texts: Study design for best teaching methods - how to avoid overly specific results?

texts:
I would like to do a study with a class in which the students are split into two groups, A and B.  They will each receive a tutorial on the same topic, but group A will get a different tutorial than group B.  I will then give a post-assessment and a week after post-assessment, to explore retention rates among other things.  The goal is to compare the methods for tutorial delivery.  Specifically, group A will get a tutorial that is modeled on the traditional "expert solving problems at the board" while group B will get a tutorial that requires the students to do self-directed problem solving, with scaffolding.

My concern is that I won't be able to distinguish between expert solved problems vs. student solved problems. Rather, I will be able to distinguish between "when an expert solves THESE problems in THIS topic" compared to when students do so.

In short, I'm worried that my study results will only be valid for a very specific set of circumstances, not generally applicable even to other institutions that teach a similar but not identical course.  What are some strategies, if any, I can use to avoid overly specific results?


texts: What's the right time to transition from postdoc to PI?

texts:
I've been a neuroscience postdoc for the past ~2.5 years and have recently applied to Assistant Professor positions in various R1 universities within the US. I decided to apply mainly for timing reasons: there were lots of good open positions and I'd had a very productive 2018 (with many pubs from grad school coming out). Now, having received several interview invitations, I'm starting to wonder what I'd do if I got offered a job.

The reason for my hesitation is that I have changed areas in my postdoc (going from experimental work to theory/modeling and machine learning). I really like my new research area, but I feel like in the past 2.5 years I haven't learned enough about it yet, nor have I established myself as a theorist/modeler. There's so much more that I still want to explore, and I feel that as a PI I would not have the time to learn and develop new research directions, new collaborations, etc.

If I do end up getting a job offer, would I be crazy not to take it, given how competitive the market is? More generally, what's the right time to transition from postdoc to PI?


texts: How hard is it to get a good to great grades in undergraduate school?

texts:
I am currently studying undergraduate school in Europe and am toying with idea of applying to a U.S. collage for graduate school.

So I‘ve read a bit online about GPA requirements and there it says that one should have a score of at least 3.0. My current GPA would be way below that and I‘m not a crazy outlier at my school. All of my friends have grades similar to mine.
At the same time I know a few friends in America who all never have grades worse than a B.

So do I just coincidentally know two absolutely non-overlapping groups on either side of the Atlantic is it easier to get good grades in America?


texts: How are non-academic (eg. industrial) reports cited in publications?

texts:
This question pertains to peer reviewed journal articles in materials science/metallurgy.

In my upcoming research article, I wish to use some statistics from an industrial report to highlight the relevance of the material being studied. Said report is not academic or peer-reviewed, as it is based on business numbers and forecasts, aggregated by a forum.  It does not have an author/list of authors (only a foreword by the secretary-general of the forum).

How can I cite this article? Is there a strong reason not to use this and stick to only academic publications?

Thank you!


texts: Applying to US Phd Programs while doing a UK Master's

texts:
I recently received a conditional offer from UCL in MSc Advanced Neuroimaging. I'll be completing this program through distance learning (meaning that I won't have to physically be present in the UK).

I was thinking about applying to PhD programs in the US this fall with the hopes of starting in the fall of 2020. However, while I was looking at the course requirements for the MSc program, I noticed that my thesis would require a final presentation in September 2020 and results will be notified in October 2020.

Will this overlap (starting a PhD program in September 2020 while finishing my master's thesis) cause a problem? Will I have to wait to apply in the fall of 2020? I would really like to apply this cycle so that I won't have to waster another year.


texts: Making myself an attractive candidate for a research lab (no prior lab experience)

texts:
I graduated with a B.S. in mathematics but have always had an interest in chemistry. In particular, I enjoyed the labs. In fact, in the near future I plan to become involved in a Food Science program. It would be greatly advantageous to me to be able to do work in a research lab. Unfortunately, my actual lab experience is weak (Gen. Chem, physics. My Organic chem had no lab section).

I'd like some suggestions on how to improve one's usefulness in the lab without actually working in the lab.

A couple ideas I had:

Learn Statistical analysis / database software
Practice identifying spectroscopy (NMR, Mass, ...)
Reading about technique or experimental set-ups anyway.

Is there anything else? Is identifying spectra even useful, or is it all done by computer now? Are there (free) online resources for any of this?

More specifically, for my case:

I'd like to work in a food science lab. So the main focus would primarily lie in organic chemistry, biochemistry, and microbiology. Possibly in flavor chemistry or food analysis, but I don't yet have a more specific research area in mind.


texts: Is it wrong to call yourself Dr First_Name Last_Name when you have a Professional Doctorate such as DTech or DBA and not a PhD or MBBS?


texts: What is the perception of foreign Universities (Non UK) in the US for prospective academic positions (Postdoc/Tenure)?

texts:
First of all, I know that your work speaks for you, and if you have really good papers, you have better chances, but just bear with me, and for the sake of argument lets assume that your research is only one of the points to consider.

I did my undergrad in what could be considered the best University in my Country (Mexico)and got a Magna Cum Laude.

And then, I did my Graduate studies in the University of Tokyo publishing a couple of Journal Papers (I'm really pushing for that 3rd one!)

This question is directed to people in the US, since I'm looking to find a permanent position.

What is the perception Universities in the US have of foreign Universities? I happen to know that UK Universities like Cambridge and Oxford have no problem (for obvious reasons), but a professor friend of mine told me that other Universities are just not that well known. And having a degree from the Hawaii University was better than having a degree from Tokyo University. (As a side note, he is a professor at Haw Univ, and he wanted me to apply over there)

I just want to know how true or false this is, and realistically speaking how hard/easy is to get a position as a postdoc and eventually a full time professor if you are not from a US univ.

For example, do I have the same chances as someone who graduated from a top University (your Ivy leagues, Public Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, etc) or do I least have the same chances as middle range Universities?

As a side note, I have a postdoc in the UCLA lined up, so I guess that'll boost my chances a bit.


texts: I regret my choice of grad school, is it possible/common to accept an offer I turned down a year ago?

texts:
I got accepted to three universities when I applied for grad school last year. There were two I was debating between and I chose one. Well, that was a HUGE mistake. The location is bad which I knew. I thought I would be able to handle that, but it's turning out that I can't...at all. The location is super depressing. There's nothing to do anywhere. Outside of my house there's always junkies hanging out shooting up. There was a meth lab around the corner that burned down. There is absolutely nothing to do, and the location is very far away from family. I couldn't see my family for some holidays which was very sad.

The location here is miserable, I honestly don't think I can handle another 5 years here.

I turned down another PhD offer, thinking I could handle this location. Well...I can't. The department here is ranked much higher than the other department. There's someone here I wanted to work with. But I don't even care about any of that if walking outside makes me miserable.

I don't care if none of my credits transfer. I don't care if I have to start over. I just can't handle this location. The only thing I don't want to go through again is applying and waiting to hear back, asking for letters of rec, etc.

I emailed the other department (who DID accept me last year, even with a fellowship) if there's anyway to transfer that doesn't require applying again.

Is this common? Is this possible? Or am I just stuck here or stuck reapplying?


texts: Shifting from a bachelor's degree in ChE to graduate studies in Mathematics

texts:
I am currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering (2nd year student) from SLIET, Punjab, India, which is a Central Funded Technical Institute under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India. Before moving on to the main part of the question, let me describe a bit about my background in mathematics.
So, I am currently involved in a group research project on discrete geometry, which is being mentored by a renowned mathematician (of UCSD) in the US. I will also be doing a research internship on algebra under a well-known faculty of IIT Bombay in the upcoming summer of 2021. I participated in PROMYS 2020 Bridge Program (as a junior counselor and researcher) and PROMYS Boston 2019 (as a first year student) as a Mehta fellow. Also, I participated in MSP 2018, ENS Paris, as one of the top 50 young mathematicians around the world. In addition to this I am a Regional Mathematics Olympiad (RMO) awardee and have also received a high-distinction in AMC 2016, back in high school.
Now moving on to the main part of the question, I wish to pursue my graduate studies in Mathematics from the US or Europe, that is, I wish to shift to mathematics after I am done with my bachelor's degree in chemical engineering.
But, as you might know the mathematics that is taught in a typical engineering program covers real analysis, multivariable calculus, Fourier series, linear algebra, vector calculus, complex analysis, differential equations (ODE and PDE), Laplace transform, probability and statistics and numerical analysis. We are not taught abstract algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), most part of analysis that is covered in a typical undergraduate mathematics course and topology. So, these are the courses that would formally lack from my coursework, which would seriously make my application (for graduate studies in mathematics) weak and less competitive.
Though I will be taking five additional undergraduate courses in mathematics and computer science next semester (from NPTEL), namely, introduction to rings and fields, introduction to algebraic topology, introduction to Galois theory, introduction to algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, and design and analysis of algorithms. I hope taking these courses would cover up for the lacking coursework to some extent. I plan to keep taking such additional undergraduate courses in mathematics and computer science for the further upcoming semesters too. In addition to this, I have also taken courses in Number Theory, Graph Theory and Topology during my two years at PROMYS.
I am also preparing for the GRE mathematics subject test and covering some of the undergraduate mathematics courses on my own, at the same time.
I have heard that funded masters are not a thing anymore in good US universities. So, should I be opting for an integrated PhD in mathematics from the US or should I be opting for a masters in Europe after my bachelor's? Which is easier to get into (provided my background in mathematics)? And, what else should I be doing (like more undergraduate research work, coursework, etc.) to enhance my profile in mathematics, in order to get into some decent universities?


texts: What are refereed and non-refereed journals?

texts: What does it mean by publication in refereed and non-refereed journals? Are these terms applicable to conference papers too? Is there any relationship with peer-review?


texts: Is punctuation necessary for displayed formulas in academia writing?

texts:
If a formula appears in the main body of the text, there seems no doubt that punctuation should be given to that formula when necessary. But when a formula appears displayed (i.e. solely taking up a line), there seems no consensus on whether punctuation is needed for it. I wonder if there will be any potential ambiguities if punctuation is (or not) included in this case.

