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68860 | What to do when professor agrees to send a recommendation letter but does not send it and does not answer emails?
I asked my professor to give me recommendation letter and he agreed to that.
However, he has not sent it for my application yet. He is not even answering my emails since 3 months.(I am sure he is alive!)
I paid the application fee of the destination university and they always send me emails asking about completing my application.
what's going on?
What should I do ?
When is the most recent email that you sent him?
I remember this frustration from when I started in Academia. Many professors receive far too many emails daily, or have so many different things they need to remember that something like this easily slips. Depending on your relationship with your professor, I would just ask them in person as soon as possible - they agreed in first place, so chances are they just need a friendly reminder (and possibly aren't aware of your deadline).
I am sending email since January, the last one was last week (5 in total)
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108930 | How to find PhD students interested in 6-months paid exchange visits to work on a supervised project?
I am a junior research fellow with a bit of a luxury problem. I am in a field with many good, open problems. I have a grant which could easily support salary for a couple of exchange PhD students for say, six months, to solve some of those under my supervision - but how do I find those?
I have tried some of the obvious channels, asking network, including old supervisor. Asking around at conferences. Most senior people I talk to agree it would be a good idea - but I can't seem to get any good people to bite.
I am asking advise from people who have been in a similar situation - also students who have accepted such offers, what made you do it? What made you hesitate? Is the prospects of 6 months of relocation off-putting? Are you afraid what your supervisor might think? And for more senior people, whose students I would potentially snatch up: Would you recommend a good student to do something like this? Would you be annoyed that I "borrowed" your good student, just after you taught them all the difficult parts?
Did you try posting on student-based forum? Reddit? etc.
Is Reddit considered a student based forum?
Reddit has sub-Reddits for students in different fields as well as scholars/researchers. There also are other student-based forums i.e. (http://www.eng-tips.com/) etc.
What’s an “exchange PhD student”? Do you mean visiting researchers? If so, is it customary for the host to pay them? As far as I’m aware they’d be paid from their usual money pot during that time. Or are you referring to covering the cost of lab consumables/… for that time?
Six months is too much time to put life on hold. PhD candidates usually do short term scientific missions of a couple of weeks to a month.
@TheGuy at my university at least, there is a sizeable “reddit crowd” that posts a lot, but most students don’t go on reddit (at least regularly).
What field is this? In pure math, I wouldn't mind in principle sending a good student somewhere for half a year to do another project.
Have you tried mailing lists?
Are you currently at a highly well-regarded institution? The sort of work you are proposing seems to be most valuable as a networking opportunity for students, to let them meet people they might do a post doc with (or in the future on the job search), get acquainted with people who can write additional recommendation letters, etc. As a more junior person, you probably can't offer these things directly more than people at the students' home institutions, but there may be peripheral contacts that you can use. Otherwise it sounds like a tough sell.
I'm curious to know what field you are working in. I am from India and know that for a fact that people here(read, students) whether phd or not would jump at a chance of being able to work with a professor abroad, especially when it's funded.
@TheDoctor Not where I am. Most projects people work on here are planned for 1-3 years. The "small side projects" usually end up using way more than just weeks as well. But six months time is a lot of time to pay double rent/ leave your young family/ put your main large projects on hold for.
@skymningen In my field we are able to collaborate at a distance. The short term scientific missions have the purpose of establishing and nurturing collaborations. The projects continue for more time than the couple of weeks.
@TheDoctor I collaborate over a distance, to me the whole "borrowing" would be the difference, and would mean to move to the other location (I did that for two weeks to finish off a distance based collaboration project.) Otherwise it is just a collaboration and happens every day. In that case I don't understand the question. I read "Is 6 months of relocation off-putting.". Without a fairly high compensation, compared to an actual Post-Doc contract or a longer term PhD position, yes, it is.
At my university we have a programme webpage in Spanish that does exactly what you are talking about. I've had friends apply (they where thrilled, and say it was a great experience) and I, myself am planning on applying soon. If you are like us, from a country with not that many opportunities, that is not necessarily well funded, that has only 1 expert on our field IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY! then the paid exchange visits are awesome! Please do them!
This is a bit of an expansion on aeismail's answer, which already covers what I expect to be the central issue - a 6-month internship with a "junior research fellow" is just not particularly attractive to many PhD students.
Put yourself into their shoes. Your project, even if leading to a nice article, probably does not contribute strongly to their own dissertations. Most PhD students in the Western world are fully funded, so the fact that you also have funding does not help them (they would basically be temporarily replacing one funding for another). Your reputation is probably not yet strong enough to be a good experience just for name recognition and letter purposes alone. This is not to say that there are no students out there that would be interested in that, but I would guess the majority is not and finding the ones that are is not trivial.
However, I am sure you have options:
The most obvious one is to take the funding for "a couple of students for 6 months" and arrange it in a way to fully fund one PhD student for their entire study. If necessary, try to co-fund if you have to from some other source.
Conversely, you can try to fund undergraduate research from your own community or university rather than convincing PhD students from abroad to come to you for a few months.
Try to work with your research collaborators to arrange some sort of exchange with them. If you have good connections to some other seniors in your field, set a collaboration up with some of them that includes a 6-month visit of one of their students at your site in the context of a larger project. This has the added benefit that a longer collaboration is surely more useful for the other senior, you, and the student than a one-shot visit and article.
Offer (paid) internships for students from developing countries. For such students, a paid visit to a stronger, more well-known university can be incentive enough. You will need some local contacts, though, to bring you in touch with interested students and help with screening of applications.
And for more senior people, whose students I would potentially snatch up: Would you recommend a good student to do something like this? Would you be annoyed that I "borrowed" your good student, just after you taught them all the difficult parts?
I would recommend it to the student only if we already worked together, or if I otherwise had a really strong opinion of you, or you had access to something that the student really needed for their own project (say, good industrial data). I would not be interested in you "borrowing" a student if it was not clear to me what would come out of it for the student (no, "publish an article" is by itself not good enough - the student would do the same back home).
"A couple of students" probably means about two years' funding—not enough to fully support a student.
@aeismail No, but how much off it is depends on location. In the UK you only need one more year, in central Europe maybe one or two years.
Accepted answer for the refreshing, brutal honesty: "- a 6-month internship with a "junior research fellow" is just not particularly attractive (...) Your project, even if leading to a nice article, probably does not contribute strongly to their own dissertations.(...) Your reputation is probably not yet strong enough to be a good experience just for name recognition and letter purposes alone. "
This is exactly what I need to keep in mind when I approach people, so thank you for that.
"Most PhD students in the Western world are fully funded". That's probably true for the rich countries. In Latin America (basically half of the "Western world") we are not so lucky :(
Your post has hit on the problem: you want some PhD students to come work with you for six months. This is a bit too long for a summer internship-like posting, but not really long enough to justify the work required for what would amount to a relocation. It's like a long temp assignment.
Perhaps you should be looking at trying to support some students who are just finished with their PhD's—or have just handed in their theses and are figuring out what to do next—at nearby universities. Or trying to arrange the funding to support a postdoc for a year.
Thank you for your comment - I had not considered that the duration itself might be sub-optimal. In my mind, six months would be adequate to take a small, well-posed problem and make it into a research article for the benefit of both of us.
Unfortunately my grant provider will not allow me to hire a post doc with this funding, otherwise that would also be a good idea.
@nabla just want to say that it might be even more difficult to get post doc for a 6-month post, since post docs might have families, more personal responsibilities. it's even more difficult to uproot for a very temporary position.
Which is exactly why I would not consider that :)
The people just finishing or trying to finish a Ph.D. will have more than enough on their hands (writing a thesis, preparing a defense, writing applications, juggling fellowship deadlines,...).
@skymningen Thanks for the catch. I meant “finished with” not “finishing up.”
That still includes them being worn out, covered in the need to apply for a comparatively safe position and thus not able to put as much effort into the project as it needs. To me, this sounds like a plan for a "cheap, short-term Post-doc that you can't count as a post-doc in your CV". Why would they do that?
@skymningen Maybe they need the money?
I've been on both ends of the table.
As a Phd Student what would attract me:
assistance with accommodation (not just $$, but that would be very helpful, but have that sorted out would be a plus, because housing is often a headache inducing problem, at least certainly in cities and around big universities, and depending on when the 6-month post would start), so having some help on this front would be very attractive
clearly define in your advert (if this is the case) that the student would be given a self-contained project (i.e. solving A specific problem) under your supervision, and that by the end of the post, there's likely a paper that can come out of it.
along the same line, lists any specific techniques that your lab specializes and whether the student will learn/use these techniques.
As a postdoc hiring students:
am not a faculty member so can't speak to that, but have hired students as a postdoc. It helps to have your collaborators put in a good word for you, for example, if you have colleagues in the same field (but not doing the same thing), they might be interested in collaboration in the form of having students exchange and spending the 6-month working on that collab. project, obviously things can go wrong, from what i heard, but that would also depend on the discipline and relationship between the labs etc. But it's one place where you may find students whose expertise lies generally within what you might need, and will likely come with their supervisor's endorsement.
Try getting a Danish PhD student. At least as the University I am currently working at in Denmark, an extended stay is obligatory. But then again, the students home university would probably pay for the stay, so your first world problem of too much funding might persist ;)
Other than that, I would go through recent publications citing your work. There ought to be some PhD students who know your name already, and work in similar areas. Those are the ones I see most likely to join you, and those I would invite.
It's probably better if you contact their supervisor first, as you don't want to steal away a PhD student for half a year, without the supervisor agreeing on it. But if he is willing, he can pass on the offer to the student.
Go talk to people who manage "Marie Curie Sklodowska Actions" - research programmes ran by the European Union. Those are usually indusutrial doctorates, and they work as follows: "most of the 3 years in the industrial partner of the program + several months of stay in any institution of student's choice". It's very flexible stuff.
Those several months can easily be 6, if it doesn't derail the industrial research. Such stay (called a "secondment" in the bureaucratic lingo) is usually paid by student's home institution, and can be in any place in the world.
Obviously funding is an issue. Can you pay relo/salary/housing what? It sounds like you have some but not clear how much.
Why do they have to be Ph.D. students? If anything, this sort of thing is better for a post-doc or junior researcher similar to yourself (done with his main project, able to get traction on a problem and publish in half year). I have seen these come from Japan or France to the US at a major research university for 6 month stints. They enjoyed it and got good stuff done. Not sure exactly how it worked with the money but these were people with secure positions at home, but more junior.
Some appeal of the place would be helpful. Anyone doing this is going to want to get something out of the experience more than just "chance to work on your problem for 6 months". Warm climates have appeal to cold weather types (in winter). California is appealing at all times of the year. The US is intriguing to Europeans and Asians. (The converse also, but maybe to a lesser extent.) Being in/near a big city is interesting. Etc.
P.s. Not a canned answer, but hopefully this helps you think through the problem.
P.s.s. It would also be more helpful if you told us the field, area of problems. There may be generalizable insights to other fields, but there also may be specific things about what you are doing that make it harder/easier to attract people or to have them be effective for short duration.
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116621 | Where should you mention the name of potential mentor in research statement when applying for a post doc?
I am going to apply for a postdoc position. I exchanged emails with one of the professors as potential mentor and he told me to mention his name in my research statement. In which part of the research statement his name must be written? Is it enough to write it in the first paragraph?
Please ask only question per question. Ask the other as a separate one.
Your research statement should probably mention the new potential mentor's name in the context in which his research interests align with yours. So give a bit more than just the statement that he has agreed to mentor you. In other words, say why it would be a good plan for you to work with him.
As to having your previous advisor give you advice on your research statement, there is no ethical concern at all. It is natural for you to continue to seek professional advice from your doctoral advisor. Your relationship doesn't break when you finish your degree. It changes a bit, as you become his colleague in the field, rather than his student.
I don't think it matters so much where you mention your potential advisor, as long as you do it very, very prominently. From what I understand the fact that you already have an advisor in mind is a key fact in the application procedure, and you should never assume that the evaluation committee reads your letter with care. That is, format / write it in a way that even an evaluator who only glances over your letter will understand this fact.
With that in mind, I suggest to bring up your advisor (at least) in your cover letter, in the introduction, and maybe in the conclusions of your research statement. You don't need to be heavy-handed about this - it is ok if you add something along the lines of "I am very much looking forward to work with Prof. X on Y" in a few places, although at least once in your statement you probably want to have a small dedicated paragraph where you discuss that you have been encouraged by Prof. X to apply to work with them.
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140200 | Impact factors of preprint repositories
I'm wondering if the growing catalogue of preprint repositories have known 'impact factors' similar to those of popular print journals. If so, can anyone highlight them?
Even if there are services computing them, the impact factor for a preprint repository would not be useful.
Impact factors represent how many citations an article gets on average within a certain period of time. As such, they are supposed to be a rough metric for the selectiveness of a journal. If a journal is highly selective, then only highly impactful articles should (in theory) make it in, driving the impact factor of the journal up.
Now a preprint repository is explicitly designed to not be selective - Every paper gets in (possibly under some conditions that are hardly comparable to peer-review). As such, the impact factor of such a repository would not measure anything of interest.
