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thread-2 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2 | As a computational chemist, which online resources are available for Ph.D. level jobs? | 2012-02-14T20:26:22.683 | # Question
Title: As a computational chemist, which online resources are available for Ph.D. level jobs?
Which online resources are available for job search at the Ph.D. level in the computational chemistry field?
# Answer
> 4 votes
One of the best resources for jobs in computational chemistry (not limited to PhD level positions) is the job section of the Computational Chemistry List.
Another place where I've regularly seen relevant postings is the "Computational Chemists" group on LinkedIn.
# Answer
> 1 votes
If you are based in Europe, or would consider a position in Europe, I strongly recommend the CCP5 mailing-lists for this purpose. I also second the advice about the Computational Chemistry List, these are the two places I post job openings for my own group.
In the UK, all academic positions open are posted to jobs.ac.uk, making it really invaluable for job search.
Finally, some journals have a job listings section as well, such as Nature jobs, Science Careers. The learned society of your field might also have job listing, as e.g. the Royal Society of Chemistry or the ACS’s Chemistry jobs listing.
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Tags: phd, job-search, online-resource, chemistry
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thread-3428 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3428 | What are the reasons for not using title and designation in publications? | 2012-09-26T07:12:14.513 | # Question
Title: What are the reasons for not using title and designation in publications?
In primary publications, such as journals or conference proceedings, it is a common practise not to use the title or designation of authors in the front-matter.
What are the most compelling reasons for not including those information? Or in other words, are there any disadvantages?
# Answer
> 6 votes
I suspect to some extent it has to do with the wide range of available titles and honorifics out there. Moreover, this can lead to rather strange credits, such as the German system, where a title such as "Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr.rer.nat. Dr.(h.c.) Dr.(h.c.) Dr.(h.c.)" is not as uncommon as it should be.
Keeping to names makes things more egalitarian. If needed, you can always look up a person's credentials. (It also helps to keep things consistent, and easier to track authors and cite papers, if you don't have to deal with titles as well!)
# Answer
> 4 votes
I don't see this as a specific issue about titles, but rather a broader issue about how much information to provide about authors. In principle, there's an enormous amount one could say: for example, one could append complete CVs to the end of each published paper. Clearly, it's important to draw the line somewhere. The journals I'm familiar with typically do this by focusing on two issues: identifying authors unambiguously (people sometimes share the same name, but almost never the same name and department), and providing contact information. Titles and credentials bring up the question of status, and that's tricky because there are many different signs of status. Journals occasionally designate status awarded by the publisher (e.g., IEEE fellows or members of the US National Academy of Sciences), but it can be tricky to go much broader than that, since you need a good explanation of why you are publicly recognizing one person's particular type of status and not another's.
One option I've occasionally seen is to include a brief bio (typically one paragraph) of each author at the end of the paper. This is a convenient way to learn more about the authors, and it lets them each highlight whatever information they think is appropriate.
# Answer
> 1 votes
My experience is that professional fields (e.g., engineering and medicine) title are used more frequently in everyday life and are included in publications (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine and IEEE) while in non-professional fields (e.g., math and biology) titles are used less frequently and not included in publications (e.g., Ann Math and Cell).
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Tags: publications
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thread-3445 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3445 | What should/can I do on finding an error in a published article? | 2012-09-26T15:34:16.337 | # Question
Title: What should/can I do on finding an error in a published article?
Recently I found a paper that has a number of typographical errors, esp in equations. Should one notify the authors or the publishers on such issues? How do the approach change if the article is somewhat aged?
When should/can one write a 'Comments on ...' article? How different is an Errata and a 'Comments on ...' article?
# Answer
Here's what I would suggest:
* First, alert the authors to the issues. Wait to see how they respond, or do not respond. But in all cases, they should be the first you write to.
* If the issues do not severely impact the correctness of the work or its utility, stop there. It's probably not worth making a fuss about something most readers will either not use, or can easily correct themselves.
* If you publish something on the topic yourself, especially if you build on the authors' equations or otherwise use them, you should make a note of the issue in your article.
* Finally, if you believe the issue is important and/or the equations are widely used, you should contact the journal's editor and ask for guidance.
Errata are “authored” by the original authors. Publisher's corrections also exist, when the responsibility for the issue (typo in equation, misprint in figures, etc.) is that of the publisher.
> 16 votes
# Answer
To answer your last question, an errata is always (almost always?) written by the authors of the article, whereas a "Comments on..." article can be written by anyone. However, to write a "Comments on..." article, which in my experience are rare, you must have a substantial new idea. It's not enough to say "I found typos in the original paper".
If the **original paper contains a proof that is incorrect**, and **you have a proof that is correct**, that could be enough for a paper. In this case you probably also need to provide counterexamples to the original proof. Similarly, if you can explain why the original data analysis was seriously flawed, and you have correct data analysis, that might be a paper.
> 13 votes
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Tags: publications, journals, errors-erratum
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thread-3446 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3446 | What is the criterion to include an institution as “affiliation” in an author list? | 2012-09-26T15:49:42.970 | # Question
Title: What is the criterion to include an institution as “affiliation” in an author list?
While looking at this *Science* paper, I noticed that a few of the authors have a lot of affiliations: the first author has five affiliations, including four different departments or programs at Harvard University, and the last author has seven, all of them at Harvard University:
I consider it immoderate, as I cannot imagine that each author has such strong links to so many workplaces (imagine what their typical week looks like, changing desk every two hours!). However, it was published in a highly-respected (and highly-watched) journal, meaning it probably is an accepted practice.
So, what is the criterion for affiliations? How can one end up with 7 different departments at the same university?
# Answer
The general criterion is that you must list your primary affiliation or any institution that is providing essential funding/resources, and you may list any institution that has given you a relevant appointment (which could be called many things if it's not a real job: affiliate faculty, courtesy appointment, visiting position, consulting faculty, etc.).
In practice, the way it works is that some people collect enormous numbers of affiliations through great popularity: every department wants these people to come and interact, so they all offer appointments. (When this happens, it's hard for the popular people to turn down the invitations, out of fear of causing offense, so they end up with a lot of affiliations.) Other people deliberately try to accumulate as many appointments as possible, to show off how popular or interdisciplinary they are, and they achieve this by going around asking for appointments. (And they often get them, since even if you aren't excited about someone, it's easier to give them a meaningless affiliation than to turn down their request.)
The net result is that there's no way of knowing what it means in any given case, without more information.
> 14 votes
# Answer
A department is paying something? If YES then the name is on the paper, it's that simple. I think that, one day, I will have to put the name of the coffee shop close to my home since it participated a lot in enhancing the quality of my research.
> 12 votes
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Tags: publications, affiliation
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thread-3420 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3420 | How can I do a literature review efficiently? | 2012-09-25T15:57:00.170 | # Question
Title: How can I do a literature review efficiently?
For a new project I want to compile a literature review to determine the state of the art and possible approaches to start with.
Last time I adhered to the following scheme, but it felt very inefficient.
1. Search scholar.google with relevant keywords. (3-20 papers)
2. Read this first set of papers and look for main publications most of these papers link to.
3. Use scholar and webofknowledge to collect all papers, which cite the main publications. (30-200 papers)
4. Go through all the papers ordered by assumed importance or newness and note used methods, results, strengths and weaknesses in a spreadsheet till running out of time or motivation.
What system do you have to do literature review and what would you recommend me?
**\[update\]**
After posting my question I found Am I reading enough of the scientific literature? Should I read for breadth or depth? which talks, as I see it, more about how to read scientific publications.
I am more interested in advice on how to make sure one has found all the important publications and how to prioritize one's reading list. One advice I got some time ago was to start with new publications fist and then to work yourself back in time. Is this a good advice? How do you do it?
# Answer
If you know that the relevant literature is mostly in one community, then the approach you've described works fairly well. It may be "inefficient" if there are lots of related papers, but (to use computer science jargon), it's efficient in the size of the output :)
I have found that finding a **recent** survey helps a lot, because it taxonomizes the literature and provides many backward pointers (as well as forward pointers via papers that cite it).
But ultimately, the best test is if you start coming across the same papers in references over and over again. At that point you can feel a little more confident that you're converging.
Some specific tips:
* Look carefully at **how** papers are cited. That provides clues on how to prioritize your searching.
* Learn how to skim a paper really quickly to see its main contribution, which will indicate whether it merits further interest.
* If certain researchers keep popping up, go to their websites to see if other papers might be relevant (or if they have a review article that Google search didn't reveal)
* Look at venues where papers are typically getting published, and look at recent issues of those journals/conferences to see if you've missed something.
Apart from that, going across communities is trickier, and often requires some luck, or the right keywords. Again, some knowledge of the researchers in the area helps: odds are that if the topic spans disciplines, at least some of the researchers involved also span disciplines and can point (via their work) to new paths to explore (see the above note about conferences)
> 36 votes
# Answer
More of a tip than a full answer but worth adding non-the-less: try starting off by reading 'review articles' rather than 'papers of original research'. The advantages of doing this are
* They provide an historical overview in most cases, useful for getting context
* They are more accessible (in terms of readability)
* They are longer, containing more information, with more thorough explanations
* They tend to be less biased
> 10 votes
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Tags: productivity, literature, reading, literature-review
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thread-3450 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3450 | How to review a paper for originality? | 2012-09-26T20:50:34.847 | # Question
Title: How to review a paper for originality?
Originality with timeliness is among the most important criteria for a paper to get published.
Many a times when we are reviewing a paper, we are faced with dilemma as to how much of it is original, how much of it is based on another paper, and how much of it is just repetition in a slightly different context. Also, at times papers cater to interdisciplinary and cross-area and it may seem that the idea is original.
1. What preparation does the reviewer need to have in order to review a paper justly?
2. How do you judge the originality of a paper?
# Answer
> 24 votes
I've reviewed more than 50 papers, and my preparation to review them has varied widely. At least a few of them have drawn heavily on papers I've written. Generally, these are extending my results. Typically, I ask myself: **What does this paper add?** Is it something I would have thought of easily or not? If yes, why didn't I include it in my paper?
In contrast, I've also **reviewed some papers that I was not well prepared for.** They were in my general field, but in a subarea that I hadn't worked in. **These papers took a lot more work.** (**Up to 10x as long** for me to review as a paper in an area where I'm very familiar.) For papers in an area that's new to me, I often have to look up (and skim) at least a few of the references from the introduction to judge whether the paper is original. **Originality has at least two very different levels**. The easier one to achieve is: (1) this **result is new**, and doesn't follow simply from anything previous. The much harder one is, (2) this **technique is fundamentally new** and produces interesting results. If the results are interesting, most journals are happy to publish articles of type (1). Articles of type (2) are much rarer, and can potentially open entire new fields.
**tl;dnr:**
1. ***Preparation***: you need to *either* know the subarea well *or* be willing to read a lot to learn about it.
2. ***Originality***: What papers does it draw on? How likely is it that a reader of those would be able to write this paper? Answering this question may require you to read a lot of background.
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Tags: publications, peer-review
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thread-3112 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3112 | Are academic book buyers legitimate? | 2012-09-05T20:51:18.153 | # Question
Title: Are academic book buyers legitimate?
I have recently been receiving number of visits from "academic book buyers" that are looking to buy books that I no longer want. It is never stated outright but they seem to be looking mainly for evaluation copies of textbooks. At least 2 of the cards that I have been given indicate that they are "recycling" the books, although what this means is not clear.
Are these book buyers benefitting or exploiting academia?
# Answer
> 13 votes
I agree with Yves that they are selling the books back to students. Then I think the economics works out as follows:
The faculty selling the books and the book buyers benefit a lot. The publishers stand to lose some money, since reselling the books hurts the market for new ones. They presumably pass some or all of this cost on to students through price increases, so the students also lose money in aggregate. Now the question becomes what price the books are being resold at. If they are resold cheaply (used book prices), then the students who buy the resold books benefit (they get near-new copies at cheap prices), at the expense of the other students. If the books are resold at new prices, then no students benefit.
# Answer
> 10 votes
Paper, printing, and binding (PPB) are typically a small fraction of the retail price of the book. It depends on a lot of factors, but as a ballpark figure, if you take the total cost of PPB for the nth edition of a big-selling 3-color college freshman textbook, and divide by the number of copies sold, it's probably ~$10, or ~ 1/10 of the ~$100 retail price.
Not only that, but the *incremental* price is even smaller. In traditional printing (not print on demand), printing costs are almost all setup costs. Once you have the print run going, the cost of producing one more book is nearly zero. Again, it depends on a lot of factors, but a ballpark figure would be about $1, or ~1% of the retail price.
This explains why publishers are seemingly so wasteful about sending out these unsolicited copies so indiscriminately to professors. It's not wasteful at all, because the incremental cost of printing a book is so low.
I always just pass the books on to students for free. This is good for the student who gets the book, and the money spent by the publisher to produce the book is so small that essentially no cost gets passed on to students. If I give it to a student, and the student then turns around and resells it, I think that's fine, too. It has the effect of undermining the *$&%^#*& evil publishers' exploitative pricing by helping to maintain a healthy market in used copies, while the nth edition is still in use. Part of their reprehensible scheme for maintaining exploitative prices is to kill off the used marked for edition n by rapidly bringing out edition n+1. The evaluation copy they send me might get out on the used market early enough to get some use before then.
# Answer
> 7 votes
There are good chances that they are selling the books back to students. Given the price of academic books, this is is the most profitable way of "recycling" a book.
# Answer
> 5 votes
I would refrain from doing any business with these buyers, mainly because I find their solicitations annoying. I wouldn't want to encourage them to continue bothering me or my colleagues.
If you want to ask whether it is ethical to resell evaluation copies at all, start a new question.
# Answer
> 5 votes
I would say that these book buyers are legitimate from personal experience, as a student, from Kerala, India. May be the perspective is different in different parts of the globe.
I have seen a lot of second-hand book sellers and street vendors, selling used academic books. I don't think they are making much profits by selling them. They acquire books at no price or at very low prices directly from the users, students or faculties, and sell at one-fourth or even one-sixth of the original price of the book. They manage to do so, because they do not pay taxes to the government (either they are not bound to pay or they simply do not pay). They usually do not have permanent shop for selling the books. Sometimes they acquire books in exchange; the customer exchanges some of their books with the seller, for more useful ones, without money transaction. This is the kind of *recycling* that happens.
The reason why I argue that they are benefiting the academia is; they market their books, saying that they are used by scholars and has lots of annotations, side markings, simple explanations on the margin etc. I have even heard one fellow saying 'this book was used by a famous rank holder of the university'.
As the demand of used books is large, they are actually fulfilling the customer interest.
The reason for giving away of the books vary; having an extra copy, or the book is too old (some like new books), or the area of interest has changed or one has moved to higher class.
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Tags: ethics, books
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thread-3461 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3461 | When is it okay to publish when doing enterprise? | 2012-09-27T16:22:34.163 | # Question
Title: When is it okay to publish when doing enterprise?
I completed my PhD last year and now work in industry. Nevertheless I've continued to work privately on my MSc and PhD thesis' work and lately I've been getting stellar results on the work I did for my MSc thesis. (My thesis work is unrelated to my current employment.) The results have undeniable commercial potential which I hope to explore; yet perhaps because I've spent so much time in academia, I have the urge to publish. I'm keenly aware that publishing has the risk of ceding my competitive advantage to potential competitors, yet I know of a couple of academics who both publish state of the art research in the area of their growing businesses. Therefore I suspect that under some circumstances it is possible to be involved in enterprise and publish, although I'm not sure what those circumstances are.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this issue. When is it okay to publish when doing enterprise?
Edit: my question is not about whether it is okay to publish if outside academia. Rather, it's about when its okay to publish research that is being seriously considered for a (future) commercial product.
# Answer
> 3 votes
*The results have undeniable commercial potential*
You don't mention *which* industry you work in, but within the industries I'm familiar with, companies own **everything** that comes out of their employees' brains. By default, your ideas, techniques, code, and results are almost certainly the property of your employer—even if you developed them at home on your own time using your own personal equipment— and they may not be inclined to let **you** exploit them commercially. Read your employment contract *very* carefully.
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Tags: publications, industry
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thread-782 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/782 | Should I be truthful about graduate school rejections? | 2012-03-17T07:48:25.430 | # Question
Title: Should I be truthful about graduate school rejections?
Suppose a student applies to a few good graduate programmes, but for some reasons, gains an admit in one great school and rejects in a couple of equally good ones. How necessary is it for the student to be truthful about his rejects? There are a couple of circumstances that arise here:
1. The student is invited to an interview at a school, where he is asked about his applications and decisions. Is it okay to lie that the results are pending? Or that he has been offered admits at a couple of places? It is likely that the student will face a dilemma if he feels the other decisions may affect this one as well.
2. Is it vital to be truthful at the graduate school you have joined? Is there any mutual communication between administrative sections of all top colleges, which may leave bluffing in bad taste?
# Answer
As someone involved in graduate admissions decisions, I can say unequivocally that knowing a student has been denied admission at another program does not negatively influence my admissions decisions. I have all of the application materials from the student, and (assuming the applicant is strong) the decision is sufficiently important that I will certainly look at and evaluate all those materials. The decision of another school is not a useful indicator of whether I should admit you.
Indeed, if you tell me you have an offer from another top program, I might even be more cautious about offering you admission. Why? If I make all my initial offers to students who end up going to other schools, then I have to go back and dig through the applications and find the ones that didn't already accept an offer, which by that time will be lower quality applicants. I know of one program where this happened last year and they resolved to make more strong offers to the second tier of (still quite strong) applicants this year.
> 26 votes
# Answer
As a first very generic rule, academia is very small world, and it's not unlikely at all that the members of the committee responsible for the interview know if the results for another school have been given or not. They might not know the results, but they might know that you know.
As a second generic rule, lying is extremely badly perceived in academia, where the probity of a scientist is very important. If I were to interview a student, and if I suspect that the student is bluffing or lying, that would be an immediate no-go.
As a third generic rule, competition is normal and welcome in Academia. When you apply for a school, or even later for a position, it's normal and even expected that you will apply to other places. If no-one asks, you don't necessarily have to put on your CV the list of schools from which you've been accepted/rejected, but if the question is asked, there is no shame in telling the truth.
So, long story short, you don't have much to gain by lying or bluffing, but you have a lot to lose.
> 20 votes
# Answer
Personally, I make it a point *not* to ask about alternate schools and programs that a candidate might be applying to in addition to my group. In this way, there is no bias on my part. If the candidate freely offers that information, I will of course take it into consideration, but I have not solicited it, and therefore there should be no compulsion on the part of the candidate to admit to things, one way or the other.
That said, it's not in general a good idea to lie openly to academic institutions. As several other respondees have pointed out, it can be easily caught—particularly if you're in a small field. Moreover, there have been a number of high-profile cases in recent years of academics losing their jobs over misrepresentations of their credentials. So anything that even hints at dishonesty can get you into trouble. (Moreover, many schools do have an "ethics" clause in their admissions policies—and *intentionally* lying, either in the application or during interviews or a visit, can be construed in some cases as sufficient to lead to a retraction of an offer of admission!)
> 10 votes
# Answer
You should be truthful in all your professional endeavors. Lying is unethical and unprofessional behavior which could be grounds for dismissal or worse. I say this as a blanket statement and stand by it, but obviously ethical standards and practices vary across different careers and walks of life. In academia, the feeling that lying is unethical bordering on repugnant is very strong. One should avoid it at all costs.
The fact that you use the word "bluffing" is slightly distressing and shows that you may not yet have internalized the ethics of academia. **Bluffing** is something you do in poker. More generally, it is a game theoretic strategy designed to minimize information given to one's opponent. Saying that you've been accepted by a program when you have not been -- or, especially, when you have been rejected there -- is not bluffing, it's **lying**.
People who feel strongly that lying is unethical also well understand that you are not obligated to give full information just because it is asked for. In some social situations an innocuous lie is more acceptable than a refusal to answer a question, but academia is not one of them. If someone asks you for information about your applications to other programs and you have any concerns that it may not be to your advantage to give out this information, simply say something like, "I'm sorry, but I'm really not comfortable discussing that right now." As above, sometimes it feels impolite not to answer a question, so it is worth practicing a bit so as to be able to do it in a relatively graceful way.
As for the question of whether different academic programs communicate with each other enough to make it a realistic chance that someone lying in this way will be caught out: absolutely yes. Academic circles are small, are populated by the same people for years and years on end, and almost invariably tend to contain at least a few people who are ridiculously -- almost preternaturally -- in the know about all kinds of personnel decisions.
> 9 votes
# Answer
One goes to graduate school to work in a field or with a certain researcher. That person, accordingly should have specific enough goals before applying that tweaking a scattershot approach shouldn't apply. In the extreme, you are trying to get into only one place and so the focus is more on developing a relationship with the "target" there.
That said, at least I have found my self in similar situations. As to bluffing. I think the best advice, if you feel the admissions officers are plumbing for advice is to say that you haven't found out yet. The advantage to bluffing is that it makes you look better inasmuch as one school will want another school's candidates.
> 0 votes
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Tags: phd, graduate-admissions, rejection
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thread-3466 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3466 | How should I credit co-authors of a paper in conference proceedings I prepared myself? | 2012-09-28T04:14:27.943 | # Question
Title: How should I credit co-authors of a paper in conference proceedings I prepared myself?
Suppose I've done some research as part of a (small) group, and this research has been published as a paper with all group members listed as co-authors. Then I go to give a presentation on this research at a conference, but I prepare the presentation and the writeup for the conference proceedings mostly on my own. Is it normal to list all the co-authors of the original paper as authors of the conference proceedings? If not, is there a particular way I should credit them in the proceedings, e.g. a footnote, or in the acknowledgments section?
I know the obvious answer is probably going to be that I should ask my co-authors how to credit them, and I will do that, but what I would really like to know is the most common practice, if there is one. (My field is particle physics)
# Answer
> 26 votes
The practice I'm most familiar with is that a coauthor is a coauthor is a coauthor. Anyone listed as a coauthor on the title page of the paper should be listed on the title slide of any talk about the paper, and explicitly acknowledged ("This is joint work with...") when the talk *begins*. Whether any of your coauthors helped you prepare your slides or the proceedings abstract is none of the audience's business.
But this attitude is clearly specific to my field, where papers only rarely have more than three authors. It might not scale so well in fields (like particle physics?) where a "small" group may have 100 members.
# Answer
> 7 votes
Most common practise, I think, is to add them as co-authors in the write-up for proceedings, while in the presentation, mention them in the acknowledgements slide at the end of presentation. The title slide may include your name alone and mentioning your group's name is a better practise. Some also highlight PI's name in the title slide of the presentation.
The proceedings write-up, probably will get expanded later and takes the form of a journal article. So giving credits to all those worked in the problem should be properly attributed.
# Answer
> 5 votes
I think the key distinction is whether the conference presentation and writeup are viewed as a presentation of new results or as an exposition of work published elsewhere.
When you are publishing a research paper, the criterion for coauthorship is making an important intellectual contribution to the research. Everyone in this category must be listed, regardless of their role in the actual writing, unless they specifically decline coauthorship.
On the other hand, there is no need to include these coauthors on further expositions: if you go on to write a survey or review article on this topic, then the authorship should reflect who actually worked on the article, rather than who did the original research. (The same way if you wrote an exposition of some of Einstein's work, that wouldn't make him a posthumous coauthor.) Of course, the exposition needs to give clear credit for the original research.
The border between these cases can get a little blurry. If something could be viewed as a research announcement (where experts would be learning of the work for the first time), then I'd say that puts it in the research category, rather than exposition, even if the primary publication appears elsewhere. The basic issue is whether you could cause confusion. If your writeup may be cited as a research contribution, then you should list your coauthors.
If you are in a field like CS, where conferences are a primary venue for announcing research results, then you definitely need to list your collaborators as coauthors on the presentation and writeup. In math, things are a little different: some conferences publish refereed research papers in their proceedings, but there are also other possibilities. Some places, like Oberwolfach, ask speakers to write up an account of their talk, but this is not considered a research publication at all. In a case like that, there's probably no need to have formal coauthors, as long as the text itself is perfectly clear about referring to the research publication and author list. (When collaborators of mine have written things like this, I've been happy not to be listed as a coauthor on the resulting document, since that way I don't have to worry about the writing.)
However, the most important rule is not to offend your collaborators. Leaving out someone who feels they should be included is worse than including someone you don't think is necessary, so it's always best to ask.
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Tags: conference, authorship
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thread-3479 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3479 | Unprofessional to write (in a paper) that something is "really cool"? | 2012-09-29T15:45:48.760 | # Question
Title: Unprofessional to write (in a paper) that something is "really cool"?
Is it unprofessional to write (in a paper) that something is "really cool", for example, when describing a colliding black hole simulation?
# Answer
> 11 votes
In addition to Dave's answer, I'd say that in general, subjectivity is not very professional when writing academic papers. The point is to convince the reader by presenting only objective argument. Somehow, if I read a paper with something like "it's cool, it's amazing, that's the best, etc", then I might think that the author just ran out of objective arguments.
# Answer
> 13 votes
It sounds unprofessional and unscientific. Imagine also your readers in 30 years, what will they think? They may not even take the paper seriously. Indeed, current potential readers may not take the paper seriously.
What would you think if you read an old paper that describes a black hole simulation as "groovy"?
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Tags: writing-style
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thread-3488 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3488 | Is it ok to cite someone who provided a bad citation for correct information? | 2012-09-30T05:13:20.303 | # Question
Title: Is it ok to cite someone who provided a bad citation for correct information?
In a master's thesis the author provided a seemingly incorrect citation. ( Link to paper citation 4)
The information is obviously correct but in the cited paper I couldn't find any reference to the information he cited. Is it ok to cite him?
# Answer
> 6 votes
If you want to refer to his work (i.e. his results, discussion or conclusions), you should cite it.
If you want a reference to the particular piece of information he cited (the sentences describing plasma etching before his call to ref. 4), then you should find a direct source: either a textbook or review on the topic. This would be much better than a research article (or thesis), especially one badly sourced.
# Answer
> 2 votes
In general I do not like citing non-peer reviewed sources. Further, it sounds like you ware using it as a secondary source, which I like citing even less.
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Tags: citations
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thread-3462 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3462 | How does one try to make a journal cover? | 2012-09-27T19:54:43.740 | # Question
Title: How does one try to make a journal cover?
Though fewer and fewer scientists actually read dead-tree editions of journals, being featured on a journal cover is still a nice way to highlight your paper to a large community, and is usually considered a great recognition of one’s work. So, how does one go about getting on a journal cover? If you feel you have extraordinarily attractive graphics, do you submit them for consideration to the editor? Or is it useless, and should only be done when explicitly asked (or suggested) by the editor?
# Answer
I emailed the editor and suggested I had a beautiful and relevant graphic for a special issue. That worked.
**Edit:** Image attached. Also, note that I did go about it incorrectly, but it worked anyway. I emailed the editors when I submitted my paper. I should have waited until it was accepted.
> 13 votes
# Answer
Usually the journals (at least with my very recent publication with Nature Publishing Group) ask for a potential journal cover upon notification of your manuscript's acceptance.
> 11 votes
# Answer
Pay the color charges. A lot of journal covers come directly from figures in an article. If you go out of your way to avoid paying color charges, you will never have a cover worthy figure. You will, however, have a lot more grant money.
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, journals, graphics
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thread-3498 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3498 | How does a research masters work? | 2012-09-30T14:26:29.590 | # Question
Title: How does a research masters work?
I always thought PhD as being the main post grad research path if you wanted to get funded and that Msc was the way to get yourself ready for a PhD. I recently became aware that not all master courses are taught and some are research based, so I am wondering whether it's normal to do a research Msc (as opposed to a taught one) and if so, are there any advantages to this over just going for a PhD?
# Answer
Advantages of doing a research-based Masters (e.g an MRes) before the PhD:
* learn research skills
* explore your subject
* refine your research question
* get a big chunk of your literature review done in a structured setting
* work out if taking a PhD is really for you - whether you've got the aptitude and the interest
> 9 votes
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Tags: research-process
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thread-3499 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3499 | How essential is your GPA for admissions to PhD programs to US universities in Theoretical Physics? | 2012-09-30T14:54:22.390 | # Question
Title: How essential is your GPA for admissions to PhD programs to US universities in Theoretical Physics?
I am a Physics undergrad aspiring to pursue mathematical physics(string theory etc) as a future career. How much importance is given to your GPA by grad schools in the US or Europe for admitting students to PhD programs. A comprehensive account of the importance given by universities of different tiers would be appreciated. Example what are the guidelines followed by unis like harvard, princeton in comparision to something like texas, rochester, UCLA, etc. Also, what GPA is considered 'good' by a uni like princeton compared to the lower tier universities.
# Answer
> 4 votes
The importance of any single metric is binary and its value (important or not) depends on the size of the department. If the department is big admissions committees use metrics to weed out candidates. Basically anyone with GPA/GRE below X is triaged (doesn't matter what school you went to, how good your references are, etc). Smaller departments generally look at all applications. Once your applications is looked at, it is considered as a whole. There is no formula by which good GRE scores can offset a bad GPA. Obviously a better GPA doesn't hurt, but you really want to worry about the things you can control. For example, good research experience tends to trump everything else.
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Tags: graduate-school, graduate-admissions, university, undergraduate
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thread-3475 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3475 | Work in an area or work on problems? | 2012-09-28T22:25:06.667 | # Question
Title: Work in an area or work on problems?
I have a question about two possible career paths, for which I was unable to come up a better title. Let me explain what I mean:
Path 1, Working in an area: By this I mean, *making a career* by adding to the knowledge of a field of study. This may include sorting out open questions in that field or identifying new issues or pushing the boundaries of existing knowledge. This typically involves having a larger perspective and understanding of the field and its relevance to the world.
Path 2, Working on problems: By this I mean *making a career* by solving a series of specific challenging problems not necessarily belonging to a common field of study. Here one only attempts to understand enough about the problem at hand to solve the problem, but does not show an interest in developing the area as such.
Working in an area requires one to have a broader vision, scholarship and commitment to the development of the area. Working on problems does not involve commitment, but requires one to repeated invest oneself in learning about a new area. By working in an area one can encounter a degree of monotony. By working on problems, one can potentially find new challenges at every juncture.
So my question is: career wise, what is a better option? Specifically, which of these kind of academics are more valued by the community? What, if any, are pitfalls of these paths? Meta question: is path 2 a path at all or do all academics eventually settle into path 1 after spending some time on path 2?
**Edit:** I guess the key difference between the two paths is that path 1 leads one to become an "expert" with extensive knowledge in a particular area. Path 2 exposes one to a variety of problem situations and makes one a better problem solver, though it may not make one an expert in any field. For the purpose of this question, you may take the area to be a well studied field such as, say integer programming, which has some long-standing open problems, but is not necessarily so young that it allows for a variety of research opportunities.
# Answer
> 10 votes
Without knowing anything about the specific area, I'd say that you've set up a false dichotomy. I don't know if anyone ever consciously does one or the other exclusively. Sometimes you work bottom up (i.e path 2 -\> path 1), and sometimes you work top down (path 1 -\> path 2). Both these "paths" should be dimensions of your research.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I am reading the paths 1 and 2 as follows
Path 1 : The culmination of working on one problem (either success or failure) leads to another which leads to yet another and it goes on and on.
Path 2 : Number of problems on a field that are not related to each other and are stand alone; do not depend on or influence the other.
As @Suresh has already pointed out the answer might heavily depend on the field. But trying to answer in general, it is better to follow the Path 1, as it is mentioned in the question itself, it is focussed on a long term goal and elevated vision. Academia always long for broader vision and greater commitments. An employer would love to hire some one who has a concrete long term goal and enthusiasm.
