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thread-36570
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36570
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Steps for creating a scientific journal
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2015-01-10T14:35:23.513
|
# Question
Title: Steps for creating a scientific journal
I have organized several times some international conferences on my field (computational chemistry), where accepted proceedings are afterwards evaluated again for it submission to a special issue of a journal. Now I am thinking that I could create a journal for all those submission, even if at the beginning we have no impact factor (ISI) or if people are not so interested, but I would like this idea very much.
So I wonder of you can point which steps should I follow for creating a journal. I think I could attract many submissions, and I have servers where I could host it, but do not know the other technical and/or legal details.
# Answer
Having followed a few new journals from birth to quick success I can see the following steps:
1. Make sure you identify a scope that has long-term interest (pretty obvious)
2. Make sure the idea is supported by your scientific community; that they see a benefit in yet another journal. Community involvement really helps.
3. Assemble a group of enthusiastic and well-respected scientists in the field of interest to form a group to plan for the journal and who may constitute the nucleus of the editorial board (equiv.).
4. Create a proposal including a description of your goals and target audience for the journal.
5. Decide how the journal should be published. Open Access seems like a safe bet and initiate discussions with an Open Access Publisher. It is possible to publish on your own but using a publisher may provide access to other types of support so a careful assessment of the options are important.
----Now we assume the journal has passed the planning stages and will be launched
6. Make sure the community knows about the journal. This ground work can be continuous throughout the process but has to be realized by this point.
7. Try to attract as many prominent authors as you can and have them submit high quality work. This will help make the journal attractive. One goal, like it or not, is likely to get an impact factor (if that matters in your field) and that means publishing papers that get referenced. Attracting good papers in under any circumstances a good start.
8. Maintain high standards in your review process and make sure to maintain high publications standards. Good papers attract other good papers when people realize the journal is to be counted.
Only the contributions you can attract determine the success of the journal. Although some of the points above may seem obvious or even trivial, the more effort you add early on the higher the chance for success. In the cases I have seen, having the community on the train from the beginning and following the development has proved to be fruitful.
> 16 votes
# Answer
Peter Jansson's answer tackles a good part of the process, but let me add the question of the publisher.
You can go through an existing publisher, in which case you will have to choose one (and then convince it that it is a good idea to start your journal, but if you managed steps 1-5 in Peter Jansson's answer, it should not be difficult). There are several criteria to be considered:
* What service does the publisher provide to the editorial board? Discuss with editorial boards of journals published there to find out. Also, a publisher which is well-known in your field can have an easier time making your colleagues become aware of the existence of your journal, but it seems that this task is largely up to the editorial board anyway.
* What service does the publisher provide to authors? For example some publishers ask authors to format their papers in their style prior to submission, which can be a pain, or may have painful electronic system that authors must use to submit or to contact the editorial board. Your past experience can give you a good idea. Also, the question of usual cost the journal charges for extra pages or for open-access is crucial. Publishers can also have very different policy with respect to green open access, see the Sherpa/Romeo site for info about this.
* What service does the publisher provide to readers? For example some commercial publishers provide very poor copy-editing; you can care or not. Also, the question of the usual cost of subscriptions for non-open access journal is crucial.
You could also want to go with your university's press if it exists, so as to be close to the publisher and interact more easily with it.
If you plan on act as publisher as well, things are more complicated. Let's assume that you do not want to manage subscription payments nor article processing charges; you will still deal with quite some stuff.
* Your journal should have an owner; it may be you, or your university, or another institution, or you could create a legal body for this (e.g. a foundation), notably if you want some money to flow. For example, I know a journal run by department, with money and one full-time staff from a university and a national research institution.
* Your journal should have an identification, most notably an electronic ISSN. This is not difficult to get as far as I know.
* Your journal should be indexed in the databases used in your field (e.g. Zentralblatt and MSN in mathematics). Asking the publisher of the database would be the obvious way to go.
* You will need a software to track submissions (which need to be assigned to an editor, which need to be assigned to a referee, which await for a decision, etc.) and to host the website of the journal. Most probably you know how to do this part since you did it for your conferences.
* If you want a paper version, you will have to deal with a printer and with mailing issues, but this is very XXth-century and very likely for a journal that does not charge subscriptions.
* You may need to use an anti-plagiarism software, depending on your field (sometimes in small fields plagiarism is easily detected, but this is not universally true).
I certainly miss some points, please free to add in comment and I'll try to keep the list up-to-date.
> 6 votes
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Tags: journals, conference
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thread-36721
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36721
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Would successive rejections of different papers by the same journal lower the probability of acceptance of the next submission to the same journal?
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2015-01-13T16:34:51.743
|
# Question
Title: Would successive rejections of different papers by the same journal lower the probability of acceptance of the next submission to the same journal?
I have tried to submit some of my papers on unrelated topics to a journal and gotten rejected, either desk rejection or rejection after peer review, by the journal. Recently I worked out a new paper and would like to submit it to this journal again.
The reasons for rejections have never been elementary ones, say "poor English" or "of poor quality" or something like these (I know all these reasons from my peers). For most of the time parlance such as "the results are not significant enough to warrant publication in ..." is the reason.
Then I would like to know: Does my records in that journal significantly affect the viewpoints of the editors on my current submission?
# Answer
My guess about the situation is that your prior rejections will not significantly affect the editors' opinions on your new submission.
However, the fact of your prior repeated rejections *is* evidence that you are misjudging the suitability of your papers for that journal, either the aptness of the topic(s), or the level and quality. Thus, if I had to wager, I'd bet that you'll be rejected again... not *because* you were rejected before, but because the factors in play that led to your prior rejections will most likely manifest themselves in the present case.
So, really, you should get more-specific advice from an advisor or mentor about appropriate venue(s) for your papers, as well as possibly critiques of the writing style.
> 14 votes
# Answer
The answer lies in why they have been rejected. Papers can be rejected because they are unsuitable for the journal, are of low quality either technically or scientifically or both. You should have received some words of why the rejections came about. There is of course a chance that an editor will tire from seeing papers to be rejected from the same author time and again and that this will lead to preconceived ideas that all output from that author is of the same quality.
So key for a successful submission is to find out why rejection has occurred. Try to avoid any mistakes that can be the grounds for the rejection. Supply the manuscript in exactly the way any Instructions for Authors dictate. Provide a good accompanying letter for the submission that details the importance of the research and the conclusions you have reached as well as why the journal appears to be suitable for your point of view.
> 13 votes
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Tags: publications, paper-submission, rejection
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thread-36707
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36707
|
To cite a publication with two authors in a presentation, should I write "X and Y" or "X et al."?
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2015-01-13T04:05:46.950
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# Question
Title: To cite a publication with two authors in a presentation, should I write "X and Y" or "X et al."?
I am preparing to give a presentation after few days. Some papers are authored by two people and some are by three. While referring their work during presentation what should I write for two authors.
Suppose there are two authors only - X and Y. Shall I write ***X et al. proved that*** ...... or ***X and Y proved that....***
# Answer
> 16 votes
This was addressed on English.SE, Is "et al." acceptable for citations with exactly two authors?
The answers there indicate that major citation styles (MLA, Harvard) do *not* use "et al." when there are only two authors.
APA style also does not use "et al." for only two authors.
I'm not going to exhaustively check every citation style, but I'm not personally aware of any where "et al." is acceptable when citing a publication with only two authors.
Also of interest to those who happen to like grammar: the English.SE answer also points out that using "et al." for two authors can be considered incorrect, regardless of style considerations (text in brackets is added by me):
> The Latinate abbreviation "et al." is short for "et alii," which means, "and others," and always refers to people, not objects. So if you had two authors, adding "et al." would indicate that there were \[plural\] other authors - and since there are no\[t multiple\] other authors in this case, it is incorrect to use it.
While "et al." could also technically stand for the singular "et alia" which would be technically correct, that's certainly not a conventional abbreviation.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Follow the requirements of the journal, if they are firm. But let me argue why you should include all the authors, if possible, in many circumstances, even if there are three or four (or more). In particular, I come from a mathematics background, but this applies to many fields.
When you cite a paper as "X *et al.*,", the other author names are invisible. If the paper is good, and gets cited often in this way, people may begin to know it as the "X *et al.*" paper - thus obscuring the contributions of the other authors. Thus X gets, in effect, sole credit in the text, and the other authors are relegated to the references section. The same holds at presentations.
Reputation is particularly important for many authors - especially younger ones, but even well established ones. It helps build their reputation for quality work, which in turn is related to jobs, grants, editorships, etc. The authors whose names are obscured may miss out on recognition that they actually deserve, solely so that an author can save a few characters in an electronic document.
This is particularly relevant in fields where authorships are alphabetical by default, such as mathematics. In this case, the first author only had the luck to have a name that comes earlier in the alphabet.
There have been studies where the effect of having an early-in-the-alphabet name have been investigated. Two of them are:
The essay "Et al." is unethical by Noah Snyder was influential in my thinking about this issue.
# Answer
> 3 votes
While in publications, you should follow whatever the official style is, in presentations you are typically much less constrained.
My own guiding principle for slides is to minimize the amount of visual clutter on screen, and especially to minimize text---after all, I want people to be listening to the talk, rather than simply reading the slides. What's important to communicate is:
* This material belongs to a particular publication (either yours or somebody else's)
* A sufficiently unique identifies that somebody can find it in an associated bibliography.
I go for a fairly sparse slide format, so I tend to communicate references in the tersest way possible on the slides, using \[X & Y, YEAR\] for 2 authors and \[X et al., YEAR\] for 3+, and then saying the citation more fully as I talk, e.g., "X, Y, and Z's paper last year in Annals of Randomology." In presentations, however, there is much space for personal style and expression. At the other extreme, I have also seen people include entire full citations on slides, complete with page numbers and DOI. What is important is to give credit while you can experiment with what best suits your own sense of design and the balance between communication and completeness.
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Tags: citations, presentation
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thread-36734
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36734
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Are there any downsides to sharing a successful proposal with others?
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2015-01-13T21:15:54.960
|
# Question
Title: Are there any downsides to sharing a successful proposal with others?
Since being awarded a grant from NSF (my first!) I have received a few requests from strangers at other universities, who are themselves seeking funding, to see a copy of my funded proposal. Initially I reacted negatively to these requests, thinking that somehow the "secret sauce" of the successful proposal would be weakened by sharing it. However, I now feel that sharing a funded proposal has the following benefits:
1. It increases my work's exposure and may lead to complementary research by another group;
2. It may lead to an opportunity for collaboration.
The major downside is the prospect of plagiarism-- that the stranger would use my text in a publication. Of course *I* am planning to do that, but they should not since I would probably find out sooner or later.
If it *is* appropriate to share funded proposals, then the next logical step is to make the entire proposal entirely public. Here it seems like there is significant opportunity to weaken my chances of getting future funding-- but I can't say exactly why I feel that way.
What do other SE readers think of this? This may be appropriate for community-wiki.
(Some related reading: http://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2012/08/10/a-list-of-publicly-available-grant-proposals-in-the-biological-sciences/ )
# Answer
> 20 votes
Funded NSF proposals are requestable directly from NSF through the Freedom of Information Act. Proposal authors are given the opportunity to suggest redactions to NSF of proprietary or other information that should not be disclosed generally, but their FOIA office has final say on what gets sent. This kind of information might include not yet released product specs that would be bought with the grant funding or salaries of non-public employees. I suspect that all non-classified US federal agency grants are FOIAable through a similar process, but I only have FOIA experience with NSF.
Some people put their successful grants online, some people keep them secret. Your special sauce, in the end, is probably not that special, but good writing and good organization may be informative to weaker writers in the world. We don't publish our grant application texts online, but they're definitely out there due to FOIA.
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Tags: funding, open-access
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thread-36741
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36741
|
Will it be a bad move for Master's to do summer internship in industry when trying to pursue a PhD program?
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2015-01-14T00:42:32.943
|
# Question
Title: Will it be a bad move for Master's to do summer internship in industry when trying to pursue a PhD program?
Currently, I am in second semester of Master's program in Computer Science and Engineering. Even though I am yet undecided, I lean a little bit more towards pursuing PhD program rather than getting into industry.
Many people tell me that research experience is the only factor in getting accepted to PhD. The problem is that I have a summer internship offer from an established industry, and I do not have any professors that will accept me as a summer research intern at this time.
Personally, I do want to try out the internship to see what it is like, possibly helping me decide whether to definitely pursue PhD or look for more industry options. However, as of now, I feel that it will be a bad move in terms of applying for PhD next semester, where I will probably lack research experience that other candidates might have. Meanwhile, I am trying to build research experience through course projects and directed research within academic semesters.
How much adverse impact will it have in PhD application if I were to choose summer internship at the industry?
# Answer
> 4 votes
A person who has had his finger in both the academic and industrial pie, and then tells me that they want to do a PhD, comes across as more credible. You understand what each has to offer and you are more likely to stick with your choice. As for research ability - it has to be quality, not quantity, at this point. The rest surely will come in the course of a good program.
If the internship is interesting I would take it. Just make sure you learn something while you are there - do more than "just your job".
# Answer
> 2 votes
I was in the same boat. What I found is that it doesn't hurt, but it doesn't really help much either unless the internship is in like R&D or some area where you're doing novel work. When push comes to shove, professors/admissions committees want to see strong letters of recommendation and a strong (or at least extant) publication record. If your summer industry internship can at least garner a strong letter or recommendation then you have something.
What I did was to take the industry internship position and join a research project in my extra time. I worked an 8-6 position at a tech company and worked out optimization functions and ran simulations and such on my lunch break and at night. It wasn't a full throttle research summer, but I got a decent publication (and a great letter of recommendation from my research collaborator) out of it...and I still pulled in a nice tech company internship pay too ;-)
After the summer, I decided I liked research more anyway so I went ahead with the PhD application. Turns out doing both simultaneously helped me make the decision.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, research-process, masters, internship
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thread-36749
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36749
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Interview for pure math graduate program
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2015-01-14T03:53:28.130
|
# Question
Title: Interview for pure math graduate program
I will have an interview for my graduate school application in the coming days. I don't have much research experience but I am taking a few graduate courses which are related with the potential research field, so I think the main part of the interview will be on my coursework. The interviewer is my potential supervisor whose research field is theoretical PDE and applied analysis. The professor is very famous and has a real authority in this research area (at least in my region).
I have talked with the professor before, and he said he will ask me to talk about my "understanding of mathematics" in the interview. To be honest, I don't quite understand what the professor mean. What are the questions a professor will ask in an interview for a pure math program? Is it common to ask me to solve some exercises immediately? I think comparing with solving a specific exercise, "understanding of math" is more high-level, for example, the development of real analysis. Could you give me an example or share me your interview experience?
---
This is a short summary of the interview. The entire interview took around 1 hour. First the professor read my transcripts and found I had took a course about Fourier analysis. Hence he asked me what is the most useful technique I had learnt in that course and what were the most interesting materials of the course? Then he asked me about my understanding of graduate-level real analysis. He asked me to state Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem, and asked me *why* this theorem is correct. I tried to prove the theorem using Fatou's lemma and he thought it's too technical. So after several attempts under his guidance, I finally found out what he wanted is an intuitive understanding of Lebesgue integrable function (what kinds of properties that a Lebesgue integrable function has, but a riemann integral function does not necessarily have). Finally he asked me to prove some statements/ find some counterexamples related to Lebesgue differentiation theorem, which I thought were selected from PhD qualifying exam. I didn't know much about the differentiation theory at the time, so I just finished what I knew.
Basically the professor only asked me a few questions in the interview and he turned out to agree to take me as a student even though I didn't solve all the problems immediately.
# Answer
My grad school interview for math was a bit different. It was more about determining whether I would accept an offer if they gave me one, because they didn't want to offer places to people who would not take them. I did however interview for my undergrad, and there the questions were on mathematical understanding. A question I was asked was "derive x^x". This is something that most high school students haven't seen, but should be able to figure out with some guidance. I would expect a grad school interview question to follow a similar pattern: ask about something you probably haven't seen before, but that you can figure out with some guidance from the interviewer. They will be looking for how you try to tackle problems you haven't seen and how you justify each step you take.
> 3 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school, mathematics, interview
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thread-36553
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36553
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How do you prepare for a meeting with a potential masters thesis advisor?
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2015-01-09T23:10:02.503
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# Question
Title: How do you prepare for a meeting with a potential masters thesis advisor?
I want to do a thesis masters with a specific teacher in the field of Antennas. I am supposed to meet with him to discuss about this in 2 weeks. I am undergraduate in electrical engineering graduating this May.
How can I prepare for this meeting?What to expect?
I guess I should bring my CV and transcript. Maybe personal projects.
# Answer
When I meet with potential students, I am trying to find out whether we have mutual interests and compatible working habits. Sometimes I have a specific project in mind that I'd like to staff, and I am looking for a student with specific skills or background. Hopefully, the student is trying to find out whether he/she wants to work with *me*. There are a few things you can think about in advance to have a more productive meeting.
* Look at some of his recent publications, and recent publications of students he is supervising. You don't have to read every word, but you should get a sense of what the advisor works on. If you happen to think of an intelligent question or potential extension to his work, great, you may bring it up in the meeting if it seems appropriate, but if nothing comes to you, don't force it.
* Expect that he may ask questions to find out more about your interests, strengths, and goals, so be prepared to talk about these. I often ask potential students questions like,
+ What kind of work do you like to do?
+ What specific areas of research are most interesting to you?
+ Are there any classes that you especially enjoyed?
+ What do you want to do next (e.g. after the MS)?
* Think about what questions you might want to ask him. For example, depending on your own working habits and goals you might want to know:
+ Where do his students end up? Do most go on to industry jobs, or PhD programs?
+ How does his group operate? Does he have regular one-on-one meetings and/or group meetings with students he supervises? Is his group very collaborative or do most students work individually? Does he have specific expectations about when his students will be their offices, or is he OK with students who work unusual hours or from other locations?
* If you have *specific* technical skills that you believe will be helpful in your MS research, be prepared to bring them to his attention. (For example, if you have taken a course with a lab component that involves techniques relevant to your research interests.)
And yes, it might be helpful for you to bring your CV and transcripts to the meeting, and also email them to him a day or two before. I usually like to look at these *before* a meeting so that I can see if there's anything specific in them that I want to ask more about. ("I see you're taking \[some course\] this semester, how are you finding it? ")
> 5 votes
# Answer
I've never done this, but I would send via email or drop off a package with your CV and transcript now or at the latest a week before the meeting. This is so he can review it beforehand rather than be flipping through it at the meeting.
If you haven't, you should review his recent papers and website, if he has one, to gain knowledge about his current research interests. If possible, you might also try to review master's theses or Ph.D dissertations that he was the advisor for. Try to come up with some ideas on ways to further that research.
> 0 votes
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Tags: masters, advisor
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thread-36762
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36762
|
In PhD admission is research internship or a job in a research lab better?
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2015-01-14T10:52:23.143
|
# Question
Title: In PhD admission is research internship or a job in a research lab better?
If I hope to enroll in a Computer Science PhD program in a top tier university (Stanford/CMU) and I currently hold a master's degree (without publication). Is a year-long Research Software development job at a reputable R&D Lab (Microsoft research lab at my country for example) or a short-term research internship at a good lab that may get my name on a paper in a good journal? Of course you may assume I cannot do both.
# Answer
> 2 votes
To expand a bit on my comments:
> In PhD admission is research internship or a job \[at a research lab\] better?
Whatever you think gives you a better research profile at the end.
If you get a job at a strong research lab like Microsoft Research (MSR), you will typically also write strong papers, collaborate tightly with academics, and go to conferences. Hence, many of the advantages you would hope for from a research internship you would also get with a job at a good research lab. That being said, you may also get swamped with tasks more focused on "transfer" or productisation tasks, which are likely still valuable for PhD admissions, but arguably less so than actual research papers.
That being said, I am wondering whether you are (without a PhD) actually competitive for a job at a good research lab. As far as I know, these labs typically hire primarily at postdoc level and beyond.
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Tags: phd, research-process, career-path, job
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thread-36769
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36769
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Can I reuse my published images
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2015-01-14T13:28:35.973
|
# Question
Title: Can I reuse my published images
I have written respectively co-written papers where we have added images to illustrate our contribution. The images are far from technical and show prototypes in the field of HCI. It is not uncommon to write follow-up papers, especially of latest braking publications.
A publisher has asked us if we had previously published any illustrations and if we had secured all copyrights for them. As we own the illustrations but have published them before in a copyrighted paper respectively article, would we be able to reuse them?
I have looked at some publisher's copyright statements but they mostly refer to the paper, not the images. Would the latter be considered part of the publication and, therefore, be implicitly also copyrighted by the publisher?
# Answer
> 3 votes
In the context of an academic publishing agreement, the "paper" almost certainly includes everything on the page including the images, but read the agreement carefully. If you handed over the copyright of your images, then you'll need to secure the right to reusing them from your original publisher. This is usually easy.
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Tags: publications, copyright
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thread-34276
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34276
|
Should I submit my revised workshop paper to a journal if I don't think it will meet the "30% new material" requirement?
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2014-12-14T16:34:30.900
|
# Question
Title: Should I submit my revised workshop paper to a journal if I don't think it will meet the "30% new material" requirement?
Let me explain my case first. I submitted an article to a Computer Science Conference, and it got one rejection, and two qualifications as a borderline paper. The reviewer that rejected the paper only said that it was not in the scope of the conference and nothing more. The other two reviewers made thoughtful comments and the final verdict was that I should submit it for a workshop on that conference.
I made the necessary changes, submitted to the workshop and it got accepted. Here it was one accept, one borderline and one reject. So I changed some parts that the reviewers suggested and submit it for the final printing.
The thing is that there will be an special edition of a journal that is planning to consider the papers submitted to this conference. So the authors should re-submit their papers for a new review and they state that the papers should present at least 30% of new material.
Here is the point, the deadline is approaching fast and I am making the add-ons based on what the reviewers point me before (when I first submit it for the conference and then what was the suggestions for the workshop), but I am running out of ideas; by the way, I am the sole author of this paper. What should I do in this case? Should I just submit it with the changes? I just don't know if that would be enough. Or am I just wasting my time and should I left it because it has already been published in the workshop?
# Answer
> 1 votes
From an ethical point of view, submitting your paper is perfectly fine if you make clear what the changes to the workshop version are that make the paper contain something new.
As far as the question whether you should do it is concerned: If you cannot even convince yourself that you have enough new stuff in the paper to justify (another) journal publication, then it will be insanely hard for you to convince the reviewers that there is enough new stuff. So the submission is likely to waste your time (and possible the reviewer's time -- if the paper gets past the editor) as it is too likely to be rejected. If you are very lucky, some reviewer will suggest a possible point of extension that will make the paper strong enough for another submission.
# Answer
> 0 votes
My short answer would be, do what you think should be done and submit it. How anyone can put a fixed, in this case, 30% new material requirement on something appears ridiculous. To imagine a good paper would be rejected because it is not 30% new creates a sense of amusement in me. Either the manuscript is publishable or it is not. It can of course be deemed not appropriate for the issue but that is a different problem.
Apart from the idiosyncrasies of your system you need to assess the value of your manuscript. Is the work publishable or not. Will the thematic issue be the only way forward for this manuscript or will it be publishable elsewhere? Actually regardless of the answer to the latter question, sending it to the thematic issue would not hurt. You could get it published there which probably would attract attention to it since it is published along with other papers with similar focus. If it is rejected you will likely have additional feedback that would help when publishing elsewhere. I will point out to anyone thinking otherwise that I am not suggesting sending in something subpar just to get reviewers to help here!
In the end you need to see what you think *can* and *should* be done with your manuscript and make sure you do it. You cannot do much more, if you fall short of 30%.
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Tags: publications, journals, computer-science, workshop, extended-paper
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thread-36744
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36744
|
My adviser agreed to write a letter of recommendation, but hasn't done so
|
2015-01-14T02:56:15.567
|
# Question
Title: My adviser agreed to write a letter of recommendation, but hasn't done so
I am currently a M.Sc. student and I was planning to apply for PhD programs. I asked my adviser to write me a letter of recommendation two months ago, and he agreed to do that. However, now that the deadlines are approaching (in 2 days) he has refused to write a letter, and basically he says that he wants me to stay in his research group and do a PhD under his supervision. In other words, he is forcing me to stay in my current school. I have been rejected from one of the PhD programs that I had previously applied, because he did not submit the letter of recommendation.
My first question is: what should I do? I do not want to create conflict, because he is my adviser and I need to defend my thesis in peace in the next two months.
My second question: If I do not send a letter of recommendation from my adviser, will it affect the decision of admission committee?
This is a time-sensitive manner and I really appreciate it if you could give me some insights, I am absolutely stuck here.
# Answer
First point: what your professor is doing is absolutely not OK. There are valid reasons to back out of writing a recommendation letter late (illness, family emergency to name a few), but what he is doing is intentionally sabotaging your PhD applications.
Second: ask for a meeting with your advisor, where you can have some uninterrupted time to explain your motivation for wanting to go elsewhere for your PhD. Focus on things like wanting to diversify your interests, work with a large variety of people, maybe work on a research project that is not available at your school. Feel free to add in things like how working with him has helped you realise how many opportunities are out there and prepared you to undertake studies at *insert name of university you are applying to*. Ask him if he could write you the recommendation letter and tell him that when you have your acceptances you will make a choice of where to go, and you will not rule out your current institution until you have all the answers. Explain that you feel that he is limiting your options, and feeling shut in is not a good place to be when you are trying to make serious decisions about your future. In short, flatter him and the current programme, explain your motivation in a way that doesn't come off as "this place sucks" and hope for the best. Keep the tone of this conversation calm and non-confrontational. You don't want to destroy your last few months there, and even if he says no, thank him for his time and explain calmly that you hope he understands why you will still go on with the application with another recommender, and that you hope there will be no hard feelings between you.
If this doesn't work I would go to the professor that knows you the second best in your master's program, or maybe even from your undergrad, and explain the situation to them (confidentially) and ask if you can get a letter of recommendation from them instead on short notice. It will probably be seen as a little strange that your advisor isn't writing you a letter of recommendation, but at that point it's your best option.
> 9 votes
# Answer
While this is unacceptable behaviour, it it not uncommon at all. Many of my friends doing Master in Korea were in exactly the same situations as yours when they wanted to apply for a PhD in the US. Even worse, their advisers wrote for them bad LoRs, so that they could be rejected. Somehow they were all accepted, because doing Master in Korea often results in lots of publications.
* Your first question: there is nothing you can do with your adviser. Your LoR should come from a prof. who really wants you to be accepted, and writes a LoR with his best effort. A bad LoR is much worse than no LoR at all.
* Your second question: do not worry about what you can't control. Instead, try to make the best application with all you have.
When I wrote my Master thesis, I was having a family problem and couldn't focus. As a result, my adviser didn't satisfy about my work. Of course, he didn't want to keep me for a PhD, and was willing to write a LoR for me. But I thought his LoR would not be strong, so I chose not to get a LoR from him. This is not really a problem for me when applying for a PhD in EU, because most of positions required a Skype interview (and some followed by on-site interview).
> 2 votes
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Tags: phd, application, recommendation-letter
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thread-36780
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36780
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Is it possible to switch to a better university for PhD after completing a Masters in computer science?
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2015-01-14T16:11:52.190
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# Question
Title: Is it possible to switch to a better university for PhD after completing a Masters in computer science?
Is possible to get into a "better" university for PhD after doing an MS in a relatively low grade school in the United States? If so, what kind of profile is expected during admission?
# Answer
> 1 votes
You may have to re-take some coursework, because there may be restrictions on transferring graduate coursework from a graduate program to another, and you are going to need a high masters GPA as well as some research experience for this move to be successful.
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Tags: phd, computer-science, united-states
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thread-36790
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36790
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Would a legitimate journal send unsolicited email to an author offering to feature an article in their own publication, for a fee?
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2015-01-14T19:31:26.923
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# Question
Title: Would a legitimate journal send unsolicited email to an author offering to feature an article in their own publication, for a fee?
I have received an email from a journal in the field of engineering saying that they found an article of mine and want to feature it in their own publications for a fee. I cannot tell if this is something legit or something they send to everyone they can find. I have Googled, but there is not much information on them. How can I tell?
# Answer
> 31 votes
### Absolutely not.
While open-source journals can charge authors to help recoup the publishing costs in the absence of paid subscriptions, it is completely dishonest for a journal to "republish" a work that has *already* appeared in print. It is even **more** dishonest for them to charge you to do it. At best this is just an advertising service; at worst it's a scam.
I wouldn't even dignify the email with a response. Send that email into your junk folder.
# Answer
> 17 votes
aeismail's answer is 100% correct in general.
However, the place that emailed you isn't a journal, and doesn't claim to be (at least, not on their website). It's a website that prints the citation and abstract of articles published in other journals, with a link to the original article on the original publisher's website. Presumably (based on your experience), they allow people to pay to have their abstract "featured" on the website.
This is not necessarily dishonest on their part - they may be permitted to reproduce the meta-information of a published article, which is what they are putting on the website.
However, it will be of zero benefit to you to pay to have your article "featured" in this way.
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Tags: journals, disreputable-publishers, fees, spam
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thread-36794
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36794
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Have researchers any incentive to publish negative or confirmatory results?
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2015-01-14T19:42:19.227
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# Question
Title: Have researchers any incentive to publish negative or confirmatory results?
Negative results are sometimes seen as failures, and confirmatory results as lack of creativity, even though both kinds can be useful. Have researchers any incentive to publish negative or confirmatory results (put aside the cases when they are forced to, e.g. certain registered clinical trials)?
# Answer
> 14 votes
There is certainly incentive to publish negative results: a good negative result that clearly establishes, "X is not possible" or "X is not true" can be extremely valuable. I've published some negative results myself, and am proud of the work.
Negative results, however, typically must hew to a much higher standard of evidence than positive results, in order to distinguish between "X is not possible" and "I can't figure out how to do X." For positive results, showing "I can do X" automatically implies "X is possible," but the syllogism does not hold in reverse. I think this is one of the main reasons why publishing negative results is so difficult. Also, it's easier for reviewers to argue with negative results, and harder to argue with positive: with negative, it matters strongly *why* they are negative, while with positive the "why" can be relegated to discussion and hypotheses for future investigation.
Confirmatory results, however, are much harder to justify in absence of an explicit mechanism requiring them, as for medical studies. Typically, we get confirmatory results not directly, but indirectly through the development of new results building on the prior results: the prior results get confirmed through their use in the controls in the new study.
# Answer
> 4 votes
There are journals dedicated to negative results. If you have spent time and money trying to replicate a result but were not able to do so, you can either throw the data away or publish in one of these venues.
In addition, John Ioannidis' classic "meta-negative" paper achieved a minor sort of fame.
There are also journals that "encourage replication" (whatever that means in the context of high rejection rates), e.g. the IJF.
(Of course, negative results have value from a purely *scientific* point of view.)
So, overall you can certainly get citations by replicating results and/or publishing negative results.
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Tags: publications, motivation, publication-bias
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thread-36787
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36787
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How to narrow down a field of study when you enjoy and perform well in every subject?
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2015-01-14T18:17:31.973
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# Question
Title: How to narrow down a field of study when you enjoy and perform well in every subject?
Might it be odd for a student to love and have excellent academic performance in all subjects—I am that student. I am really confused what to study in the university. My grades are similar (high) in all subjects, and I prefer both scientific and non-scientific subjects. It's like I want to get a degree in all fields. How can I decide what I should choose? What can I study? I have tried a lot of tests, even paid ones, but I get similar percentages for all choices.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I would pick a major that maximizes your future options. Not necessarily one that will get you a job, but one that gives you a strong foundation so it's easy to pick up knowledge of other subjects.
One good major for this is **math**. Once you have mathematical sophistication it's a lot easier to learn other fields, like physics, engineering, computer science etc. In general, I think it's a lot easier to switch from math to a more applied field than it would be to switch from an applied field to math. (Personally I majored in math, and then switched to computer science, which is another major I highly endorse.)
Besides, it is a very fun major. At any reputable university the homework assignments require original thought and no two problems are the same.
In terms of career options, most math majors I knew either (1) went for their PhDs (2) became traders/took other jobs in the financial sector (3) branched into software engineering or data science.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Performing well in every subject is simply impossible past the high school level. Conversely, I would argue that a strong high school student in a US-style system *should* be able to perform acceptably in every subject (excepting effects of disabilities), since studies in high school are typically designed to give the sort of general grounding that will be required in most professional careers (critical thinking, analysis of written ideas, clear exposition of your own thoughts, creative expression, foundational mathematical and scientific knowledge).
Beyond high school, one might still have the potential to be good at any particular thing. It is just that this is the time when one begins to study specialities more deeply, and there are simply too many of them to be an expert in all of them. This happens in a fractal manner at each level: in undergraduate, you can be excellent at whole major, but cannot study all the majors; in graduate school, you can be excellent at a sub-discipline, but cannot study all sub-disciplines; as you establish a career as an academic, it is important to identify a small scope of contributions within the disciplines you work where you can contribute uniquely well.
These realities also imply an answer to your dilemma. You don't have to pick the "right" academic focus, you just have to pick one that you will enjoy. And you can even afford to be wrong a couple of times, as long as you figure it out and shift to something that suits you better. Moreover, it's possible to do this at every level (though it's harder to make large shifts the deeper you go), undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and even beyond.
In short, you can think of academic areas like the Tim Minchin love song says: "If I didn't have you, someone else would do."
# Answer
> 2 votes
It may help your search if you change the question slightly. You have been doing very well in all subjects, and you enjoy them all to some level. So the questions "Am I capable of passing exams in (subject)?" and "Would I enjoy studying (subject)?" are not giving you very informative answers.
Rather, consider asking: "Could I imagine *not* studying (subject)?" For me, this helped eliminate a few options from consideration when I was choosing school subjects, and has continued to be a useful guide. At the school level, I decided not to continue with studying chemistry - not because I was bad at it, or hated it, but because it didn't grab my interest for further study. Likewise, when applying for university study, I decided not to go for French, because although I like the language and literature, I felt that I didn't need a degree in French in order to satisfy my interests. And so on. On the other hand, the things that I have chosen to pursue are topics that I can't imagine being without.
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Tags: major
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thread-36810
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36810
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What happens if a conference doesn't get enough submissions?
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2015-01-15T01:46:56.993
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# Question
Title: What happens if a conference doesn't get enough submissions?
A fairly well known yearly conference is being hosted in a location this year. It turns out this location probably isn't the best and is impacting submissions.
Proceedings are being published in a IEEE/ACM/Springer book.