Thanks Jeromy. But how would you really tell if your article is making any impact? I mean, how would you grade the preprint outlets in terms of their effectiveness?
The whole point of the preprint repositories is to provide an outlet for new results that bypasses the peer review system without offering an alternative to it. Since preprints are not peer-reviewed, they should not be cited (otherwise the whole peer review system would be broken, and we might as well cite Wikipedia). As they are not cited, they cannot contribute to an impact factor.
The most a preprint can receive in terms of "impact" is exposure via social media, and most preprint archives offer such metrics (bioarxiv for instance). This can be nice to look at, but ultimately it really means very little about the traditional impact of the paper, the same way that a newspaper writing about some research does not increase its credibility or scientific importance. It can also give a false sense of achievement.
From my experience the media hype around preprints is not related to the repository but rather the authors sharing it via twitter and it being picked up by sufficiently connected users. Again, this doesn't say anything about the impact of the paper but rather how "viral" it is.
Why are you publishing a preprint? What would be your motivation to choose one repository over another? I can't see any reason not to go with whatever repository is respected in your field. If you are publishing a preprint to avoid scooping, or out of sheer altruism, it shouldn't matter so long as the information is publicly available. If you want publicity, it also doesn't matter (as explained above).
I completely disagree with "Since preprints are not peer-reviewed, they should not be cited". It's important for people citing articles to know whether they are peer-reviewed or not and to take that into account when citing, but that doesn't mean preprints shouldn't be cited, and it's normal to do so.
Ok, so let's start citing preprints, and citing papers that cite preprints, and soon the whole peer review system collapses. This isn't my opinion, this is just policy of most journals. You can mention a preprint, but it shouldn't be used as supporting evidence. A similar issue is met by citations of retracted papers, only that it is harder to solve in retrospect. The problem is that there is no tiered system in references that can separate ones that have been retracted or preprints from peer-reviewed papers, so it all gets added to the same stats.
"This isn't my opinion, this is just policy of most journals" - can you support this statement somehow? I am not aware of any journal that bans citing of preprints. Peer review isn't quite as magical as you seem to think it is - lots of bad stuff makes it through peer review, and lots of good stuff hasn't been peer reviewed yet. As an author, if I am citing a preprint I am going to do my own "peer review" in deciding that the work is worth citing.
Since preprints are not peer-reviewed, they should not be cited --- This view is probably a bit field dependent, as it is fairly common in mathematics to include preprints in references (now, 20 years ago, 40 years ago, and earlier). See, for example, this google scholar search for "Borel set" (a rather common mathematical term in many areas of mathematics) and "preprint". (continued)
In earlier years (and often even now) one would usually see things like "unpublished manuscript", "in press", "submitted", "to appear", etc. rather than the actual word "preprint", so the search I gave using "preprint" shows only the tip of the iceberg, especially for papers more than 20 or 30 years ago (which are still often very relevant in mathematics, by the way).
I've no idea how things are in mathematics, but as far as I know it's many worlds apart from life sciences, and the number of preprint citations I have seen even in recently published papers is probably less than one per paper. Before you shoot me for coming from a different field, consider what I wrote above, that all our metrics (at least in my field) are based on citations. Poor research is already a problem, adding preprints as viable "supporting evidence" would be very bad. Of course, mentioning a preprint is totally fine, but if that becomes common there should be a separate ref list.
probably less than one per paper --- It's almost certainly less than one per paper in mathematics, at least in the final published versions. (It's likely higher in preprint versions, since some of the latest findings being cited might not have been published, but will be by the time the paper itself is published.) I got the impression that you were suggesting it was almost nonexistent (in your field), but it might actually be higher in life sciences than in mathematics!
Citing preprints is common in some scientific fields (e.g. computer science, some subfields of physics, math), so doing so will arguably not break the peer-review system by itself. In some cases, the ArXiv preprint version of physics papers is cited more than the version published in a journal (where there is one)
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49911 | How to determine if an institution is a research or teaching university in the United States?
I came across a faculty vacancy announcement at a US university where it is mentioned that the candidate will be expected to perform teaching, research and guidance duties in area(s) of expertise. In addition, the candidate will share responsibility for committee and department assignments including administrative, supervisory, and other functions. From this statement, can it be determined that it is a teaching university where I will be primarily involved into teaching and administrative duties? There is no point of contact mentioned in the announcement whom I could contact with in order to know the details.
The faculty webpage will give a contact address you can use for asking questions specific to this job. (But the general question is a good one.)
It's always wisest to do these evaluations based on public information such as university web pages, catalogs, etc. You should start by looking at what academic degrees are offered in your discipline (bachelor's only, MS, or PhD) and look up the research activity of the faculty to see what they've been up to.
Just ask them???
Come now...is there any such thing as a "teaching university" anymore?
Sure there us. Ask anyone teaching at a CalState or Michigan State University or similar with a 3:3:3 or 4:3 teaching loads just how much research they are getting done. It's not zero but it can be close.
@RoboKaren That would be a teaching position, rather than a teaching university. I bet they have someone with a lower teaching load.
The OP notes that he means a university where "I will be primarily involved into teaching and administrative duties." Most of the positions at mid- and low- tier state colleges fit within that category. There may be one or two people with course releases or buyouts, but they would be the exceptions rather than the standard.
I teach at a research university and we have pretty much the same language in our job ads.
How to tell if a school is a research university:
See if your university is listed as one of the original 59 Research I Universities defined by the Carnegie Institute (see the 1994 list here) or 108 Research University/Very High (RUVH) in the current classification.
a. Related to this - does the school offer doctorates in your field? Is it well known for producing high caliber scholars? Does it seem to be getting national grants? These are all part of the criteria for the R1 or RU/VH designation.
See if the course catalogue is online and look at how many courses a semester each professor teaches. Research universities will be 2:2, 1:1, 2:1, or 1:1:2 or even lower (1:0, 0:1:1, etc.).
Look at the CV of faculty and see if they are publishing actively in highest tier journals
Ask a faculty member who teaches there what the teaching:research ratio expectation is.
Beggars can't be choosers. Unless you have other options then you take the position if offered and then when outside opportunities beckon, you switch.
Discussion: While it's easy to figure out the overall research vs. teaching balance and emphasis at a Harvard University versus Sweet Briar College (a small liberal arts college); there is a considerable grey middle ground. At upper-tier SLACs and state universities, there may be more of an equal 50:50 research:teaching emphasis, or even an unexpected imbalance that an outsider would not be able to easily perceive. Usually, you can ascertain this over drinks at the post job-talk dinner.
I think your point (3) is the ultimate measure. If people are publishing, it's a research university. If they are not, it's not. Also, be particularly careful before applying to positions where current holders used to publish a lot before coming there, but are not anymore. Basically, if I have the impression that a school has a tendency of attracting good people who then fall off the research train when they join, that's a big flashing stop sign for me.
Also, re: your point (5) - at least here in Europe, a good postdoc is much better for your research career than a teaching professorship. As postdoc, you'll get less reputation but a lot of time for brushing up your CV, and you can apply for funds and get your quasi-own students. In a teaching position, most people don't have students nor time to actually write grants or conduct research of the quality that would later on lead them to a research professorship.
When I hear teaching university, I think of a four-year liberal arts college such as Colgate, where excellence in teaching is prioritized over "publish or perish." When I hear research university, I think of an institution where you don't get tenure without a record of significant original research, such as Cornell University. To get a quick clue, go to the institution's home page and look for "Academics" in the menu. (If that doesn't yield a blurb, try searching for "About [name of institution]" in the site's search box.) Here are two examples.
With a 9:1 student-faculty ratio, our students are pursuing their intellectual passions in close contact with field-leading experts. (Colgate)
vs.
You'll interact closely with world-class faculty and a diverse student body, each a collaborator in learning, in research, and in service. (Cornell)
Note there are schools that try to hit a balance, such as Ithaca College, where faculty are strongly encouraged to involve their undergraduate students in authentic research experiences. Here's a clue:
Ithaca College strives to become the standard of excellence for residential comprehensive colleges, fostering intellect, creativity, and character in an active, student-centered learning community. (vision statement)
An additional clue is whether the institution offers a wide gamut of graduate degrees. If so, it's probably a research institution. You can check this aspect quickly at the College Board and put the name of the institution in the search box.
University of Phoenix offers a lot of graduate degrees, but is hardly a research university...
And there are some graduate degrees that are not research oriented (eg. MBA)
Use the institution's reported balance of instructional v. research staff in the IPEDS database. Head to http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/ and choose Look Up An Institution (or others if you want). Choose the institution you want, then click Human Resources. Probably the best metric is simply All Staff - Full Time Research versus All Staff - Full Time Instructional Staff.
Harvard: 1897 to 2136, highly research
Minnesota: 1329 to 3330, highly research
Valparaiso: 0 to 262, highly teaching
Wisconsin - Milwaukee: 101 to 1113, mostly teaching
There are a number of other useful metrics, including grant money from the federal government. For instance, NIH gave Wisconsin-Madison $257,660,041 in 2014. See http://www.report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm. Check out the number of graduate research fellowships awarded as well: https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=loadAwardeeList. These are applicable if the NIH, NSF, GRFP, or other government programs offer awards in the fields you care about.
That sounds like a normal faculty position at a research-focused institution. I can imagine at a teaching-focused institution, research might not be mentioned. Even at research institutions, there is still a lot of teaching that needs to be done. 2-3 courses a year would be common for new junior faculty with maybe some relief in the the first year plus a startup package that you could use to buy out time.
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43468 | Is it acceptable to submit manuscript to new journal if the first journal provides no response, is unreachable, and might be fake?
I have submitted a paper to a journal. Having got no reply (after waiting for more than the period of acceptance) I tried to connect the editor via telephone numbers given on website. It said that the telephone number did not exist. So, I tried to open the website link, it did not open initially and later it connected me to a different site with the same name where it sold hardware parts. Hence I thought it was a fake website and applied to another journal and was accepted. Now it asks me to pay fee to publish paper. Is there any problem if I publish the paper in the second journal?
Did you tell the story about the first journal to the second journal? Also, who asks you to pay fee to publish paper? Please clarify.
Just a rough intuition: That is a fake journal and do not pay to publish, for it would do you no good...
"Never pay to publish" is good advice only in some fields, I am afraid.
"Now it asks me to pay fee to publish paper". Would you please clarify that who is that "it"? Who asks you to pay fee to publish paper? The first journal or the second journal?
Based on what you describe, I would see it as exceedingly likely that the journal is indeed fake. I would formally retract the paper at the journal, and afterwards discontinue all dealings with them. They will likely not answer, but I would just assume that the entire submission is dead as soon as you have told them that you wish to retract. The will likely not publish the paper anyway, if you are not paying them a fee (which you will of course not do).
After you have retracted the submission to the first journal, there are no ethical issues with submitting the paper again, this time making sure that the journal is in fact "real". Some advise you to tell the second journal about the "history" of the paper, but I am honestly not convinced that this is ethically or practically necessary. As long as the paper is not under consideration elsewhere (and it is not, as you have retracted the original submission), the new journal does not need to know where you have tried before to get the same material published. For instance, one also does not typically indicate if a paper was rejected before at a different venue.
May I ask: how would the OP do to contact the first journal to express the will that he wants to formally retract the paper?
@scaaahu Well, I was assuming that you still have something (a contact mail address, a contact form, anything). If you have indeed no way of reaching the old journal, I would just assume that the entire thing stopped operating by now.
I know what you mean. I am still dubious. I am not a lawyer. I don't know how can you legally claim that you have formally retracted the paper?
@scaaahu I don't think that this is a legal question. Legally, as long as you have not signed the copyright slip, the journal cannot go forward and publish the paper. It is more a question of publishing ethics re: double submission, and in this sense I think you should be ok as long as you made due effort to retract from the first journal.
Okay, I am satisfied with your explanation about legal issue. I am still unclear about how would the OP claim that he has made due effort to retract the paper. For example, what if the first journal did not disappear, just that they changed the name/phone number and web site? How would the OP claim that he has done everything possible to track them down? Sorry that I may sound very pushy(I don't know the right word to describe it). In my opinion, it's a tough issue. Or, am I thinking too much?
@scaaahu You're thinking about it too much.
@scaaahu, they got in contact to demand payment, all he need do is respond to that contact that he is withdrawing the paper. That's it. It would have been better if he had done so before he submitted elsewhere, but this seems like a bit of a special circumstance. The first journal basically disappeared. You're not required to wait forever while and allow a journal to hold your article hostage.
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45034 | What to do when completing a full-time masters by research, and a part-time job interferes with grades and progress?
I'm currently in first year of MS by Research in computer science. The first year includes coursework and second year is research thesis.
I've been working part time 20 hours a week in a software company. I have 4 subjects. So far I have managed to complete assignments but haven't really studied well.
Now as the semester is close to end, I have projects, assignments and exams. I'm struggling to decide if I should continue working here. Sometimes I think it's doable but it's a little risky. I may not get proper marks to progress to next semester. What would you do in such situation?
