, and then throw away the code, then you can also live happily without writing a single unit test without feeling like a fraud at all.

EDIT: of course this does not mean that it is acceptable to write code where you are unsure whether you have implemented said algorithm correctly. Ensuring that what you have indeed shown what you claim to have shown is mandatory, especially in research code.


In the field of engineering, can GRE General test score be substituted with GRE Math score? In the field of engineering, can GRE General test score be substituted with GRE Math score?

Suppose a US university requires GRE general test score for PhD program, if an applicant sends GRE Math score, will that be enough?

Pretty much all programs will reject your application without consideration if you do not submit everything they request.  Some places are flexible; they may be willing to accept either test score.  (Some of the department at my university, including my department, are willing to take any one relevant score.)  However, such programs will almost always state this explicitly in their graduate application guidelines.  If you think a program might be willing to accept the substitution, you can always contact their director of graduate admissions or director of graduate studies and ask.  Chances are strongly against their saying yes, but it probably will not hurt your chances if you ask.


How does a university award honorary doctorate? Important scholars (e.g. Nobel laureates) regularly receive honorary doctorate from different universities. I know that the Board of Trustees (or a similar board) reviews available nominations and awards an honorary degree to a person, but I wonder how the nomination process is conducted.

It seems to be very chancy, as there are many universities and many famous scholars. Usually there were no previous relationship between the awarding university and awardee.
For example, it is common for a Nobel Prize winner to receive honorary doctorate from 30 universities. He/she could have previous connections (e.g. collaboration, contribution, etc) with only a few of them.

How does a nominator suggest awarding to an eligible but irrelevant scholar?

Some universities allow faculty to nominate those chosen for honorary degrees. From what I understand, some even allow certain members of the graduating class and/or student council to nominate & vote. At other institutions, the senate, department heads, deans, president or chancellor may pick the candidates. Some institutions may have a nomination body and a voting body. I would think that it depends upon the size of the institution.

To find out for sure, check out websites for specific universities. Often times universities have focused areas of research or a campus wide research goal for which they have TONS of funding. On most occasions, honorary degrees are awarded to those who are conducting research in that field. They often award honorary degrees to those who are active in their communities as well.

Another common thing with honorary degrees: once an individual has been granted one other institutions will sometimes scramble to recognize that person as well. This is especially true if both institutions are located in the same area, or if they largely focus on the same research matters. People who make a difference on a global scale are often chosen as recipients of honorary degrees not only because they've made a difference, but because a university is, after all, still a business. If they give someone famous an honorary degree, you can bet it will be on the news. It will even get better coverage if other universities have also awarded the person with honorary degrees! Sometimes they look for a unique person to give an honorary degree to- because that will also get more coverage (for example, people from minority groups or from third world countries).

Each university has their own policy regarding nominations and different criterion, but they're all about creating a buzz. They may pick a First Nations community leader as a recipient in hoping that they will attract more students from that community. They also use honorary degrees as a way to network. If they want to meet their idol, they award them with an honorary degree so that person has to come and meet them to accept it (it is, after all, only polite, right?).

If you're curious about individual schools, you can look up the honorary degree recipients - they will often state why the person was given the degree. The key thing to remember is that they could come across anyone and find a reason to nominate them. They may see a firefighter on the news who saved the lives of people by rushing into a burning building. They attribute great courage to that person, so they nominate them to receive an honorary degree in emergency service operations. Their spouse, friend or neighbor may tell them an inspiring story which urges them to do more research on the person. Then that person ends up nominated! Yes, they have criterion, but it is flexible. They can word their statements for nomination in such a way that anyone would be fit for an honorable degree.


Should I apply for the scholarships if I currently have a RA position in my supervisor lab? I am a M.Sc. graduated and I will start my PhD in September and in a top university abroad (Canada). My supervisor guaranteed a yearly stipend during my studies as long as I am in good academic standing from his own grants.
Recently, department secretary advertised the PhD scholarship competition of the university which covers the stipends of students during their PhD studies. The amount of scholarship is just slightly better than my current RA funding (~2k per year difference), so it is not a major monetary benefit in that. More over, I wondering if accepting the scholarship leads the professor to pay less attention to my project as he is not under some pressure to complete the projects that he did not receive grants for. On the other hand, accepting the scholarship may give the students some degree of security about their funding (e.g. if they find conflicts with their advisor in future and want to change advisor).
All in all, I would like to know if is it a good idea to accept an scholarship instead of the RA funding of the lab you work in?

You should get scholarship if:

You want more money
You want to make your supervisor happy
Self-esteem (because you can self-fund yourself)
Something to put on your resume
Easier if you want to change supervisor
The scholarship is guaranteed (if offered) whereas your lab's yearly stipend is not. Your supervisor only gives you verbal agreement, but she might change her mind. Do you have a contract with her to guarantee your payment for the next 4 years?