I thought to myself: What happens when a conference of this calibre does not get enough submissions? (after extending, and extending the deadlines)
Do they just stop the entire event? Or do they suffice with a crappy proceedings?
# Answer
> 6 votes
For a conference without integrity, it can of course simply accept whatever washes up on the shore.
For a conference with integrity, however, there is generally a good deal of flexibility in the structure of a conference program. Putting together a program is always a delicate balance of talk length vs. number of tracks vs. plenary events like keynotes and panels vs. breaks, lunches, etc. Thus, if the number of submissions is low, but still enough for a viable meeting, the organizers will simply end up with less papers and a more relaxed meeting pace. You can easily flex the number of talks up or down by 50% in even a single track conference by playing with the schedule structure. For a multi-track conference, it's even easier to scale the number of tracks.
If the submissions are *very* low, to the point where it is impossible to fill even a very relaxed schedule with reasonable talks, that's a different story. It's unlikely to happen all at once, because it would take a remarkable collapse to be down by 50% in a single year. In any case, societies like IEEE or ACM provide a conference with financial insurance, so that it will not be a complete disaster on a fiscal level, at least. The next year, however, the society may no longer be willing to sponsor the conference...
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Tags: conference
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thread-34869
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34869
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What kind of design freedom can you permit yourself in academic writing?
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2014-12-27T18:52:54.673
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# Question
Title: What kind of design freedom can you permit yourself in academic writing?
In scholarly journals, or publicising in certain magazines you are expected to hold true to a certain design pattern and citation style. However, when publishing your own work independently you are free from those constraints, or are you?
I am a designer by heart and every couple of years I create a new template that I use for future academic papers, following contemporary design patterns. In my opinion, my templates look nice. Not too strict, though flirting with kittenish. I am convinced that a nice design leads to a fruitful first impression. However, I am aware that this might be very subjective.
My question is, then, do academics generally look down on "design hippies" and should all retain a strict - possibly even chippy - style? Or does all of this matter not as long as everything is legible and well-formatted?
I use hand-written, cursive fonts in informal paperwork all the time. That's why I posted this question: even though certain fonts are well-suited for distinguished forms of design and publicity (such as magazines or webdesign), how does a formal academic world react to such patterns. On a (possibly less formal) website, for instance, Pacifico would be used without question. Of course, an academic audience is an 'ole other bunch all together. That's where my inner designer and outer academic struggle with one another. Should we stick to the trusted, formal (and, let's be fair, boring) style, or can we go a little (just a tad!) crazy? Note that I'm not strictly talking about fonts. It can be anything, going from structure (column layout), to colours and highlights, to bold face and font families. Heck, maybe even illustrations!
*Update:* people in the comments seem to focus a lot on the fact that I mentioned Pacifico, a cursive font. First of all I should clarify that I only brought it up as an example. Secondly, I only considered that font as a candidate for large **headings** with a font size of 24pt or larger - which increases readability. I did not imply to use this particular font as the *main* typography for my text, but merely as a means for catching titles. I'd also like the emphasise - again - that I am aware that certain fonts are not formally applicable and would annoy rather than refresh an academic reader's mindset. But as said, I am a big fan of design trends (focusing on, but not restricted to, fonts) and innovation, and I am simply curious to know how academics think about this: how far can one go. How different is an academic design style from for instance web, advertising, magazines and newspapers.
# Answer
> 43 votes
I read papers, I don't hang them on my wall. That is the main objective, and your design should subdue to it. I enjoy a well crafted book, but I get extremely annoyed when some unnecessary decoration gets in the way of usage.
In your case, the font of the titles requires a mental effort from my part to read them, which I find unacceptable, and thus, annoying. When reading a paper, I usually skim through the sections to get a broad picture of it; with Pacifico, I need to waste neurons in deciphering it while constructing my mental idea. I also find that the numbers in the text stand out a lot, probably more than they should, as they are not information I would like to get while skimming.
On the other hand, I have encountered a few unique and very nicely crafted documents, and those made a more long lasting impression. If not for anything else, I remember the general image of the article.
Bottomline is, if your design is good, it will be welcomed; but if it has flaws, some picky people like me\* may get displeased and cause a worse first impression. A standard template is a safer option; but more difficult to stand out.
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\*To give you an idea of how much, I find several citation styles to be rather annoying because they are clearly inferior to others. For example, anything without DOI in the modern times.
# Answer
> 28 votes
As March Ho mentioned in the comments, one important factor is legibility. This is true both at the level of fonts and more broadly in design/structure: if your most important goal is to communicate your ideas, then it's worth optimizing for ease of reading and comprehension. Unfamiliarity is itself an obstacle, so even if your design would be superior if widely adopted, it might prove inferior in practice.
Another issue is demonstrating membership in the community of scholars. Choosing an unconventional design amounts to announcing "I am an outsider," and although being an outsider is not a bad thing in itself, it can come across to readers as a terrible sign. For example, when I see mathematics papers with highly nonstandard formatting, they are almost always crackpot papers of no value whatsoever. That's not company you should voluntarily join. I wouldn't consciously ignore a paper just because of the formatting, but I can't help approaching it with a strong prejudice. Unless your papers are really exceptional, unconventional design is likely to decrease your readership.
The fundamental issue here is whether you are writing for yourself or others, which is a common tension within academia. You can take the position that you are creating a work of art and aren't willing to compromise on your vision even if it will hurt the work's reception, or you can try to do what's necessary to increase your work's impact on the scholarly community. Different authors end up balancing these concerns in different ways.
# Answer
> 11 votes
If you are self-publishing, then you are free to format your work however you please. However, as the others have already pointed out, the harder your work is to read, the less it's going to be read, and the more trouble you will have getting others to take your work seriously.
As you mentioned in your question, you yourself find the font "borderline legible." That's already a huge strike against its use: why would anyone else want to read it if you, the designer, find it only marginally legible?
As someone who greatly appreciates good page design, I have to admit that I find it too "cute" for its own good. There are many fonts that could serve your design purposes of being "original" without sacrificing legibility. Pacifico is not one of them. Also, the bold numbering in the text is probably not good unless those are going to be hyperlinks.
# Answer
> 8 votes
I believe the guidelines can be stated fairly briefly.
*The typography* should convey the message without providing resistance to the reader. Selecting good type faces and setting the text according to typographical guidelines regarding line spacing and line length (number of characters) is key. Remember many journals are set to conserve space rather than readability as a prime target.
*The illustrations* should as show (in Edward Tufte's terminology) graphical excellence, that is give the viewer the most ideas in the shortest amount of time with as little "ink" as possible.
Just remember that if the main point is communicating science, then the ease with which the reader can access the information is more important than personal design ideas. The challenge thus lies in achieving "excellence". Fortunately, excellence usually also *is* beautiful (my personal note)
References Edward E. Tufte, *The Visual Display of Quantitative Information*. Graphics Press.
(e.g.) Robert Bringhurst, 2012. *The Elements of Typographic Style Fourth Editions (vesion 4.0)*. Hartley & Marks.
# Answer
> 7 votes
Academia should be in part about the transfer of existing knowledge, and in part about pushing the boundaries and discovering new things. For the former, being a little bit formal and traditional is OK - although it's also good to bring a new and personal style to the way you convey the information (think of Richard Feynman's incomparable physics lectures that brought a new clarity to a traditional subject).
I like it when people try different things - as long as these things contribute to the over all purpose of the paper. For example, I was very impressed the first time I read an internal report in which the author used pull-quotes to help in the process of following the narrative - very powerful, but rarely used in scientific publications. That kind of experiment - specifically aimed at aiding in the understanding of the document - is laudable. Just tinkering with fonts - especially fonts that are not so legible - is something I appreciate less. I'm OK with showing individuality of thought, and in the expression of the individuality in any form: but it has to support the main aim of the publication.
Some people publish to show how clever they are: they use long words, complicated structure, difficult mathematical derivations... this can indeed give the impression that they are "a notch above the rest of us mortals". But it does not provide *access* to their thoughts, and limits the dissemination of their ideas and contributions. And that, ultimately, is what publishing ought to be about.
# Answer
> 5 votes
There certainly is room for improvement of scientific writing. The question is, are you trying to convey your work in a more efficient way, or are you just adding noise?
I can think of several examples of positive attempts at improvement: Don Knuth's TeX project, the special fonts created for his book *Concrete Math*. Or the work of Tufte on graphics and page layout. Even though these can at times be annoying, inasmuch as novelty often is, they do help and some of their stuff gets picked up and ends up going mainstream.
Sometimes, reading older research (say, 50+years old) can be rather refreshing as well.
On the other hand, you have to be extra careful and really ask yourself if your design really helps. If you, and several others you will show your work to, are convinced of the improvement, then definitely go for it. You may even suggest to your readers that you are open to comments and feedback.
# Answer
> 1 votes
In my experience, academic culture seems to be of two radically different minds when it comes to design:
* For papers, there is virtually no appreciation for design innovation, qua innovation. I suspect that the cultural focus on *content* makes a glitzy presentation seem "suspicious." In practice, there actually can be a good bit of innovation, especially in the design and presentation of figures, but it needs to be within some indefinable bound of scientific "good taste," whatever that means.
* For presentations, on the other hand, the sky is the limit, and innovation in communication seems to be highly appreciated. For example, I've seen a number of talks using Prezi in the last few years, which are definitely following a trendy new tool and playing with its capability.
Perhaps a good way to think of the differences is like the differences between forms of poetry: papers are like a sonnet where you can make beautiful art within a absolutely rigid form, while presentations are free verse where there is much more freedom of choice for both good and ill.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think the best outlet for such creative yearnings is presentations, and perhaps posters. In these there is so much heterogeneity to begin with that you will not experience much prejudice due to simply being different.
Another good candidate is figures. Here, there are 3 chief cases particularly suited to creativity that I know of:
* Diagrams, especially flowcharts showing steps of a project
* "Soft data" where precision is less important. For instance, when you have a graph of number of PhDs over time not to present it as data, but to make the point that it is increasing, you can get away with some fancy colorful designs such as the default Word chart themes.
* In complex and unusual datasets, where no good way of visualizing them has been agreed on. For example, in genetics, with heatmaps showing various signal levels across the genome you have some latitude in picking colors and adding little icons and so forth.
For publications, you couldn't easily mess around with the typography because most journals precisely specify their visual style, and they have some uniform theme across all the papers in their issue and across different issue they want to maintain. They won't let you choose your own font.
For *informal* texts, you do have an advantage: 90% of scientists use either Times New Roman, Arial or Calibri (the Word default). Another 9% use whatever came with their Mac or Linux system. If your font is slightly different, but largely similar to these (Pacifico doesn't work, Lato is fine) most people won't notice, and those that do notice would appreciate a good font (assuming you made good design decisions).
When I use Latex to type my own informal writing, it ends up in Computer Modern. Granted, this is a very good font, but although being vaguely similar to Times New Roman, it clearly isn't even to an untrained eye. Because of this, I doubt anyone is bothered that I used a different font, and the comments I got tended to be favorable.
So for your informal texts I'm sure you can get away with taking some liberty in your font choice. It's still worth erring on the side of being conservative, though: First, don't make it too weird. For instance, writing a report in Comic Sans (I'm sure it is obvious) is a bad idea. Writing it in Helvetica instead of Arial - the rare person who notices will think better of you for it. Second, don't change it too often - if every other letter you send to a collaborator is a different font, I imagine the charm will quickly wear away.
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Tags: publications, formatting, design
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thread-27618
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27618
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Why do some Universities give honorary degrees?
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2014-08-25T22:19:54.587
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# Question
Title: Why do some Universities give honorary degrees?
Most of the question is the title: Why do some Universities give honorary degrees?
E.g. the President of Indonesia, Sukarno, got 26 honorary doctorates, and Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has been awarded around a dozen honorary degrees.
What is the benefit for the Universities? Donations? Political leverage? Genuine attempt to give to somebody the recognition he deserves? If last option, why calling it a degree instead of using a more general term like award/medal/etc, like some other Universities do?
# Answer
> 7 votes
Benefits to the university include donations, drawing important people or celebrities to give commencement addresses, and publicity. I'm sure genuine attempts to give recognition are a factor at least some of the time :)
Here are some data points:
* Higher ed writer Tim Johnson asked the University of Vermont for a list of honorary degree recipients from 2002-2012, and how much each of those people has contributed to the university over the last decade.
Of the 60 recipients, 35 were on the record as having made donations to the university, for a total of \>$13.6 million for an average of $228,248. (Excluding one degree recipient with an outsized $9 million contribution, the average was $68,854).
According to the chair of the UVM honorary degree committee, it's not *only* a thank you for a donation:
> Gary Derr, UVM’s VP of executive operations and chair of the university’s honorary degree committee, defends the practice, explaining it has to do with recognizing individuals for outstanding achievements or service to the university, state, nation or world. A degree is not, he insists, just a thank-you for writing a fat check.
* From the New York Times:
> "Sometimes they are used to reward donors who have given money; sometimes they are used to draw celebrities to make the graduation special," said Arthur E. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University... "I've always viewed it as a last lesson a college can teach, by showing examples of people who most represent the values the institution stands for," Dr. Levine said.
An unusual benefit mentioned in the same article:
> Chapman University in Orange, Calif., awarded an honorary degree to the author John Fowles after he agreed to let it create a writing center and literary festival in his name.
* Similarly, former George Washington University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg reports that "people have asked for an honorary degree in exchange for a donation" but adds
> We also give honorary degrees to people who don’t give us a penny. It's just because their lives are exemplary.
* Another potential benefit to universities is publicity. Reportedly, when Southampton College awarded an honorary doctorate to Kermit the Frog in 1996 (commencement address here),
> 31 newspapers picked up the story, a free marketing bonanza that raised the college's profile and drew hundreds of new admissions
* Of note: honorary doctorates are an easy offering for diploma mills, since they don't have to pretend it's about anything but money. Here are some examples:
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Tags: university, degree, awards
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thread-36820
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36820
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How to find out the first name of a professor whose home page lists only first initial?
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2015-01-14T22:48:36.360
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# Question
Title: How to find out the first name of a professor whose home page lists only first initial?
This is probably a soft question. I am interested in complex analysis, and I want to ask the first name of this person, S. Ponnusamy, whose name I wish to mention in a paper.
What is the best way to go about asking such stuff?
# Answer
If you are at a university that has access to MathSciNet, then you can look up any one of his publications (listed on the web page you linked to), and then click on his name to find out that his first name is Saminathan.
> 3 votes
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Tags: personal-name
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thread-36735
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36735
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Professor/supervisor switches from writing emails in his native and local language to English - how to react?
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2015-01-13T21:24:59.887
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# Question
Title: Professor/supervisor switches from writing emails in his native and local language to English - how to react?
A professor of mine, who's native language is German and who is teaching a class in English in a German speaking country, suddenly answered an e-mail which I wrote in German (I'm a native German speaker too), in English. I'm wondering why he does that? What the proper way for me to react is, i.e., should I use English when sending him e-mails from now on?
# Answer
I wouldn't worry about it too much: given the bilingual nature of his work, your professor probably context-switches back and forth between languages frequently. If the professor is very comfortable in both languages, they might not have even realized the switch, e.g., if responding to your email in the middle of a large block of work in English with their head in "English-mode".
If you want, however, next time you see the professor in person, you might ask if they have any preference for language in their communications with you: it could easily go either way (e.g., in English to make forwarding to non-German speakers easier, in German for personal comfort, or even no preference at all).
> 55 votes
# Answer
> suddenly answered an e-mail which I wrote in German \[...\], in English. I'm wondering why he does that?
He might think that since the official language of the class is English, all communications should be carried out in this language. Or, maybe, if you're asking a technical question, he prefers to use English to avoid confusion between the technical terms employed during the lessons and the corresponding German terms.
> should I use English when sending him e-mails from now on?
Given that the official language is English, this should arise no complain on his part. But you can also ask which is his preferred choice between the two languages, given that you are a native German speaker.
In Italy, I teach in a couple of courses which are taught in English: many of the emails I receive from Italian students are written in English, and I typically answer in that language. It's a good practice for both.
> 20 votes
# Answer
Explanation 1. For some reason the professor finds it easier to express a certain thought in English. As a native speaker of German myself, I often find myself in this situation. For some reason I can think of a nice formulation in one language but am unsure how to put it in the other. Also, e.g. when dealing with a student who could also be considered a colleague (student has a PhD or wrote a joint paper with the professor's colleague), in some fields the professor might be unsure whether to use *du* or *Sie* \- a problem that doesn't exist in English. Or the professor wanted to reuse part of an email sent to another student. Or the email uses technical terms whose German translation sounds awkward.
In this case you can just answer in whichever language you prefer.
Explanation 2. The course is taught in English at least in part to make the German-speaking students get used to using English. Or at least the professor thinks so.
In this case it may be better to reply in English.
> 11 votes
# Answer
I would not interpret too much into this. I have to deal with such questions (in which language should I write an email?) almost daily in my function as an assistant professor. My native language is German, but I teach at a Dutch university (some courses are in Dutch, some are in English). With Dutch students, I usually communicate in Dutch (a language which I speak at near-native level), with international students in English - but when it comes to Germans, it already becomes complicated: It seems natural to communicate in German, but at the same time, although German is my native language, it is sometimes just **easier to express a thought in a language I use daily in research** (English) **or teaching** (Dutch or English).
Second, I sometimes write in a specific language in order to be able to **forward, (B)CC or archive** the mails. It's just not very practical if you cannot share something with a colleague because of language issues. Also the other way round, you sometimes **copy/paste** things without wasting time on translating things.
Third, I honestly am sometimes just **unaware of the language i use**. If I just have been talking in one language with a colleague, I might use that one in a mail that as well, without it being a concious choice. The hard part of working in several languages are not the languages themselves, it's switching between languages.
So, I would not put too much weight into this issue. However, it might also be that the professor wants to make a statement: I have some colleagues who want to make a statement by communicating only in a courses "official" language to avoid the impression that they would differentiate between students.
But, of course you can just ask what language the professor prefers. I get these questions occasionally, and - to be honest - I usually don't care too much.
> 8 votes
# Answer
I live in Germany since long ago.
On my experience, German are doing this mostly because 3 reasons:
1. they won't worry because of your (for them) bad German.
2. they are suspecting, your German is bad and maybe your English is better. It happens mainly on noisy phone lines, where they suspect mostly lingual problems and seldom acoustic.
3. they only want to train their English (which they can't do with other Germans, but with a foreigner). Talking on German with a foreigner doesn't have any benefit for them, but talking on English means a possibility to a little bit of free training.
I think that the difference between the native and a non-native language is always very strong and prof always knew if they changed it. Maybe it is possible if he replied his twentieth mail on the day to his undergrads and all of them communicated with him either of German or on English with various levels.
In your place I replied to the prof on English, but mentioned on the first row some like this: "Ich würde gerne weiters mit Ihnen auf Deutsch kommunizieren" (I would be glad to communicate on German with you).
> 0 votes
# Answer
It's standard to respond in the language being taught to give the students opportunities to practice the use of said language.
This is even more important if the students feel uncomfortable using the language.
No pain no gain, as they say.
> 0 votes
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Tags: etiquette, language, communication
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thread-36827
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36827
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Is it okay to add a lecturer on LinkedIn
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2015-01-15T07:48:51.230
|
# Question
Title: Is it okay to add a lecturer on LinkedIn
I'm a graduate student and I recently attended a course by a very inspiring lecturer (associate professor). Do you think it is okay add him on LinkedIn? Do I push him into an uncomfortable situation by doing that?
# Answer
> 15 votes
I do not believe an educator would feel they were put in an uncomfortable position by a student sending a LinkedIn request.
You should not, however, expect that the lecturer will accept your request. Some lecturers like to be very close to their students. Personally, I like to keep a professional distance from my students, even after they graduate. Of course, if a student happens to share a common area of research as me and wants to work together, that would be different but I certainly do not accept many requests to "connect" to students, even after they graduate.
What you should avoid is sending multiple requests or following up in person "Hey, did you get my 'quest? It would be super-kul if you'd add me." If they want to connect they will. If not, they will just consider you a student who is interested in having a closer connection than they want and they will ignore it.
Either way, I do not believe any lecturer would be made uncomfortable by your gesture of interest.
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Tags: social-media
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thread-36822
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36822
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Should a CV have footnotes containing links to proof of achievements?
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2015-01-15T05:46:52.467
|
# Question
Title: Should a CV have footnotes containing links to proof of achievements?
I'm writing my resume for an internship and I was wondering if footnotes that cite proof of my achievements are necessary? For instance, I was a finalist in a programming competition last year and the results are posted online. Should I post a footnotes linking it to the site? Or will the review not care enough to read it?
# Answer
> 6 votes
When I look at someone's CV, I don't plan to verify the details. Often, I have a printout and am not close to a computer anyway. I just want to see the information. And the typical vita does not include links or other documentation, it just lists the information.
So, adding footnotes to verify things would make your vita seem unusual, and I suspect it would make the document more cluttered as well. It could also have the unfortunate effect of making a reader wonder why you are trying so hard to give proof - perhaps you are compensating for something else?
If the person reading the vita wants documentation, they will ask for it. Until then, don't worry about it.
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Tags: cv
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thread-36829
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36829
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Why would a professor agree to write recommendation letter, then mention in it that he doesn't know student very well?
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2015-01-15T09:25:14.583
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# Question
Title: Why would a professor agree to write recommendation letter, then mention in it that he doesn't know student very well?
I had a colleague who asked a professor to write a letter of recommendation on his behalf. The professor agreed and wrote 3 letters for this colleague. The colleague had an interview with one of the colleges he applied to and he came to know that the professor wrote that he doesn't know him very well.
My questions are: why would a professor agree to write a recommendation in the first place?! And what is the effect of this letter on one's application?
I asked him to write one on my behalf, and he might have written similar statement.
# Answer
> 9 votes
If a student whom I don't know very well asks me for a recommendation, then I point that out to the student and suggest that it would therefore be better to ask someone else for a recommendation instead. But if the student, aware of the situation, still wants me to write the letter, I do it, and I include in the letter the information about how well (and in what circumstances) I know the student.
# Answer
> 8 votes
In many cases professors agree to write letters for students we do not know well because we are the best option, according to the student, for them. Some students do not have good enough relationships with enough professors to get all the letters of reference they need. They may approach a professor and say, "I know we do not know each other very well and I only took a class with you/worked in your lab for two weeks/etc, but I need someone else to write a letter and I think you are in the best option I have". At which point, the professor may agree. If the student is not as up front, hopefully, the professor was clear and said something like "I don't know you very well, but I can write you a letter and talk about X." Again, some students will agree.
While it is not desirable to have references from people who do not know you well, including in a reference that you do not know the person well is not inherently bad. In fact, it probably is better to be up front about the relationship because it explains why the letter is so narrowly focused.
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Tags: application, recommendation-letter
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thread-36843
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36843
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Should I let my recommendation letter writers know that I didn't submit my application in the end?
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2015-01-15T12:23:34.250
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# Question
Title: Should I let my recommendation letter writers know that I didn't submit my application in the end?
I feel guilty and not sure of if I should inform my recommenders of this issue.
A school I intended to apply has received the reference letters from all my recommenders, but as the deadline was approaching I just found that I could not prepare something required by the school in time! So, considering the amount of application fee, I decided to close my application.
Now I feel maybe I should have told my recommenders about this issue, yet, whenever I was about to write a sorry email then I withdrew my draft.
In such a situation, am I suggested to say sorry to my recommenders formally?
# Answer
> 6 votes
This really depends on the situation. If you only planned to apply to the one school, and ended up not applying, then you've wasted the time of your references, as they did not need to write the letter at all, and could have used the time for other projects.
On the other hand, if this is just one out of some number of schools, then the issue is not as severe. The extra investment to write the "last" letter is not that great. While it is unfortunate that you might not apply, such things happen.
In either event, though, it may be worthwhile to let them know you didn't submit the application—they may ask the school directly if they have contacts, and it wouldn't be useful to find out from the school that you didn't apply, rather than from you personally.
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Tags: phd, graduate-admissions, etiquette, application, recommendation-letter
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thread-36725
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36725
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Can an emotional letter of motivation be harmful in a PhD application?
|
2015-01-13T17:23:55.987
|
# Question
Title: Can an emotional letter of motivation be harmful in a PhD application?
Today some of my friends were discussing a motivation letter. One friend's application was rejected. One reason his friends find out is that the letter of motivation is very emotional. So I was thinking: is there no place of emotion in academia? People used to study a lot as a strong feeling works in them, inspiring them to do more and more work. This is the emotion. Can it play harmfully in a letter of motivation?
**Edit: I have collected his small letter. It is included. We thought it is very emotional.**
> College XY has best undergraduate mathematics department of the university of XY. IITX is built upon the basement of the first engineering college of Asia. I completed my B.Sc. from XY and M.Sc. from IITX. Both the times I got first class after each evaluation. I had a dream to continue my PhD studies in a good western university. I tried. My degrees are equivalent to degrees from European universities. I came to the understanding that my knowledge is not much sufficient for their requirements. Currently I am working in a project focussing on a very particular problem. I am out of touch from many interesting topics of mathematics. Many advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me which shall be very useful in my work. So I am thing for a better opportunity to revise my mathematical concepts in a better way and to collect new knowledge. I wish to build myself in a way that I can continue my PhD work in a good university and I can be a successful researcher. If I get the opportunity to continue the diploma hope I reach my dreams.
# Answer
In brief, even after imagining that text's language cleaned up, the problem is not about "emotion" but about lack of verifiable substance. As in @aesmail's good answer, insubstantiated claims, or, worse, claims which appear to be counter to any documentable reality, are at best unpersuasive. For example, unsupported claims about the quality of one's university or department are at best pointless, and suggest that one does not know how things work. Proposing to "collect new knowledge" gives a very strange impression, as though the writer believed that learning new things was somehow unusual... while being remarkably inspecific.
That is, if I were to receive such a letter, I'd consider it basically content-free, for all practical purposes. "Emotion" is not the issue. The problem is that such letters should *not* be content-free, but should include tangibles, past accomplishments and connections with the future, etc. A content-free letter competes very badly with content-ful letters.
> 52 votes
# Answer
There is a wonderful quotation by Bertrand Russell that perfectly sums up the nature of emotions in academia:
> Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire. \[1\]
You should definitely show a sense of inquisitiveness, drive, enthusiasm, and eagerness; the "catch" is that we want to see that *in your work*. Dazzle us with your papers and presentations. Wow students in your lecture. But what we don't want is for *you* to tell us that you're enthusiastic and passionate. Leave that for others, such as the people writing your letters of recommendation, to tell us that.
\[1\]: *The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell*, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., p. 536 (1961).
> 40 votes
# Answer
As others have said, the main problem of that letter is not its emotionality, but the lack of content and the presence of unnecessary details. Let me analyse a few example sentences:
> College XY has best undergraduate mathematics department of the university of XY.
According to whom or according to which criteria?
> IITX is built upon the basement of the first engineering college of Asia.
This is unnecessary: it does not actually strengthen the previous claim, nor it gives useful information to understand the background of the applicant. It's just a historical curiosity. Probably briefly listing the main research topics of the department would have been more useful.
> I completed my B.Sc. from XY and M.Sc. from IITX. Both the times I got first class after each evaluation.
What was he evaluated on? Typically students have to write a dissertation at the end of their degrees, it would have been better to add information about these: objectives achieved, feelings about continuing on the same topics or moving to other topics.
> Currently I am working in a project focussing on a very particular problem.
Which problem? Is it a toy problem or a research problem that can be suitable for a publication?
> Many advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me which shall be very useful in my work.
Indeed, many advanced parts of mathematics are also unknown to mathematicians. So which are these parts that are needed for his work?
Therefore, on the basis of the above, I would have rejected his application too. You can write an emotional letter, but the emotions should be just an addition to the information needed by the application board to correctly assess the level of the applicant.
> 20 votes
# Answer
Here is my cruelly honest translation of the letter. I am not trying to insult you. I have received many similar messages as unsolicited emails (always from India), and this is essentially how I read them.
College XY has best undergraduate mathematics department of the university of XY. - I am aware that my university isn't particularly good, so I am making a desperate attempt to argue that my education wasn't as poor as the general standard for my university.
IITX is built upon the basement of the first engineering college of Asia. - If something isn't actually good, point out how big, old or expensive it is and maybe people will be fooled.
I completed my B.Sc. from XY and M.Sc. from IITX. Both the times I got first class after each evaluation. - Hard to tell due to the bad English, but apparently the applicant is claiming to have had good grades. Impossible to tell whether this means top 10% or top 90%.
I had a dream to continue my PhD studies in a good western university. I tried. - What is this supposed to mean? Applicant once was accepted and started a PhD at a European university, but failed?
My degrees are equivalent to degrees from European universities. - According to whom?
I came to the understanding that my knowledge is not much sufficient for their requirements. - Contradicts the previous claim.
Currently I am working in a project focussing on a very particular problem. - Currently I am doing some research that I am not at all interested in and that I am not even prepared to explain in detail if someone asks me about it, because I don't understand it myself.
I am out of touch from many interesting topics of mathematics. - In an application I was once asked about some basic (first year level) knowledge related to what I was applying for and didn't even have an idea what the words meant.
Many advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me which shall be very useful in my work. So I am thing for a better opportunity to revise my mathematical concepts in a better way and to collect new knowledge. - Maybe I could become a mathematician by doing my undergraduate degree all over again, this time at a proper university.
I wish to build myself in a way that I can continue my PhD work in a good university and I can be a successful researcher. - Because I underestimate the effort involved in learning things properly, I think that I can do this on the side, while officially working on a PhD, and even get a PhD too.
If I get the opportunity to continue the diploma hope I reach my dreams. - Diploma or PhD, what's the difference? It's all the same to me.
Besides, my English isn't good enough to study in English, and since I am blissfully unaware of the fact it is not likely to improve. Sorry that I can't mention the special strengths of the university I am applying to. I have no clue what they are, and anyway, I am sending this to several hundred. It would be too much work to adjust the text for each.
> 11 votes
# Answer
There is most certainly a place for emotion in academia. That place is amongst your most trusted friends and closest colleagues.
Science works by identifying truths that hold regardless of whether we care about them or not, regardless of whether we desperately want them to be true or fear that they might be. Science is funded by agencies who don't care how much your work means to you, but rather how its outcomes might support the agency's mission. Professors are hired by other faculty who don't care whether working there will fulfill your dreams, but rather how your skills and abilities will fit the needs and goals of their department.
So by all means, have emotions, share your emotions with people who genuinely care about you as a person, and allow your emotions to direct your passion in research and teaching. But know that you will be judged not by your passion, but by the fruits of your labor, and make sure that those are at the forefront of how your present yourself to strangers.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Emotion in academia is a double-edged sword. On one hand, emotion (e.g. curiosity, drive) is usually what drives us to conduct research in the first place. But as research should always be targeted at getting closer to a objective truth, emotions must not interfere with your struggle for the truth. Yet there are many emotions (e.g. fear, faith, trust) that can cloud your judgement and lead your research down a wrong path.
In short, emotions can be a good reason to conduct research, but must not affect its results. If your friend's motivational letter was suggesting that he might be affected by emotions in the latter way, this may justly be held against him.
> 7 votes
# Answer
The problem is not about emotions. Other answers have pointed out a lack of substance, but I'll make a different point. It's that your friend draws a very bad image of him/her-self. Your question title should really be "Can a letter of motivation that highlights weak points be harmful in a PhD application?"
Just isolate these four parts of the motivation letter:
> I tried.
*And then?*
> my knowledge is not much sufficient for their requirements
*So no surprise you're not admitted.*
> I am out of touch from many interesting topics of mathematics.
*Not good if you're to pursue cutting edge research for a PhD.*
> advanced parts of mathematics are till unknown to me
*ditto*
This is an application. It needs to draw a good image of the applicant, **not** show the weak points.
> 5 votes
# Answer
The original poster is asking totally the wrong question. The problem isn't his friend's level of "emotion"; it is his friend's utter lack of social intelligence at how he will be perceived in writing such a thing. The answer is not for his friend to become a smoother wordsmith; the answer is for his friend to get out into the world more, and actually develop a functional level of social intelligence.
The intended reader of this letter is a HUMAN, probably a group of them. Each of them can be expected to be a very, very smart human, who will analyze the letter on many different levels, but nevertheless, a human, with emotions, from which the writer would like a particular (favorable) response. My immediate emotional response, as a human, after reading this, is disbelief, annoyance, and disgust. Disbelief at how clueless the writer is, annoyance at how little useful information he provides me, disgust at how little he must have thought about me and what I might want to see in such a letter, and then a bit more annoyance at what a waste of time it was to even read it. This letter is so poor on such a fundamental level, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea it was written by someone seeking entry into a PhD program.
The primary emotions being expressed in the letter are anger at the injustice and victimhood of being denied, and bewilderment at not understanding the reasons why, and then more anger at finding out his prior education, is, apparently "worthless" in the eyes of these institutions.
So, the reader of the letter should admit into their PhD program, an angry victim of rejection, a victim who seems to believe the fault was with the evaluators, not himself, yet does not show any understanding of WHY others rejected him? A candidate with this lack of awareness does not inspire confidence, doesn't seem like a good bet.
And instead of telling us even what area the "very particular (mathematics) problem" is in, we are left to guess? Why doesn't he just say it's a "problem in the area of (some mathnobabble area, I'll say "online reputation management") involving (slightly more particular considerations, I'll say "mathematical models for detecting falsified reviews"). What is he hiding from us by being vague? Maybe he's hiding... that he actually knows NOTHING! Yet, perhaps he knows a great deal. The reader cannot tell anything useful about what he does and does not know in the relevant area.
A socially intelligent writer would have gone to great lengths to find out why his qualifications were perceived to be unsuitable by other institutions, and then calmly but briefly explain it. How could he appear to not know WHY those other institutions rejected him? Was he so lacking in motivation, he did not bother to find out the specific, detailed reasons for his rejection? I submit that much academic work is about figuring out what the problem is that needs to be solved, and then applying thinking and action to solve it. How is it possible to have confidence in a candidate who accepts rejection without clearly figuring out the reasons, what the PROBLEM was? How can this man be trusted to take effective action to identify problems, and then solve them, as part of a a PhD program? To address this issue, he must be able to briefly and calmly explain what the problem was, and preferably why it will not be an issue at the desired institution. For analogous examples from Finance and Economics, "European institutions require an EU-accredited course in Financial Derivative Models, which was neither required nor available at my prior institutions." Or, "European institutions prefer graduates of the Austrian school, while my coursework was centered around the Chicago school". Explaining why the problems other institutions cited won't be an issue at his desired institution is an exercise I will leave to him.