This is essentially a question about functions of punctuation for displayed formulas. I don't want an answer about rules from certain style guide...


texts: Is simplication of known results worth a publication?

texts:
I am an applied mathematician. A very simplified outline of my situation is as follows:

The leader of my research group is a "big wheel" in his specific research area. His contributions are considered both important and very demanding.

Recently I found a way to get a simplified access to one aspect of his work. I am very sure that no more than a few dozen people have ever made the effort to dig through this and understand it. The simplification is substantial, and even to my group leader it has not been known. Certainly it is not known to almost everybody else.

Other than an alternative simplified manner of setting up the theory, I can round out some things that have previously been done by hand-waving. That is only of theoretical interest.

So I wonder: finding this has been difficult, and it would help other researchers to know about it. But is it worth being published, with only a "sugar glaze" of actually -new- results? How can I determine this? How low for a journal should I aim?


texts: How to detail conference presentation of my work that was given by someone else on CV?

texts: Recently some work of mine was presented at a prestigious conference by the second author on the forthcoming journal article. On the write-up submitted to the conference I was listed as first author, but was unable to attend for personal reasons. How should I list this achievement on my resume whilst still acknowledging the roles played by each author?


texts: Does the NSF support researchers with no academic affiliation?

texts:
It seems that NSF only supports researchers affiliated with academic institutions. For instance, if a researcher is in the industry, is there a chance to get funding from NSF for a pure academic research?

Let's say the researcher's employer is not a scientific/research establishment, maybe it's a manufacturing plant, and the researcher's interest has nothing to do with his/her daily job.


texts: Is it possible to be a paid RA in a math or computer science lab in order to be immersed in the academic research context?

texts:
I'm currently a research assistant in a neuroscience lab at MIT and I'm considering pursuing a PhD in math or theoretical computer science. The RAs in my lab who want to eventually become neuroscientists are in a perfect place - a large, collaborative environment where they get paid to work closely with neuroscientists and learn hands on what the entire research process is like in that field before committing to a 5 year grad program.

I want an environment as close to this as possible in math or theoretical computer science to solidify my belief that I would be happy pursuing research in these areas. Is this kind of opportunity available in these fields? What is the closest I can get? I did an REU program in undergrad and loved it, but want more if it's out there.

Thank you so much for your advice, this is a great community.


texts: How to cite a Linkedin Profile in IEEE format?

texts:
The IEEE standard specifies said format for all website citations:

  World Wide Web

  Author(s). “Title.” Internet: complete URL, date
  updated [date accessed]. M. Duncan. “Engineering Concepts on Ice.
  Internet: www.iceengg.edu/staff.html, Oct. 25, 2000 [Nov. 29, 2003].

In particular to Linkedin profiles, the format I decided on so far looks like this:

  John Doe. "John Doe." Internet: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johndoe/, 2017. [Nov. 10, 2017]

Is this the correct format for a linkedin profile?


texts: Email to two academics of differing familiarity

texts:
I am sending an email to two people: Prof FirstName1 LastName1 and Dr FirstName2 LastName2. The former has a PhD and is officially a professor (with tenure, if that matters) with whom I am not intimately familiar. He prefers to go by Prof or Dr LastName (I have no problem with it). The latter I have worked with for a few months now and strongly prefers not to be called Dr (much less Professor, as he isn't one; he does research and lectures but the institute at which he works does not grant that title). Instead, I call him FirstName2 as he has instructed me to do. The two are of a similar age and experience (as far as I know).

My question is, when emailing them, should I say "Dear Prof LastName1 and FirstName2," or a more formal (but possibly upsetting) "Dear Prof LastName1 and Dr LastName2," or something else altogether? Furthermore, what would be the most polite thing to call each of them in a meeting where both are present? I would like to respect both of their preferences, but not respecting FirstName2's title seems like it could be taken the wrong way (i.e. insulting).

I ended up going with "Dear all," even though there are only two people in the email but I am wondering what the most polite way would have been (for future reference).


texts:
For a CV/ grad school application, is there any benefit to noting that after a paper my group submitted to a peer-reviewed journal it was returned with comments from reviewers and we addressed them and resubmitted?

For example,

[1] A. Author et al., Brilliant Title That Draws Attention, Submitted to J. Phys. B, [arXiv:1908.12345].

versus

[1] A. Author et al., Brilliant Title That Draws Attention, Re-submitted after peer-review to J. Phys. B, [arXiv:1908.12345].

Or something like that?


texts: How Much Say Would A Prospective Supervisor Have In A Students Admission To An Applied Math Graduate Program?

texts: I am interested in applying to some applied math graduate programs but I have some deficiencies in a few math courses. However, I have reached out to a potential supervisor and our conversations are going well. So my question is, if a prospective supervisor wants to take on a particular student, but students have to enter a common pool of applicants, how much influence on An individuals admissions does a prospective advisor have in the process.


texts: Relevance of a PhD with a quantitative psychology group for applied math

texts:
My background is in mathematics, with a main interest in mathematical statistics / biostatistics, and I am considering applying for a PhD position with a quantitative psychology group. The research itself can apparently be made statistically challenging towards the candidate's interests, which sounds appealing. I am not sure if I want to continue in academia after the PhD, but it would preferably be in mathematical statistics or biostatistics.

Would a PhD research with a quantitative psychology group take away this option or make it more difficult, even if the reseach itself is approached from a mathematical statistics view?


texts: How should academics handle communication with the media?

texts:
I'm not famous enough of a scientist to be frequently solicited by the media* (plus my field has little political/social controversy around it), but I had a few encounters with local newspapers and one with a public national television. The results were not entirely bad, but the general sentiment given was significantly different than what I would have wanted it to be.

It seems like I'm not alone, I just got back from a conference in my field where more senior scientists discussed their relationship with the general media. It came out that more often than they would like, the relationship was bad.

Problems stated, among others†:

Misquotation, or words taken out of their context significantly changing their meaning (this is the most frequent).
A general difficulty for the media to understand, and convey, uncertainty ('we think, it might be so..' or 'we are rather confident that ...' becomes 'it is so')
Difficulty to apprehend results, applications, consequences that may or may not appear 10-20 years down the line.
Exaggeration of the conclusions

etc.

These are not without consequences, at the personal level, as it can give the impression that you don't know what you are talking about.

My first thought was to ignore the media attention and advocate that scientists should do the communication themselves to bypass the regular media (having a blog, entertaining a profile on social media, etc.), but it is extremely time consuming and would distract from the actual research work. I think there must be something to do, on our side, to help with that.

I understand that it is due to how media works, and I don't believe it will change by a lot. But the question is then: are there any strategies that would help reducing this effect, at least to protect oneself against the consequences?

*newspapers, television, magazines, etc. i.e. not scientific journals.

†anyone who has items to add to this list is welcome to do so.


texts: Should all authors on a paper be comfortable explaining every aspect of the paper?

texts:
Say I am person A who has built up some degree of expertise in mathematical topic X. Person B works on mathematical topic Y and realizes she needs a result from topic X. She asks me if I know how to prove this result. I work for a bit and prove this result, which person B works into their paper.

Now, I'm confident about my work on topic X, and am confident that person B is not manhandling its use for topic Y - i.e., they're very clear about the assumptions my result uses and what it implies. However, my knowledge of topic Y is not very deep, and it would take a significant amount of time for me to comfortably grasp exactly how the paper's use of topic Y works.

Is it then dishonest to proceed as an author? Is it expected that every author knows every aspect of the paper?


texts: How do I invite an expert to contribute to a review article I'm writing?

texts:
I am in the process of writing my PhD thesis, and I would like to extend the state-of-the-art part into a review article. Although I am confident that I have investigated and understood the existing literature thoroughly, I think the overall quality and visibility of the review article would increase if I find an expert to collaborate with on the paper. My PhD supervisor is not an expert in the field and I expect his willingness to actively contribute to be near zero.

I have already identified a rising expert (junior PI) that I would like to contact. A strong plus is also that he seems to be an expert on the area of the article where I have no published results, whereas I have some published research in the other of the two subareas of the review article. However, I am not sure how and when to contact this person (I have not met him in person).

One approach would be to (nearly) finish the paper and then send him a direct email, asking whether he would like to contribute, and send him the paper after he agreed to handle the draft confidentially so he can decide if he wants to contribute. I would also mention that I am willing to do the ground work but expect him to comment on the draft and help improving the overall quality of the paper.