The question really is not "Is it possible?" but "How much slower will progress be?" Taking a full-time courseload while working is not the path most would take.
Well it's tough ! Really Tough ! I almost went crazy half way through. But I reminded myself, key is to never quit. However, I'm not getting time to study.
It is most certainly possible to get a research degree while working part-time --- or even full-time. I know a number of people who have done it. As you are finding, it is quite rigorous, however. In many cases, it may be better to take the coursework part time, so that you have enough space to really absorb the material, rather than just trying to hit passing marks.
Yeah, probably I should study part time and work part time. All 4 subjects I'm studying are really heavy but itneresting. I wish I had more time to go in depth.
Another option might be to focus on your studies full time, without working. Do you have savings that would permit this? Can you get a teaching assistantship? What about a student loan? Perhaps your employer would give you a leave of absence.
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75933 | Why might only some papers from a conference be included in Google Scholar?
Why some publications are not included in Google Scholar, while some are, for the same conference?
For example, there are a number of papers on Black Hat:
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Arnaboldi-Abusing-XSLT-For-Practical-Attacks-wp.pdf
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Evenchick-Breaking-Access-Controls-With-BLEKey-wp.pdf
But when you search for them, like "Abusing XSLT for Practical Attacks" on Google Scholar, there is no result.
They are papers in 2015, it has been one year since then.
Also, they meet the Google Scholar's inclusion requirement:
https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html
However, for some other papers in the same conference (Black Hat USA 2015), they are included in Google Scholar.
So what are the real standards for publications to be included and searchable in Google Scholar?
Google Scholar is pretty hit and miss - it's using a crawler not manually curated. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if material is just not picked up for various reasons.
Your title and general question are appropriate (i.e., why are some publications included, while some are not), but if you are only really interested in why Black Hat conference papers are not well indexed by Google Scholar, then you should ask that as a specific question. Otherwise, the Google Scholar inclusion criteria information (which you link), answers your general question adequately. The Black Hat case is a minor exception. If, however, Black Hat is what you really care about, then please make that the topic of your question, not just "an example".
Doing a little bit of poking around, I found most articles on BlackHat 2015 not listed in Google Scholar, and all of the articles that I did find listed were cited by other papers.
It seems to me then likely that this is among the "grey area" sites that Google Scholar is not indexing (BlackHat's status as an academic conference is murky), and thus that any material that you find is being added to the Google Scholar index through other routes.
What the "other routes" are? If the paper has a citation, would it be crawled?
@WindChaser Google infers publication records from citations, even if it can't find the original document.
If so, how Google Scholar binds its found PDF file to the publication entry (which previously has no PDF available)?
@WindChaser I'm not a Google engineer, so I don't know for certain, but my guess is that Google finds all of the PDFs with the rest of its web-crawling, and it's not to hard to link it over when Scholar discovers that it's a scientific publication.
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20041 | I have the option to retain copyright on my published paper. Should I?
My coauthors and I have just had a paper accepted by a journal. The journal in question is published by a nonprofit professional society and offers two options in their copyright agreement.
We transfer copyright to the publisher, as is traditional. The journal has exclusive publication rights but we retain the rights to post the paper on our web pages or arXiv (post peer-review), distribute to colleagues, etc. We also have the right to release our paper to the public domain after 28 years.
We retain the copyright for ourselves, but grant exclusive publication rights to the publisher. We still have the rights to post and distribute the paper privately as before.
I am trying to determine the pros and cons of each option. From a practical standpoint there doesn't seem to be much difference: in each case, both we authors and the journal have the rights to do the things that we respectively care about.
In principle, it would seem better for us to retain the copyright rather than transfer it, just on the grounds that it is better to keep as many rights as possible. I could only think of one possible drawback: suppose that a number of years from now, some person X wants to republish our paper, or use it in some other way that requires the permission of the copyright holder. If we transfer it, X can work it out directly with the journal, who should remain easy to contact. If we don't, X has to track down all three of us authors (or our heirs) to get permission, and then we have to decide what to do about it.
I'm not asking for legal advice, and I know you're not a lawyer, etc, etc. But I would be interested to hear about any experiences with this, or other issues I haven't thought of.
The publisher is the American Mathematical Society and their copyright agreement form can be found at http://www.ams.org/authors/ctp.pdf
I wonder (not for the first time) what it means to retain the copyright on something but grant "exclusive publication rights" to someone else.
@PeteL.Clark IIRC only the copyright holder or their designated agent is allowed to file a DMCA takedown request or copyright infringement lawsuit, at least without having it thrown out of court immediately. So basically, the responsibility of enforcing copyright falls to the copyright holder.
If I remember correctly, the drawback you mentioned, in case someone wants to republish your work, is the reason the Association for Symbolic Logic decided (long ago, when I was on its executive committee) to ask authors to transfer the copyright for papers published in the association's journals. I believe the copyright transfer agreement included clauses allowing authors to post their papers anywhere they want and, generally, top make them accessible any way they want.
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14209 | My transcripts are not an accurate indication of my academic ability
Can the absence of an official academic adviser in the department at which I finished my undergraduate studies be used in my graduate application to justify some deficiencies in my undergraduate grades transcripts?
Without knowing the whole story, generally no, the admission committee looks for reasons to enroll you, not the reasons for your bad grades. If you have bad grades due to the lack of an adviser, then you better have other evidence to show your true academic ability. E.g. exceptional TOEFL and GRE, or a steady improvement in grades from freshmen through senior year would be ideal.
@Penguin_Knight - you really should be submitting this as an answer. It responds to the question perfectly.
Maybe you can use percentiles for your grades. That is a more fair system. What kind of deficiencies are we talking about?
@Penguin_Knight: Good TOEFL and GRE scores are unlikely to make up for a sufficiently bad transcript.
Do most PhD applicants have official academic advisors? I would find that very surprising.
@Trylks Deficiencies such as taking some advanced courses before their unofficial prerequisites (the devised plan doesn't mention the dependency), or taking a course with a lecturer who arranges exam dates that conflicts with other courses from other departments (happens a lot)
The lack of an official advisor is most unlikely to be of any benefit as an excuse for not doing well in classwork. Presumably you have a common core of classes in your major, and you'd better have a good explanation for any significant deficits in those courses. The lack of an advisor might have led to poor course choices in electives, but you could have ended up taking the same courses even if you had had an advisor. Moreover, your advisor didn't take your classes for you; he didn't do your homework or take your tests or complete your projects for you. Ultimately, you are responsible for your performance as a student.
I also can't help but think that giving this as an explanation is probably worse than not addressing it at all. One of the key things programs expect students to develop is independence, the ability to learn things on their own and to take responsibility for their own education. Even if it is unfair, I think this makes "someone else did a bad job of telling me what to do" a uniquely bad excuse.
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163847 | What if the value cannot be accurate to one decimal place?
I have read a lot of papers, and the tables they draw are accurate to one decimal place. But my data looks like this: 0.003% 12.736% 19.255 and so on. If it is accurate to one decimal place, 0.003% is zero. There are three more data in my table: 5.265*10^8 6.840∗10^4 2.213∗10^3 and their sum is 5.266∗10^8, but if I am accurate to one decimal place, it becomes 5.26∗10^8 6.84∗10^4 2.21∗10^3, their sum is 5.26∗10^8. The sum equals the first addend.
How precise should I be?
Use significant figures not decimal places.
Also, read up on the general topic of uncertainty analysis. Stopping at sig figures is sometimes sufficient, often not.
This question is answered thoroughly in books on uncertainty analysis as well as in textbooks for first year courses in chemistry or physics.. It belongs in Engineering, Chemistry, or Physics stacks. If you move it to one of those sites, include information on the specific part of the background reading that you have done in the reference books where you are not able to master the concepts in practice.
Thinking about data in terms of decimal places is misleading. You should really be thinking about data in terms of the precision with which you know the values, also sometimes referred to as significant figures.
How precisely do you actually know those values? It is 12.736% because you actually have enough data to say that it is accurate to one part in 100,000, or is it because of something like Excel defaulting to three decimal places?
You need to figure out the amount of error in your measurements, and once you know that, then the answer to your questions will be clear.
+1 Setting up a measurement instrument such that you can distinguish between 12.736% and 12.737% is in most cases an extreme investement in time, efort and resources. So if you have such an extremely accurate measurement, then you know about it. In other words, if this isn't screamed at you every time you approach the data, then you can be pretty certain that it is not that accurate, and 12.736% in reality just means 13%.
@MaartenBuis "You can be pretty certain" is not a scientific principle. You need to know the specifics of the source of the data. Accuracy varies widely. I have examples of data with 7 sig digits. I have a case where the magnitude has uncertainty. I have a case where the sign of the value is uncertain.
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164073 | Acknowledgements section of the paper
Conference papers are now double-blind. So when was the acknowledgment part written? If I write an acknowledgment when submitting the paper, isn't it easy to leak information? Is the acknowledgment written after the paper is accepted?
Thanks
Definitely. Otherwise, there is nothing to thank, especially if reviewers are nasty.
Thank you for your comment, but what do you mean? Is the acknowledgment written after acceptance?
If I write an acknowledgment when submitting the paper, isn't it easy to leak information?
Definitely
Is the acknowledgment written after the paper is accepted? Definitely
The author name is also added after acceptance, isn’t that the exact same issue?
Manuscripts should be submitted for double-blind review without acknowledgments, which are added after acceptance in the camera-ready manuscript.
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162551 | Would this be considered a valid reason to apply for deferral for graduate school admission?
I have been recently admitted to a top 5 graduate school in the US and I am considering deferring my admission by one year.
My reason is that I am currently pursuing a master's degree and under normal circumstances, one can complete it in 3 semesters, however, I am in a position to graduate in two semesters. Still, I would like to work on a research project with my supervisor (who is very famous in his field) in the third semester starting this fall to hopefully publish something useful.
Do you think that this is a valid reason to ask for a deferral?
Why not start your PhD program as soon as possible and do research and publish there? No good reason to waste time.
Have you already started doing research with the famous professor? Or would you be starting from scratch during the third semester?
@cag51 I will start working on my master thesis in the coming spring semester, but converting it into a publication will surely take more than a semester
Suggestion: contact your PhD supervisor and ask them whether writing up your MSc thesis results for publication would fit into your other obligations at the start of your PhD program
In the global scheme of things, nobody really cares whether you work with Prof A at university X or with Prof B at university Y. but you can't do both at the same time. Life is about making choices, even if you would prefer not to.
You can ask the program what their policies on deferrals are, but I wouldn't defer for this reason.
Your goal at this point is to move to the next step. You've been admitted to a PhD program, so you completed that transition, it's time to start working towards your PhD.
It's perfectly reasonable to finish up previous work as a side project (you don't want to delay progress on your PhD, but it's worth dedicating a bit of extra time to polish up a manuscript and get it through review). Assuming your start time is fall 2021, you still have several months to push the project as far as you can. I would strongly suggest that approach rather than trying to buy another year, even if it's permitted to do so (it may not be).
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159759 | Types of research papers
There are research papers that focus on the presentation and analysis of application of a specific idea on a specific subject; e.g. how a closed-loop (in contradiction to an open-loop) can help patients with early symptoms of Parkinson's disease, experiencing low-amplitude tremor. It includes the application of a specific method (closed-loop) to a specific case of study (Parkinson's disease, early symptoms) using measurements and experimental data that are relevant to this study only and could probably not be useful under a different set of assumptions.
There are also other types of papers where the authors only need to give a general scope a method or set of methods, without considering the uniqueness of any specific case, and by using simpler models and more general assumptions; e.g. how to use closed-loop interventions, to shift brain activity from an initial arbitrary pattern to another.
Are there names for these two types of research papers, based on the above distinction?
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86831 | How to get a new personal academic webpage to show up in searches
I recently create a new google sites-powered webpage for my academic page (after seeing discussions at this question and others).
However, being a brand new page, it won't come up at all if you search for my name (even with qualifiers such as 'math' or my institution).
What steps should I take to ensure that others can find my website?
I am specifically looking for answers that apply to academic pages, as I've heard that they may be indexed in a different way from normal webpages.
Why would academic websites be indexed differently?
Yes, patience helps; but check your metadata. If you publish with wordpress, establishing useful metadata is quite streamlined.
The usual approach would be to create links to the website from other prominent indexed websites. So for example, you might want to create a link to the page from your university profile page. You could also add links from ResearchGate, LinkedIn and other social networks that allow you to share a link to a personal website. You could start creating content and sharing it on social networks.
Then, you just have to wait a bit for the web crawlers (particularly Google) to find and index you. This might take a month or more.
If you are specifically interested in being indexed by Google Scholar, check out these guidelines:
Individual Authors
If you're an individual author, it works best to simply upload your
paper to your website, e.g., www.example.edu/~professor/jpdr2009.pdf;
and add a link to it on your publications page, such as
www.example.edu/~professor/publications.html. Make sure that:
the full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with ".pdf",
the title of the paper appears in a large font on top of the first
page, the authors of the paper are listed right below the title on a
separate line, and there's a bibliography section titled, e.g.,
"References" or "Bibliography" at the end. That's it! Our search
robots should normally find your paper and include it in Google
Scholar within several weeks.
