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Q: Is assessing grant proposals CV-worthy? So far this year, I have been asked to be an assessor for proposals submitted to three different international funding schemes, with the value of the proposals ranging from $0.5M to $10M. I acceded to the first two requests (one of which has me assessing 7 proposals, the second only one proposal) because I thought it would be useful experience to see how proposals are assessed, in case it brought insights that would be useful next time I submit a proposal of my own. The time commitment is starting to become an issue, though, and starting to clash with my other commitments, so I am hesitating about the third. So: apart from the small honorarium that some of these schemes pay assessors, is there anything in it for me? Is assessing grant proposals simply seen as part of one's academic community service, to be performed as a good citizen like reviewing papers, or is it seen as a measure of esteem that is therefore worthy of putting on a CV? A: You performed a valid service and gained valuable experience. You should definitely include this on your CV. A: Mike C's answer is good. Just to add a bit to it, many universities in the U.S. at least require service as a portion of your duties. In my field, it's not unusual to see jobs described as 50% research, 40% teaching, 10% service. It's extremely important when applying for these jobs to be able to demonstrate experience in all three areas. Reviewing, whether for grants or for manuscripts, is one of the few areas where early career people have a real opportunity to get some service experience, and so you absolutely should have it on your C.V. Just don't do so much that it's significantly impacting your research!

Q: Applying for faculty position --wondering how long to expect to wait I applied for a faculty position. One month later they asked my references for reference letters. I have not heard from them for a few weeks. I have not been asked for a phone interview yet. Is it appropriate to touch base? A: I am the chair of my department's faculty recruiting committee. Yes, you should definitely feel free to contact the search chair to ask about the status of your application. My department started accepting applications last October for faculty positions beginning in Fall 2016. We automatically solicit reference letters for all assistant professor applicants, usually within a few days of the application. We have invited almost all of our interview candidates at this point, but we may still invite more, and in principle, we can even continue accepting new applications. Except for interview invitations, we normally do not contact applicants until the search formally closes, which will probably happen in mid-April. It's probably safe to assume that if you haven't heard from a department (at least in the US) by now, they're probably not interested, but there are certainly exceptions. My own job search is an example. My current department invited me for an interview in late April, three weeks after sending me a rejection letter. ("We changed our mind; we'd like to interview you.") The framed rejection letter is hanging on the wall in my office. A: I don't think it's unreasonable to touch base, but let me be a devil's advocate: my rule of thumb is that you contact people about the status of applications when you have new information for them; the best example would be an offer somewhere else, but that isn't the only possibility. If you don't have new information for them, what purpose is going to be served by contacting them? What could they tell you that will change how you're going to live your life? Given that they haven't contacted you directly (I'm assuming since you don't mention it), you should probably just assume you are not in serious contention for this job. Maybe you will be at some point later in the process, but if that does happen, it can be a pleasant surprise. A: You can certainly contact the department (or whoever from the search committee who contacted you asking for recommendation letters) and politely ask where the search process is. For the search process that I'm currently involved in, you'd be told "We've invited candidates for on-campus interviews, but you weren't on that list." You might ask why others who weren't invited for an on-campus interview haven't been notified. One answer is that we might (in case someone declines to interview or people turn down our offers) go back to our short list and invite someone else. Another reason is that the human resources office is ultimately responsible for sending out "We had lots of very well qualified candidates, we're sorry that we didn't hire you this time." messages, and they'll wait to do this until after we've actually hired our candidates. At a certain point it's likely to become public who will be interviewing on campus. If the department has a colloquium calendar, you can check to see if any presentations by faculty candidates have been announced. The field specific "X jobs wiki" pages often have useful information (although the rumors can also be incorrect.)

Q: Can you get hired where you received your phd? I really like the institution where I'm working on my PhD, and I enjoy the city that I live in. I have shown that I am a strong research, and I am really starting to make a name for myself. I was wondering if people ever really get recruited for a tenure position at the institution where the received their PhD. (I don't go to one of the top 5 universities where they kind of have no choice but to recruit from within.) A: Yes, but it is rare, for most schools. It is usually frowned upon, however, the top schools have to hire from somewhere so it is common for them to at least swap graduates. My anecdotal evidence is that low ranked universities also tend to hire a higher proportion of their own students. A notable exception is MIT, where 39% of the CS professors received their PhD degrees from there. Table is from http://jeffhuang.com/computer_science_professors.html A: Attitudes towards a department hiring their own PhD students as tenured academics varies quite a bit across institutions and departments (from my observations as an Australian academic). For many it is discouraged, for others it is sometimes an advantage, and for others, it just takes an extended postdoc typically somewhere else in order to be competitive for a position. There are a few general principles that are operating: Departments often want to see that you have your own independent program of research which is often more evident once you've made it on your own. In particular, departments often want to see that you are able to work independently of your supervisor. There is often a desire to lead to a proliferation of ideas which is more likely to occur if people leave their PhD institution. On the flipside, some departments value hiring their own PhD students. They know your skills and temperament and if they see a lot of potential you can be an attractive candidate. Their PhD students may also get experience with teaching that means that they understand the culture of the university. One scenario that I've seen occur a few times is an academic getting a PhD from an institution, then spending a few years doing a Post Doc or lecturing position elsewhere before returning to the original institution to take a continuing position. This often satisfies many of the requirements of showing that you are an independent researcher. Another scenario is working at the same university but in a different department. This is often applicable if your research is in anyway cross-disciplinary. Also, my casual impression is that high ranking universities are somewhat less likely to hire their own PhDs for continuing academic appointments straight out of their PhD. If you're interested in getting a continuing academic appointment at your PhD university, you should gather some more specific information. Look at where current academics in the department did their PhDs. If there are such academics see whether they left and came back or went straight through. If you can, try to find out about the politics of such appointments and whether they were purely on merit or whether they were supported by existing staff keen to build up an area. Talk to your PhD supervisor. Even better, if you're able to, talk to the head of department or someone else who is likely to be involved in hiring decisions. Finally, academic appointments are very competitive and the frequency with which jobs come up at your level in your area and at a given institution may be low. For this reason alone, it pays to consider other universities. Even if you want to get a position at your own institution and your institution doesn't have a bias against hiring their own, you still need to be better than all the other applicants which include a much larger pool. A: I was hired on a one year teaching/research contract at my institution even before my PhD corrections were ratified. I ended up leaving halfway through (though saw out the rest of my teaching duties) for a 2.5 year research contract in a research centre I had my eye on the past year. So it's definitely possible, but as to whether it'll be a tenure position, depends on your university. I'll put it this way, at my university, we had a tenured position come up in my department with a few very strong internal candidates who had PhDs from that university, and I mean very strong (big grants, books, tons of publications) apply. They didn't even get interviews. Someone from overseas was hired, and I think at my old university in particular there is a want for 'international' talent.

Q: Writing theory section of thesis - feels like I am just copying I am doing a PhD in physics / applied math and have just started writing the theory section. A large-ish part (5-10 pages, estimated) will be setting the scene with some theoretical tools that I am using but did not invent. These tools will eventually be used as the basis for analysing data. I will say the word so you don't have to think it: plagiarism. I have absolutely no desire to plagiarize so am very careful about citing my sources - however while writing I get the feeling that I am simply copying off of others. Question, in two parts: Can anyone give a strategy for how to write a theory section and make it ``your own'' while clearly citing relevant material? Is this feeling actually normal and am I just over-reacting? A: Although I'm not in "physics/applied-math", but, rather, "math", I see the same or similar issue arise. Let's consider the point that, by this year, the "context/background/set-up" has very likely been highly optimized, both for effectiveness and for succinctness. Nothing wasted, nothing superfluous, etc. So it is likely to be hard to "improvise" much on its description without making it worse in some way. This may be the case even down to small notational conventions, wording, etc. So, be absolutely scrupulous in citing, and try to have it all in your own head so that you can write it yourself (not literally copying), even while citing, ... and remarking something like "we recall some standard facts/ideas/set-up, e.g., from [X]." A: Given that you've almost finished a PhD in your field, it's fair to say that you should have a solid grasp of the basic definitions and concepts you're trying to write up at the moment. So I suggest you do the following. Close all your textbooks and papers and write that section on your own, without looking at any other sources while you're writing it. That should ensure that you express the ideas mostly in your own words. Then, go back and check your version against the standard references to make sure you didn't get anything wrong and that you've included any relevant citations. If you see that one of the standard sources has explained one of the concepts much better than you did, consider explicitly quoting that source: e.g., "Symplectic widgets were defined by Widgetmeister [Wid83] as [...]". At the end of the day, though, you don't need to worry too much about this. As long as you cite sources clearly, I don't think anyone's going to complain that your description of the standard material looks a lot like other peoples' descriptions of the same thing, especially if it's not word-for-word the same. Standard material always looks standard and a lot of readers will skip over it anyway. The real contribution of your thesis is in the later sections. A: This is actually very simple ethically: You did research work which - by your description - is experimental. You ran experiments, you're analyzing data, you're making conclusions based on the data. Your research contribution is your conclusions. (and possibly your raw results and experimental setup as well.) The theory section is not plagiarized because you're not claiming this is your original (theoretical) work. You're summing up what other people have done and discussed. That's it. Other answers have good suggestions regarding how to approach writing this section. PS - Sometimes, the cogent presentation of the theoretical background can itself be considered a contribution. But this happens more in textbooks or in review papers, less in theses.

Q: Co-author does not want biography+photo in paper submission Some journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (randomly picked) require a biography and sometimes also a photo of the paper authors. Currently I have the case that a co-author working in the industry does not want this. He says (and I can totally understand this) that he does not want that possible future companies will find a photo of him when using a search engine. He also does not like the biography part but would accept this, if there is no other solution. Question: Is it uncommon to ask the Editor-in-chief whether the biography and/or photos may be omitted? The journal would be a perfect match so that I do not want to pick another one just because of this. A: Rather than trying to determine whether it is common or not to get the EiC involved in this matter, I would like to suggest that you ask a more "productive" question: are there established ways of handling the case when a co-author does not want to include a bio and a photo? The answer to this question, as far as the IEEE is concerned, is "yes." Next to the author's name, simply state: Randy D. Fuddles, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication. A: I can't really say that I "get" the concern of the co-author here, but I am aware that different people have dramatically different views on privacy than I do. In general, this is definitely a question that you can ask the Editor-in-Chief without concern. However, depending on how many submissions the journal in question gets, it is possible that the EiC may be rather uncompromising upfront. For some top-level journals, submissions are a dime a dozen, and I have seen editors that see little need to engage in potentially time-consuming discussions with authors prior to even seeing an acceptable manuscript. Hence they may just point to an existing policy if there is one, without much further thought. Hence, another possibility would be to just submit the paper regularly, and delay the problem until the paper proofing phase. If your paper is deep enough into the process that the question actually becomes urgent, it seems exceedingly likely that the editor and/or responsible persons from the publisher's side will be willing to compromise over such a triviality rather than reject the paper. For instance, they could allow your co-author to have a placeholder rather than his photo, and/or have a very short bio text along the lines of "Dr XY is currently a research engineer at GoodStuff Inc. For privacy reasons, no other information is given."

Q: In case of in-lecture quizzes, is it unreasonable to fail students who are late or absent? I am teaching a large undergraduate class this semester. One day a week (same day every week) we have a quiz. The syllabus doesn't specify at what moment of the class period the quiz will be given. It does say though that students who missed the quiz aren't allowed to make it up. So, I've had the following situation since the semester started. First and second week I gave the quiz at the end of the class. During week 3 I already had a few students coming more than 20 minutes late, but early enough not to miss the 15 min quiz, which I gave again at the end. So, this week (week 4) I gave the quiz 10 minutes after the start of the class. The actual time of the quiz wasn't announced in advance. And yes, I've had many students coming late and some came when the quiz was already over. These students couldn't have 15 minutes like others if any time at all. Now these students are claiming that I needed to tell them in advance at what time the quiz was supposed to be or emphasize that it can be at any time, or otherwise they follow the pattern. All students who came in late were the ones who were late the previous week except one student. I repeat that it's a big lecture hall, and I don't want to take notes when a specific student actually started his or her quiz and add 15 minutes to that time. Also, after quiz I want all of them to concentrate on the class material. And I don't want to give it at the end all the time as some students will come in late, and that disrupts the flow of a lecture, distracts other students and generally erodes class morale. I drop quite a lot of lowest quiz grades at the end of the semester to meet those cases when students do have to be absent. So, a good student's grade won't be affected if he or she will miss a couple of quizzes. I am currently facing lots of negative emails from students who were late and didn't get the grade they would get if they had the same time as everybody else. Do you think it's me being unreasonable? Their main argument is that it should be clearly stated when a quiz is given or emphasized that it can be given at any time, which I find unnecessary. A: Do you think it's me being unreasonable? Sadly, yes. I see two problems here: You said in a comment that the policy of "the quiz can happen at any time" was not articulated at all. You gave the quiz near the end of the class a couple of times, and the students naturally assumed that that's when you'll always have it. Now you are trying to argue legalistically that since you didn't say when the quiz will occur, you were reserving the right to hold it at any time. However, in my opinion if you are going to argue based on legalisms, the burden is on you to dot all your i's and cross all your t's and make sure that you gave your students such amazingly clear information that they couldn't even imagine arguing with you. The thing to keep in mind here is that you are an educator, not a prosecutor trying to entrap a criminal in court. The students deserve to have clearly articulated rules so that they can focus their time and energy on the material; in particular, if there's a quiz, they deserve to know the precise time when it will be held, or at the very least to have an explicit announcement that the quiz can be held at variable times. Overall, your approach to dealing with the students who came late as I'm understanding it from your question seems to me to place you in an adversarial, combative position relative to your students, which is not where you want to be as a teacher - it can only serve to distract from your educational objectives and provides for a poor learning environment for your students. A second problem is that I'm getting a strong feeling from reading your question that you're trying to use the quiz as a crowd control mechanism, which feels wrong to me (and partially as a result has gotten you into the current messy situation). You've devised an elaborate strategy that consists of holding a quiz at a randomly selected time during the class as a solution to the problem of making students come to class, and come on time. The problem of students coming in late may be a very real concern, but random quizzes are simply an inappropriate and ineffective way to address it (and one that can potentially be perceived quite negatively by the students). A quiz is a form of assessment, and is a legitimate device to use for that purpose, but let's keep things in their right place: deal with the problem of disruptive late-coming students in the appropriate way, and have your assessment in the way that makes sense from an educational standpoint, whether it be quizzes, exams, homework, or even mandatory class attendance if that's important to you and your institution's policies allow it. A: I'm going to go against the flow here and say that in my opinion, yes, you are being unreasonable. I don't know the specific regulations of your institution, but I firmly believe that attending classes should not be mandatory, and students are entitled to do self-study or otherwise learn the material without your help. They may even be forced to do so by external factors (say, other classes taking place at the same time, or a day-time job). Either way, this is no business of the teacher. In that spirit, I think it is just unfair to do the quiz without setting the time in advance, doubly so if you have not given them any sort of heads-up, and only decided to change a set schedule after a few weeks. Moreover, given the tone of your post, it seems like this change of schedule is intentional retaliation against the students for coming in late, and again, in my opinion, this is not the right way to prevent this sort of behaviour. Even if it is not the case, I would not be surprised if they felt that way. I see how it can create a disturbance, especially in a big class. The simplest solution I can see is to do the quizzes at a set time (preferably at the very beginning or the very end of the class), and, if you are afraid of the disturbance, make a short (2-3 minutes would be enough) break before and after the quiz so that those students who only want to take the quiz can come and go without making too big a commotion. This way, those who actually want to attend your class can do so without much of a hassle, while those who don't or can't will have a predictable schedule. As an added bonus, it makes for fewer students who would not be paying attention. If late arrivals are still a concern even after that, you can try to simply explain, politely, how big a problem that is -- assuming that it is indeed such a big problem -- are a few people arriving late to take the back seats really a big deal? I am in no position to judge that, obviously, but if the only thing that suffers because of that is your pride, perhaps you should just swallow it. If that fails as well, you may follow @DaveRose's suggestion and just keep the doors locked except during the test (after giving them a heads-up in advance). In my opinion, this is still excessive, but as long as it is completely clear to everyone involved, I guess it is an acceptable policy, if at all allowed/possible. A: Either attendance in lectures is a required and graded component of the course or it isn't. If it is, then make sure everyone is aware of this, take attendance, and deduct grades from students who are late or absent. If it is not, then simply do not expect students to be present during your lectures. If there are lateness issues or if students coming late are disruptive then deal with this on its own merits. It should have no bearing on when you schedule formal evaluations. Frankly, giving students grades in a course simply for being present at a lecture (or deducting them for being absent) sounds insane to me. It's easy to show up to a lecture and learn nothing. It's also easy to not show up to a lecture and learn everything. This isn't elementary school - the primary purpose of a higher-education course is to provide to the student an objective, quantifed, and certified evaluation of their competence concerning the material in scope. Lectures are one of several services provided to assist students to that end, but they are just that - a means to an end. If there are graded tests, quizzes, examinations, etc, you have a professional responsibility to let your students know in advance where and when they need to be to take that test. How else can you expect them to organize their time?! In most higher education I've ever seen, attendance at lectures is strictly optional. Your lectures are there as a service to the students who feel that they help them learn the course material. Many students do not. I was one of them - lectures consume a considerable amount of time and, quite often, are paced so painfully slowly that for some they constitute a grossly inefficient use of time. For those who can teach themselves the material covered in a lecture in a fraction of the time, forcing them to attend is nothing short of forcing them to waste their time. Playing ridiculous games of bait and switch with randomly timed tests feels rather unprofessional. Your students are adults - treat them as such.

Q: Is it fair to punish absent students with a one-question exam? I recently came across a post (that I won't disclose because it contains the professor's last name): Attendance in this course was regularly low, so the professor used a one-question exam to punish students who weren't attending a class. Those who weren't in class would have obviously failed this exam, and those who were in class (presumably) would have all gotten A's. The final remark on the note on the door was "maybe we'll do this again some time". Let's assume a few factors about the course and this one-question exam, since we don't actually know how they're implemented: The course has an attendance policy (3 days max missed before your grade starts dropping, for example) This one-question exam has an impact equivalent to a homework assignment (could drop your overall grade by 1% if you get a 0). By the language of the original post, this is not something the students would have expected to happen; this means that the policy would not be outlined in the syllabus. What if the course didn't have an attendance policy and the professor is simply annoyed that students aren't attending the class? What if this one-question exam was only worth a point or two instead of a whole homework grade? Is it fair (ethical, if you will) to use this kind of tactic to impose additional punishment on students who don't attend lecture? Clarification: Students who are absent (if intentional, extraneous circumstances aside) deserve to lose the points for the work they missed. However, this tactic is being used to additionally punish students solely for being absent; this is also why I posed different assumptions about attendance policy. A: I think that this is unprofessional, and is leaving the institution open to all sorts of action (up to and including legal proceedings, if it impacts on a student's progression, for example). For example, what if a student is unavoidably absent? If it's only "worth a point or two", then I don't think it's worth antagonising people in this way. The sarcastic note left on the door simply underlines how poorly thought-out this whole thing was... A: Note that at many Universities the "grade distribution" has to be announced in advance, and changing it later in the term needs often to be approved by chair. This closes the door for this type of idea, and opens the ground for appeals by students. On another hand, while the exams dates for final exams and midterm exams need to be announced in advance, we are often not forced to do the same for work which is worth a small percentage of the mark. Even if I don't use it, I have the flexibility of having few Quizzes during the term, without the date being announced in advance, as long as they are not worth too much and, most importantly, as long as I announce this at the beginning of the semester. And I had colleagues which announced at the beginning of the semester that there will be two surprise quizzes during the term(of course technically they were not surprises anymore), each questions worth 1-2.5% percent. And the students know in advance that by missing a class they might lose on those percentages... A: In my experience, many professors build a little wiggle room into their syllabi for this reason. For instance, professors may assign 10% of the course grade to "class participation". It is then up to them how they assess this. Some take attendance every day; some take attendance only on a few days; some use this sort of "fake quiz" approach. I know of one professor who included "Quizzes" as a category of points on the syllabus, and specifically announced that these quizzes would be the kind you describe: unannounced, trivially easy quizzes designed solely to check for attendance. She would have such a quiz on days when she noticed low attendance. I think the degree to which it is ethical or allowable under policy guidelines depends on hwo transparent the process is and how much the grade penalty is. If, for instance, the syllabus allots 10% of the grade for attendance/participation, I think it's totally legitimate for the professor to assess this via trivial pop quizzes, as long as the penalty for missing them all is no more than 10% of the overall grade. Taking the points out of the "exam" portion of the grade would be less defensible, but in practice I don't think it would cause a major stir unless the penalty was large.

Q: Can I transfer my PhD to a Masters I am pursuing my PhD and am in the first year of my program in Automotive Engineering. I completed my Masters in the same field, at the same school. I am having a tough time with my adviser and go into depression all time. I cannot take it any more. He threatens to take away my funding each day something I cannot afford. I am an international student and if I let go I will have to go back to my country and will be left with nothing. I wanted to know whether I will be able to transfer to a masters program from a PhD program. We have a Mechanical Engg. Dept in our college and the courses are common. They have a no thesis option and I can pursue my CPT and OPT. I don't know whom to pursue or call in the college regarding this. Hence I came here. A: Yes, in almost all cases, a PhD student can transfer to a Masters program. The person to contact is your department head, or dean. This is surprisingly common, and I've personally know several people who went on to very happy careers after switching to an MS.

Q: Doctorant (PhD student) vs doctorant contractuel (contractual PhD Student) In the French education system, what is the difference between doctorant ("PhD student") and doctorant contractuel ("contractual PhD Student")? A: In France (like other countries), there are several ways to fund a PhD student. A doctorant contractuel is a legal designation used to refer to someone who has signed a specific job contract called a contrat doctoral. This contracts allows universities to hire PhD students and describes the working conditions of the PhD student as an employee of said university. Note that, in addition to this contract, a decree (2009-464 in the Wiki link) can also modify the working conditions by stating that a PhD student funded with such a contract must spend 100% of his/her time on research activities. As a result, an additional clause must be signed to be allowed to do teaching activities. From what I know, this is the one crucial point to be aware of when proposing or signing such a contract. A doctorant is a just a term used to designate a PhD student, without any distinction regarding the nature and source of the funding.

Q: Free, open-source substitutes for Mendeley? Mendeley is (mainly) a proprietary social network to share basic citation data and research papers. see also Are there any free and open source substitutes for this service? A technical possibility: users could collect BibTeX data and a hash and share this information. It would be very useful to have such a free service because every journal provides the citation data in a different format. That includes false field entries, broken files and hidden download buttons on the website. A: The only alternative that comes to my mind is Zotero: It is open-source, it comes as a standalone application or as a web-based version with Firefox, Chrome and Safari connectors, it integrates with Word or OpenOffice, it syncs with the Zotero server, it has BibTeX export, and more. The Zotero standalone client is cross-platform and open-source (AGPL licence), and it can be run on its own or synchronized with the web version. The web service is free to use up to a fixed storage quota, with paid storage available, and there is an open-source implementation of the dataserver available if you want to roll your own. The local client stores its data in SQLite format so in principle your data is not locked in, but the database is relatively hard to trawl externally; however, since the client is open source there are relatively few future-proofing concerns. A: Docear Haven't tried it yet but https://www.docear.org/ seems to stand out as one of the leading open-source alternative to mendeley. Docear is basically a marriage of JabRef and Freeplane. It uses JabRef as a backend for its reference management and Freeplane to organize references, annotations you make in the pdf, and any other information (including images, links and crossreferences) in a mind-map. As the original author of this answer pointed out it is indeed open-source—licensed under the GNU General Public License. A: I really liked Mendeley's potential but got frustrated with both their pricing model (maybe I just never learned how to use the software correctly) and it consistently butchering imported BibTeX entries. I've been a pretty happy BibDesk user for a long time, it is true open source software, but unfortunately it has not been ported outside of the OS X environment, so this is only a qualified answer.

Q: Why is it reasonable to believe that this student handed in a term paper from another class? I have a student who has handed in a term paper from another class, only changing the title page, and he claims that he only put the due date for the current course's term paper on the cover sheet of the old term paper to remind him of when the new term paper was due. He claims he was then cutting and pasting (appropriately, of course) between the old paper and the new paper and must've gotten the two files mixed up. Of course, the "wrong" file (old term paper with new due date) was "accidentally" uploaded to our learning management system and he did submit the "correct" file two days later (that was extremely poor quality), but only after I pointed out the problem to him. Now he is claiming I am unreasonable because I don't believe him and have failed him for the course. We are about to go to a grade appeal at the department level. I was wondering if everyone on here could provide suggestions for why it is reasonable to stick to my decision, despite the student arguing very vigorously that I'm unreasonable, unfair, and even irrational for not believing this was "just an honest mistake". (Given my university's fondness for "student friendly" I may not be supported very vigorously by the committee.) A: I might be having a completely different stance on the topic, however I feel it needs to be thought about. The primary goal of a school would be to asses whether the student in question has achieved a certain level of competences. In order to test those competences you'd give all sorts of assignments to see whether the student has both competences AND skills required for their studies. As @Significance and @DanRomik mentioned before, filing the other paper can be seen as self-plagiarism. However, if you consider that filing this paper is invalid you could also say that he never filed any valid paper in the first place. Meaning he crossed the deadline that was given for this paper. School is a place to prepare a person to work at companies and more. So it would not be a bad idea to treat a student as if he were an employee. He filed his work late, couldn't meet the deadline and would obviously be penalized. Now since school is a place to learn from your mistakes you could throw him a lifeline. Rather than smashing him down, I'd accept his paper that was of extremely poor quality, but penalize the grade of this paper based on crossing the deadline. Now, in the end he may still fail due to the poor quality + crossed deadline. But at the very least he would have learned to be more punctual about his work. After all, being able to deliver good quality work on a timely way are some of the most important competences a student has to learn.