While Path 2 is not a way that `does not involve commitment`, it is more focussed on short term goals and narrowed vision, such as getting a degree, finishing a project etc. This also involve commitment, but not on a large scale.
Thus brings up the question, "Why we want to learn or explore?" Irrespective of the field, this seems to be the essence of the question.
# Answer
> 0 votes
Areas are not well-defined, they change over time and even if a dean know when the boarder between some fields, Nature does not (as they are mostly communities emerging from common scientific interests).
Moreover, confining oneself to a given area may end up into working in a exhausted subfield that people no longer care about (and missing new opportunities).
However, when it comes to your visibility and prestige, other researchers will care only about your skills and achievements in a given field. But again, there is also a question of how much the disciplines overlap, both in terms of communities and methodology.
So here there is a trade-off between being recognized (and prepared) well in one field vs less but in more.
When it comes "is it better to focus on solving particular problems or learning general stuff", the question is a bit different from your career-related one. Opinions may vary (and it may be a matter of one's personal philosophy), but for research\_ output (not e.g. *teaching* skills) the first one is the only the one that counts. And if someone is skilled and committed, the later comes anyway (and the converse is not true).
(Anyway, it's the reason why during PhD it is (arguably) advisable to focus on solving problems (and learning stuff needed to solve them), not on spending hours on general courses.)
# Answer
> 0 votes
A classic interview question (paraphrased) comes to mind:
1. What do you think is the most important problem in your area?
2. What have you done to solve this problem?
Perhaps, these questions might be worth thinking about when choosing a career path.
Although this might look more like a comment than an answer, what I mean is you need to think about your question from several perspectives: what do you think is essential for your field and how you can contribute there, and what are your personal talents or virtues, such as working on technical problems in depth, or administrative skills in managing resources for problem solving in a broad sense, or something else. These are your assets. List them and do analysis on how would they be better applied, what combination of them would yield bigger impact or bigger rewards, depending on what you favor.
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thread-3313 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3313 | How important is research experience of undergraduates in the application for graduate school? | 2012-09-20T00:39:22.590 | # Question
Title: How important is research experience of undergraduates in the application for graduate school?
I'm planning to apply to graduate school in applied mathematics, but I do not have any research experience. The reason being is that I did not become a math major until my junior year in college. How will a lack of research experience affect my application?
# Answer
Evidence showing a research experience is definitely a plus.
However, do not get discouraged if you have none. Show in your application that you know what you want and why, be persistent and proactive and see how you can stand out in a positive sense from the rest of the applicants.
> 4 votes
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Tags: research-process, graduate-admissions
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thread-3490 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3490 | Is there a network map of subjects and how they connect with each other? | 2012-09-30T07:23:32.770 | # Question
Title: Is there a network map of subjects and how they connect with each other?
**The problem**
When doing a literature review at the start of a process of addressing a specific problem, it's easy to miss related material, if I don't know that it **is** related.
**The example**
Let's say I'm looking at a particular electricity-generation problem relating to pollution costs (in a very broad sense), of combustion and cooling: there might be relevant papers about, say, biodiversity and temperature in river water, that I don't know about, and haven't made the connection to, and it appears in a journal well outside the field of electricity generation.
However, within the literature, there will be authors whose papers span those fields: work on valuing biodiversity (so that loss of biodiversity represents a quantifiable cost), and the effect on biodiversity of changing river temperatures (so that using river-cooling in electricity generation, has a deleterious effect on river biodiversity).
**The proposition**
It should be possible, by doing an analysis of keywords, of co-authorship, and of journals, to automate the building of a network of subjects and of authors, to map out interconnections between specific narrow subject areas, and find the people that work in those interconnecting areas.
**The question**
Is there such a network map of subjects and authors, anywhere? Not just for this specific example, but one that spans a very wide range of literature (e.g. Engineering, Science, Technology, Economics). Ideally, one that gets updated frequently, based on ongoing publications?
As I hope the example above illustrates, it has to be:
* easy to interrogate it;
* very detailed on subject linkages; and
* provide links between people as well as subjects.
# Answer
Here is a subject map of science:
It is taken from the following paper, freely available from Plos One:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039464?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039464.g001
I think that this is the sort of thing that you are interested in.
N.B. I am not a co-author, nor have I read the paper, so I make no judgment on its quality.
> 16 votes
# Answer
There is an interactive map on Eigenfactor (a much better (arguably) way for assessing impact that mere citation counting):
eigenfactor.org - mapping science (currently, only for medicine related)
You can explore disciplines by graph of citations (i.e. which discipline cites which; it need not to be symmetric).
> 7 votes
# Answer
Generally, a researcher is current in the field, (s)he knows the top conferences and key research groups as well as what they have achieved. Often there is no space to list every paper on a certain subject anyway, so one must choose the key papers related to the topic at hand.
However, there are quite a few services that index papers by keywords or topics and authors. Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library to name a few.
Search engines do a good job indexing the papers, Google Scholar and DBLP come to mind.
And finally, the social networks such as Mendeley, Linked In and Research Gate encourage the authors to list their research publications and provide search functionality.
> 5 votes
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thread-3456 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3456 | Advertising one's publication | 2012-09-27T12:58:20.970 | # Question
Title: Advertising one's publication
After posting a preprint on arXiv, or after an accepted paper appears online, how to bring other's attention to it?
(Unless one is already a big name in one's field, or one proves a long-standing and well-known open problem, I doubt that just waiting for things to happen is going to suffice.)
For sure one can give talks or present posters on relevant conferences. But are there any other methods of bringing it to the attention of others who might be interested and for whom it may be beneficial?
The question is both about "classical" methods and any relevant Internet tools.
# Answer
Eykanal is basically right, but there's a fine line between networking and being annoying. There are plenty of circumstances where sending email to more famous/senior colleagues is perfectly fine.
If you already have a professional relationship with someone, it's perfectly fine to write a quick email saying something like "Thanks for the great lunch conversation we had at \[conference\] last month. You might be interested in this paper I just wrote." Yes, a recent lunch conversation counts as a professional relationship.
If you *don't* already have a professional relationship, then you should probably limit emails to a few key people who have a *direct* connection to your paper -- either you build on one of their results (which your paper cites), or improve one of their results (which your paper cites), or they've written papers on closely related topics (which your paper cites) . But within those constraints, emailing your paper is perfectly fine; everyone likes to hear that *their* work is useful and interesting.
If you do send your paper out, be sure to welcome comments, but don't *expect* a response from anyone. That silence from Famous Person On The Internet doesn't *necessarily* mean that they aren't reading your paper; they're probably just really busy.
> 16 votes
# Answer
In general, I would say **no**. Poster sessions and talks are the main way of sharing your research. You can try contacting the authors of any widely-known blogs in your field, and you can try sharing your research with any collaborators from other projects (i.e., ones who don't already know about it), but anything beyond that and you're venturing in the realm of being annoying.
There's one major exception that I can think of, and that's in the case where you're publishing a research analysis technique. In that situation, you can publish a toolkit that uses your method, and that may help speed up adoption of the technique. For example, in neuroscience, the SPM fMRI data analysis toolbox is very widely used. The group behind the toolbox came out a few years ago with a new set of techniques—DCM—for mapping brain activity, and incorporated those techniques into the toolbox. Because of this, many researchers now use this analysis tool. (Of course, this also means that you'll have many researchers using the tool incorrectly, and you may have to publish instructions on when and when not to apply the technique.)
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JeffE pointed out another exception; if you're building on the results of another research group, it is definitely acceptable to contact the researchers in that group to let them know if your work. They're the most likely people to be interested in your work, and (arguably) they are in a position to give you the most useful feedback.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Don't forget about old-fashioned face-to-face conversation. If you go to a conference, it is likely you will meet new people or re-connect with friends or acquaintances from other institutions. A common first question in such conversations is "What do you do?" or "What are you working on now?" This is a natural lead-in to tell this person about your latest work. Try to keep it short and tailor it to the known interests of the person you are talking to. If they are intrigued, they can ask more questions and keep the conversation going. The same principle applies if you meet someone on a research or seminar visit somewhere (whether you are visiting them or they are visiting you). Face-to-face conversation is less efficient than a talk or poster, since you are only getting to people one or two at a time, but it is also usually more compelling.
It's worthwhile doing this even if you are also giving a talk or poster at the conference, since it can serve as advertising to convince them to come to your talk or visit your poster. Alternatively, you can give a talk on one topic and advertise a different topic (say your previous paper) in conversations. Again, it's worthwhile to tailor your choice of which result to advertise in conversation to the interests of the person you are talking to.
Other suggestions:
* Encourage your co-authors to give talks on the paper as well. This can be a mixed blessing, because people tend to associate a result with either the person they hear it from or the most famous person on the paper, but it definitely helps to spread knowledge about the paper.
* If you have your own travel money, you can write to someone and suggest you visit them and give a seminar. You can also write to someone asking for a visit if you don't have money, but that is rather pushy, and is best reserved for cases where you have a strong existing relationship with the person, such as a past supervisor or recurring collaborator.
* Again, if you have money, you can invite someone to give a seminar at your home institution. This is an opportunity to learn about their latest work and also to chat with them and tell them about yours, as above. Even if you don't have money, there may well be a local seminar series that has some, and perhaps you can make a speaker suggestion.
* This one is less under your control, but one of the main ways people hear about new results is indirectly, when someone else mentions them or cites them. What this means is that if you can get the information about your paper to just one person who can directly use it to advance their own work, you have doubled your advertising power.
> 8 votes
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thread-3481 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3481 | What's the point in a "list of figures"? | 2012-09-29T17:29:48.110 | # Question
Title: What's the point in a "list of figures"?
What is the point in a "list of figures" in the following cases?
1. Masters thesis
2. Ph.D. thesis
3. Academic (text)books
# Answer
A list of figures allows one to find the figures contained in a book. This could be useful, for example, when you want to quickly find one of the figures you recall seeing in the book, but you can't remember which page it is on. You could also use the list of figures when buying the book to see whether it has lots of figures or only a few.
> 23 votes
# Answer
To add to Dave Clarke's answer, especially in large publications, like the ones you mention, having a list of figures can be very helpful. E.g., a researcher cites a particular finding from a doctoral dissertation, which has some 100 pages and 20 figures. In such a case, researchers usually mention the figure's number. To the reader of the researchers article a list of figures in the dissertation would make locating the referenced figure much easier.
> 13 votes
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thread-3518 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3518 | Is a thesis a publication? | 2012-10-01T04:13:01.123 | # Question
Title: Is a thesis a publication?
If I publish a Master's thesis, does that count as a "publication" (ie protect me from other people publishing my work as their own?)
If I think I can get a paper out of my thesis, am I forfeiting this possibility by sending copies of my thesis around to other people to look at?
# Answer
> 16 votes
In order, yes, and no.
A thesis is a public document and thus helps establish "prior art" in terms of research. Of course sometimes researchers come up with the same ideas simultaneously, or certain work is just not known as widely as it should be, so sometimes work gets innocently repeated (as compared to plagiarised, which can also happen, but reasonably rarely).
As for publication, a thesis is an entirely different kind of publication to a paper, in every discipline I am familiar with, publishing papers drawn from work in a thesis is expected, sometimes even required. The only (?) way you could interfere with further publication would be if you published your thesis as a monograph.
# Answer
> 9 votes
The second question appears to be more involved than the existing answer indicates.
It is possible that your school may own the copyright (at least) to your work.
See MIT Policies and Procedures | 13.1 Ownership of Intellectual Property:
> Copyright ownership of theses generated by research that is performed in whole or in part by the student with financial support in the form of wages, salaries, stipend, or grant from funds administered by the Institute shall be determined in accordance with the terms of the support agreement, or in the absence of such terms, shall become the property of the Institute.
It is further possible that your funding source may have a larger stake in your intellectual property.
See Do I Own My Dissertation? — Columbia Copyright Advisory Office:
> For instance, an employer supporting the student’s studies or an outside funding source may lay claim to whatever intellectual property is created.
Although the above source notes that this is not the usual case, a graduate student acquaintance of mine was not even allowed to continue work toward his thesis project after sale of his research by the university to an outside corporation. He had to choose a new project and begin again from scratch.
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thread-3501 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3501 | What's the point in "the paper is structured as follows"? | 2012-09-30T15:14:56.160 | # Question
Title: What's the point in "the paper is structured as follows"?
Inspired by the recent question on list of figures: what is the point of ending your introduction with a paragraph saying "The paper is structured as follows: in Section 1 we do BLAH, then in Section 2 we do BLAH, we move on with BLAH in Section 3, and conclude with Section 4 in which we do BLAH"?
Many papers in my area do it, my coauthors add them to our papers, and I kinda took the habit, too, but I never really understood why. It looks like a poor man's table of contents. After all, we already write what we plan to do in the introduction, and remind the reader in the conclusions.
# Answer
> 67 votes
Unlike Dave and Henry, I am going to argue *against* the style `The paper is structured as follows...`, though not against inclusion of content serving the same purpose.
Quite some time ago, I took to heart advice by Simon Peyton Jones on this, which can be found here (slide 19), also echoed by Sandro Etale in his advice on writing introductions. In essence it boils down to this:
> Don't write *The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the problem. Section 3 ... Finally, Section 8 concludes*. That is most of the time only a waste of paper.
>
> **Instead, use forward references from the narrative in the introduction.** The introduction (including the contributions) should survey the whole paper, and therefore forward reference every important part.
In a consequence, the position I take on this part of writing introduction is that while it is important to inform the reader about the structure of the paper so that he/she can take the path of few surprises and easily follow the discourse, it should be however done with style. Doing it in such a poor manner as "The paper is structured as follows ..." is simply **bad literature**. I would argue, that it is better to firstly, clearly state the contribution of the paper and then write up the paper's plot summary leading from the introduction to the culmination of the paper in supporting the claimed contributions and discussion. I mention the references to the individual sections, and sometimes even deeper structural parts, only in passing, or include them in parentheses.
On a similar note, regarding `Conclusion` section, I took to heart the advice of D. J. Bernstein on writing conclusions. Citing other authors, he suggest to simply drop the conclusions part from papers and put all the important conclusions into the introductory section. Well, unless there really is something *important* to say there. Since then, I conclude my papers either directly by a loose paragraph at the end of the `Discussion` section (renamed usually `Discussion and final remarks`), or if I feel like there is something important to say, by a standalone short section `Final remarks`. However, never re-iterating what was done in the paper. The reader is anyway free to "rewind/relist" in the paper (see the very last point by DJB).
P.S. The links to homepages of the two guys include many more good tutorials on aspects of writing/research in computer science.
# Answer
> 35 votes
The answer is really the obvious one: it is to alert the reader to the structure of the paper. In addition to this part in the introduction, the paper should also, every now and again, tell the reader where they are in the overall story of the paper. This makes it easier for the reader to read the paper, by giving them the global picture and pointing out from time to time where they are in the global picture.
A table of contents would be overkill (and it would take up too much space).
# Answer
> 24 votes
I find these paragraphs very useful (and often include them myself), precisely because it's a short version of a table of contents: often readers don't want to read the whole paper, but want to find one particular part of it. A summary of what's in each section makes this much easier.
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thread-3522 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3522 | Choosing a title to hold upon completion of a doctoral degree: "Dr." vs. "Ph.D." | 2012-10-01T10:46:09.217 | # Question
Title: Choosing a title to hold upon completion of a doctoral degree: "Dr." vs. "Ph.D."
> **Possible Duplicate:**
> EU Ph.D. in Germany: Calling yourself “Dr.” or “Ph.D.”
I'm asking this question in relation to my doctoral studies in Germany. However, my question may be relevant to regulations in other European countries.
At the university where I pursue my doctorate, I have the choice between two titles. Upon successfully completion of my dissertation and all related examinations I can decide which title I want to hold: "Dr. rer. nat." or "Ph.D.".
In Germany, the traditional title is "Dr.". From what I understand the title "Ph.D." is being introduced at many universities for reasons of comparability with degrees from other countries (especially with the US and the UK). I'm guessing, the reasoning is that holding a "Ph.D." will improve your chances when applying for (academic) openings internationally. However, I have also been told that the German "Dr." has an excellent international reputation and may give you an edge over "Ph.D.".
EDIT: A couple of years ago, legal steps were taken so that a "Ph.D." issued by other European countries is automatically recognized in Germany (as long as the issuing institutions are eligible) and may be "translated" to "Dr." in Germany. There is also a question related to this here. However, a "Ph.D." issued in Germany may *not* be "translated" to "Dr."! Therefore, I have to decide for either one and *cannot* use both.
Hence, my question is: **What are the advantages and disadvantages of either title with respect to academic careers in Germany and internationally?** Is a "Ph.D." seen as less distinguished by German academics? How is the German "Dr." perceived by academics in other countries as compared with a "Ph.D."?
# Answer
I'll add a bit of a legal perspective into the game. Disclaimer: I hold a Dr. rer. nat. from Germany, though lived and worked in several other countries in the EU.
Firstly, personally I think, that "choosing a title" and seeing it as an important issue, is largely a German/Austrian/(Central European?) specialty. After all, why should your title matter outside academia, where the difference is anyway largely understood around the world?
Secondly, even when you hold some title from country X, you **are not** automatically eligible to use it across the border, even given there exists an equivalent one in the other country. Rather, there are legal procedures which lead to a formal recognition and proper translation of your title. So for me, being a "Dr." with a title from Germany, to be able to use either "Dr.", or "PhD" in other EU countries, especially those east of Germany, I would have to either undergo a formal procedure called nostrification, or, in selected cases, if the university is granting an equivalent degree in my specialization, they could forgo the nostrification hassle and they could recognize it right away (rather and exception to the rule). Either way, you need to obtain a formal certificate from the state, or at least the university, stating exactly how your title translates to an equivalent title in the other country. Only then you can use the title freely. To top it up, the whole matter is regulated by bi-lateral international treaties between countries exactly stating which title holders are eligible to use which titles in the other country and how. See for example the treaty on grades recognition between Czech Republic and Germany. There even is a full website in Germany on all this (mostly for foreign title holders wanting to use them in Germany).
To sum it up, there is a whole lot to simply using an academic title in a country different from the one you obtained it in. This can be straightforward in countries where the culture doesn't care too much (in my experience e.g., Netherlands), but in countries where the title can be legally a part of your name (not sure whether it still is the case), such as almost whole Austrian-Hungarian empire heritage countries, this can be a big deal.
My point is the following: **It's probably irrelevant which title you choose. If you want to be precise, legally speaking, somebody probably already translated your title to another one (which you can't choose) which you should adopt in other countries.**
Apart from all that above, I regularly see people approaching me in e-mails, or letters by both "Dr. XYZ", as well, as "XYZ, PhD" - not speaking of those not checking the background and virtually promoting me to levels I do not belong to (yet). Again, the precise title doesn't matter that much after all.
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Later edit, on a more anecdotal note:
> the precise title doesn't matter that much after all
Well, except when you want to use the title for things like skipping a queue when visiting a doctor and being treated very respectfully by all the nurses (Germany), or when encountering police, getting away with only with a warning and avoiding a fine for speeding, or other minor trespassing (countries eastwards of Germany). I have first-hand knowledge of such incidents, so my advice here would be to 1) go for the fanciest possible title, yet it should be widely recognized by general public, and 2) if your country of residence allows it, include the title on your ID card, passport, social security ID, whatever else, so that you can wave it when necessary :-D.
> 12 votes
# Answer
As someone living in Germany right now, I can attest that there really is very little difference between PhD's from countries like the US, the UK, France, and Australia, and doctoral degrees from inside Germany. In many cases, German universities are looking for people with international experience when hiring, and thus the external experience with having a degree that *isn't* a "Dr.rer.nat." or a "Dr.-Ing." can be helpful.
However, as mentioned in the above link, it now *is* acceptable for people with PhD's to call themselves "Dr." inside of Germany. It may not be allowed for someone with a PhD degree from inside Germany to call themselves "Dr."; however, the inherent advantage is relatively small, I believe.
Moreover, if you are outside of Germany, the possession of a doctoral degree is probably more important than the actual title of the degree: in the US, I don't think you will be treated differently holding a "Dr.rer.nat." than the PhD.
> 8 votes
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Tags: phd, germany
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thread-3473 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3473 | How should a postdoc address senior research staff and faculty members in the USA? | 2012-09-28T16:03:51.863 | # Question
Title: How should a postdoc address senior research staff and faculty members in the USA?
What is the etiquette for addressing senior research staff and faculty members in an academic setting in the USA? A postdoc is no longer a student but at the same time he or she is (in general) not at the level of senior research engineers/scientists and professors. How should he or she address them ("FirstName" or "Dr. LastName") so that proper respect as well as confidence in one's "above-the-students" position is maintained?
Does it depend on the University, Lab group or the level of experience one has acquired before joining the present postdoc position?
# Answer
When I was a grad student, my initial preference was to call faculty "Doctor" or "Professor". At some point (about halfway through, I think) one professor said to me: **"If you want them to see you as a peer, you should call the professors the same way that they call each other."** At my university, all the professors called each other by their first names (it didn't matter if they were assistant, associate, or full). Since I planned to make a career in academia, I *really did want to be viewed as a peer*. So I started calling them by their first name (and no one ever told me to do otherwise).
> 18 votes
# Answer
When I was a grad student, I got into the habit of always referring to everyone as "Professor" or "Doctor". The theory was that no one would be insulted by your referring to them as "Professor", whereas some folks would be insulted if you called them by their first name. This worked very well; the few people who wanted to be on a first-name basis always told me so at our first meeting ("Oh, please, call me Bob").
> 12 votes
# Answer
Address senior research staff and faculty members in the same way that they do with you. You're "Robert Doe" and full profs are calling you "Bob"? Then you can do the same.
And if you are the senior, you are supposed to tell explicitly what is the tradition, in order to avoid embarrassment for juniors.
> 8 votes
# Answer
As a grad student I was lucky and faculty in my program tended to be clear about what they wanted to be called. Since everyone but the medics wanted to be called by first name, I came to the conclusion that faculty should expect to be called by the first name unless they say otherwise.
There was one awkward Professor in my grad program who never made it clear what he wanted to be called. Soon after deciding to call him by his first name (Lou) I heard my advisor, who has known Lou for 40 years, called him Louis. At that point I decided if my advisor calls him Louis I better stick with Professor. About two weeks later another colleague was talking to me about how he and Louie used to play football together. At my next interaction with Lou I related the stories and asked him what he wanted to be called. He thought Lou would be fine.
> 2 votes
# Answer
What is likely true is that first/given-name form of address expresses a peer-relationship attitude. In some contexts, there is a nearly-mandatory pose that "we are all peers", etc. While, ideally, this is true at a moral or civil level, it is equally obviously false in terms of sheer experience, and, usually commensurately, expertise.
(There is an auxiliary-but-related question simply about *age*... Given the extreme disparity between my own kids and myself, I don't expect them to address me by my first name... nor as "Professor Garrett" ... but hopefully by some affectionate honorific that does acknowledge (the complexity of) our relationship. Similarly, I pointedly adopt a stylized form of address for my kids. We are all acquainted with the trope that when the mom addresses the kid by the kid's full name, they're in trouble. I myself, especially at the point that I'm older than many postdocs' parents, have a similar feeling about *that* relationship. Opinions differ, of course.)
Use of an honorific, even if informal-honorific, form of address does express respect. Use of given name expresses familiarity, etc. At worst, given-name address implies a sort of "good ol' buddy" relationship that verges on the demeaning.
Perhaps the genuine issue isn't the words uttered, per se, but the tone-of-voice and body language. But, if we agree with *this*, then the original question becomes enlarged to the question of whether one should express deference or respect for ... ok, the real question is about how one fills in the blank about the object of this sentence! If it's "one's boss", well, one does what is necessary. If it's "one's mentor/teacher", then perhaps a systematic tone of respect is appropriate. If it's simply "the old person", then who knows? What *is* your attitude toward your mentor/advisor/teacher?
Operationally, as in some of the other answers, unless there's a pervasive conformity pressure to do "given name address", surely it's better to err on the side of slightly-excessive expression-of-respect, rather than the other way. Wait till some says "Please, just call me ...", rather than the awkward opposite.
(In French and some other languages perhaps-inappropriate first-name address *used* to have its own name: "tutoyer", meaning to address toooo many people with the familiar "tu", rather than formal-er "vous", but I gather that times have changed...)
In terms of quips, I might suggest that, ... in contrast to the suggestion that if your thesis advisor or postdoc mentor *doesn't* want you to call them by their first name,then get another, ... if you don't have a mentor you respect enough ... for good reason, that their expertise and insights are nearly-unimaginably superior to yours at this point in your career... to throw a little honorific their way, *then* you should get a new advisor/mentor.
People won't be offended by your being too polite and respectful, but may be by the opposite. Pretty straightforward, I think.
> 2 votes
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Tags: postdocs, etiquette
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thread-1273 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1273 | Use cases of org-mode as a scientific productivity tool for academics without programming needs | 2012-04-25T11:55:17.727 | # Question
Title: Use cases of org-mode as a scientific productivity tool for academics without programming needs
I am a social scientist working primarily on Linux, but also at times required to work on Windows systems at the University. I have been looking to improve my productivity in the academic workflow which primarily consist of:
1. Collecting literature, reference-management, review notes etc. (currently zotero)
2. Outlining, writing long documents (currently Lyx)
3. Task, time and project management (currently misplaced and lost pieces of paper)
I can imagine that these steps apply to most academics, and many will share my interest in developing a more productive workflow. In my research on potential solutions to this issue, I keep being drawn by org-mode as a potential swiss-knife solution that can take care of all these needs, and be my mainstay as a personal-information-manager, organiser and text editor. But being built on emacs, I find it forbidding. I also have no need to program anything, so learning emacs seems like major overkill for my needs.
Could academics who use org-mode or a similar solution for organising their workflow give examples of ***how*** they use it? Also helpful would be an evaluation of productivity improvements that such users have themselves experienced, and the kind of productivity improvements that can be expected with a basic academic workflow described above. I am interested in evaluating whether it pays off in terms of productivity improvements in the face of what appears to be a massive learning curve, especially as I don't need any programming tools?
I am aware that this might lead to subjective opinions, so I would request academics with a similar work profile to reply based on their personal experience regarding the learning curve, possible benefits, example cases and perhaps alternatives they have found superior (preferably also cross-platform and open source).
# Answer
> 22 votes
I use Org-mode and AUCTeX (Emacs LaTeX package), to do all three tasks you outline. I have an Org folder that I sync across machines using Dropbox, which I find to be a simple solution for someone who does not use version control on a regular basis.
# Organization
I separate my tasks into broad groups with each group getting its own .org file. For example, I have .org files for administrative tasks, journal publications, service, research topics, and any major projects that I am currently working on.
The structure of an .org file is relatively simple, for example a file to track journal submissions, revisions, etc. may look something like this:
```
* Initial Submissions
* Accepted
* Rejected
* Revisions
* Book Chapters
```
Org-mode uses asterisks to denote levels of headings, and `<Tab>` to fold and unfold the headings. So expanding the revisions heading would lead to:
```
* Revisions
** Paper 1
** Paper 2
DEADLINE: <2012-05-04 Fri>
```
You can set deadlines for any task by pressing `C-c C-d`, which will generate the the DEADLINE: line you see above. Setting a deadline for a task will make the task show up in the agenda view (accessed through `C-c a a`), which is my main project planning tool for day to day work inside of Org-mode.
You can also track the time you spend on tasks with `C-c C-x C-i`, which will clock you in to a task and `C-c C-x C-o`, which clocks you out. The tracked time will show up in the agenda view and can be useful for project planning or reporting. You can also generate separate standalone tables inside your .org files if you prefer a bit more customization.
All of this can be done with a vanilla Org-mode install and no customization. I have my tasks set as multi-state TODO lists that I can cycle from TODO-\>STARTED-\>WAITING-\>DONE-\>CANCELED. I have my keywords set in my .emacs configuration file with the following:
```
(setq org-todo-keywords
'((sequence "TODO" "STARTED" "WAITING" "|" "DONE" "CANCELED")))
```
The `"|"` separates in process keywords from finished state keywords. If you are looking for more elaborate reports, such as Gantt charts, my answer to this question briefly discusses some of the options available.
# Outlining
For outlining and writing long documents, you can just create a new .org file and outline using the * heading approach. Org-mode makes it easy to move headings around if you want to restructure your document at any stage. For example, if you had this outline:
```
* Intro
* Part 2
** Part 2a
** Part 2b
* Part 1
** Part 1a
** Part 1b
```
You realize that Part 1 should really come before Part 2 so you move the cursor to the Part 2 heading and press `C-<down arrow>`, and Part 2 and all of its subheadings will move to the proper position.
```
* Intro
* Part 1
** Part 1a
** Part 1b
* Part 2
** Part 2a
** Part 2b
```
Depending on your needs, writing a paper based on the outline can be done in much the same way. Org-mode has support for LaTeX, both for inline fragments and for environments. Since you mention LyX, I would imagine the transition to stand-alone LaTeX should not be too onerous. The Org-mode LaTeX export does a fairly good job but if you have a document with a significant amount of LaTeX syntax, it may be better to just write the draft in LaTeX using AUCTeX, but this is beyond the scope of the question.
# Reference Management
I use a combination of Org-mode and RefTeX (available with AUCTeX) to manage my references and to make notes. As mentioned in John Moeller's answer this takes some non-trivial configuration. I used this setup almost verbatim to start my reference management, and I have found that it works well. This link was inspired by the same setup and may be useful for both reference management and writing drafts in Org-mode that contain extensive references.
I start with a master .bib file, that contains the bibliographic material for each reference. After adding updating the .bib file, I use `C-c )` to insert a new heading into my notes.org file. The customization will generate a heading with the title of the paper and a link to the PDF of the paper. For any notes I take on the paper, I can use the rest of Org-mode's abilities to either have multi-heading outline style notes as subheadings, or just write paragraphs separated by a blank line. The end result is an .org file with headings for papers, textbooks, etc. and subheadings for each paper with links to PDFs and all my notes in a single file.
# Tips for Starting Out
There are a few ways to help smooth the way to working with Emacs, Org-mode, and AUCTeX.
1. Install Emacs 24 pretest instead of Emacs 23. Emacs 24 has package management included in the vanilla install which makes it much easier to add packages without a lot of programming experience. It also has Org-mode included in the default install. This link gives instructions for a variety of operating systems. I have been using it for awhile now and I have found it to be very stable.
2. Go through the Emacs tutorial, accessed via C-h t. This will give you the basics of navigating using the Emacs keys. It will likely take some getting used to, especially how Emacs handles selection, cutting, and pasting. This will likely be the biggest hurdle if you are used to the cutting/pasting/navigation in word processors.
3. Keep this reference card handy. It has nearly all of the commands that you will use on a daily basis.
4. For Org-mode specifically, look through the manual, but more importantly look at the tutorials. Specifically the general introductions and the power users describe their setup sections (the first two sections linked above). These tutorials will highlight the customizations made to the initialization file (.emacs) for these users. Even without elisp experience, you should be able to find something close to your desired workflow and be able to modify it with some trial and error.
When I started with Emacs and Org-mode I had very little experience with Emacs. A vanilla Org-mode install with no customization is still a powerful tool. As you get more comfortable with working in Org-mode you can start to work on customization. Even with very little interest in programming there is a significant enough user base that someone may have already done something close to what you are looking for.
After I got comfortable with Org-mode, I started using Bernt Hansen's set-up with no changes. It is a bit intimidating on the whole as he has some extensive customizations, but he documents them well and explains almost everything he does. Then after using it for awhile, I was able to modify the initialization to something that better suited my workflow. It took some trial and error and a bit of extra time on the learning side, but I believe that it has payed off in the long run.