Generally, PhD student is expected to secure a scholarship. Your supervisor is responsible to guide you for your PhD with or without your scholarship.

You may ask your supervisor to give you top-up.

You should not get scholarship if:

Your supervisor wants to employ you and pay you salary
You want to work while doing your PhD

Otherwise, why not?


Peer review in Computer Science Journals I work on both in the area of pure Computer Science and in the area of Computational Chemistry/Biology.

Till now I have submitted papers to well known venues(journals) of both these fields. I don't understand the following situations after paper submission in both these fields:

Submitted papers in non-CS journals follow a quick review procedure i.e. submission - editor assignment - reviewer invited - under review - review completed - [...] Turnaround : 3 months
But, for pure CS Journals, every step is late except the first step which is obvious. Turnaround: 10-12 months

What can we infer given such situations in peer review world?

Note: I am talking about majority of journals in both these mentioned fields.

In computer science, unlike in the majority of other academic fields, most research is published as articles in conference proceedings, and conferences do follow a quick review process. I imagine that the pressure on journals to provide a quick review process is thus less strong.


Do teachers/professors refer to each other by their titles? I just began shadowing a high school classroom as part of a requirement to earn teaching credentials. The teacher I'm shadowing has a PhD and is referred to as "Doctor Smith" (generic name) by his students. I am not his student and it is the first experience I have in a classroom setting where the teacher is my peer; but, it still feels uncomfortable to call him by his first name.

Do I call him "Doctor Smith?"

If he doesn't have a PhD, should I call him "Mr. Smith?"

When is it appropriate to call someone by their first name?

A good safe approach is to start out calling him "Dr. Smith".  Most likely he will quickly say "Please call me Fred" and then everything is resolved.


Should I justify the organization of chapters and sections in the research paper? I am using a research handbook written by Creswell to guide me in writing my Bachelor's Thesis.

Specifically, I followed his research design model.

Should I justify why I structured my Methods Chapter the way I did by saying that such structure was recommended by Creswell?

For example, I may say that Creswell suggested that this section should be included in the research design.

I live in a developing country. My institution has no specific style guide.
They underestimate undergraduate research, but I cannot wait for my supervisor to tell me what to do as long as my sources are authoritative.

Here is a link of a summary of the book.

I cannot consult my supervisor at the moment nor wait or state why here.

Thank you

If I take your question correctly, it sounds as if you don't know whether to refer to the styleguide that informed you to structure your thesis in a certain way. So, in your introduction, you have a section such as:

  The next chapter of this thesis describes the background literature. Chapter 3 outlines the methodology and so on. Chapter 4 presents the experimental design, whatever … Finally, chapter 7 concludes and provides further possibilities for research. This structure is suggested by Cresswell (19xx)

If that's what you're thinking, then I would say no; don't reference the styleguide that you based your thesis structure on. Just like you wouldn't cite, for instance, the AP styleguide for your spelling conventions.


Why is headhunting uncommon for academic positions? In scientific conferences, there are usually many headhunters who come to offer newly graduated scholars jobs in the industry sector. As a matter of fact, the recruitment in industry mostly works with the headhunting system.

However, academic recruitment is mainly application-based, and they are stuck with Equal Employment Opportunity, in which even when planning to appoint a Vice President to a vacant President position, they need to follow public call for application.

Why doesn't a department chair offer faculty position to exceptional scholars to attract extraordinary people?

In an application-based system, only those who are looking for new jobs will apply, but in a headhunting system, headhunters tempts satisfied employees with attractive offers.

In general, when someone is averagely satisfied by his/her job will not check current job ads.

Why doesn't a department chair offer faculty positions to exceptional scholars to attract extraordinary people?

Ah, but they do. For high profile academics, there are many behind-the-scenes discussions between department chairs, deans, and other faculty members. If a department really wants a particular academic for a particular chair, they'll have discussions about it with the candidate. I imagine that certain faculty get calls rather frequently asking if they want to move universities. Some professors can pretty much move at will; see, for instance, Cornell West's move between Harvard and Princeton -- West got in a tiff with Harvard President Lawrence Summers, and then he up and moved to Princeton, where they were happy to have him.

The networking system within academia is broad enough and the number of open positions small enough that hiring headhunters is not really necessary, although for really high profile positions -- presidents of universities and the like -- a headhunting firm may be hired to make sure certain protocols are met.