Q: Is it okay to include a very long appendix (for MS thesis)? I am currently doing my MS thesis and I have to include an appendix to describe a mathematical subject. However, I added extra details in that appendix and it is now too long. My Prof. suggests I better not include it "at all", or if necessary just make it shorter (though he admits that it is very well written and referenced). Is it unusual to include a very long appendix in a thesis? My thesis is now 150 Pages; 20 pages are for that appendix. A: This does not sound unusual to me. Just ask yourself, is there a possibility that the reader would need this? I have seen theses and dissertations with no appendices and some with over 50 pages of appendices. In my field, these are often filled with user study materials, source code, or raw data which can easily eat up many pages. I don't see any harm done with being conservative and including everything. In this case, I have seen people list two versions of their thesis online, one with and one without the appendices.

Q: Serving sweets at an oral qualifying exam What are your opinions on serving sweets at an oral exam. The only people attending would be the exam committee members. For my master's degree I was at a school where it was customary for everyone to bring cookies and coffee at oral exams or presentations. However, now I'm at a school where generally nothing is served at seminars unless the speaker is visiting from another university. My lab-mates mostly only brought some bottled water to the exam for the committee members. One, also made a pot of coffee and brought it to the exam. My exam will be later in the afternoon and I know that two of my committee members will have been in another exam prior to the start of mine. I feel like it would be nice if I brought a box of candy or something along with water and maybe coffee for refreshment. I'm a little worried about them getting impatient or in a bad mood as the exam draws on. One of my lab-mates however thinks that I would be taking it too far and I may offend the committee members. EDIT: this was marked as a possible duplicate. I believe it is different because the other question was referring to a defense where anyone could attend. Providing refreshments in such a case could be seen as an attempt to get more people to attend. In my case no one was allowed to attend and I was afraid that a committee member could see this as me giving "gifts" in hopes of swaying them. A: Over here in the UK, we do not provide anything as a candidate, if necessary the research group's secretary knows what to do. Anyhow, I would agree with your friend, I would provide only water, and then if applicable I would ask a senior lecturer (such as your supervisor or head of group) in the research group to invite the examiner(s) for tea/coffee/beer and/or lunch.

Q: Petitioning to leave PhD program with terminal masters due to illness in family - how should I expect my request to be handled? I'm currently debating whether or not to stay in a PhD program. My mother was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer last week. While I'm waiting to hear back from further analysis/prognosis, has anyone had any experience with this type of situation. I'm currently in my second year and would very much like to leave with my masters. In my department, you have to "petition" to the department to receive it and its pretty much up to the sole discretion of the faculty members. Are they likely to give my masters, considering I have been in the department for 2 years? What type of information can they ask me for? Can they ask for certification of my mothers illness? When should I tell them? Thanks. A: Talk to supervisor: First of all, you need to talk to your supervisor about this, and see how much leave you can get. Very unfortunately, I see this every year many students have the similar situation. Aim for 6 months leave first: You shouldn't just drop the whole thing. I would suggest you to take a leave for 6 month, and then extend it if necessary. Don't Lose Touch: I know it is a hard time, but do not just drop the whole thing completely. You can still read about the subject you are working on. Through university's VPN, you can still read research publications and be up to date. Little Note on Big Picture: We all go through these sort of issues somewhere in our life time. We shouldn't make career suicide, or get into hard medication through drugs because one of our family members is passing away. We need to be strong, somewhere in our life time our parents pass away; and even though it is sad and hearth breaking we need to carry on and keep fighting.

Q: What advantages do libraries offer over the internet for doing a literature survey in Mathematics or CS Currently my literature surveys do not involve trips to the library and I am wondering if I am missing out on something important. What sort of material/knowledge can the library provide that I would miss on google scholar. Thanks A: Almost none. I recently wrote a research survey, while on sabbatical at an institution without a physical library, but with extensive electronic subscriptions. I never missed having physical library access, even for papers dating back to the 1840s. (In fact, the historical literature was more likely to be freely available than papers from the 1980s.) Occasionally I had to use my home university's VPN to get access to a different subset of the electronic literature, and there were one or two books that I had to download via bittor—sorry, that I had to borrow from colleagues down the hall. Yeah, that's it. A: My situation is different from JeffE's. I had been looking for a couple of old CS books (in automata and switching circuit theory) published in 1960's. I finally found them in an institue library. According to the librarian there, the two books I wanted to borrow had not been checked out for at least two decades. This is just me. My research area is not very active. I wanted to find info about what was done in those books which were not cited in modern literatures. I knew the existence of the books because I saw them when I was a graduate student in 1970's. If your research area is modern and active, I guess you don't need to go to the library. Internet would be good enough. By the way, my personal experience is that Google is sometimes better than Google Scholar. A side note. My feeling of reading books in the library is different from staring at the computer screen. A: Don't assume that a library is a building. Libraries provide the funding and infrastructure that lets you access online journals and databases, just as they used to provide you with hardcopies and card catalogs. If you think that Google scholar provides the same degree of access you are sorely mistaken. And no, I am not a librarian, but I am very grateful that I have access to a good library. Now, the question of whether libraries should be forced to pay for access to journals is another question.

Q: How can I tell my advisor that I'm not going to work for free? I am an undergraduate student of Physics in Spain. This year I have to prepare my bachelor thesis and I also applied for a fellowship with the same advisor to do further research on the same topic. I wasn't awarded the fellowship and I told my advisor about it but he wrote me an email a few days back telling me to try to finish the thesis early to be able to start with the collaboration. Given that I wasn't awarded the fellowship I just want to finish my thesis and I don't want to do further work (which was discussed under the hypothesis of me getting the fellowship) for free. I thought that this was clear to my advisor when I told him that I didn't get the fellowship but it seems that it is not the case I don't want to sound rude when telling him this because I still have to finish my thesis with him and I wouldn't like any kind of problem between us. How could I tell him that I'm not willing to work for free? A: I would suggest that you repeat that you did not win the fellowship and ask if he has other funding available, "because I am still very interested in the work, but will need to find paid work instead if I can't get a stipend for this collaboration." A: I think you should act as soon as possible. There are other sources of funding, and there may still be time to get hold of one. So, in that light, just send an email saying that you can't afford to work for free. Add that you thought it was clear from your previous discussions, so offer your apologies. And, finally, say that you are willing to try to apply for other grants. A: I think the famous 'Let the truth set you free' applies here. If I were you I would handle the whole situation as following: Meetings: I would have regular meeting with your supervisor to keep the conversation going and get the feedback from your supervisor. Mentioning The Collaboration: Then, in one meeting I would say to him/her that I can not do the collaboration as I need to find a paid job. I would say this face to face, and not through email; so he/she would get the whole thing without any false judgement.

Q: When updating a preprint on arXiv, should I update my affiliation? I have a preprint on the arXiv, a couple of years old, and will shortly be re-submitting an updated version. The changes are fairly limited — more than just typos, but not so much as to change the section numbering, let’s say. I and a co-author are postdocs, and have moved institutions since the original version. Should we update the author affiliations as given in the article, or leave them as they are? The article hasn’t been published and probably won’t be any time soon (it’s expository, and a bit difficult to find a suitable venue for). However, it’s been fairly widely read and cited as a preprint. The field is pure mathematics. A: Your affiliation as far as the work goes is where the work was done. You should perhaps add a footnote giving your current location, and (obviously) update any contact information given. Or do it the the other way around: give current affiliation, and in acknowledgements or at least a footnote state where the work was done. I've seen both.

Q: How to deal with a professor who grades assignments and exams incorrectly I currently have a (graduate) professor who clearly does not understand the material she teaches at the level required by the course. This normally would not be a problem - I'm fine with educating myself via textbook - but unfortunately her inaccurate knowledge also extends to grading. I have no problem with studying hard for a difficult class, but I can't possibly know how to predict the exact incorrect ideas that the professor has and incorporate them into my work. My first response was to very, verrrrry diplomatically approach the professor and talk to her about the questions - but she immediately became angry. I then talked to my advisor, who said that this isn't the first time she's heard of problems with this teacher. My advisor said that her only idea is for me to go to the head of the department, but I'd really prefer not to do this for two reasons: Relatively small department; it's likely that this professor has a good relationship with the department head, and I would look bad It seems like a "nuclear option" and I would prefer to avoid it (if possible) This is my last semester of graduate coursework in molecular biology, and I have never had a problem like this before. I feel like my only option is to drop the course - without it, I would still have all my coursework requirements fulfilled - but I don't want to have a W on my transcript. I have been unable to come up with a satisfactory way to resolve the problem. Possibly helpful additional information I have talked to other students in the class; all (of the six I have talked to about the issue) have experienced similar problems in grading I have confirmation from other teachers that my answers are correct, but they don't want to confront a colleague (and I can't fault them for this) I don't dislike the teacher; she seems like a relatively OK person. I just wish she understood the content better The teacher can't possibly have a grudge against me, since I had never met her before the class I'm very interested in what this class covers, which is why I took it despite not needing to I have taught some of this material at the undergraduate and graduate level; I understand it's difficult stuff. It's more the teacher's attitude towards grading that is the problem. A: Not a definitive answer, since I’m a postdoc with comparatively limited experience of such conflict situations, but I do have a few suggestions. They aim to: maximise the chance of getting better grading without ruffling too many feathers; give you solid documentation if you do end up escalating the complaint; minimise the embarrassment in case it turns out that you’re misunderstanding something and your lecturer’s grading is defensible after all. If you confront the teacher again, do so by email rather than in person. This has several advantages. Firstly, it allows you to look over what you’ve written and make sure you’re phrasing everything as tactfully as possible. Secondly, it gives her time to (hopefully) get over any initial anger/embarrassment and give a considered response. Confronted on a sensitive topic in person, it’s easy to get flustered and defensive, and entrenched in a position it’s difficult to climb down from later. Finally, if she doesn’t respond constructively, you have the exchange in writing, so are on firmer ground for escalating the issue to the department head. If possible, phrase the question/request so that your desired outcome is also palatable for her. If you argue that she’s fundamentally misunderstanding the course material, she’s pretty unlikely to accept that — admitting that one’s wrong about something is already difficult, admitting one’s incompetent is a whole lot harder again. Instead, you could say that (e.g.) you have learned some of the material previously, and so know it with a different viewpoint from hers (and maybe give a couple of examples here, ideally with sources in well-established literature) and you would like to check that this angle will also be acceptable for work on the course. I’m not saying you should say exactly that — but look for something that allows her to concede that your understanding is correct, without having to admit (to you or herself) that hers is wrong; and down the line this makes it easier for her to improve her understanding of the subject, rather than remaining antagonistic towards your suggestions. On the other hand, if she does defend her current approach, this gives her a chance to lay out her case more clearly and carefully. If you do this and she still doesn’t engage constructively, you’re now on very solid ground to escalate the complaint. You have a written record of your good-faith effort to sort this out tactfully. You have specific examples where she has doubled down on her misunderstanding of the material. (I’d suggest double-checking these with your advisor or another faculty member to be absolutely sure you’re right about them.) Even if the head of department supports this teacher in general, it will be comparatively difficult for them to dismiss the complaint or paint you as a troublemaker. A: My recommendation would be to withdraw from the course. I'd almost go so far as to say you have a prime opportunity to do so in this case: it's not a required course, and you know you can learn it on your own, and you have other things that take priority with your time. Granted how defensive she got (and noncommittal your advisor was), the overall trajectory seems to be some combination of (a) getting into an ongoing and escalating dispute with her, (b) contending with department interactions over an extended period, (c) triggering end-of-course grade disputes, etc. This threatens to be a huge sink in your time and emotional energy, so I would recommend simply sidestepping the whole issue as the best option. Now: The one thing that makes me hesitate with this advice is that I don't have very deep experience with what a effect a "W" has on a PhD transcript. Personally, I have a whole bunch of W's on my undergraduate transcript (albeit none in my major), and they have never been an issue or mentioned in any context: not on applying to graduate school, getting industry employment, or getting a full-time lecturer position. Edit: Thanks to @vadim123 for the comment: "Nobody cares what you have on your PhD transcript. They care about (1) what you've published, (2) what's in your thesis, and as a distant third (3) your GPA. Oh, and (0) what your letters of recommendation say about you." Sounds about right. A: Find out the final-grade appeals process in your department/at your university. (Where I am the procedure is department-level, but that may or may not be the case where you are.) Keep every assignment your professor has graded; separately, write up where and how the grading is incorrect. Follow the procedure to the letter. Be apologetic and accommodating (as you have here) rather than angry. Explain that you did try to raise this with the professor directly, and the result was not positive. This deflects the situation into being about your grade, which is impersonal, rather than a personal dispute between you and the professor, which you (probably quite correctly, graduate departments being as clannish as they are) wish to avoid.

Q: How to screen out candidates for faculty jobs who don't know the subject I teach physics at a community college and have been on a number of hiring committees for tenure-track jobs. Usually we interview about 6 people for such a position, and of those, usually something like 3 of them show a lack of knowledge of the subject in the interview. When I say a lack of knowledge, I mean that they can't do easy freshman stuff. We will ask them a question that is posed as a request for them to pretend we're a class of students and give a short explanation of something, so it's nominally a test of their ability to teach it, but in reality we find candidates who simply don't know it. These are people who have a PhD from an accredited school. (We hardly ever interview people who only have a master's.) [EDIT] (To clarify, I'm talking about very basic knowledge, such as understanding what Newton's laws mean. We're not asking candidates to recall obscure trivia. Personally, I don't really care whether they know which is Newton's 1st law, 2nd, or 3rd. I'm talking about candidates who actually demonstrate elementary misunderstandings of Newton's laws. Since a lot of academia.SE users are in math, I think a good analogy would be if someone applied to teach math, and that person didn't know the chain rule -- which I have heard from colleagues in math departments at community colleges is also common. Continuing this analogy, the issue is not that they fail to remember the term "chain rule." The issue is that if they're asked to differentiate sin cos x, they can't do it. They do silly things like attempting to use the product rule, as if the sine was multiplied by the cosine. Or they throw up their hands and won't try, even if the committee tries to help them out.) Are there good strategies for screening these people out at an earlier stage, without needlessly losing too many good candidates from our pool? Here's what we're already doing: We require applicants to submit undergraduate transcripts, and we are less likely to interview people who have poor undergraduate grades (such as Ds and Fs in math and physics). We prefer applicants who have graduate degrees from more prestigious schools. We prefer a candidate who has taught a wide variety of courses to one who has only, e.g., taught mechanics. Undergraduate grades do seem to correlate with what we see in the interview, but it's also possible that someone started out their undergraduate education with a weak high school background and then overcame that disadvantage. There is also the difficulty of comparing different countries' grading standards. We require graduate transcripts, but I find those hard to extract useful information from. We are currently only asking them to give the names of references, but not to supply letters of reference along with their applications. Would it help to make them send letters? You would think that someone with really weak competence would never get into a good graduate program, and therefore we could just not interview people who have degrees from low-prestige programs. However, our pool doesn't usually include a ton of people who have degrees from the best graduate programs, and we have also seen people in the past with degrees from renowned universities who nevertheless displayed major gaps in their knowledge, as well as highly competent people who got their degrees from no-name schools. A: Presumably your interview is doing a good job screening out the individuals who you feel "don't know the subject" and you are trying to screen them out prior to the interview. I think a reasonable screening tool could be a a phone interview. You should probably conduct between 10-15 phone interviews to find the 6 candidates you want to interview. While I say "phone interview", it is most often now a "Skype" interview. These interviews could be as short as 30 minutes and should be no longer than 1 hour scheduled back-to-back such that they all get completed in two long days. The phone interviews I know about have had 3-6 people (presumably the majority of the committee) present, but I think depending on department politics that you could reduce it to a smaller group (maybe even just the committee chair). While you could simply focus the phone interview on the questions that cause candidates the most trouble during on campus interviews, given 1/2 your candidates have difficulties recalling key concepts of "random" classes, you may want to help them out a little. If you require that applicants submit a sample syllabus for freshman physics and another for an upper level elective, then the phone interview should focus on the teaching statement and sample syllabus. During the phone interview you should also mention some of the other key classes of you department that they might teach on. If a candidate is truly clueless, this will not matter, but good candidates will realize that they need to brush up on those classes for the on campus interview. In summary, an inability to talk about a syllabus the candidate has written would be your screening tool and the hints during the phone interview will help you minimize throwing out potentially good candidates. A: You think that asking one or two questions on the spot in an interview is a good way to assess an applicant's knowledge of basic concepts in the discipline. However, this sounds like a relatively poor approach to me. There are basic principles of psychometrics that are relevant here. Basic principles of item response theory are relevant. First, people differ on a distribution in latent ability (i.e., knowledge of the domain). Second, items differ in difficulty. Third, even with these two bits of information, there is a random component. So if you want to measure latent ability in applicants, then you can improve your assessment by having more items. For example, give them a written test with a bunch of items. More importantly, I think you need to be be careful with assuming that most people can recall basic facts from the undergraduate curriculum. If you teach that curriculum, then you are likely to recall many such details. If you don't teach such material, even if you've learnt the material and would know how to look it up and solve problems when required, it may not be available to immediate working memory. It might be easy to relearn and if you were given the task of teaching a class related to that content, you may still be able to do a good job presenting it. In summary, you may want to think about the degree which being able to recall undergraduate knowledge at the time of hire is predictive of job performance. I imagine that it might be relevant, but I also think that a whole range of other indicators would be relevant too. So in addition to trying to measure the construct better, I'd recommend that you treat it as one of several indicators of potential job performance. A: There's a famous test in the CS world called "FizzBuzz" that companies these days are using to efficiently screen out candidates that managed to get degrees without actually learning anything. FizzBuzz (and its variants) focus on what are considered to be core concepts that any programmer regardless of language should be able to do in a matter of minutes. As reported, the results are astounding. While material on the effectiveness of FizzBuzz in recruiting has never been extensively peer-reviewed (to my knowledge), coming from that world and even being a self-taught programmer I can tell you that anyone worth their salt should be able to complete the test in at least one language, even if the solution is inelegant. It sounds like you're running into a similar problem in your neck of the woods, and are already onto a similar solution. I'd recommend trying to find that core set of problems that any undergrad should be able to solve one way or another and use that as your screening. Let them use a textbook, maybe hint at a list of possible problems ahead of time as others have mentioned so they aren't caught off-guard, and be willing to help the way you've been doing. But make the first interviews (possibly over Skype as was also suggested) quick and to the point so you don't waste time. Establish either the base knowledge, or at least the ability to pick up on it quickly while under pressure, before proceeding to full, in-person interviews. Those tricks have worked in my industry, hopefully they can help you in yours. We've seen that it doesn't matter who graduated with what degrees and has what recommendations or grades, the ones who can actually live up to their title and do their job are sometimes the least-decorated. Edit: These "quick" interviews can be done on Skype in at most 30 minutes, possibly more like 15 depending on the questions. You can knock out a lot of candidates in a short period of time before dedicating serious resources to second-round interviews (which may still be online and only last an hour), assuming you think the process through in the beginning.

Q: How can I keep up with all the important advances in fields related to mine? Being updated with new ideas in many research fields is impossible, seen the diversity of research topics and the strong relations that exists between them. Most of the researchers in the world, are needing to interact with many fields and to be up to date with the trending ideas in each one of them. Example: if one researcher is specialized in remote-sensing. Being up to date in this field is possible with some effort. But, this field is related to many other fields ( computer vision, image processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence..). Any new idea in any of these fields could directly impact remote sensing as well. The problem is that this researcher cannot cope with the high speed changes that occurs in these fields. This example is applicable to many cases as well. And many of you are facing the same situation. I am in the beginning of my PhD, my thesis interact with many research fields. I have to summarizes the trending ideas in many fields to conclude the state of the art of my thesis. Following the traditional method by accessing the literature of each field may out passes the goal of my thesis. I want to know if there is a mean to know the trending research ideas in one research topic and the statistics related to them that are gaining some interest. Is there any mean to track advancement in a research field? A: There is no easy way: First step would be to talk to your advisor. Second step would be to look at recent issues of the main journals in your field. Third step would be to attend some of the main conferences in your field, listen to the talks and talk to the people. After that you make up your mind what your opinion the trending issues are, and repeat steps 1 and 2 (and maybe 3) to try to confirm that.

Q: How do universities (particularly medium sized ones) plan their master course schedule? I'm a student at a university of around 20,000 students (using the semester system, just to be clear) and it's currently summer/fall registration planning time, a time for me which is more stressful than any of my classes, with all of the various requirements that must be met, especially since I must fit in gened, major, and honors courses in my schedules. As hard/stressful as it is for me, it must be an absolute nightmare for the university. It's not a large enough school that they can just offer 20 slots of a specific course (this happens, but only for nearly universal courses like comp I), and the majority of courses required for my major are offered once per year, in one section only. How on Earth do schools deal with the logistical nightmare that must be planning hundreds of courses while avoiding conflicts which would make it impossible to meet requirements on time and making sure enough slots for each course are open? A: At my institution, this planning is done separately by each department, which reduces the number of courses from "hundreds" to "dozens". In my department, it's done by hand, by the chair and a couple other experienced faculty members, with the aid of some spreadsheets. They are familiar with the requirements of the degree programs offered within the department, and some of the most common conflicts with other departments. (For example, calculus is taken by many first-year physics majors, so we try not to schedule it at the same time as the intro physics lab.) Over time, various courses have settled into "traditional" time slots which are known to work reasonably well together, so we use caution when deviating from tradition. This does mean that students with more unusual programs (double majors, etc) may find conflicts between required courses which can be difficult or impossible to resolve. These have to be handled case-by-case; in some cases the department may waive or modify requirements that can't reasonably be satisfied.

Q: Can we modify some part of a standard benchmark? Will the results be accepted by the community? I am researching on spinlock synchronization method used in parallel applications. Unfortunately most of the standard benchmarks in the parallel computing area use another type of synchronization method called mutex locks. I am thinking to replace mutex locks in these benchmarks with spinlocks and get the results? Will the results be still considered by the scientific community if I inform the modifications done to the benchmarks? Will that be a valid claim? Any pointer in this matter is highly appreciated. A: As always when using code you do not own, you need to check the licensing terms for the benchmark. Do they prohibit what you want to do? Assuming that is OK, I would distinguish two uses of a benchmark: Report and publish results as results of the benchmark. That should only be done if you have conformed exactly to all relevant requirements, which will probably prohibit the type of change you want to make. Publish a paper in which you compare and contrast the standard form of the benchmark with your spin-lock variation. You could treat the spin-lock version as a new benchmark based on the standard one, documenting your changes. I know I would be interested in the results. If the number of threads the hardware can run simultaneously is at least as high as the number of application threads, do we need all the overhead to let a process sleep while waiting rather than just spinning? This sort of question becomes more interesting as hardware improvement becomes more a matter of adding hardware threads than of making each thread run faster.

Q: How can you change a bad course run by somebody else? I am a (very) junior post doc in a prestigious university, and for the last three years I have taught a first-year undergraduate level course on statistics, designed to be taken by biochemists. By "teach", I mean "provide classes going over a set of problem sheets written by somebody else". My background is in particle physics, and I find that the course, written and lectured by a very senior academic, is exceptionally poor. For example, the "standard tables" of numerically integrated distributions that he provides to the students differ to the values one gets in R, or using other modern numerical methods. Additionally, his model solutions include things such as assuming that radioactive decay is normally distributed (it isn't, it's a classic example of a Poisson process), cherry-picking data to fit a regression line to, and not making explicitly clear how the different types of expressions vary for the t-distribution when the samples are assumed to have equal or unequal variance. He treats parametric and non parametric tests as interchangeable in answering questions, and the style of the questions themselves boil down to "guess an expression and put numbers into it". There is no mention of Bayes's theorem anywhere, nor of modern statistics. The students do not like the course at all, and I find that I spend a large portion of the time filling in gaps in their knowledge, and saying things like "The way answers this question is as follows", even if I am relatively certain that in doing so he has made a tacit assumption that might not be correct. Whilst admittedly teaching statistics to biochemists is notoriously difficult, I feel that the course as stands does not prepare them for a research career (they can't pin-the-statistical-test-tail-on-the-donkey-of-experimental-design) and actively avoids adequately discussing several quite important subtle points. I have made most of these points to the senior academic in charge several times. He does not respond to them. He recently discovered that the notation he uses is inconsistent with that of the rest of the literature on the subject, and wrote an email to the people who deliver his classes saying something along the lines of "I have been teaching this course for 20 years..." and then stating that would essentially ignore this fact. When he went on sabbatical for a year, another academic (less junior than I, but still junior) entirely re-wrote the course, and it received much better reviews. When the lead tutor came back, he ignored the changes, and reverted back to his stock material. This is incredibly frustrating. I do not know how adequately change anything, without committing career suicide and going to person in charge over the lead's head. I do not wish to make a fuss, but I really feel that it isn't very professional of me to have to start every class essentially ranting about what the students have been taught, teaching them how to pass the exam, and then telling them "fun things" that I think they should know at the end if there is extra time. I want to teach a course that adequately prepares individuals for their future, not very much for the past. What is the best way to go about getting out of this situation without either (a) getting me fired, (b) getting the senior academic fired or retired, or (c) creating a very public fuss and generally being a bother? A: I commend you for caring about these issues. When you have a permanent position somewhere, I hope that you will push for the sorts of improvements you described. For the moment, you are in a position of essentially no power, and it is unlikely that anyone will listen to you. You tried the only potential solution at your disposal: you raised your concern to the academic in charge, and you found he doesn't care. As such I recommend that you do the best job possible within the limits of your authority, try not to make any enemies, and try not to worry about this much. If a similar situation occurs later in your career, when you are likely to have more clout and authority (and possibly less pressure to publish), you might push harder for change.