Once you are comfortable with Emacs, I would also recommend the Emacs wiki. It has some descriptions of useful packages, some discussion, and even some configuration suggestions to help build up your initialization file. If you ever get to the point in your setup where you think, "I wish I could do XXX", the odds are someone else has written a package that covers what you need.
# Answer
> 7 votes
I am an academic \[history\] who adopted org-mode about 18 months ago. Frankly, I'm puzzled by all the warnings about the steepness of the emacs learning curve. For a newcomer who doesn't do a lot of command-line work, the hardest part for me was configuring emacs on my Win and Ubuntu machines. But there are lots of resources and tutorials out there, many of them accessible from orgmode.org.
I started out only using emacs for org-mode. After watching a few screencasts I knew enough to start outlining. Gradually i've been using emacs for more and more tasks outside org-mode, though that remains my main use for the editor. I've been gradually increasing the complexity of my workflow over the last year, adapting bits of the various GTD setups linked to the org-mode.org. I am not a programmer and had only started working with a Linux machine a few months before getting into org-mode.
In my opinion, one of the obstacles to greater adoption of org-mode is that people see the amazing workflows set-up by gurus and assume they need to use emacs at that level. My opinion: for writing, organizing and work-flow, you can get 80% of the ultimate value of org-mode in about 20 minutes of instruction.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I use org-mode as an grad student (computer science), and primarily use it for throwing together fast documents. It isn't great for papers/articles, but it is great for homework and notes, because it uses markdown for formatting. There is very little to learn here that can't be found in the manual. See the sections on exporting/publishing, and pay attention to the parts on LaTeX.
I used to use org-mode for scheduling and it was great (I went on vacation and lost interest in tracking all of my time). It's great for tracking how much time you spend on projects and doesn't need much configuration up front.
I also used it for collecting references, but that took some nontrivial configuration. It wasn't hard for me because I'm used to programming, but your mileage may vary.
# Answer
> 4 votes
I really like Bernt Hansen's org-mode setup. I am not a programmer and I do feel a little lost in Emacs, but I'm having no trouble using org-mode. I started with Vincent Goulet's Emacs package because I also use emacs to edit latex and R scripts. Then I added Hansen's code to my .emacs file a few sections at a time where it seemed applicable to my workflow, editing slightly when I could decipher it and see a way to make it more applicable. It took a couple of days plus little tweaks occasionally since, but very manageable.
In addition to what has been mentioned, I use clocking into the different steps of a project almost religiously because I am working on estimating the time I spend on different tasks in order to better plan future projects. I've been terribly over-optimistic with promises of submitting work in the past.
Finally, I would highly recommend JabRef for literature management if you want to stay with free open source software. I've had no trouble with RefTex---I didn't have to do anything beyond Goulet's instructions. JabRef imports references in the usual way (e.g. Reference Manager, etc) and has a database-like interface, but creates a bibtex file in the background. Citations in Latex (in emacs) worked perfectly.
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Tags: productivity, time-management, software
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thread-3537 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3537 | What are the pros and cons of multidisciplinary research? | 2012-10-02T03:43:29.597 | # Question
Title: What are the pros and cons of multidisciplinary research?
Does doing multidisciplinary research enhance one's employment opportunities compared to doing a degree in "basic" sciences?
For example, is a Ph.D. in Nano-science/Nano-technology in any way better than a Ph.D. in Physics or Chemistry, considering employment in India or in Asia? Would like to hear perspectives from other regions as well.
(In India, the basic qualification for employment in universities or affiliated colleges, as Assistant Professor is M.Sc. with UGC-NET or a Ph.D. in the relevant subject. Multidisciplinary research is available only in major research institutes and a limited number of universities.)
# Answer
This does not fully answer your question, but it is certainly one consideration.
Multidisciplinary theses are often examined by multidisciplinary committees. Examining such theses is difficult, especially if the committee has no experience examining multidisciplinary theses. A consequence is that you will often be forced to conform to the conventions of different communities. In addition, the chemistry committee member may not see the thesis as a chemistry thesis and the sociology committee member may not see the thesis as a sociology thesis, because it lies somewhere in between the two fields and cannot be a complete thesis in both fields.
> 5 votes
# Answer
I am a PhD student in Computational Science, which is an interdisciplinary major spanning mathematics, computer science, and engineerning. We are often pegged with the label "jack of all trades, but master of none" because we are a relatively new major with out well-established guidelines or rules judging the merit of work. Often, we are required to accept a "home department" whose quality judgment rules dominate. I'm not sure if this is the case for all interdisciplinary programs, but it helps alleviate the grey area and ensures that the work is evaluated according to a well-established criterion.
> 3 votes
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Tags: career-path, multidisciplinary
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thread-3545 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3545 | What do co-supervisors get out of a PhD? | 2012-10-03T06:00:22.477 | # Question
Title: What do co-supervisors get out of a PhD?
PhD supervisors usually get paid to supervise. They also have the prestige of having lots of students under their belt.
It's common to also have co-supervisor (I think it's mandatory in many fields, in Australia at least). What do these people get in return for their services? Put another way: if I'm asking someone to be my PhD supervisor, expecting them to help me out a whole lot for the next 3-4 years, what do I have to offer them?
# Answer
Dave's remark on switching to the student's shoes and contemplating what you can get out of a co-supervisor is, in my opinion, a very useful one and should be of primary concern to students.
Let me put some personal perspective on this. I, as a senior post-doc, act as a co-supervisor of two PhD students (with some international twist to it within the EU context) and have colleagues who do the same, hence my observations below. Of course my view is one of a junior researcher, so take it with a grain of salt.
My benefits from being a co-supervisor are the following, in the order of subjective importance:
1. **new horizons**: the students act as *drivers* and *catalysts* of research topics I do not necessarily care for in a very personal and deep manner. It means that I can broaden my horizons and get somebody pushing me towards learning something new. That is a good thing for me as a curious person, as well as for my career.
2. **publication record**: given the first point, obviously, if the students work well and our collaboration works well too, since I get as much influence on their work as they allow me, or ask me to, we get together some useful stuff done and get papers published. I would stress the word "together", where I rather take the passenger's seat and try to help wherever necessary, but the crucial decisions are student's. The finished and delivered projects, as well as papers are obviously a good thing for both of us, too.
3. **project leadership experience**: often the collaboration is in a context of a project, where, as the more senior guy,I would take the role of a project manager, or a team leader. Of course this gives me plus points to the CV as well, not speaking about learning how to do this kind of work. Another good thing for my career.
4. **soft skills**: by doing the above and by that closely collaborating with people with whom my bond is tighter than just a joint interest (as it would be with a member of my community from a different institution), in a way, we are supposed to work out our ways along each other. At least for me, that is a good training too and good for my life and career, whatever twist should it take in the future.
5. should the collaborating partner become a friend of mine during the process, I would add it as a benefit too. But obviously this one is not everybody's piece of cake.
All in all, the points above boil down to a single one: ***being a co-supervisor means for me to become and act as a senior buddy to the student and prepares me for running my own lab/group, should it become reality one day.***
> 12 votes
# Answer
Co-supervisors play different roles, which may vary from individual to individual. Sometimes they are there as a backup, either in case things go wrong with the main supervisor, or if the student needs someone else to talk to. They can read the papers (and eventual thesis) of the student and may even participate in the research, adding a different perspective. In some cases, they can be more active than the supervisor (this is often the case if the co-supervisor is a post doc). Often they will be a part of the committee assessing the thesis in the end.
What does the co-supervisor get out of it? Well, a tick on his/her CV. Publications. Experience dealing with students. Contacts. Ideas. And work. In any case, it is part of what an academic is paid to do.
The real question should be: what do I, as a PhD student, get out of having a co-supervisor?
> 13 votes
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Tags: phd, advisor
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thread-3559 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3559 | Do high-profile journals edit authors’ figures? | 2012-10-03T19:09:03.483 | # Question
Title: Do high-profile journals edit authors’ figures?
I have a paper published in a *Angewandte Chemie*, “one of the most renowned chemistry journals”, and realized that the figures have been edited from the version I had submitted. They did not tell us about it, but clearly modifications have been made for typographical consistence with their style guide: some symbols have been italicized, axes labels have been changed from, e.g., “Temperature (K)” into “Temperature / K”, etc.
I was surprised, because I know that most journals don’t typically edit figures, so I wonder: is *Angewandte Chemie* unique in this respect? Do other higher-profile journals, such as *Nature* or *Science*, edit figures or provide feedback to authors on graphics?
# Answer
> 9 votes
Yes, high-profile journals do typically edit figures for style and consistency. You will find this information on their web sites, e.g. nature physics.
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Tags: publications, graphics
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thread-3560 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3560 | How to keep track of current physics after graduating? | 2012-10-03T18:37:01.153 | # Question
Title: How to keep track of current physics after graduating?
This summer I graduated from college, majoring in physics, but for reasons outside my academic career, I won't be able to attend graduate school for at least a couple of years. Despite that, I'd rather not neglect my physics education until grad school becomes possible.
I realize that a B.Sc. doesn't mean I should be able to read all the latest articles coming from the frontiers of research. However, I'd like to keep track of current affairs in physics to both be in touch with my field, and to help me decide on which sub-field I will focus once I return to the academia, and perhaps even decide where to go and under who to study. What would you recommend is the best way to do this, and what are the resources available that I should be aware of? (Note: I will probably not have access to paid scientific publications after I receive my diploma in the next few months)
Also, I wouldn't want my physics skills to rust in the meantime. Apart from participating here on the physics stack exchange, do you know of any good resources for physics questions/riddles/puzzles, hopefully at the appropriate level for a college graduate, so I can spend some spare time solving those to stay in intellectual shape in the next few years?
# Answer
> 5 votes
I am in this same situation. Here are some thoughts I have:
In order to retain the skills we learned as undergraduates, we have to practice them much like we had to 'practice' problem sets for assignments. I think that the MIT open courseware is an excellent tool for reminding and practicing.
Physicists don't write papers about stuff other physicists know. Most (or all) of what's in a paper could be new and unfamiliar to the majority. A BS does not bring you up to speed with the physics community (my degree barely got me into the 20th century) so there is still a good deal of study before you could pick a paper and read it with ease. Continuing with your own studies by advancing your knowledge of physics will do a lot to help you understand what is in these papers. Reading the titles of recent Arxiv papers is a fun pass time; you can sit down and read any that perk your interest.
# Answer
> 3 votes
As stated in the comment above, the only way is to stay involved. I would suggest reading as much as you can, particularly in the subfields in which you hope to specialize one day. If possible, try to stay in touch with professors you know from undergrad, and attend their journal clubs to stay in the research field.
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Tags: education
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thread-3234 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3234 | Stranded in a taught MSc CS Program. What should I do? | 2012-09-16T20:39:33.457 | # Question
Title: Stranded in a taught MSc CS Program. What should I do?
I am an international student pursuing my masters degree in computer science at a mid-low tier U.S. university. This is my second year and still I couldn't get in a research group and here usually profs. consider PhD students for research.
This program has a thesis option but it is not compulsory and it seems like professors and department is abusing this to get rid of spending time for MS students. The program is actually a taught MS, but it is disguised as a MS CS program. Some schools clearly mention that their program is not designed for research or thesis work. And still my schools web page talks about thesis work but I don't see a single student in my batch doing a thesis. Also the courses they offer are mostly advanced undergrad classes. I didn't come here to take the same classes which I did in my undergrad or I can learn from MIT OCW.
While choosing this program over others, their research focus was important for me and I was interested in doing a MS thesis. But now, I only have minor class projects which are far away from research. Probably, if I apply for a PhD my recommendation letters will not be strong as a result of this. My GPA is good, I am not a bad student but still whoever I talk with says "give some time". And time is passing.
I want to get involved with some research, what can I do outside this school ? Can I transfer to other program ? I am thinking of taking permission from school and not paying this semesters fees and applying for a transfer to a school where students really do a thesis work. If a get a masters degree from here can I find a research internship position as an international on student visa ?
# Answer
> 4 votes
Be proactive. Identify the professor(s) that could be your thesis adviser and keep asking for advice on how you can participate in his or her research and how he/she can officially become your adviser. You could also talk to the department chair.
In the mean time you could look into participating in some open source project, which could score some bonus points for you when applying for PhD or internship.
Another option for bonus points and priming your skills is participating in (programming) competitions that require more than just coding skills but analytical and creative thinking as well.
If all else fails, consider applying for a different school, although this may mean time lost. On the other hand, I did retake several classes while in a grad school although I already had a MSc, which was well worth the time spent, offering deeper and more research oriented perspective on the subjects.
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Tags: graduate-school, research-process
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thread-3572 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3572 | How to protect against the theft of a paper? | 2012-10-04T08:54:55.557 | # Question
Title: How to protect against the theft of a paper?
A professor requested that I exchange my paper with another student, to get their suggestions. Every student in the course must exchange their papers in this way, before the teacher will look at it. I have never encountered another professor with such a policy and am concerned of the possibility that a student might claim my paper to be their own. What steps can I take to guard against such a possibility?
# Answer
Email the work to someone (or yourself) well before you hand it over.
Also, try to relax. It is not likely someone will try to pass your work off as theirs because they would be aware that you were going to hand the same piece of writing in and that would lead to trouble for both of you.
I think the reason he is getting you to do it is to get you used to how things work in a research environment. So it is not such a bad thing, maybe.
> 8 votes
# Answer
This seems like a reasonable request by the instructor. Without understanding why you are feeling vulnerable, it is not possible to provide an answer. It is worth talking to someone (possibly the instructor or maybe your advisor or a therapist) about why you are feeling vulnerable.
As for protecting yourself, emailing the document to/from your university email account is probably sufficient as documentation. The next level up would be to email the student the document with the instructor cc'd. This way you are proving you shared your paper (and gaining documentation). Anything more and you will likely be revealing your insecurities, which might lead to more insecurities.
> 11 votes
# Answer
Sign and date a copy of your work, seal it in an envelope (using tamper-evident seals) and have it received by your teacher (that is, give it to your teacher then have your teacher sign a note that he/she received the envelope). This will serve as evidence in case another student claims your work is his/hers.
> 3 votes
# Answer
You could ask the other student to be part of the study. If he/she does some substantial thinking about methods, content, writing etc., you can offer him/her to be co-author.
> 2 votes
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Tags: plagiarism
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thread-3260 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3260 | Who all are considered authors of papers written on behalf of a research group? | 2012-09-18T10:03:15.923 | # Question
Title: Who all are considered authors of papers written on behalf of a research group?
In epidemiology it is not uncommon to see papers written by a bunch of authors on behalf of a research group (say "the X research group"). See, for example, this paper (randomly chosen from pubmed):
> Moreira L, Pellisé M, Carballal S, Bessa X, Ocaña T, Serradesanferm A, Grau J, Macià F, Andreu M, Castells A, Balaguer F; **on behalf of the PROCOLON research group**. *High prevalence of serrated polyposis syndrome in FIT-based colorectal cancer screening programmes.* Gut. 2012 Sep 14.
My question is: are the members of the research group X (whose names and affiliations are usually reported in the Appendix at the end of the paper) considered as authors of the paper?
**Edit:** I am particularly interested to receive answers that apply specifically to epidemiology, but of course experiences from other fields are very welcome!
# Answer
I'll give my perspective, as an Epidemiologist:
It depends. Helpful, I know.
Often the reason there's a "on behalf of the X group" is that some small analysis has been pulled out of a larger study, and the named authors on the paper want to acknowledge that their results are the byproduct of a larger effort. A large clinical trial, or cohort trial for example, can spawn dozens of papers and secondary analysis done by doctoral students, small component research groups, etc.
For example, this paper is (I think) the result of the "Epi proColon" clinical trial currently being conducted by the manufacturer. It's a head to head comparison with 'FIT' - fecal immunochemical testing - to detect colon cancer. The paper you linked is an ancillary analysis of that, noting a particular finding that, while of interest to the field and clearly enough for a short paper, wouldn't ever make the "main" paper cut when the results of the clinical trial are published.
@Raphael has asserted that he thinks there should be a difference between "I turned a skrew" and "I wrote the paper". The problem for Epidemiology studies is that's often somewhat ambiguous. For example, many clinical sites are directed by people who don't really care about publications, being professional clinicians, but are still instrumental enough in the conducting of the study that they could arguably be included as authors. If you only had one of these, sure, toss it in as authorship. But what if you're running a multi-site clinical trial at ten sites? Do you include all ten? After all, they saw patients.
The "group" authorship is a useful way to acknowledge that. They can cite those papers on grant applications, "why should we continue to support your diagnostic lab" progress reports, etc. It's a compromise position for trying to tighten up who is an author while at the same time supporting large, collaborative science.
Those authorship acknowledgements also serve to make something "the official position of X study group". You often see that in vaccine trials and the like.
That being said, unless I was a named author on the paper, I likely wouldn't include it on my CV if I was anything but a very new investigator. But part of the point of these papers is that who is a named author is a rotating list. The Epidemiologists write their epidemiology papers, the clinicians write clinical papers, the lab people write lab papers, the biostatisticians write...you get the idea. So everyone publishes *named* in their niche, but the group effort is acknowledged for the entire productive output of the study.
> 9 votes
# Answer
In particle physics (and we have some very long author lists) they are.
Authorship rules are generally set out in the collaboration's Memorandum of Understanding (whatever it is called) and can sometimes call for odd things such as a paper being credited to someone who didn't even know it was being written but whose work calibrating some systematic effect of a minor subsystem a decade ago was used in the paper. That happened to me once, I checked inSPIRE and discovered I had a new paper out. Turned out to be a nice one, too.
To avoid that many of these documents have a "recent membership" type of clause so that you have to have been an active member of the collaboration in the last (typically) year to be credited. "Active" is defined by things like sitting shifts, attending collaboration meetings, contributing institutional funds to the general pool or hardware to the experiment and so on.
> 12 votes
# Answer
I asked the guys at the library of my university about this issue and here is their reply. It looks like if I am member of the research group X, even if I am not among the names on the front page, it counts as a publication for me:
> According to the ICMJE guidelines on authorship and contributorship (http://www.icmje.org/ethical\_1author.html) you count as an author and will have the same rights and responsibilities regardless of your place in the author list.
>
> Therefore, you also have the right to verify the publication as yours in the bibliometric system.
Again, we are talking about epidemiological research here.
**Edit:** To me, Anonymous Mathematician is right and the answer I got was meant to be read as: "If you fulfil the 3 ICMJE conditions, it does not matter if your name is written only in the appendix and not on the front page. You're an author just the same".
**Edit 2:** This is the answer from the library guys after I asked for clarifications
> The part of the recommendations that you quote\[\*\] concern who should be considered to be the author on a paper when it's sent to the journal. All the persons in the author list, even the ones that are in a group listed in an appendix, should fulfill all three requirements. If they don't they should be listed in the acknowledgement instead of the author list.
>
> If this is not the case for your article, the responsible authors have not followed the guidelines.
\[\*\] This is what I quoted:
> "Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3."
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, authorship, collaboration
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thread-3589 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3589 | How to prepare a Journal Club (or Methods) presentation? | 2012-10-04T16:11:11.500 | # Question
Title: How to prepare a Journal Club (or Methods) presentation?
I recently gave a presentation that was poorly received by my PI. I presented a technique that I have been trying to master (Patch Clamp). My PI thought I was not adequately prepared but gave no further feedback.
I spent three days putting together my presentation and read chapters (Springer books) and papers, listened to lectures on the subject--over two weeks. I have been giving presentations since undergrad. I just finished my M.S. I hope to enter graduate school in Fall of 2012.
I don’t know what I am doing wrong. What is a more effective way to prepare a talk or presentation? How much background reading is sufficient? What types of questions do ask yourself when preparing a talk? How do you know you have truly mastered the material?
# Answer
> 14 votes
*(this is rather long: I wrote it for one of my students, who had a similar question)*
**BASIC UNDERSTANDING** When you're processing a paper, ask yourself:
1. what is their precise problem formulation
2. what is their solution
3. what larger issue are they trying to address with their paper
4. Do (1) and (2) actually fix (3)
5. (for experimental papers) do the experiments tell a convincing story to bolster their claims. Be suspicious of what they claim unless the line of reasoning is clear.
**SYNTHESIS** Once you've done this for a set of papers, you should start trying to connect them together:
* is there a linear progression of ideas ?
* How do the tools connect up
* Is there some way to simplify and explain what groups of papers are doing under a common theme ?
**CRITIQUE** Once you have the above, then you can ask
1. what are the gaps in what people are doing
2. Are these gaps important or minor ?
3. Does some union of the papers essentially solve the problem ? if so, why and if not, why not ?
4. Are these papers even solving the right problem ? (this last point is both tricky and critical - it is very easy for a line of research to be internally consistent but get totally derailed from the original motivation for the problem)
**DIRECTIONS**
Now you're ready to suggest new directions and new ideas.
note that critique comes AFTER basics and synthesis - you must understand very well before you can judge.
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Tags: phd, research-process, journals, publications, presentation
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thread-3591 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3591 | Are the referees of a journal allowed to reveal the title of the papers they review after the review process? | 2012-10-04T17:43:49.840 | # Question
Title: Are the referees of a journal allowed to reveal the title of the papers they review after the review process?
I am wondering if a referee can reveal the title of the papers he/she has refereed for a journal (either by talking about it in the pub, posting it on facebook or another mean) after the decision has been made.
The reason for my question is that I have seen some people revealing titles of the papers they referee but I have not found an authoritative reference for judging this behaviour.
# Answer
**Don't do that.**
Everything related to reviewing is confidential.
You will certainly upset some **editors** if you reveal your identity to the authors without the editor's permission. (Remember that the authors usually know who was the editor. Perhaps the editors did not want the authors to know that they asked you to review the paper?)
More generally, there is nothing to gain by doing this, and everything (= your reputation) to lose. You do not want to do anything that someone might interpret as a violation of the confidentiality of the peer-review process. (Even if you had both the authors' and the editor's permission to publish this information, others might not know that.)
> 25 votes
# Answer
I looked up the policy of journals in the fields of physics and chemistry, and their policy regarding reviewers does not directly address your question. Most ethical guidelines say the same thing: **manuscripts sent for review are confidential**. For example, quoting from the APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct:
> Privileged information or ideas that are obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for competitive gain.
From the more loquacious ACS Ethical Guidelines:
> A reviewer should treat a manuscript sent for review as a confidential document. It should neither be shown to nor discussed with others except, in special cases, to persons from whom specific advice may be sought; in that event, the identities of those consulted should be disclosed to the editor.
This clearly covers the case of revealing the part (or any part of it) before it was published, as well as nonpublished parts of the paper (i.e., the published version is of course public, but anything else is still confidential).
However it seems to me that, narrowly read, there is material that this rule does not cover. For example, the text written by the reviewer is not indicated to be confidential (except insofar as it reveals part of the authors’ confidential material), and it seems clear that you retain the right to publish it. (Whether it's a good thing to actually do is another matter. Except in extreme situations, I would advise against it.)
**So, once a paper is published, are you allowed to reveal that you were a referee? I think so.** Is it a good thing? I don’t think it hurts anyone.
---
PS: I interpreted your “after the decision has been made” as meaning “after the paper is published”. In the interval of time between editorial decision and publication, it *is* clear that this information is confidential.
> 6 votes
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Tags: journals, peer-review
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thread-3600 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3600 | Are abstracts confidential during the review process? | 2012-10-05T08:23:49.977 | # Question
Title: Are abstracts confidential during the review process?
In an answer to a question about the confidentiality of reviews, I basically said you cannot reveal information about the review until the paper is publicly available. This question about revealing information after publication is making me rethink my answer. The question I have is, *is the information (e.g., title, authors and abstract) that you are given to decide if you want to review confidential?*
It seems to me that the process of agreeing to do a review is NOT
1. Please review our reviewer guidelines (including confidentiality policies),
2. If you accept these guidelines please look at this abstract and let us know if you want to review.
Rather, it seems it is
1. Please look at this abstract
2. If it interests you, please consider our review guidelines.
This suggests to me that the initial information (title, authors and abstract in a non double blind review) are not confidential.
# Answer
To complement other answers and comments: indeed, as far as I can tell, from a quasi-legalistic viewpoint "consent" cannot be pushed on me by sending me something in email, e.g., an abstract and asking whether I'd review the article. Nevertheless, it is my firm impression that, there is a strong *expectation* that any such information is kept confidential in perpetuity, whether or not one agrees to referee/review.
Yes, I agree, there is something a touch unfair or burdensome about this, since one can imagine that a malicious editor could wreak havoc with one's work by sending a steady stream of one's competitors' as-yet-unpublished work... thus seemingly obliging one to disrupt one's own work... ?
And, yes, something like this does sometimes happen when one served as NSF reviewer (in the older system), especially, where work-in-progress is sometimes portrayed.
Despite the potential for abuse in having others put obligations upon us, it seems that the potential for abuse, in the line of "conflict of interest", is substantially greater if confidentiality is not essentially promised implicitly, and in perpetuity.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I checked the peer review policy of Nature and Science, I guess that should is the best we can get. The policy can be found here, here (both Nature) and here (Science).
A bunch of relevant quotes from the Nature policies:
> As a condition of agreeing to assess the manuscript, all reviewers undertake to keep submitted manuscripts and associated data confidential...
>
> Nature journals keep confidential all details about a submitted manuscript and do not comment to any outside organization ...
>
> Referees of manuscripts submitted to Nature journals undertake **in advance** to maintain confidentiality of manuscripts and any associated supplementary data.
And some from the Science review policy:
> Reviewers **are contacted before being sent a paper** and are asked to return comments within 1 to 2 weeks for most papers.
>
> The submitted manuscript is a privileged communication and must be treated as a confidential document.
I would read it conservatively. That is, consider an abstract to be `a part of the manuscript`, hence the same rules governing general `manuscript` should apply. Apart from that, both journals state that **in advance** to being sent the manuscript, the (I guess still *potential*) reviewers agree to keep the matter confident.
I think an answer may also lie in the exact process handling review. First, a potential reviewer is invited and sees a title and possibly paper's authors. Then he/she has to log-in into a review system, but I guess, somewhere in the process accepts general terms and conditions which established the contract. And only then the reviewer sees the manuscript. I am not sure if all journals do it this way, but those I reviewed for did so. Well, besides some special issues handled outside the journal submission/review system, where the case would be unclear.
---
I just checked the reviewer invitations I received from journals in my field and I found that the only disclosed thing in the invitation e-mails was the submission's title. I must accept/decline to review and only afterwards I saw the manuscript, or its abstract.
> 7 votes
# Answer
Well, as you said, there is no rule that explicitly says that the information mentioned in a “invitation to review” is confidential. Yet, as with the related questions, there is a big grey area around the process of peer-review. Many people would expect this information to be kept confidential… and it does make sense: after all, the reason you gained access to what is (at that stage) privileged information is for the purpose that you may review it. It is part of the review process.
Let's see it another way: this situation is not so different from the case where you would accept a review, then drop it (write to the editor to pull out) upon learning that you won't have time to do it. Morally, those two situations are close to one another.
> 4 votes
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Tags: publications, peer-review
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thread-3059 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3059 | Book recommendations for information visualization? | 2012-08-31T18:42:49.737 | # Question
Title: Book recommendations for information visualization?
When writing papers, one specific problem is how to effectively organize the data we want to present so as to enable the audience and readers to quickly understand what we want to demonstrate.
I've browsed a very good book before which shows you how to draw figures and tables in academic papers in the "right approach" but seems I cannot remember its name.
If anyone has read any good book on this topic, please recommend their names.
# Answer
> 12 votes
The preeminent author on this topic is Edward Tufte, who wrote "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". He has a few other books also available on his site (see previous link) that are worth checking out.
# Answer
> 4 votes
Two really well presented and interesting books are in the well known O'Reilly collections:
1. Beautiful Visualization Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts
> Visualization is the graphic presentation of data -- portrayals meant to reveal complex information at a glance. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. Successful visualizations are beautiful not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that efficiently generate insight and new understanding.
>
> This book examines the methods of two dozen visualization experts who approach their projects from a variety of perspectives -- as artists, designers, commentators, scientists, analysts, statisticians, and more. Together they demonstrate how visualization can help us make sense of the world.
>
> Explore the importance of storytelling with a simple visualization exercise Learn how color conveys information that our brains recognize before we're fully aware of it Discover how the books we buy and the people we associate with reveal clues to our deeper selves Recognize a method to the madness of air travel with a visualization of civilian air traffic Find out how researchers investigate unknown phenomena, from initial sketches to published papers
1. Beautiful Data The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
> In this insightful book, you'll learn from the best data practitioners in the field just how wide-ranging -- and beautiful -- working with data can be. Join 39 contributors as they explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video.
>
> With Beautiful Data, you will:
>
> Explore the opportunities and challenges involved in working with the vast number of datasets made available by the Web Learn how to visualize trends in urban crime, using maps and data mashups Discover the challenges of designing a data processing system that works within the constraints of space travel Learn how crowdsourcing and transparency have combined to advance the state of drug research Understand how new data can automatically trigger alerts when it matches or overlaps pre-existing data Learn about the massive infrastructure required to create, capture, and process DNA data That's only small sample of what you'll find in Beautiful Data. For anyone who handles data, this is a truly fascinating book.
# Answer
> 1 votes
A book I would recommend is Kosslyn's *Graph Design for the Eye and Mind*. What I particularly like about this book is that all recommendations are based on scientific findings and are discussed as such:
> Graphs have become a fixture of everyday life, used in scientific and business publications, in magazines and newspapers, on television, on billboards, and even on cereal boxes. Nonetheless, surprisingly few graphs communicate effectively, and most graphs fail because they do not take into account the goals, needs, and abilities of the viewers. In Graph Design for Eye and Mind, Stephen Kosslyn addresses these problems by presenting eight psychological principles for constructing effective graphs. Each principle is solidly rooted both in the scientific literature on how we perceive and comprehend graphs and in general facts about how our eyes and brains process visual information. Kosslyn then uses these eight psychological principles as the basis for hundreds of specific recommendations that serve as a concrete, step-by-step guide to deciding whether a graph is an appropriate display to use, choosing the correct type of graph for a specific type of data and message, and then constructing graphs that will be understood at a glance. Kosslyn also includes a complete review of the scientific literature on graph perception and comprehension, and appendices that provide a quick tutorial on basic statistics and a checklist for evaluating computer-graphics programs. Graph Design for Eye and Mind is an invaluable reference for anyone who uses visual displays to convey information in the sciences, humanities, and businesses such as finance, marketing, and advertising.
# Answer
> 1 votes
I'd recommend David Mcandless's "The Visual Miscellaneum". The author does information visualization for The Guardian. This book is probably best for "wow, that was a great way of getting this information across visually!" It's a lot less academic than say, Tufte's work but a great tool nonetheless.
Nathan Yau's "Visualize This" is a fantastic book that ranges from the "why" to the "how to implement."
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Tags: books, graphics
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thread-3611 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3611 | How is a Coursera exam typically conducted? | 2012-10-05T22:21:32.573 | # Question
Title: How is a Coursera exam typically conducted?
Many Coursera online courses have an exam component. This raises the question: **How is a Coursera exam typically conducted?**
It seems non-obvious to me how one would conduct an exam involving students who might be on different continents.
# Answer
> 8 votes
Having not used Coursera, I do not know what tools they use. However, I have been a part to online exams from both the student and instructor perspective using the Blackboard learning management system. I suspect that features like many (if not all) of the ones Blackboard supports are present in Coursera.
* Time limits - The instructor has the ability to set a time limit to the exam (which discourages web browsing to find answers). The instructor can also choose to force the student to complete the exam in one sitting or allow students to leave and return.