Another approach would be to upload a finished (to the best of my abilities) paper on arXiv and than send him the mail asking for his willingness to contribute.

Is there a better approach?


texts: What should be done about a professor who treats foreign students worse than domestic students?

texts:
My school and my department has a lot of undergraduate students from China. When I took this instructor's class, he routinely

pressured the foreign students to answer questions about their home country that they weren't comfortable answering. (This is a math department; his questions weren't relevant to the course.)
pressured the foreign students to quickly answer when they struggled to either understand him or respond in English.
sneered when they answered one his questions wrong, no matter how strange the question was.
didn't accept "I don't know" from Chinese students.

He never did this to any of the domestic students. This was a topic of discussion among the American students before his class—we all noticed it. Several Chinese students dropped his class because of the way he treated them, but they didn't complain because that isn't considered kosher in China. (He actually said, "I don't understand why 'A' students are dropping," after a very talented Chinese student withdrew from this class.)

I can't point to any one thing he said or did that clearly crosses the line—I would have reported him to the dean's office and the department chair if he had—but he came up to it too many times for me to be comfortable with his behavior. I liked the guy in the beginning of the course, but I was sick of the way he treated my Chinese friends by the end.

To summarize: I feel this adjunct's behavior towards Chinese students borders on harassment, but isn't obviously harassment. Should I do anything? What?

To clarify—this class already ended, but I'm told he still keeps up this crappy behavior. And the Chinese students actually come from mainland China.


texts: Is it okay to give a gift to my research mentor who happens to be the dean?

texts: I'm about to graduate and would like to give my research mentor a book as a gift. It is common in my institute (which is in the US) to give professors gifts as students graduate. However, the problem is my research mentor last year became the dean of the college, and I'm not sure if there is a different set of rules for the administrators than for the faculty. So is it okay for me to give a gift to the dean? Would it make a difference if I do it before or after my graduation?


texts: Using a similar application essay I used before

texts:
I recently submitted an application essay for a pre-college program, and was accepted. I'm particularly proud of my essay; I put my best into it.

Now, after the pre-college program, I intend to apply for one of the institute's degree programs.

I've written an essay for the application. Most of it is rewritten, but it does have a lot of similarities (the intro paragraph is nearly identical).

  Would it be considered plagiarism for using my own work? If not, is it still frowned upon if there are many similarities, and could impact my chances of getting accepted?

I understand that it is likely that answers are individual to each institute, but I'd like to know what the general answer is.

I've read some sources that claim students applying to multiple schools use very similar essays for all (assuming the prompts are similar), only changing statements specific to each school. So, maybe it is alright that I do such a thing? But then again, this is the same institute I'm applying to.


texts: Is there any obligation for authors of a paper to provide the dataset used in their research, upon request?

texts:
I've recently read a curious article on machine learning where the author used a very interesting dataset, which would normally take thousands of man-hours to recreate. Now, assuming I would like to either:

Recreate the author's results, or
Improve upon them

Does the author have any obligation to provide me with said dataset?

N.B. In this particular situation the author has declined my request


texts: What do I do when my TA workload is more than expected?

texts:
Last year I was offered full funding for my PhD program to TA two courses a semester for the duration of my program (education psychology). Key words, Teaching Assistant. I expected this to mean I would be working with a professor each semester and teaching a recitation section twice a week (one for each course). This was all fine and great in the fall.

Then this semester, I was told I would be instructor of record for two courses (aka, I would be teaching these two courses entirely on my own and responsible for everything).

I feel extremely overwhelmed by this workload. My research has been suffering as I've had no time to work on anything outside of TAing and coursework. Next fall I was also told I would be instructor of record for two courses again (these two courses I have never taught).

I e-mailed the person in charge and asked if it would be possible to actually TA a course as the workload was a lot to manage and was hit with

  As TAs progress we expect them to take on full classes

From speaking with other TAs in the department, this is very common at the school. I was not aware off this before taking the TAship, as at the time I thought TA meant teaching assistant and not being expected to take on a whole class. Very few are only TAing (most of my colleagues are responsible for their own classes), so from my perspective it feels like an exploitation because they don't have enough professors.

Is this a common practice? Nowhere in my offer letter does it say instructor of record. It distinctly says TA. Any advice from anyone in a similar position?


texts: Who has the right to bestow a professor title? (government or university)

texts: In my country (Vietnam), the professor title is bestowed by a national council. In Korean or USA, it is bestowed by the university. What about other countries (e.g. Japan, France, Germany, Australia, England, Russia)? And if the title is bestow by the university, is it still recognized when the person who hold the title move to other university?


texts: Should I work an the advisor I "click with" or an advisor at a higher-ranked institution?

texts:
I am currently deciding where to do my next Postdoc. I have had many Interviews, and have two solid offers on the table.

The first offer is in a highly ranked private University (not Ivy League nor MIT), with a professor who seems real nice.

The second offer is from a somewhat lower ranked institution (State University) but I clicked way better with the professor.

Both opportunities seem really appealing for me but I'm wondering whether later hiring committees will look at which institution I worked rather to with whom I worked, both professors are rather young and are just starting shop, so is not a matter of a renowned professor either.

I'm probably just looking to see what you would do if this were your situation.


texts: Advisor forcing to publish paper in high profile journal

texts:
One of my graduate students, doing their PhD in another university, is doing quite well. Recently, he told me that he is having a tussle with his supervisor on communication of his work to a specific journal. His supervisor insists he submit his research to a very high profile journal, but my student does not believe that his research work would be accepted by this journal. Side note: His supervisor does not have any publications in this high profile journal.

Now my question is that, how to deal with such situation?


texts: PhD in theoretical physics: good or bad for engineering jobs?

texts:
I'm a student who is currently undertaking a Master of Physics (coursework & research) at the University of Western Australia. I have also previously completed two Bachelor's degrees: one in physics and one in electrical engineering (with honours). Next year, I am hoping to start a PhD in high-energy physics (HEP) somewhere in Australia, doing a highly theoretical topic (such as supersymmetry, string theory, etc.) with the long term goal of following an academic path in this area of research.

From my understanding though, it is VERY hard finding academic jobs relevant to this particular field. I've heard through the grapevine that you have more chance of becoming a professional athlete than becoming a professor in theoretical HEP which is honestly quite dejecting.

However, understanding physics beyond the standard model is undoubtedly my passion so I would really like to pursue a PhD in it to determine whether or not it can become more than just a hobby. I've heard of theoretical HEP PhD's going into finance, etc. when finding an academic position proved fruitless, but if I'm being honest, that doesn't sound all that appealing to me. If the academic path didn't work out, I have always had a super keen interest in areas such as signal processing, control theory and data analysis. Which leads me to my main question:

In case I can't find an academic position in theoretical HEP, do you think my EE degree and MPhys (both of which involved experimental research projects highly focused on signal processing and data analysis) would be sufficient credentials to land a job in engineering/signal processing/data analysis? Or perhaps if I'm lucky, even some area of industry research (if so, what areas)?

Further, do you think having a PhD in theoretical HEP, in addition to my other credentials, would be a benefit or a hindrance in securing these types of jobs?

Some potentially relevant information:

I have 3 months of work experience at an electrical engineering company

My EE research project involved analyzing audio signals using a DSP to achieve desired acoustic properties

My MPhys research project is about detecting gravitational waves which involves heavy signal processing and manipulating large sets of data (100GB+) using python

By the end of this year my MPhys research should produce at least 1 or 2 papers in the Physical Review Letters journal


texts: Is it OK to start a PhD with a side project still running from your master's?

texts:
I just finished my master's and I am about to start my PhD studies. As I am very used to do many independent projects during my bachelor's and master's, I am willing to continue a side project on a fairly related topic. Actually, this is project is on a topic completely related to my potential PhD project and even during my job interview my supervisor said it is a plus for me to have experience with these kind of projects.

I have been working on this project from second year of my master's and I worked only about 3-4 hours per week on that, so I guess I can manage to keep it as a side project. The thing is it still needs some work to lead to some acceptable results, but I'm sure it will pay off, if I can make it. Yet, learning about the methods used in the project are really helpful for my PhD project as well. The problem comes where most professors want concentration from their students and this might not be Ok with working with another researchers. Besides, my collaboration in the side project seems not to be very efficient since it is a side project for my collaborators as well.

The question is should I discuss this with my professor even if I want to dedicate some of my free time to that?  Should I risk my relationship with him in the early stages of my PhD studies (in case he is not Ok with that?)? Do I look like some trouble maker if I ask him about this? Do you think I should continue this project or just simply drop it and concentrate on my PhD project?


texts: Should a Database Update be sent for publication in same journal where previous edition was published?

texts:
My lab published a database (db) two years back in Nuclear Acids Research. Now looking at the increasing data and new features we are planning to update the db. but the db admin is leaving now and I have taken full charge over it.