Q: Should I ask for a recommendation letter from a professor who has a bad non-academic reputation? I am an undergraduate interested in applying for graduate school in a physical sciences program. I have a good relationship with a few of my professors (it's a very small department). I would like to ask if they would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for my application. There is one professor who I respect greatly and who has told me in the past that he would be willing to write a glowing letter. He has a great academic reputation; he publishes the most out of all the professors in the small department and in (what I have heard) are top journals in his field. The trouble is that he has a poor non-academic reputation. For instance, a quick Google of his name will yield a page full of news articles regarding his troubles with the law. These are the top results from the search. Would a poor public reputation like this have a negative impact on the effectiveness of the reference? In theory, I know it shouldn't. Yet I am aware that real life hardly ever works as 'in theory'. EDIT: the "troubles with the law" involve an impaired driving conviction. For context, this is in North America. A: To me, the key question seems to be whether the type of misbehavior is something that is likely to be seen as impinging on their judgement as an academic. For example, if the person was known to have been prosecuted for fraud in a company they ran, that would be quite likely to affect perception of their honesty and judgement in recommendation letters. In the example you give, however, I think that an impaired driving conviction is likely to be viewed as a form of misbehavior largely orthogonal to conduct and judgement as an academic, and therefore not likely to be any problem for you.

Q: Do most postdoc offers include travel funding? My mathematics department (a research-oriented department at a non-top school in the United States) has recently made a postdoctoral offer to a strong candidate, and I very much hope the candidate comes. I have learned that the offer doesn't include any money for travel. Since his eventual success on the job market would presumably depend on how widely his work is known (among other factors), I believe that he (and essentially any other postdoc) should travel extensively to conferences. At least, he should have the opportunity to do so. Some conferences have funding for attendees, but many don't. Unfortunately, none of us have much grant money we could spare for this purpose, and in any case my feeling is that this should come from my university. Is it typical that postdoctoral offers are made without any travel funding? And if yes, is it typical that candidates are able to successfully negotiate for some funding? A: None of my postdoctoral positions had travel funding in them, nor have I heard of anyone getting such funding. There are several factors to mitigate this, not all of which may be available in all situations. The postdoc can learn how to apply for grants and other things, which can provide the necessary funds for travel or other research needs. If he is invited to give talks, then the inviting institution/department/professor will often cover travel expenses and offer a per diem. He is likely coming there to research with specific people. These people, being experienced, established professors who can attract promising postdocs, likely have grant money of their own, some of which could be allocated to the postdoc's travel costs. This is often what pays for the previous point: professors can often use grant funds to cover the costs to bring in speakers. Exceptional postdoc candidates are likely to be offered exceptional postdoc positions, with fancy names like The Harry Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship in Dynamical Systems. These often come with bigger paychecks, making it easier for the postdoc to afford such outside costs. A: My postdoc in math at a top-ranked U.S. school did not come with any dedicated travel funding. Some amount of funding was still available through the department, but not much - perhaps one domestic trip per year. This was not advertised as part of the job, it was just something that the department chair could arrange. The postdoc was not funded by a grant, nor was it one of the "premier" postdocs at the school, which was large enough to have several "levels" of research-oriented postdocs. A: I did two postdocs (in math), and I had some travel money with both of them. One was an NSF postdoc at Columbia. I do not recall if the NSF provided travel money then, though as mentioned in the comments they currently do. In any case, the department provided some travel money to postdocs. The other was in Japan funded by the JSPS which had explicit travel money attached, though it was barely enough for a single conference. Most conferences I wanted to attend as a postdoc provided funding so I don't think I used most of my travel money from Columbia. The department where I am now (a large state research university in the US, but not a "top department") provides some travel money for our postdocs (and faculty and grad students), which we can also supplement from our own grants. I'm not aware of any conventions that say the department should or should not provide travel money, though I don't think it's typical that travel money is made as a part of an offer. If your department normally provides some travel money to faculty, it seems reasonable to provide some to postdocs as well (maybe a smaller amount, or under certain conditions). I think it's a reasonable thing for a candidate to ask about before making a decision, but I wouldn't try to negotiate for it to be put into the formal offer (which is usually made by the university/college rather than the department anyway).

Q: Importance of PhD pedigree when applying for tenure-track jobs How much weight does a department's hiring committee give to the prestige of a candidate's PhD program when looking to hire tenure-track professors? Does someone coming from a top 5 university with a short publication record have a better chance than someone from a ranked ~50 school with a better record? A: In philosophy in the US, graduates of the top 5 programs got 37% of the total jobs. Graduates of the roughly 75 programs not ranked in the top 50 all together got 12% of the total jobs. The impact of prestige on hiring is overwhelming. http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/04/on-sample-data-on-this-years-tt-hires.html Edit Spurred by xLeitex's comments below, I did a bit more research and thus am editing my answer to provide a few more links I've found, since I think the topic is both important, and it comes up somewhat regularly on the site. First, Baldi 1995 found that "job placement in sociology values academic origins over performance." Second, Burris 2004, 250 argues that the "social capital" involved in coming from a prestigious department affects not only one's placement into a first job, but also one's subsequent academic career. Third, Long 1978, 902 argues that scholarly productivity is "facilitated by department location" but that "productivity, as indicated by measures of publication and citation, plays an insignificant role in the selection process." Certainly the picture that these three articles present makes it looks like prestige of one's PhD granting department isn't merely correlated with getting a successful academic career, but is an important causal factor. A: I haven't been on a tenure-track hiring committee, but while I was on the searching end, I was told that pedigree was a factor (not necessarily a big one), because people in other subfields had trouble judging how good a candidate's work was, even given their publication history, but could evaluate their pedigree. This effect may be more pronounced in fields like math, where there are big variations across subfields in how much people publish.

Q: What are possible legal ways to obtain a textbook for free? I'm not sure whether this is such a great question, and I'm not looking at illegal ways, but is there any way to obtain textbooks for free (legally)? Answers very much appreciated. A: Here are a few ways that you should look into: Check your university library If your library doesn't have it, ask them about doing a interlibrary loan Talk to your professor. They can be insightful and understanding about these things so they might be able to lend you a copy. Search online for ebook/PDF versions. I found that an old edition of a statistics book was available on the author's website for free. If you are out of options with obtaining it for free then you can usually find a used copy at your book store or online for cheaper. Books certainly can be pricey, so in the future it helps if you factor these costs in when you apply for student loans/scholarships. A: From the point of view of teaching staff: sure there are, I get them all the time. If you are the person in charge of a university course, you can often ask the publishers for an instructor's (or evaluation) copy. Some of them will only give you (time-limited) online access, some will ask you to send the book back if you don't adopt the book officially in your syllabus, but most of the times it's a free copy for good. Sometimes I even had sales reps come to my office, or send new editions to me unsolicited. A: Move to Switzerland. It is legal up there in the middle of the Alps to download copyrighted material for private use. The definition of "private use" includes (according to the linked article) "any personal use of a work or use within a circle of persons closely connected to each other, such as relatives or friends" and "any use of a work by a teacher and his class for educational purposes". It is still illegal to share copyrighted material using Bittorrent, because it works in a peculiar way: it does not simply download the files, but also uploads parts of it for other users of the network.

Q: Obligation to quote source of grammatical knowledge Do I need to name a source (a website for example), which lists grammar rules for a language? I would like to know if this is considered one of these goods, which cannot be owned and thus needs no quotation. For example a website lists prepositions, which cause a specific casus in a language. If I take those prepositions and list them in a document for that casus, do I then have reference a source, or can I assume this to be something not owned by anyone? What about example phrases? They're also part of daily language and should not be owned by anyone. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with having to quote, but I'd probably prefer inventing my own example phrases and such. I don't lack the creativity. A: I would like to know if this is considered one of these goods, which cannot be owned and thus needs no quotation. Academic citation isn't about ownership. It's not about copyright. It's not about intellectual property. It's about allowing the reader to know where you got your ideas. It's about recognizing other people for their work. In many cases different people might describe the grammar of a language a bit differently. They might even describe different dialects of the same language. Different dialects of the language might treat the same prepositions as treating a different casus. Maria Brenda wrote "The Cognitive Perspective on the Polysemy of the English Spatial Preposition Over" – a whole book over a single preposition and what it does in different cases. If you cite a specific source for your list then a reader can understand of why your list looks the way it does. If the care they can go to the original source to understand how the list got created. A: A routine list of basic information does not need a citation: for example, you would not need to cite a list of capital cities of US states, nor would you need to cite the source of a simple list of English prepositions. However, if you cited them in order of frequency of use, you would cite the source from which you took that information, since it is likely not to be considered "basic information." However, citing examples that you have taken from another source is good practice, and something you should probably do. (Again, the exception is something so basic or so short that it can't really be considered plagiarism: for example, you can't really claim plagiarism to not cite "the book is red"; but if you use a hundred such examples from the same source without citing, it gets murkier.)

Q: Plagiarism if different term used? I wrote my bachelor thesis but now I saw that from one source I mixed up a term, instead of term that was used I accidentally used a different one. this happened because I translated that from a language. And I saw that I put my quotation marks at the wrong place, I quoted only the last half of a sentence but I accidentally put my quotation marks more at the beginning of my sentence, even tho the beginning was not a direct quote from the source. Can they now accuse me of plagiarism????? A: Screwing up a single small quotation in the manner that you describe could not reasonably be considered plagiarism. While yes, it is true that you did not correctly attribute some words, from your description is appears that the attribution is not so much missing as misplaced. Moreover, while I cannot entirely judge without reading the actual text, it seems likely that any reasonable reader would likely be able to tell from the context that you are not attempting to claim the quoted text as your own. It's still good practice to go back and correct, if your institution allows it, but don't worry about being accused of plagiarism over a single typo-level error.

Q: If I believe a student lacks the preparation to pass, what should I say to them? I'm an Advanced Level math teacher in my country. I teach two courses Pure and Applied. Its duration is 3 years. At the end of three years, there is one exam for the whole three years. Only 1200 students are selected for universities out of 50000. I told (Privately) two of my students that they are going to fail the August AL exam if they are not going to work hard. They have no knowledge of their syllabus. (They joined my class three weeks ago). I myself told them the truth and they stopped the class telling me that I'm a very discouraging teacher. I could have told them "Yes you can," but as a teacher I told them the reality. Is it better to tell them that "You will get an A" or to tell them the truth? This course contains 40 lessons and it is a 3 year course from which now only five months are left. A: With only three weeks you can already tell they are bound to fail in five months? Yes, that is too discouraging. There is a middle ground between "you will get an A" and "you will most certainly fail", i.e., If you want to pass, you'll need to strengthen this and that and do a lot of exercises on the material of the class. I know August looks far away, but actually, it will come sooner than it seems, so I suggest you start working on this right away. By assuring them they are going to fail you have discouraged them from even trying, and possibly planted a predisposition: they know they will fail, you know they will fail, so they will fail (or you will fail them, or they may think you graded them too strictly to fulfill your prophecy). Your task as a teacher is to help them learn as much as possible, and at the end, assess if they have learnt enough and grade them. I was recently teaching some programming courses, and some of my students were really bad. I knew one of them wouldn't be able to finish the tasks on time, but he took a bunch of tutorials and painstakingly went through them, trying to understand every step of the way. At the end, he didn't know enough to pass, but certainly learned more than if he had just given up at the first try; and he knew that was a possible outcome. A: In general, it is not a good practice to make negative remarks about a student in front of others. Any such feedback should be provided in private. Also, since your course is only three weeks old, you may not have enough information to gauge a student's ability. A: You may use the same trick that support staff and sales representatives use: avoid using expressions like "no", "cannot", "sorry but...". Instead you turn it around like so: "In order to achieve this goal, we need to do the following...", and then list all the things that are required for it to happen. If you follow this pattern you have been honest and given full disclosure about what they need to do, without explicitly discouraging.

Q: How can a masters student compensate for lack of solid foundation in basic math and CS fundamentals? I am a graduate student in Computer Science (in the U.S). I did my undergraduate study in India. My fundamentals in Math and CS importantly are shaky. I often feel insecure in class where my peers seem to understand in depth about fundamentals that I have been taught differently (now I think about it -- mediocre standard at best). I have been working my way through math using Khan academy. For CS I study them as and when needed. But I still feel a major gap in my approach and would like to get some suggestions on this. A: That you realize this is good, but the appropriate approach depends on lots of individual factors. The people who are likely to be able to give you the best advice are your professors/advisor. They probably know best where you are at and what is most important for you to succeed in their program. Also, informing them that you are aware of your deficiencies and are trying to make up for them should improve their opinions of you, and also make them more willing to help you succeed in the program. That said, here are some things that can help: start tutoring or TAing for lower level math/CS classes (I first really understood eigenvectors when I was tutoring other students in linear algebra), going through texts on your own (exercises are the most important!), taking/sitting in on undergrad classes (some of our grad students with weak backgrounds do this), typing up your own notes on this fundamental material, finding people (students or faculty) you can ask specific questions. Also: read up on the impostor syndrome (on wiki-p and here, say). You may have it. A: Take the relevant (even low-level) courses to fill out your knowledge is probably best. You might consider asking the teacher to attend classes without grading, or ask them to suggest material for self-study and self-assessment. There are lots of freely available lecture notes, even classes with complete homework and exams (sometimes over several years) and often complete solutions. One thing I found out the hard way about self study is that (as far as viable) just-in-time learning is best. Seeing where you will apply the material helps with motivation, avoids getting lost in unproductive side branches, and "hands-on" learning is more fruitful. Besides, "learn this because I might need it" can be a mistake (it is never used), happens too soon (when the use comes around, you have all but forgotten about it), or (even worse) a better technique comes by, and you'll have to learn that on-the-job anyway. Yes, this will take time. Perhaps even lots of it. But as I tell my students, better leave late with a degree than soon with nothing.

Q: Do reviewers become biased about research papers written by authors of a previous low quality paper? In single blind paper submissions, reviewers can see the author names and affiliations. Suppose two papers are submitted in a conference, one of them is fairly well written and the other one is a low quality paper. Also, one or two authors are common in both the papers. If both the papers go to same reviewers for review and reviewers review the low quality paper first, do they become biased while reviewing the fairly well written paper? Do the chances of selection of the good paper become less? A: I would distinguish between two papers in parallel (as in your example) versus a history of bad papers. If I'm seeing a good paper and a bad paper that share an author, and I don't yet know that author well, then the bad paper probably won't affect my opinion of the good paper too badly (unless we are talking really embarrassingly bad). I'll have a mixed opinion, but I'm still forming it. On the other hand, there are certainly some authors who have built up a history with me such that I see their paper and think: "Oh no, I hope they've learned from last time." A: In psychology, there is the phenomenon of "anchoring" - a first impression colours the rest of a transaction, whether it is negotiating a price, opinion about personality or other issues. This indicates that, yes, a bad first paper which captures the attention of the reviewer can have a detrimental effect on how subsequent work is seen. If it is a novel researcher, the memory of the name may not be retained, so, the effect might be milder, but if there are two papers in one conference from the same author, and reviewed by the same people, that effect may indeed hold. This is a reason why many conferences espouse double-blind reviews (although I am not a friend of this for other reasons which are outside the scope of this question).

Q: What should I do if I am having a very hard time with a course and the professor teaching it, but he is the only one who ever teaches this course? I am into my second semester as a part-time graduate student in Information Science. I work full-time as a web developer, so juggling work and school is hard but manageable. My first semester I found to be okay, and I had a 4.0 at the end. I take 2 classes at a time, as that is all I can take on with a job right now. However my second semester is halfway through now, and one of my classes is fine, but the other is very difficult. The difficult class is a computer security class. On rate my professor, I saw before the semester that he had bad ratings (1.0 across the board and rated for hard tests). I wanted to avoid him, but he is the only professor who teaches security courses at my school. So I tried it, and within the first weeks of class, he cancelled two lectures in a row! He wanted us to study the material on our own, which for me is difficult as I typically learn better with a teacher in front of me. As the semester went on, I found the material getting so hard that I couldn't even understand most of what he was talking about. He reads off of a powerpoint slide and doesn't explain further. He is the kind of professor that doesn't answer emails and pushes any questions off to the TA. So I have to email the TA for help, but the TA only offers help 2 hours a week (and they are when I am at work!). I have a C+ so far in the class, which to me is very bad. Are computer security classes typically harder? What should I do with this class? I am afraid to withdraw because I will just have to retake it with the same guy, plus my job is paying for these classes and might have an issue with it. Does anyone have grad school advice in general with what I've said? A: You can: Ask around and try to find someone who has done well (or is doing well) in the course, who you might be able to hire as a tutor. Form a study group with other students in the class. Look for recorded lectures on YouTube from another professor at another university covering the same material. Buy a copy of the textbook. Study it. Ask good questions about things you don't understand, e.g. on Computer Science Stack Exchange or Information Security Stack Exchage. Drop the class, do some self-study, and then take it again later after you're more comfortable with the material (as suggested by vonbrand). You haven't said how much time you have to study outside of work and lectures, but it may not be enough. You can't expect to grasp all the material you need for your graduate coursework just from sitting in class for a few hours - real learning requires time, and independent work.

Q: How can writing a Review Paper possibly help in the CV of a undergraduate student? I'm a student of computer science amd I've written a reseaech review article on Fibonacci Sequence which will be published next month in a math journal. All I wanted to know is how will it help in my academic profile and what affects will it make in my CV? A: Any work of quality adds value to your profile. If I refer to your question, even the act of writing a review paper, if performed by the rules of the art, is something that you can show and discuss about. Addtionnaly, if the work has received some sound academic validation (published in a reputed journal) of course this adds to your resume. It adds sometimes more if the topic of your work is close to your background, which seems to be the case here. Beware though: it is not common for an undergraduate to be able to write correctly a review paper, esp. on a well-paved topic such as Fibonacci numbers. So, to be blunt, if your paper was accepted almost without review in a local university journal, it might weight less. Or even negatively. This really depends on who reads your CV: some will be impressed by the: "published in the Mathematical Journal of Mathematics". Some others may have a look at your paper precisely. If they find that the content is of low level, they might have a more negative opinion than if they were not aware of your paper.

Q: How can one prevent a co-author from publishing without consent? I have been reading about several cases in which a co-author submitted a paper without the consent of another author (for example in What to do after I was named as co-author on a paper, without my consent?). Consider a situation where one co-author goes on to publish without my consent when I am the first author. I know the rule for most publishers would legally prevent a co-author from doing this as the submitting author requires consent from all authors. However, it seems that in practice many journals have no practical processes in place to prevent this. The co-author would likely submit to an Elsevier journal. It seems that the Elsevier submission system (EES) would allow them to submit and go through the whole process by themselves without informing me if they wanted to. Moreover, it seems that for Elsevier journals, only the submitting author is informed of advancements through the process, so that the co-author could indeed go through the whole process without other authors knowing. If I only find out when it is published, it also seems that I have nothing to do about it. It seems that a retraction would only do more damage to my career as the paper will just stay online with my name and also be tagged as retracted. There seems to be no way if disassociating yourself with a published paper. I am a bit worried to see that in fact there seems to be no real barriers to a co-author doing something like that. Note again that I am referring to the Elsevier process, though there may be other publishers with a similar process (and potentially the process is not like this for all Elsevier journals). To summarize, it seems that, at least for certain journals: A co-author could submit a paper without the consent of other authors and the journal would not inform or ask explicitly for consent from other authors. The co-author could go through the entire process, even up to publication, without any other author explicitly being asked for confirmation. Other authors in such a case would not even be informed of the submission or status changes of the paper If eventually the paper is published, the only option unaware authors have is retraction, which is likely to do even more damage to their career than the fact that the paper has been published prematurely. Am I correct in my assessment? it seems like if this is true for even some journals, then the publishing process for such journals has been designed quite poorly. I would like to know how, as an author, I could prevent such a thing from occurring to me. How can I prevent a co-author from publishing without my consent? I am aware that the best means is having a good relationship and communication with the co-author in the first place and I will do the best I can in this regard. But I would like to know what other practical means I have of preventing this. A: Write an email to the editor. As you said, submission needs formal aproval of all coauthors so if you tell the editor or publisher that this is not the case, the paper will not be published. Publishers usually assume academics are grown ups and the likelihood of person naming people as co-authors against their will is very low and thus the hassle of sending multiple emails or having everyone involved in the online submission is not worth the trouble. Keep in mind that some articles have up to 1000 authors. A: I have recently received an e-mail from an Elsevier journal, which went like this: Dear Dr. Roland [...], You have been listed as a Co-Author of the following submission: Journal: [...] Corresponding Author: [submitting author] Co-Authors: [all co-authors] Title: [the title of our manuscript] If you did not co-author this submission, please contact the Corresponding Author of this submission at [e-mail address of the submitting author]; do not follow the link below. ... There is a number of journals which send out similar e-mails (although Elesevier does this to advertise ORCID and not to ensure that all co-authors are aware of the process). I agree that the editorial systems of all journals should send out automated messages to all co-authors (and demand a confirmation), but unfortunately that's not the case. If I didn't agree with this submission, I would of course confront the submitting author as advised, but I would also inform the editor-in-chief ASAP. There is no way to protect yourself against other people attaching your name to a manuscript without your knowledge. However, something like that is actually quite rare. A: I haven't had any bad co-author experiences like this (thankfully), but have friends who had, and have had some "less than optimal" experiences of a similar nature. The best single piece of advice I've come up with (for myself) is to address co-authorship expectations early and often. If there are plans to turn an analysis into a paper, talk about who will be on it, the order, the expected roles, etc. the first or second time you meet about it. That gets expectations out in the open. If it's a multi-person project with several papers, talk about that (who will use which variables, co-author which papers, etc.). Then, stay connected with the group (particularly if you're junior). Check-in with the leads often, do whatever work you can with/for them, etc. So they know you're still interested, active, and available. Sometimes, people fall off papers because they just lose contact with their team. Other times it's for poor performance. So don't hesitate to ask your seniors and peers what else you can do to help (and if what you did was helpful). For example, you might feel like you're being helpful by giving a lot of comments on a draft, but if none of them are useful, and all you do is comment (not edit), you might start to be seen as the person who just drags out the writing process without adding much to it. If you're senior or the money-getter, you can do that and stay on the paper. Not so much if junior or in the middle. Another thought is to make yourself indispensible. Learn one part of the data, one technique for analysis, one lit area better than everyone on your team. That will make you the go-to person for that element for all papers to come. I hope this is answering your question. I've been assuming that your co-authors are all working in good faith. That is, that if you get dropped it's because they accidentally dropped you or you really weren't doing your job well. There are malicious people out there, too though. Short of literally holding their hand, there's not much you can do if they wan't to publish without you. If that happens, take it up with the journal immediately. If you're at the same institution, take it up with your department head or other ombudsperson. If you have a close friend on the paper, ask them what happened. You may find out it's an oversite, and they add you to the paper. But it's better not to let these things fester. Good luck!

Q: Is it plagiarism to use an online tutorial as the basis for completing a programming assignment? Let's suppose that you were assigned a programming project, which is considered from your teacher/professor, not easy. However, you manage to find an online tutorial, that guides you step-by-step through the process needed (so the source code you have written doesn't have much difference from the one on that tutorial). The final solution is based on this tutorial, but you have also added your own information, corrected some minor errors, etc. I don't know if this matters, but you know exactly what every single line of your code does, you are able to explain and answer complex questions, etc. Is that considered plagiarism, and if yes, why? If not, how can somebody support that on a teacher/professor? A: Using online material to learn is not plagiarism. This is a great way to learn (e.g, worked examples and subgoal labeling) and is a common way for instructors to try to teach something. Am I plagiarizing every time I use a common design pattern? No. However, copying and pasting code from online is. It gets a little fuzzy when working on simple assignments that can be found easily online because it could be weakly argued that you are recalling it from memory. I would definitely not be concerned about this, especially if you think you understand the code and were not trying to cheat. If you're genuinely concerned, you could even discuss it with your instructor and they might realize that they are not spending enough time discussing a certain process or giving you enough practice material. EDIT: Based on your clarification in the comments, if this is something more specific/arcane and not a tutorial on something general, then just cite it. I have done this in my programming courses before. I added a comment at the top of my code linking to the material I referenced and gave a very brief description of what it is and how I used it.