* Flexible scheduling - The exam does not have to happen at a specific time, but may be accessible over a time period, perhaps 24 hours or more. The instructor can still enforce time limits and so on.
* Lockdown - The implementation of Blackboard my institution uses comes with Respondus Lockdown (there are other products), which prevents students from navigating away from the exam once it is started. These products can also prevent such things as minimization of the window, opening new tabs, etc.
* Proctoring - I have proctored an online exam for another instructor. I had to enter my credentials and a code before the student could start the exam, and I had to enter a different code when the exam was completed.
Features like these give instructors flexibility in offering the exam to students around the world, while still making it harder to cheat.
**They will "cheat", however.** No online course management system can prevent the student from using their text, notes, or another computer or electronic device to look up answers. The best defense against infractions of this nature are well-written tests (the kind you might write for an open-book or take-home exam).
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Tags: online-learning, mooc
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thread-3208 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3208 | Returning to university | 2012-09-15T16:08:40.220 | # Question
Title: Returning to university
I graduated from an undergraduate maths course from a prestigious university. However, I was rejected from attending it's master's program due to poor showing in the final exams. I'd like to study at said university again sometime within the next few years, applying for the same course. In applying though, I will almost definitely have to use the same final exam results. What can I do to show that I have improved, if I indeed have? I am not currently enrolled in any graduate level program.
# Answer
At many schools, particularly those rated highly, the **most important parts of your PhD application are your letters of recommendation**. What many applicants don't grasp is that a PhD program is *so different from undergrad* that *past performance in the latter is only a poor indicator of future performance in the former*. For most students, the *hard part* of a PhD is doing original research. So, as an applicant, you must convince the committee that you will excel at doing research.
One way to make your case is to have **already successfully done research** (or some "research-like" project). In the absence of this, you must somehow convince your letter writers that you will succeed in research (and then they convince the admissions committee). Meet with your letter writers and ask them what they suggest. You might even ask them if you could work on some research with them (**prior to being admitted to the PhD program**).
> 3 votes
# Answer
Have you considered directly contacting the admissions committee or a former teacher and asking for advice? They'll probably be wary of saying anything that sounds like "if you do x,y, and z, you'll be accepted", but even if they're unwilling to share specific advice they might be willing to tell you what other experience (beyond the exams) they consider during the admissions process. A bonus of contacting the admissions committee in a respectful and professional manner is that if you do indeed follow through on any recommendations they give you, you can mention this in you application as evidence of your commitment to improving. You might also ask if you can retake the test--either officially (i.e. if they'll replace your old results with your new ones) or unofficially (i.e. your old results will still be the official ones, but at least you have some metric showing your improvement). Another option is to talk with a professor in the department with whom you have rapport and ask them about how to frame your rejection in your application when you reapply. For example, is it considered good form in your field to discuss what led you to do poorly on the exams (whether this was some unrelated life experience, or a lack of preparation)?
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-3172 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3172 | What are some options for a graduate student abandoned by Ph. D advisor? | 2012-09-11T17:59:09.640 | # Question
Title: What are some options for a graduate student abandoned by Ph. D advisor?
I'm currently doing a PhD in applied mathematics, I'm about to start my final year. The problem that I've been working on for the last 2 years was originally proposed by my advisor and one of his colleagues. The direction of research wasn't that good, the problem had already been studied by previous researchers and there is very little one can add to what's there already.
I discussed this with my supervisor early on, but he suggested I persevere because he saw some promise in our approach. In these 2 years I have struggled to find something worth mentioning, and have only produced meagre results at best. What's worse is that my advisor has virtually no interest in what I do. I don't think he's actually read any of my work, or even read any of the surrounding literature. His advice has not been so useful.
Without anybody to guide me and without a clear problem to work on I feel really lost and a bit cheated especially considering the amount of attention he gives to his other students. I'm no genius but I've consistently helped his other postgrads do their own research (in completely different areas), and while our advisor has guided them into publishing several papers each, I'm sitting here clueless, with absolutely nothing to show for myself.
Sorry about the rant, but I'm really lost. Any advice would be appreciated.
# Answer
There are two questions to answer:
> * If you got another project from this advisor, would you stay?
> * If you got the opportunity to switch advisors, would you leave?
If you are willing to stick with this advisor, you should bring up your dissatisfaction—and perhaps suggest a plan of action to "migrate" to another topic. (Can you, for instance, use the methodology on a different problem where it might be more successful?)
If that isn't an option—and to be honest, I suspect it isn't—you should work as aggressively as you can to find a new advisor and a new research topic, while if possible staying under the radar. You don't want to create a situation *before* you have somebody firmly in your corner who's willing to support you.
> 26 votes
# Answer
Many of my friends doing PhDs in the UK have this problem, even those in top tier universities. Those with the worse problems ended up dropping out and reapplying for the same PhD under another supervisor. I think the supervisor tend to be more integral to PhD students in the UK and there might not even be an option to "switch".
Based on their experiences:
1. Like aeismail said, you should definitely stay under the radar. This was advised to all of my friends in similar situation. Most importantly, it is deemed unprofessional to openly blame your supervisor, even if it really is your supervisor's fault.
2. Seek official help: the single biggest turning point for my friends was using the official channels and/or speaking to the director of graduate studies in your department. These people are very experienced at handling situations like your, and will certainly know to do it covertly.
Possible outcomes based on my friends' experiences:
1. Your director of graduate studies or student counselor might offer to help or get someone to help read your current work and evaluate your situation. This might identify the problems you need to fix to graduate, and they might be able to help communicate any issues to your supervisor.
2. They might arrange for a co-supervisor. This resolved the situation for several of my friends. The co-supervisor essentially becomes your new supervisor.
3. In the worse case, it doesn't work out. The student drops out of the program and reapply to another supervisor with the help of the department (making it easier). Unfortunately, it can be a gamble because they have the option of rejecting you. Depending on your school, they might have a different policy and allow for an actual switch instead of having to reapply.
Bottom line: seek official help ASAP. Stay professional and under the radar, do not sound vituperative. Don't be afraid of taking drastic actions like reapplying if need to.
Good luck!
> 25 votes
# Answer
If you're lucky, our institution have some sort of principal or someone responsible for the graduate students, someone to talk to about exactly these things. A review on the progress should be done at least every year, to avoid being stuck on a problem for too long.
If things do no run smoothly, it is a problem not only for you, but for the institution, so it should be in everybody’s interest to solve this, either with a new problem or new advisor. As people mention, it is not really uncommon, but I'd say be careful blaming your advisor, sometimes there's just a mismatch. Talk to some other professor maybe, they've all been young once, and might have some good advice.
> 3 votes
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, advisor
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thread-148 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/148 | What is the difference between Ph. D programs with coursework and those without it? | 2012-02-16T04:06:56.863 | # Question
Title: What is the difference between Ph. D programs with coursework and those without it?
I have been looking into PhD programs in the Engineering field, and I have found different types of programs, such as some with coursework, and others without any coursework.
What is the practical difference between them? (Besides the obvious coursework) What kind of student is expected for each of them?
EDIT: To be more specific, I have been looking into Robotics PhD programs, such as:
# Answer
> 19 votes
It seems to me that there are several advantages; none of these are suitable for every student. It's up to you whether enough of them apply to you, to make it worth doing a taught PhD:
1. A PhD with a bit of coursework in the first year will help those who are crossing over into a discipline that they're not already deeply embedded in: it will give you some hand-holding through the things you'll need to know but don't yet;
2. it should (if taught well) also teach you some extra research skills;
3. it will give you some indication as you progress as to how well you're doing, compared to how well you should be doing if you're going to finish
4. it will allow you to explore different aspects of the field, to help you finalise your thesis topic
5. it may, depending on the country and institution, give you an intermediate degree at the end of the taught section, such as an MRes, which will count for something even if you then don't go on to do the full PhD
6. it lessens the culture-shock for those going straight from fully-taught study to a research degree.
# Answer
> 12 votes
One thing to keep in mind is that there are international differences as well. In Germany, for instance, doctoral programs almost *never* require coursework as part of the research program requirements (although it may be mandated for purposes off establishing degree equivalency, if you come from a foreign country or have a degree from another field). This is because it is assumed that you have taken all the necessary courses as part of your Master's program, which is considered the follow up to the bachelor's rather than the precursor to the doctorate.
The reverse is true in the US: I don't know of any PhD programs there that *don't* require courses, for the reverse reason.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Also, a coursework PhD program is very useful for someone (like me) who took a break from academia to work for a couple of years - it would be invaluable in refreshing those basics that have atrophied during the time spent at industry.
# Answer
> 2 votes
Sometimes, especially in the beginning, it is easier to measure course progress than research progress, and thus good for the self-esteem. Being able to say "I've accomplished something this semester" is crucial.
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Tags: phd, graduate-school, coursework
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thread-3625 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3625 | How to interview a faculty candidate? | 2012-10-07T05:12:00.510 | # Question
Title: How to interview a faculty candidate?
When interviewing a faculty candidate, how should I structure the interview? What questions should I ask? How should I make the best use of the limited time available? Assume this is for a full-time faculty position at a R1 (research-focused) university.
# Answer
If you have a 30-45 minute slot (which is typical for such things), you have to make some decisions:
* Are you a 'buyer' or a seller' ? Are you evaluating the candidate, or also trying to convince them that your institution is a good place to work ? In general, you want to do both, but which you're thinking of emphasizing more will affect how you conduct the interview.
* Is the meeting before or after the candidate's talk ? If after, you can do some probing based on the talk. If before, you might choose to ask them about material not in their talk, but in their CV.
* Is there concern about their area and how it fits with what you're looking for ?
* Have you heard anything from your colleagues during other interviews that might prompt you to take a particular line of questioning ?
In general, since you can't really get a big read on a candidate in a short session, your best bet is to focus one one aspect (such as one of the above), and explore that in detail. One thing I've also found useful is to ask questions "out of left field" that test the assumptions the candidate's work rests on: if done right, this allows you to explore the candidate's larger views about their field and the direction of the research.
> 9 votes
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Tags: professorship, job, interview
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thread-3630 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3630 | How should one respond to 'Call for Paper' e-mails? | 2012-10-07T08:30:20.790 | # Question
Title: How should one respond to 'Call for Paper' e-mails?
Of late I have been receiving a number of e-mails with subject 'Call for Paper' and invitations to contribute to new and/or open-access publications. While most of them immediately qualify for the trash bin, some do have a professional looking layout and language. Sometimes their publisher name looks very similar to reputed publishers.
Should I create a filter to delete and mark spam for all mails with 'Call for Paper' in the subject?
Do reputed publishers ever advertise or invite authors to contribute to their journals?
# Answer
Every conference and workshop will issue a call for papers. The editors of special issues of journals may issue a call for papers. Editors of books on a special topic may have call for papers. How else will they advertise their conference, workshop, journal, book and get submission?
Many of these will be perfectly legitimate and even highly reputable venues. Naturally, some of these might be poorly ranked conferences or even in-it-for-the-money ventures, rather than serious scientific venues. But if you mark them all as spam, how will you know what is out there to submit your papers to?
**The best strategy** I can think of **is to create a folder to collect these call for papers and use a filter to move them into that folder.** When you need to submit a paper, you can search through the folder to find an appropriate venue. As most conferences repeat yearly at roughly the same time, you can collect the names of those and the approximate due dates in another file (or calendar), so that you build a good picture of what the major events in your field are.
Every now and again you will need to find a new forum or perhaps there will be a book that you could contribute to. By filtering all call for papers, you miss these things.
On the other hand, you can find most of this information using Google ....
Answering the title question: generally you shouldn't **respond** to these emails. That said, you could send an email to be asked to be removed from the mailing list, but this is probably ineffective.
> 15 votes
# Answer
Unsolicited CfP emails are a very bad practice, but there is little you can do. Just ignore and delete the irrelevant CfPs manually.
Reputable conferences and journals *usually* send their announcements only to the relevant mailing lists, so that only those who are really interested in the CfPs will receive them. Unfortunately, there are some reputable venues that resort to spamming, and there is also the grey area of people forwarding CfPs to their colleagues, departmental mailing lists, etc.
**Automated filtering** sounds tempting, but it is very **dangerous**. For example, an invitation to serve in the programme committee of a conference may look very similar to a CfP. Such invitations often include the same basic information as a CfP (conference name, location, date, topic, web site URL, chairs, etc.) – indeed, it might even include a preliminary version of a CfP. An automated filter might easily classify it as CfP spam.
> 15 votes
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Tags: open-access, email, spam, announcements
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thread-3021 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3021 | Are there any particular grants or fellowships in the sciences specifically for non-traditional students? | 2012-08-28T13:28:58.507 | # Question
Title: Are there any particular grants or fellowships in the sciences specifically for non-traditional students?
After obtaining my masters degree, I spent four years doing other things before returning to pursue my PhD. My advisor has a Dept. of Energy grant which has funded me, but the grant will not be able to fund me for my entire PhD program. I'll probably need another two years worth of funding to finish my degree. I may not be able to get a Teaching Assistantship, as they are limited at my institution. I've also noticed that I don't qualify for some fellowships (like NSF GRFP) because I am not a "traditional" student. What are some other options for students in the latter part of their PhD program (i.e. dissertation)? Particularly, for the field of computational science?
# Answer
> 7 votes
In general, you're in a very tough situation. Most of the "big name" fellowships are moving *away* from funding older students, on the relatively flimsy rationale that they're making a bigger impact by funding less experienced students from the start of their program.
There are a few programs that do support late-term graduate students; these are typically known as **dissertation fellowships.** Examples include the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowships, but these also have other restrictions associated with them (for instance, a commitment to a teaching career). Similarly, the Fisher Doctoral Fellowship primarily supports environmental and energy-related research, while the Merck Fellowship Program is for African-American students in biomedical-related fields.
So there are resources available, but they are certainly very limited in scope, and you'll need to make sure you meet all of the qualification criteria. The other problem for you is that these fellowships are typically only one year in duration, so if, as you say, you are two years away from finishing, you will need to find some means to finance one year of study, either through TA's or other sources of funding. In the meanwhile, you should talk with your advisor if there are other resources within the group to help you—at least partially.
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Tags: phd, thesis, funding
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thread-2258 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2258 | Strategy for using a Virtual Learning Environment (aka Blackboad/WebCT/Moodle) | 2012-07-02T09:58:08.290 | # Question
Title: Strategy for using a Virtual Learning Environment (aka Blackboad/WebCT/Moodle)
My university is switching its Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Specifically, we are moving from WebCT to Moodle, but I don't think this matters. This means I need to spend some time learning how to use the new software, but it also presents me the opportunity to think about how I use a VLE to supplement my traditional teaching. Are there any references of how to best leverage the use of VLEs?
# Answer
> 1 votes
WebCT is probably about as user unfriendly as it gets so you'll probably find moodle pretty easy to pick up after that!
Try this http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=5
# Answer
> 3 votes
# Moodle
I recommend you to try a demo site of Moodle. It would be specially helpful to try one that has content. **Here you can find one**. You can choose which role to use, so you will be able to see what students see and to see some settings for each activity.
**Moodle's documentation** is the bible for using Moodle. You just have to make sure to review the documentation of the current version of your site. For instance, the capabilities of versions 1.9 or lower are much more limited than those of versions 2.0 or higher. However, if you are beginner I suggest you to visit first the demo site. Moodle's documentation could be more difficult to grasp if you do not know how a site works.
# Contents
I am not sure if you are going to use Moodle as a support for classes ("blended learning") or if you are going to teach an e-learning class. However, regardless of the kind of use, **here** you can find interesting ideas and concepts about distance education using Moodle. These ideas will be useful even if you are teaching a blended learning class. This document explains some principles for distance education (e.g., the course interface should be simple and intuitive).
# Tips
* The module called "**Lesson**" is very flexible to show and assess content. Some creative users have used it to simulate a situation where students have to make choices. Depending on those choices the module shows them different contents or questions.
* The "**Workshop**" module allows you to implement a peer review system in a class.
* The "**Assignment**" module can be used as an "electronic mail box". Students can submit their project reports online.
* In the newer versions of Moodle there is an option to create a "**Rubric**". So you can quickly evaluate projects clicking on the rubric.
* You can set up a "**Wiki**" in the course's page. For instance, you can ask students to use the Wiki to document their progress on a project, so you can directly comment in there.
* You can create **groups** of students in the course's page. One of the advantages of this is that you can implement forums for each group, so students can exchange messages within their groups.
* If you are teaching a class that uses a lot of math, you can write in Moodle using Latex syntaxis.
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Tags: teaching, software
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thread-1686 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1686 | If you get stuck in research, at what point in time should you ask for help? | 2012-05-24T21:57:22.293 | # Question
Title: If you get stuck in research, at what point in time should you ask for help?
It's always worthwhile to take some time to try to figure it out by yourself. But eventually there's a point where you're unsure how much more time it would take to figure it out by yourself (which could take far longer than you originally think), and when asking for help could be more helpful.
So for analytical or computational research, what are some guidelines for when you should ask for help (from either your adviser, other grad students, or other researchers) when you get stuck?
# Answer
I find that grad students always wait too long to ask for help, either out of fear of looking "stupid", or out of inexperience, or out of a misplaced sense of stubbornness. If you've spent a few weeks on something and you're thoroughly stuck, then you should absolutely ask someone (advisor, other students, anyone with knowledge). You'd be surprised at how often you were merely barking up the wrong tree, or just didn't know a very important fact or reference, or just had to reformulate the question differently. All of this takes experience, and that's what an advisor is supposed to provide.
> 45 votes
# Answer
My answer is in two parts.
> When to ask other grad students or other researchers for help?
The answer is, anytime. There is nothing to be afraid of asking questions to your office mates, researchers across the doorway or even online. However, they may or may not be able to offer much help because they may not know exactly what you're working on.
> When to ask your advisor for help?
The answer is, when you're ready to ask meaningful questions. You don't want your advisor to say why didn't you ask for help sooner. Nor you wanted him to accuse you not working hard enough. If you have meaningful questions and you're stuck for a while - how long is that "a while" usually is a few weeks(long enough to be considered long), you should approach him/her and say you're stuck. Your advisor is there to answer your questions. That's what an advisor is. If you already spend a few weeks on a problem, he would be glad to help you.
You gain more understanding of your research when you try to figure out how to ask questions which make sense because you have to organize your thoughts before asking. Then you're closer to the bottom of it.
However, if you really want to figure it out by yourself for some reasons, you can consider giving yourself a few months. In this case, you would at least let your advisor know you're onto something so that he knows you're making progress. Don't forget he is your advisor. He is on your side !
> 23 votes
# Answer
It took me six months to gather the courage to talk to my research adviser when I was stuck on a project that I knew would "never" work. I should not have waited so long. The conversation we had was very helpful, got me back on track, and, more importantly, got me off the project.
If you are in the same place for more than two or three weeks, its time to have a frank discussion with your research adviser. It's unlikely that he or she knows that you are stuck. The best case scenario is that you have a plan to get unstuck. The worst case scenario is that you are no better off. If you already have a committee, then your next step is to go to the other committee members for help.
> 17 votes
# Answer
It really depends on your advisor's personality, your history of asking for help, the timing of the project, etc. The way in which you ask is also relevant. If you are generally a person who works autonomously and feel you can approach your advisor in a professional (non whiny, non needy) way, most advisors will be happy to help. If you're just afraid to dig in and get your hands dirty (which it sounds you are not), your advisor will probably be less interested in leading you through the process. And there is everything in the middle.
It also depends on whether it's your advisor's project and your project is part of a greater whole; if by delaying too much you are going to slow other people, you should definitely lean on the side of asking for help earlier. However, if you are working on your own idea, you should probably work longer before asking for help. You may also find that you are as much (or more) an expert on the topic than your advisor, so the advisor may not know the answer and may be hoping you'll be the one to figure it out.
There are no general rules. But if you can show that you can figure things out on your own, your advisor may see that as a positive thing and give you a better recommendation for it. On the other hand, if she/he sees you as so stubborn about asking help that you work inefficiently that could be a bad mark.
> 11 votes
# Answer
I do analytical/computational work daily, and I talk to my colleagues quite frequently. Just showing the derivations I made so far to someone often helps me spot my own mistakes, and get new ideas to attack the problem. Your colleagues will often have better understanding of certain subjects that you didn't think would matter for your problem. I guess it depends on your personality (I have highly collaborative), but I would say ask within a day from the moment you got stuck. If someone ends up helping you solve the problem, you will learn from that experience anyways.
> 10 votes
# Answer
You should ask whenever you're stuck. And, as mathematician Peter Sarnak said, "Doing research ... most of the time one is stuck."
You should always be talking to people about what you're working on. You shouldn't be asking them to solve the problem for you, but you should be asking if they know of relevant techniques that might work on your problem.
You should certainly ask your advisor for help every time you meet with him/her. Again, don't ask them to solve the problem for you. Instead, ask whether you should pursue strategy X or technique Y. This can save you a lot of time (but they might be wrong, too).
> 8 votes
# Answer
I constantly discuss my work with my colleges all the time, not only may I get some helpful pointers or references, but asking/staring the question helps me in the solving process, similar to Rubber duck debugging.
> 3 votes
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Tags: research-process
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thread-3655 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3655 | Is there any referencing style analyzer? | 2012-10-08T14:57:09.057 | # Question
Title: Is there any referencing style analyzer?
As different journals and Conference proceedings have different reference styles, it is very much important to quickly identify the specific reference style they prefer.
To do this, is there any reference style analyzer which can analyze a given example reference style and give the name of the style?
# Answer
Unfortunately the name of the reference style is in general Journal X's style. Even journals that claim to stick to a standard style (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago) often throw in little twists. In general I find that if you get close, journals are pretty forgiving and will copy edit you to the correct style.
Basically you want your in text citations to follow either an author-number (Vancouver) or author-date (Harvard) style. As for the list of citations, just make sure it has all the information that the journal uses (e.g., DOI if the journal uses it).
> 3 votes
# Answer
Each journal will have a **guide for authors** that will specify the required reference style. That's the fastest, easiest and most reliable method.
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, citations, reference-managers
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thread-3583 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3583 | What is the closest alternative journal to journal X? | 2012-10-04T12:46:44.827 | # Question
Title: What is the closest alternative journal to journal X?
Does anyone know of a website or resource that identifies the nearest journal neighbours to journal X (any specific journal) in terms of content (perhaps defined by some distance metric defined on article keywords?). In other words, if I am rejected by journal X, which journals might consider the same paper?
# Answer
Indeed, there are tools that create maps of journals in a given area. Most of them are based on citation data, i.e. they consider that citations between articles of journal A and journal B are a good indicator of proximity of the two journals (and it seems like a good definition of “proximity”). If you are interested in the topic of how such maps are created, and how they can be analyzed, you can read on the topic. For example, see “Seed journal citation network maps: A method based on network theory” and related papers.
Now, regarding online tools available, a search lead me to VOSViewer (paper), which looks like it contains exactly what you want:
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A final note: while such journal maps can be useful in discovering new journals in a field you don't know well, I will add that each journal is unique, and you have to learn about the journals in your field in order to increase your chances of success at publishing articles. It may, for example, tell you that two journals are very close in scope when they actually have very different editorial policies. *Read the editorial guidelines for the journals of your field* and, at least as importantly, *read papers of each journal* to get a feeling of what the actual policy in place are.
> 19 votes
# Answer
If your institution has access to Journal Citation Reports, there is a feature called *Related Journals* that will provide a list of titles similar to your selected title, based on citing and cited relationships. Journal Citation Reports is a subscription database provided by Thomson Reuters
> 4 votes
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Tags: journals, bibliometrics
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thread-3658 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3658 | Is it alright to skip problem solving sessions during coursework? | 2012-10-08T15:28:31.073 | # Question
Title: Is it alright to skip problem solving sessions during coursework?
During coursework, there are sessions where a problem set is distributed beforehand and a TA works out the solutions in front of the class in a stipulated session.
Given the student works out the problems himself and is confident of the material being covered, is it alright to skip such sessions? Is this viewed adversely during grading, etc?
# Answer
Yes, skipping the sessions is not only alright, but is in fact advisable. Will it be viewed adversely during grading, you bet yeah. The key thing to remember is that in grad school grades don't matter. If skipping the session means you can put an extra hour into your research, then that is better time spent.
The way it will affect you in grading is you might lose some participation points and the benefit of the doubt for borderline grades. The instructor may be less inclined to write you a letter of recommendation, but ideally your letter writers will be talking about your research.
> 6 votes
# Answer
*“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.”*
Yes, you should do your best to maximize your gain from grad school, including skipping sessions/lectures which are not profitable, unless it is explicitly against the rules (in some institutions, there are mandatory lectures). If that means you skip some lectures, do it. If asked, be polite but direct about it. Some people will take it badly, most probably won't.
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I'll reinforce my (and Daniel’s) answer with an anecdote: as a student, the department head welcomed us at the beginning of my first year. He said his institution was a place of science, not of conventions, and independence of great minds mattered above all. “Some people learn best in books, in chats with researchers… not by sleeping in lecture rooms. That's okay.” — Two months later, I went to him a morning because I needed his signature on an application. He gave me hell because I dared skip *his own* coursework session, which was happening at the same time with a TA from his group.
So, you can skip lectures, you don't have to try to hide it, but don't rub it in either :)
> 3 votes
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Tags: coursework, teaching-assistant
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thread-3673 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3673 | Can you mention that you were a paper reviewer after it has been published? | 2012-10-09T13:43:49.453 | # Question
Title: Can you mention that you were a paper reviewer after it has been published?
> **Possible Duplicate:**
> Are the referees of a journal allowed to reveal the title of the papers they review after the review process?
Suppose you were a single-blind paper reviewer (i.e. you could see the author's name, but they couldn't see your name) and you didn't obviously de-anonymize yourself during the review. If the paper gets accepted and published, and you are writing a review/summary of it (in its published form, not in any pre-publication form you have seen) on your blog after it appears in print.
1. **Can you mention the fact that you were a reviewer for this paper?**
2. **Can you make comments about pre-publication versions of the paper?** For instance: 'when submitted the paper lacked X, but other reviewers and I suggested it to be added and after revisions the author provided a full proof of X'.
# Answer
> 10 votes
I'd just pretend that you stumbled across a paper, rather than say you reviewed it on your blog.
And you should **not** make comments about the pre-published version of the paper. This could be embarrassing for the author, and seriously violates the trust embodied in the reviewing process.
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Tags: peer-review, etiquette
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thread-1275 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1275 | When and why a scientific technical report is written? | 2012-04-25T14:00:43.497 | # Question
Title: When and why a scientific technical report is written?
While making some paper search in my scientific field, sometimes I find articles that are not published in journals or conference proceedings, but as **technical reports**.
In my experience, I've never written a technical report, and I've never even been asked to do it.
So I was wondering: what's the difference between a technical report and a scientific paper? Why some researchers publish a work as technical report instead of sending it to a conference or a journal?
When do you suggest to write one instead of addressing it to a conference or a journal?
PS: It seems to me that writing technical reports is more diffused in English-speaking world than in Continental Europe. Is it true? Why?
# Answer
> 27 votes
The main advantages of a research report is that it's published very fast, and without reviewing process. From what I've seen, a research report is basically used:
* to publish a longer version of a paper, for instance including proofs or detailed examples that couldn't fit in a version submitted to a conference.
* to put a timestamp on an idea, in order to be able to claim "We did it back then"
* to create a reference that can be cited for project reporting, even though the work has not been published (yet).
* to make a pre-print document freely available, for instance if the published version is behind a paywall.
Such features are particularly useful when one wants to disseminate (for instance sharing with some colleagues) some unpublished material. Basically, I'd say that most of this can also be achieved by submitting the paper to a public repository, such as arXiv.
EDIT: considering the language question, intuitively, I would say that when research reports are used in the publication process, it's likely they are written in English. If a non-English speaking university does not offer a mechanism to submit research reports written in English, that might explain why it's not used. However, I've written research reports in France and Italy (in English).
# Answer
> 15 votes
Perhaps it varies by field but other uses I have come across in my field are;
* Required by a grant funding agency (i.e. a report of the findings from the study to the grant agency). Here is such an example of a NIJ report. These tend to be *much* longer and more detailed than a single journal article.
* Reports disseminated by other institutions. For instance, the non-for-profit I work for releases technical reports that we want to disseminate to the public (the same goes for the state agency I work for). The material *may* be the same as subsequent journal articles but the intended audience is not limited to academics and is much broader. Here is an example of this by the RAND corporation. Another popular one in the Social Sciences is the Campbell collaboration library of meta-analysis.
These are similar to what Charles stated, but I would nit-pick a bit with the motivation. They aren't always just another means to disseminate what are otherwise journal articles. It is also a very potential heterogeneous field of papers. The RAND and Campbell articles I cited above are typically considered very high esteem (and go through a similar peer-review process to more typical journals). But pretty much any agency can release a technical report (put your agency name on it and post the pdf on the internet) so they can vary dramatically in quality.
# Answer
> 5 votes
In the particle physics world---where we have large organization that operate for decades---"technical report" is one of the several names given to internal documents and communications with the funding agencies that are intended to
* communicate important technical details between units (e.g. the accelerator division needs to inform the experimental scientists of the operational limits of the beam position monitors)
* propagate and preserve specialized knowledge and competencies
* to document details that won't be written up in a paper for many years (large experiments often leave off writing a detailed description of the experiment as built and run until after several data papers have appeared; by the time you get ready to write this "instrumentation paper" many of the people who installed the device may have moved on)
* provided supporting justification for grant requests and project proposals
* demonstrate readiness to actually start spending money on conditionally approved projects (which is essentially *all* US projects in the post SSC era; and both the Europeans and the Japanese have similar administrative protections)
Accordingly most particle physicist will spend some time writing such documents every few years.
# Answer
> 4 votes
In addition to the answers already posted, sometimes when a professor is given a professorial chair (endowment), he or she is required to submit formal documentation describing the research done while "sitting in the chair." Some departments/colleges/universities will accept (non-refereed) technical reports in lieu of refereed papers just to get around the technicality.
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-3680 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3680 | How to cite conference contribution that appears later in a Journal Supplement | 2012-10-10T07:23:11.007 | # Question
Title: How to cite conference contribution that appears later in a Journal Supplement
People from our group attended some important conferences (Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society, etc) and sent abstracts that were accepted as posters or talks. Later, the abstract appears in a Supplement of a Journal (in this case, Biophysical Journal).
My question is, in such cases, can one cite this publication in the CV as a regular paper? Otherwise, what should be the best way to cite it?
# Answer
> 11 votes
They are not usually listed on the same list as “regular papers” in a CV. The reason for that is that **they are not peer-reviewed**. In the fields of physics, chemistry and biology, it is most common to list your scientific production in a CV by breaking it down into the following categories:
* Peer-reviewed articles
* Book chapters
* Conference proceedings
* Invited conference talks
* Conference talks
* Conference posters
I looked at examples from the *Biophysical journal* supplements, and the abstracts are quite short (one paragraph or two). Even though it is published in print, it is too short to be considered proceedings. Thus, **I would list it as either a talk or a poster**. That is was published as part of a supplement to one journal does not make it very different from any other conference.
In some countries and in some fields, it may also be typical to further break down between national and international venues (journals, conferences, etc.).
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As a side note, the journal webpage has some information on how to format such citations:
> Smith, R., S.E. Jones, T.J. Smith, (2006) Histone phosphorylation in DNA damage. 2006 Biophysical Society Meeting Abstracts. Biophysical Journal, Supplement, Abstract.