And overall, there is little to no mention of anything substantive he has done, nothing that can be verified; the primary mentions are of the injustice he feels has been done to him by having his degrees ignored and disrespected by other schools he has applied to, schools who are obviously arbitrary, mean-spirited, and just out to get poor little him.
I hope I reach my dreams? What ARE his dreams, maybe a little statement of them would help? His dreams are so vague he can't even briefly state them? And he HOPES he reaches, not he "is determined to do the work to reach", his dreams? But don't just try to be more smooth; invest time, attention, and emotion to figure out what his dreams actually are, so that he can clearly and compellingly express them in a sentence or two. "My dream is to..." (I'll say, "help the online world become a more honest place") "...and being admitted into this program would bring me closer by..." ("being around brilliant mentors who can help me devise and improve mathematical models for detecting patterns of deception and fraud").
Such a letter should be written to show an awareness of, and caring for, the point of view of others. As it stands, it loudly conveys a lack of awareness in those areas. The readers would be likely to conclude the writer is unaware, a bad thing in itself, or, even worse, uncaring.
The writer of the letter would be better advised to take up some hobby or activity, take a year off from school if necessary, to work on and improve his social intelligence. Maybe go to a university and work as a mathematics tutor for students in the areas he has learned, while taking classes or doing other work that involves interacting with people a lot. It should be an area that requires a level of social intelligence skills to be successful, provides opportunity after opportunity to develop them, and provides immediate and direct personal feedback on how well he is doing. A quick list of ideas could include doing commission sales work, working as a bartender, and volunteering to canvass and advocate for political candidates and their campaigns.
> 1 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, writing, statement-of-purpose, emotional-responses
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thread-36856
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36856
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Is it always necessary to include a research question in the introduction of a paper?
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2015-01-15T15:12:29.130
|
# Question
Title: Is it always necessary to include a research question in the introduction of a paper?
A question purely out of interest (and a bit of importance, since I'm enrolling in a research master program next month):
I wondered whether it is always necessary to include a research question in the introduction of a paper. For example, an introduction can also contain a description related to the purpose of writing the paper, right?
To give my question more context: suppose that you had to carry out a literature study on a specific subject in the field of software engineering for school, where you have to investigate a few methods (how they work and how they are related to one another). In this case, an introduction that explains why the paper will be written and an outline of what methods will be described would be sufficient, right? Or am I wrong? I mean, I don't really see the need to set up a research question, since the paper is more descriptive by its nature in this situation.
# Answer
If you are writing a research paper it is quite difficult not to have a question in some form. The purpose of the introduction is to set your study (question/gap of knowledge or what have you) in perspective, to narrow the focus down from a slightly bigger picture to the gap you are trying to fill or narrow even further with your study. Even if your paper is a review, you are doing a review for some specific purpose.
So, you may be thinking too narrowly if you think of a question as a sentence with a question mark, the focus of your paper will be your research question, usually a gap in knowledge where you through your study takes our knowledge beyond the current limits.
> 1 votes
# Answer
To amplify on what Peter has written, if the best research question you can think of about the work you have done is:
> Can we \[prove|design|implement\] ...?
or
> How do you \[prove|design|implement\] ...?
then you a probably better off going without an explicit question and simply leading your reader through a narrative description of your work. The answers to these questions tend to be the trivial "Yes, and here's how..." since you wouldn't have written the paper if you hadn't answered the question already. These questions can be a little more compelling to the reader when the answer is contrary to what an expert in the field might have guessed or the question is widely asked (e.g. "P=NP?").
> 0 votes
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Tags: publications, writing, introduction
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thread-36857
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36857
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As a novice scientific writer, how can I publish a scientific review?
|
2015-01-15T15:25:42.310
|
# Question
Title: As a novice scientific writer, how can I publish a scientific review?
I like to write and investigate in science; but it is not enough; Precisely I want to write a scientific review, as a beginner I don’t know how to publish it; I don’t have a support, is it possible to publish a scientific review alone and for free? Otherwise, do you have any idea how can I find chemists co authors that may accept to work with me;
Thank you very much in advance for your suggestions;
# Answer
Publishing a review on your own can be done. However, it would be better if you found a senior researcher in your field that you can co-author the manuscript with. Publishing a review alone may not do much for your professional career (it can even harm your career if it turns out your review is not good enough). Co-authoring a review with an expert on the subject can be considered highly prestigious and by working with a senior person on this publication, you will learn much more than if you work on your own.
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, writing, review-articles
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thread-36858
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36858
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Should I block my facebook account?
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2015-01-15T15:39:37.180
|
# Question
Title: Should I block my facebook account?
I am applying to a course in Quantitative Finance in a prestigious university in Europe.
I am wondering if it may be the case to block my facebook account; I don't want the commission to look at my profile or to gather information on me that I am not willing to give them directly.
I know that there are probably rules so that you can't discriminate based on age, sex, religion and stuff, but facebook accounts contain far more than that.
So I guess my questions are: Is it common for university to look at candidate's profile before accepting them? If it is, how much does this influence the decision? Can my reluctance to give away some (personal) information be perceived negatively?
# Answer
> 11 votes
I don't think it really matters for admissions purposes whether you block your account. If you have anything on your social media accounts that would be unusually damaging in a professional context, then it's probably a good idea to adjust your privacy settings (and/or posting habits) now rather than waiting for it to become a problem in the future, but ordinary Facebook usage is not likely to be an issue. In my admissions committee experience, I've never heard anyone refer to an applicant's Facebook profile and I've never looked at one myself. I've occasionally searched for information about an applicant online, for example to find a research paper that wasn't included in the application or to get more information about an award that was mentioned but not explained. If I run across something else that seems academically substantive (such as a math blog or mathoverflow account) I'll look into it, but I wouldn't bother to look at Facebook since I don't expect it would include anything relevant.
> Can my reluctance to give away some (personal) information be perceived negatively?
Under ordinary circumstances, I don't think anyone cares at all. For all the admissions committee knows, you never post to Facebook, and they wouldn't be interested in any case. It would come across as suspicious if it looks like you are actively hiding something scandalous (for example, if there are rumors going around about terribly offensive things you've said on Twitter, and now your account is private), but that's presumably not the case here.
# Answer
> 3 votes
It would be best if you made your account private, especially if you are applying to work with a certain professor. People involved in hiring are often recommended to perform a Google search on a potential finalist for a position. If they uncover some poor quality social behavior on social media, it may affect their decision.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, university, privacy, social-media
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thread-36840
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36840
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If a PhD position I applied for and didn't hear back from is removed and relisted, does this mean I was rejected?
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2015-01-15T12:13:22.457
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# Question
Title: If a PhD position I applied for and didn't hear back from is removed and relisted, does this mean I was rejected?
I just wanted to know your opinion about an issue. I have contacted the supervisor of a research project for doctoral student position and I was encouraged to apply. By the way my experience really fits the position.
I applied through the online application platform and after that I didn't receive any mail regarding my status. Then the post for this research position was removed last week and I just saw that the position post is online again. I think that they are not interested in me, because if they did I think they would have contacted me and not put the post again to search for applicants. What do you think? Am I rejected?
# Answer
Reposting a search does not mean that all the applications received so far are unsuitable. It often means that they have not received the volume of applications they expected/wanted and are worried, without having necessarily looked at the applications, that they might have missed qualified applicants.
Given you applied on line and never got a status update, it is always reasonable to ask if everything is okay. Given the position has been reposted, it is worth asking if you need to resubmit your application. Sometimes HR and electronic systems do not carry applications over from one position to the next.
> 22 votes
# Answer
If the project supervisor encouraged you to apply previously, it should be fair to inquire about the status of your application. Maybe just ask for a confirmation that they received it.
> 7 votes
# Answer
If the professor is not responding, why not just give the professor a phone call or drop by their office to talk? It may be best to first set up an appointment for the phone call or office visit.
> 1 votes
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Tags: phd, application, rejection
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thread-36783
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36783
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Should I submit a revised version of my paper before hearing back about the first version?
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2015-01-14T17:38:09.777
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# Question
Title: Should I submit a revised version of my paper before hearing back about the first version?
I submitted a paper to a decent mathematical journal more than six months ago. Later, after communicating with several people, I have come to find the notation that I used in the paper very confusing, and thus fear that people may have serious difficulty in understanding my work.
I have since revised my paper by eliminating some notations and adding more examples and explanations. I think the revised version is much better than the previous one, even though there are no changes affecting the results of the paper, and I haven't found anything wrong in the proof.
I am worried that the referees will be annoyed by the notation that I previously used, and thus lose interest in my paper. So, I am considering submitting the revised paper to the editor to help the referees better understand my work. But some people say the referees would be unhappy to see the revision if they do not ask me to submit one.
Two weeks ago, I got a reply from the editor saying the paper is still under review, but he did not say when the review would finish, saying something like "it is difficult to put excessive pressure on the reviewers." So, I guess the review may still require some time to finish.
Should I submit the revision or not?
# Answer
You should **not** submit your revised version at this time. If it had been just a day or two since you submitted, it would be a different matter. However, more than six months later, it is quite likely that the reviewers *will* be angry to receive a new version of the paper, particularly since you have made a great deal of changes. This will be even more so if they are a substantial portion of the way through the review process. (It is also unfair to the reviewers and editors if the author can keep changing and revising the paper while it is under review.)
Your best bet will be to wait until the reviews have been returned, and use your revised version of the paper to "jump-start" the revision process.
> 7 votes
# Answer
I'm a mathematician who sometimes referees papers for math journals. If I were the referee for your paper, I would prefer to receive the revised and improved version. Quite possibly your referee has not started yet. If they have started, they can choose to ignore the new version, or use the new version to make the refereeing process easier.
(For what it's worth, a shorter version of this answer received at least six up-votes on mathoverflow in the brief time before the question was moved to here.)
> 5 votes
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Tags: journals, peer-review, mathematics
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thread-36879
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36879
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Prevent plagiarism after rejection of a paper?
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2015-01-15T19:37:23.533
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# Question
Title: Prevent plagiarism after rejection of a paper?
After reading the question What to do if a referee plagiarises the result after rejecting a paper?, I wonder what can be done to prevent this.
I also recently got a conference paper rejected with a good (but not very good) idea. Reviewers gave me 2 × weak accept and 1 × accept and only the meta-reviewer rejected the paper with bogus arguments.
The next conference where I would like to submit is in a few month such that nearly half a year is in between the two submission deadlines of the conferences. I don’t know how may people had access to my work and would like to protect my idea.
I can maybe upload it to arXiv now before submitting it to the conference. Some conferences are fine with this as for example ICML:
> Publication at http://arxiv.org explicitly does not conflict with ICML.
but I am afraid that this can become problematic for other conferences.
What else can I do?
# Answer
> 8 votes
I think that this has been covered on this site before. But briefly:
* Most academics (in particular those who have weighted in on the issue on this site) agree that the best way to prevent plagiarism is through more light, not more secrecy. In other words, once you've shown your work to one other person (and in many academic fields, this will necessarily occur in the course of doing academic work), the more people who know about it -- and the more that people know that people know about it, and so forth -- the less likely it is for your work to be plagiarized. Thus posting your paper on the arxiv would be an ideal solution (and have many other benefits as well) *unless* you're working in an academic field which has the practice of regarding, or potentially regarding arxiv submissions as "prior publication". (If so: have you considered switching to math / physics / TCS instead? In those fields we not only do not feel that way, we regard the whole notion that freely showing your work to others counts as "publication" as being infinitely lame and wrong-headed.)
* Even if you can't or don't want to upload a public copy of your work, you have already done plenty to establish your priority. Namely you submitted it to a conference and got three referee reports. You should certainly keep these reports for your records along with the correspondence with the handling editors. If later on someone tries to steal your work, all you have to do is produce this correspondence. You should also be able to count on the conference editors / organizers for help: whether the paper is accepted or not, if a conference submission results in someone's work being stolen, the organizers of the conference have an ethical obligation and a professional stake to be actively involved in your pursuit for academic justice.
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Tags: publications, plagiarism
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thread-36760
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36760
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Dealing with adversarial grant committee members in interviews
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2015-01-14T09:48:26.330
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# Question
Title: Dealing with adversarial grant committee members in interviews
I'm applying for a grant to research topic *foo* using *bar* as my working hypothesis (and it's not really something controversial: a lot of things are easier to deal with if you assume that *bar* is true). Now, one of the people sitting in the grant committee has published a couple of articles arguing that *bar* is horribly, irredeemably wrong, and we all should assume *quz* instead. This person is likely to raise this issue at the interview stage.
This doesn't worry me from a purely academic perspective: there are many ways of showing that this person's arguments don't hold water, and I can literally spend the rest of the day talking about them. However, it does worry me from a "I want that grant money" perspective: if I get that question, I'm going to have just a couple of minutes to state my case and get the rest of the committee (experts in my general field, but not in this particular narrow topic) to side with me. What would be an appropriate way of framing my reply?
**Update** --- The interview happened, the committee member in question raised this issue (just as I anticipated), and I replied along the lines that Sydney E. Everhart suggests below. The rest of the committee looked satisfied with this answer (as did some colleagues I had rehearsed the interview with a few days in advance), so in that sense, thank you, Sydney. Unfortunately, the committee member in question wasn't so impressed and gave a very negative evaluation of my proposal. I guess you can't convince someone that doesn't want to be convinced.
# Answer
> 11 votes
I am not in your field of work, however, as one of the comments to your question pointed out, this type of scenario can happen in other fields and situations. The best first step is to acknowledge the debate and the limitations of your own study. However, frame your response such that regardless of the debate, you will still learn something new. For example, my response might be something like:
"Clearly there are two schools of thought as to whether *quz* or *bar* is the correct assumption, however, that question cannot be answered in a single study alone. By funding this proposal to do work under the assumption of *bar*, we can answer questions X, Y, and Z. An additional outcome is that we will be providing more information about phenomena surrounding *bar*, thus providing more information that may ultimately help to answer the question of *quz* versus *bar*."
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Tags: funding, interview
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thread-27424
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27424
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How can I remain motivated while studying for comprehensive exams?
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2014-08-20T17:22:56.300
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# Question
Title: How can I remain motivated while studying for comprehensive exams?
At my university, the MS and PhD programs in Computer Science have comprehensive exams. The exams retest the student on topics from designated core courses. The exams are separate from the course and may be written by a group of instructors instead of just the instructor who taught the course.
Students are given a list of books to read. Some of the books indicate selected chapters, others are expected to be read and understood cover to cover. The scope of the exams is daunting and preparation for the exams is expected to be a major undertaking by the students taking months of preparation. For full time students this is difficult. For part time students like myself who work full-time and have family this effectively sidelines research during the preparation period. If you do not pass the exams on your first try, it can be very demoralizing.
I was able to stay motivated by following the strategy I described in a similar question: strategy
What other strategies have people used?
# Answer
> 1 votes
The strategy that I used was to divide the work into chunks and assign them to finite periods of time. Let's say your exam is in three months and you have two books to read and two course notes to review. That means that you'll have 12 weeks to study. The 12th week should be reserved for "hitting the hotspots" before your exam and general review of all the materials covered in weeks 1-11. Then divide up material to be covered from the two books and two courses across the remaining 11 weeks. I would suggest that you divide it into 11 weekly topics. Assign reading to yourself. The goal of each week worth of studying is to create your own "cliff notes" for that week's chunk of material that can be studied during week 12.
A good strategy to avoid burnout is to schedule time for no studying. This especially important since you have family. Make sure that you schedule your no study time during a time that they also want to interact with you. For example, no more studying after noon on Sundays would be a good amount of time.
Since you do have family, also consider scheduling alone time for yourself where you get to do only what you want. Doing nothing, watching tv, or checking on your stackexchange questions are okay during that time. But make sure to limit those activities to only that time.
Good luck!
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Tags: graduate-school, exams, motivation
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thread-36887
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36887
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Possible causes of confusion and mistakes in technical terminology in bilingual settings
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2015-01-15T21:49:14.440
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# Question
Title: Possible causes of confusion and mistakes in technical terminology in bilingual settings
**Disclaimer:** This question is probably on the brink of off-topicness; maybe, it is also opinion-based and I don't exclude it is way too broad. Nonetheless, I'm asking this out of curiosity: so, if you close this question, I won't complain; but if you answer, I'll appreciate.
To try to stay on track, let me state clearly the rules of the game.
First, I'm interested in the following bilingual settings or situations:
1. Courses which are taught in a language which is not the local language (e.g. a course taught in English at a German university).
2. Courses which are taught in the local language that adopt textbooks written in a different language.
3. Students, researchers and professors who collaborate with people speaking different native languages.
Second, here is the question:
**Have you got any example of technical terminology or symbology (from whatever field) which has been, in your experience, cause of confusion, misunderstandings or mistakes in the above given situations?**
Let me give you a few examples I've come across:
* In English, the term *voltage* denotes a common electrical quantity. The Italian term for voltage is *tensione*. Many Italian students who have been exposed to English classes, however, instead of using the correct term when speaking in Italian, use the mistranslated term *voltaggio*, which looks similar to the English term, but is incorrect.
* In German and in several East European countries, the symbol used to denote voltages is U instead of the more common V. But this wouldn't cause much trouble were it not for the fact that the symbology employed to indicate the polarity of a voltage is opposite to that employed in US or in many other European countries. It took me a while to realize this, but now, if I have a technical discussion with someone from those countries, it's the first thing I point out to avoid many headaches to everybody.
* A Czech researcher told me that the common low-pass or high-pass filters are actually called high-reject and low-reject filters in the Czech technical literature, and this was a major source of confusion when he started reading the English technical literature.
**Note:** I'm not interested in common words that can sound awkward or rude or offensive in another language, just technical terminology which can cause confusion.
# Answer
Actually, I think one of the biggest issues that we have to deal with as scientists is the use of writing conventions. For instance:
* The "decimal point" in Europe is normally written as a *comma*. So a German would see that "a mile is 1,760 yards" might not know if a mile should be 5280 feet or 5.28 feet! (This can cause confusion when translating back and forth.)
* Similarly, I have to be very careful with my handwriting, lest my audience think my "7" is a "1."
A lot of what you're talking about, though, I think falls either under the header of "false cognates" (or *faux amis*, as they're known in French), or of words with multiple definitions. As examples of the latter, for instance, *Benzin* in German can mean both "benzene" as well as "gasoline," while *Neigung* can mean both "slope" and "gradient."
> 3 votes
# Answer
The German word for *torque* is *Drehmoment,* which is a composite of *Dreh (turning)* and *Moment.* Thus a very literal translation of *Drehmoment* would be *turning momentum.* This leads to confusion with the English *angular momentum,* which is *Drehimpuls* in German, but which one might easily accidentally translate as *Drehmoment.*
> 2 votes
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Tags: language, terminology
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thread-36891
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36891
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Decision time on a postdoc offer while applying for other positions
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2015-01-15T23:08:56.777
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# Question
Title: Decision time on a postdoc offer while applying for other positions
I have recently applied for several postdoctoral positions as well as a lecturing position. A week ago I had an interview for one of the postdoctoral positions and I should know the outcome of this interview by the end of next week. During the interview I was asked if I was applying for other positions, to which I said yes and briefly described what these were.
The project is a very interesting one but I also want to consider the other positions I applied for (especially the lecturing one) if I were to be the preferred candidate. However, I will have to wait until the end of February or so to hear about these other positions.
So, if I was chosen for this postdoc I was interviewed for, I was wondering how long it is acceptable/customary to make them wait until I give them a final response.
I'm sure they would be ok with a couple of weeks, 1. because moving overseas can be a bit of a change from a personal perspective and 2. because considering other potentially interesting opportunities makes sense at this stage in my career, but I was wondering if making them wait for a month or so was too long.That being said, I heard about people making an employer wait four months or so but I would find it rather impolite.
Thanks for your input!
# Answer
Most likely, you won't be able to "make" them wait at all. If they give you an offer, they will also give you a deadline to decide whether to accept it. You can ask for an extension of this deadline, but there are no guarantees that they will agree to extend it. The power here is mostly on their side, not yours, unless you are really a superstar, or are the one and only qualified candidate.
For a position like a postdoc, the employer typically has a fixed number of positions available (often just one). Commonly (especially for a field with an academic-year hiring cycle) they interview a number of people and then make offers made serially. Every day that they wait for you to make a decision is a day in which the next person on their list might take another job, reducing their options if you turn them down. So it's not in their interest to give you an indefinite amount of time to decide, since that could result in them hiring someone not as good, or not being able to fill the position at all. They don't want to rush you into declining, but they also can't wait forever.
It's hard to predict what kind of deadline they might give you. Some employers will give a candidate a very short deadline (a few days) if the candidate is a "reach" - the employer doubts that the candidate will accept, but wants to at least try to get them. This way, in the likely case that the candidate says no, not much time has been lost. More commonly, the deadline would be on the order of a week or two. Having as much time as a month seems unlikely, but there are a lot of factors that could affect it, and if they are not tied to the academic year there may be more flexibility.
What "makes sense" to you from a personal perspective (pondering an overseas move, exploring options, etc) is not really the employer's concern. Even before receiving the offer, it would be a good idea to carefully consider all the pros and cons, and come to a tentative decision about whether you would take the job if offered (including scenarios about other offers received or not received). Between the interview and your own research into the institution, you should have almost all the information you're going to get; the only extra information in the offer itself would be the salary (and other benefits). So ideally, as soon as you get the offer, you should know how you intend to decide, or what other offers you need to wait for.
It's entirely possible that you may have to make a decision on this position before hearing about the others. That's just how it goes.
> 13 votes
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Tags: application, postdocs
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thread-36867
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36867
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How hard is it to succeed in research after an adviser's death midway through PhD?
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2015-01-15T16:23:53.083
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# Question
Title: How hard is it to succeed in research after an adviser's death midway through PhD?
**TL;DR**: How hard would it be to finish out a Ph.D. and have an effective early career (as a pure mathematician) after my adviser has unexpectedly passed away? My department does not have any tenure-track faculty able to take on students in my field at the time, but two postdocs in my field have offered to help, and the department has offered to fly me to visit researchers in my field. I am currently in my fourth year at a U.S. university.
I read this similar question, but it seemed to address practical plans for going forward more than the costs and benefits of doing so. What I'm looking for is advice on how difficult it would be to have a successful career and/or finish the Ph.D. in a reasonable amount of time, in addition to talking about what options I have.
I am a pure mathematics Ph.D. student in my fourth year. My adviser recently passed away unexpectedly, and my department does not have anyone else in his field who is able to take on students. He was a great loss to all of us, as he was a deeply intuitive mentor as well as an excellent researcher. Before my adviser's passing, I had anticipated 1.5 to 2.5 more years to Ph.D.
In the next six months or so, my department has offered me the option of working with a couple of postdocs (in my field) at my current institution, as well as flying out to occasionally meet with more senior mathematicians at different institutions. It is unclear whether the department will hire another researcher in my field anytime soon, especially one who is not fresh out of a postdoc. The department is currently uncertain if there will be tenure-track faculty there who could advise me anytime before I graduate. The department tends to offer at least 6 years of funding to Ph.D. students.
I currently have enough material for roughly one paper, but I feel that I still need guidance to finish my Ph.D., and I felt like I was really benefiting from weekly/biweekly meetings with a single adviser. My adviser helped keep me confident and excited, as well as explaining difficult techniques and offering new approaches to proofs or counterexamples.
I have heard some people advise on transferring institutions at this point, though my department does not recommend that. In addition, some people have pointed out to me that an adviser is an important early-career research collaborator, to the extent that it is difficult to do good research early in a career without having them to collaborate with or ask questions of.
If my time to Ph.D. is going to be lengthened significantly, I would like to know that going forward, as it would help me make decisions about whether to transfer, etc. So my question is: how hard would it be to finish out a Ph.D. and have an effective early career without an adviser in the traditional sense?
# Answer
The unexpected death of someone close to you is a tough situation; more than that, it is one of the archetypical tough situations throughout human history. The obvious -- but not easy -- general answer is that you need to either become more self-reliant, find other people to satisfy the needs and desires that were being met by the departed party, or some of both: some of both sounds healthy to me.
It sounds like your department is trying to work with you to meet your needs, which is great. My first comment is that's an ongoing process, not a one-time decision or fix. How are you supposed to know right now what accommodations are needed or optimal? You can't. You should identify specific departmental personnel and make clear that you will be checking in with them periodically about the situation.
> I have heard some people advise on transferring institutions at this point, though my department does not recommend that.
Whether they recommend it or not, you can leave at any time, and -- with a deceased thesis advisor -- an absolutely clear conscience. So if you know of a faculty member at another institution that you think would be an ideal advisor, feel free to explore that right away. It sounds to me like you don't, and I'll continue under that assumption.
Your department's recommendation may well be reasonable....but do you understand why they're making it? I would hope that by saying this to you they have some degree of planning for your successful completion of a PhD. You say a little bit about this, but not enough: they offered for you to work with postdocs, but you say that there are no faculty in your field. That's a bit ambiguous: are these postdocs in your field, enough to help you finish your thesis? I'm guessing they must be at least close, because if not you could get a tenure-track faculty member who is not in your field.
I think you should talk to these postdocs and get a sense of whether they could help you finish your thesis. If so, that sounds like a good option for your situation: basically they become your new thesis advisor, and the fact that they are not tenure-track at that institution is not so directly relevant, so long as they will stay there until you graduate. (Look into that!)
For the majority of students in pure mathematics that are not in the home stretch of their program, being without a designated advisor at their home institution would leave them terribly adrift: a few plane trips here and there will not cut it. Recently I was on the committee of a student whose advisor left the department soon after she started working in earnest on her thesis topic. They kept in close contact through weekly skype appointments *and* a faculty member in a related field stepped up to become her official thesis advisor. I watched this happen and would say that it set her back a full year. In the end she did graduate, get a good visiting position, and now seems to be doing extremely well. The moral is that ultimately it is all about the student: this was a real test of her character, and she passed with flying colors, but gosh it was hard, even hard for me to watch. (And I must tip my hat to my departed colleague as well: he was still closely involved with the student the whole time, infinitely more so than he was obliged to be.)
I would say that you in particular sound like you really need a new advisor. Don't stick around at your home institution without someone stepping up to that role. (And certainly don't wait around for them to hire someone else! Unless they can tell you right now who they want to hire next year, in which case you should ask to spend the intervening time at the present institution of this person.)
You ask about how academia works without having an advisor to mentor you post-PhD. To be frank: by asking for a quantification of the marginal difficulty of the deceased advisor and in other ways as well, your question is telegraphing that you have an uncertain commitment to a post-PhD academic career.
An academic career in pure mathematics is hard for everyone, and thinking that the key to success is close post-PhD contact with your advisor sounds closer to wrong than right to me. I will admit that I had a fairly extreme situation: my former PhD advisor is one of the great mathematical luminaries of our time. He gave me the help and guidance I needed as a PhD student. But I have never collaborated with him, and since graduation I haven't asked him any mathematical questions. We remain on perfectly good terms (I have his phone number) and have professional interactions like two mathematicians in the same field, but once I got my PhD he became my **former** advisor (though that is still a critical role: e.g. it involved writing a lot of letters on my behalf!), if you take my meaning. One of my oldest friends got a math PhD. A few years later, his advisor died in a tragic bicycle accident. So that meant the end of the mentorship, and I remember discussing the awkardness of the situation with him for several years after. My friend is now the chair of the math department at his university. Again: **ultimately it is all about the student**.
To sum up: as others have said, this may well be a traumatic situation for you. Take it as such, give yourself some time to grieve and to let things sink in. While you're doing that, involve your department in your plans to complete your PhD there or elsewhere and to find at least one new mentor. When you do find a new mentor, see if you can regain mojo you might have lost during this tough setback. But if you really think of mathematical research as something that you need someone else's guidance and energy to pull off, I would recommend that you complete your PhD and then look elsewhere for a career: either a teaching-intensive job or something else entirely. The main benefit of a research career in mathematics is that mathematics is frickin' awesome and spending your life doing it makes you a rock star. There are other benefits, but none that stack up against the sizable costs.
**Added**: You speak as if you might not even finish your PhD. For someone who's four years into a math PhD program and already has enough results for a paper, I think not finishing the degree ought not even to be an option on the table. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if your natural emotional reaction to your advisor's death is playing a role in your thinking. Trust me on this: *everyone* wants you to finish your PhD. It's a cliche to say "That's what your advisor would have wanted", but it's probably true, right?
> 13 votes
# Answer
In academia, as everywhere, life happens. Fortunately, a lot of people understand this.
It will definitely be harder to succeed when your advisor has passed away than if your advisor had lived. I suspect, however, that it will be much easier than if you had a falling out with your advisor, which has been addressed in a number of different questions on this site.
It sounds like your institution is doing the best it can to offer you options for getting new advising, and that those options are not so bad. It is also the case that you are reaching the point in your program where you would in any case need to start reaching out to build strong relationships outside of your home institution. Where your advisor might once have helped bootstrap your connections, you have instead your institution's offer to help you meet with other mathematicians. This is a big juncture in your life and career, and everything changes. Despite the fact that the original quote is false, a crisis really is both danger and opportunity.
**Also, make sure to take care of *yourself*.** You just had somebody close to you die, and that might affect you in a lot of ways, including interfering with your ability to work. If you aren't already doing so, I would suggest proactively starting to see a counselor to help you navigate any psychological challenges that may come up: even if you don't feel you are having troubles now, they may start and it is better to catch them early, rather than having troubles that you might attribute to your new advising and then realizing six months down the road that it was actually your reaction to the death.
> 39 votes
# Answer
First off, I am so sorry for your loss.
Disclaimer, my field is not mathematics.
That being said, adviser plays a dual role, expert and mentor. In their technical expert role, he or she works closely with you to guide you through the difficult problems. In their mentoring role, they take care of you being motivated, dealing with the stress, advise on how to be a member of research community, how to present yourself etc... Ideally, and most often, one person full-fills both roles. But not always.
So, maybe the postdocs plus an external expert, can fulfill the technical advisement role. But then also, ask the department for a faculty mentor. This person might not be as familiar with your work, but can offer you general and close support. Huge part of being a successful researcher is to be able to explain your work to someone not very familiar with your area. The sooner you start practicing that, the better. This is also a time of opportunity for your personal growth, on taking more responsibilities under unfortunate circumstances.
As far as your future goes, remember that the postdocs will become more experienced, and will be able to give you letters or references, along with the your mentor. All of them witnessing your resilience in overcoming this major setback at this hard time will speak volumes of you, and how you tackle problems.
But then, my field is not mathematics.
> 11 votes
# Answer
It's an unfortunate situation, but it sounds like your department is trying to do what it can to accommodate you. If one of the postdocs is willing and able to take on the role of advisor, that might be the best solution. Of course, a lot depends on factors that we can't know from this distance.
> 5 votes
# Answer
The first question that I would ask of the department (in particular the head of the graduate program or the department chair) is whether or not there is some faculty member who would be willing to act as your formal supervisor (perhaps in conjunction with another research advisor from outside the university) on your current topic. It may take some time (weeks) to get an answer.
If the answer is something like "Yes, professor X has volunteered to take you on.", then you should talk to professor X to see how it would work. Professor X might be willing to do his best to advise you on this topic even though it's outside of his area of expertise, and that would be a very fair offer. Of course you would have to decide whether you'd be willing to work with an advisor who wasn't as well qualified as your previous advisor. If professor X is only willing to advise you as you start over on a topic in his area of interest that would be a very different situation and you would have to decide whether to change topics or move to a different program. If the department has difficulty finding a faculty member willing to act as your advisor, then I'd say that it's definitely time to move on.
Our department had a similar situation a few years ago with a faculty member who was supervising an MS student in cryptography. The student was only a few months from completing his MS thesis when the faculty member died. Although this was far outside of my area of expertise, I stepped in and together with the other committee members, we got the student through. It was hard for both me and the student but the student was clearly better off finishing the thesis in this way than picking a new topic and starting over from scratch.
> 4 votes
# Answer
It is definitely a setback, but should not be disastrous if your are flexible. I see two major issues. If you follow the path they are setting you on with postdocs providing your primary supervision a infrequent meetings with a more senior person, I would worry that you will not get the support you need and will result in a serious setback. My guess is that at 4 years in and having a paper worth of results, that finding a new supervisor at another university might be possible. This would set you back in you would need to physically move and change research directions a bit, but apart from the lost time, my guess is your thesis might actually come out stronger.
> 2 votes
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Tags: phd, mathematics, advisor, death
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thread-36485
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36485
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How to thank a good teacher?
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2015-01-08T23:40:13.823
|
# Question
Title: How to thank a good teacher?
Say if you were a graduate of ABC university, and When you want to thank a teacher of this university because she used to help you a lot in some courses or because she has the same hobbies and interests as yours, and you want to be friends with her:
1. Should you just send a thank you letter to her or buy her a present?
2. If you choose to buy her a present, should it be a brand-named and very expensive one?
# Answer
> 8 votes
No gifts. Words speak volumes. If you must give gifts, something handmade is better than anything purchased. Purchased gifts, especially more expensive gifts, may, in fact make your instructor feel uncomfortable and skirts the line of appropriate teacher-student relationships.
At the very minimum, a handwritten, thoughtfully articulated note is the easiest way to thank a good teacher.
A handwritten letter to the department Chair is even more powerful, but the **best** way to thank a truly outstanding teacher is to nominate him or her for a teaching award. Most institutions have teaching awards that give excellent instructors public recognition, something to enhance his or her resume and best of all they sometimes come with a small monetary reward.
# Answer
> 15 votes
As a college instructor, the one thing that has meant the most to me in terms of thanks has been when students tell my superiors how much they enjoyed having me as an instructor. Even just an email to my boss from a former student was a very solid form of thanks. It made me look good; it also made my supervisor proud of himself for one of his lowlings having success. For me at least, this was the ultimate thanks.
# Answer
> 8 votes
A good thank-you note is always appreciated by a former teacher.
I would recommend that if you are a current student at the university, and may have that former teacher again, that you *not* purchase a gift with a significant price tag, as that could be viewed as creating a conflict of interest. On the other hand, a small memento of personal, but not monetary, value is still appreciated. (For instance, a photograph or small handmade item or perishable good would be OK.)
If you are an alumnus, then the rules are obviously different. However, before giving an expensive gift, you might want to consider if there's an alternate use of the money that might be even more appropriate or appreciated (e.g., a donation to a charitable organization in the teacher's name).