Q: Someone reported cheating during a quiz, but I didn't catch it myself There was a weekly quiz in a TA discussion section I led today. During the quiz I was writing things I planned to talk on the board and didn't pay attention to students. Then one student suddenly said to public "Frank, we're not allow to use note in the quiz right? These(point to a region that contains 2-3 people) people are using notes." I looked back and confirm with that students about where she points to, but the people she accused cheating(if accurate) already put away the notes so I got no direct evidence. Should I do anything in this scenario? Quiz only worth 0~2%(0% if it's lowest quiz grade, 2% if not) of overall grade if that matters. Update: The case was also reported to the Professor today and according to Professor's email it looks like the case is more serious than I expected and I'll have to explore a little more. Thanks for all responses so far. A: You're the teaching assistant. Inform the professor and let them handle the matter or offer you guidance. That's their job. In this case the evidence for cheating is tenuous at best, so I suspect nothing will be done against any of the students. I've known more compelling cases of cheating to go reasonably unpunished, and one case of very blatant (and easily proved) cheating that was handled with just a stern admonishment and warning from the professor. But you (and the professor) would rather the professor hear of the matter through you, than the possibly salacious gossip of the students. So what what really needs to be addressed is: Always keep your eye on the students during exams/quizzes. As much as you want to believe that they're all perfectly moral and self-policing people (and quite probably most of them are), or that they can't possibly fit in cheating during "brief" windows, there will always be exceptions, and you owe it to the students who are such from giving such a clear opening to those who aren't (for whatever reasons). You can't prevent all cheating all the time—it comes in a lot of forms, and some people are really good at it—, but this was easily preventable. You may find yourself needing to apologize to the professor for this lapse, though I wouldn't get too worked up over that. Most of us have made such a mistake at some point (although not all of us may be aware of it), and the minor value of the quiz helps take the edge off, such that a simple apology and recognition of the error is sufficient to make things right. A: Perhaps my opinion is less valid given I have only tutored groups of students, and have not yet had formal teaching experience. But, again, perhaps a recent undergrad student opinion would be helpful. In my opinion, you can not reprimand students for cheating without witnessing it yourself, or having a very good reason (backed up by solid evidence) to penalize them for cheating. Obviously, it seems likely this student that called them out was probably not lying, unless she's a sociopath. So, they either were using notes, or this other student saw what she thought were notes, but actually weren't. Either way, you can not really punish the students without further evidence. Academic dishonesty is a serious accusation that can tarnish a student's reputation for the entirety of their academic career. Evidence is a must. However, I don't think it would be a problem if you just point-blank asked them if they were using notes and deliberately cheating.

Q: Is it acceptable to contribute a poster to a conference without actually attending? I have a poster presentation that I cannot attend but I have prepared a poster to tell my friend to post for me. Is it common to do a poster presentation at a conference/meeting without being there in person? I have been to a quite a number of conference and this seems like a norm. A: Without knowing the particular field or conference: No, this it's not common to have a conference poster without presenter. It often happens that poster are on display for the whole conference and nobody stand by their side to explain them and this may give you the impression that there is nobody there to present them. However, usually there is one slot called "poster session" where the presenters are supposed to be with their posters and the all other participants are supposed to walk around and get into discussions about the posters. However, more importantly: There may be a rule on attendance stated by the conference. It may happen, for example, that if some poster had no presenter, the paper that belongs to an accepted poster will not be published in the conference proceedings (or removed from the online proceedings).

Q: Should I warn a professor about his bad internet security practice? A relatively old professor from another institute "forwarded" to me, using his work email, a work-related message he had received on his Gmail account. However, he actually saved the entire Gmail webpage and attached it. A saved Gmail webpage may contain personal information and should not be shared with others. He is based in a distant city and I didn't meet him in person (yet), but we work remotely on the same project. Should I care and tell him about this bad security practice? How? A: If this was a one-time thing and you don't know this person very well, I would avoid bringing it up. Once you know this person fairly well or communicate with them on a semi-regular basis, then sure, in your next email to the person just put as a note at the end of the email that they might be cautious about including the entire webpage. The concern is that it might be off-putting to someone if they don't know you well and perhaps this professor actually verified that no personal info was included. A: I think it is first necessary to evaluate the actual risks involved in such practice. Forwarding an entire email web-page is indeed a bad habit in terms of security, but it does not necessarily point to specific vulnerabilities (like remote code execution, injection-based attacks...) with a clear risk assessment. My point from the above is, given the circumstances, it's hard to articulate the exact risks caused by this incident. If this is an isolated incident, especially if you don't have a relatively close relationship with this professor, I would strongly discourage you from bringing it up. Keep in mind that it's hard to express the right degree of sympathy through an e-mail, and therefore, you might come across as picky, arrogant or even rude. (This is especially true if you're emailing someone who isn't familiar with you personally) EDIT: I also agree with @Austin Henley's answer, especially the last part: "he might have actually verified that no personal info was included" A: You shouldn't do this, because there's no point in doing so. If this person isn't tech savvy enough to be able to properly forward an email, they're certainly not going to be able to understand a subtle security risk like this one. As long as he's not doing something egregious (like sending you his password in plain-text), don't worry about it and just be glad that he didn't print out the email and snail-mail it to you.

Q: How to treat papers or other work from dyslexic students? I know that as a student with dyslexia you get all kinds of benefits such as extra time for work, exams, access or licenses to spell checkers, etc. (Never used or been offered any, not that I needed it.) However, I cam imagine that by the time you graduate you would be expected to have a competence level of at least a certain degree. I myself am currently graduating for a bachelor's degree in Business IT. While the focus here mainly lies in IT, I have been told that my use of language is seriously sub-par for the degree despite knowing of my dyslexia. Now, I have been told that my work is well above average (average of 8/10) but that due to my use of language, the grade doesn't reflect the work. Having teachers fail me fully based on language has become quite common for me. In particular my use of the Dutch language; I should note English is my second language. Just to clarify, the spelling is not the problem, the way I build up my sentences is (think of starwars-yoda). While the text can be understood, it's not something you can breeze through with a martini like some other papers. So as the final question here: How should students with dyslexia be handled? How would one get them to improve on their language? Should we even need to help them improve their language? Other than just redirecting them to some dyslexia institute. And, how should their work be looked at? Edit: To clarify, I'm interested into how both students and teachers alike could approach this. Not just myself personally. A: The disabilities office at my Univ (large state univ in the U.S.) strongly advises that instructors not attempt to improvise accommodations for students with disabilities, whether self-declared or documented through the disabilities office. Their point is that we (outside the disabilities office) are not at all experts in such things, in the first place. Rather, the disabilities office will discuss with faculty the possible sensible accommodations, and in effect negotiate something. Faculty should not "get creative" and take initiative. A significant point is that, although the circumstances or environment or timing or... for exams can accommodate, there is apparently never any notion that the grading rubrics should accommodate. That is, it's absolutely not that lower standards are applied to the output, but that the situation in which the output is produced can be modified. Indeed, it is not that we expect less in such cases, after all!

Q: To which point is a paper considered as a "student contribution"? I am a PhD student, in the process of submitting a paper and I was asked to check (or not check) a box to state if : This contribution was solely written by students and/or doctoral candidates. This paper was solely written by me as first author, with my supervisors as co-authors for reviewing. It deals mostly with measurements and their interpretation, which were done by me exclusively, the only non-original content is a figure I'm citing from another paper. However, my supervisors reviewed this paper, and also gave me advice during the research. Is this sentence to be interpreted drastically (meaning I should not check it since the work is done by a supervised student, and not student(s) exclusively). And in a more general way, to which point would a paper be no longer considered as "student contribution" ? This may seem obvious but I'm not familiar with publications processes since it's the first time I submit something. A: In my experience, such declarations are typically defined in terms of authorship. Thus, you will see, for example, a prize to be awarded for papers with a student first author, or for papers with only students as authors. I would therefore generally interpret "solely written by" as meaning "all co-authors are." If you want to be certain, however, it should not be any problem to request clarification from the organizers.

Q: Is it allowed to ask for help in community for thesis? I'm writing on my master's thesis. A specific part causes some troubles and I hadn't any progress here for several weeks. I'm now considering to describe my problem, my ideas and my accomplished work so far in detail in a community and ask there for help. Would that be plagiarism, if I got some help from the community? So I would be using someones idea. The thing is, my problem is very domain-specific, so I can't really generalize it and ask at anonymously. My adviser already tried to help me, but still I'm not really making progress. A: Plagiarism is when you use other people's ideas and fail to give them credit. So if you make it clear that an idea came from someone else, and credit them appropriately (with a formal acknowledgement or a citation), you will avoid plagiarism. Of course, in order to be acceptable for a degree, your thesis will still have to contain a sufficient proportion of ideas that are your own. Before discussing the details of your work with others online, you should ask your advisor whether it's a good idea to do so. It's possible that your advisor specifically wants you to work out certain parts for yourself. Another concern is that sharing your ideas increases the risk that someone else will carry out your research before you do - in most cases, this risk is outweighed by the benefits of sharing, but your advisor needs to agree.

Q: Where to publish research if I do not want a peer review process? I have a few papers, one of which is on a topic that, after thorough checking, has not been researched from this particular angle before. My question is where can I publish this without going through peer reviewed academic journals? I only have my undergrad, and am looking to publish the work to make myself competitive for a PhD finance program. The paper is on real estate finance. I just need a quick- one, two, you're published! Will finance programs look highly on this, or will they ignore it completely? A: "…a quick- one, two, you're published!" That's not how it works. What works is: Make it a publicly available preprint (online repositories like arXiv, a preprint series of some institute, university, maybe via your personal website or blog…). Submit to some peer reviewed journal that complies with papers that are available as preprints (and there are journals that do not cost you anything; you will not get "open access" for free, but in many cases the preprint can stay freely available). Put the paper in your CV and add "submitted for publication". Then the paper will be visible and checkable and it also shows that you know how scientific publishing works. A: To the real question behind this, "will such non-peer reviewed papers count towards getting into a PhD program?", the answer is "probably not at all" (I'd be interested in proof that you can do worthwhile research that is regarded as such by people knowledgeable in the field, i.e., reviewers), "and it might even be harmful" (it looks an awful lot like trying to game the system, and cheating in any form is frowned upon). A: You could put it on your blog, but it will probably be ignored. Part of the point of peer review is to help make sure that what you have published is new knowledge and not just a rehash of old things. So some experts in the field are asked to check. There are other reasons for peer review, but those might not be relevant here. Why do you want to avoid it?

Q: Is it plagiarism to reference a fictitious source? I'm dealing with a student essay that references three books in support of a claim. None of the books referenced have authors listed, and, based on the contents of the student's essay, I can't find any information on these books online. I'm fairly certain they don't exist, but I'm not sure what to call this beyond academic dishonesty. I read this from the Nebraska Methodist College: Other acts of plagiarism are more limited in scope, but are nonetheless cheating. If you decide to make up a quotation or other material and an associated in-text citation, this is plagiarism. If you change or invent the author of a quotation, an idea, or a statistic to make your paper appear to contain more numerous sources, this is plagiarism. I've run into a few other university plagiarism guides that mention the citing of fictitious sources as plagiarism, but I'd like to know if this is standard, fair, or legitimate to label this practice plagiarism and not just academic dishonesty. The conflict is this: the student isn't citing these presumably falsified texts directly, but they are referencing finer plot points and characters in them. That is, they are talking about the fictitious dilemmas of the fictitious characters as a way to support their thesis. To me that's dishonest and shows a lack of integrity. I'm grading students on a rubric that awards points for organization, analytical treatment, and language use. If I treat this as academic dishonesty maybe I knock the person's grade down in the rubric criteria related to analysis, but if I treat it as plagiarism I'd give the student a zero. A: For example, Merriam–Webster defines plagiarism via to plagiarize, which it defines as: : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source This does not include inventing a quotation, which is in fact sort-of the opposite of plagiarism: passing off one’s own idea as somebody else’s. Other dictionaries agree on this and so does my understanding of the word plagiarism. Moreover, defining plagiarism so broad makes the term rather useless and almost equivalent to the umbrella term academic misconduct. The reason why we have a word for plagiarism is to differentiate a specific kind of misconduct, not a specific severity. The conflict is this: the student isn't citing these texts directly, but they are referencing finer plot points and characters. To me that's dishonest and shows a lack of integrity. I'm grading students on a rubric that awards points for organization, analytical treatment, and language use. If I treat this as academic dishonesty maybe I knock the person's grade down in the rubric criteria related to analysis, but if I treat it as plagiarism I'd give the student a zero. I fail to see why you would be more lenient about academic dishonesty than about plagiarism. I don’t fully understand what you mean by “referencing finer plot points and characters”, but I would classify what you are describing as fabricating evidence, which is roughly as grave as plagiarism. I say roughly, because I see no point in ranking the severity of those misconducts in general and the severity distributions of individual instances of those misconducts strongly overlap. What is important at the end of the day is whether you are reasonably convinced that the student in question did not just work sloppily, but intentionally deceived the reader (i.e., you). The aspect of intention alone suffices for awarding them zero points, in my opinion. A: I kind of like Teddi Fishman's (Chair of ICAI) definition of plagiarism from her paper “We know it when we see it” is not good enough: toward a standard definition of plagiarism that transcends theft, fraud, and copyright: Plagiarism occurs when someone uses words, ideas, or work products attributable to another identifiable person or source without attributing the work to the source from which it was obtained in a situation in which there is a legitimate expectation of original authorship in order to obtain some benefit, credit, or gain which need not be monetary. I agree with Wrzlprmft: let's not muddy the water and include all sorts of academic misconduct in a definition of plagiarism. Plagiarism is one form of academic misconduct; all forms of academic misconduct should incur a sanction, which will, of course, differ according to the individual circumstances. A: Plagiarism refers to a specific kind of dishonesty--in a nutshell, pretending to have written something that was actually written by someone else. Fabricating sources doesn't meet that definition, but it isn't necessarily a less serious offense. Plagiarism in academia is wrong primarily because it is fundamentally an attempt to gain a grade that wasn't earned. Grades are typically given for a student's writing, and if a student tried to deceives you into believing that a paper is the student's work when it really isn't, then that is a serious offense worthy of a zero. So what was the effect of the deception in this case? If you were giving grades primarily for doing research, and the student tried to deceive you to into believing that research had been done when in fact it hadn't, then the offense has essentially the same effect as plagiarism, and it merits a similar penalty. If, on the other hand, the research itself was only a minor factor in the grade, then it might be a lesser offense. I believe that the penalty still needs to be sufficient to deter dishonesty in any form, but you might reasonably decide that reducing the grade to zero is harsher than would be necessary in this case.

Q: Is it possible to do research in cell/molecular biology without doing experimental work myself? I am currently a master’s student hoping to shift into a PhD. The thing is, I hate the lab work. I love all the literature review, designing experiments, troubleshooting problems and data interpretation. Is there some sort of work around or is this just part of paying my dues? The most likely answer that comes to mind is: “suck it up and pay your dues”, which I totally get, but is there an area somewhere that negates the benchwork, or is that just years of climbing until I get to be a PI (well, if I get to be a PI). A: I don't think it is possible or constructive to avoid lab work in your field at PhD level. The point of a PhD is to train you as an independent researcher, and therefore you need to be familiar with all stages of the research process, including data collection. There are plenty of fields for which data collection does not involve lab work, but unfortunately for you, cell and molecular biology are not among them. Going through the process of lab work is not just important in terms of getting the data, it informs the rest of your work. I don't believe you will design an experiment as effectively if you are not familiar with exactly how long the different processes will take, where the challenges lie, where errors might creep in, and so on. Likewise, you are better able to interpret the data if you understand how it was collected. This stuff can be learnt to some extent by reading/talking to people/being given a demo, but by far the best way is to do it yourself. "Paying your dues" may be a part of it - certainly, someone needs to do the legwork! - but I would encourage you not to look at it that way. At this stage in your career, it is highly valuable to you to gain an overview of the research process, even if later on (and you might not have to wait until you are a PI) you specialise in a particular phase of research. EDIT: Others have pointed out fields, such as bioinformatics, in which it is possible to avoid lab work. Perhaps I was considering "cell and molecular biology" too narrowly. Nonetheless, bioinformatics still ultimately relies on data, and so I still believe that gaining experience of how that data is gathered is highly valuable. A: If you want to avoid laboratory work, you need to go into an area of the field where you develop a valuable expertise that is not laboratory work. That may then put you in a position to be a valuable collaborator for people who do engage in laboratory work, rather than a parasite upon them. Fortunately for you, in this computational age there is quite a lot of such work. Examples include molecular modeling, *omics, bioinformatics, metabolic engineering, sequence optimization, and many others.

Q: If a college/ university made false claims on its website, should you still consider studying there? The school I'm taking about here is regionally accredited. The problem is, on its website, it falsely claims to be a member of two different international academic associations. Should I look for a different school just because of this? PS: I asked these academic associations through email if the school is any way related to or affiliated with them at any time. They gave me a negative reply. A: Are you sure this isn't a mistake or misunderstanding from either the university or the association? I would recommend contacting the department or university. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt with this type of thing but are you sure this is a reputable school? Accreditation is a vague thing and varies wildly in how it is regulated and who accredits it, especially across different countries. I'm a little surprised that you contacted the association directly. I myself never pay attention to professional associations and don't know anyone who does (at least not enough to investigate the claim). But again, if this is important to you, I would recommend giving the university a chance to clarify by contacting them. You must remember, the people making the website or handling the accreditations most likely aren't the professors teaching the courses. I would also recommend looking into the reputation of this university more if this is indeed true. EDIT: Many diploma mills/for-profit schools are "accredited" but that doesn't mean they are reputable, so beware.

Q: Why does the director of graduate studies want me to keep my TAship, even though I obtained a scholarship of my government? I am a first year math phd student. I could get a scholarship from my government and notified the director of graduate studies of my department (which is now my provisional advisor) that I wish to decline my TAship position for the next term. He advised me to think more about it and told me to think about it 2 more weeks. He told me that I should keep being a TA. Well, my TA duties are a burden and I do not learn nothing of math from it. Besides that, it drives me crazy. I do really detest having to deal with those undergrad students. I prefer to devote myself to learn and then do my research. But my advisor wants me to think more about it, Why? If I am not a TA, I could have more time to work on my advisor's projects. Besides that, I do not think my department would have any trouble to find another TA. My school is not Harvard but it is ranked among the 30 best of USA, so there is a lot of people that want to be a TA there. Why does my advisor want me to keep being a TA? A: You need to ask your advisor, since nobody else can say for sure what his reasoning might be, but here are some possible explanations: You do a great job as a TA, much better than whoever might replace you, and the department would be unhappy to lose your services. You do a poor job as a TA and need to take this opportunity to improve your teaching skills before they interfere with your career. Having more teaching experience on your CV or better teaching evaluations may help when you apply for jobs, even aside from whatever you might learn in the process. If you "detest having to deal with those undergrad students", you may be miserable working in academia. It's much better for you to figure out now whether/how you can handle teaching successfully without having it feel like a huge burden. Delaying confronting this issue isn't necessarily in your best interests. A: Why not just just ask your advisor? They said something and you don't understand it - asking them for clarification is the obvious next step, whether it's about mathematics or anything else. With that said, your program might have a requirement that all grad students serve as a TA for some number of courses, and your advisor wants you to get the requirement out of the way now; if nothing else, they are probably trying to help your career by ensuring your teaching record is not empty when the time comes to apply for jobs. P.S. While your temperament about teaching seems to have improved since (what I assume is) your previous post, I strongly recommend you reconsider using the word "detest". If I were your student and were on the receiving end of such an attitude, I'd feel quite bad and certainly not motivated to learn anything more about mathematics. On a more selfish note, if it becomes known in your department that you have such a negative attitude about teaching, it can affect the teaching letter that will be sent as a part of your future job applications. A: Another potential reason is that you said you could get a scholarship next year, but could is different from will. Is this scholarship guaranteed? If not, your DGS might be advising you to wait until you are 100% sure you have funding before you decline the TA position.

Q: Evaluating red flags in potential advisors' scientific production and impact, past students, research interests and personality In the next few weeks I'll need to pick an advisor for my master's thesis (in a certain subfield of mathematics). I've narrowed down the choice to two (full) professors. Prof. H I've known Prof H for two years, took two courses with him, and got the top grade in both of them. He is a very good, peaceful, and punctual person; and he is clear and precise in explanations. He has much academic experience (being over 60 years old) and has supervised many students (at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level). However, I've noticed that his former PhD students (10, currently still assistant professors) are not much productive (and mostly publish with him, working on his research program). I've a marked interest in a certain sub-subfield, but he works in a different (smaller and, in my opinion, less interesting) sub-subfield; he is quite productive and in the last 30 years he has covered an impressive (and well-organized) research program (in which I could easily find a thesis topic) and he has grown to be a household name in his area of specialization; but his research, although very solid and original, has not been exactly groundbreaking and his latest works (which are all of high quality and quite innovative) have not been very impactful (in terms of citations yet). Prof. K Regardless of the choice of the advisor, I will take one course taught by Prof K. However, I don't known him personally yet and therefore I'm not familiar with his “style” (although I've been told that he is generally a good person). He also has many years of experience (being slightly under 60 years old) but has supervised fewer undergraduate and master's students (some of whom changed areas of research for their higher studies), no PhD students, and several Post-docs. He works exactly in the sub-subfield I'm most interested in and has produced many solid papers over the last 30 years; comparatively, I'd say that his work is less innovative and much less systematic than Prof H's but maybe broader; in fact, while Prof. H has expanded, organized, and generalized in an original way a couple of (small) research areas (also highlighting connections with other areas), Prof. K has mostly applied a vast sophisticate toolbox to solve several interesting problems and created only few novel "tools" slightly adapting the existing ones (although I must note that Prof. K's area is essentially much more “scattered”). Prof. K does not seem to be quite an household name, but has given substantial contributions, is quite active in the community (and his former advisor was the expert of the area). Working with either of them has some pro's; however, there are some alarming red flags about both of them. I have a hunch that working with Prof. H may be smoother and simpler; however, Prof K research interests are much more appealing to me (and aligned to what I'd like to do during my PhD – for which I'll apply to another institution anyway). Assuming that both of them would accept me as a student, to which red flags should I pay most attention? What factors (also other than the ones I've talked about) should I take into account the most when making the decision? A: Well, first of all, this is a master's thesis. I would argue that it doesn't really matter that much, because you will at most be working with this person for a year or so and then leaving to go somewhere else. Given what you've written here, I wonder why this is even a question for you. You know Prof H and have taken courses with him and done well. You know that he gives good mentorship and feedback. You know that his former students end up very successful. You know he's productive and well-known, which could be helpful for getting into a PhD program. The only question here is does he have enough subfield knowledge in your area to advise your thesis? Also, if he has 30 years of research and is a household name, how is his work not impactful in terms of citations? You don't become a household name as a scientist unless you've written some papers with impact. Prof K might not be a bad choice either. The fact that he has had no doctoral students is irrelevant because you're writing a master's thesis. But why go for an unknown if you already know Prof H and know that he's a great advisor?

Q: Back door route to top research schools? Is there a way to gain admission to these institutions by getting paid experience prior to applying? I have a friend who graduated from a top 150ish school in the US and did moderately well (biochemistry, 3.8 GPA). He had some research experience on hand during his undergraduate career, but didn't have publications. He had about 2 year's worth of research, and maybe ~5 poster presentations at conferences. He did a summer internship at a medical research institution where he now works as a research assistant (after he graduated). After catching up with him and talking, he admitted to me he could not get PhD admissions to top tier universities with rudimentary statistics straight out of underad. He spent about 2 years working at said medical research institution, got I believe 4 papers under his belt, took his GRE, did moderately well but not amazing, and applied. Now he's been receiving admission into institutions such as MIT, Stanford, etc. Institutions by his own admission that he could not get into with a snowball's chance in hell before he started working/publishing. I was curious, what was the catalyst? Did paid experience prove he was worthy of the skills and not cheap undergraduate level (aka solidify he was "the real deal")? Was it the papers? Was it him now riding the prestige of his employer and not his undergrad? Was it him being 24/25 and a little more mature/realistic in interviews as opposed to the bulk of his 21 year old competition? Was it showing graduate schools that his 2 years of succeeding at his institution meant he's more likely to succeed into graduate school life? This whole idea got me curious if it's possible to massively increase one's chances at admissions to higher tier or even above average graduate schools in the sciences if one is patient and willing to wait enough to gain experience once they're done with their undergraduate career. Academics of SE, could I have your input? A: I wouldn't call this a backdoor route. It takes time to get quality publications and letters of recommendation yet undergrad goes by fast. Your friend also wasn't from a top university which makes these opportunities even harder to come upon. There are a lot of details missing here (what were his letters of rec like, quality of publications, etc.) but it sounded like your friend did some good work and got accepted because of it. Whether you do this work during undergrad or after you graduate, doesn't necessarily matter.

Q: Am I not meant to be a software developer? The first time I remember wanting to be a software developer was when I was in 8th grade doing a future career project. My first exposure to programming was in high school when I took AP computer science. I did horrible and failed the AP test, but I still wanted to pursue it in college. So I did. I am currently a junior in college with a 2.4 gpa and have done poorly in almost all my CS courses. It takes me much longer to complete programming assignments compared to my peers and I am always last to finish during programming labs. I wouldn't say that I enjoy programming, but I can tolerate it. I think about switching majors at least once a day since freshman year of college, but I could never bring myself to do it. There is nothing else I'm more interested in and there is just something in me that wants to be a successful programmer, but I constantly idealize how much easier it would be if I was doing something else. I am a believer in the notion that you have to be good at something by practicing it over and over before you can enjoy it, not the other way around. However, I am terrified that I will never improve as a programmer. Is the fact that I've done so poorly so far a sign that I should look into studying something else? Any thoughts will be appreciated. A: Lots of people (including me) get conflicted about what they want to do with their lives while in college. So, the first thing I'd like to say is that your uncertainty is quite normal. But, if you're getting anxious about it, you need to fix that. I'd like to suggest that you consider going to an academic counselor at your school. Find one that you trust to say all of the things that you have said here. This is just the sort of thing that they are trained for. I, personally, got my music degree a long time ago. I didn't do very well at first. I thought I wanted to be a famous concert pianist, but I really didn't. I did poorly in school at first, but eventually I decided that I didn't care about being famous, I just wanted to play the piano well and get my degree. I improved and managed to make it through as a solid 2.5 student. I got to be a good pianist and musician, but not good enough to be a pro. So, a week after I got out of college, I took a job at a ComputerLand store (a big chain back in the old DOS/IBM PC/Apple II days). I have spent the last 30 years in the IT business, doing one thing or another. I still practice piano regularly and take students from time to time. So, a few observations. If you decide to move to something else, you're not a failure. If you think that you are interested in nothing but computer programming, you're letting your anxiety get the better of you. If you "want to be a successful computer programmer" it sounds like maybe being successful is more important to you than being good. If so, then you need to rethink your priorities. You won't be happy in any field (or in life, for that matter) if what others think of you is what defines what you think of yourself. You need to care about doing a job well, and seek to feel that satisfaction that you get when you do. I'll suggest again that you get with an academic counselor. Helping you get in touch with what you really feel like you want to do, and then helping you do it, is their full time job. Plenty of them are very good at it. If you decide to switch majors, then you'll get plenty of help. Above all, don't just sit and do nothing and let your anxiety marinate. You don't need stomach trouble! Go do something. Start examining your desires, abilities and skills, and be tough with yourself about what your feelings and motivations are. There's nothing wrong with tearing it all down and starting over; you never really do start over because you bring all the life lessons that you learn along with you. Get to it, and persevere. :)

Q: Is it possible to remove an author's name after publication? If a paper was published with an author's name without that author's consent, what can be done about it? It there a way to disassociate oneself with a published paper? is retraction the only way? If the paper is retracted, does it still stay online and is associated with that author's name? A: All journals that I've come across require the submitting author to certify that all authors have consented to publication. I would think that therefore if an author gets in touch with the publisher to indicate they have not given consent, the publisher would be forced not only to withdraw the paper, but also instigate investigations into misconduct. A: It is possible, and possible routes have been given in other responses. However, I'd like to give another facet. Before you go down this route, consider the consequences: a likely investigation into misconduct of your fellow authors you will not be exempt from the investigation, namely "how did it get that far", and inhowfar your role in miscommunication contributed furthermore the authors will be exposed and you will be likely shunned by them (and a "halo" of their friends). This is not to say you should not pursue it; it may be perfectly justified - but, as you did not inform us of the context behind your question, you should understand that retracting authorship is a massive step to take and you should be aware of its consequences. You will lose a lot, so I only see the upholding of ethical principles or the threat of a massive loss of reputation as plausible scenarios for such a step.