Is it mandatory for us to send the update to same journal (so as to increase chance of acceptance)
What authorship may I expect? (1st or 2nd)


texts: Is translating my own work to use it in my PhD thesis plagiarism?

texts: Strictly speaking, is translating to english my own published work written in my mothertongue in a non-peer reviewed journal to put it as a part of my PhD thesis plagiarism ?


texts: Any pointers for reading articles digitally (on screen)?

texts:
First of all let me apologize for the title, as it is perhaps very vague. The issue is as follows; I have stopped printing my articles and instead starting reading them on screen via my library manager software (Papers2).

The problem is that I find it's MUCH harder to focus when I am reading on screen and thus takes much longer for me to read articles on a screen. It's almost like I get some sort of digital dyslexia... As possible reasons, I figure small things like new mail notifications, screen brightness, sitting/standing posture etc all weigh in somehow. But I suspect that the subliminal association of "how I normally read stuff on a screen" might have a larger effect. In other words since I am normally skimming through stuff when I am in front of the screen, my brain might try to take in information the same way when I am trying to read an article, which of course is a recipe for failure...

I wonder if it's just me or if this is a common phenomenon? Additionally I would appreciate if I could get some tips on how to tackle this problem. Obviously printing all papers is an option but it's neither elegant (creates a mess on/around my desk) nor is it environment-friendly.


texts:
I am an undergraduate student who is submitting my thesis for committee review. However, one of the committee member is unsatisfied and thinks that I attempted plagiarism from my advisor's paper. However, in my situation:

I am writing a result in extension to my advisor's paper;
I have proved new results in the almost exact same setup as the reference;
Since it is my first paper, a great deal of my explanation and logic is inherited from my advisor and his paper. Therefore, a lot of explanation and formula takes the same form (with possible slightly different definition of variables).
I pointed out directly that how this paper is related to previous work and added reference for directly quoted prop/defn.

This committee member will not support my submission of thesis unless I rewrite everything in my own words. However, I doubt if I can rewrite everything instead of simply rephrasing due to the nature of this work. I wonder what are your guys opinion and how I should deal with it?


texts: What is the failure rate of dental students in Japanese universities?

texts: If you pass a dental degree from a Japanese university, you automatically get a licence to practice. Therefore we have have a lot of dentists in Japan. The pertinent basic question of quality of dentists is how many fail university. What are some statistics on that?


texts: Should I keep my achievements to myself?

texts:
I'm a PhD student and I have published several good papers and achieved some awards and leadership position early in my career. I always celebrate my work but not boastfully since I poured in a lot of effort and hard work to create it.

But what really makes me glad about it is that many students in my University and young professionals become inspired and motivated by my perseverance and are encouraged to publish their own. Sometimes I even offer help and simple advice (e.g., how to deal with reviewers or prepare the manuscript for submission) to my fellows.

But recently, a group of my fellow students and my friends started to call me out, saying that I give them and others pressure to publish and I am inconsiderate about how they feel on their circumstances. They become resentful and there are days discredits my work. I did not mind it at first, but it is becoming frequent and I have become anxious and guilty about myself and my achievements.

So, I was wondering if ever I achieve something should I keep it on myself and only share to few people? Should I be felt guilty of achieving something on my work?


texts: How to supervise an undergraduate reading a paper for the first time?

texts:
I am helping supervise a senior student who is reading a scientific research paper for the first time. The goal is to understand a portion of this paper and write an essay presenting the background, and filling in the details.

The student has not brought anything concrete the past few meetings. I can see that they are struggling with the setup, and I am not sure how much do I let them struggle without spoonfeeding them the details. They also overestimate how much they really know and or understand, and clearly show that they feel bad about themselves when I point that out.

We are not pressed to produce something substantial. My own goal is for them to develop skills that are going to make their life easier later on. I have no experience how to manage this human part of the project.


texts: How do I approach a professor from another university?

texts: I am doing my undergrad in engineering at a small liberal arts school. Due to lack of research opportunities at my current school, I am looking at getting a research position at a state university nearby. My question is, how typical is it for professors to let students from other universities join their labs? I want to send an email to a professor that I am interested to do research with, but I am not sure how to approach him in my email.


texts: Thinking about grad school for computer science. How to talk to my old professors now?

texts:
I am considering grad school for CS now after graduating my undergrad in 2014. I have been working for the past 4 years and it has been fine, but I feel like I might need a more complete education in order to reach where I want to go in my career.

I understand very little about grad school applications. I know I need to take a GRE test which is fine, I can study for those. I need a statement of intent, I can write one. But then there's letters of recommendation. Apparently I want these from my old undergrad professors. I mean my grades were fine, but I never had a close relationship with any professors and even if I did, it's been awhile. How do I go about making that happen now?

Any advice for approaching this. Is there a good resource of information for someone in my position? Thank you.


texts: What to keep in a presentation intended towards invited collaboration?

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

Any suggestions or help will be highly appreciated.


texts: Using standards proposed in another paper

texts:
So my situation is as follows:

I am writing a paper related to DDoS attacks and part of my paper describes a case study. During my initial background research I looked into other similar work and ran into this paper in particular: Measuring Denial Of Service by J.Mirkovic. The paper proposes a new standard on how to more accurately measure DDoS.

Being inspired by the paper I would like to use the approach described in this paper but am struggling with how to implement it into my own paper without it looking like I am copying large parts of their work.

Can anyone give me an example of how this has been handled before? What would the proper way to deal with this be?


texts: Is it OK to review a paper which builds on my work?

texts:
Suppose I've written a paper which someone else (who I do not know) has built on. The new work is intimately related to mine; it would not have existed without my paper. I'm now asked to review the paper. Should I:

Accept because I am an expert on my own work, making me very qualified to review the paper; or
Decline because of conflict of interest - the paper cites my work so I could be biased towards accepting it since it boosts my citation metrics, plus I'm obviously flattered someone thinks my ideas are interesting enough to work on and I'd hate to discourage them with rejection?


texts: How can I justify doing a second Master's in Mathematics?

texts:
I'd like to apply for a PhD in Mathematics/Applied Mathematics in Europe. I have a BSc in Math and a taught 1-year MSc in Applied Math (without thesis) both from top US universities. I have taken advanced courses during my undergrad, I do have research experience, but not in Mathematics (it was in Data Science, mostly involving computational programming) and have no independent research experience (all of it was directed research).

Now I'm looking for ways to make myself a more competitive applicant, for which I asked for suggestions in this questions. But here, I wanted to ask specifically about doing a second Master's in Mathematics.

I have seen this question, but this doesn't apply to my case, since I may actually pursue a Master's in a more general field (Mathematics instead of Applied Math). I've also seen this one and this one, but these two don't apply to my case either, since I'm actually open to getting my second Master's from a "lower ranked" university (especially since I'd most probably need a scholarship, which would be hard to get from a university at a level of reputation comparable to that of my undergrad and MSc institutions).

Do you think a second Master's, most probably in pure Math (not Applied Math), and most definitely with a substantial thesis component, would help me to get into a competitive PhD program (in Math or Applied Math) in Europe? If yes, how do you think I can justify that in my SOP? My personal justification is the thesis, and the fact that most of my MSc courses were in Differential Equations and Numerics (and very applied stuff in general), and I definitely miss graduate-level knowledge in areas such as Algebra, Analysis (proof-based side of it), and Geometry. But would that be acceptable for the committee and would I have any chance for a scholarship with that justification?!

Edit: As for the specific countries in Europe I'm looking for, my top choices are Germany, Switzerland, UK, and France, but I'm open to other options if I find a good opportunity.


texts: Can research papers be mentioned as projects in a cv?

texts:
While working as a research associate at an institute, I contributed to a research project through it's development and experimentation phases. From my contributions on this project I was listed as a second author on some research papers.

How should I list these papers on my CV, independently or in relation to this research project?


texts: Is there a common standard for the title hierarchy of research positions in English?

texts:
Is there a common standard for the title hierarchy of research positions in the English language?  Excluding people who do research such as students or professors, but purely researchers.  Something in engineering such as, Junior Programmer and Senior Programmer.

I have heard of these, and in what I assume is a hierarchy:

Research assistant
Assistant researcher
Researcher
Senior researcher

Is there such thing as "Principal Researcher" which describes the job position as opposed to the PI on a project.  Would this title be given to more than one person in the same lab?

Purpose of the question:  In other languages, specifically in Asia, there are many words for hierarchy in both business and academia.  Google translate does not work, as it just recommends "senior" for many of the words, but in the native language they are much different, and are all above the standard "Researcher" position.  The research institute would like things like business cards and website to make sense to other countries and native English speakers.  As of now, the native language shows two different words, but in English they are the same "Senior Researcher", which makes it difficult to understand/explain what position the person is in.


texts: Are all papers published by ACM indexed in DBLP?

texts:
Will a paper accepted by a new conference, whose proceedings will be published by ACM and indexed in Ei Compendex and Scopus, also be indexed in DBLP?