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Tags: journals, conference, citations
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thread-3575 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3575 | How to evaluate students? Resources on educational assessment for higher education | 2012-10-04T09:33:54.057 | # Question
Title: How to evaluate students? Resources on educational assessment for higher education
Most academics are involved to some level in teaching classes and evaluating students. I never got a proper education in teaching, unlike what we had for research, and neither did any of the lecturers and professors in my community: we learnt on the job, and for the most part reproduce what we have seen others do.
There is one area where I feel this is not enough, and I could be better: evaluations. We mostly do two sorts of evaluations: written exams (exercises with series of questions) and short bibliographic or research projects (ending with a short oral defense). In addition, many high school teacher friends tell me that research on the evaluation of knowledge acquisition (or student assessment) has made huge progresses in the last 20 or 30 years, that have completely changed the way *they* teach and evaluate students. Yet, I don't think things has changed so much in higher education, and I don't find around me any tools (lectures, seminars, tutorials, what-ever) to learn of this topic.
So: **How can one learn to better evaluate student’s skills and knowledge acquisition? What are good (and modern) resources out there on educational assessment as applied to higher education?**
# Answer
> 19 votes
A good place to start to fill gaps due to lack of teacher training is with a general book or two on the topic. I was surprised when I read these at how different current attitudes and approaches are compared to when I was a student. Consider:
One of the key issues these books talk about regarding assessment is the notion of **constructive alignment**, which is ensuring that the assessment aligns appropriately with the learning outcomes of the course. In these books (and others) plenty of advice is given to help you better align your assessment.
Another important issue is that assessment guides the approach to learning. If students know that they only need to learn a whole bunch of facts, perhaps based on their examination of past exams, then they will adopt a shallow approach to learning and not really understand the material. Trying to encourage students to adopt a deep approach to learning is extremely important and is strongly influenced by the approach taken to assessment. These books also focus on this issue.
After reading those, I recommend the following books, which both focus on assessment. They have given me plenty of ideas:
They both written in the context of British universities, but I'm sure the ideas are fairly universally applicable.
There are also plenty of journals of higher education, if you want to get access to cutting edge research in higher education. Some are devoted to assessment, and others are more general:
I'm pretty sure that this only scrapes the surface.
Finally, the Google returned some resources, which lead to more detailed resources:
# Answer
> 4 votes
Depending on country, your university may provide training. In the UK all teaching staff must obtain a Post Graduate Certificate in Higher Education. While I still do not fully understand the process, it seems that this is nearly a Masters in Education. I would check with your office of professional development to see what courses they offer. You may also want to look at auditing a course in the Department of Education. Although in my experience Departments of Education are often rated as having poor teaching (this may obviously be due to student bias).
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Tags: teaching, assessment
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thread-3684 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3684 | Isn't ghostwriting reverse-plagiarism? | 2012-10-10T14:43:21.093 | # Question
Title: Isn't ghostwriting reverse-plagiarism?
Ghostwriting is when an author writes a work and attributes it to someone else.
Isn't this *reverse-plagiarism* (someone taking credit for someone else's work, but *with permission*)? I'm not sure it happens in academia a lot, but I've seen instances where a professor "ghostwrites" course notes for another professor. Actually those notes are really bad and it seems like he doesn't want to take the hit of delivering the course himself. Instead he ghostwrites it for other people. It seems wrong to me.
# Answer
> 16 votes
Unattributed work in academia is generally considered unethical. In my own experience, however, I believe that I've come across very few instances of actual ghostwriting where the real author was unnamed. Normally, at least some acknowledgment is called for, either in an editor's note or introduction.
Now, to answer Mankoff's comeent below, by "unattributed work," it can be okay for authors to *choose* to remain anonymous, if they feel it is in their best interests to do so. However, to take *someone else's* work and to pass it off as their own is clearly unethical behavior. However, from an ethics standpoint, even if the ghost author is asked about attribution and declines, the "named" author should not attempt to claim sole credit for the work. Instead, the author should make some sort of reference to those who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. Otherwise, they're passing off someone else's work as their own.
# Answer
> 10 votes
In general, I would say that ghost writing does not constitute plagiarism and using one is not an academically dishonest. A scientific writer who is not an expert in a particular field can convert research notes into a manuscript. These words are not the contribution to the field, but rather the research they encompass. While converting the notes to prose could be viewed as worthy of authorship, I think it is also reasonable to say that it is not. If the writer and the researcher agree that the writers assistance is not worthy of authorship, then there is no problem.
While I do not use a ghost writer, I see this as no different then employing a programmer to write code to control my experiment, an RA to collect the data from the experiment, a graphic designer to create the figures, and a statistician to run the statistics, all of which I do do to varying degrees. To me the contribution is the design of the experiment and the analysis and interpretation of the results. I acknowledge these individuals to varying degrees in the manuscripts, but rarely give authorship.
The ICMJE guidelines for authorship are
> Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.
A ghost writer does not meet conditions 1 or 3.
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Tags: writing, ethics, plagiarism
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thread-3683 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3683 | Referee access to a not-yet-public URL cited in a paper? | 2012-10-10T14:11:40.113 | # Question
Title: Referee access to a not-yet-public URL cited in a paper?
I am reviewing a publication, in which the authors give the URL of an online tool (data analysis and sharing) they have developed. This URL has apparently not yet been publicized, as searching for it in Google didn't bring any result. Because of that, I'm worried that the paper's authors may identify me as a referee when I go check their website (after all, the logs must be clear). That probably wouldn't be very ethical, but I have no way of being sure they won't do it.
What I am supposed to do about it? I thought of contacting the editor asking for guidance, using a private proxy<sup>\[1\]</sup>, or logging from an internet café somewhere. Do you have any other suggestions? Or am I just worrying too much?
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1. I don't know which anonymizing proxy service to use, and I welcome suggestions in comments, but that probably isn't particularly relevant to this site.
# Answer
> 12 votes
First, I think you are worrying too much. Second, I think it is bad form on the part of the authors. If the material on the website is critical for the paper, it needs to be provided in an archival form that the journal can keep track of. I would evaluate it based on what you have been given.
# Answer
> 3 votes
On the technical side, you can use Tor. That's what I do as a reviewer for accessing on-line supplements to blind reviewed conference submissions.
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Tags: peer-review, anonymity
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thread-3690 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3690 | What is IRDAM Journal? | 2012-10-11T06:37:23.587 | # Question
Title: What is IRDAM Journal?
I was reading Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing Series. One of the articles is titled: “If an IRDAM Journal Is What You Choose, Then Sequential Results Are What You Use”.
I have encountered this term in this site also. Can anybody explain this term?
A Google search asks ”Did you mean: IRDA Journal”
In the article I linked, it is explained as "Introduction, Results, Discussion, and Methods". I understand its meaning as this readily. What I would like to know following points.
* Which type of journal articles are suitable for this style?
* Which branches of academic endorse its usage?
* Are there any other such styles exists?
* Are there any other abbreviations exists?
* finally but not least, why should I follow this type of sequence?
# Answer
If you look at this article, you can see that IRDAM is an acronym for Introduction, Results, Discussion, and Methods. IRDAM is a style/format of presenting results in publications.
Quote from the article:
> The IRDAM format requires a substantial change in how the Results section is organized. Because the methods are listed at the end of the paper, or online, the reader is not exposed to details of the experimental protocols and methods before the results are presented.
See also,
> The format used by many high-impact basic research journals, such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Journal of Cell Biology, is arranged so that the Results section immediately follows the Introduction. The Methods section is placed at the end, or it may even be published as a supplemental data file.
> 7 votes
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Tags: journals, writing
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thread-3692 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3692 | How do recruiters consider parental leave in one's career path? | 2012-10-11T07:43:23.093 | # Question
Title: How do recruiters consider parental leave in one's career path?
It used to be that mostly women would take maternity leave, and in the field where I work it would be accounted for by a hiring committee. Most likely, someone would say “yeah, there is a dip in X’s scientific production during years XX-XX, but that's around the time she got 2 kids, so it's not worrying”. It might not always be put very delicately (I heard of a committee member once saying *“so, let's decide in advance: how many papers is one kid worth?”*), but there existed some sort of positive bias.
Nowadays, more and more fathers take parental leave (around me, it seems to be usually 6 to 12 months when the kid is young). Thus, the situation is getting more complex. How do hiring committees in academia handle these cases? Should one consider a parental leave as “lost time”, professionally speaking? Or are recruiters in academia more understanding than that?
---
*Edit:* more specifically, I'm talking about the US system. I know that standards of parental leave are more generous in Europe than in a typical “welfare is communism” country :) So, I am worried about how academic employers might react to a woman having a 2 years parental leave in her curriculum, or a father having taken a 6-month leave in the recent past.
Of course, the situation in others countries is also interesting… So please don't hesitate to leave comments!
# Answer
> 9 votes
The US hiring committees I've been on generally *don't* handle this issue, because it's mostly orthogonal to the hiring decision. We can't legally discriminate on the basis of gender, age, martial status, sexual orientation, parental status, or fertility. We can and do discriminate on the strength of the applicant's cumulative research record (including *recent* productivity) and their reputation in the research community. Short gaps in an applicant's research record are inconsequential; *everybody* has off years. Longer gaps, even if they last multiple years, can be ignored if their post-gap work is sufficiently stellar. (And if their work isn't stellar, even without the gaps, why would we want to hire them?)
However, this *is* an issue that promotions and tenure committees have to address. At my university, parental and other leaves extend the tenure clock, and tenure/promotion decisions are based on the candidate's cumulative record *since their last promotion*, not their cumulative record *in the last n years* for any fixed value of n. The committee usually knows *that* the candidate's clock was extended, because we can figure that out from their CV, but we are usually not told *why*, because it's none of our business.
There are **many** reasons why a researcher might take a leave of absence / stop their tenure clock / have a gap in their publication record. I've seen all of the following:
* Parental: having *or adopting* a new child (either or both parents)
* Medical: serious injury or illness, of either the researcher themselves or a close family member
* Bereavement: death of a researcher's spouse, child, or other close family member
* Entrepreneurial: building a startup company
* Administrative: holding a service position, either at the university or elsewhere (for example, at a funding agency)
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Tags: career-path, recruiting
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thread-3700 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3700 | Reproducing figures in blog/SE posts | 2012-10-12T04:45:46.750 | # Question
Title: Reproducing figures in blog/SE posts
Sometimes when I am writing a review blog post (or an answer on SE), it is convenient to include a figure from the original paper. Some journals (say PNAS) have policies that explicitly allow non-commercial reproduction of figures:
> Anyone may, without requesting permission, use original figures or tables published in PNAS for noncommercial and educational use (i.e., in a review article, in a book that is not for sale) provided that the original source and the applicable copyright notice are cited.
Others, however, seem to explicitly disallow this, of note is the Nature Publishing Group. Today, I had to fill in an online form on RightsLink in order to ensure I could use a figure in my post. I didn't have to pay anything, and the rights were granted instantly after completing the form, but it was still a hassle. The biggest hassle is having to go to each journal's website to check their policies. Hence the questions:
1. **Is there a general law like fair-use that allows me to place figures from published papers inside blog posts for non-commercial commentary/review purposes?**
2. What if your blog has ads that generate revenue, is the use of the figures no longer non-commercial? What about SE that generates revenue but not for the poster?
3. Is there any extra etiquette one should keep in mind for including figures in blog posts?
# Answer
Some thoughts on this issue:
* First, the fair use doctrine is tricky. Assuming you're not ready to hire a lawyer, **play it safe**. If you're not sure, ask for permission. If you're asked to remove something, do it.
* There has been some noise a few years back on the topic of blogging and reuse of scientific figures. See here, there and there for some links to that affair. The conclusion I would draw is, again: **play it safe**.
* In at least some jurisdictions (France is one), having ads on your web will mean your blog is considered a commercial publication. Asserting fair use for commercial works is typically harder, though this distinction tends to diminish (here).
* Attribute figures (source + link). Always. It's just good manners.
I'll finish by a general observation related to copyright law in academia, as I see it (at least around me): people tend to just do stuff, and then play dumb if they get caught (which rarely happens). Lots of researchers knowingly put up (without authorization) PDF files of their papers on their website, and say “I'll just remove them if I am asked too”.
> 11 votes
# Answer
I also write a blog, and sometimes I also tend to pull images from papers or bookstores.
I do not monetize in my blog, so I'm safe there, and as far as I remember, the current state of the law is that you receive a cease and desist before anything else can happen, so the worst that can happen is that you get a slap in the hand, for the case of the USA.
Now, other countries like Japan just passed really strict laws, where you are not allowed to host anything that is not copyrighted or you face 10 years in prison (no Cease and Desist).
So be sure to see where your blog is hosted, and whether you are hosting anything at all.
One suggestion I tend to follow is to publish things from Arxiv and Wikipedia, which are both for free use.
> 4 votes
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Tags: etiquette, plagiarism, online-resource, graphics
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thread-3695 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3695 | How to find all of the responses to a published research paper? | 2012-10-11T23:54:48.580 | # Question
Title: How to find all of the responses to a published research paper?
While searching through various journals with my library's on-line journal search tools, I have occasionally found short articles which are simply comments on other published papers. These short articles might have various kinds of comments, but generally describe why the first paper's research or theories are flawed. In addition, sometimes I have found replies from the original author of the first paper, responding to these comments, for e.g., to clarify the meaning or perhaps to give further support to their original arguments.
* Do such exchanges generally only occur within the same journal, i.e. the responses are published in the same journal, or can these occur across journals?
* Are there any special tools to assist with locating all of these "replies"?
# Answer
> 14 votes
First, it may depend on your field, but at least in mine (physics and chemistry), it is rare for papers to generate comments or replies, and really extraordinary for a paper to be followed by multiple comments. (The editor usually lets the original authors reply to the comment, however.)
Some publishers provide links to the comments and replies on the webpage for the original paper. Otherwise, you can locate those comments using the following criteria:
* they are published in the same journal, or in a preprint server (like arxiv)
* their title includes “comment on” or “reply to” (or other such publisher-dependent prefix that you need to identify)
Finally, you should get the list of all newer papers citing the original paper, and check them out. If you're investigating a paper in depth, you’ll do that anyway :)
# Answer
> 6 votes
In pure math, a good paper may be cited only 10 to 20 times. An excellent paper may be cited only a 100 times or fewer. As a result, it's **fairly quick to skim the titles and abstracts of all newer papers that cite a given paper**. This is easy using MathSciNet. I think Web of Science provides similar functionality for other fields.
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Tags: research-process, publications, citations
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thread-3696 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3696 | What are the responsibilities of a Program vs. General Conference Chair? | 2012-10-12T00:10:24.857 | # Question
Title: What are the responsibilities of a Program vs. General Conference Chair?
What are the responsibilities of a conference's *program chair* versus its *general chair*? Computer science conferences like STOC and FOCS list separate program and general chairs.
A guess would be that the program chair is in charge of the technical content (which papers are accepted, etc.) whereas the general chair is in charge of administrative aspects. However, some conferences, like FOCS, list a third group of *local arrangements chairs* who sound like they are in charge of the administrative side of the conference. Others only have one group of undifferentiated "chairs".
What do each of these jobs entail? Are they considered "equal" in terms of service to the community?
# Answer
Conferences in *theoretical* computer science like the ones you mention typically don't have general chairs. They have a local arrangements team for organizing the event, and program chairs to manage the review process.
Many conferences in CS outside theory have a general chair because they have many more activities. The general chair might be in charge of selecting
* The workshop program chair
* The posters chair
* The tutorials chair
* Publicity (and social media) chairs
* Treasurer
* Local arrangements
And so on. The general chair can be viewed as being in charge of everything except the technical program and then delegates.
But this may vary even within iterations of an individual conference.
> 8 votes
# Answer
The answer varies with the size and scope of the conference. You might have many more "chair" roles, such as e.g., AAMAS, or IJCAI. All depends on the activities the conference runs. In the simple settings when the conference is relatively small, local organizers and program chairs might be just enough. All to do is to organize the venue, catering, registration, finances, etc. (local chairs) and then the technical program (program chairs & program committee).
Normally, program chairs are responsible for selecting, approaching and managing the program committee, deal with the basic publicity (calls for papers and participation - that can also go to local chairs, or even publicity chairs) and then, most importantly run the whole submission, peer-review and proceedings publishing process, normally except for the printing part. Similar would hold for all the other "lower-level" chairs, such as tutorial, workshop, etc. chairs.
Now if the conference runs many activities, you need to manage the whole process and there you go with your general chairs. But again, all would depend on the conference type, size, activities it runs and the traditions in the community.
> 2 votes
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Tags: conference
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thread-3697 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3697 | Is it reasonable to cite published computational results rather than reproduce them yourself? | 2012-10-12T01:43:45.350 | # Question
Title: Is it reasonable to cite published computational results rather than reproduce them yourself?
In computer science, when we write an academic paper, we often have to include comparative results that our method has some kind of quantitative advantage against some other state of the art results.
While it is sometimes easy to reproduce a cited paper's results (e.g., classification of small datasets), other times it is very time consuming and you could spent the better part of your research time just writing code testing the other methods.
However, it sometimes happens that when we reproduce the method, we do not get the presented results. So it can be tricky to do that as well.
* **Is it reasonable just to cite another paper's results at face value?**
* **What suggestions would you give to this conundrum?**
# Answer
* I treat **computational results as *in silico* experiments**. They have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, so I trust them by default, unless I have a reason not to. I cite them without a need to recompute them.
* Sometimes, I have a reason to doubt them: they don't match my intuition, or they don't match my own results in a related case; they seem incoherent; they don't match experimental data; etc. Then, I redo them, possibly in more than one way (different software, try checking the effect of some of the assumptions, etc.). If I learn something from it, I consider publishing this study.
> 14 votes
# Answer
My most-cited work arose because we couldn't reproduce an earlier published paper in the field. We did a much more extensive study, and demonstrated conclusively why the previous results were unreliable.
So, while you don't need to reproduce every single result that has previously been published, it can serve a useful purpose to try to reproduce at least *some* of those results—because then you can be sure that your model is working the way you would expect it to (provided the previous data can be trusted; as my case showed, this isn't always the case!).
> 8 votes
# Answer
> Is it reasonable just to cite another paper's results at face value?
In my opinion, there are only few limited cases where this would be acceptable. For example, when comparing industrial-scale systems, or comparison of qualitative features of the works. Also in the case there exist an established set of benchmarks and your algorithm can solve some of those the other can't, you do not really need to reimplement. Possibly also when testing the algorithm cannot be done in a reproducible manner (industrial-scale field tests). When it comes to experimental efficiency, however, I think you usually do not have much choice and should reproduce the others results - if possible at all.
> What suggestions would you give to this conundrum?
Depends on what you need the cited work for. In the case you developed an algorithm which is supposed to be more efficient than the cited one, to prove your point you need a controlled experiment when both methods are run under same conditions (e.g., implemented in the same programming language, and run on the same system etc.) and with the same set of benchmarks. In such a case, if you want to demonstrate your point properly, your best is to reimplement (or ask the authors for their implementation and adapt it to your conditions) and run head-to-head. Otherwise your performance curves are going to be incomparable. For good examples of how to do this, see for example comparisons/evaluations of experimental performance of planning algorithms, or SAT solvers.
> 1 votes
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Tags: journals, publications, citations
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thread-3711 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3711 | Can "Feel free to contact me if you are interested in a copy of any of my publications." cause legal issues? | 2012-10-12T11:54:49.610 | # Question
Title: Can "Feel free to contact me if you are interested in a copy of any of my publications." cause legal issues?
I know that some journals allow public archiving of publications (making them available for download) on a researcher's personal website. Some of these journals (at least in my field), however, constrict this right by saying that it is only allowed to public archive after one year following publication. **EDIT**: My question is concerned with the time frame of this first year or with the situation where journals do not allow public archiving.
To make a publication available to an interested reader, who is unable to obtain the article from the publisher due to institutional subscription policies, does one risk any legal problems on putting the following sentence on his/her website:
> Feel free to contact me if you are interested in a copy of any of my publications.
# Answer
This will likely vary from journal to journal, but the information should be available in the "authors" section on a journal's webpage. For example, Science provides the document "License to Publish—Information for Authors" document, which clearly states:
> Once the Work has been published in Science and provided the Work's first appearance in Science is properly cited, authors may:
>
> ...
>
> * Distribute photocopies of the Work to colleagues for non-commercial purposes only (providing that recipients are informed that they may not further distribute or copy the Work). Authors may distribute photocopies or download and email the Science PDF to their colleagues for their colleagues' personal use provided the recipients understand that the copy may not be further distributed or reproduced without the approval of AAAS.
This license would allow what you described, as it's non-commercial.
> 15 votes
# Answer
With respect to the specific question of writing such a statement, there is no implication of an agreement that sending you an email will automatically lead to receiving a copy of the publication. If there are specific restraints on your distribution of preprints, then you can explain those limitations when a preprint is not available.
Alternatively, you could indicate which papers are "embargoed," and include a statement that says: "Except where noted, preprints are available by contacting the author," or something to that effect.
> 7 votes
# Answer
**Short answer:** So far, I did not see a copyright transfer agreement, which did forbid an author to distribute pre-prints for his/her personal use by e-mail, or in a printed form.
**Long answer:** The answer always depends on the particular publication. Whenever you submit your camera-ready copy, you usually also submit a signed copyright transfer agreement, or a document similar to it. Therein, you always have listed which rights to the work in question you are transfering to the publisher and which remain with you. Usually, in my field (CS/AI), there is a section on "Returned rights" where is explicitly stated what (publishing a preprint, distribution to colleagues, figure re-use, etc.) and how the author can, or cannot do it (obligation to include a copyright statement, etc.). Since your question is of a legal nature, I suggest contacting the publisher of the work in question and simply ask whether what you want to do is in line with copyright agreement you, or some of your co-authors signed, or whether you need to handle it differently. But before that, take a look on that publisher's website, all the major ones have these policies quite explicitly, and often including FAQs and other guidelines, listed on their websites.
> 4 votes
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Tags: publications, copyright, website
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thread-3701 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3701 | Use "parts" in a master thesis report | 2012-10-12T05:17:20.200 | # Question
Title: Use "parts" in a master thesis report
I am writing a master thesis of about 80-100 pages and want to know a good way of structuring my document either using only chapters or chapters and "parts". f first wanted to post this question to the TeX Stack Exchange but realized that it was too philosophical.
As most thesis writers I use LaTeX and I have seen thesis templates that use `\part` (classicthesis) and ones that do not (master thesis template from a university). I think that classicthesis is mostly aimed at PhD thesis documents that are longer and will become a "book".
So when is it appropriate to use `\part`? Any specific document length in pages or number of chapters?
When you use `\part` then a page is cleared after the text. Is this a style that is used in American PhD thesis documents? Why is this done?
I have also looked at some textbooks and they often do not have something similar to part. Instead these books only use chapters. One of my favorite textbooks (*Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach* by Russel) uses parts but no actual pages that show the parts name. Instead they are only visible in the table of contents.
My two competing ideas are with and without parts:
```
\chapter{Introduction}
\part{Concepts}
\chapter{Background}
\chapter{Related work}
\part{Methods and systems}
\chapter{Proposed method}
\chapter{Implementation}
\part{Evaluation}
\chapter{Experiments}
\chapter{Analysis}
\part{Conclusions}
\chapter{Conclusions}
\chapter{Future work}
```
# Answer
> So when is it appropriate to use \part? Any specific document length in pages or number of chapters?
It is appropriate when you feel it appropriate! Seriously though, assuming that there isn't any guideline from your university (otherwise, you probably wouldn't be asking the question), it's really a personal choice, the same than about the splitting chapter/section/subsection/subsubsection/paragraph. The structure of a document is there to help the reader, in particular for long documents. A part could be something that can be read separately (i.e., with no references to the other parts), or could be something containing some huge chapters; tt could reflect a chronological order (before, during, after), or a conceptual separation (theoretical, applied), etc.
In case of doubt, talk with your advisor!
> When you use \part then a page is cleared after the text. Is this a style that is used in American PhD thesis documents? Why is this done?
As @Daniel pointed out, this is a rather technical question, that is more likely to be answered on tex.SE.
> 12 votes
# Answer
Apart from my advice in comments above to ask at writers.sx, I think you might want to consult manuals of style. E.g., The Chicago Manual of Style, speaks about division of a work in chapter 1, subsection 1.47 on division of a text into parts. I do not have the book besides me, so try to take a look at your library. Also The Oxford Guide to Style in subsection 1.3.2 speaks about this and says the following:
> *Arranging a work into parts is useful when a lengthy text falls easily and sensibly into logical divisions of similar length.*
My personal opinion is, that for a work of 80-100 pages, division into parts is a waste of paper and imposes a too high cognitive load on the reader. Such a text is not *lengthy* enough to be eligible for such a crude division into multi-chapter parts. Do you have something like 3 times (parts) of at least 3 chapters each in your thesis? If so, and your thesis is about 80-100 pages, then IMHO, something is wrong with your structure to start with. Parts would make sense for a dissertation, or a similar manuscript if you would for example attack a problem from several aspects, each of a size and structure of several chapters.
My personal advice: **Keep it simple! This is a master thesis, not a memoir.**
> 3 votes
# Answer
> When you use \part then a page is cleared after the text. Is this a style that is used in American PhD thesis documents? Why is this done?
Actually, the primary reason for this, I believe, is related to traditions in bookbinding. In the "old" days, it was accepted practice to begin each major new section with a right-hand page. Even now, some books are published in such a way that every chapter will start on a right-hand page, whether or not the previous chapter ended on a left-hand page.
Given that, the assumption would be that you'd want to have a blank page after the "part" page, and that the "part" page, as well as the first page of the ensuing chapter would both be "right-handed" when the thesis is printed in two-sided format. If you have to submit it in one-sided form, this becomes a bit of a nuisance, but I suspect this is an option that can be turned off in LaTeX.
> 2 votes
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Tags: masters, thesis
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thread-3732 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3732 | How do I respond to a review of the wrong version of my paper? | 2012-10-13T17:16:52.907 | # Question
Title: How do I respond to a review of the wrong version of my paper?
I have just had the revised version of a paper rejected from a well respected journal. However, one of the reviews is clearly a review of the original draft of the paper, rather than the revised version. I pointed this out to the editor, and his response was
> Please revise your paper again, and submit it as a new paper, by mentioning your old paper ID number, together with replies to reviewers.
I don't see how I can reply to that review. How should I proceed?
# Answer
Consider the pragmatic approach to this issue: **you have already revised the paper according the reviewer’s suggestions**, so only the response needs to be worked on. (Apart from other comments orthogonal to this main issue.)
Given that you already called the attention of the editor on the problem and he did not follow up on it, you clearly need to weigh carefully your response (unless you want to pick up a fight). I would suggest that you write a very detailed response letter, in which you explain how the manuscript addresses the reviewer's comments and questions. Do it point by point, quoting all the parts of your manuscript that are relevant (and locating them: page and line numbers).
Just do so by **being slightly evasive about the exact evolution of the manuscript**. Where you would normally say *“we have added a paragraph at the end of section B”*, just say *“the revised manuscript includes a paragraph addressing the reviewer's question at the end of section B”*. It's not untrue, though it is not perfectly clear.
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Also, **consider going for another journal**. If you believe the editor has been treating somewhat badly, you might want to just let it drop and submit somewhere else. It's a complex decision.
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Or, if you think it's worth it: **make a stand for it**. Appeal the editor's decision to the editor in chief, on the basis that a factual error was made. You need to be both strong and diplomatic in your appeal, and back it up heavily with facts. It will be easier if the incriminated review actually quotes some text that has changed in your revised manuscript, in which case the error is evident.
> 5 votes
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Tags: journals, peer-review
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thread-3719 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3719 | How to select a dissertation committee member wisely? | 2012-10-13T03:34:52.570 | # Question
Title: How to select a dissertation committee member wisely?
I'm currently developing my dissertation proposal, and am in the process of choosing my committee members. I have heard that one should carefully choose their committee members, since they ultimately judge if and when your PhD work is done. As far as I can tell, a committee member should at least have some expertise in my research topic. I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I want to know what other qualities should I look out for? What qualities in a committee member should I avoid? I imagine these other qualities are subtle and difficult to judge at first. Nonetheless, how do I know if they are a good fit for the success of my PhD?
# Answer
> 26 votes
First, **ask your adviser**. He/she likely knows more about most of your department faculty than you do. You don't have to do exactly as you're told. But if you don't, this should be an intentional choice on your part, and you should have a good reason for that choice. Beyond that, I see at least 3 broad areas to consider. You want committee members who will
1. **strengthen your professional network**: introduce you to potential collaborators, and possibly help with your search for a postdoc or tenure track position; and/or write a letter of recommendation for you
2. **give valuable feedback on your work**: you think they'll actually read your thesis (you might be surprised how uncommon this is), and might have something constructive to say
3. be **easy to work with** in the defense process: likely to be flexible on the date of your defense, and likely to sign off on your dissertation without demanding lots of changes (fitting into 4 schedules besides your own can be a nightmare; it's nice to have a few committee members who are easy to work with on this)
Which of these contributions you value most will depend on what you're hoping to do after your PhD. If you're looking to move into industry, many of your professors' contacts may be less valuable to you than if you hope to stay in academia. Do you plan to stay research active? In the field of your dissertation? Practically, you may have limited options. At the very least, you should weigh 1, 2, and 3, and estimate how you think each candidate will contribute in each area.
# Answer
> 8 votes
This is certainly a very important question. Here is the make up of my committee and its pitfalls. This isn't the best committee but has its advantages. You could easily extrapolate from my experience:
### Adviser/Committee member 1:
1. I have a fantastic adviser who always stands by me and supports my work. He essentially fights for me if things go awry.
2. He is also the PI of the project I am working on so my successful graduation and publications do interest him.
### Co-adviser/Collaborator/Committee member 2/Extradepartmental committee member:
1. He champions the the ideas behind my research and has done so for the last 20+ years. So there is no problem that I'll get support from him
### Committee member 3:
1. Doesn't have anything invested in my research but since it is generally related to his work, he is on board.
2. He is sitting on the fence as far as criticism goes.
### Committee member 4:
1. He doesn't like my work since his adviser didn't like this work and its implications.
2. However, since I have a generally pro-me committee, I should be alright but not without breaking a sweat.
3. If I convince him of the merit of my work, I'll have no problem in the future convincing any other detractors See comment by JeffE.
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Tags: phd, thesis-committee
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thread-3730 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3730 | Wordiness of paper titles in life and medical science journals | 2012-10-13T15:41:21.340 | # Question
Title: Wordiness of paper titles in life and medical science journals
I do research in the life and medical sciences. If I want to publish in one of the major journals (Cell, Nature \*, etc.), would I have to confine a title to something short and snappy, or can I be more verbose so that my title conveys better the output of the research?
For example, is this sort of structure:
*XXX and YYY are AAA and BBB in PPP and QQQ, respectively*
too wordy?
PD. I'm not sure if this was the right forum on the stackexchange network, so please feel free to suggest some other site to post.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Copy the pattern that is used most common in your target journal.
Look through a couple of dozen articles. What's the median word-count in titles? Do a majority have colons, or not?
# Answer
> 4 votes
When I wrote my first paper, I read this book about scientific writing: "Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words" by David Lindsay.
The author of the book highlighted that **article title should be as explicit on the content of the article as possible**, as it is the first element any potential reader will read. As today the amount of available articles is growing faster, the skimming step in the article research is becoming more and more important and a good, self-explanatory title is therefore a key element in article "success".
As an example, the author strongly discourage the use of non-explicit title such as:
> XXX as an effect on YYY
and advice to use something more like:
> Increase in XXX induce a decrease in YYY
which directly tells the reader what is the article about and the what is its main finding.
In conclusion, do not be afraid of wordy title.