# Answer
> 3 votes
I'll suggest that you write a note. Use paper.
You can add a small gift to this - something that she can keep on her desk, a souvenir perhaps, that is related to her passion/subject.
Other than the great advice above, simply in terms of writing the thank you note, you may find this link useful:
```
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2008/10/23/the-art-of-thank-you-note-writing/
```
I'll mention the main points here, and you can use the link for a more elaborate guide.
a. Always write the note as soon as possible.
b. Send it through the mail.
c. Use real stationery.
When writing,
i) Begin by expressing your gratitude for the gift/service.
ii) Mention specific details about how you plan to use a gift or what you enjoyed about an experience.
iii) For some recipients, add some news about your life.
iv) Close by referencing the past and alluding to the future.
v) Repeat your thanks. (in short)
vi) Valediction.
I hope this is useful in penning the actual note. Cheers!
# Answer
> 1 votes
Sending a not very expensive gift but chosen carefully, with a personal note, as suggested above is good.
However, teachers often appreciate if students stay in regular contact with them, discussing future career/family plans and sharing updates about batchmates. It all depends on the kind of teacher and the level of your relationship.
# Answer
> 1 votes
It is traditional at the time of graduation to give your stole to someone who has provided you with an unusual amount of help and support. A lot of times this is given to one's parents, especially if they have paid for it, but it can also go to a mentor, as a profound expression of gratitude.
# Answer
> 0 votes
If you google "rate my professor", you will find some very popular websites that you can provide good feedback. Most of those who use such websites, are for giving negative feedbacks.
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Tags: etiquette, professorship, gifts
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thread-36902
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36902
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Can a paper be rejected because another paper (by someone else) based on its arXiv preprint extends the result?
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2015-01-16T02:29:26.817
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# Question
Title: Can a paper be rejected because another paper (by someone else) based on its arXiv preprint extends the result?
Suppose that I put a paper to Arxiv and submit to a journal at the same time. Someone extends my result and clearly cites my paper. This is totally fine. They submit it to a journal. For whatever reason in the review process, their paper is published before mine is accepted. Do I now have to worry that the referee will reject my paper on the grounds that a better result exists, even though they acknowledge that they get the idea from my result?
# Answer
On the one hand, referees can reject your paper for all sorts of foolish reasons. I would not if I were refereeing, but that means nothing for some random person with an axe to grind. I wouldn't worry about this scenario too much though, because it would require some relatively extreme timing to happen.
On the other hand, even if it did happen, if people are citing you and you are having an impact, is it really that much of a problem if the paper is "just" in arXiv? Only the most blind and foolish Impact Factor junkies would hold the lack of brand name against you. Also, you will write many papers in your career, and I would be startled if such a situation happened more than once.
> 6 votes
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Tags: publications, journals, arxiv, rejection
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thread-36877
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36877
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What should a student do if a professor agrees to write recommendation, then retracts offer upon realizing he confused the student with someone else?
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2015-01-15T18:36:42.483
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# Question
Title: What should a student do if a professor agrees to write recommendation, then retracts offer upon realizing he confused the student with someone else?
Prof. Z has taught thousands of students in my former school since 2010. In the Biology course that he taught, there were two students (A and B) with similar full names and nicknames, but their academic results were totally different. Prof. Z liked student A but hated student B because student B used to be very naughty in Prof. Z's courses and got very bad grades.
On January 4th, Prof. Z received student B's email for a letter of recommendation. Prof. Z agreed to do so and arranged a time to meet student B. On the day when they met, Prof. Z knew he had made a big mistake, and he refused to do anything for student B. Given that situation, what would you do if this happened to you (as student B)? This really happened recently in my former school, and student B was very angry and made a complaint to the head of Prof. Z's department.
# Answer
As Student B, I would be pretty mad about this, even more than if he had declined to write me a letter in the first place. But I would also recognize that it was for the best (if he hadn't done this, he would have written me a bad letter).
Also, I would never have gone to the department head about this because
1. It's not something that merits a formal complaint
2. It's not something I'd want to be known for, especially among other professors who may be writing my letters of recommendation.
> 1 votes
# Answer
The questions-not-asked include asking about the basis for student B's actions. As @BenBitdiddle comments after his answer, perhaps student B was "advised" to ask the most famous professor, etc.
My blanket reaction to this is that this advice should not have come from any professionally competent "advisor", but probably from peers, or peer-based information. Abstractly, there's certainly nothing wrong with getting the opinions of one's friends and peers. However, it is exactly in such situations that the critical weakness in asking people who don't know much about a given thing is instantiated. How to know that this would be a problem? Difficult, for many understandable reasons, but that does not resolve the issue!
That is, younger people would benefit from appreciating the palpable fact that important decisions affecting their lives are made by people (often older) who need not share their viewpoint, nor their same-age friends' viewpoint.
While it is true that some people who "have power" abuse it, this is not a universal, and it is not wise to postulate that all experienced/older people are oppressive or selfish. Genuine experience, as opposed to conjecture, is hard to replace. Thus, ideally, letter-of-recommendation writers are sufficiently experienced to have been through (and succeeded in) the endeavor for which they're writing a letter. Perhaps also experience (and successful in) appraising the likely future success of people in those endeavors. From this comes the value of letters of recommendation.
Yes, unfortunately, even a pretty-darn-good performance in a routine course doesn't give a letter writer much to work with. Many people hit that mark, etc.
What's a student to do who has trashed all those bridges, before they realized that it'd matter? Probably spend extra time proving exactly that they'd caught on, and have moved to a different plateau. But there'd need to be tangible evidence, not just a promise.
So, in effect, "tell your friends not to hope for letters from faculty in whose courses they'd done badly"... And, if people discover themselves in the position that there's no alternative, then they need to get as close to a "do-over" as they can, because otherwise they've sealed their own fate, in any conventional avenue.
Yes, it is indeed unfortunate that this "appraisal" period comes during a period of peoples' lives where many things are in turmoil...
So, again, people who become aware of this mechanism should "tell their friends" to work hard to avoid finding themselves in such a situation. If one does, then it is almost surely better to allocate considerable time to repair the damage, rather than somehow "fake it" and limp along with fatally bad letters of recommendation.
By the way, part of the "currency" that faculty have to spend (or not) is their word/reputation, so they are very, very hesitant to blow it on bogus not-so-bad recommendations. Faculty who'll give glowing recommendations to nearly anyone will have debased that currency to an extent that it is nearly worthless... so you'd not gain from a letter from them *anyway*.
> 5 votes
# Answer
Semi-serious answer:
---
**As student B:** Next time, claim a family emergency and ask whether the prof can please send you the letter of recommendation. As much as you liked to see him in person, you're at home caring for your dying grandmother (again). (And drop this case, you're getting an even worse reputation.)
**As better student B:** Don't ask for a letter of recommendation from a prof if you did show abysmal behavior and performance in class. It's a letter of recommendation, not cronyism, there should be something to recommend.
**As an even better student B:** Behave better in class and learn to learn (and to perform). University isn't school and you're supposed to be an adult by now -- you actually have a job: to learn the material, to understand it, and to learn how to think. And BTW, there's a place for naughty behavior in class -- *if it's smart*. But that requires understanding the material, which according to the grades B did not.
---
**As prof Z:** Apologize that you have written the wrong letter of recommendation, which was a honest mistake. Ask the student whether s/he really wants a letter of recommendation which essentially states that s/he was in class, disrupted it and got bad grades (if it's legally possible to write about negative events)
**As a better prof Z:** Never write a letter of recommendation without checking first for whom you are writing the letter of recommendation. Ask for the identifying information that differentiated between the students when it came to assigning their grades. If students failed to understand their job, they might fail to understand what is involved in getting a letter of recommendation.
**As an even better prof Z:** If you have a student B in your class, try to inform this person about the consequences of his/her behavior. And that in earlier schools, everyone might have been a winner, but here good grades require knowledge/skills/performance. Also inform administration that you have a student apparently riding on the coattails of another student. Every prof who had both students in their class should get this information.
---
**As student A:** Never give student B your diplomas.
**As a better student A:** Ask prof Z. for that letter of recommendation.
**As an even better student A:** Legally change (add to) your name.
> 3 votes
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Tags: etiquette, recommendation-letter
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thread-36886
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36886
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How could one prepare for a telecon interview for a government lab?
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2015-01-15T21:26:32.277
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# Question
Title: How could one prepare for a telecon interview for a government lab?
Suppose that, after applying to a publicly advertised position, a person gets invited to an interview for a regular (not time-limited) scientific job at a national scientific research laboratories in the United Kingdom. Due to the location of the candidate, the interview is scheduled to take place as a teleconference (i.e. Skype). The candidate is instructed to give a 10-minute presentation titled ”Background experience of the candidate” for a panel of four scientists. The candidate has a conventional career-path so far with Master, PhD, and post-doc, but has so far not had any “real job”.
What might be effective strategies for the candidate to prepare for such an interview? Needless to say, summarising Master + PhD + postdoc/postdocs in 10 minutes is, to say the least, *challenging* (read: impossible). How could one focus a presentation and what kind of questions might one expect?
# Answer
10 minute job talks in the UK are pretty common. While it is not helpful. You really should have some canned talks, of various lengths between 2 minutes and 1 hour, that provide an overview of you research. For versions that are 5 minutes or less you should be able to deliver them with and without slides and the longer versions you should be able to deliver them with slides but also with a pen and napkin while sitting around a table with a few people. You never know when you will be asked to describe your research. In terms of preparation, I would focus on being able to describe your research at various levels of depth.
The best 10 minute job talks I have seen in the UK have demonstrated that the past research is important and has depth, but also has breadth in terms of fitting in with other people in the department. You do not need to be over the top in terms of saying how you fit in with the others, if you really fit in, they will see it.
I would say in terms of timing provide a 2 minute intro covering your MS, PhD and postdoc(s). That is a 30 second description of each. Ideally, the descriptions show how they fit together, and how one led to another. I would then spend another 2 minutes talking about breadth and impact; basically how your research fits I to the big picture. I would spend the remaining 6 minutes talking about a single research project. This is similar, although shorter than, a conference talk. In terms of ordering, this could come in the middle or the end.
In terms of questions. After the talk, you can expect typical research talk questions. At some point they will then switch into the formal interview. In the UK, these are scripted and they need to ask each candidate the identical questions. They have some leeway with follow up questions, but it is pretty narrow. There is often an "outsider" from HR or another department who makes sure the script is followed. The questions often focus in the essential and desirable qualities from the job description, so re-read that carefully. Brits are all about box ticking, so make sure you are able to clearly explain how you meet all the essential requirements and as many of the desirable requirements as possible.
> 3 votes
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Tags: career-path, interview, video-conference, government-institutes
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thread-36900
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36900
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How to reply to an academic interview invitation?
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2015-01-16T01:21:17.487
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# Question
Title: How to reply to an academic interview invitation?
What is the recommended way to reply to an academic interview invitation? And would there be a difference in response if the invitation was sent by a faculty or a staff? Should it be very short or should the applicant express his interest again in the position, maybe provide more details of his qualifications etc?
# Answer
If they call you and you answer, be excited and happy and keep the conversation really short. The person who called you does not really want to talk to you, they just want to tell you that you got an interview and possibly to dump some information on you. Your side of the conversation could be:
> This is so great and I am really excited to come for the interview. I have to run to a meeting/teach (doesn't matter if it is true or not) can we set up a time to talk in more detail later today or tomorrow?
At that point the person calling will either setup a time or tell you they will email you the information they need to tell you.
If they leave a voice mail, you can either call them back or send them an email, unless they tell you to do one or the other. If they email you, you should probably only reply with an email, unless they tell you to call.
In the follow up conversation/email there are things you need to know, which search committees often forget about. You should of course express how excited you are to come visit and tell them about your work and learn more about them and their cool work, but you do not need to directly sell yourself at this point (or really during the interview itself). What you do need to do is:
1. Setup a date for the visit. You should tell them when you are available.
2. Alert them to anyone you want to meet during your visit.
3. Find out how travel is paid for and arranged.
4. What the interview consists of and who will be at those events.
5. If they need a title and/or abstract, and if so when, for the job talk.
The reason you need to know what the interview consists of is that a campus visit may include one-on-one meetings/interviews, a panel interview, a research seminar on your past work, a teaching demo, and a "chalk" talk on your future work. If they want you to teach an hour lecture of an actual calculus 101 class, you really need to know that beforehand. Alternatively, they might want you to talk through a syllabus of a graduate class you would teach. A 10 minute research talk aimed at the search committee is very different than an hour long seminar with undergraduates present.
> 6 votes
# Answer
PS Start gathering the email addresses of everyone you will meet now. You will be tired after your interview/talk so get your draft thankyou emails lined up ready to send.
And *don't* forget to thank all the secretaries, drivers, students who also do small tasks for you. First, they appreciate that and will remember when you return. Second, good schools find out whether you did. The general staff have a say in your appointment.
> 3 votes
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Tags: etiquette, job-search, email, faculty-application, interview
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thread-36677
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36677
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Should you conform to journal formatting requirements for the initial submission?
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2015-01-12T15:12:00.927
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# Question
Title: Should you conform to journal formatting requirements for the initial submission?
In my past experiences, I have almost never typeset my manuscripts according to the formats required by the journals to which I would like to submit. I leave my manuscripts as produced by the LaTeX article documentclass.
Recently I am wondering: Would such a behavior generally give handling editors a negative first impression?
# Answer
> 40 votes
Speaking as both an editor and reviewer, I am definitely prejudiced against a paper that fails to follow prescribed *submission* formatting (which may or may not relate to the final published format). It is simply a matter of professionalism and prior correlation.
As an editor and reviewer, you see a wide range of material submitted. Some is really good, and some is really bad. I've even gotten a few that were outright insane. The vast majority of the papers that failed to follow prescribed formatting were definitely not good.
Making a good-faith effort to follow formatting requirements generally isn't hard to do, and especially when doing so just means using the journal's LaTeX package rather than the default. Neglecting it means that the author is being sloppy and unprofessional at something easy. This doesn't necessarily impugn their science, but if they don't care enough to follow professional standards on something easy, it's a good indicator that they are likely to be unprofessional in other places where it matters more as well.
One exception: I am likely to give a pass to particularly aged/emeritus types who have a solid track record but are clearly not comfortable with modern word processing technology.
# Answer
> 50 votes
I'll venture a minority opinion (I'm in mathematics, where the culture is very possibly different than in other fields).
As a referee, I have an instinctive *negative* reaction if I know that an author *has* taken the time and effort to conform to a particular journal's style. The grounds for this is that most journals employ typesetting staff for this purpose. Especially considering the very high price of many (if not all) journals, for authors to refuse to do this suggests to me a principled refusal to waste their time.
That said, I can see that many people hold the exact opposite opinion, and even that my own feelings may be a little bit silly. So I certainly don't actually hold this against authors when evaluating submissions. (Indeed, if I receive something formatted, I never know if it is the author or the editorial staff that has formatted it.)
My impression is that most (but maybe not all) mathematicians wouldn't hold it against you if you don't bother. Moreover I believe that most mathematicians in fact don't bother with such formatting guidelines.
I have never heard anyone voice @jakebeal's opinion before. Of course, counting the upvotes, he speaks for at least eight other people! You might take this as evidence that the answer to your question is dependent on what your field is.
# Answer
> 19 votes
**Beware of what the journal styles put into your paper**. For instance, Elsevier's style file `elsart` (recommended for instance by this journal in my field) contains a footer with the words "preprint submitted to Elsevier". If I haven't submitted it yet, I don't want to write a **false statement** on an e-print on arXiv. The recommended style file for this other journal in the same field inserts the text "Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd." on the manuscript, which is **outright false** and borderline criminal in my view.
So **you'd better not use documents created with these classes for anything beyond journal submissions** (e.g., preprints, which at least in maths are basically a necessary step, or sending manuscripts to a colleague). This means that if you use them you *need* to prepare at least a second version.
My experience is that changing LaTeX format can be time-consuming, due to various package incompatibilities. So I have started submitting papers using the style which I am already using for the preprint (and for my internal notes --- I typically start to write down a manuscript much before deciding to which journal I am sending it). **No one has ever complained** (editor, referees...). More recently, **Elsevier explicitly authorized this practice** on many journals by launching an initiative called Your paper Your way.
So my suggestion is **just forget about journal styles** unless someone insists on them.
# Answer
> 13 votes
What reason might there be for not using the journal's format? Here is the one I have heard of.
If your papers are always accepted by the first journal you send them to, then you might as well format them for the journal. (But it probably means you are aiming too low!)
On the other hand: if you sometimes have a paper rejected by one journal, then send to another (and another, and another...), why should you have to change the formatting for each one? In cases like this, the author would prefer to do the formatting once, for the accepting journal. Sensible journals would allow this.
# Answer
> 12 votes
Not surprisingly, the best way is to follow the instructions. But, if you for some reason do not then keeping a manuscript very simple is the best second approach. Simple, generic, typography, 1.5-2 line spacing, figures and tables separate from the text works in most cases. As an editor and reviewer I find evidence of special formatting most annoying. It distracts the reading and is also completely unnecessary since the journal will likely reformat the article during type-setting.
There are some aspects where you should try to put some effort in: try to make sure you adhere to the journal's standard fro referencing and make sure your reference format is correct. It is really annoying when references are not complete or the reference list is haphazardly put together. The key is in the details so make sure you get the details correct. You do not want the editor or reviewers to get annoyed by inconsistencies in details, make sure they can read a well prepared manuscript with little effort and disturbing elements.
So, if you cannot follow the exact instructions, just keep it very simple and avoid inconsistencies.
# Answer
> 10 votes
Sadly, many journal submission guidelines still request an archaic format in which the figures are all placed at the end of the manuscript. Often the figure captions are themselves separated from the figures. This may have made sense in the days of hard copy submissions, but is pointless -- especially at the review stage -- given current technology.
As a reviewer I find this format intensely annoying and it is possible that my review quality suffers as well; I sometimes read through several figure references before flipping back to look at several figures at once. My personal opinion is that authors' highest priority should be to submit their work in a format that minimizes effort on the part of the referees, and if this conflicts with house style requirements, the author has every reason to ignore those requirements.
This is not to promise that every journal will tolerate such a decision on the authors' part, but I have never seen a harsher consequence than a relatively polite request to reformat.
# Answer
> 8 votes
I think there's a balance to be struck here. Some reviewers will be annoyed if there's no room on a printed version to scribble their notes about the paper. This means that typical IEEE/ACM two-column, single-spaced formatting might annoy some people. The argument from them pretty weak if your formatting conforms to the journal style rather than being some tight format that you made up.
On the other hand, using the journal style generally gives you a reasonably readable presentation designed, more or less, that way. It was probably also designed in the age of print to get the most words on the page, so it's not perfect.
The worst thing you can do from a reviewer's perspective is to come up with your own formatting that looks slapdash, unprofessional, sloppy, or is hard to read. Almost no matter what you do, someone will be grumpy, but if you use the journal template, you'll engender the least complaints.
# Answer
> 5 votes
If you are writing your paper in LaTeX, then you should use the LaTeX template provided by the journal (I have yet to submit to a journal that does not provide a LaTeX template). This will take you a few extra minutes.
The LaTeX output is what both the editor and the reviewers will see. Why would you not want to ensure this looks professional? Are you submitting to so many conferences you do not have an extra 20 or 30 minutes to polish your submission?
I don't check for adherence to journal standards during reviews, but I've gotten several papers where the author(s) didn't see what the LaTeX file would look like in PDF form. These papers almost always have other issues, and reading through a poorly formatted PDF discourages me from giving the paper the extra attention it might need.
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Tags: journals, etiquette, paper-submission, formatting
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thread-36917
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36917
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Is it ethical to have mandatory questions in an online crowdsourced survey with paid participants?
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2015-01-16T16:49:00.040
|
# Question
Title: Is it ethical to have mandatory questions in an online crowdsourced survey with paid participants?
Our School Research Ethics Committee requires when designing an online survey that each question is optional for the participants. These rules were devised before the era of crowdsourcing when researchers had to rely on the goodwill of others to gather the necessary responses.
However as I am paying each participant to complete this survey (using Amazon Mechanical Turk) do you think I have a case to argue that I should be able to make some, or even all, questions mandatory?
I have not approached the Research Ethics Committee about this yet, I just wanted to see what the norm is in other countries and institutions.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Mandatory is a difficult concept. I think it is ethically questionable to not allow a participant to withdraw from a study at any time. There may be edge cases, for example drug studies, where further follow up treatment is required, but even here I think that treatment would not be considered part of the study. When a participant withdraws from a study we still need to provide them with whatever inconvenience allowance was agreed. We are not even allowed to prorate the inconvenience allowance, however, we break our longer studies into hour long segments and pay an hourly inconvenience allowance. It is perfectly reasonable to use a "forced choice" response system where participants are required to give a response in order to continue with the study. Using the Mechanical Turk, I think ethically you should provide an easy means of dropping out that is constantly available that will not penalize the participants. When it is so easy to withdraw, forcing them to answer a question which is not inherently necessary, seems silly. If they do not want to answer it and they have no other option, they will just withdraw.
Consider two experiments that consist of two questions. In the first experiment you either show either a circle or a square that is either red or blue. If for whatever reason the participant does not want to tell you what shape they saw, you can still get meaningful information about the color and therefore it would make no sense to force them to answer the first question. In the second experiment you show them a face and ask if it is a man or a women and based on that response you ask them if it was either Alice or Carol or Bob or Dave. For this experiment they need to answer the first question.
# Answer
> 3 votes
While this will definitely vary by review board, my personal experience has been that it's a standard that you are explicitly required to inform participants at an appropriate point (disclosures, usually) that they are allowed to refuse to answer any question they want by leaving it blank or marking it in some fashion. Sometimes this even means that, if they leave any question off, you have to throw out their whole set of responses because it's useless to you, but they must still be paid/credited for their participation even if it makes it useless to you.
The question is both ethical and practical - if you require an answer you may also be encouraging dishonesty, and possibly invalidating the usefulness of your survey anyway. "I'm not answering that" is better than "I'm not comfortable answering that truthfully, so I'll just put down nonsense." And this set of rules actually goes far beyond just the idea of unpaid volunteers, as it applies to things like medical patients, paid employees, etc.
Now, *this is not to say you can't do it* \- ethics review boards have approved electrocuting and burning people based upon appropriate balancing factors, so it's up to the board and how you design and present your study.
But setting form fields as "required" will require appropriate disclosure to the participants and review board, and will likely be considered a negative that must be appropriately justified and handled. You will have to show that autonomy, right to withdraw, informed consent, non-coercion, and ethical payment are all handled appropriately. You will be making things hard on yourself, so if you don't have to do it this way, you probably shouldn't.
You are generally welcomed to pro-rate payment, so if a person refuses to answer all items you only have to pay them for the items they did answer - and you must put this in the informed consent forms and present this to the review board. Whether or not the particular online payment system or setup you use will support such a method might restrict your realistic study design, but that hardship is probably not something the review board will be particularly concerned about.
# Answer
> 2 votes
The IRB that I serve on would never approve of a paid participation survey in which the participants would be denied the compensation if they didn't complete the survey. Furthermore, if someone decides that they don't want to complete their participation in the study it would be unethical to make use of any partial responses that you'd already gotten from that participant.
In short, the answer to your question is "no."
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Tags: ethics, survey-research
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thread-36720
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36720
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How thoroughly do referees review papers submitted to theoretical computer science conferences?
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2015-01-13T16:31:02.503
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# Question
Title: How thoroughly do referees review papers submitted to theoretical computer science conferences?
Theoretical computer science conferences usually have a review period of about two months. Programming committee members have potentially dozens of papers to review, alongside their regular day jobs. How thoroughly are papers usually reviewed? What kind of heuristics are often employed to review papers faster? Does correctness of every proof get verified in detail, or do reviewers put some trust into the authors getting it right?
# Answer
> 3 votes
It varies. As a first year PhD student I was asked to review a theory paper, even though I had almost no background in the field. The professor explicitly said I only had to read the first half of the paper, and I only had to tell him if it looked interesting and correct.
At the same time I'm sure many reviewers do a diligent job and don't outsource their reviewing to inexperienced graduate students.
Related: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1760
# Answer
> 0 votes
If a PC member has dozens of papers to review, then either a) the conference is doing it wrong or b) the PC member is expected to outsource most of the reviewing work to external reviewers. A good heuristic for not over-burdening the reviewers is to expect each reviewer to handle no more than 3-6 papers. With those sort of numbers, it's entirely reasonable to expect that each paper will get reviewed in great detail.
In practice, however, a great degree of variability in the quality of reviewers. Some reviewers will do a very thorough job---my theoretical papers often get back detailed comments from at least one reviewer that makes it clear that they worked through all of the math. Everybody in academia also has "bad reviewer" stories about people who didn't take their job seriously. For example, I recently saw a reviewer provide a review which, in its entirety, said, "Accept as talk." Good conferences with responsible program chairs try to mitigate these effects, but there's always a good deal of noise in the process.
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Tags: conference, peer-review, computer-science
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thread-36910
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36910
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How do you respond when people talk about the possibility of profiting from, rather than the exciement of, your research?
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2015-01-16T14:44:03.263
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# Question
Title: How do you respond when people talk about the possibility of profiting from, rather than the exciement of, your research?
Let's say you are passionate, I mean really passionate, about your field. However, whenever you try to share the pleasure induced by your findings or further understanding or even acknowledged works with those you love and who love you, could be your family members or lover or spouse, you always get a response such as "Oh yeah, that might make a lot of money."
What do you do if you are uncomfortable with such a response but do not know how to properly express yourself in this context without hurting them? What would you do to make yourself more comfortable?
# Answer
Let's pretend that it's not an academic field that you are passionate about, but instead something like train spotting or fantasy football or competitive button collecting. Seriously, pretend that when you are talking with non-practitioners, that every technical word that comes out of your mouth is replaced with something like "'Jaques Israel' Pink Latticino Swirl" or "1820 Georgian British Livery button."
*Would you feel upset by their disinterest then?* Depending on the answer to this question, I think that there are two ways to approach the issue:
* If you would still feel upset, then it's not so much that you want the people close to you to be button enthusiasts too, but that you want them to be excited for you and supportive of your enthusiasm. A way that you can address this in your relationships is by talking less about the subject that you care about, and more about your little triumphs and setbacks in pursuing it. For example, if you are elated because you have just figured out a difficult problem, tell about your struggle and your joy, or about how it can affect your relationship with your fellow button collectors, but don't try to explain the problem or the solution.
* If you would not still feel upset, then it seems that you feel there is something important about your field that means that non-practitioners should care about what is going on in it. In this case, you again need to drop the technical vocabulary, but instead talk about how the ideas that you encounter may come to affect the world that we all live in or our understanding of it. A personal example: some of my synthetic biology work focuses on the study of *translational regulation of Sindbis replicons via calibrated flow cytometry* ("1851 Goodyear Patriotic Lady Liberty Button"), but I talk about it with non-practitioners in terms of the ways it could make vaccination easier, safer, and more accessible.
I either case, in my personal experience, the core of the solution is to drop the technical language and talk about whichever *human* dimensions it is that you really want the other person to engage with.
> 10 votes
# Answer
How about this - taken from Donald Schön (.. on top of the o) *Reflective Practitioner*
The response you are getting surprises you. It is often in the nature of skilled professional work that circumstances surprise us. And at that moment, we begin to work.
Stop yourself. Brake. And ask yourself, "What surprises me? and what would I like to know more about?"
If you can understand and articulate what surprises you in their response and how you can learn more, then you move from being irritated (and closing down) to being curious and opening out.
Does this help?
> 1 votes
# Answer
Some things you could try:
1. Get really good at selling your work, and develop an elevator pitch that most laymen would find interesting and relevant.
2. If your topic is very esoteric, you could try selling your field as a whole before moving to your specific research topic (answering the question "what is math?" rather than "what is algebraic number theory?"). This will generally be easier for laymen to relate to, and if you give them a good introduction, you may be able to steer the conversation towards the specific things that *you* find interesting about your field (rather than "it could make money"). As a bonus, this will remind you of the broader impact of your work, and the things that make your problems fundamentally interesting to other people.
3. If that fails, you can find different people to talk to about your research.
> 1 votes
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Tags: etiquette
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thread-27699
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27699
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PhD outside of Germany after a Master's from a German Fachhochschule
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2014-08-27T13:47:06.743
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# Question
Title: PhD outside of Germany after a Master's from a German Fachhochschule
Can I go for Phd in USA, Canada, Australia or any other European country with my master's degree from a German *Fachhochschule*? I am planning to work for two years as a lecturer and researcher in my home country (Pakistan) and look for PhD fundings/admissions from there. I believe the experience gained during these two years will make my application stronger.
Secondly, is there something I should do before leaving Germany (extra courses for more CPs, degree recognition or any such thing)? I'm enrolled in 120 CP Master's degree with following division:
* Course work = 60 CP
* Mandatory internship = 30 CP
* Master Thesis = 30 CP
Do universities from these regions require more CPs? I've heard this is the case for German technical universities.
This question is related but it is about PhD in Germany only.
# Answer
In principle, there's no formal obstacle to applying to a US program, since almost all of them require only a bachelor's degree for admission. I similarly don't see a major problem with admissions to Canadian or other European universities, since you would have a master's degree and therefore have an "equivalent" degree, so long as you're staying in the same discipline (electrical engineering to electrical engineering); rules may be different if you're moving between fields (e.g., computer science to materials science).
Where you may run into a problem in admissions is that as a *Fachhochschule*, your school may not have as strong an international profile as from *Hochschule* and other schools of equivalent rank in Europe. Consequently, the school you're applying to may not have ever had applicants from your *Fachhochschule*. Consequently, regardless of how good your profile and application are, you still represent an "unknown" quantity, and therefore there is a greater risk to the department by admitting you instead of someone from a school that is better familiar to the department to which you're applying.
For non-European questions, the number of credit points aren't that important. For European admissions, there may be an issue regarding this, but that's really decided on a university-by-university basis, so you'll need to consult the individual schools you're interested in for guidance. However, taking additional credits beyond what is required for admission won't help you nearly as much as demonstrating research potential.
> 7 votes
# Answer
Refer to Wikipedia, the FachHochschulen in German - speaking countries play a role of institutes of vocational education. It is difficult to give a direct answer. The situation really depends on which PhD program at which University in the USA or other English - speaking countries to which you are going to submit your application. Basically, the admission committee there will investigate your profile, or they will have a professional third party to provide an objective investigation.
In my humble opinion and experience, given a quite normal situation only in German speaking countries, a student holding MSc. or Diplom(FH) from an FH may be admitted directly in a Master program at a university, who is allowed to award Doctor degree. But that student will definitely required to take the examinations in core lectures in Bachelor program at that university. The universities in USA know this, very probably.
I suggest a solution, that you will take a Master course at an internationally accredited university in your home country before you make a step further.
> 1 votes
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Tags: phd, germany
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thread-36927
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36927
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A faculty member turned me down because of lack of funding. If the university announces funding is available, should I apply anyway?
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2015-01-16T21:22:31.923
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# Question
Title: A faculty member turned me down because of lack of funding. If the university announces funding is available, should I apply anyway?
Ten days ago I contacted a professor who conducts research in a field I am deeply interested in, to ask about PhD positions. He replied very politely that he had no funding available to hire a new person in his research group.
Today, the university announced that there is funding available for PhD positions and they welcome applications. In the application I am supposed to choose from a list of supervisors and try to convince them via a motivation letter and without directly contacting them.
Should I put the name of that professor or is it not a good idea? Wouldn't he know that there is some funding coming up soon, to suggest to me to wait a bit or is it possible he didn't know about it? Was he trying to politely say that he is not interested in me? If so, would it be a better idea to choose another supervisor or be persistent?
# Answer
> 4 votes
Maybe he meant that he didn't have funding to hire you directly. Or perhaps the university funding details are not known to everybody outside of the corresponding committee until they are out. Or even he was just oblivious to the existence of this.
There is no way to know without specifics, and there is little risk in just applying.
# Answer
> 0 votes
Well, there are two possibilities:
1. The professor has no funding available to hire a new person in his research group
2. The professor is trying to politely say that he is not interested in you
It seems like in either of those cases, you should choose another supervisor. It sounds like he doesn't want you, so if you apply to the university intending to work with him, you'll probably get rejected.
# Answer
> 0 votes
You should list that professor on your letter and at least go down with your guns blazing. He at least knows your name and has interacted with you enough that he would choose to look more closely at your application now.
You can only take his earlier statements about lack of funding at face value. Also remember that not all of us are fortunate enough to charm the socks off every person we meet upon first meeting them. This professor may be someone who needs to warm up to people. At the very least, he is likely to respect you for your persistence in reaching out to him again in this way.
What is relevant here is that this professor conducts research in a field you said you are DEEPLY INTERESTED in. List this professor as your desired supervisor.
There may also be the possibility this professor may decline to be your supervisor, for reasons that have little to do with you, and may instead refer your application to another professor, who winds up becoming your supervisor. If he did such a thing, it would probably be based on his expert knowledge of the situation, and that would be a good thing for you.
Faint heart never won fair lady. Forget the overthinking, analytical stuff here and if you are going to go down, going after something you want, make sure it is with both guns blazing. List this professor as your desired supervisor.
Good Luck.
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Tags: phd, application
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thread-36839
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36839
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How should you respond to your teacher who cannot help you with a recommendation?
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2015-01-15T12:13:01.760
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# Question
Title: How should you respond to your teacher who cannot help you with a recommendation?
I had a meeting with my former teacher in my former school. While we were enjoying our tea and pan cake, I saw Prof. Nickname, and we invited him to join us. An hour later, after the tea, Prof. Nickname left first and was walking back to his office. I ran after him and asked if he had time to write a recommendation letter for me, and he told me that he was busy with his teaching and could not write the letter for me. I could see on his face that he felt so sorry about it, and I wanted to comfort him but I did not know what I should say. Given that situation, how would you comfort your teacher who could not help you with a recommendation?
# Answer
"Thank you, I understand." ... and then let the subject drop.
Also, consider that the expression you say may not have been sadness that the professor did not have time, but discomfort with having to say no to a request in person. In addition to possibly being true, "I don't have time" is also often used as a standard face-saving code for "No."
> 11 votes
# Answer
Why do you assume it is YOUR responsibility to "comfort" this big boy over his "emotional distress" at declining to write the letter for you?
I think it is more like jakebeal said, that his perceived discomfort was at having to refuse the request in person, rather than at not having the time to do it.
In my experience, professors who feel very strongly about a candidate will MAKE time to write a recommendation for them.