Q: Is it worth going to preview event for accepted students? I've been admitted as a grad student to a US university. There's a preevent for admitted students, which seems to be a weekend of introductions and minor social events (I don't have that much information yet). Is it worth traveling from Europe to such an event? Do you have a feeling for how important these events are for building social relations with students/faculty? A: If by "admitted (accepted)" you really mean "those who accepted their offer," it's just a nice, welcoming gesture. During course work, you'll work so closely with and next to your future fellow students that you needn't worry about falling behind socially if you don't attend. If people have been admitted but still weigh offers from different schools, it's a marketing event in which faculty and current students will try to present their program - and the campus it's on, and the city and state it's in - in their best light. While it would certainly be nice to get to know other prospects, it is probably more helpful to use such events to get a feel for how you might get along with professors and such, and if the city is too busy - or not busy enough - for your taste. If you're not rich with extra time to spare, it's probably only necessary to fly in from Europe if it's case 2, and you have genuine questions or concerns. These can be nice events, but I'd think twice before flying for 6-10 hours each way on your own money - as long as you can't combine it with a longer vacation or so. A: I definitely wouldn't go just to "build social relations". You can do that when you start school in the fall. The reason to go is to help you decide whether you want to attend. If you're already decided, then going is not worth your time or money. If you're undecided and they're paying for travel, go. If you're undecided and you have to pay for travel, you must weigh the cost of airfare against the benefit of seeing the place firsthand and meeting people before you decide which school to attend.

Q: How to get a "teaching letter" when I don't want my department to know I'm looking for a job? I am currently a tenure track faculty in a college and I plan to look for a position somewhere else. A problem is that, I can not get a teaching letter from my department (in fact I would like to keep my search confidential). Teaching letters are required in my field and I am wondering what should I do in this case? Thank you for your suggestions in advance. A: As noted in my response to @strongbad, I recommend against being open about job searches if you're in a T-T position. You don't have to look far to find a lot of horror stories about chairs and senior faculty making life difficult for the 'uppity' young faculty member "who thinks s/he is too good for this school." Best to keep plans close to the chest until you're at a more definitive place in a search. So that being said... First, if you have a trusted friend at a nearby college who is in the same or related discipline, you might ask them to do an observation and evaluation of your teaching. Second, your college's teaching center may be able to do an evaluation but this involves you trusting them not to spill the beans. Finally, if this is a middle or senior position (i.e. Associate or Full) you can ask in your cover letter that because you the need for discretion because you are already in a tenure-track position, that the request letters be delayed until you make the long short list. This at least buys you time and puts you in a difficult situation only if you're a serious candidate. I've seen this done and it's not an unusual request. You can suggest that you will provide your full teaching evaluations and portfolio in lieu of a letter until you make the long-short list. A: How to get a “teaching letter” when I don't want my department to know I'm looking for a job? At the risk of stating the obvious: you can't -- at least, not if you want your letter to reflect current information about you, and not if by "my department" you mean "even one person in my department". More optimistically however, the logic that says that it's highly undesirable to let your current employers know about your job search plans is not entirely watertight, as I explained in a past answer discussing a somewhat similar question. Your department chair would be the most appropriate person to ask for a letter about your teaching. Assuming he/she is a trustworthy, professional and ethical person, you should simply ask them not to disclose your plans to your colleagues within your department. Department chairs quite regularly deal with sensitive information of this sort, and those who are reasonably good at their jobs will have no trouble respecting your wishes. With that said, I recognize that there are probably some unprofessional department chairs out there who would fail to respect your confidentiality in such a situation, or may even be tempted to sabotage your plans by writing a dishonest letter. If you are worried about not being treated fairly by your chair, I would suggest finding some other colleague within the department to ask for the letter from. The bottom line is you would need to be able to identify at least one person who is qualified to evaluate your teaching performance in your current job and whom you can trust to keep your plans confidential and not to act vindictively against you because of the slight conflict of interest inherent in your situation. If you can't find such a person, I'm not really sure what else to suggest. Good luck!

Q: Is it true that PhD students need to work 10-12 hours a day every day to be productive? I hear a lot of people brag or complain about how many hours they have to work for their PhD. Is this the norm? And if so is this really a wise choice to make? Do students really 'work' during this period of time (as would be expected in a corporate office), or do many also spend their time goofing around? I've read that it's only possible to do 4 hours of deeply creative work everyday. Since energy often depletes over the day, I've personally found that outside of a small number of hours in a day, the rest of my time is spent doing mechanical tasks or straining myself in vain to think about a problem. A: There are a lot of factors in play. With my work, a lot of it is creative so it is hard to say when I am working or not. Do people expect students to work that many hours? Maybe, but it isn't healthy (and maybe not legal). Do people really work the entire time they are at work? Probably not. Your productivity certainly goes down the longer you work. Whether people goof around or not isn't specific to Academia and can happen anywhere (I don't find goofing around to be a negative thing). I too have read several studies about the limited number of hours that people have for mentally demanding tasks. In fact, I read a study about programmers that said they were lucky to get 1-2 hours of solid work done in a day. This info can help you organize your day so that you work on difficult tasks in the morning and then mechanical tasks in the afternoon. Also, studies have shown that taking breaks and going on walks can help improve your productivity. There isn't a cookie cutter answer for everyone. It depends on yourself, the type of work, your advisor, and your coworkers. A: Most people who brag about how many hours they work are inefficient. Because they are inefficient, they feel a need to point out how many hours they work - rather than pointing to the quality of work. Keep this in mind. Some PhD programs will allow you to be more isolated from non-PhD related work than others. If you have to teach, for example, that might take a considerable portion of your week - preparation, class, grading, etc. This might cause you to have to work many more hours if you want to make progress on your dissertation than someone who does not have to teach. If you are unlucky and have your "paid research" different than your dissertation research the same thing can happen - you have to split your time into different buckets. The quality of your advisor and their expectations thus has a big effect here, too. How quickly you want to graduate can affect this too. That being said, how you work affects how efficient you are. Quality of your working hours Sitting at a desk for 12 hours straight is most often bad. Working 12 hours, taking 10 minute exercise breaks every hour? Much less bad. How deliberately you work Do you sit aimlessly without tasks? Do you have a system to keep track of what you need to do? Do you manage your energy (doing high energy tasks when you have energy, low energy when you don't) or do you just blindly do tasks? Do you know when to call it quits -- or keep going? If you have a high energy task you are doing great at, do you keep that momentum going? Conversely if you feel burned out, do you just take a break? Or keep going anyways? When do you work? Some people rock 5am-7am. Some people rock 1am-3am. Some people are afternoon people (my prime time is about 4-6pm - I can accomplish insane amounts in this time compared to the rest of the day). Figure out when your times are. Do you have distractions? An hour with no distractions during writing might be better than 4 with continuous interruptions. Read this article and apply it ruthlessly to your life. You are a maker, your advisor is probably a manager. You will likely find that the better you work, the less you have to work. But simultaneously realize the more you could work (so if your goal is more X then it's great). The how, when, and what for when we work dramatically affects our ability to work tons but also whether or not we have to. A: My experiences suggest the answer is: possibly. Or perhaps more accurately sometimes. A lot depends on the field you're in. I studied for a PhD in life science, where a lot of time at the lab bench was required. This is skilled work, but it's not "creative" nor does it involve much mental effort. So it's certainly possible to be productive at it for longer than four hour stretches. In addition I often had to go in at the weekends to observe the results of my experiments. Cells don't grow to a useful 9-5 weekday schedule, unfortunately! I imagine other areas of science will impose similar time pressures. I treated my PhD as though it were a job. Although I did work longer than 8 hours a day and I did work weekends when necessary, I viewed this as an annoying imposition and tried to minimize it. Other students and postdocs in the lab did longer hours and were more productive. When it came time to write up my thesis, I discovred I simply did not have enough material to make it worthwhile. Ultimately I was forced to apply for a lesser research degree (an MPhil) and when it came to the crunch, I was not even able to obtain that with the evidence I'd gathered. Part of this is unquestionably down to lack of bench-hours. I cannot speak about non-practical subjects, but even there I would imagine the amount of reading, learning and documentary research required would be significant, and would not involve creative mental effort. But my experience suggests that while ten hours a day, seven days a week is likely excessive, a successful research degree does involve time and effort well beyond that required for a regular highly-skilled job.

Q: Is it common for professors to use questions from the internet on an exam? I'm in Western Europe doing a Master's degree, and I expected the education quality to be much higher then what I've seen in my previous school which was in the Middle East, but some professors here still do this (taking exam and exercise questions from the internet) and they don't seem to understand the subject very well. Now how common is this in European and North American universities? Is it even considered an accepted practice? A: they don't seem to understand the subject very well. You sound like you are in a level of expertise that you could judge the quality of the lectures. You may then ideally speak to the professor about your allegation they still do this. I am ignoring the regional limitations and considering the question in a general context. Is it even considered an accepted practice? Assuming that there are no institutional guidelines that goes against assembling questions from the internet(which you must check if you haven't done already!), from a logical perspective viewing this as a student, the practice is similar to posting questions from the text book or peer reviewed journals. The professor in any case is responsible for the question and its relevance can be questioned with supporting evidence. From the point of view of a student, you could also do a student peer review about the quality and relevance of the question supported by discussions and critical reasoning. If the result of such an assessment goes against the question, you could then report him/her with proof your views about the practice. NOTE - This is not limited to internet based questions but also any questions even from the sources you think are authentic.

Q: How can I clear myself of emotional attachment when reading reviewer feedback? I have received feedback from reviewers on my latest conference paper (this is in Computer Science). It was an acceptance, which is nice. I feel I really need to consider in depth the reviewer feedback. I have consciously noticed I have a emotional reaction. Which is not rational, practical, or useful. How can I clear myself from it, and handle the review on a factual basis? Is it better to sleep on it? Perhaps it would help to strip the acceptance from it. Or maybe to rewrite it in my words as if I were reviewing the paper? Overall I guess I should feel happy, but of course the written reviewer feedback only points at the weaknesses in the work. Which is reasonable, since they can indicate it was generally good with their accept statement. (At the end of the day, an accept is an accept, right?) A: Personally, I find that the following process works well for me: Complain together with my co-authors about the blindness and foolishness of reviewers, the sorry state of publishing, and the general existence of injustice in a world not ready for the pure angelic beauty of our work. Remember not to take this too seriously. Ignore everything for at least 24 hours, letting my initial emotional response settle and giving space for rationality to return. Copy the review responses into a template for a response letter, separating each statement for its own response. This effectively forms a checklist of work to be done (or at least to be clearly explained why it should not be done). I do this even with conference papers where there is no response letter, because of the organizing benefit. When revising, focus on only one statement at a time, taking it in isolation and working until the comment has been fully addressed and I can write a clear and non-emotional response explaining what has and hasn't been done and why. Depending on the overall tone of the situation, sometimes I will start with the little things and work up to the bigger ones, and sometimes I will do in the opposite direction. Finally, as I work, I always remind myself that every statement by every reviewer can teach me something that will improve my paper, even when I disagree with it. Sometimes, the reviewer has valuable insight. Other times, their apparently "crazy" or "ignorant" reactions are instead actually showing me how I have not spoken well to the community of readers, have opened myself up to misinterpretation, or have allowed my work to be viewed as part of an intellectual battle that I do not wish to participate in. We are emotional beings, and we have emotions. Over time, you will hopefully learn to read the curve of your emotional response so that you can ride with it and manage it rather than fighting it or amplifying it when that would be counterproductive. The process that works best for you may vary, but one way or another I think that it is best to acknowledge emotions and then find a way to let them settle before trying to work with the criticism. A: One-line answer: Don't try to "clear the emotions away"; but do things which might make it easier for you to process them better. The assumption that there is a marked distinction between "rational" and "emotional" thought, that people can "clear" themselves of emotions etc. is not - AFAIK - grounded in scientific fact. Our motivations are emotional, even our intuitions are emotional, our sense of what's "nicer" and what's "right" about abstract concepts is partially emotional. Why do you think you need to detach from your emotions in order to process criticism? If that's a problem you feel you have a lot, you might need to work on that regardless of research. At any rate, I would recommend: Doing some physical activity which has an element of monotonicty, or a meditative effect, like jogging, or yoga. Reducing your effective workload for a while and, yes, getting more sleep than you usually do. Go do something that has a humbling effect with respect to your capabilities, but does not poorly reflect on your sense of self esteem. Something entirely unrelated to the (partially artificial) competitiveness or your field of academic pursuit. For example, ask a friend or a family member to let you try out something that he/she likes to do and you're not particularly good at, or some kind of craft. While doing all of that, don't try to force yourself to think on the reviewers' notes/criticism; and don't try to force yourself not to think about them. I realize this is not particularly "clever" advice. But: 1. It's based on my experience; 2. I think it should help and 3. At worst you'll have spent a couple of days doing harmless stuff. A: Before even discussing with co-authors I do the following: Print out the review. Yes, I print the report on good old paper. In this way the review becomes something you can touch, put away, crumple, burn, frame, do whatever you want… It looses some of its emotional content by becoming a real world object; it's not just some statement anymore that can stick in your mind for hours. If you want to stop thinking about the review, put the paper away. Work with the printed review. I go over the review and highlight: Praise. Comments that I totally agree with and where I just do what reviewer suggest. Comments that seems reasonable but it is not totally clear what should be done. Comments that need more thought, seem unfair or unclear. After that I try to get in contact with co-authors and start working on a revision.

Q: Will quitting a PhD to try an industry job severely reduce my chances of being accepted to another PhD program later? I know there are already a lot of "should I quit my PhD" questions on this site. But I have a specific dilemma and I'd like to get some external thoughts. After my Bachelor in mathematics, I didn't hesitate and started a PhD in pure math. After 7 months in the program, I'm having second thoughts. Research is not as enjoyable as I thought it would be. And I'm afraid that I might be missing out on other potential careers that would fit me better than academia. So I'm thinking of quitting my PhD, get a Master in applied math and try to get a job in the industry. I'm 20 years old, so I feel that this is the last moment to try another line of work without too many consequences. However, if I do that but don't like working in industry, what are my chances of being accepted in another PhD program? I'm afraid that quitting a PhD once will severely reduce my chances. Are the graduate admission comitees likely to understand the "if you love it, let it go" flavor of my experience? Or will they dismiss my application thinking that they can't trust someone who has already quit once? It may seem weird that I'm already thinking of coming back to academia while talking about quitting my PhD. The thing is that I have very little motivation to continue, and I feel like if I hang on, I will end up with a bad PhD after 5 miserable years. That's why I think of quitting. If after working in the industry I want to go back in academia, I think I will have a lot more motivation, knowing that there are no alternatives. A: Thinking of quitting or moving elsewhere is one of the important milestones in graduate studies. We can't answer your question, as it depends on lots of personal and local particularities that we can't possibly know about. But one thing I can tell you: Don't take the decision lightly. Studies, particularly graduate studies, tend to stress you out, decisions taken under stress are very often regretted later. Wait until you have had some time to really relax (i.e., near ending term break, after taking holidays). Treat it as you would any other project evaluation (you had a class on that somewhere, right?): Set up your evaluation criteria, how to measure them (be it estimated time to graduation in years or personal satisfaction in a scale from 1 to 5), and define some weight for each. Then write down your value for each, and compare. Never underestimate discussing this with your significant other, family, friends (on and off school), or even your advisor or other faculty. A: One way to ensure that you are able to continue PhD studies if industry turns out not to be for you is to arrange a leave of absence from your current program instead of quitting. They may even help you reach the Masters milestone before you spend your year in industry. You'll probably have to cast this as why 12 or 18 months of industry experience will make you a stronger PhD candidate (might be hard in a purely theoretical program, but even theoreticians can be motivated by knowing their work will contribute to applied areas and help with important problems at some point in the future). You should certainly explore the "What if I like it a lot better than my PhD work?" question when you ask your advisor for leave, but you can cast that as an unlikely outcome. Also, it will be natural for such an experience to affect your research focus if/when you do return -- but you can probably still continue with your current department without having to start graduate-level classwork over again.

Q: How to conduct IT based research in developing countries where we don't even have enough datasets for reference and analysis? Today in developed countries technology and innovation has reached its optimum level. But in least developed countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, etc, the scenario for research is different. Here the education syatem is also in learning phase. Few university exists and barely research oriented activities goes through academic. We neither have any research grants to follow or enough datasets and technologies for analysis and comparision. Even the governmemt is still functioning on paper. So in such absurd situation what kinds of researches are suggested and how to do it? A: There are ways to get research done on publicly available data. However, I would be silly to not mention that I left the UK for Germany to conduct my research, because the UK, as optimum as it is, wasn't the best in the world for the specific type of science I wanted to do. More importantly, it wasn't nearly as well funded for my particular area of science (its much better now though). Transferring to greener pastures is not only recommended, it's extremely normal in Science. What did it take to get into a top German institute? Knowledge and determination. And I know for a fact that Nepal, Bangladesh, etc have plenty of knowledge and determination, because students from these countries are working side-by-side with me. A: As far as equipment is concerned, in computer oriented fields I can assure you that the only thing equipment can affect is time and performance. I have done most of my personal work on an 8 year old laptop, and since half that work was on game development you can understand that lack of processing power has very visible results, but that doesn't mean you can't make anything, it will just run slow! Just mentioning it because one may argue that in developing countries equipment is scarce. As far as datasets are concerned, I propose four options: -You use public datasets already out there. That's not the best because you have to pick one of a few options rather than gather data fitting your needs. Also having original data is considered a pretty good thing in research, though I personally don't consider it that crucial. -You collect your own data either within the country (it always makes an impression when you get out of the lab and get your hands dirty collecting data) or online, with the help of other institutions that may make it easier for people to complete answer forms etc. -You collaborate with an institution in another country, or even form a network of institutions within your or similar countries, and use collective data. Forming an official research network will also have a nice ring to it and may attract some publicity. -The final option is to contact other departments that are not working exactly on what you are working on, but may be interested in collaborating, if you can offer them some common goal. An example would be creating a database with advanced search capabilities on ancient literature, where the department of philosophy (or equivalent) would provide datasets and you would provide the framework. Note that you may have to develop software that will be easy for them to use before they can start building a dataset, but this will pay off eventually. I personally would go for option 4, as it would also broaden the scope of interest in the project. 3 will give you some recognition outside the country, and 2 doesn't really have any specific bonuses, but it may establish the institution as self-relying and productive, especially if you do this again in the future. There are probably a couple more options I haven't thought of, but there are probably the most notable, best of luck.

Q: When reviewing a manuscript for the second time, is it fair to comment on aspects I did not realise the first time? I refereed a manuscript and recommended a major revision. Now, almost three years (!) later, the manuscript has come back to my desk. The editor told me to treat it as a revision and not as a new submission. However, since I don't remember the details, I'm re-reading the entire manuscript. I'm noticing things that I consider need to be improved. That includes things that were identical three years ago, but that neither me nor the other referees commented on. There could be several reasons why I didn't comment on it the first time: I had less knowledge and experience than I have now, or the field has moved on since it's been so long, or I simply didn't notice something I noticed now. Is it fair to comment on it now, or did I lose my chance to suggest this improvement when I didn't suggest it in the first round? On the one hand: I genuinely believe this needs to be improved. On the other hand: if I were submitting a revised manuscript, I would not expect referees to comment on things they should have commented on the first time. If nobody comments on a particular paragraph, I would assume all approve. A: I believe that it is entirely reasonable to make major requests of a manuscript on second review, as long as it is maintaining your basic standard for acceptance rather than moving the goalposts. For example, I have had the experience where things about a paper were very unclear to me in the initial review because of shortcomings in the authors' presentation. Upon revision, those things became much clearer---but not in a good way. The extra information shed light on serious flaws in the authors' work, which has led me to in some cases recommend further major revision and in other cases recommend rejection. On the other hand, some reviewers seem to like asking authors to do entirely new work, not because it is necessary for publication, but because the reviewer wants to know the answer or thinks it will make "a more interesting paper." This happens most frequently with "glamour" journals. I believe this sort of "moving the goalposts" on publication is not appropriate even in the first review, and doubly so in a revision review. A: You certainly shouldn't refrain from suggesting improvements or corrections simply because it is the second round of refereeing. Go ahead and include them, as it can do no harm. It's also fine to point out minor things like typos or awkward sentences that you didn't catch the first time. And if you have just now discovered that the paper's main result is wrong -- or likely to be wrong -- you have an obligation to communicate that fact. On the other hand, I would usually refrain at this stage from insisting on major new changes to the manuscript that I hadn't requested previously; especially things like A major reorganization or rewriting New experiments or analysis If there have been new developments in the field that significantly affect the status of results in the paper, then it might be appropriate to insist on substantial rewriting or additional research, but otherwise I would say it was really your job to catch these issues the first time around. A: If there are things genuinely wrong with the paper, you should definitely ask from them to be improved. If the issues are with things that could probably be handled better, yet which are not fatal errors, you might want to go easier on them. However, even in the latter case, there is no reason not to send back the paper for additional minor revisions before recommending acceptance. When I review a paper with a lot of problems, yet which I feel could probably be published with major changes, I try to include an explicit statement in my first review that looks something like this: "At a minimum, the authors need to make the changes that I have suggested in order for this paper to be publishable. However, given the major problems that I have identified, it is not possible at this stage for me to judge definitively whether the paper's conclusions will be justified once the changes are made; it is possible that a heavily revised paper will still turn out not to be satisfactory." This makes it clear that I cannot adequately judge the correctness of the paper without the major changes being made. In my experience, such papers usually are publishable after the major changes are made (although often with another round of minor revisions), but it a significant number of cases, the revisions only serve to make clear that there are fundamental problems with the paper, and I ultimately have to recommend rejection.

Q: Selling/Buying software in academia I have written multiple opensource programs as part of my PhD, and some of these programs require a dedicated server somewhere on the internet to work. Mainly it is online databases, but also things like project homepages, version update checks, usage-metric logging, etc. I currently host all these website/databases for free from my own stipend, but as the services have grown, I'm now paying about 10-20% of my monthly stipend on hosting bills. It's not much, only about €100 a month, but you certainly feel it when you're main source of nutrition is unguarded coffee and biscuits. So my question is how best to monetize software to academics if you're a one-man-band. I could set up a paypal account, or something similar - but never in a million years could I see my PI setting up a lab PayPal account. Donations for server costs would then most likely come from generous students/post-docs, and I don't really see that as a fair or acceptable system. I want people to pay from their grant money, as it should be. What is the best way to do this? EDIT: In light of the answers, I feel that "pay for it with your own grant money" is somewhat of a non-starter. Here's two reasons why: The software developed was not a requirement or goal of the PhD. It was created as a side-reaction of the PhD as the software I wanted to use to analyze my data was difficult to use, expensive, non-existant, etc. Based on no real data, just my observations from working in the Open Source community, 99% of OS software is written to solve the author's current problem, which then gets generalized to solve other people'e problems too, so I don't see my situation as being unusual. Still, I cannot reasonably ask my PI for money on something that was never originally part of the PhD plan. One would even have a hard time justifying that the software was required for the PhD, if the original plan did not foresee using it. For example, one program gives highly-detailed Quality Control reports. Our data passes all of these strict/new QC tests. Therefore, was it even a requirement? Following on from point 1, but really this is a separate issue, what my PI would be paying for would be for other people to use the software. To handle just the needs of my project, I don't need any online servers - I could make do with just local services and disk space. In fact i've already applied all this software to the project, so now it could just be deleted. No need to register domain names, no AWS hosting costs, no evenings spent making sure the community around my software is happy and productive, etc. In short, if my PI was generous enough to see my software as an integral part of the PhD and worthy of funding (part 1), he would also have to come to the conclusion that it's worth spending his grant money on other people's projects, which I am confident he not only would do out of principle, he might not even be allowed to. So - I really only see two possible options going forward: I apply for a new grant, totally separate from my PhD project, to cover the costs of hosting. The community using the software/services pay directly, using some mechanism that I currently do not know about. Some way a PhD student can buy software online and charge it directly to their grant, rather than with personal funds. A: You should let your PI know what resources you need to carry out your work, and discuss how such resources can be provided. You should not be footing the bill in the first place, so there should be no need to monetize to recover. A: There is an easy solution. Turn off the services. If your services are important (to someone else), then that someone else will figure a way to finance them. This is not your problem. A: I agree with the other answers that it is unreasonable to expect you to pay it from your own budget. However, since you stated your software is open source, it might be possible to use existing solutions such as github to distribute your code and host a homepage for the project with instructions. There is stil the issue that your software apparently uses other resources such as online databases. It depends on the details of your software, but perhaps you could provide the necessary information for other groups to setup their own infrastructure (e.g., minimal database dumps, or other server code). If server names are not hardcoded in your code, it should be fairly easy to make this configurable. This gives other groups the possibility the use your software, while at the same time releasing you from hosting the infrastructure. For your own usage I agree with Scott Seidman: ask your PI if your institute can provide the necessary services. Alternatively you could try asking money for the services, but in my opinion this will likely lead to a bigger hassle than is worth it. Aside from legal issues, if people pay for something they expect something in return. Are you willing to provide support? Fix your server if it crashes at 3am while your users are trying to make a deadline?