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Tags: journals, publications
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thread-2387 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2387 | BSc in CPSC or CIS: How will this affect Grad School applications (Stanford, UBC)? | 2012-07-10T19:32:17.507 | # Question
Title: BSc in CPSC or CIS: How will this affect Grad School applications (Stanford, UBC)?
I am trying to decide whether or not I should pursue an undergrad in Computer Science (link to curriculum) or an undergrad in Computer Information Systems (link to curriculum).
Specifically, I'd be curious to know if picking one over the other could be problematic later, when applying to a masters program in computer science (the CIS degree is much less theory heavy). I am interested in Standford's MS program, but if I go with the CIS program, I am concerned I will be filtered out in the selection process because I don't hold a brick-and-mortar CS degree with a heavy theoretical focus.
As a mature adult, I have financial obligations that constrain my ability take on studies full time, so I am leaning towards the CIS degree because it is offered through distance education (the CPSC degree is not), and subsequently applying to Stanford's Masters program which is also offered through distance education.
FWIW, I currently work as a developer full-time, and in my younger years I worked on a lot of random jobs, mostly non-applicable to my computer science interests.
# Answer
The obvious answer here is: if you have very specific programs in mind, and a specific set of constraints that may hinder you, check with the upper-level programs you're interested and find out what their requirements are. If the master's program requires a bachelor's in computer science, then you have your answer. If not, then they may list what degrees they accept as "equivalent" or "sufficient" for their program.
But, in general, when in doubt, **ask.** That's what graduate officers and admissions staff are there for!
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, career-path, undergraduate
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thread-3709 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3709 | What contents should I put on my academic website? | 2012-10-12T11:40:23.780 | # Question
Title: What contents should I put on my academic website?
I'm planing to setup a personal academic website. From visiting other researchers websites I have a rough idea of the things I want to put on it:
```
- Research interests
- List of articles & conference contributions
- CV
- Links to affiliated institutions
- Contact information
```
Would you agree that this list constitutes the information an academic should put on his/her website? Is there anything else you would hope or expect to find? Would you advise against putting any of these pieces of information on the website?
# Answer
> 30 votes
At the very least, you should have your name, contact information, and a bio of what you do. That's the minimal advertising necessary to serve as a useful "see my site for more details on what I do".
Given that almost everyone who visits your site will either be looking for someone's name or a paper you've previously published, the next most useful information to include would be:
* Lab members contact info & bios
* Publications with downloadable links
I would definitely recommend putting pictures up as well, so people will recognize your face when they see you at conferences. Same for lab members.
Links to other affiliations is nice, but almost certainly not important. Practically no one will follow them. Whether to list your CV is up to you; people who need it will often ask you, but it won't hurt to have it live. Depending on your research, you can have a "recent news" section where you advertise any particularly notable publication or mention in the popular press.
Finally, if you teach, I recommend putting links to the course website (which may or may not be part of your academic website), as many students will find your page by googling and will be looking for course info.
# Answer
> 11 votes
Just to extend upon eykanal's reply, I'll add a public relations spin to this topic.
IMHO, all depends on the mode in which you operate. If you are an established professor, your website is going to look differently from somebody who is striving to climb the ladder. This also depends slightly on the community you operate in, I'll speak for CS/AI, specifically more applied streams.
As an established member of the community, you rule your time and do not need yourself to be "discovered". Hence you do not need much bragging on your site and can stick to practical info. In the case you are climbing the ladder, your website is your shop-window. You need to have it up for your potential future employers, potential future collaborators, etc. It's can be used as a personal PR shop window. In that case you might want to break down your CV into pieces and include projects you work(ed) on and their descriptions, possibly even attach publications to these entries to document the rate/quality of the deliverables. Many people list *Activities* section, where they keep a list of academic services they perform, i.e., program/organizing/steering/... committee memberships, refereeing for journals and announcements of edited books, etc. As eykanal pointed out, expanding on teaching activities is important. Now, first and foremost, you want to serve your students, but remember also the (future) hiring committees. They want to see indications of those activities as well.
All in all, anything what can help you in the future, but still won't look as too much bragging about your achievements can be useful, but think about balancing it with practical stuff as well. For example, to add a "human" touch to their academic personas, many people also include "family" section with a handful of links and pictures of their family, pets, hobbies, etc.
# Answer
> 2 votes
My two cents: Put the things on your homepage that you like to see on the homepages of people like you.
Well, this is probably not the full story since not only people like you will be interested in your homepage. Maybe you also think about hiring committees, potential referee or the like to have a look at you homepage. However, you are probably to look at the homepages of people like you through the eyes of a hiring committee member, reviewer, student (or whatever) and then have a look at you homepage again. This should give you an impression whether you homepage is cool enough or not.
# Answer
> 0 votes
I'd love to see conjectures and open problems.
This is a good way to advertise for your field, and maybe someone knows a solution/related problem.
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Tags: career-path, website
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thread-4768 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4768 | Transition from Computer Science to Statistics | 2012-10-15T18:16:32.750 | # Question
Title: Transition from Computer Science to Statistics
I have a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering and I want to apply for statistics gradschool. My interest is in stochastic calculus. I'm from india and I have limited exposure to statistics. I have a work experience of 3 years in software development.
Will I get rejected from decent level schools ? What should I do to improve my chances ?
# Answer
> 1 votes
I think it depends on which country you want to apply for the Grad School. In Japan, you have a very Math oriented entrance examination for the Math department, and is usually the most important factor that decides whether you get in or not.
In USA, the educational system is different, since Undergrad education is often not oriented to a specific area, and you have a good chance as long as you get a high GRE score and have a good set of Recommendation letters (preferably from the Dean of your Univ. if you are not from the US).
As an example, take a look at Stanford's admission requirements:
International Academic Credentials
For India, you do need some kind of engineering background, but other countries like Japan, can in theory apply as long as they have finished an undergrad regardless the discipline.
Bear in mind though, that a PhD in statistics has a hefty load of subjects that assume that you have some mastery on math and advanced math(which, to be honest, the GRE does not cover). So you might have to throw in some hours just to level even with the rest of the students that have math undergrads.
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-3729 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3729 | How to encourage students to work more carefully and independently? | 2012-10-13T15:18:00.527 | # Question
Title: How to encourage students to work more carefully and independently?
One of the challenges of advising students is working with students whose "quality control" expectations do not agree with that of the advisor. When such mismatches occur, how do we encourage them to provide "better" quality work. Note that it's not the number of hours being worked the concern, but rather issues like returning a marked-up manuscript with half of the important suggestions left unaddressed, or leaning too much on the advisor or more senior members of the group for help.
# Answer
I recently heard a nice angle on this problem. Computer Scientist Olivier Danvy, adapting Buddhist philosophy, stated in a recent presentation that **you need to inhale before you can exhale**. What he meant was that in order for grad students to produce quality work, they need to see, read, ingest and understand quality work. Perhaps you can show them the difference between the high quality work and low quality papers you've also come across. Try to get the student to gauge where his/her work fits in relation to these other papers.
You'll also need to explain that even though poor quality work can actually be published, that this is not a good thing. Not good for science. And not good for building a career.
Many iterations of corrections is important. It takes time. But for every comment that is ignored, you need to find out why it is ignored, and make the student aware that it takes your time and is annoying if you need to make the same comment over and over again. Maybe the student does not understand the comment. Maybe the student is overwhelmed by the vast amount of comments. Maybe that just missed it accidentally. Maybe they just disagree.
> 14 votes
# Answer
In my experience, teaching "quality control" in larger-scale projects is part of the enterprise, since (in mathematics, for example) standard coursework provides no inkling of this. That is, it is *not* typically the case that sloppy or flawed homework or exams are returned with detailed comments, for iterated corrections, to be repeated until the thing is acceptable. Rather, as we know, schoolwork is presented to students as a high-volume stream of disconnected small tasks, most of which truly do not merit "perfecting", but, rather, treating as a bulk-processing problem.
So the methodology and style of iterative improvement and "perfecting" a larger, months-or-years-long project is arguably a novelty to the student. The "solution" seems to be to just keep iterating the corrections, perhaps making the auxiliary point of the inefficiency of your making the same point several times.
I've had the opposite problem a few times, as well, namely, exaggerated attention to over-perfecting an initial fragment, effectively avoiding addressing the sequel and larger project.
Thus, I think that imparting a functional sense of editing and quality control is part of the task of the mentor/advisor/supervisor, although, yes, energy allocated to this takes away from the more literal scientific/intellectual tasks. Advisor's firm repetition of the standards is essentially the only constructive response, I think, since, for example, it seems infeasible to hope that novices can sufficiently critique each other, as they usually share the same inexperience.
> 9 votes
# Answer
I would cite one of the maxims in industry. Your people is only as good as your structure. A good structure designed to give incentives to current students and guidance to new ones can do wonders for any organization.
You can streamline a lot if you have a whole system in place where you have older students mentoring fresh students (one to one basis) and a more structured way of presenting the job. This way the students (and the adviser) won't be running to catch deadlines and will be way more efficient.
> 1 votes
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Tags: advisor, productivity, mentoring
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thread-4738 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4738 | How can a researcher improve his contribution to society? | 2012-10-14T07:27:16.290 | # Question
Title: How can a researcher improve his contribution to society?
As an academic researcher in a theoretical field at a public institution, I am sensitive to the social value of my work (my own contribution to society). I do some teaching, whose contribution to society is easy to identify, but not much. Try to increase that aspect of my job, I have listed some things I can do (some of which I already do, some of which I don’t):
* Engage in collaborations with industrial partners (favoring transfer of knowledge to practical applications).
* Orientate one’s research goals to match an area of societal importance (green gas reduction, nuclear waste storage, you name it).
* Communicate science to a wide public, whether it is my own research or the knowledge of my field in general (popular science). This includes writing articles in magazines, writing a blog, developing educational software, …
* Get involved in education science: contribute to my national society of physics and chemistry teachers, for example. Offer some software for high-school and university teachers to demonstrate concepts.
* Register as an expert with the nearest court of law.
What other suggestions do you have to improve one’s social value? (Or should I stop worrying and love the bomb?) I mean, in the short term. I know that I (and my colleagues) contribute to the advancement of mankind in the very long term, but sometimes it doesn't help feel *useful*.
# Answer
Have you considered contributing to political life? I refer not to upholding one political view or another, but rather to ensuring that there is informed scientific input on major issues when they are being debated in political circles.
I do not know in which country you live, but I am aware that there are far too many "first-world" countries in which the policy and decision makers are poorly informed at best, willfully ignorant - seemingly - at worst.
One of the best descriptions of a university that I have come across is that it should - must - act as the "critic and conscience of society". In my view this would include taking part in ensuring those that lead us are well informed.
One way this could be done is by taking an interest in the advisory process used in how policy is formed in your country. See if you can offer your specialist views via your professional association.
A related activity is to take part in advising courts when they are considering issues based on scientific topics. This would include contributing to amicus curiae briefs, for instance. This goes beyond acting as an expert witness in court. An amicus curiae brief presents a reasoned argument using a balanced analysis of facts, reaching a conclusion. A court expert, in contrast, offers answers on specific questions from the court.
> 18 votes
# Answer
On a different note from some of the other answers, try to take to heart that **basic research is directly useful to society**. Almost all modern pharmacology is based on decades of fundamental biochemistry and biology research. Materials science is based on years of basic chemistry and physics research. Basic math research fuels advances in all types of engineering, from signal processing to computational work to structural engineering. There are many other examples for other fields of research; please edit this answer or put them in the comments.
In short, don't underestimate your current value to society.
> 23 votes
# Answer
Instead of thinking increasing my own social value (reputation), I think the other way round. The society is supporting me in carrying out the research (in theoretical field), in innumerable dimensions; from the public transport systems to research grants. I think of the ways that I can, at least in part, repay the tax-payers of my nation.
Some of the activities that I do, that I think, will be useful to the society include,
* helping fellow research scholars in other fields or disciplines in areas where I have expertise. It can vary from a simple installation of a software or help in filling a grant application to active discussion in improving their research or interpreting their results (that helps me too, indirectly).
* popularize the field among school/college students and common people, so that better ignited minds take up the field for their career.
* actively participate in various professional and amateur associations/societies/forums related to my field or where I can make some contributions.
* provide support to enthusiastic people who wish to take up a career in the field or a related field, by helping them in a project or connecting them with a better experienced person. As a researcher, sometimes I have better contacts.
* provide administrative assistance to the needy persons in my institution where I have better exposure/access, like filing an application form or submitting various fees etc.
In short, the various activities that I involve myself in, improves my social value, as far as I have experienced. The more I try to give, the more I get in return.
If you are active in the society and if they feel you are really worth, the society reaches you for help or assistance and they value your suggestions.
> 7 votes
# Answer
Although communicating science to a broader audience is important, using scientific principles to solve the basic problems of the community may be even more important and rewarding. A chilean innovation center designed and built a water sanitation system. This system has been installed in poor neighborhoods where the access to purified water did not exist. Here you can see a video with english subtitles.
Obviously, the extent to which you can undertake a similar initiative depends on your specialties. Even though being a *researcher* you may be overqualified, a more attainable initiative would be to teach high school teachers or the community. For instance, a chilean NGO teach classes for micro-entrepreneurs. The instructors are usually university students that volunteer in the organization. The students are owners of small business (e.g., local grocery). The courses include a wide range of topics, such as concepts related to taxation and some ideas about economics and marketing.
You can have even a greater impact if you distribute contents designed by you on the internet. Similar to what you suggest, you can design an e-learning course and post it on the web.
> 4 votes
# Answer
Great question. I agree with the earlier post that basic research is important but one also has to come to an understanding of what level of feedback you need for the impact of your actions. For some, totally unapplied, ethereal math modelling might be their best way to contribute to the world, others need to feel like they are doing something every day that has a direct impact.
I studied complexity theory for my PhD (modelling army ant swarming) and this directly informs my thinking in how I understand the world. But as I finished my degree I felt like I needed my daily work to have a more immediate and direct impact on the world and so I completely switched fields. Now I build gigapixel timelapse cameras for capturing long term environmental change. I chose this because people process information visually and so we should show them environmental change in compelling ways. Army ants and complexity theory are cool but I could spend my whole academic career modeling ants and in 30 years there would be no rainforests left for ants to live in. But sometimes even now I feel like I'm tilting at windmills. As an ecologist I think we are at a tipping point in human history because if humans don't transition to sustainability in the next few decades the lives of a lot of the population will be a whole lot worse than they might be otherwise. I often wonder if I should drop everything and become a full time activist... When do things become so dire you drop what you are doing and run to put out the fire instead of making beautiful movies of people who are on fire? But then again you have to go with what you are good at and so on.
Overall though I agree the best thing to do is to educate the public and find ways to make your skills useful to others. At this point, at least in America bringing thoughtful science understanding of any sort to the wider public is an immeasurable and essential contribution given the sorry state of the American understanding of reality.
But we all should be asking ourselves fairly regularly if there is more we could do. Things don't change until enough people are pushing in the same direction that we can overcome the inertia of existing power structures (I learned that studying complexity theory ;).
> 4 votes
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Tags: research-process
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thread-3119 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3119 | How big of an advantage are publications for Applied Mathematics grad school applications? | 2012-09-06T17:12:53.163 | # Question
Title: How big of an advantage are publications for Applied Mathematics grad school applications?
How much of an advantage does an Applied Mathematics PhD applicant have if he/she has a publication under his/her belt?
Of course, this depends on the "prestige" of the journal that he/she published in. I suppose publishing in a top tier journal like Nature or Science would be a major advantage, *but would the applicant be one of the first picks because of it*?
More pertinently (I suppose seekers of such advice would not have a top tier journal publication), *what about those with publication/publications in lesser journals*?
# Answer
The question is not answerable at this level of abstraction, because grad school admission is not decided on the basis of easily described rules. If you're a coauthor on a brilliant and important paper, you may still be rejected if the committee doubts you were a major contributor to the paper. On the other hand, some applicants with no publications at all may be accepted.
As a general rule, nobody on the committee will read the paper itself. That would be both time-consuming and unlikely to be fruitful, since the committee probably doesn't even have an expert in this specific area. They may get a little information from the abstract or your personal statement, but everything else they know about the paper will come from your letters of recommendation.
The letters need to indicate why this paper should help your case for admission. Specifically, they need to explain why the paper is interesting, what you contributed to it if you are not the only author, and why your work was impressive.
This task will be easier if the paper is really good, and that's correlated with being published in a top journal, but this is not really necessary. For example, if an undergraduate makes a major contribution to a solid but not exceptional research paper, then that could mean a lot, even if the paper doesn't get accepted to a leading journal. Of course the paper needs to meet at least some standards - publishing in a junk journal or vanity press doesn't count. However, the most important issue is demonstrating that you can carry out good research, not getting your name in a prestigious venue.
> 3 votes
# Answer
The answer depends on how the admissions process works. In my school you need to find someone who is willing to be your primary advisor to have any chance of being accepted. I am much more likely to spend a few extra minutes considering a candidate with a publication. In fact, I would say that I would schedule an informal phone interview with anyone with a publication nearly independent of the CV. Beyond this initial stage, which in my opinion counts for a lot, but not everything, things get too complicated to speak generally.
> 1 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, publications, application, reputation
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thread-4769 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4769 | How do I appropriately use inline citations for multiple quoted paragraphs? | 2012-10-15T19:48:52.007 | # Question
Title: How do I appropriately use inline citations for multiple quoted paragraphs?
I'm writing a paper where I have a number of sentences across a few paragraphs, all from the same source. How should I use inline citations in this situation? Should I put them after each listed fact in the sentence at the end of each paragraph, or at the end of all of the paragraphs? The paragraphs are all topically related, but each one is different enough to be a sub-topic. In case it's relevant, the topic being discussed is technology, the paragraphs detail how companies using that technology.
# Answer
> 9 votes
From what I've seen, the only situation in which you would use a single citation following multiple sentences is if it's obvious that you're quoting that source verbatim AND the quote is uninterrupted. If you're using your own terminology OR the quote is interrupted, you should cite each sentence separately.
This becomes obvious when considering the purpose of a citation. Citations are there to answer the question, "who said this?" If you're quoting someone verbatim, and it's obvious you're doing so, then you only need a single citation, as the reader will infer that it applies to the entire preceding quote.
On the other hand, if you have multiple claims throughout a paragraph, after each claim the reader will wonder, "what's his source for this?" In most cases, you will be using multiple sources, and you will have a mixture of references. However, even if you have a single source for lots of claims, the reader will still wonder *after each claim* what the source is. You should tell them the source of each and every claim separately.
The exception I've seen—and that my advisor requested I use in my writing—is in the instance of a single logical thought pattern being followed throughout a paragraph or set of paragraphs. If you're describing someone else's work, it can be justifiable to state, "the following is an overview of Bob (2007)", or something to that effect. From my experience, though, that usually only happens in review articles.
# Answer
> 1 votes
If you really have only one reference which you take one paragraph to sum up, I'd really advise eykanal’s last item (the “exception”):
> Tying one’s shoelaces with only one hand is notoriously difficult \[1\]. Although it seemed like an unsurmountable issue a few years back, the recent breakthrough of Smith et al. \[2\] relied on a few topological considerations which have been clearly delineated by Brown \[3\], and are summarized in the rest of this paragraph. *\[Here your description, with claims from Brown, without repeating the reference number\]*
>
> However, little is known about the influence of the number of fingers used \[4\] in the tying process. Here, we present a research on tying shoelaces with even-fingered hands.
This is better than having a lot of claims \[3\] with the same reference \[3\] written all over one paragraph \[3\]. However, **you need to make it crystal-clear what part is covered by the reference**: using the paragraph boundary (and explicitly stating this) is a good way of doing that.
# Answer
> 1 votes
While not really an answer, this is often an indication of a lack of understanding. The original question used of language like paraphrasing, another indication of a lack of understanding. You should probably show a draft to a colleague asking for specific help.
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Tags: citations
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thread-4785 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4785 | What is proper acknowledgment for figure authorship in a book chapter? | 2012-10-16T20:40:44.127 | # Question
Title: What is proper acknowledgment for figure authorship in a book chapter?
A senior researcher, with whom I worked a few years ago, is writing a book chapter. He contacted me to ask what was the latest work of our group on the topic of his chapter. I gave him a few links to recent articles and the preprint of an article soon to be published. He followed up by asking if “\[you\] would have a figure to illustrate \[topic of the preprint\]… preferably something that does not require copyright authorization paperwork”.
At first, I thought that was a bit much to ask… I had never asked for figures from anybody who was not an author on the paper. But the situation may be different for a book chapter, and obviously I'm glad to share the news of our most recent results. So, I took an hour tonight to make a nice illustrative figure, and am about to send it. However, I'd like to make certain in my mail that I ask for some sort of acknowledgment. So, my question is: **if someone designed a figure for a book chapter, how would that person be acknowledged? in the figure caption, e.g. “figure courtesy of X”? in another way?**
# Answer
In the acknowledgements sections, the authors could write: "The authors would like to thank F'x for providing us with Figure X".
Alternatively, in the caption of the figure they could write "Figure courtesy of F'x."
Both are acceptable, as long as you are happy. I don't think they are obliged to thank you in the paper at all.
> 10 votes
# Answer
Many graduate textbooks contain a list of references, either at the end of each chapter or at the end of a book broken down by chapter. I would imagine the citation would be there.
To the best of my (admittedly terrible) memory, I have never seen a textbook include an inline reference for a specific publication.
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, books, acknowledgement, graphics
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thread-4799 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4799 | Contents of the discussion section | 2012-10-17T09:12:36.567 | # Question
Title: Contents of the discussion section
In an academic paper, we sometimes have a "Results and Discussion" section.
It is not uncommon to add the explanation and discussion of the results together with the results section.
What are the pros and cons of both practices from an academic point of view? How do I weigh them for each paper?
1. List the results without explaining their significance, which is then explained in the discussion section.
2. List the results with their explanation as they are being listed, and eliminate the discussion section.
I find the second approach more appropriate to understand the results, since the reader wouldn't need to be going back and forth the sections, but then again, that is just my feeling.
# Answer
I must say that I would have a hard time listing the pros of the first approach (separate *results* and *discussion* sections), because I don't like it and it doesn't fit my style of writing. My advice would be: if you can, **write in the style that you like best, because that's how your writing will be most natural/readable/convincing**.
However, the choice is not Manichaean as you make it sound. There exist a continuum between those two, because it mainly depends on what you call “results” and “discussion”. When I write for a journal that requires a strict “results then discussion” format, what I usually do is that I put most of my text in the *results* part, and leave some general overall discussion for the *discussion* part. Typically, it would given something like:
> **Results**
>
> * First result. Discuss its implications.
> * Second result. How it confirms result #1. Consistent with previous observations \[ref\].
> * Third result. Again, some discussion of it.
>
> **Discussion**
>
> Altogether, what is the insight given by these results. It changes our view of this phenomenon somewhat. It is in line with work by X et al., but highlights some contradictions of Y’s model.
That's a bit “cheating”, but I've never been asked to reörganize any paper written in that way.
> 6 votes
# Answer
My post doc advisor has submitted a number of papers with the "Discussion" section renamed "Speculation". While the editor/reviewers have always required the section be renamed "Discussion", her approach rubbed off on me. By treating the Discussion section as if everything is speculation, it becomes clear what goes into the Discussion and what goes inot the results.
> 4 votes
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-982 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/982 | How should a "brief synopses of each paper" look like? | 2012-04-02T16:07:44.400 | # Question
Title: How should a "brief synopses of each paper" look like?
I'm a exchange student that just arrived in the US. The professor is asking us to do this:
> Please write and submit brief synopses of each paper before class which include the following:
>
> * the title and authors
> * a one paragraph summary of the paper (do not copy the abstract - how would you summarize the paper?)
> * 1-3 things you found most interesting (at most one paragraph)
> * 1-3 questions that arose for you while reading the paper (at most one paragraph)
I never did this before, specially in English. How should this look like ? You have rules to do (spacing, font, etc.) ? And are the "Title and authors" for my text or the authors of the papers ?
# Answer
This is a fairly simple assignment. To answer your questions:
* Obviously your name and class information should appear at the top of the assignment (unless otherwise instructed by the professor).
* The "title and authors" referred to by the professor are in reference to the paper that you are discussing, not you!
* You are told to write in complete paragraphs. That means no bullet lists, so write everything as complete, well-structured sentences.
* Spacing and font are up to you, but in general, I'd use at least 1.5 times normal spacing and 11 pt or larger font (unless you're working with LaTeX, in which case the formatting is handled for you).
> 4 votes
# Answer
Unless your professor specified something, you can basically use whatever format you want. Make sure that it looks professional though (i.e. don't use Comic Sans). The titles and authors would be those of the paper you are summarising.
Apart from that, the structure is already given. I would probably put each synopsis on a separate page with something like "Summary of ..." and the title of the paper as heading.
> 3 votes
# Answer
I think this is a really useful habit to get into when you are just starting to read the literature. It lets you look back and quickly refresh yourself about what you found interesting in the paper. I would suggest that as you develop a reference library (e.g., LaTeX bib file or Endnote) that you keep some of the content in that file. As I think grades are less important in grad school than knowledge, use a format that makes it easiest to archive with your bibliographic software.
If you use LaTeX (and possibly in MS Word) you could probably write a citation style and document class that would automagically build the document from the bib data.
> 2 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, reading, coursework
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thread-4772 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4772 | When and how do I start writing a conference paper? | 2012-10-16T05:37:34.153 | # Question
Title: When and how do I start writing a conference paper?
In some areas, like Computer Science, peer reviewed conference are as important as Journal Papers.
Unlike most Journals, Conferences have hard deadlines to submit the papers as well as page limits.
So I have a few questions:
* How early should I start writing a paper for a conference?
* Is it reasonable to write and do experiments at the same time?
* How many references should you check? one professor told me: check 200 use 30.
# Answer
> How early should I start writing a paper for a conference?
Well, there are different approaches. Some people think "there is this conference coming, I need to write something for it", others think "I have this nice idea of research, let's see where I could present it". In the first case, you might need to start *very* early, since you need to do all the research, while in the second case, you might just need to start early... Seriously though, it depends a lot of the content of the paper, the mechanical action of writing it (i.e., typing and formatting the text on a computer) is not what takes long.
> Is it reasonable to write and do experiments at the same time?
Sure. Even if you can't finish your experiments by the deadline, it's very likely you can reuse a good part of what you've already written for another conference.
> How many references should you check? one professor told me: check 200 use 30.
You don't check references because you should, but because they are relevant to your research problem. You should cite what you've read and what you think is important with respect to you work. You should cite the approaches that laid the basis for your own approaches, and explain how you build on them, which assumptions you are challenging. You should also cite the approaches that are similar to yours, and explain why yours is better.
There is no magic number: there are excellent papers with only 10 citations, and bad ones with 50 references.
> 13 votes
# Answer
Generally areas like CS have plenty of good conferences all round the year, so missing a particular deadline is unlikely to hurt you much. But in case you are targeting a specific conference whose deadline is say, September 1st, then you need to have solid results which you think might fit in well as a paper at least a month before.
It could take several rounds of copy-editing before a draft can become a neat paper. By experiments, I guess you mean simulations that validate the results in your paper. You could plan to use one section of your paper to present all your simulation results.
The task essentially involves planning your presentation, loads of typing and copy-editing and some coding for simulations. Earlier is better, and all these procedures could be totally different for a different field.
> 5 votes
# Answer
I can't directly comment on computer science, but for chemical engineering, I had to write a conference paper for AICHE. Writing a paper can benefit somewhat from a "forward-backward" approach. Start perhaps with your data, writing out the data section fully, explaining everything. Then move to the introduction, motivating your research, and explaining why your results are new. The conclusion really just summarizes the basic result of your work. Then, the abstract condense the whole paper down - write that last.
It takes practice, but its not too bad once you get the hang of it.
Several rounds of editing are strongly recommended. When you have a first draft ready, let the paper sit for two or three days. Then, print it out double-spaced with wide margins, and read your paper. Look for ways to cut words - e.g. say the same thing with less. Can you understand what you have written? Make changes until you converge upon a tight package.
For reference, get a copy of How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper by Robert A. Day.
> 2 votes
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Tags: publications, conference, writing
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thread-4750 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4750 | Present math for non-mathematicians | 2012-10-14T20:01:14.047 | # Question
Title: Present math for non-mathematicians
I am a graduate student in mathematics, and I recently got the question why there isn't a press release to the general public whenever we publish a paper (to advertise mathematics and increase interest).
Now, every paper is a bit extreme, but forced me to ask several questions:
**Would arxiv be a good place to put math text aimed to the general public?** (I am currently trying to explain an article in a very metaphorical, but accessible to non-mathematicians).
**Would it be considered strange to explain research for non-mathematicians either in a separate abstract in a paper, or also writing a shorter non-math version?** (I fear that this is considered slightly odd, and metaphors sometimes dumbs down the problem so that the question seems very silly. Also, will professors think it is a waste of time?).
A partial goal is to be able to explain what I've done the last five years to my family at the dissertation, but also get some experience in explaining math for grant applications. It would be nice if news from the world of mathematics appeared more often in the news, (local news for smaller achievements, explanations etc).
# Answer
I would recommend blogging. This seems like the standard procedure for explaining your papers both to the lay audience and to other mathematicians (potentially ones that don't work on your specific problem). The blog format is preferable over arXiv or journal publications for reaching the lay audience because it is more accessible. Links to blogs are easier to share and faster to read than journals (which might be behind paywall!) or pdfs from arXiv. A blog setting also allows you to interact with your audience through the comments, this is the best way to help guide them through any confusion.
A blog setting can also be used to provide casual tours through proofs for experts and graduate students. This has recently started in TCS. Since this is aimed at the slightly technical audience, it is more appropriate to put on the ArXiv, although I would still advocate blogs.
> 17 votes
# Answer
This is a great idea, and it does happen. For years, Martin Gardner wrote a column in Scientific American called "Mathematical Games". He took interesting mathematical ideas and made them accessible to a wide audience. Another example is Keith Devlin, who is known as the Math Guy on NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S. A third example is Ian Stewart. His book "Letters to a Young Mathematician" explains a typical mathematical career arc to a general audience in a fun and engaging way. Along the way, he touches on many important mathematical ideas.
So **why don't we see more** of this? The short answer is because **it's really hard** to do well. You have to really understand the math, and you have to be very good at explaining to people who think very differently from the way you've spent the last 15 years or more being trained to think. Furthermore, much of the general public doesn't really want to know more about math. Another reason is that this type of writing is typically not well-rewarded at research schools. The culture of research mathematics tends to say that exposition is fine, but it's not really hard, like research. So it shouldn't be rewarded at the same level.
I agree with you, that the world would be better off if more people understood what we (research mathematicians) *do*. The problem is, I don't know how to make it happen.
> 17 votes
# Answer
> Would it be considered strange to explain research for non-mathematicians either in a separate abstract in a paper, or also writing a shorter non-math version?
It would come across as strange to include a separate abstract for non-mathematicians in a math research paper, partly because it's unconventional and partly because it might be interpreted as an assertion that this paper was likely to be of unusual interest for the general public. That's not to say it's a bad idea, but I'd recommend that grad students not try it, since you don't want readers to focus on this instead of your research contributions.
Writing a companion piece aimed at a general audience is less likely to attract any negative attention, especially if it's in the form of a blog post (as Artem suggests) rather than a formal paper. If you spend too much time on this, you risk having it look like a distraction from your research, but that's not likely to come up except in fairly extreme cases.
> Also, will professors think it is a waste of time?