If it doesn't work, you could either (1) read more detailed technical
guidelines in this documentation or (2) check if your local
institutional repository is already configured for indexing in Google
Scholar, and upload your papers there.
can you remove items from the google scholar results? Some old versions of my papers appear there, and I'd like to remove them.
that sounds like a good question. Perhaps ask that as a separate question on this site.
Often times, new websites will find themselves in the "Google Sandbox."
This means that you won't see your website showing up in search results for upwards of six months (as some studies have suggested). However, do not be dismayed by this. Keep adding content, Google will still see it ... and rank your site accordingly when the time comes.
As it were, if you are interested in moving away from the Google-site, and to WordPress (which is MUCH better), there is a pretty good guide here: Building Your Personal Academic Website
I will disagree with you on what you just posted. I prepare websites and they will show up in searches within days, not 6 months as you stated. You can even submit a website directly into Google console, so it can be indexed by the search engines, which takes no longer than 3 days. However, there will be steps one needs to take, in order to do the indexing and being found process a success. If it were 6 months to show up, we as web developers would not have any job as no one would believe us.
Since this question by the OP has come back to current search results, I will say that the better approach is to use your own domain name to be found.
Part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices is to put links from social media or other reputable websites to your website. Nevertheless, when searched directly for your practices or name, you have control on your own website how you want to be found.
There are a number of ways on how you can manipulate search engines to make your site come up above other websites and pretty fast actually. Even if you link yourself from an academia page to your original website, this will hierarchically be higher on the scale than the person being found in-between pages of another page. But again, there are rules to be followed such as meta-tags, getting your website approved by Google, going to the Google console and submitting a request to be indexed by robots and other SEO practices.
You don't have to do anything, it takes a couple of weeks for search engines to index your website. There is no difference between academic website and normal website in the way they are indexed.
To ensure that others can find your website, do awesome research and publish excellent papers. Otherwise, no matter how many SEO techniques you do, nobody will care.
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91856 | Will focusing on statistics experience be beneficial for math job applications?
I've had a PhD in pure mathematics for the last 5 years, and have found several good positions, including a tenure track position I amicably left for personal reasons.
However, the job market is getting pretty tight in mathematics for tenure track positions.
I just recently have one year of statistics teaching experience (the most recent year). While interviewing for my current (temporary) position at a small liberal arts college, some of the interviewers were highly interested in my statistics experience, and I was told that statistics experience was essentially a requirement for the position.
I'll have taught for a second year, when I apply in the fall.
Is this a valuable experience that I should emphasize in my resume
(compared to my several years of calculus/algebra/linear algebra
teaching)? If so, how can I effectively highlight it?
I can't tell if it was just a fluke (like the occasional combined math/comp sci positions), or a general rule that those with statistics expertise are preferable at liberal arts colleges.
I can't comment on academic jobs, but from my experience, knowledge in statistics is extremely beneficial if you ever want to get a job outside of academia. So my advice would be that pointing out expertise in statistics will never harm you, and will often help you, so it's worth pointing out. Worst case scenario is they just think nothing of it.
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87495 | Is a post doc advisor who makes superficial contribution entitled to authorship?
I am a postdoc with two advisors (not something I would recommend for everyone). I would describe the involvement of my two advisors in the project I undertook as quite superficial. I met and discussed a lot with them, they gave me some useful ideas, but they didn’t contribute much to the core of the project. I didn’t even feel they put genuine effort to understand what I was doing. Most of their feedback was related to ideas that didn’t work or was not implemented. If the right for authorship is defined by a significant intellectual contribution, then I wouldn’t really describe their role as such.
Is it ethical to include them as coauthors in the article summarizing this project, with an author contribution statement that describes each one’s role?
In this case their role will be something like giving useful tips, analyzing the results, ..etc.
What does it formally mean to have two (or one for that matter) advisors as a postdoc?
@TobiasKildetoft: Advisor = supervisor / boss / PI. This terminology is commonly used in math, for instance, where the relationship between postdoc and advisor is less supervisory and more collaborative.
@Nate Right, hence the "formally". Usually when the term is used it refers to an informal relationship, which makes it unclear why the role of the person as advisor is really relevant.
Is it generally accepted to negotiate authorship at the start of a project?
To me that seems obvious, but I feel like I get weird reactions from my peer PhD students and faculty when I suggest this. (Perhaps I should spin this off as a separate question.)
What do your supervisors and Co authors say
@Philip Yes, you should ask a separate question. And no, nothing in academia is "generally accepted" :)
In some fields, post-docs are treated as "persons with PhDs" and not as "students", so advisors' contribution is minimal :)
The reality is that standards for authorship are not universal across disciplines. In some disciplines, your advisors should be considered authors. In other disciplines, you advisors should not be considered authors.
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44348 | How to reference a work that I refer to on multiple occasions?
If I have taken an idea or quote from somewhere I will of course reference it properly.
However my question is every time I mention someone e.g
'Joe Bloggs said..."
do I need to reference every time I mention that person if I have referenced him at least once?
Or if I say 'this proof is given by xyz book'
if I have ready referenced xyz book do I need to reference it every-time I mention the name of the book?
Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: You will have been asked to use a particular citation format, or to choose one. Look it up and follow their rules.
@BobBrown With respect, answers should not be posted in comments, since it dilutes the function of both.
In short: Yes. For every quote or idea that is not your own, this must be made clear to the reader. However, depending on the citation style, this does not always need to be in the form of “Joe Bloggs said” (which I have never seen in academic literature anyway), but may, e.g., just happen via a foot- or endnote.
If you are intensively quoting somebody or following another work, it may be feasible to have one sentence explaining to what a citation applies:
The following overview of discombobulation techniques is based on Bloggs et al. (1987).
Unless noted otherwise, all quotes in this section are from Bloggs et al. (1987). [this requires that quotes are visible as such]
This meets the above requirement.
Ok so if I say 'xyz said ..' I do not need to produce a footnote?
I would guess that this depends on the conventions of your field. But even then you would have to have a proper reference somewhere, so using a footnote would be the least obstrusive way anyway. Moreover, I never encountered “XYZ said” or something even vaguely similar in academic literature. Are you sure that you want to use it?
I am not using that specifically but I am saying stuff like 'this was presented to us by ...' what about if mentioning someone, would you also have to cite by their name ?
I do not see a big difference between “this was presented to us by X” and “X said”: They cannot replace a proper citation. Otherwise it would be difficult to confirm your citation or even to the correct person.
I'm not sure I completely agree. Citations should indicate which ideas are not yours and provide pointers to the original sources of those ideas and one should strive to make sure they do that. However, they're not a magic incantation that needs to accompany every non-original thought and walls of citations are often difficult to read.
Consider a paragraph like this*:
Johns, Jacobs, Jingleheimer, and Schmidt (2015, p. 15) state that "the
weather is going to be good today", a claim supported by several other
experts as well. (Jones, 2015; Xu, 2015b p. 9). However, we argue
claims like "the weather is going to be good today" are meaningless in
New England, where the conditions change rapidly and unexpectedly.
Relying on a claim about how the 'weather is going to be today' for the entire day may cause the listener all sorts of discomfort.
Repeating the entire 50-character citation** three times in three sentences would not add much value. The phrasing and punctuation clearly indicate what Jones and colleagues thought and, at the first mention, the citation is right there if the reader wants to follow up on it. However, there are two important caveats.
Books--and even papers--aren't necessarily read from beginning to end. To ensure that the goals of the citation are achieved, you need to ensure that anyone reading the uncited or "informally-cited" parts encounters the citation too. People are unlikely to pluck a sentence from the middle of a paragraph, but they might skip from section to section or paragraph to paragraph, so the citation should be repeated anew in each section/paragraph/figure legend. You may have a bit more latitude if the text is clearly a critique of one specific work: if the document is entitled "A critique of 'X, Y, and Z, 1995'", don't pepper every other sentence
with the full citation***.
Citing something for one fact/idea/quote also doesn't "absolve" you of the need to cite them for a second fact/idea/quote, even from the same document. The reader may not know that Johns and colleagues also made predictions about the stock market and the fifth race at Belmont.
In summary, make sure that it's clear which ideas are your own and which are borrowed, and indicate where the borrowed ideas may be found. Once you've done that, make the text as readable as you can.
* Example cribbed from a now-closed question on the same topic.
** Some citation styles do have a "short form" for subsequent mentions of the same work. That certainly helps here too.
*** Though you may want to be more liberal if the repeated citations include useful information (e.g., a page number).
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45567 | What is the purpose of an undergraduate viva for a dissertation?
What is the purpose of an undergraduate viva for a dissertation?
In the viva the supervisor is present who moderates the viva and a second examiner who asks the questions.
Lets say that my supervisor knows that a certain topic included in the dissertation is not my strongest point, would it be fair for a large number of the questions to be directed on this topic?
Should my supervisor have made this clear to the examiner in the viva?
I suspect that vivas / defences vary greatly from country to country. It might be wise for the question and answers to mention to where they refer.
The supervisor is not typically present in vivas in the UK, as far as I'm aware. (Mine wasn't anyway though that was 15 years ago.) Can we take it that you're restricting attention to vivas where the supervisor is present?
If your question is specifically about undergraduate viva's, it is actually off-topic here. Is it possible to change your question to be about viva's / defences in general?
There is no single purpose of the viva, but broadly speaking it tests a student's ability to act like a researcher. It is not easy to define what does "being a researcher" mean, but the list of skills required definitely includes such things as: understanding the importance of the problem and its place in a wide picture of researchchoice of appropriate method to solve the problem ability to find a sound, elegant and technically accurate solution ability to communicate the solution for different audiences Many undergraduate assessments only test skill 3 from the list and (partly) skill 2. When students prepare a coursework or sit an exam, they always communicate their results in a certain style, typically in writing, and written for the single reader: the lecturer running the module.
Unlike a typical assessment, the format of viva allows three-way communication between the student, the text of thesis, and the readers / examiners. The opportunity to ask student a question about the text changes the game completely for all parties. For the student, the task is not only to write and present a text with the solution, but also to understand the solution, the questions which may be marginally connected with the topic of the text — a «big picture». For examiners, the goal is not only to check the formal correctness of the arguments, but also to make sure the student can freely use these arguments, and apply them to problems within the big picture.
Answering your specific question: it does not matter, what does the supervisor know. In viva, you, as a researcher, present the thesis. Your skill to be solely responsible for the text you produced is what is tested, not the text per se. It is you, who should focus the examiners on the important parts of your thesis. Through the way how you present the research, you should be able to create a right context, and to attract the attention to the strongest parts of your thesis. Success in this part will invite comfortable questions; failure will result in a number of random questions distributed all over your thesis, which you'll have to answer. If you feel really uncomfortable talking about (some) part of your thesis, you possibly should ask yourself, why this topic is still a part of your thesis in the first place.
Many thanks for your answer. Is it not difficult to turn the examiners attention to certain bits of the dissertation if they keep asking very specific questions on very tedious bits of algebra? Lastly if throughout the viva the student can not answer a singly question on where certain bits of tedious algebra come from, would they have failed the viva?
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87951 | How to search for a paper when you have journal name, volume, issue, and year?
Is there an easy way to search for a paper in Science or Nature by the volume, issue number and year?
For example:
Science 317, 1500 (2007)
1500 is not the issue number but the page number.
Just Google it.
I don't know OP's definition of easy way but it only took me 2 minutes to go to the journal's webpage, click on the archive, go to year 2007, open up some of the issues in volume 317 and finally find page 1500 in issue 5844:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/317/5844
Year, volume and issue (and page numbers) exist to make finding an article easy. I'd say, that's easy enough but might be wrong. Yes, having a DOI is easier.
Page 1500 actually includes 4 technical comments:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138179
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138764
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138956
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1138773
Exactly. It's like finding a house if you 'only' have the house number, street, and zip code.
I love this analogy! Accordingly, the DOI would be the geo tag.
Put it in to Google Scholar
In general, Google scholar is very good. You can copy a full reference into Google Scholar and it will often return just the article you are looking for. In general, this works well, for example, you can copy and paste the reference from a journal article into the Google Scholar search box and get the article.
Presumably, this process is less reliable when you don't have the title or author names, but sometimes, year, journal, issue, and page numbers may be sufficient.
For example, this is the search result when you plug it into Google Scholar
https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&q=Science+317%2C+1500+(2007)&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C39&as_sdtp=
More generally
Most official academic search engines such as Scopus and Web of Science will have an advanced search that may facilitate narrowing your search to specific field codes.
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41080 | Does an acceptance of an abstract mean that I will definitely be presenting at the conference?
I just had an abstract accepted by a UK conference and will be submitting the final paper in a few months. We were notified by email of the acceptance and directed to register for the conference. The information we were sent currently does not mention a presentation and the schedule is not yet posted.
Does this mean that I will definitely be presenting at the conference? Or are abstracts/papers sometimes accepted but not presented?