For run-of-the-mill assistant professor and associate professor positions, and for other candidate-search positions such as department chairs, the application process works well. But don't think that there still isn't any wrangling between various faculty members and possible candidates -- if you're an excellent researcher that has been making a name for yourself as a graduate student or as a junior faculty member, you may be asked directly to apply for positions that are open.


My advisor tried to find my faults and kick me out of the research? I am a international student in a ivy league school under J1 visa ( i can work only in school). I am now working as a researcher after I got the degree. I did sign the contract that I will work for 2 years with funding. The contract said that I will work mainly for one particular project but I also have work with any other works that the school want too.

My adviser has two funding project in his hand. One is a cellphone project and another one is a Darpa project. In the beginning, I worked with a cellphone project. This project is something plan to be commercialized and funding by private investors. There were two people mainly working on this cellphone project, me and my friend. We both have separated funding from different sources to work on this project. After I had finish the project ( 6 months), I was moved to work in the Darpa project, with another team. My friend who I worked with in a cellphone project is still working in the final part and marketing it (also continue to find money from investors).

One day, my cellphone-project friend's funding were all gone ( he started this work one year before me). His fund is about two years and he cannot find the investors to put more money in his cellphone. Then this is my problem because I am not a main person in both the cellphone and the Darpa project. My adviser want to move my money to support my friend and want me to quit (because no need for my programming skill anymore, programming part is done). He started by telling me that I watched YouTube in the lab. (He did see me once that I listened to the music while I was programming). He told me that no one in the lab watch YouTube, everybody just read paper for relaxing. (All of my friends watch YouTube and Facebook, trust me). Then he continued with I am not eager to improve me code and make it faster. He told me that all PhD, researcher will eager to make it very fast. ( I programmed something is called SIFT and the speed is the best I can do, due to the nature of the algorithm ).. Anyway, 3 months ago he told me the speed is good enough for this work, that's why I didn't improve it. He told me that I have a problem in communication ( I asked him could you give me some examples about the communication problem, then he changed the topics).

Since I am holding J1 visa, If he kicked me out, I have to go back with nothing. I feel this is very unfair. When he asked me to work, it is very nice. However when I completed the work, he want to kick me out and get the money back. I have no idea what to do? What should I do after this? I feel really bad about my adviser.

PS: my professor is the member of the start-up-company of the cellphone project. but I am not, I am just a reseacher

OK, well, you have a problem.  By the terms of your appointment, you are entitled to stay for the 24-month period.  The faculty you're working with made a commitment to support you for 24 months, and generally speaking, it is his duty to do so.  However, that's not the whole story.  You also have an implicit obligation to do good research that advances his interests as well.  And, depending on your goals, you probably also need his intellectual support and mentorship to achieve many of the benefits of a visiting scholar position.  So, you need to work out a mutually satisfactory resolution with him.  This is more a situation for interpersonal negotiation and compromise than a situation where standing on your rights and thumping the table is going to help you.

You might need to make some compromises, compared to how you thought this position was going to work out.  To help with that, to begin, you should start asking yourself some hard questions and figure out what your goals are.  What are your career goals after you finish this position?  What would you like to achieve?  Are you looking to get a good reference letter from the faculty you are currently working with?  Are you looking to strengthen your c.v. with a stronger publication record?  Do you think you can do good research on your own, with no mentorship, collaboration, or support from your faculty member?  What kind of job are you looking for after you finish?  Are you looking for a research position, or for an industry position?  Can you make productive use of the next 16 months (in a way that will help your longer-term career prospects)?  How strongly do you feel that you want to stay in the current position for the full 24 months if you have no support and no interest from your existing faculty member?  The answers will determine how you act at this point.

Keep in mind that there might be no perfect solution to your situation, so your job at this point is to try to guide things to the least-bad outcome that is at all feasible.  To do that, you absolutely must know what your priorities are and what your "nice-to-have's" are.

I can see a couple of possible options for you:

You could sit down and have a frank talk with the faculty you are working for.  You could say, look, you offered me a 24-month position, you made a commitment, now it is your obligation to fulfill it.  You can be polite but firm.  However, this might not win you any friends, so if you were hoping for a good reference letter from this faculty member or collaboration and mentorship for continuing research, you might be out of luck, and you could be stuck in a toxic environment for the next 16 months.  If you take this tack, you are basically offering the faculty member nothing positive in return, so the best plausible outcome is that the faculty member honors his commitment and ignores you for the rest of your appointment.  The worst outcome is that the faculty tries to find some way to screw you.
Alternatively, you could try to understand better your faculty member's situation and then try to find a way to make yourself valuable to him.  Personally, I think this is probably a much more promising direction.  You can always fall back to the "you have an obligation" option above if this fails.