Some will, but others won't. I'd recommend not focusing just on your own papers: if you advertise other people's work as well to a general audience, they may or may not think it is worthwhile, but they are likely to feel flattered, and it will avoid the risk that this could come across as self-promotion on your part. Once again, you don't want to let this overshadow your scholarly accomplishments, but it can be a nice counterpoint to them.
> It would be nice if news from the world of mathematics appeared more often in the news, (local news for smaller achievements, explanations etc).
Certainly. If you are a decent writer, it may not be too difficult to get your local newspaper to publish periodically about math news (this would require going well beyond your own work, of course). That would be a service for the community and an interesting line on your CV.
> 6 votes
# Answer
You could make Youtube videos as well, e.g. start a video blog. Perhaps not like Khan Academy, which is mainly for instruction, but perhaps just to discuss new and cool ideas.
> 1 votes
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Tags: writing
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thread-3242 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3242 | How do I overcome fear of rejection when writing academic papers? | 2012-09-17T11:41:09.570 | # Question
Title: How do I overcome fear of rejection when writing academic papers?
I don't know how to put it. I have never published before. Previously my one paper was rejected, that was because the experiments were not ready and my advisor asked me to still submit it just to have practice.
Now, 6 months later, I am writing another paper (on a similar topic). I have done some experiments, some are still going on. My advisor had advised me that "even if your experiments are not complete you should still start writing the paper".
But I'm doing a lot of procrastination and I think I am scared of writing and possible rejection. I have done a lot of writing in other forms before, like blogging etc. But the thought of writing an academic paper with all the stringent rules (everything has to be clearly written, cited, nice flow of thoughts) is scary.
Please let me know how should one's mindset be while in the process of writing a paper.
# Answer
> 35 votes
There are two points in your question: writing a good paper and the fear of being rejected. For the first point, there is no miracle recipe, although there are some clear guidelines of what is expected to be in a paper. You can find many useful resources on the Internet on "how to write an academic paper", and you will have to select what suits you the best. In general, a good way is to understand what you like in your favorite papers, and reproduce the same scheme.
As for the fear of rejection, well, it's a bit cliché, but you just have to get over it. People get papers rejected all the time, even the top professors, sometimes it is fair, sometimes it is not. If you plan to pursue in the academic world, you should expect to get papers rejected until you retire. It's normal not to like it, but somehow, you have to deal with it.
Most of the time, when a piece of work reaches a good level of maturity, I build a quick "submission tree", that is, I look at which conferences I could submit the work, and the overlap between the notification dates and the submission dates. At the end, I have something like: I could submit to Conf1, and if it's rejected, I have one week to make it better and to submit to Conf2, and if it's rejected, ..., or I could submit to Conf3, and if it's rejected, I have two weeks to work more and submit to Conf4, etc. So, basically, the possibility of rejection is directly included in the submission strategy.
# Answer
> 17 votes
One thing that might help with the fear of rejection is to view your paper as though it was a blog post. Obviously, you won't submit something in blog style to an academic journal, but it might help to think about why you blog. You have ideas and thoughts you think are important and you want to share them with a wide audience, who might be interested in your ideas or use them as a jumping-off point for something they want to do. The purpose of an academic paper is the same (well, in addition to the career benefits of publishing). You want to share what you're doing with people who will be interested in the results, and who might find inspiration for their own work in what you've done.
It might even help, as an exercise to get past writer's block, to write a blog post about your research. (You may not want or be able to actually publish it on your blog, but it might help your thought process either way.) What are you investigating, what are your methods, how is it going so far, etc.? You can then take some of that material, formalize the language, add the appropriate citations, and include it in the appropriate sections of your paper. But picturing your blog audience, rather than some journal committee, reading your first draft might take some of the pressure off.
Another thing I find helps me with fear of failure is to accept that the first draft of anything I write will be crappy and focus on getting ideas down and revising later. I also found, at least as an undergrad English major, that it's easier to just write late at night. Something about being tired takes the edge off my self-criticism and gets the ideas flowing. I describe it as my internal editor going to sleep by ten o'clock.
# Answer
> 13 votes
This is not really a complete answer, but it's too long for a comment, so here goes...
Remember that whatever you write now is not going be submitted. You don't need to overcome your fear quite yet because you're just putting words on the paper for your own sake. Just open your favorite text editor and write down everything you can think of. Forget about editing. You are just taking notes so that *you* can read it later and understand what you did and what you had on your mind. Don't filter yourself. You are just emptying your head to make room for new things. Write to forget.
Then, when you run out of things to write, go back and clean it up *a little* -- until you think of something else to write. Rinse and repeat.
As the content gradually becomes more complete, you will have more time and peace of mind to work on the quality of the writing and aligning it with all the best practices and advice and theory and rules of academic writing.
But for now, what's the first thing you think of that you've been working on in your project? Now open your text editor and write that thought down.
# Answer
> 8 votes
Here is a great book about scientific writing, that concentrate on the article structure and the writing process more than on the grammar per se:
"Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words" by David Lindsay
This book gives **good advices on the writing** *per se*, such as:
* What are the different section of a scientific article and what they should contain (e.g. how to choose a good title)
* Tips on how to improve the message you want to transmit in your article
* How to make a good poster/presentation
* ...
It also provides great advices on **how to build a good scientific question**. It explains how a good question can facilitate not only the writing process but also the overall research. For me it is actually the kind of book any young researcher should read even **before** starting their research.
# Answer
> 6 votes
Like anything else in life, perform the task with the goal to succeed, and the likely outcome of failure.
Understand that rejection is all a part of the game. Very few people succeed more than they fail. As a matter of fact, upwards of 90% of all academic papers are rejected for one thing or another.
The most important thing is to keep track of mistakes that you've made with past academic papers. Write them down as bullet-points on a separate sheet of paper. Keep that paper right in front of you as you work on other academic papers to remind you of what **NOT** to do.
Practice makes perfect. If you're just starting out, it's likely that you're going to have many failures before you have a successful one.
# Answer
> 4 votes
If you didn't have any **scientific writing** class before, I think you should start buying a **book** about it, and read it. There are many titles avilable.
If you get one, it can give you some **good advice** on how to write (good) scientific papers.
# Answer
> 1 votes
Rejection can be hard to handle, but a good motivator is to look at people who's work was rejected initially widely, but ended up being immensely popular and profitable. Ghostbusters was rejected by three movie studios. Frank Herbert's manuscript for Dune was rejected by over 20 publishers. Lorenz's seminal paper on chaos was rejected several times if I remember correctly.
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Tags: publications, writing, rejection, emotional-responses
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thread-4812 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4812 | What's arxiv “endorsement” policy? | 2012-10-17T13:34:49.867 | # Question
Title: What's arxiv “endorsement” policy?
arxiv has an endorsement system, where
> during the submission process, we may require authors who are submitting papers to an archive or subject class for the first time to get an endorsement from another arXiv author
However, I submitted a paper to arxiv for the first time, and I was not asked for an endorsement. The relevant help page says:
> During the initial deployment of the system, we may also give automatic endorsements to submitters from known academic institutions.
So this may be what happened to me (I have a verified email address from an academic institution), but this seems weird, because it says *“during the initial deployment of the system”*, and this is dated **2004**.
So: does someone know what is the *current* endorsement policy for arxiv?
# Answer
I believe the help page describes the current endorsement policy. You may also have fallen into the category described by "We may give some people automatic endorsements based on topic, previous submissions, and academic affiliation."
As I understand it, most people are in that category and never see the endorsement system in action. In practice, it seems to get applied to cranks and to people who look like they might possibly be cranks (e.g., people with no academic affiliation, or who are writing on controversial topics).
> 22 votes
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Tags: publications, arxiv
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thread-4807 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4807 | How should an academic negotiate his/her salary? | 2012-10-17T13:19:22.737 | # Question
Title: How should an academic negotiate his/her salary?
This is a follow-up question to this question of mine, where I wanted to know if academic salaries can be negotiated.
How does an academic negotiate a pay package that has been offered? What special points in one's profile must be emphasised in order to get a favourable bargain? Are there any standard cards (tricks) that must be played?
PS: The negotiator is assumed to be fresh out of his doctorate.
# Answer
> 17 votes
It's important to remember that you're negotiating a package, not a salary. In other words, there is a set of things you're negotiating for, and you can play games in that space to get most of what you need. Limiting yourself to salary negotiation is tricky because salaries are often the most constrained part of the package (especially in public universities in the US), and the one the chair/dean has the least power to change.
So remember that your success at the job depends on your ability to recruit students, procure resources and bootstrap your research program. Which means you need startup money to pay students, lab space and equipment money as needed, teaching relief if that helps you focus on research, and so on. Throw these all into the mix when you negotiate, so that if you give up something along one dimension, you can try to parlay that into a gain along a different dimension.
Also understand who you're really negotiating with, and what powers they really have to offer you things. This can be found out by talking with your supporters at the department (you must have some, otherwise you wouldn't have an offer) and also folks at other institutions.
# Answer
> 15 votes
To a first approximation, you have two ways of negotiating for a higher salary, namely fairness and leverage from other offers.
If your offer is not in line with what other people have received under similar circumstances at the same institution, then you can ask them to address this. If you make a convincing case, they may improve the offer, either out of a desire to do the right thing or out of fear of embarrassment if the details became known (for example, if it suggests discrimination). However, it's rare for there to be enough information to make an objective case for unfairness. Unless the offer is really outrageous, you aren't likely to have much success with this sort of argument: probably, the administration will just explain why they think it's fair.
By far the most successful way to negotiate is based on other offers. This gives you concrete proof that another university values you more than this one seems to, and you can make a credible threat of going there instead. You can't necessarily expect to get other offers matched exactly, since the comparison always involves a complicated mix of benefits, cost of living analysis, departmental quality, etc. However, it at least gives you a powerful way to start the conversation, and you'll have a lot of leverage if you might plausibly accept the other offer instead.
Incidentally, the worst mistake naive job candidates make is to accept a job offer and then try to negotiate. During the period when you have offers but haven't accepted yet, you are in a better negotiating position than you ever will be later. As soon as you accept, almost all your power disappears.
# Answer
> 7 votes
I think the first thing you need to ask is do you want a raise. While it may seem obvious that more money is better, I would argue that this is not the case since the raise comes with other "costs". In the simplest case, would you rather a raise of x, or an increased startup package of 10x? While not directly linked, your total "cost" (including space) is a factor.
There are two problems with seeking a raise. First, they are hard to justify. Universities want you to do good research. The effect of a raise on research output is hard to see, while the effect of an extra RA for a year is easy to see. Further, a small increase in salary now projects to large future costs for the university. The university will keep that number in their head during negotiation. A raise means you might top out on the pay scale earlier, so your pay may stagnate (meaning the university over estimated the cost of the initial raise). This means that overall the raise is not good value for money.
You might argue that a raise is the only way increase the money in your pocket. In the short run this is true, but in the long run, better research might lead to more money.
# Answer
> 7 votes
In some cases (for example in Germany), most academic positions are paid according to collectively negotiated labour agreements. The universities have little room to deviate from this (at the professor level things are different, though). The wages are paid according to scales corresponding to different "function levels", and each scale consists of a certain number of steps. The number of steps you get for free is based on your previous experience. It might be possible to negiotate an extra step, but this is usually difficult. In principle you can be placed in a higher scale, but this depends on the specific tasks you will be responsible for. For example, a postdoc leading his/her own group can be in a higher scale than a postdoc without such responsibilities.
In short, negotiating salary may be difficult in such a system, since the universities are bound to the collective labour agreements. In the Netherlands the situation is similar.
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Tags: professorship, salary, negotiation
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thread-4794 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4794 | How would I justify that my work isn't just 'normal' design and creation | 2012-10-17T08:06:06.313 | # Question
Title: How would I justify that my work isn't just 'normal' design and creation
Quick info. I'm a 4th year student (i.e. I'll be doing my masters when I complete my 4th year). Some of the work I'm doing now will however influence my masters.
One of my assignment questions in my research module is to come up with a few research strategies that would suit my research project. Whilst I cannot say exactly what my project is, it will in general be a new built system that will make decisions based on what rankings were given by people. (somthing similar to clicking the 'like' button on facebook or giving a review star rating for books as on Amazon.com).
I'm also using the following book (*Researching information systems and computing* by Briony J Oates) as a guide. I've identified the 'Design and Creation' research strategy as what would be the most fitting research strategy for my project seeing as I would be creating a new system. One of the questions in the evaluuation guide for the 'Design and Creation' research strategy is:
**What makes this piece of work research and not 'normal' design and development work?**
How would one go about answering such a question? What criteria would one have to look at to say that such a research project is an actual research project and just not your normal run of the mill application?
# Answer
> 8 votes
I should've read chapter 8, design and creation properly. The answer is in the textbook (Oates, B., Researching information systems and computing, 2009).
According to the author, the major differences are that in the typical software industry is that the less that is learnt or the less that needs to be discovered the more successful the project is deemed to be. If all is going according to plan then using existing knowledge, avoiding backtracking and changing of design or avoiding having to redo analysis would be seen as a part success. Having to change your design, backtracking and redoing analysis are perceived as a negative risk which needs to be mitigated. These risks could overrun the project constraints such as time, budget etc. Therefore industrial practitioners often leave out risky or uncertain parts of a project.
A researcher on the other hand focuses on these risky and uncertain items because tackling these risks and uncertainties successfully would lead to new knowledge being created. Hence you can claim to be doing research rather than 'normal' design and creation through the risk taking of your software product or process. You can further claim justification for your design by using theoretical underpinnings such as mathematical formulas and or formal methods from the field. You should also be able to say how the knowledge aquired from your design can be applied generally to other situations.
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Tags: research-process
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thread-1698 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/1698 | How do I prepare for the UK Research Excellence Framework submission? | 2012-05-25T14:02:05.493 | # Question
Title: How do I prepare for the UK Research Excellence Framework submission?
I want to strengthen my return for the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF). My publications are fine, but how can I improve my REF "impact"?
# Answer
> 2 votes
*Necessary disclaimer: I have not had to be involved in REF. This is what I summarized from my experience of the recent French evaluation system. Reading the REF guidelines, it seems pretty similar in focus (although to be honest, for all their wordiness, I prefer the very detailed REF guidelines over the French way of not explicitly detailing every rule).*
So, with that out of the way, I would say there are two ways to “improve” what is essentially one’s societal impact. Both are important.
### On paper
This is the short-term way of improving your impact: just present it better. Peruse the guidance documents (and possibly other guidance, including documents your local university might issue in order to help its staff), write down the relevant keywords, list all items that can be counted towards “impact”. Then, brainstorm (possibly with colleagues or friends!) for ways to tie your already existing contributions to these items. Sometimes it is just a matter of remembering stuff you didn't think of *(in my case, I remembered that we had some colleagues from an industrial company who showed up at a series of tutorials)*.
### For real
Of course, you can also try to influence your plans to include more activities of clear societal impact. There are unlimited number of things you could come up with, and they depend widely on context (which you did not give). Keeping it short and generic, here are a few good examples that I can think of (some of them more applicable in some fields, obviously):
* organize panel discussions on your favorite topic, open to the general public
* open lab day
* “cultural heritage” research
* create visualizations of your research (pictures, movies, whatever), and publish it
* interviews or other interventions in the media (even local)
* being listed on *experts registries*: courts, journalism schools
* all kinds of work with local artists
* workshop or discussion groups involving academic and industrial communities
* being a member of a standardization body
It looks like some sort of random list, cause I tried to list diverse activities. I'm sure others will have plenty of ideas to add!
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Tags: reputation, united-kingdom, bibliometrics
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thread-4793 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4793 | Why would one choose a particular advisor, other than having shared interests? | 2012-10-17T07:50:46.177 | # Question
Title: Why would one choose a particular advisor, other than having shared interests?
I'm applying to a graduate program, and one of the application's requirements is to select at least one advisor, along with a reason for the selection. Specifically, this is the requirement:
> In order to match you with a faculty adviser, tell us which faculty member's work most closely aligns with your interest.
And there is a list from which I should choose the advisor's name, and a text field in which I'm asked to write a reason for the selection.
I already know the advisors whom I'd like to work with, and the reason is simply that I'm interested in what they do (based on their recent papers/projects). But I'm not sure if this is what they're looking for, because they've already said this in the quoted text above, and also I will choose more than one advisor, and writing the same reason doesn't seem right.
My question is: What other reasons that one may have for selecting an advisor, *other than having shared interests*?
# Answer
Many don't speak about this too often, but with an advisor you are not only choosing a field of interest, but you are choosing a *mentor*. By all means, you want to "tick well" with him/her. There is not much good for a PhD student having a star researcher advisor whom they see once in a quarter and who is a sociopath on a personal level (this is a bit too extreme, but think about it as a continuum between extremes). Choose somebody with whom you will be able to work, whose example it is worth to follow, from whom you want to learn, not only the scientific stuff, but also workstyle, level of quality he/she strives for, etc. These soft reasons are often more important than anything else. For highlighting of all the examples of stuff you don't want to fall into (but will anyway :-) ), go and look at the PhD Comics.
P.S. I am speaking with a European-centric attitude, where you choose your advisor, since he/she will be your boss, rather than being assigned to one as it seems to happen in the US system. Still, the point is worth to consider. Germans have a good term for this, your PhD supervisor is your "Doktorvater", i.e., "doctor father". That very much speaks how the relationship should end up in an ideal case.
> 22 votes
# Answer
Pick someone who is good at what you want to be good at. If you want to go into academia, look for someone who has published regularly, recently, and in quality journals. If you lean toward working in industry, find someone who has connections with industry. If you want to become a teacher, find someone who teaches regularly and has good reviews.
Having said that, I think they are just wanting to make sure you are a good fit for their department. They don't want to accept someone into their program if they're not interested in the type of research that is being done there.
Having said that, you can usually change advisors during the first year. So you probably shouldn't sweat this too much.
> 9 votes
# Answer
Some things I can think of (I'm a PhD student in my final year):
1. An advisor may be famous in their field, which in turn affects your abilities to make academic contacts.
2. An advisor may be known to be good at advising, to prioritise advising PhD students, make time when needed, etc. Having PhD students is good for an advisor, not least because PhD students produce papers.
3. An advisor may be a pleasant person to work with.
It may be hard to find someone meeting all three. I know of cases where (1) is met, but where the advisor is so busy that they hardly have time for their PhD student(s) (*now I need to write a proposal, please come back in three months*) so that other seniors in the same group do most of the supervision in practice.
There are probably other factors that I'm not thinking of right now.
> 4 votes
# Answer
None of the answers addressed the funding dimension of an adviser, so I'll add it here. My PhD adviser was well funded, which allowed me to:
* Incur no student-loan or other debt during the 5 years of my PhD (I went from bachelors to PhD, by the way).
* Travel easily when I published papers at conferences.
* Understand how research proposals are written, as the professor worked on a lot of them and we were involved in that process. Useful for when you'll have to write proposals IF you become a professor.
> 4 votes
# Answer
My guess is that this is not a binding selection, especially since you say you're asked to list *at least one,* rather than just one. This strikes me as being a "have you done your homework about our department" question.
That said, picking an advisor involves making sure that they are a fit both with respect to your research interests, but also your working style. That also means talking to their research groups: are they the kind of people you can see yourself fitting in with for the next few years? Do you see yourself "meshing" well with your advisor?
Unfortunately, those are issues you can only determine after you've been admitted. But making sure you've identified a few people that you can work with will make sure that:
* You're not setting yourself up for disappointment, because you want to work for popular professor X, who can only take two of the ten people who want to work with her, but nobody else.
* The department can try to match applicant interests with available projects—in part, again to avoid everybody trying to go into the same subfield, and so that the distribution reflects the distribution of available projects.
> 3 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions, advisor
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thread-4831 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4831 | What are pros and cons for using summer-break to work in another research group? | 2012-10-18T14:16:02.473 | # Question
Title: What are pros and cons for using summer-break to work in another research group?
Here at my university, we have 12-13 week-long summer break for the students excluding summer-school. It is almost as long as a semester. I guess this is roughly the case for other institutions. In fact I often observe that some grad students use this break to work in another research group usually in another country (European countries mostly, USA rarely). Even some others spend entire two-semeter academic term in another university.
My question is as follows: **What would be the pros and cons for using summer-time to work in another research group away from your supervisor and/or your research topic?** I guess the situation would be different for a masters and a PhD student (I am currently interested in the situation for a masters student, but general ideas covering the situation would be OK).
# Answer
> 4 votes
Here are the obvious things:
* Pro: the work in another group will build contacts, possibly improving your opportunities for future academic positions (PhD, postdoc, assistant professor position).
* Pro: funding opportunities, if you're in need of extra money.
* Con: the work done in another group will take up time and energy, and if not related to your current work, won't advance your research (experimenting, publishing, etc.). That should probably be your priority (this is related to the comment on the question about it being strange to get 12-week breaks...)
* Con: if you don't coordinate it with your supervisor, this could affect the trust in the relationship (depending on the style of the supervisor).
If you wish to pursue an academic career, in some universities respectable journal articles published are worth more than contacts when competing for a job. So don't overestimate the first "pro" I mention above. At the master's level, this is less important.
The best strategy is to coordinate the "outside" work with your supervisor for maximum benefit.
# Answer
> 2 votes
> **NOTE: The answer below assumes you have approval from your university and/or employer!**
If your university is closed for 12 weeks, I would argue it's almost **entirely positive** to go somewhere else and work, because:
* If you work more, you get more results. Sounds obvious, but it's the scientific output that counts. You can't afford lingering around for 12 weeks if you want to get a scientific career. The work you do elsewhere might or might not help you directly towards your PhD, but if it results in publications, it certainly will enhance your academic career, even if the publications are unrelated to your PhD work.
* You will enhance your international experience, which will enhance your chances of finding positions later on.
* You will improve your academic contacts, which also enhances your chances.
* If you acquire your own funding, you will gain experience in finding sources of money, which should also be greatly beneficial for your career.
All in all, I can't think of any reason **not** to do it, if the alternative is idling.
# Answer
> 1 votes
If you are currently "employed full-time" by a research group (you are a student, or a scientific worker, whose funding is from a given research group), then any extended outside work for another research group needs to be discussed and approved by your current advisor **in advance**. Failure to do so, as Fuhrmanator suggests, will lead to *major* conflicts, as you are potentially committing a major breach of etiquette, and possibly violating your departmental regulations or your work contract if you don't secure the permissions in advance.
But that said, the best use of spending time in another research group is to develop new skills and techniques that you couldn't learn (or at least couldn't learn as well) by staying in your "home" group. In such cases, I suspect most advisors would support such a move, so long as it doesn't conflict with your current progress timeline and any requirements of your department (or your funding).
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Tags: research-process
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thread-4825 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4825 | Is it appropriate to bring some kind of gift for a host professor? | 2012-10-18T10:56:26.970 | # Question
Title: Is it appropriate to bring some kind of gift for a host professor?
I'll be doing an Internship in USA the following week, in UCLA.
I'm studying in Japan, where you should bring some kind of gift to your host professor, if nothing, for his/her kindness for accepting you as a PhD/visitor/etc.
I've seen this practice along Asian Universities (Japan, China, Singapore, India). But only in Japan professors may get offended if you do not bring anything.
A friend's professor is actually from the US (in a Japanese Univ), and when she have her a gift, the professor flipped and asked her whether this was some kind of joke or bribe, given that both of them were foreigners. Their relationship did not go so well after that.
Now, with this background, I'm a bit wary of bringing some kind of gift or souvenir to my host professor, since I'm pointing towards a postdoc in the same lab and I do not want to cause the wrong impression, but I do want to show some form of gratitude, since the Professor payed for all my expenses (lodging and airplane).
# Answer
> 35 votes
I'll tackle the easiest side of the question first: **bringing nothing should not create trouble**. If you are clearly expressing your thanks for the invitation, both in written before you arrive, and in person when you meet the guy, noöne should take offense.
On the other hand, **bringing a gift is fine too**, but:
* It should be tasteful and suitable for any taste: no *sake*, no unusual (by US standards) food… unless you know him well enough.
* It should not be terribly expensive: people like the attention, but they don't actually care so much about the gift itself. Keep it simple, that way it cannot be understood as a bribe.
* Not academia-related, but still useful to remember: make sure it passes customs (I had my French gift confiscated from me once).
I usually bring stuff to colleagues who host me when I travel to other places, if only because it gives a starting topic for smalltalk (something which I'm not very good at) in a future occasion.
# Answer
> 21 votes
It is all right to give a small gift as a token of your appreciation, but in my experience, it's customary to give it at the **end** of your internship. If I understand your question correctly, you are asking about giving something at the beginning. I think that might be a bit unusual. Normally, these gifts show that you appreciate the time that someone spent working with you.
# Answer
> 14 votes
I have seen people bring local sweets, everyone likes sweets, they are cheap, so you stay away from the "bribe" thing and they can easily be shared if there are more people around. They also provide some kind of smalltalk topic.
# Answer
> 10 votes
A gift to show your gratitude will always be appreciated. People like to know that their efforts in hosting you are not taken for granted, and the token will strengthen the relationship.
# Answer
> 9 votes
Depending on state law the professor can accept it. I think that usually the threshold is somewhere around the $100 mark. I know that in Illinois if we accept a gift that is worth more than 100 dollars we have the following 3 options:
1. Respectfully refuse the gift
2. Accept the gift and donate it to a charitable organization
3. Accept the gift and then make a charitable donation equal to the value of the gift
I do agree with the other responses that it should be given at the end of the visit. The gift is a "thank you for your time and help gesture" and is a more appropriate form of saying goodbye.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Like others said, a small gift to show your appreciation would be completely acceptable. If you have trouble deciding on what to get, try giving something that your area of Japan is known for (as long as it is in good taste). It would add a nice personal touch.
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Tags: etiquette, postdocs, asia, japan
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thread-4784 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4784 | Ref. request : book or survey about conducting experimental studies | 2012-10-16T20:39:19.250 | # Question
Title: Ref. request : book or survey about conducting experimental studies
I am currently conducting researches that are almost mainly theoretical (I am a TCS researcher gone rogue = I also work on applying theory stuff to real life problems). In the future I plan to conduct several large experimental studies involving technical experiments AND human validation of the results.
I am a neophyte in conducting this kind of very large studies involving technicalities and "humanities". I ask around and search on the web for a textbook about this matter and do not find any comprehensive resource.
So the question : do you have any pointer to a book/survey/other explaining the whole process of a large scale experimental study? It can be from any domain.
# Answer
> 2 votes
I would say that the classic in experimental social science methodology is Shadish & Cook's "Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference".
It covers various forms of experimental research design and also go into considerable detail in explaining the logic and practical steps of each.
# Answer
> 0 votes
The best book about experimental studies you can read is surely ***Sidereus Nuncius*** by **Galileo Galilei**, the father of modern science.
That book was published first in 1610, but it's still very current. It explains to you how Galileo Galilei built his technologies (the telescope) and how he run up his experiments to discover new stars and planets.
Definetely, a **must-read** book for every scientist.
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Tags: reference-request, methodology, experiment-design
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thread-4849 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4849 | Is it important to list the merits of a research paper? | 2012-10-19T06:37:07.213 | # Question
Title: Is it important to list the merits of a research paper?
When we write a research paper, most of the times we need to describe in the introduction what is the merit of the present work (unless is a survey of sorts).
Many professors, tell me that is enough to write it within the sentences with some context. And is the way I see it in most papers.
Other professors, however, I've seen they especifically list the merits and innovations of the papers in the introduction, for example:
* The present work presents cherries using A, which has never been done before.
* We implemented the mix of berries and bananas, which has never been tried.
While I find the approach intuitive and way more explicit than the usual approach, It seems a bit condescending.
What is your suggestion, should I write a list of merits or not?
# Answer
Somehow it is common to start an introduction with *a general blah-blah*, basically saying that a field is important and repeating some popular facts.
However, in my opinion, the most important thing of the introduction is to say
* what is there,
* what is the actual contribution
and said in a precise way, so reader will know if the content is useful for her. And in such a way as *"we prove X1 and X2, under the assumption of Y, and conjecture Z"* instead of *"we investigate X1, X2 and Z"*.
Of course, giving the general context is extremely important, but not more that saying what's there.
Personally, I wasted a lot of time reading papers whose abstract or introduction left me believing that they solve a general problem, when in fact it was only *n=2,3,4* case, or just something tangentially related to my research interests.
There is an incentive to write introduction in a *big talk / general blah-blah* style (because it sounds serious, because it may bait uninterested readers, etc), but (IMHO) it is very counterproductive, sometimes verging on the edge of scientific dishonesty (i.e. an implicit overclaim).
> 12 votes
# Answer
In the end, the strength of your paper is in a large part defined by its contributions. Therefore, I believe it is absolutely vital to clearly state them. A bullet pointed list is an excellent way to do so. Remember: papers are almost never read from start to end. Therefore, it is important to make your paper visually pleasing, by, for example, making the most important parts (like the contributions) easy to find. Bullet-points serve that purpose.
Excellent slides by SP Jones on how to write a great research paper (which also covers this question) can be found here.
The link also contains much advice on academic research, for instance on giving talks.
> 9 votes
# Answer
It is fine in most formats to finish your introduction by stating your goals. I tend not to over-emphasize the list of innovations in the paper *right in the introduction*, usually because **it is already made clear in two places: abstract and conclusion**.
Also: if by “specifically list the merits” you mean use a bullet-point list, I'd suggest to avoid it. It's not the same as an oral presentation, where you might want to focus on nice simple messages for an audience whose attention is never to be take for granted. When someone has read your introduction ’til the end, they *are* interested in your work, you don’t need to resort to oversimplifying your message.
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, writing
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thread-4861 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4861 | What does "research activities" mean? | 2012-10-19T14:20:26.257 | # Question
Title: What does "research activities" mean?
When a graduate/fellowship application asks about research activities, am I allowed to talk about expository pieces that I have written? For example, one semester I read a highly influential and important paper in my field. I then wrote a significant length expository piece based on it. Would this be considered a research activity? Or does this imply that it has to be original research? I looked everywhere through the application guidelines for the explicit definition of "research activity" but I couldn't seem to find it anywhere.
# Answer
Writing an expository piece is not a research activity. Research activity in general refers to original research with things like systematic reviews and meta analysis falling into a gray area.
> 3 votes
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Tags: graduate-admissions
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thread-3694 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/3694 | How to effectively supervise grad student calculus teaching assistants (TAs)? | 2012-10-11T21:30:03.543 | # Question
Title: How to effectively supervise grad student calculus teaching assistants (TAs)?
Those of you at universities where calculus is taught in small sections with graduate student instructors; what sort of structure do you have for supervising/mentoring the graduate students and overseeing the administration of the course?
E.g., does this duty rotate among tenure-track faculty, do you have a dedicated instructor who does this on a long-term basis, or do you have some other structure?
# Answer
I'm not in math, but I have supervised several times multiple sections of a first-year software design course taught primarily by grad students (usually I also am teaching one of the sections).
* Weekly meetings are helpful, at least an hour, especially for first-time TAs
* Collaborating on course content (presentations, exercises, quizzes, homework, exams) via the cloud (e.g., Google apps) is great
* My policy is to share all my content with new TAs when they come on board, with the agreement that they'll improve and re-share it back.
* I try to get extra $ for "tutoring" hours for them, outside the course, so as to make the work less painful. Anything that boosts morale and shows you're on their side is great.
* I try to nurture leadership within the group, as turnover is high.
* I used to pay (out of my pocket) an end-of-semester team-building social outing (I felt it was worth it, to have motivated TAs). However, when the department chair found out I was doing it, he started covering the cost from then on, if I invited him, too (this has become a normal thing, since it's essential to get and keep for a while the motivated TAs).