Yes, it's absolutely reasonable to ask the department to pay. However, you should have agreed this with them before submitting the paper. Obviously, funds are finite so the department has to prioritize and they would obviously prefer to pay for cheaper and/or more prestigious conferences (of course, those two goals are often mutually exclusive). In general, you should avoid putting yourself in the position where you have to pay for your own conference expenses: this usually means being selective about which conferences you submit to.
You say "We were notified", which I assume means you and your supervisor. Since your supervisor was fully aware that the paper was being submitted, he or she should have already planned how to pay for one or both of you to go to the conference.
I am just wondering... How can a conference accept papers based only on their abstracts? Isn't it an indication regarding the (lack of) seriousness of the conference?
@PatW: Different academic cultures. For instance, in mathematics conference submissions are not peer-reviewed (and hence nobody considers a conference presentation to be comparable to a publication). Organizers typically accept as many submissions as possible, provided they appear to be actual research. The abstract submission is mostly just to verify that your proposed presentation is on-topic for the conference and that you are not a raving lunatic, and to help the organizers estimate how much space is needed and to group related talks together.
Similar to @NateEldredge and his comment on mathematics, abstracts to public health/medical conferences are often peer reviewed, but its generally just a "No, just no...", "Poster" or "Oral Presentation" ranking system, and they're not considered to be even remotely comparable to an actual publication.
The practices vary significantly by field, but unless it is a very unusual case, having your abstract accepted means that you will be presented in some form or another. It is not certain, however, whether you will be making an oral presentation.
In some meetings, having your abstract accepted means that you are definitely going to be getting up on stage and presenting. In others, it means that you will definitely not be presenting, but will be given a chance to stand next to a poster in a distant corner of a giant room where nobody will realize that you are even there. Most are somewhere in the middle, and you cannot know where it will fall on that spectrum without asking the organizers or looking at information from past conferences.
In all cases, however, it is reasonable to approach your advisor / department to ask about travel support. Whether you can get full support depends on their policies and finances. If you cannot, many conferences also have student travel grants or opportunities to work as a conference volunteer in return for having some of your costs compensated.
Good to point out that you've also small grant agencies and foundations that offer student travel support. Someone around you could point you out to something. I cannot since I'm not in the UK (and it would probably be a too specific question for this site).
Yes, "accepted" means that your talk is going to be included in the program (when it's published) and you are expected to present it at the conference. Congratulations! Don't get your hopes up though, your time slot could be as short as 15 minutes and in parallel with other talks, and the conference organizers will not contribute any money towards your accommodation or registration costs (unless explicitly stated).
If this is a joint work with your advisor and/or they suggested you to apply for the conference, probably they have already plans for the funding to be covered by your department (usually, under their research funds or under a common fund for phd students). If you applied for the conference without telling anybody, this is unusual and it will be a surprise for them. Ask your advisor, definitely, but the answer is not a certain "yes", especially if they are short on funding.
If I can add some more advice, don't be afraid to talk to your advisor for matters such as this one. It is a reasonable doubt and it's understandable that you have it, since you have zero experience with conferences.
It is crucial for the future of your doctorate that there is a direct and healthy line of communication between you two.
In many fields, being accepted does not mean getting an oral presentation slot.
This may get lost among the other good answers, but it's worth looking at the conference website for last year's edition of the conference (or the last several) in order to find out about the format. If it's entirely organized around parallel sessions of paper presentations, then you're likely to be giving a talk. If it's an even mix of posters and talks, then it might be up in the air.
Also, you should look at the Call for Participation for this year again as well. If posters are mentioned as a separate submission item with a different date or other specification, then it's likely you submitted for a talk and should be presenting one. It might also say there whether accepted abstracts will be invited for talks, posters, or a mix.
First of all don't worry about whether the question is silly or not. There are no silly questions, there are only silly questions ;) Moreover, it's pretty normal for early PhD students to be unacquainted with the 'politics' of academia (how publishing works, differences between venues, etc..). So it is pretty normal to ask your supervisor about these stuff, otherwise he/she might assume that you know that information already and, then, you will be in trouble.
In my field, some conferences base their acceptance on the abstract only, meaning that they accept or reject your abstract, and based on that you get an opportunity to write the full paper, submit it and present. I am sad to say that usually these conferences are not really strong ones.. but in any case going through the submission process and getting the opportunity to write a paper and present it has a lot of benefits that outbalance the strength of the conference.
You should examine the conference's website, you could also email the organizers. Usually they should clarify whether accepted contributions are to be presented in talks, or as posters (where you print a poster, stand next to it and answer questions of those who pass by).
I don't know any venue that accepts contributions without planning them to be presented. So I really doubt that.
As for the funding, yes it is always okay to ask, if they can't fund you they'll just say that they can't. They could also agree but set limits to the accommodation (e.g. it doesn't have to be a 5-stars hotel). If your supervisor recommended submitting a paper there then he probably knows that it is possible to fund you to attend.
I would suggest that, as the other answers say, you should talk to your advisor about this. First off, they will be happy to explain the process to you. In fact, I'd go so far as to take a guess that your advisor will have potentially published in this conference before (you could check their past publications to see if this is the case). Was your advisor aware that you had submitted to the conference? (I will presume so, as in my experience, UK PhD students typically show their papers to their advisors prior to submission). If not, it might be helpful to do so in future, as it allows them to anticipate the potential need for conference funding in advance.
I know that my first publication was at a conference which my advisor had previously presented at many times before (as well as having at one point been an organiser). As to if you will give an oral presentation or not, that is highly conference-specific. My first conference presentation was highly unusual, in that I ended up having around 1 hour to give a presentation and field an extended Q&A session (which was very helpful). Don't fret though - this was highly unusual, and I was aware of it in advance. You will more likely either be giving a poster presentation, or a standard-length presentation with a few minutes for questions. I simply give this example to highlight that you really should speak to your advisor, as every conference is different.
Don't feel silly about asking your supervisor, however. I am sure they will be supportive, and happy to explain how this works. They should also be happy to explain how the process of paying for conferences works (since it is hardly an elephant in the room - conference publications are relatively expensive). There might even be a designated fund to pay for student publications.
While certainly not always the case, I had my own budget for conference travel and registration fees, and was able to simply use this to pay for conferences and travel. For my first conference, I spent roughly the same as you are talking about spending, so that's not wholly unreasonable. Conferences can be expensive, but the opportunities to network, meet other researchers, and share your work are important, and your advisor should understand this and be able to help you understand what is going on.
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42250 | Difference between "referee" and "reviewer" in the context of journal manuscript review?
I've seen the terms "referee" and "reviewer" both used to describe a person who gives feedback to a paper in a journal submission. Are there differences between the two terms? Is one used in some situations where the other isn't?
Mildly related: difference between draft, manuscript, preprint, paper, article.
Somewhat more than mildly related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/32720/what-are-the-differences-between-peer-reviewed-journals-and-refereed-journals
I'm a non-native speaker mostly interacting with other non-native speakers, but for me "reviewer" is slightly more formal than "referee". I agree with everyone else that they are synonyms, though.
For a submitted manuscript, probably they are the same thing. Sometimes papers may be "reviewed" after publication, and that guy would be a reviewer and not a referee.
So far as I have ever been able to tell, "referee" and "reviewer" mean exactly the same thing.
I was searching the web for this question as this renowned mathematician[http://www.imath.kiev.ua/~rop/] has used word Referee and Reviewer differently, don't know why,
@IgotiT He distinguishes between his work reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication in a journal ("referee") and reviewing already published papers for an online database ("reviewer"), just as JessicaB explains below.
I think they are synonyms.
I guess there might be a very slight emphasis that a referee makes a decision, where a reviewer produces a report. But both do both, in the case of journals.
A referee never makes a decision on a manuscript; that is the editor's job. They can (and do) recommend one, though.
My experience is that usage varies. In my field, it is common to use 'referee' for the person who anonymously comments on a paper submitted to a journal, and 'reviewer' for the person who writes about a paper already published to appear publicly in a database. However, people I know in similar areas use 'reviewer' for the first meaning. To confuse things more, there are some discussions underway about changing the publishing model, which would have the effect of essentially combining these two situations.
Typically they are synonymous (see this wiki entry). Some journals use one term or another, and some use both. Some fields may tend to use one more than another, but I don't know. However, my impression is that the term "referee" means someone who makes a thorough evaluation of a paper (one should check correctness and make detailed suggestions if appropriate), and the term "reviewer" is more general for someone whose opinion is solicited.
In math, full refereeing takes a considerable amount of effort and many journals now solicit quick opinions from experts to determine if a paper should go through the full refereeing process. The experts who give brief opinions could be considered a kind of reviewer (in practice, I haven't heard this term applied here, but calling them something like "preliminary reviewers" seems reasonable), whereas they should not be considered referees.
They are not synonymous. A referee decides whether a contribution is to be accept or not for publication. A reviewer provides information on published articles and books. A review of a academic work gives a brief and clear account of its contents. Reading the review is not intended to be a substitute for reading the original work; the primary purpose is to help the user to decide whether he or she needs to read the original. Therefore, the main results of the paper should be briefly described, preferably in a non-technical manner.
I would say they seem absolutely synonymous in every use I've come across.
If anything, it might actually be the case that Referee is the noun and a review is the verb i.e you are a Referee but you are doing/giving a review.
I think in practical terms both do the same thing. In theory a reviewer just reviews while a referee also decides whether to accept or not.
In more practical terms, when a referee delegates the reviewing process to one of their post-grads, the post-grad is a reviewer but not a referee (and yes I know this "never happens").
The editor/editorial board decides whether to accept or not. Referees make recommendations.
@Kimball I'm just saying that the referee's duty is to state whether they accepts or not. I do know they often don't have authority to make the decision and it's in most cases a recommendation. The reviewer does not have this duty.
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94291 | Where is the latex template for IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health?
I was trying to find the latex template for IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, but I am only able to find the .doc template. Do we have any .tex template for this journal?
http://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/create-your-ieee-article/use-authoring-tools-and-ieee-article-templates/ieee-article-templates/templates-for-ieee-journal-of-translational-engineering-in-health-and-medicine/
Usually there should be latex template as well.
There is an IEEE Transactions LaTeX template.
It seems JTEHM does not provide any template for LaTeX documents. The standard IEEE template is available with \usepackage{ieeetran} but it does not seems to be coherent with the word document provided (e.g. abstract), so it might need adaptation.
Maybe papers on "translational engineering in health and medicine" do not have any equations in them, so the editors think LaTeX is not needed.
You could play with IEEEtran to generate the similar looking document template. This is what I could get.
\documentclass{IEEEtran}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\title{Here goes my JTEHM Title}
\author{Author1, Author2, Author3 \\ Institute1, Address1\\ Institute2, Address2}
\begin{document}
\twocolumn[
\begin{@twocolumnfalse}
\maketitle
\end{@twocolumnfalse}
\begin{abstract}
~{\lipsum[1-1]}
\index{keyword1, keyword2, keyword3}
\end{abstract}
\bigskip]
\section{Introduction}
\lipsum[1-7]
\section{Conclusion}
\lipsum[1-1]
\end{document}
Looks like tex SE. Was the question more fit for tex SE and somewhat-less fit for academia SE?
Thanks, very similar, but minor differences. For instance, the first letter is Capital.
@TinaJ won't it be taken care by editorial team after acceptance.
I contacted their office and looks like they don't have latex template. But they provided me with IEEE JERM tex template which is almost identical.
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87321 | Uploading a revised version of published journal article on arXiv
I uploaded a pre-print of an article on arXiv 1 year ago. The article was accepted in SCI journal and currently available online. However, I found a typo mistake in one equation and want to add more discussion related one figure (On researchgate I am receiving a lot of queries regarding that figure). Should i upload a new version of pre-print on arXiv? (How citations will work in this case? as arxiv version is more advanced compare to Journal version) OrI may upload a short document on arXiv as an errata/correction with extra discussion?Or I may address errata and discussion in online page of journal? Actually this journal allows the registered users to comment and start discussion related to published article.
I'm not sure what you mean by "how will citations work?" Can you explain what you are concerned about, specifically?
I wonder if arXiv version is more advance compare to journal version how the research community will know this? and also once this article get published in journal the google scholar has removed arXiv version from my profile.
This has happened before. Just update the arXiv version and indicate in the "Comments" field and ideally also inside the file itself that the version is newer than the published one. Examples of such updates:
https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3306v4 (sadly, the Comments field isn't too clear here)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04832v1 (here, the fact that this is a post-publication update has been made clear in the file itself)
https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0602634v4
The fact that I found/recalled these three links within 10 minutes should suggest that this is not a rare occurrence, although I wish that people would make the status of the preprint as being a more correct version of the publication clearer. Either way, the update is highly encouraged from a reader's perspective :)
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104669 | How to contact EiC when his emails seems like auto computer generated reply
One of my article is under review in reputable IEEE journal. The average time of first decision for this journal is 3 months. However, my article is under review for 6.5 months and upon my inquiry I always get same email from EiC (editor-in-chief), which looks like an auto generated email, stating we appreciate your patience and we are trying to complete the process ASAP. According to journal policy, I cannot know who is the handling Associate Editor and all inquiries should go to EiC. In the given situation how can I invoke editorial board to expedite the process? Is it fine to make a call to EiC on his personal contact number?