Q: Online master's degree in CS at the Georgia Institute of Technology I am a working student (working in software engineering) and this year I'll be completing my CS Bachelor's degree in Italy. I am doing the online degree as I can't attend lectures, due to my job. I would like to continue my studies with a Master's Degree in CS so I googled a bit and found out that GaTech is offering an online master's degree I am interested in. Here in Italy the online degree has the same value as the on-campus degree: we take exams on campus, study online with videos and materials provided by the professor, we have conference sessions with the professors for any questions or we can go visit them in their office. The exams are exactly the same as the on-campus degree, so are the professors. I was wondering if this is the case in the USA and if doing an online degree will be a limit for me to pursue, in a remote future, a PhD. Should I move to the USA to study (I can work remotely) or I can study here, in Italy, and just go to the USA to take exams? A: In my opinion, Georgia Tech's Online Master of Computer Science will not help you get a computer science PhD in the US. Not because it's online, but because it's a professional master's program. There are two types of master's degrees in computer science in the US: Thesis (aka research) masters degrees have a significant research component, in close collaboration with an advisor, leading up to a thesis. These are generally seen as useful stepping stones to a PhD. Professional (aka class-based, aka "taught", aka terminal) masters degrees consist entirely of classes. These are generally not seen as stepping stones to a PhD, because there is no expectation of (and therefore no resources for) research. Moreover, because of the huge scale (>3000 students) of the OMCS program, having any kind of sustained on-on-one interaction with faculty—which you would need to get strong recommendation letters—is almost impossible. (I regularly serve on the graduate admissions committee in a top-10 American CS department.)

Q: Is it ethical to withdraw a conference long version paper after being accepted as a short paper? Is it ethical to withdraw a conference long version paper after being accepted as a short paper? Just recently we got an accepted short paper at a decent Computer Science conference. However, we submitted as a long paper and there is not a single instruction cautioning us that the PC could demote the paper. A: Yes. Publication requires both the consent of the publisher (via the editor or program committee) and the consent of the authors. If you do not consent to publish under the conditions imposed by the publisher, you can just say no. A: It is up to you to withdraw. But consider that if the conference asked for a major revision (cutback, in this case), they'll have their reasons (sure, space is an issue, but they are telling you it is not worth a full paper as it stands). I think it is unlikely you'll be able to publish the full version elsewhere, at least not without significant further work. Perhaps the best course of action is to shorten this, and rework into a full version for elsewhere. [Note that the above is just from what OP tells us, not even knowing the area. Further details could change my assessment radically.]

Q: Is it acceptable for a student to hire a tutor to explain and fix homework mistakes? In a course we have a lot of hard homework. We are allowed to share solutions etc, as long as each student's doesn't just copy but understands what he/she writes. Is this acceptable to hire a tutor help me solve the homework I can't solve? A: We are allowed to share solutions etc, as long as each student's doesn't just copy but understands what he/she writes. This is the only information we have about your instructor's policies, so this is the only answer we can give to your question. It's OK to hire a tutor for help with the homework, as long as you don't just copy but understand what you write. It's also possible that your instructor intends different rules for paid tutors than for cooperation with your fellow students. However, we would have no way of knowing that from the information provided in your question. There are also general expectations about plagiarism and originality, and these are ethical norms that you're responsible for understanding and following, regardless of your instructor's policies. Your description of your working relationship with your tutor isn't specific enough to make it clear whether you have a problem here or not. As JeffE has pointed out, "fixing" your mistakes might entail plagiarism, if it means that what goes on your paper isn't actually what you wrote yourself.

Q: Value of "nonresearch articles" section in PNAS I noticed that PNAS website contains the section for the so-called "nonresearch articles" (original orthography is retained), otherwise referred to as "collected articles": http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/collectedpapers.xhtml. Upon a brief look at the section and its categories, it seems that articles published there range from "core concepts" articles (somewhat similar to a brief Wikipedia article) to a topic or field review articles and beyond (papers, based on symposiums and other events). what is the level of acceptance, if known, for articles, targeting the above-mentioned section; what is the scientific, academic and career value of publishing in that PNAS' section (in other words, is it worth considering targeting this outlet [particularly, for a beginning researcher])? A: I had a look at the latest collection paper (Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene). This turned out to be a PNAS Direct Submission, which appears to be a pretty standard peer-review process and definitely the standard way to submit papers to PNAS ("Direct Submissions now account for more than 95% of papers submitted and 78% of papers published in PNAS"). I couldn't find out any sort of invitation for collected papers, so my guess is that these are papers that have already been published through standard peer-review, which have been grouped after the fact by PNAS editors. So this isn't a "PNAS section", but just a thematic collection of papers that have been normally published in PNAS (which, in 2014, had an acceptance rate of 17%).

Q: Is it possible to do a cheap or free online or distance Ph.D. program? Is it possible do to an online or distance Ph.D. program at all? If so, are there ones that are cheap or free? A: To a first approximation, it's not possible. There are few online or distance Ph.D. programs, and they usually have bad reputations. A Ph.D. from a university with a bad reputation will actually be worse for your career than having no Ph.D. at all, so you should be very careful. Plus these programs are as far as I know never free. You can get financial support for Ph.D. work in several ways (competitive fellowships, a faculty member's research grant, teaching classes for the department), so depending on the field you may not need to pay anything yourself and may even earn a modest stipend, but that's not because the program itself is cheap or free. Ph.D. supervision is intrinsically time-consuming and expensive. I'm skeptical of how serious your question is. Hoping for a free online Ph.D. isn't really reasonable; furthermore, if you have no time to attend a university, then you probably have no time to complete the years of full-time research required to write a Ph.D. dissertation. However, I felt it was worth answering to warn you about scams from unaccredited universities. There are plenty of diploma mills that will offer you a relatively cheap and easy Ph.D. online. Such degrees are completely worthless, so they'd basically be stealing the fees from you. A: A PhD requires significant time input from an advisor – several hours a week from somebody earning a decent salary. That's not something you can get for free or at a distance. If distance learning is an absolute requirement and you're in the UK, the Open University might be what you're looking for. If free is an absolute requirement, you need to look into potential sources of funding: in most places, there's no such thing as a free PhD but there are organizations (including some governments) that will pay the fees for good students. But be aware that these are very competitive. A: Peter- where are you located and what is your citizenship? Many countries have Higher-Degree-by-Research (HDR) for free or minimal payment but only available to local students and based on competitive entry. For instance, in Australia, many PhD programs are currently free for local students, but you must be citizen, secure a commonwealth 'position' (as basically the Commonwealth covers your tuition) and in around 2016- fees will be introduced. I think international students can also apply for tuition-free positions but this might depend on the university. Depending on your Faculty, research topic and resources required to undertake your research - it is not uncommon for a PhD to be undertaken 'remotely' in Australia. However, Australia generally does NOT have course-work related PhD - the entire 3 years is research and thesis writing (this differs from the system in the USA). I think also Germany and Belgium have free higher education.

Q: Conference with very few submissions I have submitted a paper to a conference in theoretical computer science in China, whose deadline was today 06/Mar/2016, 11:59 EST. It is not one of the mainstream conferences, but I have heard some serious computer scientists advertising it. In some conference ranking sites, this conference is ranked B. On the other hand there are some prestigious specialized conferences that are also ranked B. So I decided to submit to it. Looking for the historic of the conference in previous years, I have seem that the average acceptance ratio is 30%, and that the number of submissions each year is above 100 (some years way above 100). Now for my surprise, I submitted my paper something like one hour before the deadline, and my paper received a number below 10. The submission system was easychair, and there were some boxes where we could chose the subjects of research related to the paper. 1) Is it normal to have such few submissions at easychair just one hour before the deadline? 2) Is it possible that this conference is artificially increasing the statistics for the previous years? One weird thing that I noted is that in previous years the proceedings were published at lncs. However this year, there is no information about where the proceedings will be published. 3) I'm seriously thinking about withdrawing, since I can't imagine how the conference will reach a reasonable number of submissions, even if the deadline is extended. Do you think I should do that? A: Statistics could be artificially increased, but also the advertisements of the serious computer scientist could be faked (if they are on the website of the conference). Almost all of the scamming conferences use real, "famous" scientists that are supposedly chairing sessions and giving lectures, even though they themselves don't know anything about it. If you really think it's a scam you could withdraw, however I don't think they will actually remove your abstract from the website. I personally think the best way to avoid scams or second tier conferences is to just talk to colleagues / mentors / professors in your field, as you might also end up at conferences that seem interesting but are actually not completely about your field.

Q: How good to publish a paper in an E-Journal compared to printed journals? I am wondering the qualitative difference between a printed journal publication and E-journal? Whether both have same impacts. I understand that impact varies from journal to journal and publisher to publisher. But I am talking about the reputed publishers only e.g. Springers, Elsevier etc. I would also like to mention that the said printed journals here are elecronically availalbe first while e-journals have no printed version. So how good to publish a paper in an e-journal? Whether papers published in e-journals give same impression as in printed journals? A: You appear to be confusing together two different issues: open-access vs. paywalled and printed vs. electronic. Let us start with printed vs. electronic: the difference between a article available electronically vs. an article available only in print is that the article available electronically will be read and a paper article generally will not. With a very small number of exceptions, for the most part electronic access is the means by which scientists access journal articles these days. If they journal is not open access, then the researcher will be using an institutional subscription. Now, as for open access vs. paywalled: some studies have shown that open access articles tend to be read and cited more than paywalled articles in similar quality journals. For both open access and paywalled articles, however, the primary determinant in how they are viewed is the quality of the journal in which they are published, and in both cases there are excellent journals and terrible journals. A: I think a lot of scientists don't know whether a journal actually appears in print. So it's not about that they don't care, it's also a lack of knowledge. In 10+ years of research I've only seen paper copies of maybe a dozen journals.

Q: Offer to chair a session - how should I decide whether to accept? I am doing my PhD and presenting a paper at a conference, which I have already done a few times. However, I just saw an email from the organising committee asking if I am willing to chair one or more sessions. How should I decide whether to accept this offer? What are the reasons to accept, and what are the reasons to decline? Is it a very common thing to do for a graduate student, who does not even have a Ph.D, to be invited to chair a session? While I feel honoured, I am also somewhat overwhelmed and not sure if I should accept it. A: Whether this is common depends very much on the conference. The last time I was at a conference, I was invited out of the blue by someone I didn't know to chair a session, in a very short and very informal e-mail as if it was coming from a long time friend in a hurry. This was less than a year after I obtained my PhD. A PhD student in our research group did the same. All it means, really, is that you sit on a chair in front of the room, make sure the presentations are on the presentation computer, announce the speakers, etc. You will get detailed instructions. Unless you mess up (and why would you?), you really have nothing to lose. A: The typical duties of a session chair are: Before the session, make sure all of the presenters are present and check A/V to minimize problems during the session. Convene the session at its start, getting the audience to sit down and be quiet. Introduce each presenter and their talk. Keep the session on time, warning a presenters when they approach the end of their allotted time and cutting them off if necessary. This is especially important for big conferences with many parallel sessions, where people may be switching rooms in mid-session. You should typically ensure that about 5 minutes is reserved for Q&A, but the time may be shorter with very short talks (e.g., 3 minutes of a 15 minute talk). Moderate the question and answer period. Formulate a couple of interesting and respectful questions of your own for each talk, in case the audience doesn't have any questions. This is sometimes the hardest part of moderation. These duties aren't too hard, and it's not too unusual for senior graduate students, postdocs or young faculty to be asked to chair. It's a nice little low-grade visibility and networking experience, and can be a first (small) step towards becoming involved with other aspects of conference organizing. The only reason that I might recommend against accepting is if the session is early in the conference and you haven't been to conferences and seen how sessions are typically run before. This is something where I would recommend making sure you've watched others before you do it yourself---though you will see many bad examples as well as good.

Q: How can I make my thesis supervisor be more responsive? This question is related to this one and this one. My Masters' thesis supervisor is incredibly superficial as in he doesn't respond to messages in a timely manner; I am not talking about understandable delays such as a few days or perhaps even a week but 15 weeks all in all. What I have tried up to now is to have a professional discussion about my progress so far, feedback and future directions. All seemed well, I received feedback regularly (for two weeks) and then I had to redo the discussion. This wouldn't normally count as an issue but he is incredibly inconsistent in his feedback. For example, the suggestions I have received this week are inconsistent with what he requested the week before, but consistent with what was needed two weeks back. There is always this back and forth between what I should modify within my thesis (he doesn't keep any records of what he suggested and always ends up in giving advice that contradicts what he mentioned previously). I've resorted to taking pictures of the sheets (sometimes feedback contains figures and tables) and actually including them in my thesis draft prior to sending it to him. Another issue is related to his organization of these drafts. Somehow, he never seems to read the latest submitted version the thesis draft, doesn't sort files by date, etc.. As a solution, I am now prefixing the thesis name (the name of the .pdf file) with the date in which I submit it. Unfortunately, it didn't help (I'm still at square one). Sometimes feedback is lackluster, he regularly takes a week to read two pages and give advice on them. The problem is that they are from a chapter that has long passed review (and was agreed upon by him that it is correct, both theoretically and grammatically). Any help as to how I may actually complete this thesis? It's pretty infuriating because I've finished with moderately high grades and am now stuck because of this supervisor at the end. A: First of all, any relationship is a two way street. You can not blame everything on your supervisor, you are the one who chose him/her; and you are the one that should have request regular meeting with him/her in the past. You have two options: Managing the Situation: You can start managing the situation and start requesting regular meeting with him/her. He/she is not responsive on email? Well, you can see him/her on his/her weekly office hours. Doesn't have office hours? Well you have to pop in into his/her office and see if he/she is there and kindly ask him/her to respond to your email. You see what I'm trying to say here? Find Another Supervisor: You did take classes, and you saw the lecturers. You can always find a supervisor that does have the "common sense" part and kindly ask/her to do the master thesis with him/her instead. There are always young and talented lecturers (and not yet popular) that do take such cases at least because to gain some experience and also help such students. Note: At the end of the day, you need to write your own thesis, and you are the one that present/defend your thesis at the end. So also pay attention to your own work and try to finish it ASAP as any supervisor has some limitation to help you figure out your own path.

Q: Where can I publish summaries of my research? I would like to publish summaries of my research in some news or research journal for the sake to promote the research. But there I don't want to publish anywhere but the summaries are also not so exciting to publish it in a prestigious journal. It is more to have a recognized online presence (url and doi) that is not the own homepage. What could I do? A: Some quick ideas: If you want to publish just short papers on single findings, there is a new journal called Matters which does just that. You will get a DOI. https://www.sciencematters.io/ Check the scope though, it may not be suitable for your discipline. If you want to summarise your already published papers in order to reach a broader audience, something like Kudos could help. You won't get a DOI for these summaries, but will get metrics in a dashboard when you sign up and start writing summaries. Finally, you could start blogging! It's a great way to document the research process. You can sign up for your own blog using WordPress or similar. You might have seen this Vox article recently on the researcher live-blogging her progress: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/3/11148452/science-blog If you don't want to start your own blog, look for collective blogging platforms like Medium, or something specific to your discipline and start writing. The good thing about blogging is that the informality allows you to write a lot quicker. Promote your posts on social media to attract an audience.

Q: Second author being lead presenter on paper at a conference? I am second author of three on a recently published conceptual paper (i.e., no data). The first author is a a student I co-supervise, although the paper did not stem from his thesis but is a contribution we were invited to submit for a special issue. Authorship order accurately reflects paper contributions. We had discussed submitting an abstract to present this paper jointly at an international conference. The submission form allows multiple presenters but one must be named as the lead. My thinking was that this should be the student, since he is first author on the paper, but that I would contribute at least 50% of the preparation. However have found out that the conference funding from my department is only available to lead presenters. The student has funding for travel to the conference regardless, as he will also be separately presenting his thesis work. He has also stated it is no issue for him if I submit the abstract as lead presenter (I would of course credit him and provide the accurate citation for the paper with him as first author, or even present jointly as per the original idea if he wants to do this). BUT - as a relatively new academic I would really appreciate opinions as to: Whether this is not the right thing to do even if he says he is ok with it - perhaps I should just sit this one out and leave that material to the student to present at a later conference if he chooses; and Whether it would actually just be weird for the second author to be taking the lead on the conference presentation i.e. being the named lead presenter, particularly if the first author is also present at the conference and/or involved in the presentation? As a little bit more context, I am interested in attending this conference for the networking and learning opportunities, and don't have anything else to submit as an alternative being so new in the job. I have previously presented all my previous work. A: As far as I see there is nothing particularly strange with any of the authors presenting while any other authors also attend the conference. (Well, I am from mathematics where there is no such thing as "order of the authors" but I also work with people from other disciplines which do have this notion.) So having the second author presenting while the first authors is in the audience seems totally OK for me. (It could just be that the presenting authors is the "best presenter of the group" or, by contrast, should train presenting…) Also it is totally OK for you to be first presenter, especially since the student agreed. There are many different things influencing who presents some paper/poster (some of which you already stated such as funding, time to attend) and I think the audience would not even think about the issue much. In general, all authors should discuss who should be presenting and as long as all authors agree, the outcome is OK. A: As mentioned before: if he agrees there's no problem. Just like your PI could present your work, you can present the work of your student. If you contributed more than only supervision: even better. But I answered especially to say that usually there's no such thing as "leaving the material to present at a later conference". In my field at least, some work is presented on multiple conferences, recycled in big presentations by PIs and incorporated in the presentation on the follow-up publication. Of course he'll not be invited to present the same thing at the same conference next year, but somewhere else he could very well be.

Q: Options other than the NSF for PhD level grants? There is a big push in the PhD program I'm headed into for candidates to apply for NSF grants (in fact, one of the required classes for the first year is a class on writing grant proposals, and as a final project, every candidate submits an NSF proposal). I'm assuming this is the same for any Science/Math PhD program, as funding is tight for many departments, and a grant basically makes you free for the University. Are there any other options for Science PhD-level grants I could apply for? A: A few government fellowships come to mind: DoE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) DoD Science, Mathematics & Research for Transformation (SMART) There are also many fellowships from industrial research labs that you could look into, depending on your field (Intel, IBM Research, Microsoft Research, Facebook, Nvidia, etc.) A: Don't forget about: NIH Individual National Research Service Award (NRSA) predoctoral training fellowships A: I think all the answers given so far (and several others) are included in the list at gradschools.com. Start with the list here: Federally funded portable fellowships It includes DOE CSGF, NASA, DHS, CDC, NDSEG, and NIH. Almost all the fellowships listed are primarily for STEM students. A few of these are also relevant: Portable Fellowships from Independent Organizations In particular: Hertz, NPSC, and a couple of others that have more narrow eligibility requirements.

Q: Will they send offer letter within 15th April In this fall 2016 I have applied for graduate admission (PhD, Physics) few universities and I have received an admit from one of them. The university gave me a deadline (April 15) to accept or decline the offer. On the other hand, I emailed the other few universities(my priority university selection where I would love to join.) to know my application status. They have put me on a waiting-list. What is the possibility of these university that they will send another round offer letters within the 15th April ? A: There is certainly a possibility that you will get moved from the wait list to acceptance before April 15th, but there is absolutely no guarantee or requirement of further contact. By "possibility", I mean this happens to students every year and it isn't particularly unusual - but I also mean that this only happens to a minority of students, and is hard to predict due to the nature of statistics and small numbers per program. Some programs might admit 2 students and both admitted students accept, while others might admit 20 yet go 2+ full rounds of wait list contacts before admission decisions are officially finished. The general advice in the US is that you are safe to wait until close to that April 15th deadline for acceptance if you are not certain that's where you want to go, even if you are just holding out to see if any wait listed programs might accept you. Waiting past that deadline is risky unless you request and obtain an extension, as programs are well within their rights to rescind their offers and move on to their own wait list after the dead line.

Q: Habilitation in Germany as a nonresident I am a young scholar about to complete my PhD. in Finance from an Asian country. I am interested to know whether it is possible to pursue Habilitation from Germany (or any other European country) while working as an Assitant Professor in my home country. I have the following subqueries: Is it possible to do the Habilitation similar to a traditional part-time individual doctorate while working in the industry which provides a lot of flexibility? I also came to know that Habilitation can be completed through a series of good publications in a specific field. Is this route possible while not working in Germany or any other European country? Are publications during Postdoctoral Fellowships in Germany or any other European country (with funding usually lasting for 2/3 years) considered for Habilitation through cumulative publications route? Although I want to pursue habilitation for its own sake, I am also interested in permanent posts as a Professor in Germany. Apart from Habilitation, one way is to work as a Junior Professor, which is temporary in nature( usually lasting for 6 years). In my home country, it is much easier to get a permanent post as a Professor, usually promoted from Assistant Professor rank (also permanent in nature). Thanks A: I think you have a few misconceptions about what a habilitation is. To answer your first question: Yes, you can apply for a habilitation as an external candidate; just like a doctorate, this procedure is formally totally independent from your employment status. (But just like for a doctorate, it is much harder to get them to take you on if you are an external candidate.) For your second and third question: This is very much field (and university) dependent; some will accept a stapled thesis (i.e., just submitting a list of published papers written after your doctorate), others require you to actually write a book. In any case, it is irrelevant where you wrote these. However, the main part of the habilitation is to obtain the venia docendi -- the right to teach at this specific university. This means: You must demonstrate to the committee your ability to teach at university level; again, it wildly differs how you need to do so -- some places will accept student evaluations of classes you taught elsewhere, others require you to give an example lecture in front of the full faculty (which, needless to say, can be rather a tough gauntlet). The easiest way is to already have a habilitation at a different university. (This is called Umhabilitieren.) More importantly, if you are not interested to teach at this university (and even more importantly, they are not interested to have you teach), the university will not confer a habilitation on you. (To put it bluntly, universities take a dim view of "degree collectors" who are only in it for the title.) So, no, a crucial part of the habilitation can not be done remotely. Since you wrote you are also interested in a full professor position in Germany: You are correct that a habilitation is a formal requirement for obtaining a full professor position is Germany, but the hiring committee can consider other accomplishments as equivalent. The most frequent one now is a positive evaluation as a junior professor, but another possibility is a tenured position at a university in your home country. In any case, your accomplishments in research (and getting grants) will be a much more critical part of getting a position. A: I'm only answering because I'm surprised no else has done so yet. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than I will come and set me straight. My impression is that the Habilitation cannot normally be done remotely. You don't apply for the Habil. Rather, you get hired by the university and after a probationary period the degree is conferred on you, together with permission to teach without being supervised (the venia legendi) along with elevation to the status of privatdozent. I think in some places you must accept the responsibility to offer a certain number of lectures per year at the university to be given the Habil. If so, then your plan is shot, because you couldn't accept that obligation. But further, why would you want the Habil.? It wouldn't help your academic career in the US at all. (Your mileage elsewhere might vary.) rather, I think people would look at somebody six or seven years out of the dissertation and want to see a large body of promising published research, not a qualification for a educational system from another country. Your time would be better spent, IMO, trying to publish scholarship, not chasing new degrees. A: I just want to confirm that it is possible to receive Habilitation without the need of teaching at German university, because I just received my habilitation without the need to teach. If you have taught in the past in internationally recognized universities (especially in USA) and you can demonstrate the excellence in teaching by providing a "University Graduate College Teaching Excellence Award" from your University you can ask to be liberated from teaching obligations during your Habilitation process. You only need to deliver a single 2 hour sample lecture during your 3rd or 4th year of habilitation while the students evaluate your teaching performance and are giving you score on a predetermined score-sheet. You just need to score above 50 % to get an OK. Furthermore you can perform your research elswhere, and not in Germany. I also know this from experience. However you do have to be accepted by University and get some kind of post. Now it gets tricky here in your case, since you do not wish to be employed by German university during habilitation. I guess you can become associated as a University fellow who does not receive salary, and if your habilitation supervisor is OK that you are not present at university you may do your habilitation remotely, and visit university only during the habilitation meetings and your accomplishment presentations (usually 1-2 days per year). But this absolutely depends on who is your habilitation supervisor and whether he will allow it.