In the meantime, you should accept that:
1) This professor, for whatever reason, did not feel strongly enough about you to make the time. He may simply have poor eyesight and couldn't remember who you were, did not successfully connect you in his mind with who you were as a student. When you ran to him after the meeting, he may have been embarrassed about it. Or he may simply have been deep in thought about a particular problem and distressed at having his thoughts interrupted.
2) This professor does not require any comforting from you.
On the positive side, your enthusiasm and confidence should serve you well, so keep your assumptions and move forward. You assume that the professor valued your work but didn't have the time; keep the assumption that your work was highly valuable, whether or not this professor realized it. Keep the assumption that the failure to recognize this is the professor's lack of awareness and is his problem.
While it is wonderful that you want to comfort others, be careful not to overdo this in situations that do not call for it. Make sure you are fully using your attention and energy first to strengthen your own foundation, before giving this kind of energy away to others.
> 3 votes
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Tags: etiquette, recommendation-letter
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thread-36942
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36942
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How to respond to "How much funding will you bring?" as an interview question for a faculty job?
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2015-01-17T03:34:47.500
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# Question
Title: How to respond to "How much funding will you bring?" as an interview question for a faculty job?
What are the possible answers for such interview question assuming a new graduate with no funds! How much funding you will bring to the department?
# Answer
> 16 votes
This is an invitation to discuss your plans for obtaining external funding. They want your answers to questions like the following:
* What agencies fund research like yours?
* What projects do you have that you think would be successful in gaining external funding?
* Why do you think you would be successful? Can you point to similar (but not too similar) projects that have been funded? Why would a funding agency agree your work is worthy of support? Why would they agree that you are a qualified person to carry out the work, and that your project is likely to actually produce useful results? How would you convince them? What supporting evidence would you use?
* How large would those grants be likely to be? How do you know?
* When do you propose to begin applying for such grants? Is there anything specific that needs to happen first?
* Do you have collaborators in mind with whom you might co-apply? Have you discussed this with them?
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Tags: funding, interview, faculty-application
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thread-12743
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/12743
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Style for first introduction sentence - citation required for lurid statement?
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2013-09-16T13:33:07.353
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# Question
Title: Style for first introduction sentence - citation required for lurid statement?
I'm trying to write my first introduction sentence, which should be catchy. I came up with a sentence along the lines of "imagine the world without this super thing, all these things wouldn't be possible". Obviously, this case will not occur in the next million years and I guess I won't be able to find any paper supporting my claims. However, the described consequences still seem realistic.
As the rest of the introduction is very technical and dry, I think a fresh start is quite nice, but I'm worried someone might say that this first sentence is not scientific as nobody can back up my statement.
Is having a bit more colloquial or lurid kick-off sentence considered to be a "good" or "bad" scientific writing style?
# Answer
> 14 votes
I think there is a **non negligible chance that this will make a bad first impression on the readers**.
Don't get me wrong: I love it when people depart from the dry and oft boring “academic style” of writing and try to invigorate their papers: more concise writing, less use of conditional, more direct statements, use of active voice, stating one's opinion when need be, etc. But this should be done with the goal of making your paper easier to read, and not hyping it. **If you start with a broad claim that has little to do with your actual conclusions, you may alienate some readers** (*“hey, I read the paper because the first line said that a world without gluons would be beneficial in the long term, but then it's only a boring particle physics paper!”*).
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To give a specific example, when I read papers dealing with physical and chemical properties of water, oftentimes the authors think it wise to start their introduction with a broad statements like:
> Water is the most abundant molecule of the human body, and the second most common molecule in the Universe. Its presence or absence has dramatic consequences for human life and civilization: droughts cause famines and floods cause death and disease. Though it has a special relationship with our everyday lives, there is still much we need to learn about it.
and then end with:
> In conclusion, we reported the most accurate measurement yet of the bending vibration frequency of heavy water, with an uncertainty of 10<sup>–9</sup>.
It annoys me.
# Answer
> 7 votes
> Is having a bit more colloquial or lurid kick-off sentence considered to be a "good" or "bad" scientific writing style?
**It depends.** If your attention catching statement is relevant, true, and tasteful, then it is probably "good" scientific writing style. However, if the connection to the rest of your paper and its findings is not immediately apparent, the veracity of the statement is in doubt, or it might be considered *not tasteful*, then it would be "bad" scientific writing style.
See also Eykanal's answer to this post about the appropriateness of humor in academic writing. These points apply here too. Don't compromise the integrity of the results--is it relevant? Use this type of statement sparingly. And last but by no means least, this may best be reserved for someone who is fairly well-known in their field--don't jeopardize your career!
I would add one more point to Eykanal's excellent advice above. **Don't be afraid to be *interesting*!** Just be sure that your interesting statements are in good taste.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I once wrote a journal paper\[\*\] whose abstract was in the form of a limerick:
> The analysis of control flow
> Involves finding where **return**s may go.
> How this can be done
> With items LR(0) and (1)
> Is what in this paper we show.
The reviewers seemed OK with it (which is to say, none of them took issue with it in their reviews), but the editor nixed it on the grounds that ACM's indexing software wouldn't deal with it properly.
The moral of the story, I suppose, is that humans may not be the only "readers" of your paper, and non-standard writing styles may confuse such non-human readers.
\[\*\] The paper showed that algorithms for computing LR(0) and LR(1) items, used in parsing context-free grammars, could be used for control-flow analysis of tail-recursive programs. I still think it's the best abstract I've ever written. :-)
# Answer
> 3 votes
With regard to citations: Generally, statements that are "common knowledge" don't require citations. Nor do statements that are purely conjectural, or are not intended to be taken literally. The opening sentences you have in mind seem to satisfy at least one of these criteria.
I won't venture an opinion on whether or not a creative opening sentence is a good idea or not.
# Answer
> 2 votes
First of all, a good (not catchy) title catches readers, not a first sentence in an introduction. The problem of trying to be catchy is that people's opinion about catchy may not be the same as yours, in which case it backfires. yes, science can be dry and the temptation is large to be catchy or funny, but it rarely works. Rarely, partly because each paper is read by only a few, and partly because the diversity in opinions.
The introductory sentence should try to provide the interesting perspective within which your results fit. It is difficult to get right but since it is not the first you write, you can use the results and your hopefully thought through title to ponder what is the perspective you wish your work to fit.
# Answer
> 0 votes
it's well known in writing that you should "murder your darlings", which is excising the unusual phrasings you think are so sparkling, i.e., your darlings. there are many, many web sites covering this tactic. when you edit this way, the result is a clean text which will better accommodate OP's tendency to playfulness.
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Tags: citations, writing, writing-style, science
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thread-36960
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36960
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How much contribution justifies being a co-author of paper
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2015-01-17T10:51:02.213
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# Question
Title: How much contribution justifies being a co-author of paper
I am part of a Computer Graphics lab where I got to help a small team already working on a paper, by assimilating/cleaning up some data sets which they required. I was also part of some discussions and shared my views whenever possible trying to help them in analysis phase. I have hardly any other contribution other wise.
Going forward, I am now being offered to be one of the co-authors of the paper. I kind of feel that I haven't really done enough and its almost reaching it's ending stage anyways, so not much chance in future as well.
Other team members are making a point that it won't be just on their part if this work takes up my time even when I don't get to be an author. I am in kind of a moral dilemma as I don't feel my contribution is enough.
Q1. Is just helping out a good enough reason to be a co-author ?
Q2. How do I justify to myself if I have really contributed enough ? Or should I let the team decide if my work is sufficient ?
Q3. In general, are their any tangible points/guideline I can verify my contribution with ?
# Answer
The standards for co-authorship vary greatly from field to field. In some fields, you can be a co-author merely by supplying a useful reagent, where in others you need to be much more heavily involved with the actual work. I don't know what the culture for computer graphics in particular is, but no matter how you draw the line, the general principle is the same everywhere:
*The authors of a paper should be precisely the people who meaningfully contributed to the success of the work.*
Some advocate for the tighter definition laid out in the Vancouver Protocol, which requires every author to be a significant writer of the paper as well. That, however, has some serious problems, particularly in tending to unfairly exclude students from authorship.
Applying this to the case of your authorship, the answer is not immediately obvious from your question whether you should be an author or be named in an acknowledgements section, because it depends on the value of the work that you did and that's something that only you and your co-authors are in a position to just. For example, if your work with the data set was just reformatting it from one format to another, then it's clearly not worth authorship. If you did some real curation of the data set, e.g., evaluating the information to remove artifacts, and this made a big difference in obtaining the results, then authorship is certainly reasonable. Note that the *amount* of work that you did is not actually a good measure: if you whipped up a curation script in a few hours and then let it run, it's no less valuable than spending months inefficiently curating by hand.
Finally, it's fine to err on the side of inclusiveness. If your contributions are a borderline case, and the primary authors found your work valuable enough to merit a co-authorship, nobody will be hurt by including you in a minor author position in the author list.
> 4 votes
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Tags: publications, computer-science, authorship
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thread-36941
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36941
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Getting credit/ownership for improved software
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2015-01-17T02:38:31.790
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# Question
Title: Getting credit/ownership for improved software
I recently made some changes to a piece of (proprietary) code that my group uses which has made it two orders of magnitude faster. The code I updated wasn't mine and the original algorithm IP was published a few decades ago so I can't claim I did anything other than some clever refactoring/parallelizing (which somehow everyone else said wasn't possible). The impact of this update is such that work that would have taken months can now, in principle, be done in under a week (or from hours to minutes).
Unfortunately academia doesn't really reward 'enablers' for improving software so I'm not really sure what I can gain from this beyond some ideas in my own PhD that were not possible previously.
The critical point, compared to other questions I've seen on this topic, is that the code is now commercially viable. Understandably my supervisor is very happy and wants to keep things under wraps for the time being.
I'm aware that the university probably owns every line of code I just wrote. Do I have any ground to request compensation if the software starts being licensed? I don't want to sour the relationship I have with my supervisor which has up until now been very good (and I've just earned a lot of respect for this work).
If I was working in industry this is about the time I'd be going to my line manager and at asking for a salary bump or a promotion. In academia it seems like this sort of work is relegated to a pat on the back and a footnote. I suspect I'm being sour, but is this just the way it goes?
Am I allowed to ask that people cite the software even if it's not a publication (not that we have a website!)? For instance one can cite R, Numpy, etc.
# Answer
As a software developer it is hard to believe that improving a piece of (proprietary) code can made it two orders of magnitude faster. Although parallelization can make it 2-5 times faster on a modern workstation of 6-8 cores, unless the original code was notoriously bad it is hard to imagine that it can really be faster by two orders of magnitude (~100 times faster) just by improvement, without changing the original algorithm. So, are you 100% sure that the acceleration you get is legit? Sometimes (especially with parallelization) when things are too good to be true, there is some subtle condition which usually breaks by parallelization. So, first make 100% sure (compare results produced for a wide range of input data) by the two versions of the software (the old and your version). I assume you use some version of version control system (who does not?), so you still have the old version somewhere. It does not matter if this experiment takes a few days - 1-2 weeks it has to be done to be 100% sure that something did not break and you do get identical results between the two versions of the software **for a wide range of input data** and not just by a small test case.
If you are 100% sure that you really improved the software without breaking anything, the main question is did you actually improved the original algorithm or not. Simply adding an OpenMP directive and parallelizing a code which was parallelizable all along, is not a publishable result. In this case, your improvements do not merit a publication and therefore **no publication =\> no citation**, since you did not create the original software. On the other hand, if you did more than refactoring / parallelizing the software and your contribution is significant you must publish these results on a technical-focused CS conference. Then everyone using your version of the software could cite this work and additionally could cite the online version of the software if it is publicly available.
On the legal version of your story, I really do not have the expertise to answer. In this case, I would search the IP policy of the university as @NateEldredge suggests and ask an experienced lawyer who knows about software patents. I do not think anyone of us here are really entitled here to give legal advice. Of course if your version of the software starts getting money for the university, you are probably entitled to a share and you must protect your rights as good as you can. It is just that right now, we do not know if this software is going to actually become a product for sale.
Also about your paragraph:
> If I was working in industry this is about the time I'd be going to my line manager and at asking for a salary bump or a promotion. In academia it seems like this sort of work is relegated to a pat on the back and a footnote. I suspect I'm being sour, but is this just the way it goes?
I do not know how much experience you have in the software industry, but be rest assured that you do not get a raise everytime you do a good job. After all, this is expected from you and it is a prerequisite for you **keeping your job** for a long time. You can always ask for a raise, but that does not mean you will get one.
On the other hand as I mentioned earlier, either you changed the software's algorithm and implementation so much that you deserve a separate publication or you bug-fixed a crappy code (which you will use on your PHD) which does not really say that much. Either case, this is probably the only credit you will get.
> 2 votes
# Answer
The most simple solution is to publish these new results. The question to this answer can be found here: In which journals should I publish my software?. This is the most appropriate thing to do. Some journals also have something like the \`\`OUP Bioinformatics Application Notes''. Check, together with your advisor, if you can find something like this.
The possibility of monetary compensation of some form is probably low. Not only because you are in academia, also because you most likely work as some form of public servant. Details are different for all countries and work places, however.
> 0 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, software, intellectual-property
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thread-8766
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8766
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Should I tell other interviewers where else I've interviewed?
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2013-03-20T17:54:03.863
|
# Question
Title: Should I tell other interviewers where else I've interviewed?
I am currently travelling for faculty interviews. Some professors and other interviewers have asked me where else I have interviewed. Should I tell interviewers where else I've interviewed?
Intuitively I would like to give them less information, but I also don't want to appear guarded and defensive as a person, either.
# Answer
I cannot speak for faculty interviews personally and this may be redundant information but I interviewed at multiple "top ranked" schools for PhD admissions and in everyone of them I was asked where else I was interviewing and I told them the truth.
Having said this, nowadays, most job talk notifications are available on the website of the university or college or institution where you are interviewing and it is relatively easy to determine this from a google search of your name. For instance, this year our department is hiring for 2 different job lines and there are quite a few faculty candidates giving talks every week. We always Google their names to find out where else they are interviewing. In the case of one particular candidate it was very useful to find out that that that candidate had put up a list of other institutions where he/she was interviewing this particular season.
I do not think personally that giving them information about where else you are interviewing will add or subtract from your overall job application materials and probabilities.
Best of luck for getting a job !
> 14 votes
# Answer
> Some professors and other interviewers have asked me where else I have interviewed. Should I tell interviewers where else I've interviewed?
Yes, it is very likely in your best interests. If you have other interviews at comparable schools, then you will benefit from saying so. If you don't, then it's not so clear. However, departments will assume your job search is not going well if you are reluctant to address the issue and they haven't heard impressive rumors about your interviews, so avoiding discussing interviews won't really help. Instead of saying something awkward like "I'd rather not talk about that", it's better to be up front and optimistic. "This is my first interview" is better than "This is my only interview so far".
Here are a few reasons why telling about other interviews can help your case:
1. As a general rule, people want something more if they know other people also want it. Valuing a second opinion is rational behavior.
2. Even when it doesn't change the outcome, competition can speed things up. If a search committee member is trying to make an offer and still needs some final committee or administrative approval, it's helpful to be able to say "Let's move fast, since she is also interviewing at X, Y, and Z, and we'd like to make a good impression by coming up with the first offer." If it's too late for that, they can say "She already has an offer from X, so we need to act before she decides."
In principle, you could hurt your chances if you list a lot of schools typically considered much more desirable (which could make the school you are currently interviewing at feel they would just be wasting their time trying to compete). However, in this case you are probably already in trouble, since the rumors of your busy interview schedule may already worry the search committee. Instead of trying to cover things up, it's better to acknowledge that you have these other interviews. If you are worried about this risk, you can address it by making your interest clear throughout the interview.
> 20 votes
# Answer
If you don't want to disclose that, you can simply say: "I'd rather not discuss this", and you can look straight into your interviewer eyes with that. I've seen candidates do that; it may have looked harsh, but there's no obligation on the candidate's side to tell anything beyond the contents of the job talk.
You can also try to convert this into a joke like "Enough to earn me a free roundtrip this year". An American faculty should take that as a hint that you don't want to talk about it. An international faculty may need a more straight answer like the one I gave above. (I am talking about the US here as the largest academic market; in UK, as far as I understand, you won't have more than 30 minutes face time with the faculty of the hiring institution, and they probably have more important things to ask than the # of interviews you have.)
Having said that, you need to weight in the benefits of telling vs. not. For one thing, you may not have all the invitations out yet on your first fly-out, so you really don't know yet what other interviews you might have. On the other hand, by the time you reach your sixth destination (if you are lucky to get that many), the first place may already have told you, "Sorry, we made the offer to somebody else". So nominally you may have interviewed there, but really you won't get an offer from them.
As a bottom line, you need to do what others in your discipline do. You don't want to look like a fool in the environment where everybody keep their secrets by telling left and right about your choosing between Harvard and Stanford (and thus losing a chance to get a far more realistic offer from Alabama); and you don't want to look like a fool hinting at many undisclosed interviews when your adviser had told them that this is the only interview you have when they called him/her, or your other interviews were posted on a job market rumor website.
> 13 votes
# Answer
At least in Germany, interviews for academic positions are more like dating than like normal job interviews. If you are good, the department will worry about being rejected as much as you do. If they offer you the position and then you don't accept, they are losing time - they may not be able to fill the position in time -, and it's also bad for their reputation. Each time someone gets an offer from universities A and B and chooses to accept the offer from A, this contributes to the reputation of A and harms the reputation of B.
Whether it's good for you if the committee at one university know where else you have applied and how you are doing there, depends very much on the relative reputations of these universities and how they are judging you. You want them to think that you are the perfect fit, not that you are overqualified and therefore likely to reject their offer (doing well with an application at a much better university) or underqualified and going to harm their reputation that way (as could happen if they make you an offer and at the same time you are rejected by a university with much lower reputation).
PS: I think I should clarify that all of this applies primarily - perhaps exclusively - to professorships, especially to permanent ones.
> 5 votes
# Answer
It may depend on your discipline, but I've noticed that faculty candidates for Computer Science that interview at my university tend to list their job talks on their CVs as invited talks.
Therefore, being cagey about where you're interviewing or trying to obfuscate it would be counter-intuitive. You're probably already leaving a pretty obvious trail from your job search, people in your field probably know others in your field and communicate with them, and it wouldn't be difficult information for anyone to find out, so it would seem like being up front and honest about it would be the best path?
> 2 votes
# Answer
I don't know about regulations here. Personally, I think that being open and honest is the best thing (and this is how I handled it). Telling that you have been interviewed for some other positions shows that other committees consider you as a possible candidate which is good for you, especially if you have been interviewed at places with higher prestige. One the other hand, I do not think that a committee will think "Oh this guy has been interviewed there, so we should hire him...", but probably I am wrong.
Moreover, I agree that it does not harm to say that you do not want to disclose your other interviews.
> 2 votes
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Tags: interview
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thread-36976
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36976
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How do we explain a timing diagram in a technical talk?
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2015-01-17T17:13:57.610
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# Question
Title: How do we explain a timing diagram in a technical talk?
One of my slides of my presentation at a technical conference includes a timing diagram. I have to explain the functionality of the read/write operation with the help of this figure. I have maximized the diagram and am planning to explain each signal assertion. This slide is one of the many slides and I am concerned about the time needed to be allotted for the timing diagram. I feel it is rather important as it explains the functionality of the proposed model.
Please suggest how I should go about formatting the diagram as well as explain the timing diagram. Edit1 : A timing diagram is used to trace a set of signals to explain the behavior of a particular system. More details here
# Answer
> 0 votes
If your audience cannot be expected to be fully familiar with timing diagrams, begin by explaining what they are - a lot of software people are unfamiliar with them.
I suggest alternating between showing the complete diagram for context and showing an expanded view of a portion of it. The expanded portion will be easier to read, and will call attention to the points you are currently making. You can add annotations that would not fit on the full diagram. When you show the full diagram, put a box around the piece you are going to explain next, so that the audience can see how it fits in the full diagram.
In the expanded views, I would keep all the signals in their normal order, but possibly bold the ones that are relevant to the current discussion.
# Answer
> 0 votes
This is the sort of situation in which I highly recommend animations.
Rather than just showing the whole diagram (which will typically be quite complex) and trying to direct the audience's attention as you explain, you can *physically* direct their attention by the messages move as you talk about each one, creating the diagram as they go. The eyes and the attention of the audience will be drawn to the moving elements, and you can build the complexity incrementally from an initially simple and easy to grasp slide.
It takes longer to build such an animation, and you have to embrace a presentation program that can support it properly (e.g., LibreOffice or PowerPoint, but not so much Beamer). I find, however, that it is definitely worth the investment of time and effort, in terms of how it improves your ability to communicate with your audience.
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Tags: conference, presentation, electrical-engineering
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thread-20159
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20159
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How are GPAs from different universities evaluated for admissions to MS programs in the USA?
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2014-05-02T16:51:55.877
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# Question
Title: How are GPAs from different universities evaluated for admissions to MS programs in the USA?
I am about to apply for a Master program in U.S. as I am about to graduate in Bachelor of Engineering. Though I heard that all my grades during all my academic life is taken into consideration (GPA). Here in Brazil is very common to have a huge gap between universities both in teaching level and avaliation process. So, holding a degree from a weak college may be much easier and thus helping you to get a higher GPA while a well-known college will be much more difficult and probably your grades will be lower. Even though you have a degree from the very best college and you do have a good knowledge of most subjects, the GPA from the person who came from the weak college may be higher.
This also extends to the outside world (comparison between GPA's from different countries). So, how is it really done in practice? Do I still hold a reasonable chance of getting into a nice college with not a so high GPA?
# Answer
> 5 votes
We have the same phenomenon in America, of course. All other things being equal, a 3.5 GPA from Princeton is much more impressive than a 4.0 from some random state university. The whole idea of GRE scores is to provide a metric that isn't confounded by the difficulty of different programs at different colleges in these ways. An additional difficulty you face is that your American evaluators won't know how good or bad your university is. This makes your GRE score doubly important.
# Answer
> 2 votes
You can add a note in your statement or supplemental materials that "At my university, **\____**, the mean GPA was 3.5 with an sd of **_ and in my department, the mean was xyz with an sd of \__**" so that it's clear that you are two sigmas above average, etc.
That assumes that you are above average. You should be able to get this info from the university registrar or office of institutional research.
But you should know that GPAs as a whole are deprecated in the application process. Individual grades (how well did you do in computer science, for example), some test scores in some disciplines, and your statement is much more important. As well as your letters of recommendation.
# Answer
> 0 votes
In general 3.4 or 3.5+ is considered a good GPA, and you won't need to explain why it isn't higher to any reasonable admissions board no matter where you graduated from. Well know schools want a diverse grad student body, and will look to pull students from prestigious schools as well as smaller state schools and international schools.
No matter the GPA, I would apply a prestigious "dream" program or two and see what happens. This is especially true if you can line up excellent recommendations. While it might be a longer shot, $50 application fee isn't much, and you will not be left playing "what-if" with yourself.
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Tags: graduate-admissions, gpa
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thread-36951
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36951
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What factors determine acceptance to top graduate program in Engineering?
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2015-01-17T05:45:06.020
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# Question
Title: What factors determine acceptance to top graduate program in Engineering?
Question that is really bothering me is what are the important factors for admission to top five engineering graduate school? I searched in different forums and saw people got accepted to PhD program at prestigious school with GPA 3.40 GRE Quantitative of 165 and no publication. However I also saw people could not get in to even master program with 4.0 GPA ,good GRE score. I am starting to think that GPA ,GRE and even research experience are not determining factor. Can anyone please clarify this for me?
# Answer
To get into a top graduate program, you typically need:
1. No red flags that will cause your application to be discarded.
2. Something that causes you to stand out from the vast crowd of good applicants with no red flags.
A lot of people seem to think that having an extremely high GPA, GRE, class rank, etc. will help, but it does not. The problem is that such standardized evaluations address only category #1. There are a lot of good students out there, and graduate programs aren't really interested in whether you are the *best* student. Instead, they are interested in whether you have problems as a student that would prevent you from succeeding in graduate school.
The honest truth is that there is a huge amount of unpredictability in satisfying criteria #2. and you can only do so much to control it. There are many useful things you can do to help make yourself stand out, like participating in research projects, but ultimately there are no guarantees, because you never know how many other excellent candidates might also be applying to that program in that year, and what exactly it is that will make one person's application resonate with the particular faculty member who reads it.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I applied to, and was accepted at well know university after attending a small regional state school. While I have no proof of this, I sincerely believe the quality of the letters of recommendation is what made the difference.
I had a 3.5 GPA and good, but not great GRE scores, and no papers. I was heavily involved in the ACM (computer science professional organization), and signed up for several grad level classes. I made sure my letter writers would have more to say then "is a good student." Show that you are truly passionate about your field of study. That will be reflected in recommendations.
> 2 votes
# Answer
An important factor is where the student did their undergraduate work. The admissions committee will be familiar with many undergraduate institutions that have good reputations and some that have bad reputations. If you come from an undergraduate college that has a bad reputation or that the committee is simply unfamiliar with, then this will make admitting you a risky choice. If there are plenty of strong applicants from well known good undergraduate programs, then the easiest thing to do is to select from those students.
> 1 votes
# Answer
Is it usual that an undergraduate student in USA has published by the time he gets his degree BSc.? I really doubt it. 3 - 4 years is quite a short time for a student to equip himself enough to write anything meaningful. In Europa, a 5-year Master program (3 + 2 years) may probably last 6 - 7 years, because the Master thesis is a relative heavy project. People may even need a year to plan, set up and conduct experiments in the laboratories. After that they could spend several months on writing thesis, rarely one has publication.
> 0 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, graduate-school
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thread-27112
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/27112
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Are standard metrics of academic output skewed by the relative popularity of a field?
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2014-08-12T11:09:25.810
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# Question
Title: Are standard metrics of academic output skewed by the relative popularity of a field?
The number of citations seems to be a good unit of measurement for someone's success in a specific field, however, shouldn't the h-index also include the popularity of a given field? For example, I've seen papers in computer science being cited thousand of times while other papers relating astronomy only a couple-hundred times.
When taking into account the actual quality of the paper and the amount of work that was put into releasing the evidence, the astronomy paper would probably be measured higher (for example). However **publications within less popular fields are cited less simply because they're not as *popular* as other fields**.
If I choose a field that is not particularly popular, I risk at perhaps not achieving the same amount of success that I would if I had chosen a more popular field.
Are standard measures of academic output skewed by the relative popularity of the field?
# Answer
> 18 votes
The comments are already spot on, but let me elaborate a bit.
**Comparing h-indices (or any other "hard" metric) is already dangerous in narrow fields and downright foolish if used for comparisons among different fields.** This is not only because some fields are larger than others, but also because:
* Differences in publication standards. In applied CS we write *lots* of papers, in many natural sciences, much fewer papers get written per researcher and time period. Arguably, this is because many empirical fields require the setup and analysis of lengthy experiments, something that is not typically (but not never) done in CS.
* Difference in co-author ethics. Just check around here on this stack exchange, and you will see that standards for co-authorship are *not at all* uniform in all fields. Clearly, fields with more loose co-authorship standards also expect researchers to be part of more paper projects, hence leading to higher h-indices on average.
* Differences in citation standards. In some fields, papers traditionally have 10 or less citations. In others, multiple dozen references are considered an informal minimum, again leading to higher average h-indices.
(and this is even without going into how easy h-indices are to manipulate if you are willing to - keyword "citation rings")
# Answer
> 3 votes
Setting aside fields that are very small, with almost no one working in them, the size of the field matters quite a bit less than people tend to think. The reason is straightforward: larger fields have more citation donors, but also more citation targets. Suppose each paper cites 30 other references. In a field with a 1,000 papers, you would have 30,000 citations shared among 1,000 targets for an average of 30 citations received by each; in a field with 1,000,000 papers you would have 30,000,000 citations shared among 1,000,000 targets again for an average of 30 citations received by each.
In principle, the *growth rate* of the field does matter. If a field is growing rapidly, you have a large number of citation donors referencing a small number of target papers, leading to higher citations rates among these early entrants.
In practice, as mentioned in the other answers and comments, the most important factors are probably citation and authorship practices in the field, and the degree to which the field is adequately covered in the citation database you are using.
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Tags: bibliometrics
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thread-36984
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36984
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Can a University put a Creative Commons document containing a NonCommercial element (NC) behind a wall?
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2015-01-17T19:03:52.303
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# Question
Title: Can a University put a Creative Commons document containing a NonCommercial element (NC) behind a wall?
Can a University force web visitors to connect with their University ID to access a document licensed under Creative Commons containing a NonCommercial element (NC)?
Enrolling into at University a student often costs money, and the ability to access the document could be viewed as a perk for employees (i.e. indirect compensation): as a result, I wonder whether putting the document behind the University wall is considered as a commercial use of the document.
For example, I see that Stanford University forces web visitors to log in with their university account to access this CC BY-NC document:
# Answer
> 9 votes
Creative Commons "NonCommercial" prohibits uses that are "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation." Under U.S. law, where *exactly* the boundary lies can only ultimately be determined by development of precedent in case law, since the U.S. has a common-law legal system.
It is pretty clear, though, that this type of use would be non-infringing, for the following reasons:
1. Virtually no person pays to become a university student for the *primary* reason of access to online documents. Likewise, it is an exceedingly minor perk for employees and could not be considered to give the university a significant commercial advantage (rare historical documents might be a different matter).
2. The actual barrier is a University ID, which can typically also be acquired in many ways that do not involve compensation passing in either direction (e.g. research affiliates).
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Tags: creative-commons, license
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thread-36959
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36959
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How to approach experts to get feedback on a paper
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2015-01-17T10:30:33.593
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# Question
Title: How to approach experts to get feedback on a paper
I'm a PhD student in pure maths at a university in Europe. For reasons that I won't go into, my research interests do not coincide with my supervisor's ones. This means that, although she gives me good general advice, she can't give me more "technical" feedback on my work. I've now written a complete first draft of my first paper, and I'd like to get some external feedback before thinking of submitting it to a journal. My question is:
> What is the best way to approach the experts in my field (for whom I am a complete stranger) to politely ask if they can read my paper and give some feedback on it?
Emailing, of course, would be the preferred means of communication, so suggestions on how to structure a potential email to send to the experts are very welcomed.
# Answer
> What is the best way to approach the experts in my field (for whom I am a complete stranger) to politely ask if they can read my paper and give some feedback on it?
For a student who is not very senior -- let's say "very senior" means they already have a draft of their thesis -- I think that (probably: as usual on this site, a literal universal quantifier will get me in trouble) the best way to do this is with your advisor as an intermediary.
Don't misunderstand: you ask whether it is frowned upon for you to directly contact experts and ask for feedback and the answer is a resounding **no**: you can contact whomever you wish, and they may or may not respond. However, they are much more likely to respond -- and to respond more deeply and usefully -- to someone that they already know, at least by reputation, especially if that person is at roughly their level of seniority (and, yes, even more if that person is more senior).
When I was a PhD student, I didn't have the best luck "cold-contacting" people. I remember in particular trying to contact one guy who was a former student of my advisor and whose thesis I was reading. He was a professor in New York but he didn't have a webpage. I left a longish, awkwardish *phone message* for him at one point and never heard back from him. (Did he even get the message? Who knows??) I emailed a famous French mathematician and did hear back from him....four months later, which is like forever when you're in your 20s. I was so clueless back then: if I had been serious about it, I would have gone through my advisor, and they would have responded. Well, of course I knew that intellectually, but still somehow decided that it would be better if I did it on my own. (There were a lot of things that I did and didn't do as a graduate student that were directly motivated both by a desire for independence -- good -- and a lack of confidence -- bad -- intertwined in such a complicated way that it is hard for me to pull them apart even now.) It's not that people don't want to be helpful. It's that their time is at such a premium that they have to prioritize helping people that they already know.
If your advisor cannot direct you to those who have the research expertise you need, then I would say that she is not really your advisor and you need to find someone else who can fulfill that role.
Anyway:
1) As others have suggested, if you have completed drafts of papers -- even if not in as polished a form as you would want in order to submit to a journal -- then putting them on the arxiv is a great idea. You'll get some small (in most cases) positive (in my experience) number of "cold emails" just from them, and these can be priceless: in my case, more than once I got connected with the one other person on the planet who really deeply understood and cared about what I was doing.
2) A lot of times you *will* still send an email. It's just that your advisor will have greased the wheels for you by ensuring the recipient's, um, receptivity in advance. Let me give a little advice on that:
* Introduce yourself politely but don't make a big deal out of it.
You don't need to be overly obsequious or solicitous about their personal life and such. Something like "Dear Professor X, Hello there. I am a student at University A working on Subject B. Though we have not corresponded before, I think you know my advisor, Professor Y. She encouraged me to contact you about my work on C." That's plenty of introduction; you could get away with less.
* Try to write an initial email that the recipient can and will read completely as soon as they open it.
Thus you want it to be quite short, but not so short that it doesn't say anything.
* Don't describe your work at length in the email. Instead, include files (of a reasonable length) and/or links to files or webpages. (If you have a webpage, you should put a link to it somewhere in your email!)
* Make a clear request. Better: ask a math question.
If you include a 30 page paper and say "I'd be grateful for any comments you have": well, that's the sort of thing that I do to my good friends, and when I run into them the following year they politely apologize for not having finished it. Mathematicians like questions and -- here's a little psychological secret -- seem to regard a question mark as being much more compulsory of some sort of answer than most other people. (I am always amazed at how I can have a phone conversation or an email exchange with some non-academic type, ask a question, and their response completely ignores the fact that I asked them anything. To my eyes that is some kind of Jedi mind trick.) If you want to know whether X is true, ask them directly and right away whether X is true.
In fact, if you're not clear enough about what you want, it could go wrong in the other direction: some samaritan savant could reply with several typed pages that answer your question all too well and leave you without a thesis problem. (This is another good reason for getting help from your advisor.)
> 7 votes
# Answer
Generally it's considered okay to e-mail researchers who you don't know and share your work with them. This is especially true if you are a student.
Be conservative about it -- pick only a few people whose research interests align closely with the paper you're writing. (For example, whose work are you citing?) *Don't* e-mail famous people just because they're famous.
That said, I think that asking for detailed feedback might be seen as presumptuous. Rather, just tell them that you would like to share your work with them, describe it very briefly, and say something like "If you have any comments I would be grateful to hear them."