Does the journal have a desk editor (that is, an employee of the publisher)? If so, you could try contacting him or her - the desk editor is likely to have more time, and could say something like "we've invited 3 reviewers of which 2 declined and the last review is due in ____ days".
on https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ the only contact person is EiC, and on the Journal website under contact us the email of other two EiC is given.
What's the name of the journal? The link you gave doesn't work (it redirects to ScholarOne).
@Allure sorry for causing confusion "mc.manuscriptcentral.com" is the central system for submitting article for IEEE journals and other publishers. I am not sharing the name as I am afraid it may cause some problem for me, and for journal and EiC reputation.
What does EiC mean?
@henning: "Editor in Chief"
I guess, you can ask directly two EiCs with manuscript detail, something like “did you hear anything from reviewers yet?”
I suggest contacting the publisher and asking them for a status update. The publisher is likely to have more time, and should be able to provide almost as good an update. IEEE's website lists some people to contact. You might be able to find an even better contact person from the journal's website.
I'd write in the email:
Is my paper under review?
If it's under review, are there any problems (e.g. the only invited reviewers haven't responded to the invitation for 3 months, and no new ones have been invited)?
If there are problems, can you ask the EiC to look at the submission?
In a first email I wouldn't mention that I've already contacted the EiC. If they ask about that, then only I'd say I've contacted the EiC, but received what looks like an automated response.
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13523 | When should academic papers be censored due to public health/safety concerns?
A recent paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, which reports the discovery of a new botulinum toxin, has been censored:
Because no antitoxins as yet have been developed to counteract the novel C. Botulinum toxin, the authors had detailed consultations with representatives from numerous appropriate US government agencies.
The team sequenced the bacterial DNA corresponding to the toxin, but did not publish it.
I can understand the reasoning, and see how it might make sense, but I wondered: in such a case, what are guidelines that should be followed? The editors indicate consultations with governmental agencies, but I think the government might in some case be overly eager to censor data that should, from an ethical and moral point of view, be disseminated.
So, without turning this into a political question: what are guidelines (written rules as well as unwritten moral standards) that an author, reviewer or editor should follow concerning potential public safety issues? I looked for information on the COPE website, but could not really find anything relevant.
A former professor of mine, who worked with Trypanosomes, once told us that there was an under-the-table agreement between researchers that a certain pathogenic mechanism must not be investigated. I remember finding the fact that this was done and that it worked very intriguing.
@biologue: how do you know that it worked, i.e. the mechanism wasn't investigated as opposed to investigations were not published (= in terms of public safety: a small group of people has the monopoly of this knowledge)?
This is a rising bioethics topic in the area of biosecurity and dual-use developments. Last year there was controversy with H5N1 and censorship.
There is no set policy, though they are being devolped. Most recently there is the United States Government Policy for Institutional Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern
The IAP Statement On Biosecurity principles state:
Awareness. Scientists have an obligation to do no harm. They should
always take into consideration the reasonably foreseeable consequences
of their own activities. They should therefore:
always bear in mind the potential consequences – possibly harmful – of their research and recognize that individual good conscience does
not justify ignoring the possible misuse of their scientific
endeavour;
refuse to undertake research that has only harmful consequences for humankind.
The US NIH Office of Biotechnology Activities is often consulted for such research concerns and has a report Enhancing Responsible Science Considerations for the Development and Dissemination of Codes of Conduct for Dual Use Research and has a series of recommendations.
The WHO Laboratory Biosafety Manual does not address publication restrictions/censorship.
I'm wondering if the paper in question did actually comply even with the most basic of those thoughts: if the public shouldn't know of this new toxin until antibodies are available (obviously a terrorism concern rather than about canned meat), then why not wait with the publication of the whole business?
IMHO with the publication now they advertise that they have a new type of toxin, and even say they have the sequence. They just won't tell the sequence publicly until they also have an antigen. So in addition to an "ad" to the terrorist world, trustworthy labs who'd work on an antibody ...
... don't get information they need. To me it possibly has a bit of a smell of eating your publication pie and keeping it. If they cooperate behind the scenes with other labs on the antibody, then why publish already now? Priority date could maybe be established by some notarial act, but IMHO if the safety concern it that large, priority dates or an earlier publication shouldn't compromise it. That being said, I'm not sure that a terrorist wouldn't have an easier go with a "normal" C. botulinum strain, 15% mortality is far less than 90%, but probably still enough for terror purposes.
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14065 | What's the reasoning behind phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements"?
Phrase "dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements" seems strange. Can one submit dissertation in full fulfillment of the requirements?
Most doctoral programs have other requirements for completion of the degree, such as a certain number of course hours and the passing of qualifying exams. Hence, while the dissertation is the culmination of the doctoral program, on its own it does not satisfy all the requirements for graduation.
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66947 | What are the responsibilities of the Publication Chair of a conference?
I received an "offer" to become the publication chair of a high profile IEEE conference. Before accepting the "offer" I would like to know what are my responsibilities, and I would like to plan ahead as what portion of the available time such a commitment would eat up.
I saw this description, but it is rather vague. It says:
Publications Chair: Responsible for the coordination of production of conference content (e.g., papers from special tutorial sessions or colloquia, summaries of conference papers, programs, etc.) and serves as the point of contact for all Xplore submission-related inquiries before and after the conference.
It tells nothing about the pitfalls, so I want some feedback from people who have really done this.
EDIT: additional questions
Does it have positive or negative impact on the student. In terms of workload vs. benefit?
I've been publication chair of an IEEE conference before, and it's pretty straight-forward. IEEE has a well-arranged process for managing conference publications, and you basically just need to hold up your side of the deal and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
In particular: you should have an IEEE CPS publications contact. You can get this from the current general chairs, since they're dealing with IEEE, or (since its usually the same from year to year) you can ask the previous publications chair.
Set up a meeting with that person ASAP and they can walk you through the process and make plans with you; I've had very good experiences working with their publications personnel.
The key responsibilities that you should expect to fulfill are:
Set a schedule acceptable to IEEE and the conference chairs
Work with the general chairs to fill out the required forms and get them to the IEEE on time, so that you can get the publications IEEE CPS contract signed. This will include setting the various different types of publications (e.g., main track, short papers, workshop papers, tutorial abstracts, etc), as well as pages sizes, expected number, delivery method (I recommend USB sticks) and budget.
Send information about camera ready from IEEE to the various conference chairs that need it (general, program, workshops, tutorial, etc.).
Work with chairs to get all of the front matter prepared in a timely fashion and within the schedule negotiated with IEEE (cover, index information, introductions, sponsored material, etc.).
Immediately after the conference, report to IEEE whether there were any no-shows (who should have their papers removed).
One month after reporting whether there were and no-shows, everything should appear online in IEEE Xplore. If it doesn't, then you need to keep pinging IEEE's representative to make sure things get into IEEE Xplore as promptly as possible.
Could you please share some of the pitfalls of being a chair too?
@TheFireGuy It takes a bit of time---not much if you keep on top of things and the other chairs are responsive to your requests. When I was a publications chair, it probably took 20 - 30 hours total spread over a 9-month period. You also have to make sure to be organized and deal with things ahead of deadlines, or else you could make a lot of trouble for the conference and get a lot of people mad at you. If you can be organized and responsible, though, it's a great opportunity: it's often used as a "starter" position for trying people out before giving them more critical responsibilities.
@jakebeal can you consider my additional question. And maybe integrate your comment to your original answer
@KristofTak Overall, it's a strong benefit if a) you want to be part of that community and b) you do an OK job.
I can not speak of myself, but my advisor gets similar offers (not for IEEE conferences, he is in a different field). Last year we organized a conference in my University (US) and was somehow involved (replying to inquires and sending reminding emails). My answer is based on what my advisor has shared with us (his students) and what I have noticed before/during/after the conference.
He always complains about not being able to find a good publisher (cheap/er and on time)
The time he spends on organizing and collecting reviewed/finalized and "formatted" manuscripts from authors/reviewers of multiple tracks.
What he complains the most about is "poor/lack of communication" especially for international conferences where majority of participants are from outside the States. As you can tell, this is mainly related to time zone difference, and English is the not the main language.
To be honest, I do not know if there is any legal or financial-related or other aspects.
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178552 | How accurate are Taylor & Francis' "online first" page numbers?
Taylor & Francis publishes some articles "online first" before they are assigned to a particular issue and page numbers are added. They thus have page numbers starting at 1. I have access to the PDF of such an online first article, which is now properly published in an issue of the journal (and thus has page numbers starting with 601). The length of the article appears to be the same (16 pages). As I don't have access to the published version but need to quote a sentence from p. 14 of the online first pdf, which I have, I was wondering whether I could just calculate the new page numbers (so p. 14 would now be p. 614) or whether the typesetting changes when an article is added to a journal, making this method unreliable when citing.
Usually the journal supplies sufficiently definitive page numbers themselves in a "how to cite this paper" linked with the online version. Are you able to find this for the journal in question?
@jakebeal the definitive page numbers are those of the now published issue of the journal (so pp. 601-617) - however I do not have access to this issue.
@SamVimes if the journal issue's list of contents at the "tandofonline.com " website shows the page range for your paper as being "601-617", then that should be the correct page range.
@djohn Maybe I wasn't clear in my original question, sorry (I will edit it to clarify). I know that the correct page range range is 601-617. The problem is that I only have the pdf of the online first version and want to quote from p. 14 - can I now simply extrapolate that the correct quote would be "quote" (Author 2021, p. 614)
@SamVimes based on my personal experience, the typesetting used in the "online first" version should be exactly the same as a final published version (only page numbers change). At the very least, I have yet to see a case where the page layout changed. So I think you should be safe. If it's a very important citation, it might be a good idea to try to get a hold of the final paper, just in case.
Please clarify your specific problem or provide additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it's hard to tell exactly what you're asking.
@djohn perfect, that's what I wanted to know.
@djohn Can you please turn your comment into an answer so that I can give you reputation?
Note: comment converted into an answer.
Based on my personal experience, the typesetting used in the "online first" version should be exactly the same as a final published version (only page numbers change).
At the very least, I have yet to see a case where the page layout changed. So I think you should be safe. If it's a very important citation, it might nevertheless be a good idea to try to get a hold of the final paper, just in case.
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89060 | How to know whether a journal is indexed by Thomson Reuters or Scopus?
I am preparing to submit my first article to a specific journal. How can I know if a journal is indexed in Thomson Reuters or Scopus?
Scopus journal list:
https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri
Thomson Reuters Master Journal List:
http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/
@ FuzzyLeapfrog, the journal that I am preparing to send to it, is present in both databases.
Well, then this journal is indexed in Thomson Reuters and Scopus. I wish you much success for your submission. @user137684
@ FuzzyLeapfrog, thank you very much for your answers.
Simple, but useful!
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89652 | Do you need to define standard abbreviations like "EEG" and "fMRI" in the abstract?
I am preparing to send my first paper to a springer journal (journal of computational neuroscience), in the instruction author there is an instruction say Abbreviations should be defined at first mention and used consistently thereafter. I think that the abbreviations in the abstract are known for the neuroscience community. Do I have to define them first?
abstract
Based on clinical data collected using different brain imaging and recording techniques (fMRI, CT, PET, EEG, MEG, NRIS,...),
Is a simple listing of the techniques in brackets essentiell for the abstract/understanding of the article?
Abbreviations are the devil's droppings. Just spell it out.
Yes, define your abbreviations as per the instructions. Each reader may be familiar with all, none, or some of the techniques you mention. There is certainly a set of acronyms and terminology which readers in your field will be familiar with, but anything you can do to help your reader understand your material is potentially beneficial.
You can also use the other published abstracts in the same journal as a guide: note how this one defines otherwise common acronyms like EEG (but, as pointed out below, does not define some other terms).
Or, if you're worried about abstract length, avoid discussing every individual technique in the abstract and save it for the body of the manuscript.
That's a particularly funny reference to include because they do NOT spell out "REM"/non-REM anywhere in their paper, nor "ODE" nor "SPDE" and I might have missed others :)
Good point! Perhaps that's an indication of what readers/reviewers don't care enough about to define...or just mistakes.
Generally, in such situations, there are multiple factors at play. They include specific field of study and relevant de facto standards (community consensus), specific publication and relevant author instructions as well as required (or chosen) publication style. If any of these factors do not clearly prescribe the abbreviations policy, I would suggest to use the following strategy:
do not use any abbreviations in the abstract;
define abbreviations at their first mention after the abstract;
use relevant abbreviations throughout the rest of the text (occasionally returning to using the abbreviation definitions, if the frequency of appearance of the corresponding items is high).
"Community consensus" - yes. Safest approach is to just look at what other people do. While abbreviations are ideally to be avoided, there will always be some that are accepted in a given field. I can't remember reading a single biology paper that mentions "Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid".