Q: What should be the theme of a presentation in a research visit? I am having a one-week research visit in a far east country. I was asked by the head of the hosting group to give a presentation. I have never done this before, hence I am quite confused about the content of this presentation. To provide you some extra context: I am the first member of our group visiting this group, at the same time I am the most junior member in our group. As I am visiting this time, we expect in a reasonable amount of time to have a member of their group visiting us. Some information that I could include in the presentation are: information about our group (history, group members, research focus, ongoing projects, methodologies, tools...) information about myself (personal info, academic experience, research focus, detailed explanation of most recent work, desire to learn from the visit...) information about the city we are located at (to make the case that it is worth sending a student...) I think the list is too extensive. What would be a goldilocks in terms of duration and content to include in the presentation? I have to make the most out of this visit and presentation, to be able to build upon it later on. The hosting PI is top 5 in the world in his respective field. A: Short answer: ask them to clarify; ask your PI. To offer my own opinion, I would expect that for a research visit the appropriate contents of your presentation would be your latest research results. As you are visiting on behalf of your group, start with an overview of the group's main research areas and latest results (ask your colleagues to each make you a slide about their work). Then you could go into more detail about your own work later in the presentation. Perhaps pose some research questions that you think your two groups could work together on (take advice from your supervisor here). If you get to set the time, a one hour slot with 45 mins + 15 for discussion will be plenty.

Q: Dealing with an advisor who is not interested in publishing My advisor is a full professor nearing retirement age. Although he does not seem to be planning to retire anytime soon; he has this "been there/done that" attitude toward publications. He says that he has published enough significant work to be happy and that he only wants to publish breakthrough papers from now on. My issue is that I need publications to build a good resume. As of now, I have no publications from my PhD research. My research project is structured in a way that any other professor would see it as an opportunity to get multiple publications out of it because each stage of the project has enough significance to be published separately. My adviser however wants only one comprehensive paper. I have several issues with this: This reduces the number of publications appearing on my resume. I know that this really shouldn't be important, because I would still be publishing the same content. However, this is important when applying for competitive R&D positions in tech (the types of jobs I'm interested in) where during the first stages of screening applicants the number of publications would matter (since no one will actually read them at that point). This also means that I will not be able to submit anything until close to my graduation which would mean that unless I delay my graduation until after the review process is over, I would have no publications when I graduate. Several people in industry who would be hiring for the types of jobs I'm interested in have told me that they do not consider PhD applicants who have no publications. How would you propose I handle this situation? Today I told him that I'd like to submit an abstract to a conference but he would not permit it, saying that he is afraid that someone at the conference will steal our idea and publish it in a journal before we are able to. I really think he was just using that as an excuse though. A: In comments, you say that you have less than a year left until graduation. Given this fact, it would likely not be easy to get more than a couple of quality publications out during this time in any case, particularly with a perfectionist advisor and little experience in publishing yourself. As such, I think your big goal (besides graduating) should be to get a good postdoc lined up, where you can solidly advance your career and do a lot of publication. Having few publications but a respected advisor can be a totally reasonable combination for moving to a good postdoc. If necessary, you may even do more than one round of postdoc. Once you establish a solid "upward trajectory" and track record of publications, the fact that you published little in grad school will not be a problem, particularly if your one grad school publication is indeed a very good one. A: One of the first "guides" to a PhD that I ever read, mentioned the pros and cons of choosing a young advisor versus an old advisor. Certainly it isn't that black and white but your description is exactly what that article talked about. In response to your points: The number of publications on your resume is important. It is how you will be evaluated on the job market. Just as importantly though, submitting papers and attending conferences is a great way to get feedback, network, and find collaborators. Not publishing until the end isn't a death sentence but you definitely need to be getting feedback from other researchers in your community years before that. Again, publishing and attending conferences is an awesome experience and could help you find jobs (it certainly has helped me find great internships!). My suggestions would be to (A) talk to your advisor about this again, (B) find a co-advisor, or (C) switch advisors entirely. A co-advisor could potentially give you the best of both worlds. But it sounds like your current advisor has very different goals for you than what you want so you have to take some time and contemplate if you want to continue working with him.

Q: Is it OK to submit a poster version of an already accepted full paper to the same conference? My advisor has suggested that I should send a poster version of an already accepted full paper to the same conference. He suggests that I should do this because he thinks this will trigger more discussions about this work and make it known by more people. The intention is good, but I have a concern since it is a poster version of the same paper in the same conference. I feel weird. Can anybody give me more suggestions? Should I do this? A: Some conferences explicitly encourage (or even require) poster presentation of papers. In this case, there is typically an option to simply request that your existing paper also be given a poster slot. Thus, it may in fact be quite reasonable to seek to present in both ways, if the conference supports this. It would not, however, be appropriate to submit a separate poster paper that pretends to be different than the accepted paper. That would be self-plagiarism, and the conference organizers might look very badly upon you for doing that. I would thus recommend getting in touch with the poster chair and asking if they allow accepted full papers to have an accompanying poster as well. If so, that's great, and you probably don't need to submit anything more than a formality at most. If not, then accept that there will be no poster and don't submit anything!

Q: Can I lie about my GRE score to get a better letter of recommendation? I have a situation. I have got GRE score of 324. My academics are pretty strong as well (5.1/6.0). I am applying for MS to US universities. In the process of gaining letters of recommendations, I do not have too many options. One of the professor at our department has pre-written letters, because he is busy most of the times. He makes rudimentary changes to it to make it suitable for each candidate, but the gist remains the same. From the experience of past students, he asks the GRE score and he somehow thinks that it is the only "good" metric of evaluation. So he has some 3-4 versions of these letters and based on a GRE score he selects a theme. I also came to know that if student is under 320, letter is excellent, that is, it is more balanced. And over 320, there is more of a high pitching. I am not targeting many 1st class universities. I am more selective and I really do not want this bluffing. Obviously, I cannot reveal to him that I know his procedure of writing the letters and I need one for below 320. My question is, may I lie about my GRE score to him? When he gets emails from universities, can he see my GRE score? I definitely do not want him to know that I lied, at any point in time, even after admission. Are there any other options? A: I am tempted to say: "Never ever lie on an issue like that." Actually, I say: Never ever lie on an issue like that. First of all, it's wrong, plain and simple. Second, from a more practical point of view, you never know how it's going to bite you back. It can taint you forever, even if here you are downplaying your achievement. It will be difficult for people to believe that you actually did that, and they will start believing that you are untruthful in other aspects, too. Frankly, it will raise more than a few question marks if it should come out. You'll have to live with the exaggerating letters, or else to find someone else to write you a sensible one. A: No, you may not lie about your GRE score. Because: ACADEMIA IS A VERY SMALL PLACE Seriously, let me say it again (in normal letters this time): Academia is a very small place. Really, you have no idea how small of a place academia is. Trust me, this will come back to bite you, as Captain Emacs said. People talk, and one way or another, because of some unexpected set of circumstances that you cannot control or predict, your lie will be discovered and you will pay dearly for your mistake, possibly with irreparable damage to your career. So remember this: lying is in general a bad idea, but lying in such a small place as academia about a crucial thing like your GRE score is just inexcusably foolish and risky. A: The best thing to do is just talk to the professor about this. If you're worried that the recommendation letter might be too strong or too weak or too generic, just talk to him. Express your concerns and see what he says. If you don't think his letter will benefit you then try to find an alternative letter writer, but don't lie. Side note: I find it odd that you know this information considering recommendation letters are usually never made available to students.

Q: Why is research assistantship decoupled from masters/phd program? I have just been offered a spot in a 2-year full-time masters program at a university in the US. It is very research-focused with a requirement of only a few courses. In the admissions letter they also offer me a full research assistantship (RA) for up to 12 months and say that graduate students typically receive RA support for 2 years contingent on satisfactory performance. The work from the RA is integrated into the graduate course of study. It is somewhat confusing to me why the RA and the Masters program are kept separate as it seems like almost all students would also be a RA. I have two questions related to this: What are the benefits of this separation from the university's point of view - Is it mainly the ability to kick out students with bad performance? I may be able to acquire substantial external funding. The offer letter states that the stipend that I receive as a RA would only supplement any external funding to a specified level, meaning that my overall salary would remain unchanged. However, if I get substantial funding this could perhaps allow me to not have a RA/TA position for 3-12 months. Would this be of any use to me? For instance, could I perhaps not have an RA position over the summer to allow me to get some time off? Edit: This is a prestigious university and my sense is that the department/research group does have good enough finances to provide funding for both years. 2. Edit: The funding is unconditional in the sense that it is simply awarded towards the masters degree without any specific requirements. It is a tradition in my home country to award young students with scholarships to assist them in taking education elsewhere. The organizations providing the scholarships then hope that these students return to their home country after their studies abroad (which many do). A: This is very difficult to answer authoritatively because each program is different but here are some reasons: As @Brian Borchers noted, sometimes the admissions and RA funding committees are separate. At some universities, admissions is handled by the department while the RA funding has to be petitioned from the graduate school. At some places, the lack of funding in the 2+ year is a weeding mechanism. Weaker students aren't offered funding, so they are disappeared (or they pay full fare which is even better than disappearing). University or department finances may be such that they are not permitted to make a 2 year commitment. They hope that funding will continue but they are being cautious. They may hope that rather than a university RA position, you will be switched to an external grant funded RA position. They can make a stronger case for funding "unfunded" students this way. The best thing for you to do is to talk to the director of graduate studies AS WELL AS to current graduate students in the program. People on the internet can't tell you which scenario it might be.

Q: How can I find a second supervisor? I'm in the second half of my Phd in a technical field in Germany. As it is common in Germany, it is not a structured PhD program but an independent PhD without any course work/mentors etc. I am not very satisfied with my supervisor because he cannot help me at all, since my topic is not his primary interest and he is very busy since he is not yet a professor. I do everything alone from choosing the specialisation of my topic to writing (my first) papers, and I got used to that. I like my topic and I get the money and besides the bad supervision, my supervisor so I decided not to change the PhD. However, I would really like to find a second supervisor who could give me advise and has a better reputation in my field. How should I approach potential professors with my request? I would not need too much help or any money, just the name of someone who is at least a little known in this field and I would be willing to do some work for them. Is it very uncommon and unlikely to find a professor who is willing to do that? I tried once at a summer school to ask another professor and it would have worked out but I experienced afterwards that my supervisor was not at all happy about that so I have to make sure beforehand that he agrees with my choice. A: Your last paragraph already says what you have to do first: Talk to your supervisor about potential second supervisors/mentors. You could bring a list of people who you would like to approach and ask about his opinion. Maybe he also has suggestions. Also make sure that he in principle agrees with the idea of a second supervisor. Then you should be clear about what you want from a second supervisor: Regular discussions in person/email/phone? Feedback on drafts? Discussion or even joint development of ideas? Extended discussion via email? I somebody from a different place the supervisor of which I do not know would approach me about being a second supervisor, I would want to know answers to these questions and probably would have opinions about the answers, too. The last paragraph also shows that you know at least one way to approach a potential second supervisor. Apart from personal meeting I would not recommend a non-solicited email from your side. If you can't meet the potential supervisor in person, I would suggest that your supervisor would make the first contact and let him/her introduce you.

Q: What should I do, as a reviewer, if I see another reviewer suggesting the authors to cite papers not relevant to the manuscript? I have just submitted my review of a manuscript to a journal, which allowed me to see other reviewers' comments once I submitted mine. I have points of disagreement with this other reviewer, but I am sure this is normal. What alarmed me was that, his/her review comments ended with a suggestion for the authors to cite additional references which, in my opinion, are not directly relevant to the manuscript, but were suggested on the pretense that they were published in the same journal, which is weird. These references have something in common in them: they are authored by the same group of people. Although I cannot be sure that this reviewer is one of them, I have the feeling that h/she may be, and that this practice may be common. In the past, when I was the author, a reviewer also suggested me to include additional references, but these references were not authored by the same people, and anyway I ended up not including them as I thought they were not directly relevant. But as a reviewer, what should I do in this case? A: I would recommend raising your concern to the editor. If the editor is honest, they will not ask the authors to follow the citations en masse. Given that the citations are all in the same journal, however, it is possible that the editor is part of the same citation cartel and may blow off your concern. In this case, it may be worth raising the concern to the publisher and/or one of the major indices. Citation cartels have been gaining attention in recent years, and if this is part of a systematic pattern of coercive citation, then those larger organizations may be motivated to investigate and sanction. A: My answer depends on where in the review process the manuscript is. If you believe the manuscript will come back to you for a second round of reviews, I would wait until then. At that point, see how the authors handled the issue. If they included irrelevant citations, tell them in your review. Something along the lines of: While reviewer 2 suggested you cite everything ever written by Smith, they do not seem to be appropriate in the cited context. I would then add a confidential note to the editor saying that they may want to comment on if the cited work is needed. If you believe the manuscript will not come back to you (either because the authors will give up or it will be accepted), then you may want to tell the editor directly. I tend to defer to the editor on these issues, so would not say anything.

Q: What should I do if I discover a paper I rejected because of methodological flaws has been published in another journal? I recently discovered that a paper I reviewed a while back and rejected as a result of major methodological flaws had been resubmitted to another journal and published without addressing any of the significant errors that required the paper to be rejected in the first place. Is there anything I can do that doesn't violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to address the problem? A: Two things are unclear about your question Is there anything I can do that doesn't violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to address the problem?: What is the goal of any intervention? Why do you think that anything should be done? If, for example, you aim for retraction, I guess this could be difficult. You may go for this on the ground that you can prove that the authors were aware of the flaws you pointed out and submitted the paper knowing that there was something wrong. The journal may have some rule that the authors have to certify that the results are true to the best of their knowledge. If this really is so, you may have some angle of attack. If you aim for correction by the authors, it could also be difficult. However, you could consider writing a letter to the editor, pointing out what is wrong and then ask if the journal would publish such a letter. Some journals I know have such formats. You could also do follow-up research on the same topic and write a paper yourself where you refer to the paper with flaws and describe what wrong there. For the second question, it sounds like you feel that "What's published and peer-reviewed should be true." While this resonates with me, it's not something that is close to true now and probably never will be. Mistakes happen. You may then trust in the scientific community that the flawed paper will be perceived as such in the long run and find peace with this particular paper. Finally, the premise that confidentiality of the peer review process may permit some actions is not totally clear. As I wrote in a comment, I asked a question about this on MO and got very different responses. A: I think the first question you need to ask yourself is what have the authors done wrong. Disagreements between authors and reviewers about methodology are fairly common. I see two situations. The first is you believe the paper is wrong and needs to be retracted. The second is you believe the authors have intentionally mislead the reader (since you told them about the error in your review). You should be able to make the claim that the methodology is flawed from the published manuscript. As that claim would only be based on the published manuscript, it would not violate the confidentiality of the peer review process. You should follow whatever procedure the publisher has for reporting issues. If you believe the authors engaged in ethical misconduct by ignoring your review, you should be very careful. You should talk to colleagues to make sure that the methodology is in fact flawed. Once you are sure of the flaw, you then need to approach colleagues about the "hypothetical situation" of whether it is potentially unethical if the authors knew about the flaw prior to publishing the work. Once you are confident that there is a flaw and that it was potentially unethical to publish the work, you should go through the editor at the journal you reviewed for. Let the editor know about the misconduct and hopefully they will follow up on it. If the editor chooses not to follow up on a claim of misconduct, then you should follow up on that. In this case, where the journal refuses to follow up on a claim of misconduct, I think it is reasonable to violate the confidentiality of the peer review process to the extent required to show the misconduct to an outsider (e.g., COPE).

Q: Whether to take a holiday or get research experience when transitioning from masters to PhD? Background: I'm in a precarious situation. I'm currently in the sixth semester of a ten-semester (five-year) combined bachelor's/master's program in engineering. So far I've had two relevant industry internships and have been getting stellar grades, but I lack research experience in my field. I am still unsure if I want to pursue a PhD, and I'm a bit apprehensive to make that life decision now. All six semesters I've been taking classes and conducting research in a not-so-relevant field (mainly because research in my field is hard to get as an undergraduate) - suffice it to say after three years of this, I've somewhat burned out. I'm currently signing up for classes for my seventh semester, which is the first semester I'm required to take graduate classes. Because I've felt a lot of academic pressure, I decided to sign up for less classes than usual to give myself a respite. In response to this, my academic adviser recommended that I conduct research at a lab near campus to prepare me for a prospective PhD. I'm reluctant to agree because I wanted to take the semester to relax and pursue various interests I've fallen out of touch with since the start of university. I voiced my concerns to my adviser and he is continually trying to pressure me to conduct research, citing that not doing so would be a huge missed opportunity and might hurt my chances of applying for a PhD. Question I don't want to leave this as an open-ended question (a la "what should I do?"), so I'll try to make it more structured: How important is having research in a relevant field when applying to PhD programs? Would PhD programs look unfavourably upon taking a semester to "relax," considering that a PhD requires a great deal of dedication? A: Wanna relax, then do so. Don't be somewhere you don't want to be. You have to be mentally ready to do a research. I have seen many cases of young intelligent individuals who started doing PhD, and then for various reasons gave up, because some serious work needed to be done and they want to have well... some fun (rightfully so)! I would recommend do not burn the bridge with your supervisor as you might start doing PhD in upcoming years. Tell him/her in a meeting that you would like to finish your studies and enjoy life a little bit; before committing yourself to doing research.

Q: What is the difference between an academic department and program in US colleges/universities? What is the difference between an academic department and a program in U.S. colleges and universities? I am attempting to model the relationship between Departments and Programs. Thanks! A: I am not sure everyone uses the words the same way, but here is the difference at schools I have been at: A department is a collection of faculty who are organized into a unit for management and course planning purposes. Some departments have faculty from just one area, while others have faculty from many areas. The division into departments is used in particular for hiring and tenure decisions, which often begin with at the department level. Several departments are collected together to form a division, school, or college, which is the next level up the management hierarchy. Different schools use different divisions, but the smallest one is almost always called a department. A program is a collection of courses that lead to a particular degree or certificate. These courses (ignoring general education) may be taught by one department, or by many. For example, a degree program might be "bachelor's of science in mathematics" or "bachelor's of arts in management". The mathematics program will require predominately courses from the mathematics department, while the management program may require courses from the management department, the accounting department, the economics department, and maybe a computer information systems department also. Some departments offer a single degree program, while other department offer multiple degree programs. On the other hand, some degree programs are interdisciplinary and are offered jointly by several departments in collaboration. Each faculty member will work for one or more departments; these assignments are called "appointments". A student will not be part of a department in the way that faculty are, but a student may "declare" one or more degree programs, and in that way each student is typically "advised" by faculty of one or more departments. A: In my experience in one case. Departments group the faculty for purposes of finances, hiring, promotion. Programs group the students, especially graduate students, according to what they are studying. In many cases, each department houses one program. But not in all cases. Two hypothetical examples: The program in Biochemistry has no department of its own, but draws faculty from three departments---some from Chemistry, some from Medicine, and some from Microbiology.) A professor may be a member of the Department of Chemistry, but may teach courses in both Chemistry and Biochemistry. The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures has programs in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portugese. A professor may be a member of that Department, but teach courses in only one of those programs.

Q: Are IPython Notebooks code or slides? (for licensing purpose) I prepared a short tutorial in IPython Notebook and want to release it on an open license. However, as it is something between code and slides, I do not know if Creative Commons licenses are suitable (they are not meant to be used for code) or should I rather something specific for code (say, MIT or BSD)? If you are not familiar with IPython Notebook, it looks like that (not mine): Introduction to Linear Regression (from this course) Deep Dreams (with Caffe) - Google A: While CC licenses aren't really appropriate for code, and code licenses aren't really appropriate for text, there's no real downside to assigning both kinds to the same material. This is "dual-licensing" (reasonably common for software), and it allows the reuser to choose whether they wish to use and redistribute your material under license A or license B. They can then pick the particular license which is most appropriate for their purposes without having to (eg) try and work out how to apply the BSD license to a graph. For example, you could use a license statement that says something like: This material is copyright Piotr Migdal and made available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (link). Code is also made available under the MIT License (link).

Q: What to do if a colleague is reviewing an unchanged paper that has been rejected before on my recommendation? Around a year ago, I reviewed a paper for a journal. The originality of the paper was questionable, and content and presentation were severly lacking throughout. Consequently, both another reviewer and I recommended rejection and gave detailed explanations to which the associate editor agreed. The decision including the review reports were sent to the authors. Now, a colleague of mine just told me of a review request from another journal. Briefly summarizing the content of the paper, I realized that this sounded quite familiar. Expressing my concerns to my colleague, we compared the authors and the papers, and realized that this was exactly the same paper that was reviewed and rejected earlier, nothing has been changed (apart fomr some journal style specific things). How should we proceed? A: If you were asked to re-review an "unchanged" manuscript there are a number of things you can do (e.g., Asked again to review a paper, when the authors don't wish to modify it). The issue is that this is not the case. You are no longer part of the review process. The first thing you should do is STOP. The behavior you have engaged in so far has been completely unethical and a clear violation of every reviewer agreement I have ever seen. Your colleague should never have told you about the paper under review. You should not have mention that you reviewed a similar paper in the past. Neither of you should have mentioned authors or the title. The actual manuscripts should never have been shared and/or compared To a lesser extent, it is not even clear why you still have your copy of the manuscript. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) provides Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers which can be thought of as best practice. These include: respect the confidentiality of peer review and not reveal any details of a manuscript or its review, during or after the peer-review process, beyond those that are released by the journal not involve anyone else in the review of a manuscript, including junior researchers they are mentoring, without first obtaining permission from the journal; the names of any individuals who have helped them with the review should be included with the returned review so that they are associated with the manuscript in the journal’s records and can also receive due credit for their efforts. keep all manuscript and review details confidential. A: Between the two reviewers, you've created quite a nasty situation. First -- the author did NOTHING wrong. Second, you and your colleague have done something very wrong. The fact that you know nothing substantive has changed means you were essentially handed the manuscript, which is very bad behavior on both your parts. My recommendation is that the new reviewer should probably contact the editor that sent him the manuscript and say simply "for reasons I choose not to discuss, I suddenly find myself in conflict, and can't provide a review", delete the paper, and never discuss it again. Your colleague is not in a situation where he should try to provide a fair review, as he's obviously poisoned. A: The goal of the review process is to fairly and accurately evaluate the merits of the submitted manuscript, while making sure no one gains an unfair advantage through knowledge of the manuscript before it is available publicly. I see no issue about unfair advantage here, since you and your colleague were both already in possession of the same manuscript. That being said, ethical boundaries are very field dependent, and the culture in your field may be different. For example, I have reviewed a number of papers and have never been explicitly asked to keep submitted manuscripts confidential (though it is generally understood that I should). As for your colleague's responsibility of evaluating the paper, there is some unfortunate tension between the goals of fairness and accuracy, and you need to make a judgement based on the specifics of the situation. But here are the main points I think are important: It is unreasonable to expect every reviewer to understand every tool used in a submitted paper. Discussion of papers (which both parties already have access to) is to be encouraged (though the fact that one is reviewing the paper being discussed should perhaps be kept confidential, depending on the situation). From this point of view, I would consider it unethical not to let your colleague know about a serious logical error in a paper they are reviewing. On the other hand, your colleague should form their own critical opinion about the paper. Their knowledge that the paper was previously rejected and then resubmitted without any revision has (probably) already biased them against it. So, if there is a serious issue in the paper which absolutely has to be pointed out, then by all means do so. Otherwise, I would do as the other answers suggest and let your colleague form their own opinion about it. The fact that the authors have not addressed your original reasons for rejection is unsettling and could be a reflection of unethical behavior on their part, but without more information, we (and perhaps you) cannot know for sure.

Q: Is a journal that is on Beall's list but is also in Scopus a predatory journal? I have seen a journal, in the Computer Science field, that is predatory according to the Beall list (sorry if its not well written), but I see that this journal appears indexed in Scopus and Scimago; so I was wondering how to determine if a journal is predatory or not? For example, I know that even some journals from Elsevier or Springer charge different prices for publishing an accepted article, and according to some colleagues if a journal charges for publication then it could be a predatory one, but the aforementioned editorials charge also so to whom believe? I was also wondering if the B list is also accurate, I am starting to have my doubts about it. A: Indexing in Scopus does not necessarily mean that a journal is not predatory. From the guidelines for being indexed in Scopus: -The Journal should consist of peer‐reviewed content -The Journal should be published on a regular basis (have an ISSN number that has been registered with the International ISSN Centre) -Content should be relevant and readable for an international audience (at minimum have references in Roman script and English language abstracts and article titles) -The Journal should have a publication ethics and publication malpractice statement These guidelines could potentially be satisfied by a journal that Beall's list considers predatory. Many pay-to-publish journals advertise "peer review", but it may not even be solicited/may not matter in the "decision" to accept the manuscript. There also can be information on why the specific journal or publisher is considered predatory on https://scholarlyoa.com. I generally have high confidence in Beall's list--predatory journals do not have a great incentive to turn legitimate.

Q: 'Big shot' scientist offered me collaboration in a meeting. How long before I write to him? I met an important scientist in my field in a scientific meeting last week. We agreed that I should write a project draft and send it to him, so we could set up a collaboration. Because I want to take as much advantage as possible from this opportunity (I am a PhD student), I want to be very careful with the project draft that I sent him. But this week I have been very busy with other work, and I have not been able to write the draft. My fear is that the interaction will 'cool off' as the days past. It's not been a week yet, and I am planning to write this in at most 2 more days. But in general experience, how long is it ok to wait before sending an email like this? A: It will not cool off that quickly. Doing it right is more important than doing it soon. If you are a PhD student you must talk with your mentor/supervisor before establishing a collaboration or even sending this draft project. You don't know the political background.