In particular, will the proceedings of ICCBDC be indexed in DBLP?


texts: Should I include a paper published in a non English language in my CV?

texts: I have written a paper in my own language. Is it right to write it in my CV as a published paper?


texts: When should you stop asking your PhD advisor to do advisor like things?

texts: After you have finished a PhD when does it become inappropriate to ask your advisor for advice, read over a manuscript, or do any other "advisor things"? Presumably if every student an advisor ever had continued to act as if the former advisor was still his/her advisor, the professor wouldn't get anything else done. Basically how should one interact with the former advisor once the PhD is finished?


texts: Guidelines for changing terminology introduced by self?

texts:
The topics that have been in my research focus recently have problems with consistent naming and terminology through time and papers, so I might perceive it as a greater problem than I would normally, but still. I am a PhD in Computer Science, Image Analysis -- so while there's a lot of standard terminology, a lot of state-of-the-art terminology has not settled on unique names yet.
Until now, at least all the papers made by the same author/research group/under the same adviser (same last author) I've read have been consistent in their terminology (at least the one describing their main contribution). But, the latest article from an interesting author has changed his own terminology on purpose (he says so explicitly himself).
What would be a good reason for terminology change within the scope of one's own work? It's not merging work with somebody -- in fact, the article I'm talking about is the first standalone work from that author after publishing with an adviser during PhD. From my point of view, it just makes it less findable: the key words changed, which might in turn cause less people to read it and in the end cite it. How can this be beneficial?

EDIT I am actually interested in a general set of guidelines for when changing one's own terminology might be beneficial, but let me add the details of the case that inspired the question. It's the terminology to describe a data structure constructed for an image:

In the first 4-5 publications (during the PhD, before publishing the thesis), the terminology was new, the name was suggestive and conforming to the other terminology from the same filed, but still different than other data structures with similar purpose and of similar format.

The latest publication (1 author only) takes over some terminology from a related work, and introduces ambiguity. That terminology was first used to regard components of a similar, but still different data structure. No attempt was made to prove that those similar structures were equivalent (and I think they're not -- still didn't get around to proving that). A new term was created, derived from the terms for components.
Now to me a stronger suggestion is that similar but different data structure used as a basis for terminology, rather than what it was actually meant to describe.


texts: Do I need to disclose my academic misconduct on this grad school application?

texts:
I have one incident of academic misconduct on my record from my sophomore year (I was guilty), and I received a grade sanction and disciplinary probation. This does not appear on my transcript and I am no longer on disciplinary probation.
I am now applying for PhD programs and some applications ask about conduct. On one application, I'm not sure whether I have to disclose my academic misconduct because of the wording of the question.
It asks if I have ever been "disciplined for academic performance" and gives examples like "academic probation, dismissal, suspension, disqualification, etc." For the same question, it also says: "Academic Infraction: Indicate whether you have ever been disciplined or placed on academic probation while attending an academic institution."
At least at my university, academic probation is something you receive for poor grades (like having a dangerously low GPA), whereas disciplinary probation is something you receive for misconduct (anything from underage drinking to academic misconduct). So I'm thinking I can answer "no" to this question, since I was disciplined for misconduct not academic performance, and it was disciplinary probation, not academic probation. It seems that "academic infraction" would be discipline for poor grades. But that "etc." makes me nervous and I wanted others' opinions.
I don't want to answer "yes" and put myself at a disadvantage when I don't have to, but I also don't want to mistakenly answer "no" and then be caught and have my application disqualified (or worse, get accepted, have someone find out about my academic misconduct halfway through my PhD, and be dismissed). I want to make sure I'm being truthful, but only as truthful as I have to be. For obvious reasons, I don't want to disclose this unless directly asked/required. Do you think I should answer "yes" or "no" to this question?
Edit: To be clear, I am not intending to deceive by being so particular about the word choice. I have disclosed my misconduct on other applications where it was clear that my answer should be "yes". I think it's understandable that I want to be absolutely certain that I am required to disclose it before I do. I am trying to be honest and accurate.


texts: Do two-column format journals publish one column for special cases?

texts:
Sometimes a paper consists of lots of math equations which are too long so that they will look terrible in a two-column format. I was wondering:

  Is is possible or even reasonable to ask the editor of a two-column journal to publish the whole paper in one column format due to containing lots of long equations?


texts: How feasible would it be to transition from a Master in Finance to a phd in Pure Maths?

texts:
I know this sounds weird. I'm getting a Master in Business (MSc, not MBA) with emphasis in Finance (in my country you can't officially get a master in finance, logistics or marketing, they are all called Master of Business but still different based on what you want to research for the thesis).

Thing is, I really became interested in research and academia recently and have been thinking about changing my plans completely (I was working in business management before starting full-time grad school and wanted to go back to the industry, but not anymore, I found out that I like academic research a lot).

I have two college majors, one in Business and one in IT. Do you think it is possible to start a DSc program in Europe in pure maths with this background? Would I have to go back to 0 and get another, more closely related, college degree or maybe masters? I just don't want to get my hopes high and invest time and effort pursuing something unrealistic. I'll finish my masters when I'm 26 next year, if I had to go back to college for a degree in maths I'd be 30 by the end of it. Is that too old for a career as researcher?


texts: Is it a good idea to omit part of a multiple surname for publications?

texts:
I'm about to publish my first article and from what I've been reading, everyone suggests that you should be consistent with the name you choose. My first name is "Sobhan" and my last name is "Omranian Khorasani". In my country, I always introduce myself as "Sobhan Omranian" and never mention the other part and I want to keep it that way in my academic career. The problem is that if I mention my full name, then I would be probably known as "S.O. Khorasani" which is unwanted.

My question would be, would I face any issues regarding my ID (e.g., university admission or applying for a job), if I omit the last part of my family name and then for the sake of uniqueness, add a middle name? (Something like "S.A. Omranian")

If yes, can I improvise and and add a hyphen between my multiple surnames? (Omranian-Khorasani) or are there better ways to achieve what I want.


texts: Citing information from table in a review paper

texts: in a review paper, there is a topic which I need so much, the Author reviews information from sources A, B, C and D. Then he summarizes it in a table. my question is can I cite information from the table and refer to the author as the source of information or should I go to the original sources and cite from ?? Note: the table has no references.


texts: Can someone with only a master's degree promoted to a permanent full-time faculty at a two-year college?

texts:
Long story short, I am a master's graduate it statistics, and I recently applied to enrol in a local two-year college program to land a job in my rural hometown (I prefer to have a career in my rural town than in a bigger city, due to personal health and other circumstances). The admission secretary at the local two-year college saw my educational credentials and forwarded my transcripts to the dean of the two-year college's university transfer program. The dean called me on my cell and wanted to interview me for a part-time instructor position. I passed the interview and I will be start teaching introductory university math/stat courses at the two-year college in near future.
As a person who is just starting out in the two-year college teaching career, I am wondering whether the fact that I only have a master's degree in statistics and not Ph.D. would later prevent me from becoming a permanent full-time faculty at this two-year college. The dean of the university transfer program has a Ph.D. in medicine, and I see some other faculty members who have Ph.D. in their teaching disciplines. Primarily, this college offers two-year programs in trades, social work, and nursing, and this college does not offer any bachelor's degree program (although they do offer a transfer program to 4-year university).
Do two-year rural colleges like this promote instructors with a master's degree to a permanent full-time faculty if they teach well? or does such a promotion typically only restricted to instructors with Ph.D.? I am located in Canada.
Thank you,


texts: Can we submit part of our assignment after deadline?

texts:
I have a deadline for handing in my assignments. One of them is tricky and I need to think more. I coded it but I am not 100 % sure that is right. Can I think more about it after deadline of submitting the assignment are passed I give it to my professor?

What will be his reaction?
Will he give me the mark of that question?

PS: I submitted my assignments I also did that part, now I want to think more about that part. You know, that part was difficult.


texts: Is it okay to join a self-funded PhD Program with possibility/intention of leaving in future for funded position

texts:
I have done my masters a couple of years ago and now I want to do my PhD. I have been trying to get funded positions but no success yet. Without wasting my time, I am thinking about joining PhD program on my own funding. I know it will be hard for me, but I can do parttime work etc. Moreover, I am thinking to keep applying for funded positions or may be the current professor has funding later on.

I am not sure if it would be okay to leave a phd position. I read here that it would be unethical to leave a funded PhD and they have valid reasons that they fund you and invest you. However, in my case, I am totally self-funded.

So my Questions are:

Would it be okay/ethical to leave phd given that I am self funded.
Will I get any PhD position if I tell this to professor/admission committe?
Should I tell them upfront about the possibility of me leaving before?
will professors understand my justifiable reason to switch to phd to a better and funded position? May be I need a recommendation letter from them in future and I don't really want to create any bad impression of myself.

P.S.

Reasons to register for self-funded phd position:

I don't want to waste my time any further; it has already been an year and a half.
I shall get a research experience and will be in academia network that will help me to get a funded position.


texts: Lack of letter of recommendation due to long-term research experience

texts: I only have 2 research experiences, one of which lasted more than a year and is starting to look very promising for high impact factor publication (I'll be the second author though, and it's not likely to be published by the time of application). The other is with an highly esteemed professor from the U.S. who's quite happy with my 2-month research internship in his lab. Both are willing to put in some good words for me, but that's all I got, so I need a "did well in class" letter of recommendation which will probably be worth nothing. Will this hurt a lot to my graduate application? (I'm an international student)


texts: How to decide between sending paper to a specialized journal or to a journal with broader audience?

texts:
I work in mathematical physics. Typically, papers in my field are either published either in general math journals (Annals of Math, Transactions of AMS, Proceedings of AMS) or in specialized math physics journals (Communications in Math Physics, Reviews in Mathematical Physics, Annales Henri Poincaré, etc.) Personally, I have had papers published in both types of journals. Yet I don't have a good sense whether a particular preprint should go to a general journal or a specialized journal, so I usually just pick at random.