From your position his actions might appear arbitrary and capricious, but there is probably a logic behind them from his perspective.  You could try to understand what is motivating your faculty mentor and then use that to see what you can offer him.  For instance, maybe he is under tight pressure to see results, and you are not contributing in the way he had hoped.  Keep in mind that you are biased; you might feel like you did an awesome job and met all of his expectations, but he might not feel that way.  Or, his goals might have changed.  So, you could try to understand his perspective, and then figure out how to make yourself valuable to him.  Basically, look for a way to make this a win-win situation.

You say the faculty seems more interested in working with your friend right now.  Well, that's a valuable clue.  Maybe your friend is making contributions in some way that you aren't.  Have you considered trying to find a way that you can contribute, that your faculty member would value and that would make him eager to keep working with you and make supporting you a priority for him?  Have you tried asking some questions to probe about that?  His needs can change over time.  There's an unwritten assumption, when you join someone's group, that you will act as a team: that you will both act in each others' best interests.  In particular, this is not a zero-sum situation (or it should not be); if you're doing things right, when you do great work, it should benefit both you and your faculty.  You need to be flexible.  If your faculty member's needs change, you might need to change your focus and your energy to support his direction.  If your faculty member's needs have changed and you are not adapting to make yourself a valuable member of the team as his goals change, then that could explain his reaction.

You say your faculty has a DARPA contract, and that contract continues, but you are not a main person on that project.  Well, have you considered trying to make yourself a main person?  Have you considered making yourself indispensable to that project or finding a way so that you can make major contributions to the success of that project?  This is not something that is appointed or handed out; what makes you a main person is not a title that someone else hands to you, but rather your own independent action.  In the research world, people typically aren't going to tell you what to do.  Instead, they're expecting you to identify a way you can be valuable to the project, and then go do it.  You're a smart person; I'm sure you can find a way to make a contribution to that project that they will find helpful, and that will be beneficial to your career.  Go do that a couple of times, and before you know it, you will be a main person on that project, not because anyone else decided you are, but because you decided to become one and you put in the energy and hard work to be.

From your question, we only get your perspective, not that of your faculty member's perspective.  Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't fully appreciated your faculty member's perspective yet.

Overall, my advice is:

Enter this with a willingness to compromise and change.  Adapt.  Be prepared to find a compromise with your faculty member.  Don't start from the position that you're entitled to a great working situation; you may be, but realistically, at this point, that kind of attitude won't help you attain one.  Open your mind to compromise solutions you might not have previously considered, even if you have to accept something that's less than ideal from your perspective.
Find someone else you trust (a secondary mentor, another faculty member, something like that) and talk to them about the situation.  Ask them for advice.  Respect what they are telling you: be a good listener (if you find yourself arguing with them, time to back off and listen and try to understand what they are telling you).  See if this can get you any additional information about what might be motivating your faculty or ways you might be able to resolve the situation.  You're in an Ivy League school; odds are that someone else in your department cares about visiting scholars.
Go talk to your advisor.  Ask questions.  Listen.  Empathize.  Try to find a win-win outcome that both of you can feel like offers something positive.  You can be frank and honest that your relationship seems to have gotten off on a bad foot and you'd like to work out a way to improve the relationship and find a way to be useful to him that also benefits your career.  Ask him for help crafting a performance improvement plan that from his perspective would help you do a better job of meeting his expectations.

Do not start from a position that you are entitled to his enthusiasm.  Do not accuse or argue.  This is not a confrontation or a debate; this is a negotiation.  You start by trying to gather information and understand your faculty member's perspective better.  When you understand his logic and motivations, then you can try to brainstorm together ways that you can change your behavior in a way that benefits both of you (especially him).  What you can offer is your willingness to devote your time and energy to work on problems that are relevant to his needs, and your flexibility and willingness to change.  Maybe after having this kind of conversation, you will find some new project or new focus that both of you will be excited and enthusiastic about.  Or, failing that, maybe you can find some compromise solution that is tolerable for both of you: maybe neither of you walk away exactly excited about the collaboration, but you can both live with it.

Your job at this point is to make the best of the situation.  Realize that the resolution might not be perfect.  Sometimes, that's life.  You just have to roll with the punches and work with what you've got.


How to respond to a comment when two reviewers ask the same or similar question? I got the comments from a journal where two reviewers asked almost similar query. How do I respond to it? Can I answer it at one place and in the other place, I can briefly describe the answer and say a more detailed response is presented before in page so and so..

This is very common and there's no need to overthink it.  Answer the question for Reviewer 1, and then when listing and answering Reviewer 2 questions, write out the question and answer "This is the same point as question 3 from Reviewer 1, and is addressed in my response there."

You should be very sure you've addressed the question clearly and thoroughly, because if multiple reviewers flag it then there's some problem you need to sort out.