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40670 | Is doing a PhD a good way to develop a deeper understanding of quantitative finance and statistics?
I work in business and mainly deal with quant finance and statistics + do a lot of programming to implement ideas from quant finance and statistics. I have a master of science in economics.
My problem is: whenever I am trying to dig deeper (by reading articles from scientific journals) to understand some theoretical foundations of a certain idea from statistics and quant finance (ranging from pricing of exotic options to kriging based methods) to modify and customize this idea for my situation, I discover that my knowledge of math is not enough to penetrate deeper in a subject.
Is it a sign that I need to get a PhD in quant finance/ statistics/ math or it would be an overkill and I better go for a less time consuming (bloody) option (if there is any)?
PhDs generally take 4+ years of full-time work, even longer if you are working for a company, so that might influence your decision.
@AustinHenley yes, I realize that, to decide whether it is an overkill or not I would need to understand whether there are other way to get what I want.
I implied that it might require leaving your job, which removes the need for the knowledge, unless you planned to go back, in which case the job or need may not exist after X years. Definitely sounds like overkill to me!
@AustinHenley Ok, for me it would be the only reason to get a PhD and we decided that it is an overkill, so PhD is out. Do you know by chance any alternatives to get what I need?
Don't take my opinion so seriously! PhD might still be in, but generally peoples goals are different (e.g., they want a career in research). Alternatives may be another masters, a certificate, or just dedicating some time to learn the material independently.
@AustinHenley Ok, thanks, you reconfirmed what I thought myself.
Also, your local university may allow auditing courses, which is a cheaper way to attend a small number of classes.
It seems like this is the same as your previous question?
@NateEldredge I would say that I still try to solve the same problem but by asking different questions, and if you look at the responses they have quite a different flavor. Do you mean that I am misusing the site?
Yes, a PhD will be overkill. You can learn all the things you have mentioned by reading good books and papers. That is what I did during my PhD. As far as math goes, you can never learn enough of it.
@AustinHenley just to avoid any misunderstanding, the previous comment fro you was meant as a compliment.
No, this is not a sign that you need a PhD. A PhD is to prove to other people that you can do novel research to a significant depth, with significant rigour.
What you want is to learn some mathematical techniques. Now, the only way to do that, is to practice using those techniques. You need some exercises that will take you from where you are now, to where you want to be. You need to do those exercises, and find out which ones you got wrong, and why you got them wrong; and then do them correctly.
A PhD isn't an efficient or cost-effective way to do that. But a taught Masters degree (e.g. in Quant finance) might be. A free online course might be. A study-buddy who understands this stuff might be. A private tutor might be. Finding out which textbooks an appropriate Masters course uses, and working your own way through them, doing the exercises in each chapter, might be. The exact recipe will be whatever works for you. But what you need is to build up your toolkit of maths knowledge and skills, and you can only learn that by using those tools.
+1 A PhD is not, as many people think, taking the time to learn especially advanced material. It is more like an apprenticeship towards becoming a professional researcher. If you don't want a research career, obtaining a PhD will not help you.
+1, Broadly agree, but the mathematics knowledge of the OP as stated suggests that a taught Masters in maths would itself be at too high a level; the alternatives suggested are good.
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34450 | If you want to do a PhD in mathematics, how important is it to start immediately after finishing undergraduate studies?
I'm about to finish my undergraduates studies; I majored in mathematics and minored in physics, and I always intended on going to grad school to pursue a PhD in mathematics, but I've been having doubts recently. I did well in all my courses (3.92 GPA), but I'm trying to seriously consider if my background is strong enough now and if I'd truly have the motivation to stick it out. I've also been thinking even if I decided to give it a shot, it might be nice to take some time off for rest and to improve on some of my weaker areas. But I've been told by a few people that if you want to do a PhD in mathematics, you have to go pretty much right after undergrad, mainly because recent letters of recommendation are so important, and professors forget you after a time. So I wanted to know if this is true, and also thought I'd ask for advice if anyone has been in a similar situation.
If you're questioning your resolve it probably is not a good idea. Lots of people who question whether a PhD is right for them (or their careers later) do very well in academia.
Lots of people who question whether a PhD is right for them (or their careers later) do very well in academia after they find an answer.
"time off ... to improve on some of my weaker areas". Natural impulse, but I've seen this described several times as a fallacy. Generally speaking the best place to work on your weaker areas is in a university, not on a year out. The logic of taking time to rest follows (although IIRC some institutions including Cambridge still think it's not wise, and advise strongly against it for mathematicians). But the logic of taking time off from studying mathematics to get better at mathematics (normally) doesn't!
The other answers don't really address the issue of recommendations, so let me, at least briefly. I've been on our math PhD admission committee several times and we get many applications from people who've gotten their undergrad some time ago.
First, yes there is some truth to it being easier to get in right after your undergrad degree. The letters of recommendation are important. If your professors know you quite well, and the department is relatively small, they should still be able to write you decent letters after a year or two hiatus, but if it gets to 5-10 years, they may not, and with that kind of time lapse, their letters won't count for as much anyway.
My advice would be to consider what else you want to do. Is there something else you really want to do for awhile (peace corps, travel, interesting job opportunity)? If so, it won't kill your chances for grad school, but you may have to apply to more backup schools. If you're out for longer, it might be best to do a masters first before getting into a PhD program.
If you don't have any definite ideas, why don't you try applying to a few masters programs (Vladhagan's suggestion of trying a masters first is a good idea to give you a sense of what you want to do and give yourself a better background) and a few PhD programs that seem interesting to you? At the same time, maybe go to a career fair and send out a few job applications in the spring? The PhD programs that accept you (at least if you're in the US) at least should give you an opportunity to visit, so even if you're undecided about a PhD in the spring, visiting these schools (and similarly any job interview impressions) may help you make a decision.
Wait, do I understand correctly that in the US you can start your PHD straight after your bachelor/undergraduate program?
@DavidMulder: Yes, that's correct (at least in math and most fields I know), but typically graduate level masters work is built-in to the PhD program, so it usually takes 5-6 years in math.
But I've been told by a few people that if you want to do a PhD in mathematics, you have to go pretty much right after undergrad, mainly because recent letters of recommendation are so important, and professors forget you after a time.
You do not have to start a PhD program "pretty much right after undergrad". It is most common to do so, but there is a substantial minority of students who are older and/or spent several years out of school. In (American, at least) academia, your age counts for nothing; the ticking clock in the sky keeps track of the number of years since your PhD. I know several people who spent years off from undergrad in the sense of leaving school but clearly kept up with their mathematical reading and learning -- while in the Israeli army, culinary school, creative writing programs... -- and started grad school with skills at least at good as those around them and a maturity that most 22 year-olds lack. I've looked through hundreds verging on thousands of job applicants' CVs, and I am struck by how often the stronger candidates were in their 30's rather than their 20's when they got their PhD.
Of course the biggest risk in taking time off between undergrad and grad is that you will get distracted by the rest of the world and not come back for graduate study. But that's only a risk in the context of your original plan: if you found something else that you like better than being a graduate student, good for you. It is also relatively common that after a fairly small time away -- one or two years -- people realize that they really do prefer an academic career. (For some reason this seems to be most common among high school teachers. Isn't that a bit sad?) If you're not totally committed to a PhD program, taking time off and seeing whether your desire waxes or wanes is a pretty smart idea.
Of all things in your decision, I don't think that going straight to a PhD program because you're worried that your professors will forget about you is a good strategy. Professors don't forget about students that quickly, but after a few years, they may. To combat this, I would say: if you are not sure whether you want to do a PhD right away, why not apply right away to PhD programs? Certainly knowing where you can get in and seeing the programs that admitted you are all factors in your decision. If you apply right away, professors will write letters for you, and if you go away even for a long time, those letters should still be equally usable afterwards: your past undergraduate performance is not a function of time.
+1 for "apply right away". First find out what your options are, and then make a decision, not the other way around.
At least in my area of the world (Western US) and among the professors from the institution where I did grad work, almost everyone did a master's degree first. There are exceptions to this of course. How I see it is if you are a genius, go on to the PhD directly. Otherwise, a MS can give you some good background without drinking from a fire hose. This is how I improved my weaker areas. I was weak in analysis before grad school. I was able to take 4 analysis classes (graduate level!) for my MS and it was a significant boost.
When I applied to PhD programs, I got my letters from professors I had taken graduate classes from (and my thesis advisor). This allowed them to comment not just on how well they thought I would do in grad school, but how well I actually had done. This also allowed for them to comment on my research. I think it made me a stronger PhD candidate.
I will back up that you will need to be (somewhat) confident that you can become very strong in a specific niche. But that is why you go to grad school; its purpose is to make you strong in your field. And your strengths may change. I entered grad school as a group theorist and left as a probabilist.
^Applying to a PhD program and possibly dropping out with a MS might be better if you need funding (this of course depends on the program).
almost everyone did a master's degree first — That doesn't say much. I also got an MS first, but it was an administrative hurdle in the middle of a PhD program; the department didn't have an MS program that one could be admitted into separately.
@JeffE You also are a CS professor, which is a different discipline than pure maths. I would hazard to say (and it is very true at the university where I currently teach) that in CS, those who do a PhD commonly skip the MS.
Theoretical computer science isn't that different from math. I have former PhD students who picked up math MS degrees on the way, and former MS students who got math PhDs. And most of the math PhDs I know don't have MS degrees.
Entering a PhD program is a major commitment that you should not enter into if you're not completely ready. Your question shows that you're very unsure about what you want to do. Thus I would not recommend entering a PhD program at this point in time.
It is certainly possible to work for a while and then go back to graduate school.
My own personal experience is that when I got my BS degree (in Computer Science), many friends urged me to go on to graduate school immediately. Instead, I went to work as a software developer for the next three years. It became clear that I would need at least an MS degree in order to advance within the company that employed me so I went back to graduate school for an MS in applied mathematics. During my first semester as a full time graduate student I became very interested in a new area (interior point methods for LP), and applied to switch into the PhD program so that I could really immerse myself in that topic. I wouldn't recommend this approach to everyone, but at the same time, I'm quite certain that it helped me to have worked for a while before going back to graduate school.
You touch on one of the (IMHO, anyway) best reasons for taking some time between BS and PhD: work in industry for a decade or so, and with care and a bit of luck, you won't have to worry about student loans or financial aid.
Going back to graduate school I had a relatively new car paid off and some IRA money that I cashed out towards the end of my PhD to help pay expenses. That money certainly helped. On the other hand, I had to dramatically expenses to survive on my TA stipend.
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96389 | Negotiating the intellectual property of a (US) industry contract
I'm finishing a post-doc and possibly going (back into) industry, but with the intent to continue research and publish papers and FOSS software.
I know that hi-tech companies typically give you this agreement to sign about them having all intellectual property rights and you having nothing - a Properitary Information Agreement.
Luckily, in my case, I'm more-or-less the first proper hire of a professional employee (it's a start-up); and the company is positive about me doing research and about them releasing (some/lots) of FOSS. So that means that there's room for negotiations.
I haven't gotten a draft of this agreement yet, but I wanted to draw on people's experience and ask: What's important to put in, and to leave out, from such an agreement? Are there particular issues I should keep an eye for to not get "burned" by understanding things one way and the company understanding them another way?
Notes:
The field is applied computer science.
It's a US company, operating in Texas but registered in Delaware.
This depends a lot in which jurisdiction you are in. Without knowing that nobody can give you a good answer.
@AttilaKinali: See edit.
The state may also matter.
@mkennedy: Ok, state of operation and incorporation too.
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101578 | What are the default copyrights/IP restrictions for a work I post online?
Suppose I've put a PDF with an paper or treatise I've written, but not yet properly published, somewhere online. This place is not some document repository or a site that has some specific copyright assignment/assumption policy; suppose it's just a lowly HTTP server: http://some.where.org/foo.pdf . Suppose also that a link to it gets to some person with whom I've not made any explicit or implicit agreements regarding use of this work.
What are people allows or not allowed to do by US, EU and/or international copyright law?
Are people allowed to make online copies?
Are people allowed to make hard copies? Circulate hard copies? Publish hard copies?
Can people produce derivative work (e.g. applying the same ideas in some other context) and publish it, at all?
Must people credit me as the author, or can they just use the contents and forget about the author?
Are there any special restrictions if I mark my paper as a "Draft"?
Note: It's not that I want to prevent any of those things from happening, necessarily - I'm just asking about the defaults.
If your goal is further formal publication, read that publisher's guidelines. Many support so-called self-archival (putting it on a personal webpage), many impose an embargo on publishing final versions to the repositories. (And it depends what's final – the accepted or the completely typesetted version, for example.) It varies from publisher to publisher. There is also open access.
In most (possibly all) jurisdictions, the default for a creative artifact with no license information attached is that it assumed to be all rights reserved. In other words, another person cannot do much of anything with it besides look at it.
See, for example, GitHub's information about "no license" licensing. They are talking about code, but the default they mention is general.