What are the factors one thinks about when making a decision between submitting to a specialized journal and a general journal of similar quality?


texts: How to incorporate a fellowship into a CV

texts:
I am updating my CV for graduate school applications and I have an awards/honors section and I am unsure how to incorporate a fellowship I received. With the way I have things formatted, every entry looks something like:

  Name of award               Date when I received award and institution name if relevant

  Description of the award

In every other instance, the description doesn't refer back to me in any way but I am having a hard time doing this with this fellowship. The best that I have been able to come up with is along the lines of

  Summer Research Fellowship               Summer 2016, Blah Blah Blah University

  I was one of four graduate students from Blah Blah Blah University's Mathematics Department to receive a fellowship during the Summer of 2016. I worked under Dr. Something, researching stuff that contributed towards my thesis.

Does this seem alright? Also, the research I did this summer is a part of my thesis, however my thesis is not complete yet and will not be until the spring. The way its written now makes it seem like my thesis is written (at least to me), so is there a better way to state this and make it seem more ongoing?


texts:
I took a test today morning and I saw that the person sitting next to me used her phone repeatedly, I believe it was to check the power point slides for answers. The fact that this student also asked me for the answer to a question before I left also raises my suspicious slightly.

I don't know this person. I decided not to report it this morning because I don't feel quite alright accusing anyone, at least not in person. I am tempted to send an anonymous email and explain what happened, although I don't think it will make any difference. I'm not happy at all with the incident, because the test wasn't exactly trivial and some of us might fail, while other people could pass simply copying the answers from their phone.

What should I do?


texts: How to react to unfair reviewer comments?

texts:
I'm in a situation where my paper is accepted conditionally, thus I need to revise it in some way as stated by the reviewers. While two reviews were encouraging and mostly constructive, the third review is way off from the other reviewers in their judgement and included sources that I "forgot" to cite and should mention.

Yet, there is a problem since the sources listed by the reviewer were published just ONE day AFTER the hand-in deadline of the paper. I was not able to anyhow know about them. I feel in a dilemma right now between acting "independent" as a researcher but also having to follow the comments made by the reviewer to have a positive outcome.

Am I obliged to follow their comments?
Should I react in the "review log" that I need to upload, that the "status quo" on which research performed is not based upon these sources (although they might be relevant), therefore I will ignore the sources named by the reviewer? I feel that I should at least mention it from a moral standpoint.
How should I behave for a positive outcome? I feel the review was written with negative intentions in mind.


texts: How can I make a presentation accessible but low on text?

texts:
I am preparing a presentation for a conference. After reading many style guides for designing presentations and talking to other people, I have decided that the best way to make slides for a presentation is to have only a picture or formula on each slide. Then I will just talk about the topic or picture on that slide.

However, now I am wondering how to make it accessible to people who are deaf and hard of hearing. I suppose they would need something to read, but I don't want to cover my slides with text that will distract the other members of the audience. Is there a way to accomplish both? One idea I was thinking of was having a printout of a transcript, or to display a link to a transcript. However, I don't want to make a big deal out of it, and maybe passing around transcripts would take a long time.


texts: I am looking for a 2nd post doc position but i dont have any publications in my first post doc. Is that lack of publications really matters to get another post doc? or shall I stop applying and look for a position in industry? My field is materials chemistry.


texts: How does publication month and number of citations to a paper correlate?

texts:
I am assuming that there is a correlation between a paper's publication month and the number of citations it attracts, based on the following premises (that may or may not be wrong, that's also open for discussion):

When people do literature research they tend to focus more on papers that have already attracted many citations, rather than uncited papers.
As a corollary of 1., people will be more willing to read and cite an uncited paper if it has been recently published (compared to an uncited older paper), assuming that it may have attracted few (or no) citations because there has not been enough time to do so since publication.
When looking at how recently a paper has been published -and therefore establishing its "age"-, people only look at the year, rather than the month, of publication.

As a consequence of 1., 2. and 3., a paper that has been published towards the end of the year becomes "old" (and less likely to attract citations, c.f. 2.) faster than a paper that has been published towards the beginning of the year. For instance, consider a paper published in December 2014, which becomes "one year old" (according to 3.) already in January 2015, after one month of existence. A paper published in January 2014 will stay "newborn" until January 2015, therefore it enjoys 11 extra months of "freshness" compared to the other paper, and will therefore be more affective at attracting citations.

My questions are: is my argumentation above flawed (and how)? And, if not, is there any data supporting a correlation between publication month and number of citations attracted by a paper?

Note that an effective data analysis would likely need to exclude very highly cited papers that might introduce a bias.


texts: Doing research toward a Ph.D. degree versus doing research for commercial purposes

texts:
What is the difference between doing research toward a Ph.D. degree and doing research for developing a new product or technology for commercial purposes?
Can those two purposes of research proceed together hand in hand from the beginning of the research?


texts: Is it common to cite conference papers in a PhD?

texts:
I tried searching for a similar question but most I read dealt with published papers and not a PhD, so apologies if this is a duplicate. I will remove this question if it is.

I've read a number of PhD dissertations and I haven't come across one which cites a conference paper, only journals (and the occasional website). I guess also it depends on the university if they accept such citations but I was just wondering if this is commonplace?


texts: Is publishing on arXiv early a good idea?

texts:
I have a lot of unfinished manuscripts in the field of communications engineering and computer science on my computer, and I'm wondering whether it is a good idea to publish them on arXiv before the articles are finished and submitted to a journal or a conference.

One benefit of publishing on arXiv is that it helps to establish that I'm the earliest inventor of something. But I suspect this is a double-edged sword. What happens if I post something to arXiv, somebody else builds on the work and adds more material and publishes it in a journal (perhaps citing my pre-print) before I have a chance of publishing my article in a journal? Does a typical journal accept papers that were novel when posted to arXiv but are not novel anymore? Let's assume that I have an intention of publishing the papers in a journal within a couple of years at most, not within a decade or two.

Another benefit of publishing in arXiv I can see is that many publishers allow one to update previously published material on arXiv with the accepted author manuscript immediately, but do not allow uploading the accepted author manuscript to arXiv if not published prior to submission to a journal within an embargo period. So, by uploading the material to arXiv early I could effectively remove the embargo period.

One potential drawback of pre-publication in arXiv is that theoretically some journals or conferences could consider the material non-novel which could eliminate the chances of publishing in such a journal or a conference. Are there any noteworthy journals that have a policy of not permitting material that has a preprint on arXiv?

I can see the following options:

Submit preprints to arXiv as early as possible, i.e. when the work is so complete that it might be interesting to others; when accepted, update with the accepted author manuscript.
Submit preprints to arXiv a couple of weeks or a month before submitting the paper to a journal or a conference; when accepted, update with the accepted author manuscript. This would eliminate the risk of somebody building a better work on top of my work and quickly publishing it.
Submit preprint to arXiv after publication in a journal. This might in some cases mean I have to wait for an embargo period of a year or so.

Which of these options is the best?


texts: What is a good source which compares grading systems in different countries? Which also gives the equivalent of a grade in a country X to that of a country Y?


texts: What is a good process for developing a new course from scratch?

texts:
If all goes according to plan,
I will be teaching a new course in the next academic year.
Although I do have some experience teaching an existing course
which was previously developed by my colleagues,
this will be my first time preparing and teaching a new course from scratch.

I have done some thinking about my new course.
When we propose a new course,
the university where I work requires us to submit a document
which specifies the name of the course, a brief course description,
the course's learning objectives,
the structure of the course assessment,
topics or key words,
and recommended/suggested readings.

Right now I'm feeling a bit stuck.
How should I go about creating a new course from scratch?
I need to create a lot of material, including:

lecture slides and/or lecture notes
assignments and projects
quizzes and exams

Clearly, it would be a bad idea to wait until
the start of the semester when I am teaching
to create all of this material.
How much should of this material can and should I prepare beforehand?


texts: In the mathematical sciences, how much advisor contribution is expected on joint papers?

texts:
I'm a PhD student in the math sciences.  I've written a few papers, each officially coauthored with my advisor, although essentially all of the research and writing was my own.  The story is the same for my advisors' other students; they regularly coauthor papers with my advisor on which all the work was theirs.

We are all unsure how we should feel about this.  On one hand, we regularly hear stories from other students about their advisor chipping in on projects, or encouraging them to write solo if unable, and we would all appreciate this sort of freedom, guidance, and help.  On the other hand, we all recognize that we are paid out of our advisor's grants, and we don't want to appear ungrateful or unprofessional.

I guess my question is: are we being taken advantage of, or is this a fairly standard feature of advisor/advisee relationships that we should just accept?

We've all tried to casually broach the topic of when coauthorship is expected or when solo authorship is okay, but we've mostly been met by blank stares and awkward subject changes.


texts:
Say I got a Master's degree in Machine Learning and had 3 years experience as a machine learning engineer and 2 years experience as a software engineer. Would it be possible to do freelance/consulting work during the evening after I've already put my most productive hours into research earlier in the morning and afternoon?