Probably most people will ignore your message. (They have no obligation whatsoever to read your message or respond.) Maybe one or two will write back with general feedback or suggestions, and if you are very lucky you might get some detailed feedback. What you might realistically hope for is a response along the lines of "Thanks, this looks interesting, you might be interested in X, Y, and Z" which at least gives you some related works to check out.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Asking just for feedback on a specific paper is not, I think, a good approach. It would be definitely better to set up a collaboration, which can become a long-standing one and which can be more rewarding for both parties.
Many PhD programs in Europe allow, and sometimes require, students to spend a period abroad. If your PhD program allows this and your advisor agrees, you can think of searching a research group working in your favourite field and spending from a few weeks to a few months or a year with them. You can then discuss your paper directly with them and possibly you can think of new works to be done in collaboration.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I will add my answer in the form of two examples coming from experience, given that there are already other answers that might be more generally useful.
The first example is regarding how I (a non famous recently graduated postdoc) handle this kind of enquiries. From my perspective, interaction with people interested in my work leads to, besides learning more about what I do, a potential gain in citations and contacts. Both are vital to me at this early stage in my career. I therefore tend to be very keen to address emails promptly and in detail, given they are reasonable (i.e. discard spam article invitations and random applications immediately).
For the other example I'm at the opposite side of the rope, contacting other people regarding my interest in their work. Here are three cases with different outcomes:
* If it's regarding a specific paper I try contacting the corresponding author (that's the purpose of it after all!). Once I contacted a famous guy this way who failed to produce any response at all.
* After changing topics, a world leading author in my new area happened to be a former collaborator of my PhD supervisor, so I got the latter to "introduce" me to the other, which was done in the form of a phone call between the two followed by an email by me. The expert replied politely but very briefly, clearly shutting down any door to further interaction - he was clearly not interested.
* A more successful story is with regards to contacting a guy on a paper he had coauthored with a quite famous guy. After I didn't get a reply from him I tried with the famous dude, who did not only reply but also copied the less famous guy thus triggering his reaction and cooperation.
In every case I was very polite and as brief as possible in my emails.
The bottom line is that getting a reply from different people will vary depending on practical matters such as how busy they are, but will also wildly depend on their personal character. To increase your chances always try clear polite emails directly to the point, hope you get a reply but don't expect too much.
> 3 votes
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Tags: phd, mathematics, email, feedback
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thread-36953
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36953
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Where to locate authors’ names in sentences?
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2015-01-17T06:31:43.953
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# Question
Title: Where to locate authors’ names in sentences?
Is it or is it not good practice to make an author the subject of sentences in a paper? When should their name be central, discreet, or absent in the sentence? Here are five variations showing different approaches, four of which include the author’s name. Are there particular identifiable use cases for these styles?
1. Johnson argued that this will never work.
2. Per Johnson, this will never work.
3. The argument was advanced by Johnson that this will never work.
4. This will never work (Johnson).
5. This will never work \[42\].
# Answer
There is more here than style: the first and third options *mean* something quite different from the fourth and fifth. In the former cases, what you are asserting is that someone else argued for X. In the latter cases, *you* are asserting X and using the citation as evidence/support/proof. (That I can't quite tell where the second one fits into this dichotomy is a strike against it.) In an academic paper, that is a not so subtle difference.
I find the style question less critical. It is a matter of general good writing rather than anything specifically academic *or* it is specific to the journal at hand (so we need not discuss it here).
Of course you can use an author's name as a subject of a sentence: you can write what you want, you know! As a matter of style, to my ear the first option sounds good, the second option sounds weird, and the third option sounds weaker and wordier than the first, but maybe the surrounding text gives you a good reason to write it that way.
The difference between options 4 and 5 is just a difference in citation style. First that is very field dependent; in my field (mathematics), we would do 5 rather than 4; in much of the humanities it would be the other way around. Second, unless your choice is so so strange that it prevents your readers from finding the references in your bibliography, the whole issue can probably wait until your paper gets accepted, in which case they'll either do it for you, tell you exactly what to do, or tell you that you did it wrong (and ask you to fix it).
> 9 votes
# Answer
Version 2 seems stilted; 3 is an unnecessarily verbose use of the passive voice. The choice between 4 and 5 is really a matter of the journal's style guidelines rather than an active decision you will get to make as the author.
So the real choice here is between 1 or 4/5. The key thing to note is that you sentence draws attention to an actor and an action through your choice of subject and verb. (See Joseph Williams, *Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace* for a superb discussion of this and many related principles)
In 1, the actor is "Johnson" and the action is "argued". In 4/5, the action is "This" and the action is "will not work". Thus if your intent is to draw attention to the fact that Johnson made this claim, as you would e.g. if discussing a history of ideas, version 1 might be preferred. If instead your intent is to draw attention to the claim itself, and the reference to Johnson is simply a matter of good scholarship, 4/5 will be preferred.
> 14 votes
# Answer
In addition to other good points made, there is the question of whether *you* wish to assert a thing, or only assert that someone else asserts it. That is, if you write "Johnson asserts X." then (from that sentence alone) it is not clear whether you agree, disagree, or are neutral. If, instead, you write something like "One might consider X. For example, see \[Johnson\]." then you are at least tentatively asserting X, with Johnson for corroboration. This distinction might matter more than style... although I'd agree that avoiding circumlocutions and verbosity is generally good (=more readable).
> 4 votes
# Answer
To me, formulation 1 would appear useable only in special contexts, such as
> Johnson argued that this will never work (\[Jo97\]), but later Miller found a way to get rid of the obstacles in many important cases (\[Mi04\] and \[Mi04a\]).
In other words, you want to express Johnson's opinion without sharing it (and of course you back this up with citations). In general, 4 or 5 seems to be preferred (e.g., \[Corvus\])
> 0 votes
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Tags: writing, writing-style, personal-name, citation-style
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thread-36969
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36969
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Plural or singular for a multi-authored paper
|
2015-01-17T13:50:41.820
|
# Question
Title: Plural or singular for a multi-authored paper
Suppose Jackson and Kim wrote a paper in 2014. When I cite this paper, should it be
> Jackson and Kim (2014) show that ...
or
> Jackson and Kim (2014) shows that ...
# Answer
This is a special case of a more general problem about 'plural' names for specific organisations/groups, which often comes up (and is different in the UK and US, to complicate things) - for example, https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/138238/are-vs-is-for-proper-nouns-which-sound-plural-such-as-band-names
Generally speaking, either is legitimate - it depends in part whether you think of "Jackson and Kim" as the name of a single entity, the paper, or as referring to two individual researchers who happen to be mentioned together. You can also avoid this entirely by using the past tense - "Jackson and Kim (2014) showed that..." is the same whether you think of J&K as one entity or two. (Ditto for "found", "proved", "refuted", etc). This would be my personal preference.
Ultimately, though, all questions of style in academic writing can be answered with "have a look at what other papers in the field use; if you're thinking about a specific journal, have a look at what's common there." If they all use "show" for multiple authors, you probably want to use "show"
> 6 votes
# Answer
As a matter of basic writing style, this comes down to whether you intend the authors, or the paper, to be the actor in your sentence.
If you are writing about the actions of the authors, you should use the plural:
* *Watson and Crick (1953) use only two pages to describe the structure of DNA.*
If you are writing about the action of the paper, use the singular:
* *Watson and Crick (1953) serves as an example of how a breakthrough paper can launch its authors to academic stardom.*
Usually the issue is not so clear cut, because usually we are simply describing the results from the paper rather talking explicitly about its authors or about it as a document. In this most common case, the usual convention is to treat the authors, not the paper, as the actors and thus use the plural.
* *Watson and Crick (1953) demonstrate the double-helical structure of DNA.*
> 1 votes
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Tags: writing-style, citation-style, grammar
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thread-37003
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37003
|
How to quickly understand the main idea when reading a paper?
|
2015-01-18T05:43:09.563
|
# Question
Title: How to quickly understand the main idea when reading a paper?
I have problems in reading papers, specifically papers where the subject is not so new to me and I am familiar with the problem which the writer wants to solve.
How to find the those parts which talk about the main idea?
When I go to their suggested work to understand the main idea, I have to have first read their previous sections, because they define some notations and definition which they use them on their suggested work. When I go to read those parts to understand the notation. I am not sure if my reading method is good. because after reading the notations and definitions , I have to start their suggested method section. This one has its own challenges too.
My advisor said you should understand the main idea of a paper in one hour, or at maximum in two hours. But I need at least 5 hours.
(Maybe help: I am reading a paper in the field of computer networks.)
# Answer
How to efficiently read a paper is not something that can be taught over the internet in broad generalities. It seems pretty futile to try to teach it "in general" in general (!!), by which I mean that if you're trying to teach someone how to read a paper, you had better have at least one actual paper in hand. You can try to draw broader morals, but whatever lessons are there to be learned should be grounded in the reading of that particular paper. Thus for instance
> How to find the those parts which talk about the main idea?
would be silly to address without seeing the paper.
I find more promise here:
> My advisor said you should understand the main idea of a paper in one hour, or at maximum in two hours. But I need at least 5 hours.
Your advisor knows me?!? Sorry, just kidding. Anyway, that's exactly whom you should be talking to. But even with your advisor you are stuck on a way too general discussion. Go to her with with paper you are trying to read now, and learn how the advice applies to that paper.
Let me also say that I am a bit skeptical of the hard limits your advisor is imposing, or more precisely with the way you are construing whatever your advisor told you. Obviously 1-2 hours cannot be the amount of time needed to understand the main idea of *every* paper: some papers are just significantly longer, more difficult and/or more obscure than others. Speaking for myself: after some years of experience for reading for the main idea, depending on the paper, sometimes I can now grasp the main idea just as soon as I run my eyes over the first page; sometimes it takes me an hour or two; sometimes it takes me a full day's work; sometimes at the end of a full day's work I find that I *don't* understand the main idea.
Where is this 1-2 hour figure coming from, and what does "should" mean here? Maybe she means "Come back if you've spent more than two hours on it and I'll give you more help." Or maybe she means that's an upper bound for how long it would take *her* to read the paper. But she's not a student, she's supervising one. If there's one matter in which students should be skeptical of their advisors, it's in their advisors' estimations of how long it will (or "should") take a student to do something. It's not a matter of arguing with your advisor but rather letting her in to understand your process. If it's taking you so much more time than she expects, show her what you're doing and see what she has to say.
Let me also say that a longer time spent on something isn't inherently problematic. If you are reading in a language different from your own native one, it will take you longer -- and skimming will take you *much* longer. Most academics eventually realize that the people who can complete tasks more quickly are often but far from always the ones who can do the best work on those tasks. Real breakthroughs are things that people chew on and work through for weeks, months or years. Some speed freak types simply don't have the patience or focus to linger on something for much longer than it takes for others to see how quick they are. So if you are eventually understanding what you're reading quite well and you're not lagging far behind in other tasks: ask yourself whether you really have a problem or just a certain skill that you'd like to optimize when you get the chance.
> 8 votes
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Tags: publications, reading, time-management
---
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thread-37000
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37000
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Are MOOCs a good way to show grad schools that I've gained proficiency in a field which is not my major?
|
2015-01-18T04:04:31.370
|
# Question
Title: Are MOOCs a good way to show grad schools that I've gained proficiency in a field which is not my major?
I'm an undergraduate computer science major with a specialization in networks and communication looking at a masters in molecular genetics. In addition to a GRE biochemistry and molecular biology subject test score, I'm interested in MOOCs to enhance my resume.
# Answer
There are several issues with MOOCs, all of which make them a poor substitute for actual classes for admissions.
* Poor penetration. There is more widespread knowledge of them than a couple years ago, but they are still fairly unknown. Chances are high at at least someone reading your application won't know about or understand them.
* No grades. Few MOOCs offer anything more than a certificate of completion, and many don't even offer that. Even if they offered grades, verification of identity is a problem.
* Wildly varying quality. College classes are generally of a certain quality/difficulty, and knowledge of the quality/difficulty levels for certain field-specific classes across schools is something that application committees will use to judge candidates against each other. MOOCs are much more of an unknown.
> 3 votes
# Answer
No, because many people still do not know what MOOCs are (though they have been in the press a lot). Those who know what they are may not be sure if they are effective.
> 0 votes
# Answer
It is difficult to say as it differs from university to university. But an MOOC course cannot act as a substitute to an actual course in a college because the depth of the subject is simply not enough in an MOOC. Hope this helps.
> 0 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, changing-fields, mooc, biotechnology
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thread-36932
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36932
|
Translation of Dr. rer. nat. outside of Germany
|
2015-01-16T22:40:21.537
|
# Question
Title: Translation of Dr. rer. nat. outside of Germany
Psychology at universities in Germany is either in the natural sciences or in philosophy, depending on the university. This affects the kind of academic title you get. People doing their doctoral thesis either get the doctor in natural sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) or the doctor in philosophy (Dr. phil.).
If I am not mistaken, most doctors in psychology (internationally) are Ph.D.s. So my question is, how would you refer to your title internationally? As a doctor of natural sciences? As a Ph.D. (even if you have a Dr. rer. nat.)? Are there legal requirements? I am thinking about a website that is generally understood internationally and -- perhaps -- about business cards.
(And yup, personally, I think -- and act if -- psychology is closer to natural sciences than philosophy.)
(I'm sorry if I can't specify the question more closely. There's a similar question (Choosing a title to hold upon completion of a doctoral degree: “Dr.” vs. “Ph.D.” \[duplicate\]) but I don't think it really covers this issue.)
# Answer
In the US, most doctorates in science and engineering are also a PhD even though our degrees aren't in philosophy. While other degrees exist, they are less common. I would suggest translating your degree as a PhD since most international audiences will understand that you mean an academic doctorate.
That being said, I was able to get what Dr. rer. nat. meant, too, so you might decide to put that and not worry about it. Most people have the ability to search the internet when they are confused.
> 8 votes
# Answer
I would say that for business cards and websites you don't need to translate your degree title. Many people will already know what it means (German titles are unusual, but reasonably well known), and most will be able to basically figure it out, since it's got "Dr." as part of it. If you are feeling particularly concerned about misunderstanding, you can put a footnote to the effect of "German doctorate similar to a Ph.D," but it's probably better to let the other person look up a translation.
> 2 votes
# Answer
I translate my own Dr.rer.nat. as PhD when I feel like a translation is required, and state it as Dr.rer.nat. otherwise. Since it says Dr. right there in the title, it is seldom if ever misunderstood.
> 2 votes
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Tags: phd, titles, germany, translations, social-science
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thread-37011
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37011
|
Is it acceptable to submit papers anonymously to Computer Science conferences that don't ask for anonymity?
|
2015-01-18T12:08:03.563
|
# Question
Title: Is it acceptable to submit papers anonymously to Computer Science conferences that don't ask for anonymity?
Normally, a CS conference will give a clear indication in its Call For Paper (or in its submittion instruction) if the peer review of the conference is blind. However, if an author forget the anonymity requirement and submit a named paper, the result may be a merciless rejection even without any peer review. I have encountered such a thing, so I am just wondering is it acceptable to submit a anonymous paper to a conference even if the conference does not ask for it ? **whether an anonymous paper would cause some trouble to the reviewers or the Program Committee of a conference if the peer review is not blind?** Of course, the submittion system of a conference would record the information of all authors, including their names.
# Answer
> 12 votes
This is not a good idea. You just have to read every Call for Papers carefully and submit according to the instructions. That being said, I'm surprised that your program chair didn't ask you to resubmit with proper blinding instead of outright rejecting your paper. Submission errors happen, and authors are frequently given the opportunity to resubmit as long as the content isn't changed. The latter fact might be a little hard if the self-references weren't originally blinded, but I would think that most program chairs would have worked with you on this.
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Tags: conference, peer-review, paper-submission, anonymity
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thread-36947
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36947
|
Is it appropriate to ask professors to give you a mock interview?
|
2015-01-17T04:54:43.300
|
# Question
Title: Is it appropriate to ask professors to give you a mock interview?
Suppose that an undergraduate student is preparing for interviews for Ph.D. positions in natural sciences. Is it common/acceptable to ask a professor with relevant expertise and familiarity with the student's educational background and research ability to conduct a mock interview with the student as a way to ascertain problems in the student's preparation? Or will such requests be viewed as unnecessary or "asking for too much"?
I'm primarily interested in the acceptability of such requests in US colleges.
# Answer
It depends on the professor. If it's someone who knows you well and has the time, then they would probably be happy to help. Most of the professors I came across during my undergrad were more than happy to help preparing me for grad school interviews. Just make sure you ask well in advance, so they have time find an appropriate time, and don't take it personally if they say no: professors are really busy.
EDIT: Make sure you ask professors that have been through the graduate application process in the same country you are applying, if possible. Ones who received their PhD elsewhere, or say 50 years ago, will probably turn you down simply because they don't feel familiar enough with the process (unless they are directly involved in admissions for your school's graduate program).
> 9 votes
# Answer
Yes! We welcome such invitations. It's good for the entire department -- for both younger students to look at, as well as your peers so make it a big event.
Not all faculty can go but the good thing is that these tend to be self-selecting -- that the faculty who are the most helpful are the ones who come.
> 4 votes
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Tags: etiquette, interview
---
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thread-37009
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37009
|
What to name a section at the end of thesis containing original material for future development?
|
2015-01-18T11:48:32.460
|
# Question
Title: What to name a section at the end of thesis containing original material for future development?
I have written my master thesis. The last chapter is "Summary and Conclusions". After this chapter which ends the thesis, I want to add a specific note of my own. It is a new idea which needs lengthy explanation and it does not **directly** relate to the contents of the thesis. It is a new algorithm which is not used in the thesis but I want to introduce this algorithm for future development of the field.
I want to know under which section I have to write it. Should I write it as an appendix? Thanks in advance.
# Answer
If it's related to the ideas in the theses, then it sounds like a "future directions" subjection in "Summary and Conclusions."
If it's really not related at all, then it should go in a different paper.
> 4 votes
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Tags: thesis, writing, writing-style
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thread-36993
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36993
|
How to improve self-learning as a PhD student?
|
2015-01-18T01:27:39.020
|
# Question
Title: How to improve self-learning as a PhD student?
As a doctoral student, you take some classes, but most of what you do needs material that you must gather from papers, conferences, and other sources. With limited possibilities for communication with authors and such, what's the best way to learn these necessary concepts?
For example, I read a paper (from a big name publication) presenting a novel approach to SVMs with new constraints on the objective function. The description of the optimization was vague, but I needed to use this technique for my own work and my optimization skills are limited at best. I'm sure to a reviewer with the right expertise, the description was fine though.
As a PhD student, one can only take so many courses in so many subjects. Nevertheless, some things (like optimization theory in the above example) are not exactly easily self-taught, and surely not in a few weeks.
So I ask you, what is the best strategy to fill these gaps without devoting entire courses to the subject?
Additionally, how do you do that without just learning things piecemeal? Learning something useful for a hyper-specific case is essentially worthless once circumstances change. How do you balance the need to know both these hyper-specific examples and the more general ideas while doing this gap-filling?
# Answer
During my Ph.D. studies I had to do exactly that: balance my time between learning specific examples and *learning where and how to find these examples* without wasting too much time. In my case, I did not have that much guidance from my supervisor (he let me be pretty independent) and on top of that my topic was interdisciplinary. Due to the latter, there were gaps in my learning that I had to fill, and taking 20 ultra-specialized courses was not an option because of the time constraint (I had to finish my PhD within 4 years and also publish some papers in that time).
1. From my experience, a top-down approach is the most effective one. It sounds like you started reading a very specialized paper; try reading something more broad about the subject, ideally a tutorial/video/article/book chapter with emphasis on applications (since you mentioned you need to *apply* a method to your own work) that will give you a good overview in a shorter amount of time. Then, not only you will gain more insight as to which method is the appropriate one to use in your research and can devote more time to it, but you will also have kept in the back of your head the other ones, in case conditions change and you need to switch methods. Online courses (MOOCs) are a good source of information, as you can adjust them to your time schedule and often are not a semester long but rather a few weeks. I am sure you can find something on what you are looking for on www.edx.org and/or www.coursera.com.
2. Communicate with people around you. This is crucial. If you are not already in an environment where knowledgeable people are available, put in the effort to find one. Look up people and email them; most of the time professors are passionate about helping out students. I was lucky to have an office one door down from a retired professor, who had time to talk and share his expertise and advice - some insights are difficult to find in books.
Try to get creative with your learning - never is one source enough, try to diversify. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the information, so be organized, take notes, and try to be aware of what you are learning and how it fits in your purpose, with a calm mind. Take breaks when you feel overworked (trust me, this comes from experience).
From the organizational viewpoint, I think sketching out objectives every month or week, and then preparing a summary of what you learned and how it applies to your research (like a progress report) helps a lot in seeing the big picture. You don't want to get carried away too much reading about things you won't use. Of course, that's inevitable, as it is part of research - it is part of navigating in the vast realm of knowledge, sometimes you end up sidestepping.
> 10 votes
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Tags: phd, research-process, learning
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thread-37034
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37034
|
How to use lemmas and proofs from another paper?
|
2015-01-18T19:08:23.343
|
# Question
Title: How to use lemmas and proofs from another paper?
Suppose that paper A has a lemma called Lemma A, along with its proof.
I want to use this lemma in another paper B. However, in the scope of my paper, I have to change it slightly, but without losing the general idea.
For instance, the original lemma might read as follows:
> Lemma A: The intersection of two straight lines in the plane is either empty, a single point, or a straight line.
Suppose I need the following variant in paper B:
> Lemma B: The intersection of two planes in 3-space is either empty, a single line, or a plane.
Also, the proofs for both lemmas are very similar. Therefore, I have two questions:
1. Can I use the same methodology and same terminology with similar words to prove my own lemmas?
2. If I can, is citing paper A in my lemma confusing? If I cannot, can I just specify the lemma in paper A and say that this lemma and proof can also be used etc.?
# Answer
You should certainly cite paper A in any case.
One way this is commonly handled: state your Lemma B.1 and give the complete proof. At the beginning of the proof, write something like "This closely follows the proof of Lemma A.1 from \[A\]." Now your paper is self-contained and you have given appropriate credit. It is fine if your proof is similar in structure to theirs; in some ways this is better, because a reader who looks at both will more easily be able to see the similarities and differences. But do not simply copy and paste their proof and change the necessary words. Your proof should be your words, even if it is from their ideas.
Or, state your Lemma B.1, but instead of giving a complete proof, say "The proof is very similar to that of Lemma A.1 from \[A\]". This saves space but will be more annoying to the reader, who in order to check your result will have to find the paper \[A\] and read through the proof, adapting it to prove B.1 instead of A.1. (The referee may be similarly annoyed.)
Some people would omit the statement of Lemma B.1 altogether, and when they need to use it, would say "By a slight modification of the proof of Lemma A.1 from \[A\], we have blah blah blah...". This is even more annoying.
Worst of all is to just say "By Lemma A.1 from \[A\], we have blah blah blah" where Lemma A.1 claims something different from (and not obviously implying) the statement you want.
> 11 votes
# Answer
In your example, those are not equivalent mathematical assertions, and so they are not identical lemmas. What I have done in similar cases is to say something along the lines of:
> Lemma X is closely based on Lemma Y in \[cite\], and follows a similar proof structure.
This way you give appropriate credit to the original source, while still making your new assertion as you need.
> 5 votes
# Answer
Although many people do it, it is bad style and confusing to cite a lemma and restate it in a way that is not equivalent to the original one. I would suggest to state the lemma you need, and, instead of proving the whole lemma, explain in the proof that your lemma is very similar to the lemma A.1 and that the proof can be reused making the changes ... .
If, though, you just steal an idea, it might be better to completely prove your lemma in your version.
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, plagiarism
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thread-1680
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1680
|
Dressing etiquette for interviews in academia
|
2012-05-24T09:49:11.157
|
# Question
Title: Dressing etiquette for interviews in academia
Are there expected dressing norms at faculty interviews? Will a casual tee-jeans be discouraged?
In the same vein, what is expected when a student visits the campus for an interview?
# Answer
While its not mandatory to wear a suit for a faculty interview, it doesn't hurt, and may actually be expected in certain disciplines. Best to ask around beforehand. I've never heard of a dress code for student visit, but something semi-formal doesn't hurt.
As a general principle, it doesn't hurt to be more dressed up than necessary. The reverse can often be embarrassing. But as with most such thing, the departmental culture is the most important factor.
> 54 votes
# Answer
The best advice for any interview dress code is, one standard of dress higher than what you would be wearing if you got the job. eg if jeans and a t-shirt is what most people wear around the office, then business trousers and a shirt is fine for the interview. If its business trousers and a shirt, then for the interview a suit and tie.
> 27 votes
# Answer
The only single right answer is that **it varies**.
However, there are methods that you can use to establish what the right answer might be in the particular case you have in mind.
Here's my method.
* As with pretty much all human contact, **the person you meet will have norms and expectations**, conditioned by their culture, their quirks, the organisation they work in, the physical location of the organisation, your gender, their gender, your age, their age, and so on.
* There is no general answer as to what those norms and expectations are, so **research the specific person, organisation and country**.
That's half the story. The other half is:
* **what impact do you want to have**?
* **Do you want to meet their expectations, or challenge them?** The latter is high risk, but with potentially high reward.
* **How do you want to project yourself to them**?
* **How strong is your position** \- are you going from a position of strength, or one of weakness?
And **if in doubt, wear the clothes that are smart clothes within the business world (rather than the academic world) in your own culture.**
> 13 votes
# Answer
If you know who the person(s) you will meet with are, try to find photographs of them on their faculty pages.
The way they want to be seen by other people is usually pretty close to what they expect of you.
> 7 votes
# Answer
At the SLAC where I used to teach, there was a circulating story of a job candidate who showed up in a t-shirt and jeans. They were summarily shown the door.
This is even though it was a pretty casual place -- I wore a t-shirt and jeans most days during the warmer months.
Dressing nice without looking like you are going to a funeral, the prom, or a beach party is the tricky thing -- especially for women. Men can wear a dress shirt, necktie, and casual sports coat. Women have fewer dressy options so we tend to default to pantsuits.
Final thoughts:
* Dressing more formally than is the norm means that you misread the university climate *or* that you might have been nervous and overcompensated.
* Dressing less formally than is the norm means that you misread the university climate *or* that you might not being thinking seriously about the position.
Given the dangers of the latter, it's clear that dressing too formal is safer than dressing too informal.
> 7 votes
# Answer
First of all, I'd be unlikely to ever evaluate someone based on what they wore for an interview. But second of all, insofar as I did, more points go to the dressed down person than the dressed up one -- after all, people who dress up might expect me to do the same, and I most certainly do not want my department to become a place where there's any pressure to look "professional".
Though to be fair, I followed the above advice of "one step up from usual" when I went to interviews myself -- my daily wear is a tee-shirt and jeans, so for interviews a I wore a shirt-with-buttons and jeans.
> 1 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, etiquette, faculty-application, interview, outward-appearance
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thread-29318
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/29318
|
Reference on abuse of stimulant medications among professors to enhance academic performance?
|
2014-10-02T18:34:09.557
|
# Question
Title: Reference on abuse of stimulant medications among professors to enhance academic performance?
Various research articles<sup>1</sup> have been published on the prevalence of stimulant medicine (Adderall, Concerta, Ritalin) abuse among undergraduate students.
By "abuse of stimulant medicine," I am referring to the practice of students taking prescription medication that is prescribed to someone else (or, that is prescribed to them under false pretenses) in order to improve their focus and concentration while studying.
There is some anecdotal evidence of university faculty taking Adderall and related medications to enhance academic performance (and *not* to treat an attention disorder).
Is there any reference to research<sup>2</sup> on the prevalance of stimulant medicine abuse among university faculty?
---
<sup>1</sup> Here is a review article that covers some of them:
> Varga, Matthew D. "Adderall abuse on college campuses: a comprehensive literature review." *Journal of evidence-based social work* 9.3 (2012): 293-313. DOI: 10.1080/15433714.2010.525402
<sup>2</sup> I am looking for answers that are a reference to such a study. I am not looking for answers from anecdotal evidence not supported by a study or citation. I am also not looking for answers explaining why such a study is unlikely to exist, or why it should not be trusted if it did.
# Answer
There were several prominent publications in Nature, spurred by a survey that they conducted of their readers who were able to broadly identify their area of work. See this link here for information about the survey, which also cites the papers that were published in Nature. http://network.nature.com/groups/naturenewsandopinion/forum/topics/1309
In researching this topic, I used google scholar and the search terms "stress stimulants faculty -students" and published 2008 or later to arrive at meaningful search results.
The most likely reason there is more work published on student use is that students as a demographic group are both easier to study and are a more similar group of cohorts than faculty as a demographic group, which are more diverse in age, race, ethnicity, etc.
> 10 votes
# Answer
This is a more detailed answer explaining the results of the survey given by Sydney E. Everhart's answer.
The results of the informal 2008 Nature survey<sup>1</sup> found that
> One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory.
More specifically, a comment attributed to the author of this article clarifies:
> For the record, our poll didn’t parse out academics, or practicing scientists very thoroughly and the overall results can’t really be tied to scientists exactly. But our demographics do allow us to make some assumptions. We asked what category generally describes your field and included among the limited choices, Biology, Chemistry, Earth & Environmental Science, Engineering, Medicine, Physics, and Education. So if we assume those are ‘academic’ fields and academic respondents, we have 817 respondents out of a total 1,400 that fit that loose demographic. Of those we found that 106 (13%) used neuroenhancing-type drugs for medically prescribed reasons. And 159 (19%) used drugs for non-medical (i.e. cognition-enhancing) purposes. That’s pretty consistent with the overall distribution in the poll.
Unfortunately, the data from that survey - which was previously freely available for download - seems to no longer be online.
---
<sup>1</sup> Maher, Brendan. "Poll results: look who's doping." Nature 452 (2008): 674-675. DOI: 10.1038/452674a
> 7 votes
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Tags: professorship, reference-request, health, drugs
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thread-37026
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37026
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Checking/Ticking all the fields on a recommendation letter as "Exceptional"
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2015-01-18T16:28:43.743
|
# Question
Title: Checking/Ticking all the fields on a recommendation letter as "Exceptional"
My student has given me a recommendation letter form for the studies he is applying for, and the form has a part where I should simply "tick" the options. For example: Maturity, Motivation, etc. I can check these fields with "Exceptional", "Excellent", "Very Good", "Good", and so on...
When I think of it, I really want to tick all these fields as "Exceptional", because this student is my best student, he has been the top student in his class for all the courses I have taught and he is one of the best students I have known throughout the, at least, past 10 years. Do you believe that checking **ALL** the fields as "**Exceptional**" would look very bad to the admissions committee? I do not want to ruin his chances by my recommendation letter.
# Answer
> 7 votes
There is nothing wrong with checking "exceptional" for every question. Working on graduate admissions, this is not uncommon. Of course, be sure that the student really is exceptional in every area. While he may be brilliant, is he really exceptional at writing skills, oral expression, self-confidence, etc.? I actually have a more positive response if a trait has a slightly lower rating, so I know that thought has gone into the ratings, although I don't recommend doing this if the candidate truly is exceptional in every way.
If the recommendation form truly does not allow you to attach a letter, use the space to say (as you do above) that the student is one of the # best you have worked with in the past 10 years. If you have more space, comparisons to other students are helpful, for example, "X is one of the top 3 students I have encountered in the past ten years. The other two went on to top PhD programs, where they have both flourished. The one who has graduated is doing a post-doc at Y, and the other is making good progress to her degree."
You can also send a letter even if one is not requested. I don't see how it could hurt (unless you had something negative to say).
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Tags: recommendation-letter
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thread-36995
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36995
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How to keep code and output organized?
|
2015-01-18T01:56:32.763
|
# Question
Title: How to keep code and output organized?
I am having trouble keeping organized the files for the computational component of my research project. In brief, I have written computer code which I use to run computational experiments. For each experiment, I get a set of output files, from which I generate output such as plots and tables.
The trouble stems from the fact that I have multiple experiments (say exp1, exp2 and exp3) and each experiment has multiple output files (say a.txt, b.txt, c.txt). This is further complicated by the fact that I have multiple versions of each experiment (say exp1 2014-01-02, exp1 2014-05-06, etc).
How should I organize the code and the output in a systematic way? The system should satisfy the following key requirements:
* **It has to be easy to rerun version X of experiment Y.** I occasionally have to rerun earlier versions of the experiments in order to check the results or to make slight modifications.
* **It has to record the output for each version of each experiment.** I often have to run many slight variants of a single experiment to tweak some small aspect of the results, so it is essential to record the output for each run.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Funny you should ask, because I'm currently answering this question as I take breather from a project involving just such a family of experiments and variations.
In my own self-organization, I typically distinguish two types of such variants. If some variants are "dead" and would only be referred to on rare occasions for historical purposes, then they get checked into version control and deleted from my working set---they can be exhumed by the powers of SVN/git/Mercurial when needed.
For the "live" versions, some experiments get grouped thematically and some chronologically.
* Thematic is for when I'm it's a purely computer-based experiment (which can be re-run arbitrarily), e.g., "overlay-network", "random-network", "unit-disc-network"
* Chronologically is for when my computer-based runs are based on real data from a physical system that can't be regenerated, but only replicated, e.g., "2013-05-09 Alphavirus", "2013-06-09 Alphavirus run #3", "2013-07-02 Repeats of Failed Samples"
I maintain a strong distinction between several types of files, which must never mix:
* Core code: there is precisely *one* version of any core code system, maintained by version control. If I need to maintain variants, they have to be set by option flags, not by forking the codebase (that way lies madness).
* Each thematic/dated directory gets a README file, whatever notes are neecessary and (typically) two subdirectories: experiments and analysis
* Experiment scripts for a thematic cluster live in the experiments directory
* Each batch of experimental data lives in its own subdirectory of the experiments directory where its script lives.
* Analysis contains scripts to process the experimental data. Often there are two layers: one to process raw data into results, and another to plot the results. This is because extracting results is often time intensive and figures are frequently tweaked. If there are a lot of results files, they get their own subdirectory too.
* Plots, living in a subdirectory of the analytical scripts directory
I also typically maintain a few master scripts which allow me to re-run large swaths of experiment / analysis when the core code is improved or a bug is found, which happens more frequently than one would like.
# Answer
> 4 votes
Every time I run a script, I pass it two arguments:
1. A file label that gives a name to my experiment
2. A short blurb of text that automatically gets put into a README file. (This precisely documents the conditions of the experiment so I remember what I did.)