* If you can approach it as a management problem and apply some management techniques (don't take on their monkeys), it's feasible. Also, I scooped a few good research students (and was able to spot some I wouldn't work well with) thanks to the experience.
* My department doesn't rotate this kind of responsibility, since courses are generally "owned" by only one or two professors. We are unionized, and have considered having this kind of supervision recognized formally in terms of teaching load (which it still is not). It comes up every time our collective agreement is re-negotiated, but the % of faculty it affects is small. The P&T committees take it into consideration, however.
> 7 votes
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Tags: graduate-school, teaching, teaching-assistant
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thread-4887 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4887 | How do the "proposed research" essays of those who win NSF Fellowships compare with those who don't win NSF Fellowships? | 2012-10-21T16:58:45.850 | # Question
Title: How do the "proposed research" essays of those who win NSF Fellowships compare with those who don't win NSF Fellowships?
I just looked at the research proposals of a few people who failed to win the NSF Fellowship, and they actually scare me a bit.
I know that the NSF cares about Broader Impact a lot, and that is where I might actually be strongest at. But the reviews look at intellectual merit first and foremost, and that's what scares me, since how can you convince the reviewers that your idea has more intellectual merit than a huge number of other very strong applicants?
# Answer
As someone who reviews graduate applications, both for admissions and for fellowships, I can say that the number of strong applications is really large, and now in many cases is almost certainly larger than the number of fellowships being awarded in most of these competitions. The unfortunate side effect of this, which is obvious here, is that in most cases, you could have an application that is "strong enough" to merit receiving the fellowship, but not get it. Unfortunately, you don't get to do multiple stochastic realizations; you have to deal with the events the one time they unfold.
That said, how do you impress the reviewer? By having a clear sense of what your project is, and being able to talk about coherently and convincingly. The reviewers are looking for good ideas *and good people* to fund. You need to convince them that you're going to be a good researcher, and you have a good idea to "sell." If you don't think your research is all that amazing, how are you going to convince somebody else about that?
> 12 votes
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Tags: nsf
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thread-4881 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4881 | How much do figures need to differ to avoid copyright claims? | 2012-10-20T19:30:26.667 | # Question
Title: How much do figures need to differ to avoid copyright claims?
It sometimes arise that I need to use, for an article, a book chapter or any other written work, figures that I have already published (not figures published by others). These are usually schematic figures explaining what a chemical or physical system look like, how an algorithm works, etc. Thus, instead of reusing the exact same figure, I can easily create another one, conveying the same message with (more or less subtle) differences in presentation.
However, I have no idea how to answer the following question: **how different need two figures be** to avoid the second one infringing on the copyright of the first? What is a good rule of thumb to be used? Is it enough to change one of the following:
* color scheme
* viewpoint of a 3D visualization
* moving around blocks in a 2D diagram (or mind map)
* changing axis properties (labels, tick mark positions, etc.) in a graph
# Answer
In general, I would argue that the new plot needs to do one of two things:
* present materially different content relative to the old image
* present the same material in a different context.
Graphs are generally visual representations of numerical data. The numerical data itself *cannot* be copyrighted (because the data are "facts"), only the presentations thereof. However, simply changing axis labels or colors, and other similar "gloss" changes, don't really make the graph any different. Rotating a 3D graph, or changing significantly the relationship of blocks in a mind map or diagram to show off different features *would* represent a change in the message and presentation, and therefore would be OK.
However, chemical structures and mathematical equations are not normally considered subject to copyright, as they represent "facts," and cannot be arbitrarily drawn or represented; there's only so many "legal" ways to write them. That said, cutting and pasting somebody's figure from another article *would* be a copyright violation; recreating it yourself would not. (Otherwise, we would never be able to write *E* = *mc*^2 without it being a copyright violation!)
If there are doubts, however, you can always try to contact the journal in question. If needed, you can ask for permission to reuse a figure, especially if it's one you've already created. Most journals already permit self reuse, so long as you include an appropriate credit and citation of the original.
> 8 votes
# Answer
First up, a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer. This does not constitute legal advice.
I assume that your earlier work has been published and that the copyright to that work vests with your publisher.
I see two relevant possibilities here.
**1. Your new work does not differ substantially from the earlier work.**
A later work which is *substantially similar* to an earlier copyrighted work may infringe that copyright. From Wikipedia (yes, but the reference is to case law):
> See, for example, Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc. v. Carol Pub. Group, 150 F.3d 132, 137 (2d Cir. 1998) ("Since the fact of copying is acknowledged and undisputed, the critical question for decision is whether the copying was unlawful or improper in that it took a sufficient amount of protected expression from Seinfeld as evidenced by its substantial similarity to such expression.")
What substantial similarity means in your case will turn on the facts. I would not be comfortable saying that your proposed alterations to your previous work would result in a sufficiently different work.
**2. Your new work has some element of originality over the first work**
In this case, your new work might be considered a derivative work:
> Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author.
I've written this from a US law perspective. I am more familiar with UK copyright law but the basic points above are broadly similar.
> 3 votes
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Tags: publications, copyright, graphics
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thread-4859 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4859 | Till what point do you do exercises while studying? | 2012-10-19T13:15:06.327 | # Question
Title: Till what point do you do exercises while studying?
I will try to make this as less subjective: Till what point do you continue doing exercises at end of the chapter to learn something: I do it in Grad school and that's where I really learn. Do professors/post docs learning about new fields do it too?
# Answer
> 6 votes
Learning is a life long activity. Graduating with a PhD is not a license to stop learning, it's a license to (eventually) get paid to do research and learn more :)
# Answer
> 5 votes
To reiterate and "second" other answers... but to try to re-frame the sense of the question, also, ... I'd agree that one should engage with ideas, but not necessarily on the terms dictated by textbooks. As alluded to in other answers, one of the benefits of experience is knowing which exercises might be worth doing... as opposed to being unable to tell, or merely being *compelled* to do a high volume of exercises toward a grade.
Memories fade with time, even for the best memories, and unused ideas fade out of one's mind. On one hand, this can be an indicator that a highly-touted thing has no genuine utility, at least in one's own professional life. On another hand, sometimes the pay-off occurs so much later than one's introduction to an idea, perhaps decades earlier, that the relevant connections are very dim. To guard against "fatal dim-ness", occasional "refreshing" of memories is necessary. No, this is *not* quite the same as "doing exercises", in the important sense that, at this sort of "later" point in one's life, it often happens that reviewing *larger* points is sufficient to revivify specific memories about *relevant* (as opposed to traditional-pedantic) details.
One not-entirely-realistic attitude, but quite useful as an ideal of sorts, is to consider the notion that one changes oneself sufficiently so that the ideas of a subject seem entirely reasonable, simplest-thing-in-the-world... rather than unintuitive and unanticipate-able. That is, the meta-exercise is to change oneself so that no further exercises are necessary (apart from perhaps the "refreshing" of memories).
These comments have ignored the hugely significant psychological point that one should as-soon-as-possible recover from the burden of thinking in terms of approval of some authority figure. To say the least, this is not an intellectually honest or psychologically healthy criterion to apply to one's activities. Pity that "school" engenders this so powerfully. That is, don't embark upon a regimen for the approval of others, but to achieve your own objectives. Oop, yes, that entails trying to understand what your own objectives might be. Yes, if you are an undergrad or grad student, or even a postdoc or junior person, this is complicated. But, I recommend, do recognize that issue: one should be trying to think for oneself, but with incomplete information, or bad information, and lack of experience... ?
Last, "of course", one should not use "doing exercises" as an avoidance mechanism to allow avoiding facing more amorphous, real issues. "Doing exercises" is not the stairway to heaven, any more than a stringent exercise program guarantees professional athletic success, etc.
The relevant summary might be to start thinking in other terms than "exercises". After all, there are no "exercises" that qualify you to buy lunch, or mail a letter... The fixity of novice mathematicians on "school" and its ... mixed... credentialling system is in many ways very noisy and non-informative. Even if one needs to fit into that, one should not think too much in those terms.
# Answer
> 4 votes
**Keep doing it as long as it’s useful to you.**
I’m a couple years into post-doc’ing, and find exercises just as useful as I did in grad school; and I know professors at multiple stages of their career who appear (from conversation) to still frequently do exercises. On the other hand, I know at least one person who claims to have never particularly found exercises helpful.
So it certainly varies from person to person whether exercises are/remain useful; for a given individual, though, I have no idea how it typically changes over time. For my part, the main change over the last few years is in how selective I can be about exercises: I can now generally look quickly over a page of exercises and gauge pretty consistently which ones will be essentially routine, and which will require some real thought. Both kinds can still be of interest (at least to me), but for different purposes.
# Answer
> 3 votes
Exercises fall at various levels in Bloom's Taxonomy. Exercises at the higher end of the taxonomy are harder to do, but verify more objectives, since they rely on understanding and applying knowledge from the lower levels.
To try and answer your question, I'll generalize a bit and say that academics are by nature quick learners for the lower-level objectives (knowledge, comprehension). Exercises at this level are probably less useful than Upper-level exercises (application, analysis, evaluation, creation).
However, whenever I haven't taught material in a while, re-doing some of the knowledge exercises is a great way to freshen up and be sharp for class.
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Tags: professorship
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thread-4899 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4899 | Crediting sources one has found citations from | 2012-10-22T12:01:41.423 | # Question
Title: Crediting sources one has found citations from
Suppose that I am doing a literature review on a topic, and I read paper A, which makes an interesting claim and references paper B as its source. Naturally, as paper B is then the primary source, I will look up B and possibly cite it in my own paper if it seems relevant. And suppose that it turns out that paper A says nothing else that's relevant for my topic, so I say nothing about paper A.
And this seems fine if I only discovered one citation from paper A. But if I find several useful citations in the same paper, it starts to feel like plagiarism if I just ruthlessly harvest it for citations without never citing itself.
Sometimes it's easy to work in a citation in such a case. For example, if it's a review paper I'm reading, I might be able to just write in my own paper something like:
> Qwerty (2009) reviews a number of a results in this field, such as the finding that over 99% of the people who contract cancer wear shoes (Keyes 1999), that pink aliens from the sixteenth dimension dislike chocolate (Pinker 2001), ...
But often there isn't really any reasonable way to work in a citation, especially not if you wish the citation to make it clear that this is where you found useful sources from. I could include a footnote or a thanks in the acknowledgements, but I've never seen anyone do that for such a reason. Are there any rules of thumb regarding the correct etiquette in such situations?
# Answer
> 15 votes
The quoted you wrote is actually a pretty good way to include that citation.
It all comes down to the fundamental reason you are citing the paper. Citations are used to refer the reader to papers that contain useful information pertaining to your discussion. As such, *“because it includes a good citation”* is not a good reason for citing paper A in itself: there are plenty of other ways you could have found paper B (other citations, web or database search, bumping into its author at a meeting, etc.). **Unless paper A adds relevant information** to paper B, it should simply not be cited. One way it can add information is by performing a review of the literature, or by commenting on the results in paper B… In the first case, your quote is a good way to acknowledge that fact; in the second case, you could simply write that:
> *Qwerty discussed in \[21\] the original results of Doe \[22\], showing how the data wasn't corrected to account for the phase of the moon at the time of measurement.*
In conclusion, I'd say: **determine whether paper A brings additional information, then either cite it or do not cite it**. It is not common practice (and I don't think it should be) to acknowledge a paper without citing it.
# Answer
> 3 votes
I think "telling the truth" is a good guide: if one finds a source via another source, it is reasonable to say so. It is true that there is a tradition of a more formal pose, something in the direction that "oh, we knew this all along", even when this is not so.
Yes, there is an issue of wording, for which we lack good precedents, because such acknowledgements are not typical.
Another reason to be sure to acknowledge all sources is to communicate to the community that this is a reasonable thing to do.
Note that the distinction between "citation" and "acknowledgement" is less intellectual/scientific than it is a score-keeping thresh-hold.
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Tags: citations, etiquette
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thread-2263 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/2263 | Grade assignment methods to make learning efficient | 2012-07-02T15:41:54.860 | # Question
Title: Grade assignment methods to make learning efficient
The way a grade is assigned in a course influences the way students study which in turn influences their gain from the course.
I want to focus on ways to assign grades which aim to eventually increase the students' gain from the course (in contrast with grade assignment methods which try to single out the most talented students).
I'll start with the questions:
> 1. What are such grade assignment methods?
> 2. Are there texts/papers/other resources discussing this subject?
An answer should address issues such as: memorization vs. creativity, the temptation to get help from external sources while doing homework, spoonfeeding vs. self-learning, etc.
I will now give my own example of grade assignment components:
1. Excercises which are graded regularly throught the semester
2. Exercises for self-learning with a solutions manual provided
3. Quizes during the semester
4. Strictly technical questions in quizes/exams
5. Questions in quizes/exams which mostly require to repeat what was taught in class
6. Questions in quizes/exams which require some creativity
7. Student presentations
8. Practical assignments (programming/labs)
9. Interviews (oral exams)
I believe all of the above may have a place in some courses with the specificed goal in mind and would like to get new ideas for grading components, for how to combine them, and to know whether any written work exists which tries to answer this question.
I am thinking mostly of courses aimed towards math and CS students and mostly about senior undergraduates, but I do not want to limit the question to these subjects and this level of students.
# Answer
As a recent graduate in CS I can only provide my experience with grade assignment methods I came across during my studies.
I think the worst method is to let the grade solely depend on one exam at the end of the semester. The students will most likely put no effort in learning for this exam during the semester and will instead invest a couple of days before the exam to repeat the lecture's content.
The most promising method I came across was using (bi-)weekly assignments out of which the student had to reach at least 50% of the points. This way, they have to focus on the topic in order to solve the assignments to be able to take part in the exam.
In addition to this method, some lecturers awarded students with more than 80% of the overall points a bonus in the exam, i.e. they will obtain (let's say) 10 points bonus within the exam. I for myself think this really motivated me to invest time into the assignments and consequently into the lecture content.
Finally, there was one lecture where students could pose questions with possible answers in an online learning platform. The other students could use these questions (after review by an assistant or professor) to learn for the final exam. Students posing very good questions gained a bonus for the exam, similar to the above approach.
> 7 votes
# Answer
A good place to begin research on grading methods is under such topics as "formative assessment", "educational assessment/evaluation" and more general headings would be "evaluation" and "educational measurement". From memory, there have been favorable results from formative assessments given periodically throughout a course session. Such tests or quizzes help provide numerous chances for students to demonstrate their learning, as well as giving themselves feedback on how well they are or are not progressing. Finding out early that the subject is beyond them is always helpful, as is giving the more capable opportunities to improve over time. There is little merit in giving single, end of course exams or projects, assuming that you value students' opinions and their mastery of the course objectives.
Note that there are a variety of alternatives to "tests" these days, many of which can provide students with the chance to show their learning way beyond the mastery of the facts.
> 1 votes
# Answer
I've used several Pedagogical Patterns in my courses, namely Grade it again, Sam that is part of Some Pedagogical Patterns. They're oriented towards computer-science curriculum, but could be adapted to other areas.
> 0 votes
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Tags: teaching, grades
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thread-4903 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4903 | What tools make it easy to maintain (or avoid!) the N versions of your CV? | 2012-10-22T14:48:06.390 | # Question
Title: What tools make it easy to maintain (or avoid!) the N versions of your CV?
Academics need various forms of their CV, depending on what purpose it's being used for. In my case, here are reasons I've had to re-format or have a different version of my CV:
* promotion and tenure,
* research proposals (each grant program requires a different format),
* program accreditation for engineering universities,
* my official web page at my university (with a French and English version).
It's a lot of busy work to maintain these CVs, especially as they evolve.
In Canada, there's a program in government-funded research to have a common format for CVs, called the Canadian Common CV. It's a great idea, but doesn't really solve the global problems. Not all funding organizations support it (or the same version of it).
Can anyone recommend tools that help in preparing academic CVs in various formats? Probably this means centralizing the information in one place and having it output in customizable formats. Obviously, there needs to be some understanding of the elements of an academic CV: publications, students supervised, grants awarded, community service, courses taught, distinguished awards, etc.
# Answer
In addition to using LaTeX with a makefile, I find that using the LaTeX package splitbib is very useful. It allows you to format your publications with different subtitles for different category of publications, and you can pick and choose which entries from your publications (which I maintain as a BiBTeX file) should be included.
Since LaTeX allows you to include files, it's relatively easy to create separate files that contain the base material and then include them as needed in different formats.
> 22 votes
# Answer
I maintain CV of various lengths (with more or less details) and in two languages. For a long time, I have used **LaTeX** for that task, along with a `Makefile` that can do conditional compilation of my argument: basically, the LaTeX code was set up so that, depending on the job name of the compilation, different bits of the CV would be included or not (this is not TeX.SE, so I won't go into the full details).
I used it for some years, but as time passed I progressed along the career track, and now I need more and more types of CV, customized in different ways. Basically, I end up having to manually select the bits and pieces I want to include for each specific use of my CV. Thus, I now maintain:
* a very brief CV (for which I use the NSF “biographical sketch” as a template)
* a full CV in English
* a full CV in French
* a list of publications, because these pretty much don't need translation apart from the section titles
I use my **word processor** (MS Word or Apple’s Pages) for the first three, as it allows me to customize a specific CV from each template, and it also allows then pasting the CV into a larger Word document (often a requirement for grants).
I still use a custom-made **LaTeX processing of my publication list**, from which I produce either PDF (if used on its own) or a HTML file, which I then copy into my MS Word CV.
> 10 votes
# Answer
There's also the idea of using a **version control (or management) system** such as Git, Subversion, or Mercurial. These tools will allow you to keep track of changes to your CV over time. If you use text-based files, it's a much lower overhead than keeping multiple versions of the different files floating all over the place, especially having different filenames for different dates of creation and editing, and so on.
> 9 votes
# Answer
In 2003 or so, I had a senior-project student try to influence the XMLRésuméLibrary project to support academic CV types, but the project didn't move forward.
There's a related project called HR-XSL, designed to convert XML-formatted CVs into various formats using command-line tools. ~~But I have not used it.~~ The examples (HTML, PDF) are for a university professor, implying it might be useful to academics. It's customizable, ~~according to the~~ and has pretty decent documentation.
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Edit: I gave HR-XSL a shot and it works easily in Eclipse (you need Ant and Java). The CV data is stored in an XML file that can easily be edited using a text (or more interestingly) an XML editor (Eclipse has a built-in one that is spiffy). Customizing the output is pretty easy, even though it's DOCBOOK and I've never used it before. I didn't carry out the exercise to the end (creating multiple formats), but feel it is going to pay off.
Some limitations of the XML schema are that there are no data types for things like "Research interests" or "Grants and Contracts". However, there's a `ResumeAdditionalItem` that supports a user-defined type, e.g., "Grants and Contracts" and all entries there get grouped under that heading.
There is also an internationalization dimension, but I don't think it will work to prevent duplicate XML sources for different languages (e.g., English and French). The reason is that the internationalization works to customize headings, such as "Table of contents" and "Table des matières". I haven't yet found a way to specify a Job Title in English vs. French, for example.
> 4 votes
# Answer
I have never tried it, but yst was created to do this. There was a nice statement of the problem here:
> Using yst, I can maintain a database of my articles, talks, service, academic positions, etc. as a set of YAML text files. I can edit these in any editor. yst then produces my website and various versions of my CV from this data, using a set of customized templates.
A similar statement by someone else can be found here
> I can have, say, my list of publications or my list of conference talks as yaml data. I can then use yst to build a CV page for my website. I can also use yst to generate a .tex file for a pdf version of my CV. This way, I don't need to make the same edits in two different places when I give another talk.
> 3 votes
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Tags: professorship, cv, version-control
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thread-4910 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4910 | Balancing between finishing past projects and working on current ones | 2012-10-22T17:37:44.500 | # Question
Title: Balancing between finishing past projects and working on current ones
Personally, I never feel done with projects, as there are always a few open projects, in which I'm involved in. (And typically 1-2 which "I should have finished year ago or so".)
First, **what are good strategies of balancing between finishing past project and working on current ones?**
On the one hand, concentrating only on current ones means that there will be a lot of "almost baked" project, in a form of partial results, never published drafts or papers stuck in the revision process. (Assigning second priority to something means that it is never going to be taken seriously.)
On the other hand, focusing only past projects would:
* look as if I were slacking off (also, as some past projects are from previous afflictions),
* have me stuck in working on projects, which are going to be "90%" for the eternity.
Second, being put in situation with constant (internal) pressure and no calm sense of finishing things (as even after polishing results, polishing a draft, going through a few rounds of revisions... there are still *n-1* open projects), **is there a way to feel accomplishment and not blame oneself when resting?**
# Answer
This is a very broad questions, so I’ll try to chirp in with some of the “tricks” I use to get things done.
* **Find ways to keep track**. It can be very easy to feel that you have so many things going that you feel overwhelmed by remembering them or else. There are a number of hardware or software tools to do that. I have a list of ongoing stuff that I keep in the last pages of my notebook, which works pretty well.
* If something needs to be done, which takes little time, **just do it right now**. More importantly, the critical amount of time depends on the life of the project: the more advanced the project is, the more you need to finish. This prioritizes finishing older projects.
For example, if I have a current project with a task that requires half a day of work, I'll try to find a time to do it later. If I have a one day task for a project that's almost done (such as revising a manuscript after reviewer comments), I'll just treat it as high priority to do ASAP.
* When working on a project with others, be clear to assign someone to monitoring progress (and reminding everyone of their contributions). On some projects, you need to take the back seat, and just let someone more concerned about the outcome drive the project.
* If some project isn't seeing any progress, try to break it up into smaller work units. Like: I'll write a detailed outline, then circulate it to colleagues or co-authors, then use feedback to write the paper (instead of trying to write the paper in one big piece).
Finally, some advice I have received as a young parent, and that is very applicable to academic life: **academic life is a long-term game**, you're in it for 40+ years. You being very productive right now, then extenuated for 6 months isn't a net positive. You are a better researcher when you are rested and (relatively) stress-free, so **avoiding exhaustion and stress is actually your #1 priority!**
> 11 votes
# Answer
Here are a few tips that seem to work for me:
* You can apply the Google 20% rule and allow yourself 20% of your time to work on projects that have no clear end point, which would include new ideas that you've just had or projects of the sort that you've just had.
* New projects shouldn't become current projects unless they are close to finished or you make room in the 80% for them by finishing other projects.
* That said, you need to evaluate the projects that you haven't completed and determine whether it is really worth completing them, apart from the fact that you've invested a lot of time in them. At some point you have to cut and move on.
* Maybe you can write up the projects that are incomplete and see what you have in the end, and determine whether it goes into the 80%, the 20%, the bottom drawer, or the trash can.
* Pick a few conference deadlines (or create a deadline for a journal paper) and work towards that to finish the work.
> 6 votes
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Tags: productivity, time-management, workflow
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thread-4915 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4915 | Where to define nomenclature in a proposal or dissertation? | 2012-10-22T23:06:04.723 | # Question
Title: Where to define nomenclature in a proposal or dissertation?
I am writing my proposal and I am borrowing heavily from one of my publications. The published paper has a `Nomenclature` section at the very beginning (just after the abstract).
What is the appropriate place for a nomenclature in a proposal/thesis? Or is it more advisable to explain the terms near the place where they are used (considering that if `Nomenclature` is published on a distant page it would be too much of an effort on the reader's part to scroll down and up again)?
# Answer
> 4 votes
I prefer to group definitions of notation and symbols with the typical "List of ..." elements. You probably already have "List of figures" and "List of tables", so simple add something like "List of symbols" or "List of abbreviations" after the other lists.
# Answer
> 6 votes
I personally think the biggest consideration is how often the term or symbol is used. If it's used a lot, then a clear definition at the start is probably the best. The reader then knows where to look if they're unsure of the meaning rather than having to find the first place it's used, and it would be ridiculous to keep defining it every time you use it.
For things that are just used once, it may be more readable to define it at the point of use. The definition is only relevant for that little portion, so splitting the definition and use makes things, as you say, too much of an effort for the reader.
The question then is where to draw the line; at what point does a rarely used term become common enough to warrant being included in the nomenclature section? This is, I think, becomes a matter of preference. Personally, if a term were used in more than one section, I'd define it at the start. Though, if it really is only used twice, perhaps an in-place definition and a "recall that we define..." kind of sentence would read more smoothly.
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Tags: phd, thesis, writing
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thread-4837 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4837 | Can I present the results of a paper that is currently under review? | 2012-10-18T18:12:02.703 | # Question
Title: Can I present the results of a paper that is currently under review?
Among the presentations in a major conference, I attended one where the author cited a paper (of theirs) under review in another major conference. Not only cited it, but showed some of its results.
I have the impression that it should not be possible, since there's the potential risk of influencing reviewers who could also be in the room during the presentation. Or is it only "good practice" not to do so?
# Answer
# In favour of unrestricted dissemination
After thinking about the answers provided so far and the discussion in comments, it seems to me that the point of view favouring dissemination of research results unrestricted by the double-blind peer-review process needs a stronger case. I believe that the answer can be derived from higher-level, rather philosophical, principles.
> ... Or is it only "good practice" not to do so \[to present results under review\]?
***What is the purpose of developing and disseminating research results?***
I am an idealist in these things and argue, that it is first and foremost the *advancement of human knowledge* and ultimately *improvement of the conditions of the human society, as well as the world around us* -- regardless of what exactly "improvement" means, I have in mind something like a wider social consensus that the change has a positive vector.
Given this stance, unless there are other considerations in the game, there is no reason which could obstruct our *advancement of human knowledge*, which ultimately rests on dissemination of quality results to the wider public. Of course, we should be careful and act in a good faith so as to be cautious about *validity*, *significance* and *originality* of our results. Peer-review process is only an *auxiliary mechanism* helping us to filter out ideas/results in violation of these principles, i.e., helps us to recognize and fix our own misjudgements and mistakes, as well as (in the worse case) dissemination of results not advancing knowledge of humankind, but produced for other primary purposes. After all, the ultimate metrics for the results of scientific research is not the outcome of the peer-review process, but rather the long-term impact on the society and the world around us. That is, whether other people will learn something from the results and whether it eventually helps them to build something beneficial to the society.
Unfortunately, thanks to the recent proliferation of the publish-or-perish attitude and its intertwining with the need to advance human knowledge, as well as interactions of these two conflicting forces, gradually peer-review becomes primarily a mechanism to filter bad-faith products - think plagiarism, results falsification and all sorts of other scientific misconduct. Yet, I maintain, *the process of filtering should not gain a higher importance than the objective of our pursuit itself*. To conclude, **if executed with caution, restrictions imposed by double-blind review process *should not* restrict our ability to disseminate our results.**
> 7 votes
# Answer
The only problem of presenting results that are not published is if someone else *steals* the results and writes their own paper about them. (Though this probably more likely only happens with ideas that are shared too prematurely.)
It is generally considered a good thing to promote one’s own work, and one way of doing this is by giving presentations at other universities.
Even if this work is under review at a different conference, I don’t think it is problematic. When presenting a paper at a conference, you are not necessarily obliged to talk about precisely the contents of the paper. You are advertising the paper, and more generally, your own work, so that people will read it and cite it. If you have bigger and better results, then these will help with your promotion of your own work.
Of course it would be weird, though probably not wrong, to talk entirely about a different paper when presenting at a conference.
> 12 votes
# Answer
There is one circumstance where presenting results under review elsewhere would be a violation of code. This is when the conference where review is ongoing requires double blind submissions.
In such cases, there's usually a clause that asks the authors not do anything overt to violate double blind review, and presenting at a different venue (where reviewers might be in attendance) would be an overt violation.
> 10 votes
# Answer
There is **nothing unethical** in doing so (including results from a paper *of your own* under review). It is not fundamentally different from presenting any other unpublished work of yours. If anything, you are taking a risk because people might jump on the idea, do the research at full speed (knowing what to look for), and publish it before your paper is finally out…
It depends strongly on the field of research, and the pressure from the competition. In my field (physical chemistry), it has evolved as follows in the last 10 or 15 years: people used to happily report on their not-yet-published results. Then, some colleagues from the US started to stop doing it, especially at the big conferences, citing fear of being “scooped”. Now, in most conferences, you don't hear anything that has not at least been accepted for publication. There are exceptions, usually local conferences, but also for example the prestigious Gordon conferences, which are held under a confidentiality agreement and where unpublished work is favored.
> 6 votes
# Answer
I see no reason to be concerned about this. Most of my conference presentations are about work I haven't even submitted yet. And the whole point is to persuade people that the ideas I'm presenting are useful. All of my papers go on arxiv.org and on my website as soon as they're submitted.
Why on earth would it be wrong to influence reviewers (except in case of double-blind review)?
> 1 votes
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Tags: publications, peer-review, presentation
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thread-4922 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4922 | What's the editor's benefit in setting deadlines for manuscript revision? | 2012-10-23T09:08:21.367 | # Question
Title: What's the editor's benefit in setting deadlines for manuscript revision?
In many journals of my field, upon acceptance of a manuscript for publication with minor revisions, the editor sets a deadline (4 weeks, in many journals) for submission for the revised manuscript.
While I usually resubmit these papers as fast as possible, I don't see the benefit *for the editor* to set a deadline. After all, once a paper is “almost accepted”, the authors are motivated enough to get it over the final line, aren't they?
# Answer
> 13 votes
Editing a journal is a non-trivial exercise, something which tends to drag on forever and requires lots of pushing of reviewers and authors to complete their tasks on time. It is time-consuming. Without deadlines, reviewers and authors will submit their work arbitrarily late, making it very difficult to get each issue out on time.
Authors may well be motivated to get over the final line, but when there are other things to do and the possibility of delaying one piece of work yet another day, then it is easy to delay that work.
# Answer
> 4 votes
Well, you want predictability in any manufacturing business, and printing press is that kind of manufacturing endeavour. Without deadlines for submissions, you won't have predictability in production.
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Tags: publications, time-management
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thread-4918 | https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4918 | Changing Interests After Getting Accepted for PhD | 2012-10-23T01:41:50.087 | # Question
Title: Changing Interests After Getting Accepted for PhD
I have brought some trouble onto myself I know, but what can be done by someone in my situation.
I applied and got accepted for a PhD program in Computer Science. I automatically assumed that I wanted to continue the work I did on my Master's thesis and I identified a professor who would be willing to work with me on that subject. When I got there, I reviewed the literature (there had been a few years of gap since defending my thesis) and decided I really did not like the direction the field was going in. I had been developing a new interest anyway, so I changed sub-disciplines. Now, no one will commit to be my advisor, at best maybe co-advisor with some outside expert. Part of the reason is because my school lacks experts in that area. I personally (on a friend basis) know some Computer Science professors, but none are experts in my field. What can I do? No advisor = No PhD, I know that much anyway.
# Answer
> 5 votes
Changing a subject during the PHD course is legitimate, and not very rare. However, finding an advisor is a must. I think in that case you'll have no choice but trying to convince professors to be your advisors.
A possible way is to find an expert from a different university, that will be your co-advisor. That way you'll just need to find another faculty in your university that is not-too-far from your interests. You might find someone that will tentativly be your advisor, and once you show some progress will agree to take you under..
But maybe the big question is, why not moving to the place where the "experts" are?
# Answer
> 3 votes
I do not think changing topics on a PhD research is totally unheard off. In fact, as Ran mentioned, it's probably more common than one would think.
Now, the advisor is indeed an issue. The problem is that it looks bad on professors if they do not understand what are you doing, and if the field is unrelated to them that might happen. Did you try looking for an advisor in other area, where what you want to do is applied?
Perhaps a nice way to approach the issue is to do a more formal research plan and a good application in mind, that might attract some advisor or at least give a strong case to an outside expert.
In these days distance should not be an issue for a CS research.
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Tags: phd, advisor
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