How likely is it that my time would be better spent wrangling data/reading papers or that my program wouldn't allow external work such as this?

How about doing this work over the summer while also doing an internship? I'd like to make a little more than the stipend a year to put in the bank, and I want to work in industry research after my phd.


texts: Should I use fancy paper for non-resume application materials?

texts:
I'm applying to an assistant professor position at a private institution. I bought fancy resume paper on which to print my CV/resume. There are other components of the application package that I need to include:

Official application (contact info, criminal background statements, employment records, etc.)
Teaching statement
Cover letter

Should all of these be printed on fancy paper? My feeling is that all except the official application should be, but at the same time that might make the relatively flimsy paper stand out.

The applications materials are being mailed directly to the chair of the department, and it is a very small department. There are only one or two other faculty.


texts: If a PhD position I applied for and didn't hear back from is removed and relisted, does this mean I was rejected?

texts:
I just wanted to know your opinion about an issue. I have contacted the supervisor of a research project for doctoral student position and I was encouraged to apply. By the way my experience really fits the position.

I applied through the online application platform and after that I didn't receive any mail regarding my status. Then the post for this research position was removed last week and I just saw that the position post is online again.
I think that they are not interested in me, because if they did I think they would have contacted me and not put the post again to search for applicants.
What do you think? Am I rejected?


texts: Blacklisted and cannot do the work I am interested in before, What I should do?

texts:
As you may know, I have been working on a specific point of research during one year of my PhD. I am extremely passionate about that topic, because I found problems that can be solved and improvements for the system. For this reason, they did not like me. In particular, one collaborator always underestimated me and later persuaded my ex-PI that my work is doubtful.

Now, I am a research assistant in another distant country. The current PI knows my situation and takes advantage of me. They forced me to work on a topic way off from my background. Moreover, I was shocked to see that they don't have any experience and that there are hostile vibes between senior researchers, which bazzled me, besides the very low payment I receive.

Now, I am trying to apply for other projects, more similar to what I have been working on before. The dilemma is the collaborator is mainly involved in different projects by different research institutes. I have to confess they are the most dominant collaborator, and it is a very small circle. I am literally expelled and a pariah. Even if I tried to find funding for the project, I am afraid they will not approve of my work. I feel in a dead end. I tried to apply for other research topics too, but I failed. I am really passionate and see the potential behind continuing in this research line, it feels like I'm fighting against the Gods of this research line. I am totally hopeless. What I can do in that case?


texts: Can i put the submitted paper in the arxiv?

texts:
I'm not so familiar about the regulations regarding arxiv and conference papers.

Recently i submitted a conference paper and it's under review, but i couldn't put all the supplementary materials (proofs and extra analysis, pseudo-code etc) in the submitted paper due to the limited space!

So legally can i put the complete version in arxive, hoping if the reviewer search for the related works he might notice the complete version by chance. Then he can benefit from the extra supplementary materials provided there to better understand the submitted version?

Also arxiv is like putting the paper there, or you also need to wait for the acceptance from arxiv?


texts: How often are authors not allowed to send their paper by email upon request?

texts:
Emailing the authors of a paper is a common way to obtain access to the paper when it is behind paywalls. However, publishing contracts may forbid  authors to send their paper by email.

Is there any research/study/survey that tried to quantify how often authors are not allowed to send their paper by email upon request? I am especially interested in papers written in English.

The RoMEO Journals database contains thousands of journals, labeled with their archiving policy (preprint/postprint/publisher's version):

Except of the database:

That gives an approximate lower bound on how often authors are allowed to send their paper by email upon request, since if an author can upload a preprint/postprint/publisher's version to a repository, they are most likely allowed to send it to someone by email upon request.

Looking at the publishers might give a decent approximation but journals from the same publisher may have different policies, e.g. http://www.nature.com/news/gates-foundation-research-can-t-be-published-in-top-journals-1.21299:

  A spokesperson for Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature, said that most Springer Nature journals do comply with the Gates Foundation policies. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of the journal Nature.) But a “small number”, including Nature and some Nature-branded research titles, do not.

Related: Am I allowed to share a final copy of my published paper privately?


texts: Reverse engineering the acceptance rate?

texts:
Assume that we have an educational instance X which requires a certain prerequisites (mininum TOEFL, GRE score, etc.). In total 100 applications have been received and 50 students have failed to score above the minimum threshold while the remaining 50 have scored above it. The acceptance rate is given to be 10%.

Is it calculated basing on all applications or only the applications that have passed some certain criteria?

In this case,

if taking into account all applications => 10 students accepted
if taking into account only those who meet criteria => 5 students accepted


texts: Scientific authorship: including a former lab member who collected (unused) pilot data?

texts:
I am working on a manuscript of a project that I am first author on, and am wondering whether it is proper to include person X. X has been gone from the lab for 3 years, and none of her data is in the manuscript or really informed the conclusions. However, my experimental design (for one figure out of 8) is very similar to her original plan, although the analysis is different. It's not clear if the original idea was X's, or my PIs (it was a pretty natural extension from a paper we read in journal club). Any advice about whether X should be a coauthor? Does anyone have any examples of this happening, and what was the outcome from each perspective?

Update: thank you for all the input! To clarify:
1. My PI was actually the one who asked ME for my opinion in this situation - I think she was on the fence. But you're right that it is her job to make the final call, she was there when the original pilot experiments were performed.

The experimental tools were not new, they are common/published already. The details of the design (I.e. vary x in increments of 5) were the former student's
Looks like we are planning (at least at the conference stage, could always change when paper is closer to submission) towards not including X


texts: Citing in a research paper when the citation is based on an published interview

texts: What is the correct way to quote a person in an academic research paper when that person has said something in an interview? Many professors are considered as experts on their own fields, and hence are often interview by news papers on recent events that are related to their research. If I want to quote this professor in my research paper for what he has said in his comments in the published interview, and want to do so on multiple ocations, what is the correct way to quote after the first occasion, i.e. am I right in writing Professor X (2016), when in fact the source where Professor X has given his comment is written by Reporter Y, or is it enough to simply give the link to the original source in the references section?


texts:
Endowed professorship is very common, but the financial endowment normally comes from external sources. Is it also common that a professor/research endow his/her position to establish a research group in the target university?

It should be an excellent approach for mid-level professors/researchers who can establish a research group in a top university (where it is normally hard to get that position) and get research fund from external sources such as industry and funding agencies.

This is of mutual benefit for both the university and professor, but I have not heard about such positions. Is it uncommon or just through private contracts?

UPDATE: Apparently, I confused endowed and named chair with research professor. I asked the question about research professor here. However, I still do not see a contradiction between research professor and self-endowed professor. Does a endowed chair must be necessary result of a huge donation to university? or a foundation can merely fund a professor position. If it is the latter case, one should be able to fund his own endowed position too.


texts: How to choose a generalist repository and what risks should I be aware of?

texts:
I am trying to choose between these different generalist repositories:

Zenodo
Open Science Framework
Figshare (or Dyrad??)
Harvard dataverse
General cloud services
...

Figshare has a nice comparison of them (
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.751546.v1), but I was looking for some guidelines to help me to choose the best one that I might have ignored. For instance, many European Projects require to use Zenodo so maybe is better to get acquainted with it, however, Open Science Framework seems to offer a better way to organize the projects but it seems there is no doi to the files uploaded. Is there any guideline or anything I should be aware of before choosing to put my dataset in a generalist repository?
Content I would like to share
I would like to use a generalist repository because I would like to share all my outputs. This might consist of code, dataset but also figures, drawings and some times I share also some piece of hardware design (e.g. step files for 3D printing the adapters, sensor net, some PCB design).


texts: Express interest to join mentor's group with whom a fellowship application got rejected

texts:
I applied for a prestigious US national laboratory post-doctoral fellowship with a potential mentor. Unfortunately, I got rejected. However, I am very much interested in working in this mentor's group. Note that I am not sure if he is aware of my rejection. I need advice on the following two queries:

Should I send another email expressing my interest in joining this mentor's group (i.e., on funding acquired by him)? If so, what would be the most polite way to ask him?
Or should I wait for the next fellowship call and apply then with the same mentor?


texts: I am taking a Bachelors in Information Technology, but I have a massive fear of public speaking

texts:
So I am attending a polytechnic(Tech school), getting a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, I am wondering if I am expected to do presentations/speeches and if so, am I able to somehow not do them but still earn my degree.

I am diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder(On my medical records it says I have Extreme Anxiety) so in my bias opinion this is beyond the " Fear " aspect and is mentally scarring. While attending middle school/High School I failed and outright skipped 99% of the presentations I had to do so I sort of digged myself a grave in terms of experience and preparing for this.

Side note, I remember in middle school I told my teacher about my distress towards having to do a history presentation, and although she made me do it(And I failed), she let me practice infront of her and another student instead of the whole class, which helped a little.


texts: What to do if I don't understand the related work?

texts:
I am writing a master's thesis in Computer Science. It's the first document I write, so not much experience.

My supervisor told me to include some previous/related work on the topic I am writing about. In short, it is about computing influence in social networks. I have found about 10 papers which I think are the most relevant ones.