At the start of my script, I create a folder inside my "output" directory for the results of my experiment (and the README file) and I name the folder `$timestamp_$file_label`. All output gets generated inside that folder, and every time I want to change/rerun the script I just change the file label and the new output gets sent to a different folder. (Or I can use the same file label; it doesn't matter since the experiments will have different timestamps).
I also use git for version control so I can easily go back to old versions of my code or take the code in a substantially different direction without erasing what I did earlier.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I have a substantially similar situation, although most of the time it's not about my own code so much as input files for a third-party model. My approach is as follows:
* input files go in a revision control system (I use git). Each time I run the model, that version of the input files is given a tag with a run number (eg "Run\_37").
* each time the model is run, output files go in a new folder that is named for the run number.
* I also keep a spreadsheet linking the two with some other information such as the date, a brief description of what I was testing, and so forth.
Where matlab scripts or similar are used to programmatically generate input files, those scripts also get tagged in a similar way so that it is always clear which version of the script was used for each model run.
# Answer
> 1 votes
While there is no right answer: a nested system of folders: the first one is called **Experiments**, with subfolders called **exp1**, **exp2** and so on. Each **expX** contains folders for the versions, and the version folders contains (if necessary) folders for **code**, **input**, **raw data**, **graphs**, and whatever else you can think of. That's how I would do it at least.
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Tags: code
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thread-37080
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37080
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If a paper cites a work and its translation, is it counted as two citations for calculating h-index?
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2015-01-19T08:25:38.687
|
# Question
Title: If a paper cites a work and its translation, is it counted as two citations for calculating h-index?
If a bibliography mentions a work two times, once in its original and once in its translation, how does this count in the author's H-index?
E.G.:
1. Everyman, J. (2000), A work on citations, Cambridge.
2. Everyman, J. (2001), Un lavoro sulle citazioni, Roma.
The (2) is the italian translation of the (1). This means that the author gets 2 citations, but they actually refer to only 1 work. How does this affect citation count and metrics?
# Answer
The h-index, as usually employed, does not take translations into account. The case you cite would be effectively the same as citing two genuinely different publications by the same author. Under certain circumstances, this might increase you h-index by 1. I leave it to you to decide whether this is fair or not.
> 2 votes
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Tags: citations, bibliometrics, translations
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thread-36776
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36776
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Recommending venues and organizations in a paper
|
2015-01-14T15:15:28.740
|
# Question
Title: Recommending venues and organizations in a paper
Some co-authors and I are currently writing a position paper that aims to introduce Community A to a set of problems in Community B, in which collaboration between Communities A and B is likely to be helpful. This paper is intended for submission to a peer-reviewed special issue that has invited such position papers.
There are already some meeting series that are intended to help foster such collaborations, but they are not very widely known. In our concluding recommendations, we are thinking of including a list of them (perhaps as a table), as an aid for readers who are motivated by our paper to seek out A/B collaborations.
Is such "advertisement" appropriate for a peer-reviewed publication, particularly given that some of the authors are involved in organization of some of the meetings?
# Answer
> 3 votes
As far as the *journal* is concerned, this would be a thing to ask your editorial contact at the journal.
As far as the *readers* are concerned, I'd ask myself: what's most useful to the reader? I'd have thought that pointing to an online resource elsewhere, is more useful than a list within the article itself. In an article, the list is frozen in time, and quickly outdated, with no option of maintenance. As a linked external online resource, then there would be the option of updates and maintenance - and even if you don't expect to have the resource yourself to maintain it, someone else might take over the upkeep.
Now, you *would* need to be careful in how you present that online resource, so that it didn't look like spamming (it will help considerably if the resource is not seen as promoting a particular business or university). Precedent is your friend: have a look through recent articles in your target journal, and discuss with your editorial contact at the journal, to find a presentation that will be acceptable to all.
# Answer
> 1 votes
In acknowledgements you can put pretty much anything, as long as it is not too long.
However, if it is anything lengthy (e.g. more than 3 recommendations) I would strongly encourage to put it in a different form than a research paper. Eg. a column in this journal (if it is a applicable), or (in acknowledgements) a link to a website listing opportunities.
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Tags: publications, etiquette
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thread-37054
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37054
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Do European PhD programs have a qualifying exam, and if so, what form do they take?
|
2015-01-19T00:58:35.050
|
# Question
Title: Do European PhD programs have a qualifying exam, and if so, what form do they take?
Now, I understand that European PhDs are far from monolithic in format, and that most quals in my field (physics) can fall into two general formats, as far as North American PhD programs are concerned:
1. A set of tests covering the fundamental areas of undergraduate-level education in your discipline (I know MIT and Princeton can be quite nasty in this regard for physics, but UChicago phased quals out due in part to student health concerns
2. A review of the literature in your research topic and the relevant fundamental notions underlying it, which must be explained in front of a jury that will ask questions as well
My question is: are quals present in European PhD programs and, if yes, what are formats commonly in use for that purpose?
# Answer
Most central European universities don't traditionally have QEs. However, it seems to me as if it is getting more popular to have *something* after the first one or two years of your programme. Two data points:
* In my current university, PhD students need to defend their thesis proposal after (maximum) two years. This includes writing their proposal, receiving written comments by two other (i.e., not their advisor) professors of the faculty, and presenting and defending their proposal in front of the entire faculty (our faculty is pretty small). Questions are asked in this defense, but not typically about material that is not directly linked to the proposal. In theory students can fail at this step, but is is very uncommon. The goal is rather to force students (and advisors) to have a clear goal of where the thesis is going early on, something that was historically a bit of a problem.
* When I did my PhD, we did not really have any sort of entry exam or defense in my alma mater. However, since then, they have switched to a model not unlike what I explained above. The main difference is that proposals are only presented (there is no written document), and that only a small committee is responsible for giving feedback on the proposal (not the entire faculty). This defense has to be taken one year after start of the PhD. Failing this defense is again *very* uncommon.
**Summary**: the places I am well aware of don't have stressful QEs. Instead, we traditionally had pretty much nothing. Nowadays, many places have a proposal defense instead of a QE, but this is not a step that students typically have to be stressed out about.
> 9 votes
# Answer
As far as I'm aware (Germany, sciences), we don't have quals here. If you're admitted, at least one professor considers you good enough and that's it. Your next exam will be handing in your thesis and defending it.
A Master of science degree or equivalent is usually required though - maybe that's why we have no extra quals.
Plus, the defense can include an oral exam on the general field of your thesis.
However, do read the relevant documents of your target university and program (in Germany look for Promotionsordnung).
With the advent of structured PhD programs, things like having to take classes for credits and minimum grades have started to come up at some universities.
> 3 votes
# Answer
As an expat, maybe a native Dutch person here can confirm this, but as far as I know there are no quals here in the Netherlands either.
It's generally expected that you have a Master's degree (3 year BSc + 2 year MSc), but I know of people who have been admitted as PhD candidates with an Honours degree (3 year BSc + 1 year of intensive postgrad study).
Many PhD projects here are run like job applications. A professor has gained funding for a specific purpose, and the department advertises the position.
After a year of working as a PhD candidate you might have to justify how you can achieve your research goals to finish the PhD in time, but that's nothing like having to put in a whole lot of work for a PhD proposal before having even been accepted.
> 3 votes
# Answer
In Sweden there are no quals per se, but we may have something related. When you have completed 50% of the aims of your PhD (when exactly this happens is decided in conjunction with your supervisor and the Department's PhD program head), you have to write a short version of the thesis, and get a title, "Licenciate", and a raise.
The exact requirements depend with the department. At Stockholm University Physics, there is only a defence with a local opponent. In Biophysics and Biochemistry, there is also an oral exam. The topic is to be decided between the student and an examiner, and has to be related to the research at hand. For example, a colleague of mine, Biotechnologist working on statistical data analysis, was examined on a book on Machine Learning.
In any case, they are never as stressful as the US Quals. Probably because firing a student is rather hard, and no one would take that threat seriously.
> 2 votes
# Answer
For some german universities (like the one I am doing my PhD at), PhD studies are supervised by grad schools that often have their own entry exam, e.g., in the form of a presentation in front of an admission committee. This presentation has to cover your future project in terms of background, methodology and aims of your study and sometimes also a short part regarding your past work for your diploma or master degree.
At my university, the admission mostly happens after you are already employed by your group leader (and by that, already have a contract). If you indeed fail (or just do not want) the admission to this graduation school, you can still (or also) apply to a more basic grad school that has no entry exam of any kind, but is also regarded as being of a lower quality (in terms of courses, funding options, renown, etc.) than the "excellent" grad school.
> 0 votes
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Tags: phd, europe, qualifying-exam
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thread-36454
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36454
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Faculty hiring differences in Theoretical Computer Science between US and UK/Germany
|
2015-01-08T10:34:48.540
|
# Question
Title: Faculty hiring differences in Theoretical Computer Science between US and UK/Germany
I'm a PhD student in theoretical computer science in the US. This question contains some great answers on how to get a faculty job in Theoretical CS. I wonder whether there are some significant differences if I will be looking for a position in Europe (in particular, UK and Germany) as opposed to in the US. As a PhD student in the US (who's neither a US nor an EU citizen, if that matters), should I do something differently? Some aspects:
* Is there more/less weight placed in UK/Germany on professional services such as journal/conference reviewing?
* Is there more/less weight placed in UK/Germany on publishing in journals as opposed to conferences?
* Should I try to get to know more professors in UK/Germany through conferences? What about doing an internship/research visit/postdoc in UK/Germany?
Other differences are also very welcome.
# Answer
The UK system is quite different from the US system I believe.
1. In the UK there is no real schedule to hiring for example. Universities just advertise whenever they want to hire someone and quite often with a very small time window until the deadline for applications.
2. TCS of the sort a US academic would recognize is unlikely to be very well represented in a UK university, with a tiny number of exceptions. You are likely to be judged by people outside your field who don't have any natural sympathy for your research area. For example, telling them you have X FOCS and STOC papers will likely mean nothing to them. Further, as they are conferences there is a risk they will regard them as essentially equivalent to non-refereed workshops. They are likely to rate journals more highly than conferences but they are also likely simply to count citations.
3. UK universities in general highly rate grant income. This may be the same as the US of course.
4. There is an official system of rating UK departments by the government (the REF) which makes a large difference to the income they receive. One key element is the impact of your top 4 most important papers published in recent years. You need to play to that.
5. Some regard industrial partnerships as particularly important.
6. You may in fact find you are more suited to a Math department in the UK, depending on what your research is in exactly.
7. Some have an unhealthy obsession with citation metrics (H-index etc.).
In short, if you have papers in Nature (or another general interest journal) or papers that are cited hundreds or thousands of times and have lots of grant income you will be in a very good position. If you have only STOC/FOCS/SODA papers that are cited a few dozen times, little grant income and no industrial links you may find things harder unless you find the one department that is looking to expand in your area.
> 4 votes
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Tags: job-search, computer-science, united-states, united-kingdom, germany
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thread-37118
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37118
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Master of Research (MRes) schools in the U.S.?
|
2015-01-19T18:54:51.477
|
# Question
Title: Master of Research (MRes) schools in the U.S.?
Are there brick-and-mortar or online schools that confer Master of Research (MRes)-type degrees in the U.S.?
# Answer
I've never seen the term "Master of Research" used in the US. Many master's degree programs in the US do include a significant research component (either a thesis or project) while other master's degree programs consist entirely of coursework. In either case, the degree can be called an MS (Master of Science) or MA (Master of Arts) degree.
In programs that do include a thesis, the thesis might be 6 out of 30 credit hours in the degree program. This is nominally 20% of the program but in practice students often spend much more than 20% of their time on the thesis. In my experience in mathematics, 3 semesters of course work plus two semesters of work on the thesis is more typical.
> 1 votes
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Tags: masters, united-states
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thread-37136
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37136
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What do AHRS, EHRS, QHRS mean on a transcript?
|
2015-01-19T23:39:56.890
|
# Question
Title: What do AHRS, EHRS, QHRS mean on a transcript?
What do the abbreviations AHRS, EHRS, and QHRS mean on a transcript?
My guess would be:
1. AHRS = "all hours"
2. EHRS = "earned hours"
3. QHRS = "quality(?) hours"
What are the differences between these things?
# Answer
* Attempted Hours
* Earned Hours
* Quality Hours
Source
> 2 votes
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Tags: transcript-of-records
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thread-26779
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/26779
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How to prevent physical/psychological health side effects of workaholism in academia and research?
|
2014-08-04T10:59:29.013
|
# Question
Title: How to prevent physical/psychological health side effects of workaholism in academia and research?
As a research student, I spend most of my time working on my research career, even when I am at home, I am awake until 3 or 4 A.M just doing my research-chores.
As a matter of fact, long-term having not enough sleep, putting myself under huge amount of stress and hard work and more important, not getting enough exercise will directly put the person's health in to danger.
**Q:** How should a researcher balance their life to both maintain their health and do their academic job?
I am wondering whether professionals and scientists really hardly worked this much and how their healthy and balanced academic/work life-style is.
# Answer
> 28 votes
First of all. Sleep. And sleep well. Increasing sleep hours increases productivity and not the other way around. Sleep early (people are not supposed to work too late at night) and wake up after good-solid 8 hours of sleep. Then when you wake up, you will realize that you have amazing clarity and excellent productivity. Also, two hours before sleep abandon work and do something relaxing, such as listening to music or spending time with your significant other. Work or stressful activities before bedtime, disrupt your sleep and its quality. So, that leaves you about 24-(8+2) = 14 hours to work which are more than enough.
Devote at least one hour per day on average for exercise. Any sport, workout is better than nothing. Also, try walking. One hour of walking per day does wonders for your heart, lowers stress and you can still think about research while doing it (I do not advice this though). It also alleviates headaches (stress or work related). Also, mind what you eat. Keep your weight steady and do not eat too salty or fatty foods, that inhibit body and mind performance. Use a multivitamin every two days (after consulting your doctor). Also remember that a healthy body always performs better, including mind activities. Also maintaining a good, healthy appearance increases your chances for a fruitful social life, which will prevent you from overworking and overstressing yourself.
And just a reminder. You should not spend too much time on Stack Academia as well :-)
# Answer
> 38 votes
I put my health first by committing to healthy activities that involve other people, so I will have to stick to them.
For example, I
* Have a standing weekly running appointment with a faculty member at my school. I won't cancel this appointment because she will be disappointed.
* Have a standing non-academic volunteer commitment one afternoon each week (giving back to my community is essential for my mental health). I won't cancel this because there's a classroom full of 12-year-old girls waiting for me to come help them with their homework.
* Spend 25 hours each week, from Friday night to Saturday night, completely disconnected from the Internet and anything work related. (I do this as a religious observance, but it's definitely good for my physical health, too!)
* Hold meetings with students and faculty in other buildings in their offices, not mine, so that I am forced to occasionally go outside during daylight hours (if only to walk from one building to the next).
All of these things are non-negotiable to me. That is, no matter what how busy I am or what deadlines are coming up, I will not compromise on any of these things. They're essential to my health and well-being, I arranged them so that other people are depending on me, and so I prioritize them.
# Answer
> 15 votes
I know that for myself, regular running has helped a lot in the past.
The miraculous thing about regular physical exercise is that even though it takes time, you may find that it *seems* like you suddenly have more time overall.
# Answer
> 6 votes
You are only as busy as you want to be. How many hours you can put into work activities without affecting your mental well-being depends on how much you enjoy your work. Given that you describe your work as chores, you should be trying to adjust the cause, not mitigate the symptoms.
There is no way that you can realistically handle the kind of workload you describe long-term. Putting in that many hours to the point that you're basically pulling all-nighters *might* be justified at crunch time: when a project is due and external factors or bad planning prevented you from finishing in time. The first step to improving your situation is to give yourself a realistic workload, likely something between 40 and 60 hours a week. Then set up a plan for your research that takes into account the hours you have available and set your goals accordingly.
You can try this for a week to see if it helps with your mental fatigue and what the impact is on your research. There are any number of studies that prove the importance of work-life balance for productivity so while you might feel like you're working much less than you should, you should be accomplishing much more with your time.
In other words: Work smarter, not harder.
# Answer
> 6 votes
Prioritize you're health, happiness and relationships first. Nowhere is it written that a graduate student needs to work insane hours, answer every email the minute it comes in, etc. Frankly, if I worked for someone that had that expectation I'd leave. In fact, I did work for an advisor who was like that and I switched after a year. Life's too short. The stress, fatigue, unhealthy eating, lack of connection with other people outside of academia... it wears on your health.
Don't fall into the rat race. I don't know your field, but in mine it's common for grad students to work insane hours because they just work inefficiently, so just work smarter.
Also, under-promise over-deliver... always.
# Answer
> 2 votes
You should work less and take breaks, for the sake of the success of your research! Out of experience, most, if not all insights/breakthroughs came while taking breaks/ holidays etc…
These breaks allow you to take some distance and give you perspective w.r.t. to your current work. On top of all the good reasons given by the other answers.
# Answer
> -2 votes
On the issue of workaholism, I think it all boils down to why people feel they are more valuable if they work hard. What makes them believe this? Are they trying to impress people and gain acceptance to fill a void?
Does a person "work to live" or do they "live to work"? The latter seems a waste of life to me.
If working very hard makes a person happy then perhaps they should do it. But if they are doing it for another reason and are not very happy, then maybe they need to reconsider.
Maybe a lot of this comes from popular culture when media personalities talk about somebody's "amazing body of work". We've heard that phrase many times. Ironically, very, very few people are remembered for their "bodies of work". It takes an EXTREME amount of EXTREMELY high quality work to be remembered for it.
People remember Mozart, but they don't remember the very good violinist that played with the city symphony 10 years ago. People remember Isaac Newton, but they don't remember lesser mathematicians who still contributed somewhat significantly.
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Tags: research-process, productivity, academic-life, work-life-balance, health
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thread-37109
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37109
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Use plural or singular first person in abstract of a talk on collaborative work?
|
2015-01-19T17:33:41.307
|
# Question
Title: Use plural or singular first person in abstract of a talk on collaborative work?
When writing an abstract for a talk on a topic that I have collaborated on with others, should I be using the plural form, such as
> "**We** have shown this and that ..."
or is it better to write it as:
> "I will discuss this and that ..."
# Answer
> 7 votes
Use "we", because although only one person will be giving the talk, you are representing the work of multiple people.
# Answer
> 2 votes
In general, I agree with jakebeal for the reason he gave. However, one of my colleagues was recently criticized for not using "I" in an abstract he submitted for a postdoc position. Apparently, some people like to see "I" as a way of differentiating between what was contributed by the person vs. what was done as a group (e.g., "I built the apparatus. We gathered data and analyzed it."). From your question, it's not clear in what environment your talk will be given, but in case it is indeed a job talk, you may consider using "I" at least once. Otherwise, I think "we" is appropriate.
# Answer
> 2 votes
The subject of course depends on the sentence, and in math either type of sentence is fine. If the subject is who is talking, use first person singular (you do not need to use the royal "we"). If the subject is who did the work, use the plural. Often I will vary the sentence structure so both "I" and "we" appear in the abstract.
Of course, you should certainly say who the work is joint with (if it does not automatically appear in the speaker info). E.g., "I will discuss joint work with Charles Xavier, where we..." Or just add a sentence to the end "This is joint work with Charles Xavier."
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Tags: writing, presentation, writing-style, abstract
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thread-37144
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37144
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Thesis: does the first page of Chapter 1 need to be in odd page?
|
2015-01-20T01:45:25.010
|
# Question
Title: Thesis: does the first page of Chapter 1 need to be in odd page?
After reading some PhD theses, I realize that the first pages of Chapter 1 are always in odd pages. I wonder if this is just a coincident or it is an unwritten rule? Thanks.
# Answer
This isn't just PhD theses: many books are formatted so that all chapters start on a right-hand page. Conventionally, all right-hand pages have odd numbers, and left-hand pages have even numbers. However, theses are often formatted single-sided, for the convenience of examiners, and so there would be no right/left distinction in that instance.
Another possibility is that page numbering sometimes uses Roman numerals for the "front matter" (all pages before the start of the first chapter), and then begins again with Arabic numerals for the "main matter". In this case, the first chapter will start with page 1, which is an odd number.
Your observation will not be the case for all theses, but it may hold when the institution's rules, or the software tools being used, follow these standard formatting principles.
> 10 votes
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Tags: thesis, formatting
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thread-37097
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37097
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Why can't friends or family members write recommendation letters for graduate admissions?
|
2015-01-19T13:48:23.367
|
# Question
Title: Why can't friends or family members write recommendation letters for graduate admissions?
When browsing their web sites, I noticed that apart from those listed academic requirements by different universities, they all require at least two reference letters from applicants, but they did not officially state that who should write those recommendation letters.
Although I have collected several recommendation letters from my former teachers, I found it was quite hard to reach my former teachers whom I had not contacted for many years.
It almost took me two months from the day I sent out my first email to the day I got enough recommendation letters from my former teachers.
It has been puzzling me why the recommendation letters should be written by school lecturers or professors.
The people who know you best are business partners, your close friends, family members like your parents, siblings, why they are not qualified to write the recommendation letters for me?
# Answer
I myself applied to graduate school quite a few years after getting my B.S. It was not easy to get recommendations from faculty who had taught me, as they had mostly retired and some had in fact died over the years. I did get one academic recommendation, but the professor admitted to me that he did not remember me and had to write his letter more or less based only on my transcript.
In my opinion, a good admissions committee should realize that situations like these occur, and be flexible about what sorts of letters they require. (I was fortunate that the admissions committee where I was applying was flexible and I did get admitted.)
That said, I would consider a lack of academic recommendations for someone who has recently been in school to be a red flag. Someone who is applying to grad school should have been a good enough student as an undergrad to have made a positive impression on at least a couple of professors. Unless you have the excuse of having been away from academia for a number of years, you should definitely have academic references.
> 2 votes
# Answer
1. Because they cannot be objective.
2. Because they do not have firsthand knowledge of your academic abilities.
3. Because they do not have the background necessary to compare you to other graduate school applicants.
Also see Kisses of Death in the Graduate School Application Process, page 2, "Harmful letters of recommendation," subsection "Inappropriate sources," and Protocol for writing a recommendation letter for someone you only know on a personal basis.
> 54 votes
# Answer
one of the links referenced above by @ff524 was actually asked by myself. The two main reasons are the following:
1. Lack of objectivity / inherent bias in favor of applicant
2. Lack of knowledge of academic discipline where candidate wants to apply.
The dilemma I faced that led me to asking the question, I was able to solve by brainstorming with my friend for other more appropriate resources to aid her. Even if the candidate is poorly qualified for the program which he or she has chosen to apply for, very few family / close friends would be willing to disclose this fact because as family, they have an inherent interest in seeing a relative succeed.
A major part of a recommendation is to assess the professional characteristics and prerequisite knowledge an applicant needs to have to be successful in the program, knowledge that family and close friends are unlikely to accurately have and objectively evaluate.
> 7 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, recommendation-letter
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thread-37126
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37126
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Trend of postdoc in theoretical computer science
|
2015-01-19T20:31:18.113
|
# Question
Title: Trend of postdoc in theoretical computer science
When looking at profiles of professors in theoretical computer science, I've noticed a trend that older professors usually go straight from PhD to assistant professor, while younger ones tend to go through 1-2 (sometimes even 3) postdocs.
Is the trend a reality, and if so, what explains it? Is it because there is nowadays more supply of PhD graduates in theoretical computer science (relative to demand), so that people need to go through more training in order to become a professor?
# Answer
This is a general trend throughout computer science. Part of it comes from a general gradual inflation in cultural expectations. I suspect that a larger amount is due to the fact that CS is no longer a rapidly growing field. For a long time (several decades), as the field expanded and matured, universities were staffing up their CS departments, and could absorb lots of graduates as professors. Now, though, the great expansion is complete in most developed countries, which means there is a more competitive market and a need to absorb graduates in holding patterns. The field has not yet adjusted well to this expectation, however, in my opinion, and does not have the well developed methods for matching graduates with postdoc positions. This, in my opinion, is one of the major challenges facing CS academia at the moment.
> 8 votes
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Tags: computer-science, postdocs
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thread-35326
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/35326
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How should one interpret a requirement that a proposal in pure math be "jargon-free?"
|
2015-01-06T08:11:46.843
|
# Question
Title: How should one interpret a requirement that a proposal in pure math be "jargon-free?"
I'm applying for a fellowship wherein they ask for a long proposal about what I'm working on (a PhD thesis in pure math). Then they advise me that some of those evaluating me will be from non-math departments, so the proposal "should be jargon-free."
Right off the bat I guess \[PSL<sub>2</sub>(O<sub>d</sub>):Γ\] \< ∞ is out of the question... I could explain what a manifold is to a mixed audience, but I think they'd need to do some homework before they followed what it might have to do with finite index subgroups of Bianchi groups (or whatever topic you might be studying). Without the "jargon" I feel like my whole language for it is gone. Afterall the reason we have so many definitions is because each one refers to a distinctly defined thing that we previously had no name for!
I can see that I could take a more historical, conceptual perspective, but I'd still be dancing around what I'm *actually doing*. It's especially hard to summarize something that is not even fully developed. I think that for people who don't study math, the only reference point is science applications, but those don't really exist here because then it would be applied math and not pure math.
I'm coming up short looking for anyone addressing this online. There are multidisciplinary tips about writing proposals, but I think the accessibility problem is at its biggest with pure math.
# Answer
> 30 votes
What I did in that position:
1. Explain some "motivation", even if it is far-fetched, from physics, economics, computer science ... for the general field of study.
2. Try to paint some geometric picture of some (very simplified) version of your field.
3. Make sure you stress that there are unsolved questions and that the solution would contribute to a general picture.
4. Give some "hard" mathematical details at the end, coming with some disclaimer, to convince any mathematicians on the committee.
Generally, I would try to give an overview of the general aim and direction of the field and stress that there are "important problems in it".
# Answer
> 37 votes
I think that the key idea here is that they want to know *why* you are doing what you are doing more than *what* you are doing.
Let's say you're diligently working towards establishing an isomorphism between soliton elves and the christmas-tree singularity. That's all well and good, but:
* There are lots of properties in the world. Why is isomorphism between soliton elves and the christmas-tree singularity an interesting property to try to establish?
* Is there a higher-level strategy to your approach than "just do lots of math until the problem is solved"?
* Why is the approach that you are taking a good one?
* If you establish this property, what are the consequences, and what comes next?
A really good and clearly written proposal should be able to have its logic grasped by pretty much any scientist, whether or not they are capable of judging its originality, plausibility, and significance in detail.
# Answer
> 13 votes
Hint: what you are doing is "non-Euclidean crystallography". Then explain somewhat aspects of those two concepts, and *why there is still research to do*. I.e. Euclidean crystallography was all worked out long ago, but ...
# Answer
> 1 votes
*I'm adding a different answer based on the advice I got from my adviser, which is the method I ended up going with since after all he is my adviser. If I do end up getting the fellowship I will most likely change my selected answer to this one (though as you'll see the other strategies suggested are actually a part of this one). Here's what he told me:*
Mainly, don't worry about the idea of it being accessible to people from other departments. When they say to write it that way and keep it "jargon-free" it really is kind of misleading compared to what they're actually looking for.
The important thing is that it look serious and professional, and writing in a more friendly tone can give the impression that the project is elementary. The evaluators (especially those not from the math department) will pay the most attention to the introductory portion of the proposal, so that is really the place to include the type of content suggested in the other answers. In particular, @J.\_Fabian\_Meier's itemized list would end up with the first 3 items done quickly at the beginning, and the 4th item would take up the remaining majority.
After setting up the general motivation and context in the first couple of pages, go ahead and get into the mathematical details as though writing for a mathematician to read it. The other people on the evaluating committee will be looking for the math representative to confirm that what you are proposing is well considered and properly formulated. Moreover the more complicated and confusing the explanation looks to them the better. After all most people not in the math world gauge mathematical sophistication by their own inability to understand it, so just go ahead and scare them!
I will add though that I think the process of trying to explain my research to a mixed audience was really good for me in developing a broader perspective, even though my adviser had me start over again after that. I think that in the future, even if I don't end up using it (like what happened this time) I might take some time to write an outreach-style exposition of my project first, just to get that farther-reaching view of things.
# Answer
> -3 votes
My only suggestion would be to describe how the work you do could eventually be applied to improve the human condition. I simply don't accept that pure mathematics can't be of benefit to humankind.
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Tags: writing, mathematics
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thread-37158
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37158
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How long does PhD Application Process take in the UK?
|
2015-01-20T06:19:25.997
|
# Question
Title: How long does PhD Application Process take in the UK?
I submitted my application with a supervisor's name fora UK university last week. I plan to apply for a scbolarship after getting an offer. The scholarship application deadline is in March. I would like to know how long it takes to get an application result in a UK uni?
# Answer
> 1 votes
This will depend on the university. You should tell them your situation.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Most PhD students in the UK will be looking for some sort of scholarship, often directly from the university. Universities will therefore base decisions around what funding they can get confirmation for. If you're applying elsewhere for funding, and you need to have a confirmed offer before applying, I would talk to whoever you submitted the application to, as they could probably make a decision on an unfunded place in time if needed, but won't necessarily do so without a reason to.
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Tags: phd, graduate-admissions, application
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thread-37110
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37110
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How do I get back into mathematics after graduating with a BSc 14 years ago?
|
2015-01-18T12:38:03.063
|
# Question
Title: How do I get back into mathematics after graduating with a BSc 14 years ago?
I've always loved maths but for numerous reasons I bounced along in general/non-profit admin/management. After maternity leave I have found myself at the bottom again and seriously thinking how can I get back on track. I'm 37 and I graduated in 2000 with a UK BSc in Math 2:1. Anyone I chat to (non-mathematicians) always say, "it will come back to you," "go for it," etc. but what do they know? What do those working in maths think? I was especially drawn to discrete maths, logic and computability. Where are the doors?
# Answer
> 13 votes
Sarah, why not just register to an MSc? It will give you an opportunity to refresh your memory and your skills and to test yourself. Also, if you'll do well, you should be able to get support letters and might even open the door to a PhD in the same place.
# Answer
> 5 votes
To do mathematics professionally you should enroll to a graduate school. I know at least two similar cases where people enrolled to a graduate school after a long gap and became successful professional mathematicians (one of them in UK).
Of course there is also a way of self-education. But the choice depends on many other factors, for example whether you need to support yourself and/or your family etc.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I think this depends very much on whether you want / need to earn money with doing mathematics or not. If you don't need to earn money with it, just go ahead and enroll to a graduate school. Though if you do need to earn money with it, you may find this pretty difficult if you start now with just a BSc.
# Answer
> 4 votes
If I'm in your shoes, then I would enroll to a computer science graduate program (first MSc and then PhD if everything goes well). Every computer science department offers courses in the areas that you're interested in. Then, if for some reason you get bored doing research, with your background, you should be able to find a job in industry.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I suggest that you start by finding someone who does discrete mathematics or something similar on the website of a nearby university. Alternatively, you could find an MSc admissions tutor. With a modest amount of luck, you will find someone friendly and helpful who will be willing to spend half an hour talking through the options with you. They will be able to ask mathematical questions to gain some sense of how much you remember, which will be required for any realistic advice.
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Tags: career-path, mathematics, time-off
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thread-37177
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37177
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Difference between research paper and scientific paper
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2015-01-20T12:04:32.897
|
# Question
Title: Difference between research paper and scientific paper
What is the difference between a research paper and a scientific paper? Does the research paper also mean a term paper at the end of your Masters?
I need to present a research paper. So does it mean I need to present a solution to an existing problem or does it mean a summary of various solutions already existing?
# Answer
A research paper is a paper containing original research. That is, if you do some work to add (or try to add) new knowledge to a field of study, and then present the details of your approach and findings in a paper, that paper can be called a research paper.
Not all academic papers contain original research; other kinds of academic papers that are not research papers are
A scientific paper is any paper on a scientific subject.
> Does the research paper also mean a term paper at the end of your Masters?
>
> I need to present a research paper. So does it mean I need to present a solution to an existing problem or does it mean a summary of various solutions already existing?
If the term paper at the end of your masters contains original research, then it's a research paper.
Depending on the policies of your department, you may or may not be required to attempt original research during your masters. In some departments, a review of existing literature may be fine. If you're not sure exactly what's required from you, you need to ask the relevant faculty or staff members in your department.
> 6 votes
# Answer
Research means that you add something new. Something you didn't know before, and ideally something no-one knew before (although at BSc. and MSc. levels the novelty requirement is generally relaxed). This can be a new investigation, or simply an analysis of a number existing papers. It must however not be a summary of existing solutions. It should go beyond that.
An important thing to remember is that in terms of assignment you are expected to demonstrate insight and understanding. To demonstrate this you need to engage with the topics, not merely summarise (which requires less understanding).
> 1 votes
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Tags: terminology
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thread-37166
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37166
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How to write an aside in a journal article?
|
2015-01-20T09:13:13.193
|
# Question
Title: How to write an aside in a journal article?
So the question is simple: What is the common way of saying something in parentheses in a journal paper like engineering or mathematics.
Assume you are talking about a mathematical approach, but in the middle you want to point out to something else, or mention an special case. I give an example:
> ...our approach is based on the following linear equations....
>
> Eq.(1).....
>
> (now here I want to make a big parenthesis or a break to discuss about something regarding the approach which is not too long to be considered as an Appendix, maybe only one paragraph )
>
> One can think of the other approach such as .....
So the question is it, how this feature is normally handled in papers, and what is the latex function to do so.
# Answer
> 11 votes
There are sometimes "remark" blocks that some authors use for discussing aspects that are of substantial interest to some readers but do not strictly belong to the core of the story that you are telling. If you are preparing your document with LaTeX, then such text blocks are called "environments".
An example is given in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science guide for preparing papers, page 4 at the bottom.
# Answer
> 4 votes
When it is the right thing to do, I am comfortable with putting a whole paragraph in a footnote and have done so. The ideal option, however, which some journals will let you do, is to have a sidebar or boxout. This has the same segregating effect as an appendix, but keeps the material closer to its reference.
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Tags: publications, writing, writing-style
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thread-36991
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36991
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Are there people who have done so much work before PhD that they get a PhD automatically?
|
2015-01-17T23:21:36.163
|
# Question
Title: Are there people who have done so much work before PhD that they get a PhD automatically?
This question addresses why it's a bad idea to try to do a lot of independent work before PhD in the hope of finishing PhD quickly.
Nevertheless, are there famous examples of people who have done so much work before PhD that they get a PhD pretty much automatically (say, 1-2 years or less)?
# Answer
The closest example I can think of is Mihai Pătraşcu. After publishing several *extremely* strong results as an undergraduate, Mihai earned an MS in one year and then a PhD in one year, all in computer science at MIT.