Q: Is there anything a student could or should do about a professor who gives lectures so dry that less than 10% of the class turn up? He's clearly a very nice man, but his delivery is reasonably monotonous, and his lecture material is reams and reams of definitions and rules. I make sure to attend every lecture, and try my best to concentrate, but do find I have had to use other sources (generally online) to be able to answer the questions he sets. All my peers that I have asked, say they find him very boring. A: That you asked the question shows that you feel that there is something that you can do, and that you somehow should do something. However, the question lacks motivation. The lecture is boring - OK. Many things in life are boring. Here are some different motivations you may have (certainly not an exhaustive list): You would like to have better lecture for yourself to facilitate your learning. That's a good motivation. Especially, you can bring this point across without judging the lecturer or the lecture. Focus on what you experience and what you perceive. Note the difference of "I can not focus for the whole lecture." and "The lecture is boring." You feel with the students not coming, think they skip the lecture because they find it boring, and wish they would have better opportunities for learning. Note that students skip lectures for all kinds of reasons. I myself skipped lectures because I did not like the lecturer (although the lectures were anything else but boring), because the lecture were indeed boring, because I did not like the lecture style (e.g. it being to fast and reading from a book suited me better), because I was just "not in the mood" (although anything else was OK with the lecture). But it seem that you checked the premise. Then here be sure to stick to the facts when formulating your suggestions/feedback. Note the difference between "The students find your lecture boring." and "Other students I talked to agreed with me." You want to help the poor lecturer. Also a valid motivation, but quite tough to deduce some action here. First, it's hard to be sure if the lecturer really wants help or could do something. So, there is no general advice in this situation. Some points to consider: Do not judge persons, do not blame anybody. Describe your experiences, suggest changes that would help you. Be prepared that nothing will happen and do not insist. Think twice before involving a third person. A: The poor old lecturer may be a bit hurt about the incredible lack of attendance. He must know that about 90% of the class think that he is very boring. If you turn up you will be more likely to ask him lots of questions because there wont be many others asking questions. This is actually a great oppertunity for you to learn stuff that the other 90% probably wont. Remember that grades at the end of the day are relative so you could get a decent grade for the boring course. If the lecturer really gets the pricker which depends on his human nature which I cant guess then he will at some of his most poorly attended lectures basicley tell you what is going to be in the exam. I have seen this done but I was too niave probably due to learning disability to work this out. A: In my experience with classes having such low turnouts, student-teacher were a bit more informal in the interaction. Try to get your point across to him in a subtle way in any such moment you might have. Anonymous mail could be a good idea in case you wouldn't want him to find who the person was. Whatever you chose, don't just tell him the problem, but solution which you think might work. eg. Sir, it would be cool if we could have more group discussions / movie related to the course etc. If not anything else, at least consider filling up that year end feedback form, properly mentioning the reasons why you think people don't attend his lectures and what all can he improve upon. This will at least give the Prof. a chance to reflect upon his teaching, if he really wants to, that is.

Q: How to specify Russian (foreign) authors in the bibliography of an article in English? I am writing an article for publication in English. It is necessary to include references to articles written by Russian authors in Russian language. Do I have to translate their names and titles of their articles to English or I can leave their names and titles of the articles in original language (Russian)? In the Russian-language articles, I see that foreign authors (their names and titles of the articles) are not translated into Russian and left in the original language (English). However, I have not seen articles in English, where Russian/foreign authors and articles were referenced in the original language (i.e. Russian). For now, I am following IEEE citation style. A: The purpose of a bibliographic reference, from your reader's standpoint, is to be able to find the original work. So, if I have any hope of finding it, you must provide the original title, as it appears on the publication. Now, since I don't speak Russian (and unless your paper is on Russian literature, most of your expected audience won't either), your reference is, for me, just a bunch of weird symbols. So, I will benefit if you provide a translation of the title and authors. That would, at least, give me the topic of the article, and if the authors have any international projection, I'll get a rough idea of their work. The different citation styles dictate how to exactly refer to the original and translated title. This is an example for APA style: Piaget, J. (1966). La psychologie de l’enfant [The psychology of the child]. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France. In your case, you would also transcribe the name of the author, and possibly translate the name of the journal, so I know what kind of work is it (it wouldn't be the same a paper published in a Psychology journal than in a pure Maths one). Note that sometimes, work is published in national venues, and later translated into English. Having the names of the authors and translated title can help me find it, if it were published after your paper. A: The IEEE Editorial Style Manual contains the following example (Sec. V, p. 35): [9] E. P. Wigner, “On a modification of the Rayleigh–Schrodinger perturbation theory,” (in German), Math. Naturwiss. Anz. Ungar. Akad. Wiss., vol. 53, p. 475, 1935. Though they do not give an explicit recommendation, the example above suggests a translation of the title with an indication of the original language. It should be noted, however, that many authors leave the title in the original language.

Q: When is it appropriate to describe research as "recent"? I want to write: "A recent study ...", The particular study I want to cite was published two years ago. I don't think that this is very recent in terms of journal appearances. But it is the most recent I could find compared to similar studies, which is what I want to emphasize. But what are the general semantics of "recent" when referencing sources? A: Good question. The semantics of the word "recent", in general, and in academic writing, in particular, is not clearly defined (that is, fuzzy), which makes its practical use quite tricky, as evidenced by your question. While @vonbrand's answer offers some valuable insights, such as considering the fluidity of a particular scientific field or domain, I would suggest a more practical solution to this problem, as follows. Consider literature that you reference in a particular paper. What is the temporal range of the sources? I think that this aspect could guide you in to where the word "recent" is appropriate and where not so much. For example, if you cite sources from the current century as well as 1930s, then a paper from 2010 should be considered recent, but not one from 1950. If, on the other hand, your temporal range of references is rather narrow, say, recent 20 years, then you should refer to as "recent" for sources that are from approximately last 4-5 years. You can come up with your own rule of thumb (10-20% of the total range sounds pretty reasonable). The most important aspect would be not the actual value (for the rule of thumb), but rather your consistency in applying it throughout the paper. A: It depends on the area. If you are talking about slow moving areas, "recent" could be a decade ago; for something that moves fast, what was published last year is old hat. Perhaps the easiest way out is to be more specific, "a study three years back..." (besides, the study might be several years back, or be a decade long study, but the journal issue just came out, so the publication date isn't necessarily telling).

Q: Is it ethical to publish a paper about porting an existing software package to another programming language? In short: I have ported a package in another programming environment, and I want to write a paper of my ported package. Would it be considered cheating? In details: I have implemented a package in Python, that is modeled after an R package, which means my package has the design and APIs similar to original's. The authors of original R package has published an official paper about the package on Journal of Statistical Software. And now I want to write a paper about my python package. The point is, since the design and APIs are similar, the structure and content of the my paper would be similar to that of the original package's paper. For example, in the original paper, the authors explained what Corpus class is, and in my paper, I would explain that my python-version Corpus has similar attributes. The biggest differences are brought by the environments and dependence, and some language-specific details. So, would it be considered cheating if I write the paper of ported software? Of course, the relative sections of my paper would include the comparisons between two packages and I would cite the original paper as appropriate as I can. A: Your paper must clearly delineate what is your original contribution and what is the same as, or based on, the previous package. So if you write about your Corpus class, for example, you must say that it is modeled after the R package's Corpus class. Otherwise it is "cheating," as you put it. (It's also not clear to me that a straightforward port of an existing package would be considered a novel research contribution by most venues for publication. But that's an entirely different question.) A: Just to add to ff524's answer, the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS) does have precedence for publishing articles that are simply "ports" of other current software. For one example see An SPSS R-Menu for Ordinal Factor Analysis (Mário Basto & Pereira, 2012). This article doesn't rewrite the package in a new environment, but simply creates a set of GUI menu's in SPSS to call the R package - which is considerably less work. (This would be equivalent if you simply used RPy to call the R libraries directly from Python.) It is hard to say whether you could get such a paper published in the JSS or somewhere else. As a positive, I would imagine there is a large user base (not necessarily statisticians) that are using Python for text processing that could use such a library. On the downside as others have mentioned its original scientific contribution is questionable in light of its redundancies with the R package. (I personally would rather do such things in Python, but you need to remember the editors of JSS are statisticians who may not hold the same views.) I would suggest you write the paper anyway and post it publicly online, as in a paper form it tends to be a gentler vignette to using the software than the doc's typically afford. Even if you can't get it published it still provides positive exposure for your work - and will still be cited if someone uses your library for academic work. A: Every scientific work is normally always based on some previous works. These previous works must be cited. Cite paper, conference thesis or in the worst case website or "personal communication" of the original software saying that this is the initial version that you have ported. If you do this, it is completely honest to write the article. I am not sure if just porting to another language brings enough scientific novelty but say porting the old forgotten 1965s piece of code in FORTRAN into C++ using object oriented design and some new advanced algorithms probably is.

Q: Changing field for PhD - How much do I need to know before I start talking to advisers/applying? I finished an integrated masters program in physics last summer, and I plan on doing a PhD on the coordination of autonomous agents, particularly in the field of automated vehicles. I was excited after having a discussion with a top professor in the field at a university I wanted to go to. I was told to read some more of his work to see if I could understand it, and get in contact in a few weeks. I did the reading, with some basic understanding afterwards, but the position I was pursuing was given away while I did this reading before I had the chance to prove my knowledge. When I read papers in this field, which incorporate set theory and graph theory as well as other areas I have no background in, how much of the material do I need to 'get' before I can seriously apply? I find myself understanding the ideas and the processes, but I get tangled in the maths. How much training would somebody with a good academic record, but from a different field, get on a PhD program like this? Would I get time to get up to speed by reading seminal textbooks? This sort of move into a new field is scary, and even with my good academic record, I am terrified of being completely useless. A: First of all, do you have enough time to change your topic? If so, I would strongly recommend to talk to your supervisor first. If he/she knows you and your abilities, he/she can guide you on choosing a topic; you can finish up and get a PhD. Second of all, with a good help of your supervisor and your commitment you can finish a PhD. Note on "Scary Parts": Nothing is scary!. I myself had no idea about a subset of computing semantics, and it felt like jumping from an airplane when I started to learn about it. However, at the end of the learning period, I realized why I was so afraid? Don't be scared, it will take your focus away, on doing your job. Your new slogan should be: Keep calm and learn! A: I changed fields between my master's degree and my PhD and I also found it scary. From my experience, there is no reason to be scared. Most students entering the graduate program will have little experience and you will have enough time to learn as you take classes or start your research. I would say that with a background in Physics you would be ready to 'seriously apply' right away. I will refer you to a somewhat similar question I answered a year ago, and the comments below it for some more info: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/42326/31255

Q: What are the pros and cons of pursuing a professorship without a post-doc? If I have a decent number of journal publications as per my area of research, is pursuing a post-doc after PhD worth it before searching for a professorship? Do faculty search committees give more preference to candidates with a post-doc over those who just finished their PhD, even though the number and quality of journal publications are comparable? Does the opportunity to work with a well know professor significantly boost the chances of getting a faculty position? A: If I have a decent number of journal publications as per my area of research, is pursuing a post-doc after PhD worth it before searching for a professorship? In many disciplines it is practically necessary to have done one or more post-docs in order to amass the research record needed to obtain a tenure track position at a research university. In my discipline (applied mathematics) it is also common for a new PhD to use a mixed teaching/research post-doc or a primarily teaching visiting assistant professor position as a way to get teaching experience. In my experience, many students apply for both post-docs and tenure track positions. Reasons not to apply for a more desirable tenure track position are if you don't have any realistic chance of getting the position or if you feel that you want to gain more experience through a post-doc before starting on a tenure track position (starting in a tenure track position when you aren't adequately prepared could result in your failing to get tenure.) Depending on your discipline, applying for a tenure track position immediately after the PhD may be extremely unlikely to get you the job. On the other hand, if applying for a position (using a generic CV, cover letter, and research and teaching statements) takes less then a minute, then why not? Do faculty search committees give more preference to candidates with a post-doc over those who just finished their PhD, even though the number and quality of journal publications are comparable? The search committee will be looking at post-docs who had as many publications as you during their PhD and then continued to produce at that rate or faster over a couple of years as a post-doc. In my experience, someone who took longer after the PhD to amass the same number of publications and citations would be at a relative disadvantage. Does the opportunity to work with a well know professor significantly boost the chances of getting a faculty position? In my opinion, yes.

Q: Publishing in 'leftist' journals or book projects: Impact on career? I am aware that this question is of different relevance for each science field. I am asking as a social scientist/sociologist here. The line between research and own political opinions is more or less clear/diffuse for other fields. In short, my field of research is relevant to some more or less intense political discussions, especially coming from the political 'left'. Along with my own political believes (which I don't discuss here), publishing in some journals or book projects is interesting for me a) because it advances my research on specific topics b) it allows me to articulate critique and take a position in public discourse c) advance critical sciences and critique in my field -- and in society as well. Is it a problem for a pursuit of an academic career, if I publish some papers in 'political biased' journals/books? Of course my own choice of jobs/funding etc. is selective and tends to exclude opportunities that are for example 'too conservative' for me. However, sometimes you cannot chose freely. Further, said publications can be omitted in my publications list; but internet makes one transparent. Has anyone of you made any experience in the either way? Or has anyone expierienced conflicts? A: There is nothing wrong with communicating your research to (a part of) the general public. In all likelihood public funding was used to pay for part of your research or used in your university, so it is only fair to give something back when you can. I would not hide it either, that only looks suspicious. Instead I would just add a section to your CV for communications with the general public. It would often be viewed as positive, though other things like publications would be valued much higher. Who knows, maybe you will end up in a very close race some day and that little extra is just enough. If those pulbications have nothing to do with your research than those are just your private actions as a citizen. You don't need to mention those in your CV, but I don't think they will be held against you.

Q: How to present a paper via skype? I'm doing a skype presentation of a paper that would be published soon. The presentation is for an improvement of a procedure that was not so accurate before (Computer Science related). Should I only keep the cam towards me or should I share the screen as well with the ppts? I've got 7 minutes for the presentation and 3 minutes for Q & A. It's my first skype presentation and I have no idea on how this would be done. A: I have presented powerpoint slides by: voice call while screen sharing the window with the presentation (works quite well) video call with slides behind me, having emailed the slides to the audience beforehand (works well for smaller audiences as long as you remember to say "next slide" or similar when you change. Sounds like it would be annoying but everyone gets used to it very quickly). I have also seen record the presentation offline, replay as a video and have a skype q&a afterwards (this was odd, I wouldn't recommend it). Final tips: Do a practice run with your supervisor/colleague over Skype Make sure you have reliable, fast internet (at my University that still means a wire) and a quiet room

Q: Ad hoc work detracting from PhD project Setting I am a graduate student in a quant/informatics group (size = 2 people: my advisor and I) housed within a larger academic group that do wet laboratory/bench research. I have my own project independent of those in the larger bench research group. Problem We often get requests from the bench researchers for some data analysis. My advisor has been passing all these ad hoc requests to me and I do duly comply. Anticipated consequence If the current pace of requests continues, I think that my PhD project will suffer. What actions should I take and why? A: Step 1: Gather data. For an appropriate period of time, keep a record of who asks for what task and how long each task takes to do. If you have comparable control data from before the requests started flooding in, track progress on your own project also, so that you can demonstrate the damage to your own work. Step 2: Bring the problem to your advisor. Show your advisor the data. Explain what you need in terms of time: X amount of time for your own work per Y work period. Ask your advisor how best to make that happen (do bring ideas if you have them, but be open to things you haven't thought of). Step 3: With your advisor's support, bring the problem to the rest of the research group. You should do this with proposed solution(s) in hand (one common Organization Hack is to bring two or three possible solutions, any of which would content you, in order to limit the apparent options to wins for you). Derailment is possible here, especially if your advisor is unsympathetic, but a calm and data-driven approach is likeliest to achieve your aim. A: Learn to say no. Also, you should talk to your advisor about this. He should want you to succeed and may not know the effects these tasks are having on you. Perhaps he doesn't know how much time the work is taking you or since you always say yes, he thinks you don't have enough work to do. Communication is key!

Q: Personal repercussions for those who actively ignore review requests? A colleague recently submitted an article to a reputable journal. The article went to 6 reviewers, one of which completed the review and the other 5 of which completely ignored the request. The ignored requests were not declined, they were ignored such that 3 weeks passed and the requests finally timed out in the system before new review requests were sent out by the editor. To me, it seems unethical to ignore a request rather than to decline to review. Under a decline, the article can immediately go to new reviewers. Under an ignore, it must time out. I realize that it is possible that all 5 ignores were passive ignores, where the ignoring person never even saw the request for whatever reason. However, let's assume that the requests were actively ignored. That is, each person saw the request and chose to ignore it. This anecdote brings up the following hypothetical questions: Putting aside the important fact that peer review is what keeps the scientific community running, are there any short term repercussions for those that ignore requests? For instance, if one of the reviewers who ignored my colleague's request were to submit an article today to the same journal and it were put on the same editor's desk, would there typically be any bias against it? Should there be? If there are repercussions, will they depend on how well established the ignoring person is in their field? What fraction of ignores are active ignores? A: It seems this editor has a problem with their workflow of inviting reviewers, a very common problem: The editor is recruiting reviewers via "opt-out" when "opt-in" would be more appropriate. If the reviewers were asked to indicate willingness to perform a review prior to actually doing the review, then the editor could detect "ignores" of both types and find willing reviewers much more quickly. Consequences for agreeing to perform a review and then not submitting a timely report would be appropriate. But there is nothing unethical about ignoring a review request. The potential reviewer is under no obligation to take any action at the behest of the editor -- it is fully reasonable to treat unsolicited requests as spam. And it would be unethical for the editor to take any negative action against the unresponsive potential reviewer who has never accepted the task in the first place. Of course, the story is different for reviewers who have agreed in advance to performing a certain number of reviews. But the workflow should still be based on positive acknowledgement that the materials for review are received. The only difference is the editor's action subsequent to not hearing back -- in case the reviewer has previously committed to accepting a certain number of review tasks per year, then the editor can try a different contact method instead of assigning a different reviewer. The bottom line is that opt-out sucks. A: I would presume that there is not much difference between active and passive ignore, it is probably a mix of both (e.g., the reviewer received the request but forgot to followup). For this reason, there are usually very few ramifications for such a lack of followup. However, it is quite common that review systems maintain statistics regarding each reviewer (such as number of reviewing assignments accepted/declined/unanswered, as well as average review time). In such a situation, not answering requests will make it less likely that a reviewer will be asked to review in the future. Apart from this, I do not believe that there are any negative consequences. Furthermore, reviews and review requests are usually blind, such that only the editor of a paper knows which reviewer declined to answer a request. A: Actually, there can be some detrimental effects for faculty who actively refuse to participate in peer review processes. For instance, the documentation for promotion and tenure at some universities requires you to list your reviewing activities. If you don't have any, that means your documentation will have an unexpected blank space in the "service" activities. This isn't normally enough to deny someone promotion or tenure, but it is enough to warrant comment from the typical review committee. ("The rest of us are doing this—why aren't you?")

Q: Career progression paths for a Postdoc I'm preparing for a PhD interview and there is one question that I'm not too confident to answer, which is if they asked where do I see myself in 5-10 years or what I plan to do after my PhD. I know I want to remain in science and do research in molecular biology, so I would do a Post Doc but I'm curious about it because I have heard that there are many levels of it but I'm not too sure what these are. Is there a list of them I could go through and see which suits me most? I'm sorry if this is confusing but I'm a bit clueless about it too. Also during one of my interviews I was asked about becoming a lab leader. To be honest, right now, I feel that I won't ever be ready for that and I would prefer not becoming a lab leader although it seems like the very final step in the research career. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong but I have seen most lab leaders to be stuck with paperworks, applying for grants etc and they rarely ever work in the lab. My desire is to enjoy doing experiments and I feel that being a lab leader is such a huge responsibility. I kind of wish I could be a Post Doc... forever? Or maybe one day I might feel the need to have my own lab, but how to answer such question without putting yourself at disadvantage? Many thanks for your help! I know I sounds like a naïve student with all these ideas (which might not be realistic), but because that's exactly what I feel like I am at the moment that I need to know anything relevant about further studies and Post Doc is still such a grey area for me. I know at some point it's all going to be a battle for money... A: Get ready for the part where you stop doing most of the research and start fighting for the money to fund the people who do if you want to work as a professor. Other options are to find a pure research track and not teach (like I do). These positions are often follow a progression like Research Associate, Research Scientist, and Senior Research Scientist. Though, there's a fair amount of grant chasing and personnel management on this track, too, and no tenure so job security is based on winning grants regularly. A: In answer to you first question...there aren't formally different levels of Postdoc positions (you'll see references to 'Senior Postdoc,' say, but those are rarely job titles). Essentially, a Postdoc is a position in which you work with a lab boss (called PI, Principal Investigator, in many fields), but also assume larger responsibility than as a Ph.D. student (first author of papers often, help with grant applications, oversee graduate and undergraduate students, ...). It's a product of the pyramidal structure of academia - not enough tenure track positions for the amount of Ph.D.s graduating, so we need to park them and further sieve some out. To a lesser extent, as going directly from a Ph.D. to tenure track and lab boss can be hard, it provides further training with less pressure than being a tenure track academic right away. The salary ranges from decent to abysmal, depending on field and school. In some fields, one Postdoc (often lasting 3-6 years) is deemed sufficient to apply for tenure track positions; in others you might have several such positions first (often shorter then, maybe 3 years each). So I think JeffE's comment isn't necessarily off, with one modification - say that you see yourself either in a tenure track position, or seriously thinking about where to go for one. Once you're part of this system, you're likely to re-evaluate wanting to be a "Postdoc forever." These long years prepare you for tenure track, and you'll be eager to finally do your own thing with full responsibility even if this now appears scary.

Q: How much is the normal salary of a postdoctoral fellow in North America and Western Europe? I understand that the salary of a postdoctoral fellow depends on the field, project, contract, and so forth, but I am curious how much is the normal range for a fellow. Someone told me that he prefer to continue postdoctoral fellowship, as he gets the same salary of assistant professorship with less official duties. In my experience, the range of salary for a postdoctoral fellow is much less than an assistant professor, something between $25,000 - $50,000. In Europe, it is in the lower side, but it is usually higher in the US. I am curious to know what is the actual rate, and is there a norm for estimating the salary of a postdoctoral fellow? In other words, when looking at postdoctoral openings, how much is an excellent/good/normal deal? A: Let's find some official numbers and statistics. From this article: As a baseline, in 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral stipend for new postdocs was $39,264, increasing to $54,180 for those with seven or more years of experience. Funding levels at universities are broadly similar. Post-doc salary guidelines depend on individual institutions, and benefits vary widely from place to place. In addition to salary, checking the benefits is important in the US, but less important in more civilized/socialistic (strike out the inapplicable term) countries. A job site that gathers salary information from US job advertisements has the following for post-doctoral fellowships: Post-Doctoral Fellow average salary is $39,302, median salary is $38,000 with a salary range from $20,779 to $961,896. I think it's safe to say that $961,896 is an outlier, but apart from that, the median matches the NRSA number. It also shows that there is a broad range of salaries, even by browsing the job listings on that site. For Europe, as I've said the situation is heterogeneous. I know how to find numbers for UK, at least. If you look at jobs postings from jobs.ac.uk for post-doctoral positions, the range appears to be £28,000 – £37,000 (apart from a few outliers). This would be roughly $44,000 – $58,000, but you have to adjust for taxes, health insurance, and then cost of living (which can be quite high in UK). In France, CNRS is the largest scientific employer, and its post-doc salary is: The gross monthly salary of a CNRS postdoc is 2,500 € As an anecdote, when I started as assistant professor, my salary was significantly lower than my post-doc salary. And even some of my post-docs in my group had higher pay than me (as well as some industry-employed PhD students). But money's not everything… A: @All, I can only give you some examples. In most areas in physics, in the USA, the postdoc salary ranges from 36000-45000US$ for most universities. Some high-ranked universities pay as much as 60000$ too to their physics postdocs, with an exception of Simons Center which pays 70000$. On the other hand, national labs pay around 70000$ for their physics postdocs - I don't know why the difference between the university payscale and the national lab payscales in the same country for the same field! In the UK it is fairly uniform for any field, at least in science and engineering. It is usually between £29000 to £33000 per year. Where you lie in this range depends on how many years you have passed after your Ph.D. In Australia, they usually pay 60000-70000 AUD + 9% (if the contract is for short term - I don't know if the short term means 1 year or less than 3 years though) or 17% (if the contract is for 3 years or more) superannuation, i.e., retirement fund. Again, there are precise rules on where you lie in this range depending on years after the PhD date. In South Africa, it is somewhere between 180000-240000 Rand per year tax-free. In New Zealand, you may expect the salary around 50000-60000 NZ$. In Germany the salary levels seemed complicated to me when I was applying as there are many kinds of taxes and you may avoid some if you are married and have child etc. In Brazil, you may expect around US$14000 for the national postdoc fellowship (52000BRL). With month life cost of US$1073 (3966BRL ) If you ask me, the postdoc life is miserable if you are in most universities in the USA and have even a small family to support. In my experience, Australia or the UK where the salaries are uniform and above the national averages for the fresh engineers (or other professionals), your life can be much more pleasant - well unless you are in the expensive area in Sydney or London! Brazil seems excellent too but I can't speak Portuguese ! Edit: Forgot about Ireland. The salaries are around €35000 per year. I used to get paid around €43000 per year (each every expenses like insurance, taxes, 'levy' which was another kind of tax, etc. were on me though) in 2009-2010, however I would think the salary levels have gone lower after the credit crunch in which Ireland has been affected the most. I should also mention that most postdocs in Math departments in the USA are paid 48000-55000 US$ per year but they have to teach 2 courses a year or so whereas the physics postdocs don't teach at all (if they teach then they get more money than their salary). Also in Japan and South Korea the salaries are around US$40000 (converting. their local currencies) A: In math in the US postdocs generally pay between 40K and 70K with the bulk between 45K and 60K. The AMS has survey data and graphs.