The problem is that, while the topic and goal are the same as mine, the math/algorithms they apply are often way different than mine, and advanced enough that it would take a lot of work to truly understand them. So in other words, I want to somehow argue why my model makes sense and not others, but at the same time my work is not directly based on others.

The question is, can I write about it even though I don't understand it? How well am I supposed to know the previous work I am writing about? Is it enough to have some intuition?

Sorry if this is obvious, but my university do not teach us how to write (I guess one point of having a Master's thesis is to learn these things).


texts: Outdated letters of recommendation for graduate fellowships

texts:
I received my bachelors in 2014 and started a Ph.D. program in 2017 after taking some time off to work in an unrelated field. I am currently applying to a graduate fellowship (similar in vein to NSF/NDSEG, etc.), and am not sure how to appropriately choose my references given that most of them are 3-4 years old at this point.

I have one from my research supervisor in undergrad whom I published a paper with, so this one is a no-brainer. The professor I'm working with to write my proposal is also writing me a letter. As for the third one, I have a couple of options:

A professor at my current institution who I worked on my NSF GRFP proposal with last semester. I did well in his class, and his research is related to my interests, but I have no research experience with him (or anyone at my current institution since first years do not typically do research)
Research advisors from short-term (5 months) projects I did in 2014 and 2015, respectively. They can obviously speak to my research ability, but are quite dated. I used these letters in my grad school apps and presumably, they helped get me into a top 5 program in my field

If my other research references were more recent, I wouldn't hesitate to use them. But the professor I'm working with on my proposal suggested that I should try to get a second letter from my current institution if possible. Does it look bad for me as a first-year graduate student applicant to only have one reference from my current institution? And would it be a poor decision to use letters from people whom I last worked with 4 years ago?


texts: What attitude should a speaker have to going over time?

texts:
From John Baez's Advice for a Young Scientist:

  Your talks should be clear, concise, fun, exciting, and never ever run over time. For each extra minute your talk runs over, 10% more of the audience will decide you are a jerk and start fantasizing about you falling down a trap door.

After 11 minutes, 110% of your audience will start hating you.

That makes perfect sense, because that includes the people waiting for the room to open up for the next talk to begin.

But some people at my college like to take the opposite view. One lecturer never releases his class until he's run at least five minutes overtime. In the mandatory presentation class, the teacher maintained that going five minutes over the twenty minute talk period time was ok, but when one student went one minute undertime, she insisted that he repeat the assignment.

My question is: how should the speaker treat overtime?


texts: Ethics of using company data from internship for academic project

texts:
I am a graduate student and one of my research projects requires me to crawl a website using their public API.  This is going alright but the amount of data we can collect is limited, since it is a public API.

As it happens, I will be doing an internship at the company that owns that website, and will soon have access to an unlimited supply of their data.  Is it okay if I use that data for my academic research project, or will they expect me to only use their data for projects relating to my internship?


texts: Religious supervisor wants to thank god in the acknowledgements

texts:
My PhD supervisor and I are co-authoring a paper. We have an excellent relation, and he is both a well-regarded scientist in its field and a deeply religious person. In our co-authored paper, he wants to include, for the first time in his career, a perfunctory thanks to God in the acknowledgements. Nevertheless, our field has an ongoing and widely publicized scuffle with intelligent design and I am afraid that such statement might hinder the paper's credibility or insult some readers.

Although not religious, I am a strong defendant of people's (and my supervisor's) freedom of belief as long as their doctrines aren't violent or discriminatory, which his aren't. It is, for me, a matter of tolerance. He also is very respectful of my position and has made clear that he didn't wanted to sneak the sentence without my consent. Furthermore, he is not trying to push any religious agenda, it is simply something that has to do with his personal beliefs.

The paper is sound from a scientific stance, no single word in its body hints anyhow to God to fill gaps in the argument and he isn't planning to include a grandiloquent dedication, but I am still afraid that squeamish readers would take matters personally and discard the paper without a second reading, affect my career in the long the long term or, even worse, we might hit the news ("see these people, they are thanking god in their paper").

Am I risking something big if I say "yes", go ahead? Should I refuse to let him put the word God in the paper? Is there any precedent of a paper in which God was thanked by the authors?

EDIT: This questions has been flagged as duplicate. I would like to clarify why it's different:

The authorship of a thesis, including its acknowledgements, belongs to the student and is not shared with the supervisor. It is (explicitly or implicitly) understood that everything that goes into a thesis was written by the student and approved by the supervisor, but, in regards with the acknowledgements, it's the students choice who to thank and the supervisor has no voice or vote on that matter. Have you ever seen thesis acknowledgements written jointly by supervisor and student? Can a supervisor ask a student to thank his wife (or his God)? Probably not. On the contrary, authorship and responsibility is fully shared in papers.
Theses are more of a formality and can be stored for decades without much attention. Papers, on the other side, are meant to reach the large amounts of readers and it is very likely that someone, sooner or later, will spot the dedication.
I wasn't clear enough about a key point in my question and will expand here. I wouldn't mind saying "yes" to my supervisor or following @Ritz recommendation if this was a paper in, lets say, accounting, business administration or even engineering, but my field is in full confrontation with intelligent design and some people might read the acknowledgements as a nod to the movement. (I see my supervisor as a good example of NOMA. Some people can do excellent science and be religious. So far, in the scientific realm, we are doing pretty well, but the reader is not going to care about that.)


texts: Can a university restrict publication of students' work due to plagiarism fears?

texts:
My question is inspired by this question. Say a student wants to publish on GitHub some code that they've written as assignments for a programming class. The student may be motivated by a desire to show off their programming skills and advance their career this way, or by a wish to provide a useful resource on the internet that others might useful (say, people who are teaching themselves to program, or programmers who may be able to use the code to save themselves some work in connection with a project they're working on), or some combination.

The student publishes the code, but is then contacted by their department who ask him to take down the code, citing concerns that the code might be used to commit plagiarism by students taking the same class in following years.

First question: is it appropriate and ethical for the department to make such a request of the student? Are they not putting their own selfish interests ahead of the student's own interests and the interests of the community of people who might benefit from having the student's code be made available online?

Second question: Is the student obliged to comply with such a request, or can they simply say they have a right to put their work online in a publicly hosted website if they so desire and be entitled not to suffer any retaliation from the department for this refusal?

Note that even if the student is not obliged to comply with the request, it may still arguably be inappropriate of the department to make it, since the department has authority over the student and under such circumstances it is not clear that the student can make a decision to refuse that is free of duress.


texts: How to begin a sentence with a citation that has multiple authors in APA?

texts:
I want to begin a sentence with a citation that has multiple authors (more than 7).

Would it be appropriate to begin the sentence as: "According to an article from the Encyclopædia Britannica written by Smith et. al., .....  ?


texts: Are racist/xenophobic opinions sufficient to revoke tenure?

texts:
Think of a tenured (in the US!) professor who asserts something like "Jews are nepotistic" or "Shoot all Muslims and let Allah sort them out" (the latter statement is a real example although better described as xenophobic rather than racist). Assuming that such a professor grades fairly and shows no behaviour in line with those assertions (e.g. attacking Jews or Muslims on the street), are these statements grounds enough for revoking tenure? And does it make a difference if he expresses these opinions

in scholarly literature
in class
on his own social media account
in a magazine
on the social media account of someone else, perhaps even a /one of his own students.

My understanding is that such opinions are covered by the free speech laws in the US and only in cases where these statements can be reasonably construed as targeted harassment (and happen repeatedly) tenure can be revoked.

I ask because I had an argument with someone that got out of hand because I think that opinions that can be reasonably construed as racist are no grounds for termination.


texts: Studying for a master's in Computer Science after a bachelor's in Physics

texts:
I am currently in my penultimate (third) year of a master's degree in Physics (in the UK). The degree is set up such that you have four years of a taught degree and graduate with a master's without ever actually receiving a bachelor's. However, it is still possible for me to switch to a bachelor's degree in Physics.

I have been considering whether it would be advantageous to switch to a one year master's degree in Computer Science instead of Physics since I have developed a substantial interest in programming and software development over the last two and a half years of my Physics degree. I have taken programming modules as part of the degree and I completed a software development internship last year that was related to geographical information services in the space industry. I also try to get involved in software projects in my free time when I can but I don't have particularly extensive experience.

After getting involved with some student space organisations and undertaking research into careers, my goal is to work in a software related position within the information sector of the space industry - something I have developed a strong interest in. Jobs like these require software skills but do also specify that a bachelor's or master's degree in Physics would be valid for entry.

So, I have the choice of continuing with a master's degree in Physics or switching to a master's degree in Computer Science. I find the latter more interesting and along with the broader principles of Computer Science I would learn from it (i.e. not just programming), it may give me an advantage when it comes to applying for the jobs I am interested in. However, the primary drawbacks to switching would be adapting to a new university and course structure when I may be able to self-teach the key skills that I would learn from a Computer Science master's.

It is possible to undertake a year-long software development project as part of a Physics master's, although this would of course be accompanied by Physics-centred taught modules.

Any advice about the benefits of such a switch to Computer Science would be greatly appreciated.