> 37 votes
# Answer
Ludwig Wittgenstein was awarded his PhD from Cambridge in June 1929, having enrolled as a student in January of the same year. The PhD thesis was an English translation of his *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*, which had been published in German in 1921 (under the title *Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung*).
Wittgenstein circumvented the usual rule on terms of residence, because he had previously been resident as an undergraduate student in 1911-1913; he left Cambridge in the summer of 1913 without proceeding to a degree. Further, the reason for his being awarded the PhD at all was in order to make him formally eligible to teach at the university: there was no doubt as to his abilities.
> 28 votes
# Answer
This happens, not often from super-gifted young researchers (although such do exist as outlined in other answers) but from people who are already professional researchers but do not have doctorates.
Some universities in the UK allow people like this to obtain a "PhD by publication", where a body of existing work - perhaps 3-5 high quality papers - is linked together by a (sometimes lengthy) narrative and submitted. Typically a doctorate by this route must be completed in one year rather than three. (some universities also now offer a three year "by publication" route for new researchers, but that has a different intent)
> 17 votes
# Answer
George Dantzig solved two previously unsolved statistics problems while in graduate school (without realizing it). His advisor told him that he would accept his papers as his thesis (though I'm unable to confirm that he actually did this).
> 9 votes
# Answer
In several countries in Europe (I can confirm by personal experience Spain, Austria and Sweden) there is the concept of "PhD by papers".
This means that the PhD Dissertation is a set of papers put together with a unified introduction (motivation, state of the art). Although some of these papers can be extended, they are pretty much the published version.
If you already have the papers, the whole process can take as little as 3 months.
Also I can't help to mention Honoris Causa doctorates, which are awarded by universities to people who have accomplished outstanding contributions to some field of knowledge. These are the only ones who are awarded "automatically" to somebody.
> 7 votes
# Answer
There are several types of PhD - one which is, in effect, a book, one which is, in effect, a series of papers, and one which is, in effect, a single giant paper.
The first form is common in arts and social sciences here in Ireland, and many of theses end up being published as books.
The third format was the usual format here, both in physical and biological sciences, and was often laid out as 'Introduction', 'Materials and Methods', 'Results' (usually more than one chapter), and 'Discussion'. This is falling out of favour, because it is too hard to produce papers from it.
We are moving, slowly, to the second form, which is the norm in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland ( and may be in other places too). This is a short introduction, a series of papers, or chapters in paper format, some of which have been published, possibly a linking narrative between chapters, and a final discussion section.
I've supervised one person, whose PhD was ten papers, eight published, and two or so, in draft. He was (and is) a capable and prolific researcher, who had just never got around to a PhD, and was applying for a chair. Needless to add, he got the PhD and the chair :-)
> 5 votes
# Answer
Apparently Lars Onsager (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1968) did not have a PhD when he was admitted to the faculty of Yale's Chemistry Department. Thus he was informed that he could merely submit one of his previous publications, as a formality, in order to satisfy the requirements of a doctorate. However Onsager did some original research anyway on Mathieu functions and was subsequently admitted to the doctorate.
> 5 votes
# Answer
My father got his PhD in Theoretical Physics *instead* of a diploma in Munich: they counted his diploma thesis as a PhD thesis and his defense was accordingly quite longer and with a different setup (and the relatives waiting outside the examination room were rather worried at first because he took so much longer than anybody else and then floored as he had not bothered to clue anybody in in case it did not work out). However, this must have been about 1964 or so and the respective examination regulations do no longer permit this kind of shortcut and have not done so for a long time.
So this is not more than a historical anecdote.
> 1 votes
# Answer
Schmitt found the Schmitt trigger circuit as a part of a project in his bachelors. He got a PhD for that.
> -1 votes
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Tags: phd
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thread-37102
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37102
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Should I apply for financial assistance to go to conferences?
|
2015-01-19T15:22:27.597
|
# Question
Title: Should I apply for financial assistance to go to conferences?
Many conferences offer some form of financial assistance, covering travel, registration, accommodation, or combinations thereof.
My university will only pay for one conference travel expenses over the course of my PhD.
While I live in a first-world country, I am not financially well-off. I can't easily afford to fly to conferences in my own country, let alone some of the more exciting international conferences.
A lot of conferences I am really interested in are of side-note to my research -- things like SciPy. Or conferences from related fields.
**Is it worth me applying for financial assistance in these cases?** Or is financial assistance restricted to people from developing nations, or to people researching the primary area of the conference, or to people who are submitting papers to the conference?
**Is the paperwork involved generally long and complex?** it is not worth the time to spend a week filling out forms, for a 1% chance of getting to go the a conference -- I could be spending that time on actual research.
**Are these awards highly competitive?**
# Answer
> Is it worth me applying for financial assistance in these cases? Or is financial assistance restricted to people from developing nations, or to people researching the primary area of the conference, or to people who are submitting papers to the conference?
Every conference has its own specifications for what kind of applicants (if anyone) is given preference for travel grants. Sometimes paper authors are given preferences, sometimes they are de-prioritized. Sometimes participants from underrepresented groups (whether in an academic, racial, geographic, etc. sense) are prioritized and sometimes only US citizens are eligible. Refer to the conference website for details.
> Is the paperwork involved generally long and complex? it is not worth the time to spend a week filling out forms, for a 1% chance of getting to go the a conference -- I could be spending that time on actual research.
No, it's not usually long and complex. Generally it involves some or all of the following: a statement from you on why they should give you a grant, a letter from your advisor indicating that your attendance will be to your benefit and the conferences' benefit, and an estimate of your expenses.
> Are places highly competitive?
Depends on the conference. Conferences that many people want to go to tend to be more competitive.
> 7 votes
# Answer
Another option is to get external funding for conferences. There are some programs for funding student travel to conferences, particularly (or mostly) for underrepresented minorities (including women). For instance, in Computer Science, the ACM-W offers conference scholarships to female students, for any conference. If you are a woman or minority, try searching a bit to see if you can turn up a scholarship in your field whose criteria you fit, and/or ask your advisor and other students in the department if they know of any. Even if you're not a minority, you can search a bit to see if you can find anything. These are often somewhat competitive, but the chances are usually much greater than 1%, and there isn't that much effort involved.
> 1 votes
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Tags: conference, funding, travel
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thread-37190
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37190
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How important is a rebuttal for a top conference (CS)?
|
2015-01-20T14:36:27.147
|
# Question
Title: How important is a rebuttal for a top conference (CS)?
After the first review process, could the rebuttal totally change the reviewers' minds, i.e. from accept to reject or the other way around?
# Answer
> 5 votes
> After the first review process, could the rebuttal totally change the reviewers' minds
Very likely no. The rebuttal letter is usually very short (a few hundred words, typically) in comparison to the actual paper, so it is unlikely that the few extra explanations will turn the reviewer around entirely. Also, what is true for most humans is also true for academics - once people have formed their opinion about something, it is hard to fundamentally change their mind. That is, if a reviewer hates a paper enough to vote for full reject in the first round, a few good explanations will not be enough to turn her/him around to accept.
> from accept to reject
Not unless you write something really idiotic ("I don't understand the criticism that this paper is drawing. I am sure, Prof. Bigshot did not have to listen to such criticism when he originally published the same contribution."). Also, if your paper is accepted, what is there to rebute?
> or the other way around?
As jakebeal writes, the most likely case is that the rebuttal letters are used to differentiate between a number of borderline papers for a few remaining conference slots. In my (limited) experience in the matter, nobody will even really look at rebuttal letters for papers that are already clearly accepted or rejected.
# Answer
> 12 votes
First, it's worth noting that very few computer science conferences actually allow a rebuttal: mostly, the decision you get is the final decision. In those rare cases that I have encountered that have a rebuttal period, it mainly serves to help disambiguate papers that are near the borderline. Thus, it can certainly shift the status of a paper between accept and reject (e.g., by showing that reviewer #3 really was nuts and should be discounted or by eliminating the doubt that the authors were benefiting from), but is unlikely to do so unless the paper was already quite close to the boundary.
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Tags: conference, peer-review, computer-science
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thread-37176
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37176
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Where can I publish failed research directions?
|
2015-01-20T11:46:19.363
|
# Question
Title: Where can I publish failed research directions?
Suppose I work on a difficult open problem, try several directions that haven't been tried before, work for several weeks on these directions, but finally reach a dead end.
Is there a way I can publish my work, so that future researchers know that these directions are futile and won't have to waste several weeks just to get to the same conclusion?
# Answer
> 7 votes
I think that one has to distinguish different kinds of failures, and also see if the field is experimental or not.
If you have done experiments and they show that some approach does not work, it is perfectly fine to publish that (although, as is discussed in various places, you often do not get the credit that you deserve for this).
If your work is theoretical, it is important that you can formalize the "dead ends" in a sufficient useful way; for example by proving that objects of a certain kind or with certain properties do not exist or that an (intuitive) lemma is wrong which can be shown by a counterexample.
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Tags: publications, negative-results
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thread-32256
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32256
|
No response from Professor; how should I remind him about writing a recommendation for me?
|
2014-11-25T16:30:34.397
|
# Question
Title: No response from Professor; how should I remind him about writing a recommendation for me?
I'm applying to a BS/MS program and I'm gathering recommendations. I'm an international student from China and I was transferred to my current college last year.
Two weeks ago, I went to see my professor during his office hours to ask if he could write me a recommendation letter. He agreed and told me to email him.
I sent my request a week later and it was just a general email asking for recommendation (without mentioning when I'd visited him).
I still haven't got a response from that professor. It's possible that the professor didn't recognize me in the email, since I sent that only one week after going to his office.
Should I leave him a reminder in a follow-up email? Or should I do so in person?
# Answer
I would send an email along these lines (taken from Cindy Au on Quora):
> Dear Professor \[Professor's name\],
>
> The deadline for submitting letter of recommendation for \[name of program/ fellowship\] is quickly approaching. I would like to inquire if there is still any document I can supply to make your writing easier in addition to what we discussed during office hours 2 weeks ago.
>
> I understand that this is a very hectic time in the school year and thus can't thank you enough for your time and support.
>
> Respectfully yours,
>
> \[Your name + ideally a link to some website containing your photo\]
> 19 votes
# Answer
My experience was that professors tend to take long time to write recommendations and many of them just forget that you requested one. I would send him an email then visit him a few days later if he doesn't reply. You need to give many warnings and reminders or otherwise you will not get it.
> 7 votes
# Answer
Here is a useful and ethical problem free hack for emails in academia or any place where emails are used a lot:
Send your email at the right time - Not after dinner time so that next day when the person you are trying to contact opens the email in the morning and yours is under 1000 other emails... So I would say send it around the time where workday starts or around lunch. Then the chances of your email being in the top 10 and visible are much higher.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Here is a useful hack for emails in academia:
Email your professor with a subject line about his research. Pick something about their research that intrigues you and ask a pointed question.
Then remind them you are also waiting for their response regarding writing a letter of recommendation. The professor may have decision paralysis when weighing other tasks they have against writing a letter. They may not have even closely read your request. They may have thought about getting to it later, but later may never be. Try this solution as it will get them to read your email. It's better if you do a bit of research regarding their work to make it sincere.
> -5 votes
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Tags: etiquette, recommendation-letter, email
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thread-37175
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37175
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Can I do a PhD without MSc?
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2015-01-20T11:31:49.040
|
# Question
Title: Can I do a PhD without MSc?
I am currently an undergraduate student in Turkey. I will graduate from genetics department and I would like to do a PhD without MSc in abroad. However my GPA sucks ( probably it will be 2.5 or 2.6 out of 4 ).
I have done my summer internships in Germany and America. I am very good in laboratory and I think I have got enough knowledge to do a PhD in genetics. My English level is upper-intermediate and I definitely have good references ( I have talked with 4 people, they are all Prof. and they all said that they would give very good references ).
But I am still concerned about my GPA. What do you think, can I be accepted to a PhD program?
Also, can I apply for both MSc and PhD or will they think that I am a fickle person and don't accept me for neither of them?
# Answer
Some places in continental Europe can accept people with BSc but without MSc (but most - don't). In UK and US, MSc is a part of PhD, so typically you do don't need one to start.
But you ALWAYS need to consult a particular university/institute, as rules vary (and especially with treating foreign diplomas).
However, if your "GPA sucks" then, unless you have a strong research track (i.e. strong recommendation letters from your research internships, published papers) special exceptions may by unlikely.
> 2 votes
# Answer
Written from my perspective and potentially varying in different countries but...
It is certainly *possible* to do a PhD without doing a MSc (I'm currently coming to the end of my PhD at a UK university and I applied straight from undergraduate). In my experience it is unusual though, possibly for good reason. You don't say why you don't want to do a Masters, but it's probably worth pointing out that if you are able to get a good MSc then it is likely to greatly help both your chances of getting a PhD and your academic development. The learning curve from undergraduate to PhD without a MSc can be a steep one, particularly in terms of managing your own time and activities.
If you have decent undergraduate grades (mine were ok but certainly nothing special), experience in a research environment and can convince whoever is making the decision about the application that you will be able to work well **independently** then I don't think there are any definite barriers against getting on a PhD. You may however find it difficult to compete with other applicants who have Masters degrees, since they have more definite proof of their ability to do independent, focussed research.
I'd suggest it's worth applying to PhD's if you feel that they are a good fit for both your interests and your experience, provided they don't absolutely require a MSc (for funding purposes etc). The worst that can happen is being turned down and you get some practice crafting applications. Obviously there is a time cost to this however so I'd advise being selective with your choices, only applying where you feel you have a real chance. This may also allow you to apply to some MSc programmes without having to worry too much about conflicting applications.
Hope that helps.
> 1 votes
# Answer
In the US, students often go straight from a BS to a Ph.D. But many graduate schools e.g. UC Berkeley have a college- or university-wide minimum GPA of 3.0. This has been discussed a bit on a previous SE thread: Minimum GPA?
The bottom line is that with a 2.5 or 2.6 GPA, you'll be ineligible for many PhD programs and you will not be a strong candidate for the others. Great letters can compensate for a 3.2 or 3.3 GPA, but rarely if ever will help much below 3.0. In your case, a masters degree may be a necessary step to partially compensate for the undergraduate grade point while building up research experience that will make you a more competitive candidate.
> 1 votes
# Answer
In the US, its quite common to go from BS to PhD. When I entered grad-school for a masters degree most of the other students assumed I was a PhD student.
The general consensus I found in grad-school was that the university preferred PhD students as they had committed for 3-5 years of doing research for very little pay, and the ones that couldn't cut it could "drop into" a masters program. Master's students (like myself) had difficultly finding assistantships as they were "taking them away" from PhD students.
While a low GPA is not good, you can make up for it by getting great GRE scores and making sure your letters of recommendation are super. Not every PhD student has a 4.0 GPA coming in. If you have good recommendations, I would consider applying to a university as a PhD student (many schools will not allow you to apply to 2 different programs).
Especially consider applying to schools your recommenders work for or closely with. Also consider trying to get a full-time position at one of your internships where you'd work closely with researchers. This will allow you to strengthen your application for next year if you are not accepted.
> 0 votes
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Tags: phd, masters, gpa
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thread-37165
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37165
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Trust issues with my PhD advisor, is it worth fixing or can I get out?
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2015-01-20T08:15:19.953
|
# Question
Title: Trust issues with my PhD advisor, is it worth fixing or can I get out?
I am a math PhD student considering changing universities. I have suspicions that my supervisor has not been very honest with me since I told him that I considered changing universities (and therefore supervisors) because of shift in interests. He got angry with me, told me that it would bring bad reputation to the research group and that I can't just leave after 1 year.
In a conversation I mentioned a university, in which there is a professor, call him professor M, whose work interests me. My supervisor said that professor M is the only one in his field in the university (apparently with the intent of discouraging me from trying to apply to that university). I looked up the website of professor M's research group, which seems to tell a different story (plenty of PhD students, at least one post doc). I found this a bit suspicious. Moreover I recently realized that my supervisor has coathored an article with an emeritus professor, who is in the university, who has worked on the same field, although not part of the research group of M. The "research group" in my university is not that active itself.
When I told him that I want to consider alternatives he told me that the doctoral programme is collecting information about PhD students (which was true), and that he needed to know whether I was part of the group or not. He gave me 3 days to decide whether to stay or leave the doctoral program. I asked the coordinator of the program about this, and he told me that the list in question changes all the time and that it is not nearly as serious matter as my supervisor claimed. It should be noted that my supervisor is notoriously bad at bureucratic/adminstrative university matters.
I suppose in all the above cases it is possible that the explanation is something less malicious, such as ignorance or misunderstanding. In any case I am not in good terms with my supervisor and I don't think we trust each other very much.
The dilemma is that the funding is good and secured, and that the alternatives are abroad (and uncertain).
Could the situation be worth fixing? Should I run for my life? Is there a risk that if I try to change universities he will refuse to write a recommendation letter or write a mild one (he supervised my Master's thesis)?
# Answer
> 24 votes
Faculty are human beings. We might be given only one slot a year for a doctoral student to work with us and we thus invest (or we feel we invest) an incredible amount of time into the students in our lab. We aren't paid extra for this, which perhaps exacerbates the feeling of ownership.
While I don't know you or your advisor, I would find it easy to believe that his feelings were hurt by your desire to shift PhD programs. You are basically taking his investment in you (which you may feel is minimal, but he may feel is considerable) and throwing it in the trash.
Managing people's feelings are part of being a professional academic. You might as well practice being good at it. Some day you'll be on the other end of the equation -- being told by a student that you had high hopes for that they no longer value working with you and that they want to move to a different program altogether. It's all part of the karmic cycle of being faculty.
Now, with that preamble out of the way. You need to let your advisor know that your shifting programs isn't seen as any rejection at all of his lab or his style of mentoring you, etc. etc. (even if part of this might be true); but rather that you are seeking something different at the other program. It's the stereotypical "It's not you, it's me" form of a break up.
# Answer
> 16 votes
Besides, @Robokaren's excellent answer, I find some problematic things on your question.
> He told me ...that he needed to know whether I was part of the group or not.
This is a very just demand on his part. So the real question is, do you actually want to leave or not? In any job (including your PHD) or in any relationship, your colleagues, supervisors (jobs) or your friends, partners (relationship) must know if they can count on you or not. It is unfair to actually make him wait until you make up your mind.
I also do not know, what did you expect from your advisor when you told him you wanted to go elsewhere. He gave you his advice (the fact that only one professor / faculty member works there on your preferable research area) and suggested that you should stay in your current university. That means he thinks highly of you which is always a good thing. And how did you react? You believed that he lied to you, because you saw on the other university's website there is a postdoc who is working there with your "dream" professor. If this is your definition of lie, you are sadly wrong. Also, the fact that he later asked you if you would finally stay or not, is probably an indication that he will not stand in your way (by not providing a reference letter) of you leaving.
Either way, as @JeffE would probably say, the relationship with your advisor is broken (at least from your side, since it is obvious you do not trust the guy anymore). So, I do not think in a little while you will really have any other real choice but to leave. In any case, make a decision and make it fast, before burning any more bridges with your current advisor.
# Answer
> -1 votes
I don't trust your advisor either, but I also, like you, realize the importance of stable funding. I would try to get along with the advisor. Much of this might be related to the advisor's ego if it's a big one. Talk of leaving could have resulted in a nice big bruise.
Keep in mind as well that bosses are always in an adversarial relationship with their "employees". It's the nature of the beast in the workplace.
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Tags: phd, advisor, interpersonal-issues
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thread-37152
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https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37152
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How do instructors grade a one-person project when everyone else in the class worked in pairs?
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2015-01-20T03:33:49.127
|
# Question
Title: How do instructors grade a one-person project when everyone else in the class worked in pairs?
I shall note up front, I am myself a student looking for insight from any lecturers or professors who have had a class with this situation and what I might expect in my case.
I am on a "Computer Engineering" integrated masters degree for which much of the assessment is done via assessed projects and coursework. Most of these projects are undertaken in groups of two where students are expected to share out work and each create a logbook also which documents their progress and individual contributions.
In a particular unit my class has an odd number of students, which after being split into pairs (using a random process) left me as the "odd one out". I discussed this briefly with the unit lecturer who felt that it would be inappropriate to create a group of three as there would then not be sufficient work for each student to demonstrate mastery over the subject.
I agreed that I would attempt the project on my own (admittedly there were not any other obvious options). Fortunately I have significant prior experience in the subject area and have therefore been able to keep up with the workload despite working alone. However I cannot help but feel that I would be able to accomplish a more polished and complete piece of work if I were not working alone.
I am therefore concerned that my work may not reflect what I would otherwise have been able to accomplish in terms of feature richness and polish and fear that this could negatively affect my grade in the unit. Note that I have completed all the basic requirements of the project fully but feel that the lightened workload from having a partner would have allowed me to explore and research in greater depth as well as complete a range of interesting optional features which would have been credit-worthy.
**Firstly, what should I expect in terms or grading?** Should I expect that they will grade my work exactly as they would that of a normal team of two, or are they likely to take into account the situation?
**Secondly, should I try and talk to my lecturer and see if there is some way I can express my mastery of the more advanced areas without having the time to implement them in the project?** or is this likely to come across merely as begging for lenient marking? If I were to have such a talk is there anything specific I could say to clearly express my concerns as I have stated here?
My institution does not appear to have any specific policy regarding uneven group sizes such as this case and as it has not happened before (as least in my classes) so the lecturer has not made any statements of how they will treat this situation.
**TL;DR:**
I am the last odd numbered student in a class for a pair project and am therefore working alone. What can I expect regarding grading and are there any actions I can take to express my mastery of the topic area to my lecturer without enough time to implement all the features in my project to prove this?
# Answer
First, I'm surprised the instructor didn't ask for a volunteer to work alone. In a reasonably-sized class with pair projects, there's almost always at least one student who would rather not work in groups or pairs. It seems a lot of this angst might have been avoided had the professor simply polled for a volunteer. Is it too late to ask for groups to be rearranged? He could ask for a volunteer, and you could be paired up with that person's previous partner.
(Then again, maybe those students who would rather work alone are the very students who need group experience the most – and maybe that's why your professor opted to do this at random.)
Getting to the crux of your question, though, I would first study the assignment carefully and imagine how things might be different if you were working in a team of two. Would you be able to divide up the work? Brainstorm ideas? Once you have something concrete in mind, I'd reengage with the professor and ask for more clarification about how you will be graded.
In other words, if you simply say, "Will I be graded more leniently?" that might be regarded as premature grade grubbing. However, if you say something more specific, like:
> I noticed this project has a lot of work, and I think I might be at a disadvantage working alone instead of in a team. For example, if I had a partner, we might divide this up, so that he was working on the interface while I was writing the guts of the program. If I have trouble getting this assignment completed on-time, will you take into account the fact that I had to work alone?
then I think you'll get your professor to think objectively about your disadvantage and answer accordingly.
It's generally best to be up-front about potential hardships that might affect the quality of your work, and to do so early. Otherwise, you risk coming across as a whining procrastinator. However, your question is reasonable, and I think it's best to get an answer sooner rather than later.
> 7 votes
# Answer
Whenever I have presented people with a "pairs" assignment I have always dealt with the odd person by making a group of three not by having that person work alone. Part of the point of the project is teamwork.
If your professor doesn't care about teamwork then I suggest you cut the project in half and do half. If there is no teamwork requirement then the assignment is simply to do half the work and turn it in. I would actually go one step further (smarter). Have the professor break it in half and choose which half you want to do.
Now when I had three people in a group and it was a large project my thinking was that each doing 33.3% was much closer to 50% than one doing 100%. I would often add a small piece of work for the group that had three people but nothing that would have pulled that group into the range of doing 150%. I felt that having the dynamic of another person was probably work in itself.
> 5 votes
# Answer
You should arrange special grading expectations with your instructor. You should not be expected to do more than one person's work. You should get this in writing from your instructor.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Some things to consider:
1. If you want to go to grad school, the professor's opinion of you might matter more than the grade you get in the class. When he writes your letter of reference, do you want him to say "this guy asked for special grading, which I guess is fair, but still a bit annoying" or "this guy did the work of 2 people and still built a better project than everyone else?" You want to show that you can thrive even when put at a disadvantage.
2. In most group projects, one person does substantially more work than everyone else. Usually the strongest student, or the person who cares the most. You have a lot of prior knowledge of the material, so there's a good chance that if you *were* assigned a partner, you'd end up doing all the work anyway (or spend a lot of effort trying to convince your partner to do his share).
Even if your partner wants to help, he probably won't be able to implement the advanced material at the same level that you would. (You could teach him, but that usually takes more time than doing it yourself.) And then you'd end up with results that are just as bad, except this time you won't have a good excuse for them.
> 1 votes
# Answer
Firstly, I'm glad you didn't agree to this situation and instead it was imposed upon you. The professor imposed it upon you regardless of the method he used. That fact could help you in any formal complaint. Remember, this extra work is also taking time away from any other work or activities. It is negatively impacting you.
**"Should I expect that they will grade my work exactly as they would that of a normal team of two, or are they likely to take into account the situation?"**
You should absolutely expect, and if need be demand, that the professor take into account the real situation.
**Secondly, should I try and talk to my lecturer and see if there is some way I can express my mastery of the more advanced areas without having the time to implement them in the project?**
This is tricky. Before I would have any conversation with the professor, I would try to find out anything I could about the quality of the other students' work. For example, if your work is of better quality than multiple of the other pairs of students, you may not need to say anything at all. Judging by your posted statements, I'd lay money on the likelihood that you have a damn good product to turn in to the prof. Then again, at this point it might be beneficial to show him what you have and ask him if he sees any serious area for improvement...and throw in something innocuous about not having had the time to perform an in-process review given your situation. "Am I on the right track" kind of thing.
> 1 votes
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Tags: coursework, grading
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thread-36766
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36766
|
What should I do if my master's advisor used a figure from my thesis in a publication without citation or acknowledgment?
|
2015-01-14T12:42:23.890
|
# Question
Title: What should I do if my master's advisor used a figure from my thesis in a publication without citation or acknowledgment?
A year ago, I finished my Master's degree and ended 6 months of working for an incredibly manipulative and demanding supervisor. We started working on a publication of my Master's results, which is awaiting final approval (post-corrections) at the journal we submitted to.
Last week, I read a paper this supervisor had published recently, which had a figure taken directly from my Master's dissertation. Our in-press article wasn't cited, and I wasn't co-author, referenced, or even mentioned in the acknowledgements. No direct reference was given for the figure, but the text surrounding it made it sound as if it had come from another article by my supervisor from last year.
It seems pretty clear to me that this is plaigarism - we worked on this project together, certainly, but the final product was a result of my work and their guidance.
My problem is, I don't know how to deal with it. We are currently co-authoring a paper, so I don't want to cause a rupture. I also plan to continue working in this field, and would like to avoid having a senior researcher and previous supervisor to be angry. At the same time, I don't want them to get away with using my work, and taking all the credit for it.
I will certainly tell them that I feel uncomfortable with how they used my work, but realistically, what can I expect/hope to happen here?
UPDATE - the figure in question is an overview of a simulation model I created, so is pretty much the core part of my Master's work.
# Answer
> 12 votes
The issue here is somewhat thorny. Relative to you, however, there is unfortunately not much benefit in any event, because citing the figure is not normally enough to merit authorship. All you would have is one extra citation, which would likely get "lost," because the publication with which it corresponds doesn't exist yet.
So I would make sure that your *new* paper cites the old paper, since it is the first to publish the figure. I would also make sure that you mention *politely* the concerns that you have over the use of the figure without citing.
# Answer
> 10 votes
One possible approach is to discuss this by presenting it as a favor to you (e.g. "I'd have been neat if that number could have been cited to this thesis, because that would help me have more citations a the beginning of my research career") as opposed to accusatory approach of "You ripped me off".
# Answer
> 3 votes
It's hard to fix the past... Rather think of the future... I would (and in past case have) let the person know that you feel you should have either been a coauthor on the paper (preferred outcome usually) or been acknowledged as contributing to the paper (specifically all non-original figures must be acknowledged as to source for copyright reasons and there is the right to be known as author and originator in relation to all aspects of the paper you have contributed to).
If you are one of many students this supervisor has in this area, and/or the figure just encapsulates ideas that your supervisor has provided, then the shoe could be on the other foot, and the supervisor may not even be aware that you feel ownership of the figure (or other aspects of the "joint research"). In your thesis/papers you need to acknowledge where ideas have originated from other people - in a thesis this is likely to be restricted to a specific acknowledgements section.
If a figure is likely to be needed in future papers, I tend to note that it is copyright by me and reproduced with permission in all papers, and thus copyright is not transferred to the first publisher of such a paper. When I circulate things (even just charts and figures) I sometimes add a copyright if it is something that I am particularly proud of and/or want to retain control of.
If I were in your shoes my aim would be to ensure that I was consulted about future papers (given the opportunity to be an author, or acknowledged, or to waive my rights).
# Answer
> -1 votes
I have had a couple of similar cases before. This is a form of both plagiarism and copyright breach (these two are not necessarily always the same). They had to do 2 things before using your figure in their article: (1) cite you; (2) Provide the journal with the written permission obtained from you, for using your figure in their paper.
The failure to do any of the above 2 items is problematic. In **theory**, you can (1) write to the journal and ask for the retraction of the plagiarizing article after providing sufficient evidence. (2) write to the publisher and ask the same. (3) write to the authors and ask them to send an erratum to the journal (or ask the journal to ask them). (4) If they did not do anything, sue the irresponsible parties.
What happens in **practice** though? An article stole a figure and even a table of my article. Interestingly enough, they had not even bothered to re-write the content of my table, but had only take a snapshot of it, and had put it exactly as is, in their own article. They had not stated at any point of their article that those figure/table were picked from my article, nor had they contacted me previously. So I contacted the journal for many times, to no avail. Then I contacted the authors (there was no independent publisher to contact). They did not respond as well! So if I wanted to sue them, I had to fly abroad, and I doubt the court in their country had any stringent rules against such copyright breaches.
**So in practice, there is usually little you can do, as journals heavily tend to sweep these issues under the carpet.** Another article had plagiarized most of the content of my article, without citing me. I contacted every one (journal, publisher, authors)... After numerous emails, the journal told me they will not retract it, and if I want to sue them, I can go to the court in their country!!!!
---
I now understand the complexity of the case, in which the author of the copied figure is also the author of the original figure.
Because **the journal owns the copyright** of the article content, not the authors themselves. So eventhough the author can claim that (s)he has used their *own* figure twice, the journal still has the right to sue them, since (s)he has breached the copyright of the journal.
But if the original article was an **open access** one, I think it is fine to use the image twice as its copyright belongs to the author (although it is not a good practice to use repeated content).
# Answer
> -1 votes
You could make an anonymous tip about your case to Retraction Watch.
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Tags: advisor, ethics, plagiarism
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thread-37224
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37224
|
How to deal with Educational Testing Service (ETS) inefficiency and awful post-exam service?
|
2015-01-21T00:11:55.147
|
# Question
Title: How to deal with Educational Testing Service (ETS) inefficiency and awful post-exam service?
I took the TOEFL test more than three months ago (outside US). Well before my deadlines. But I haven't received the paper scores yet and I shall mail them to the admission committees as an obligatory in my application package. Now, I'm running against the clock. Although I contacted customer support at ETS, the only thing I got is copy-pasted information of mailing time (allow 4-6 weeks abroad...) with a we-can-do-nothing-else statement.
This is totally upsetting. I don't want to lose my applications (and the money I have spent to get all my document translated, legalized, etc.) because of such kafkian situation. Also, it doesn't make sense to order extra reports; probably, they will get lost again.
Has anybody else passed throughout this predicament with ETS? What did you do? What should I do?
# Answer
> 3 votes
I faced similar problem during my undergrad application process. The admission officer told me to fax them a print of my score report from my online account. You can try asking the admission office at the institute that you are applying to and see if there is any way you can self-report the score before the official report arrives. Good luck!
# Answer
> 0 votes
There is a probable cause for the mail delay - weather.
I am a retiree from the US and I currently live in Taiwan. In the past month or so, I have experienced mail delays between the US and my current residency. Usually the first class air mail (US Postal Service) between the US and Taiwan is about 2 weeks ( sometimes 3 weeks at most). But, recently the time is about a month. And I haven't received couple of mails from US that were supposed to be delivered in the last week of December last year.
I mailed something to the US the week before X'mas. The receiving ends said they have not got it. I had to check with the local post office, their response was that this was due to the bad weather in December and January in the US.
My advice is: contact the admission offices to see if there is another way to send in the official transcript. Even if you receive the score report today, please consider using express mail to send to the universities because it could take another month or so for delivery. (I do know express delivery is expensive, bit it's worth it if you have good chance to get to a good university). Good luck!
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Tags: graduate-admissions, international-students, deadlines, language-exams, toefl
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thread-36661
|
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/36661
|
What are duties for jobs like Professor, Lecturer, Research Scientist, Research Assistant, and Research Fellow in the UK (Oxford)?
|
2015-01-12T05:58:18.877
|
# Question
Title: What are duties for jobs like Professor, Lecturer, Research Scientist, Research Assistant, and Research Fellow in the UK (Oxford)?
In Oxford's job website (here and here), I see positions including Professor, University Lecturer, Departmental Lecturer, Research Scientist, Research Assistant, and Research Fellow. What are the differences between the roles/duties and salary between these?
These job titles are discussed in answers to Translating British faculty titles into American equivalents but only in terms of career progression, without much detail as to roles, duties, and salaries.
# Answer
> 4 votes
It think it does vary from institution to institution. From the perspective of my University (and from my own job hunting in the UK), I would make the following observations. Salary pay points correspond to my University's interpretation of the national HE pay scale http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2210.
* "research assistant" implies fixed-term contract work on a research project (research only), where the postholder does not hold a PhD (and is not close to completing one), pay point 23.
* "research fellow" implies fixed-term contract work on a research project (research only), with the postholder holding a PhD. Pay point 29 as starting salary; pay point 37 for a "senior research fellow", who might also be expected to supervise students and write grant proposals.
* "lecturer" implies a permanent contract with the postholder expected to conduct research, teach, and write grant proposals. Pay point 37 starting salary; pay point 44 for a "senior lecturer", as a career progression and probably managing multiple PhD/PostDocs and bringing in more grant money.
* "professor" implies a senior academic, probably starting at pay point 51, managing multiple staff and working on large grants.
I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but it does seem about right for the University where I work and the others I have applied to.
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Tags: job, united-kingdom, titles
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