Note that there are certainly categories of work for which this does not apply (for example, recipes are specifically not protected under US copyright law), but it most certainly applies for any substantial paper draft.
In all jurisdictions I am aware of, at least "private use" (saving the pdf to your hard drive, printing it out to read yourself) is allowed through some manner of exception from copyright law. I guess this would still fit under a generous definition of "look at it"...
If you care about the copyright status of material you put on line, add a copyright notice. Although it doesn't confer any additional legal protection, it puts people on notice that you do care. Conversely, if you intend that others use your work, use one of the Creative commons notices or similar to express your expectations.
The default, for any creative work, is that it is protected by copyright. Your paper would have the same status as any other work protected by copyright; essentially it would enjoy the same protection as a TV show, newspaper article or a college textbook.
It would not be legal to republish the paper on another website. However, linking to or embedding it would be allowed in the EU.
Making physical hard copies would in principle also not be legal, but there are various fair use exceptions (e.g., I would be allowed to print a copy the paper for my personal use, and use in education could in some circumstances also be considered fair use).
Can people produce derivative work (e.g. applying the same ideas in some other context) and publish it, at all?
"Applying the same ideas in some other context" is not a derivative work in the sense meant in copyright law. Copyright only protects expressions of ideas (e.g., the phrasing you used in your paper to describe the idea), but not the ideas themselves. If you published a paper on, say, techniques to design more aerodynamic airplane wings, then it would be perfectly legal for someone to build (and sell) airplanes based on your techniques, but it would not be legal for them to include your paper verbatim as a chapter in a book on airplane design.
There is no way to protect "ideas". If your paper contains a solution to a technical problem, then you might be able to obtain a patent for it (e.g., a better design for an airplane wing would be patentable material). However, unlike copyright, patents aren't automatic and are also very expensive to obtain and defend.
Must people credit me as the author, or can they just use the contents and forget about the author?
If people use your work in a way that is either permitted by fair use or simply isn't prohibited by copyright in the first place, then there is no legal requirement that they credit you.
Are there any special restrictions if I mark my paper as a "Draft"?
Marking your paper as a "draft" just informs other people that it is a draft, but it doesn't have any legal significance.
Thanks for the detailed answer; I'll just mention that I don't actually want to prevent use of my draft, it's just an informative question.
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100505 | Plural-active, singular-active or another voice when writing a paper by yourself?
I'm working on a draft paper which will likely have no coauthors. I'm wondering how to phrase my paper, and the abstract especially, in terms of voice. Which of the following should I prefer?
"We present XYZ ..."
"This paper/this work presents XYZ ..."
"I present XYZ ..."
The former sounds a bit too "royal", the second is the passive voice which I tend to avoid, and the third seems overly presumptuous.
What should I go for? Or - am I missing a fourth option?
Note: In case it matters, the paper is in some branch of applied Computer Science.
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88844 | Conference/workshop does not provide for 'poster logistics' - is that normal?
I'm supposed to present a poster in an well-rated Computer Science conference, or rather in a workshop within that conference. This is the first time this workshop will have posters (the larger conference has had them for a while). However, I've not received any information about the logistics of getting the poster printed and delivered - just a general note, after my inquiring about it, saying that I'm at liberty to design it any way I like and in any dimensions I like. In a previous conference at which I presented a poster we were told to submit a PDF of dimensions X x Y by a certain time, and that was that - the poster was printed and set up someplace. The opposite case seems strage, ridiculous even: For 10 or 20 (or 100) people, coming in from different countries, to each have to arrange for the printing of a poster and either bring it from overseas in a special container or to have to coordinate with print shops in a city they don't know.
The conference is held in a couple of weeks and I'm getting worried... of course I've contacted the workshop organizers about this, but - was I wrong to expect this to be taken care of? Is there some kind of other option of arranging this which I'm missing?
just a general note, after my inquiring about it, saying that I'm at liberty to design it any way I like and in any dimensions I like – For me this would trigger an immediate reply asking them whether they are really really sure about this.
@Wrzlprmft: Indeed, I replied and asked them about this; and it raised some red flags for me.
Perhaps they have poster walls and not too many people. That being said, having 2 poster sizes as option may be a solution.
You say it's well rated. Perhaps the WS organisers are chaotic. You might ask the conference main organisers.
@CaptainEmacs: That's a good idea; when I was writing about how the main conference has posters I was thinking "maybe I can piggy-back onto whatever it is they're doing".
Up to this moment I had never even heard of conferences printing posters for participants.
I think it's most likely that the conference organizers assume the attendees are familiar with common poster conventions are are assuming you will bring a typical sized poster and have not yet had someone take advantage of their lack of specifications to bring in a 6-by-6 meter monstrosity. As all the other answers have said, printing your own poster is the norm. Having a conference print a poster for you sounds like an absolute nightmare that you have no control over the quality of. The poster might look fine to them but only you realize that one of your figures is illegible.
@Wrzlprmft If you want to carry a 10mx20m poster to the conference, knock yourself out. It's pretty clear that the words "within reason" are implied. It's also pretty clear that asking the organizers if you really can bring any size you want is an abuse of their good will and a waste of evrybody's time.
@DavidRicherby: I was not considering bringing a gargantuan poster. However, it strikes me as odd that somebody gives such a verbose answer on your liberties without addressing such a thing as orientation or given recommendations on what would be best-suited given the facilities. This simply does not look like a well-informed answer. I would not be surprised if one orientation of standard-size posters would have an advantage over the other one at the end of the day.
I'm answering from an HCI-related subfield of CS:
What you describe - attendees print and bring their posters themselves - is completely normal.
While I do not rule out it exists even in my specific field, I have never encountered a conference that would print posters for you. Any time I have participated in, or just looked at the CfP for a poster session, attendees were merely told the available board size (and thus, the maximum allowable size for the poster) and asked to prepare their poster in time for the poster session.
Typically, attendees then have the poster printed at their home institution (and get compensated by the institution as a part of the conference attendance cost). This has the nice side-effect that, at least in smaller places, you might already get in touch with a few conference attendees at the airport, because you notice the people walking around with poster tubes. At some point before the poster session (depending on the conference, already at the beginning of the conference), attendees will take a few minutes to affix their posters at the boards they have been assigned (or just at any boards, if the poster space works in a first-come first-serve manner).
The poster belongs to the attendee/their employer and they are free to do with it after the poster session what they like. A possible procedure that has been followed by many people I have been in touch with is to take the poster back to one's home institution and place it on some wall in or near one's office.
A word on your impression:
The opposite case seems strage, ridiculous even: For 10 or 20 people, coming in from different countries, to each have to arrange for the printing of a poster and either bring it from overseas in a special container or to have to coordinate with print shops in a city they don't know.
In a way, that's true. But then, note that poster printing (well, any graphics printing) comes with a certain deal of variety and "risks". Colours might be messed up, the size/margins might be unfitting ... add to that that different regions of the world are used to (and thus base their poster templates on) different paper formats. Thus, it is desirable to see the poster when there is still some time to make some corrections.
As for the special container - any university institute I have encountered owns several of these, for exactly this purpose. Note that if you want to bring back the poster (as described in my text above), you need such a container anyway for the way back, so there would be no point in carrying the container there without anything in it.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
A conference, or workshop where the posters are printed for you is very exceptional. It sounds reasonable to print all posters for the presenters locally but
you can print posters much cheaper at university than in any copy shop, because its subsidized
some prefer a cheap preprint, others are willing to pay for the nice glossy high quality print.
the posters are often created with very different software such as LaTeX, Inkscape, Corel Draw or even Powerpoint... Even if one requests an PDF version xy file: They all interpret the PDF standard differently. PDF/a tries to solve this and PDF/a verification tools exist, but hardly any program (and user) knows about it. NB: A higher version number in PDF represents more complexity (Javascript and the like) but not better compatibility.
some guests will try to send a 1 GB file, because they use a fancy bitmap background picture, others do not want to hand out the digital files.
most people prefer to have a final review on the printed poster and have a final chance to improve colours. Especially Windows users in our institute have often broken symbols in diagrams (black box ■ instead of µ).
additional staff (expensive) is required to print, to discuss with attendees about file standards, and to hang up the posters.
people often meet and discuss already when hanging up the posters (this is an additional poster session for free ;-) (thanks to O. R. Mapper for the comment. I share his experience.)
This is why posters are usually printed individually, if it is not a in-house workshop. However there are conferences with presentations on large screens instead of paper poster too.
Travelling with a poster is sometimes difficult and I have seen fabric printed posters very often, but also patchworks of many DIN A4 sheets to get one A0 poster.
Image source: http://depts.washington.edu/uwposter/product/travel-fabric-poster/
All those reasons seem rather irrelevant to me. 1. It's cheaper to print all posters at a good quality at once at a single print shop than the sum of the different printing costs for all participants; and if you factor in the time and hassle and extra money for transporting the posters - it's much cheaper to have the conference print them. (2.) everyone gets a good print. (3.) Everybody can print PDFs these days (4.) File size limits; and if you can't meet them - then the organizers don't print it for you (5.) the PDF you send is what gets printed. ...
(6.) No discussion of file standards, you just submit a PDF (and if the organizers are nice they might also take postscript files). (7.) Much more hassle and distributed costs to do 20, or 50, or 100 single-poster printing projects than one project with 20-100 PDFs.
@einpoklum There is not one PDF standard.
@einpoklum: "the time and hassle and extra money for transporting the posters" - what do you mean? Transporting a poster has never taken me any longer or caused any hassle, and with poster tubes for around 10€, the transportation cost is completely negligible compared to the number of trips such a poster tube can be used for. As for printing cost - while printing several copies of the same document significantly lowers the price per copy, I am not convinced the same is automatically true for printing one copy of many different documents.
@JonasStein: You're kind of splitting hairs. Anything beginning with PDF 1.5 (which is is 14 years old now) will do just fine. And, again, if you use some arcane tool which generates old PDFs than the script checking poster PDF submissions can just reject you.
@O.R.Mapper: You need to: 1. (maybe) go to the print shop to get the file to them / coordinate the printing. 2. (definitely) go to the print shop and back to get the printed poster 3. Carry around another item on you to the airport 4. Check in another item at the airport 5. Collect another item at the airport 6. Carry another item to the conference. 7. Get to the poster location early enough to set it up 8. Find materials to set it up with 8. Make sure it's up straight. All of this stuff adds up.
@einpoklum: 1 and 2 are more or less irrelevant/non-existant when we're talking about in-house printing at your institution. 4 and 5 do not happen (or at least play out differently) because you'd usually take the poster tube as a carry-on item that fits conveniently into the overhead bins. The others are indeed true, but then, anything from 3 to 8 can basically be said about your laptop and other materials you use at the conference, as well. It would be nice to have someone else prepare all of that for you, but the idea that you have to do it yourself is certainly not unreaonsable. Also, ...
... as a final note: I once got in touch with a really nice conference attendee who I'd see during coffee breaks and various sessions for the next few days just because I needed someone to help me hang up my poster on the morning of the first conference day. Hence, this resolves the "axiom" that anything that makes you stay longer in the conference area is a good way to meet other attendees.
@einpoklum With respect, why are you bothering going to this conference at all? You make a list of minor logistics that most conference goers are very familiar with sound like epic trials and tribulations, which suggests you don't think it is worth your time. Several commenters and several voters have made clear that these things are normal for everyone else. I don't doubt you can come up with reasons for why it might be more convenient for you personally if conference organizers would print out your poster, but your question was "is that normal" for them not to do so: YES! it is normal!
@BryanKrause: Adding "with respect" before your comment does not undo its nature. Anyway, individual printing of posters makes about as much sense to me as for everyone to print their individual section of the proceedings and bring it to the conference themselves. And (most) of the justifications I've read thus far have been kind of bizarre really.
@einpoklum You asked if it is normal (for people to print their own posters). The answer you got, over and over, is: yes it is. Why are you still debating with everyone? Did you come here looking for an answer your question, or just to rant about your own opinion looking for validation?
@BryanKrause: You haven't seen me downvoting any of those answers have you? (Ok, you couldn't have, but I didn't though).
@einpoklum I have never had to check a poster tube, I carry it on every time. They usually fit nicely at the front of the overhead bins.
Hello from the biology field!
It's very common for us to print our own posters (I've actually never seen a conference where they do that for you, although I'm sure they do exist somewhere).
I wanted to add a small point to the other detailed answers: if the posters are printed in the attendee's institution, they then belong to said institution, and can be re-used at other conferences (which definitely lowers the cost and environmental impact!) and/or displayed in the corridors and other "social" places - in each lab I've worked in, we had walls covered in collections of previous posters, reminding people of past work, past colleagues, and helping explanations to visitors.
Actually, when they print the poster for you, they obviously let you take it after the conference, since the organizers are not making a poster collection and the convention hall will not house them after the conference ends.
@einpoklum: "they obviously let you take it after the conference" - if you take it after the conference, you need a poster tube for the way back. Now that you have to bring a poster tube anyway, most of your points related to the convenience of traveling without a poster tube would seem to become moot.
@einpoklum yes, obviously they don't have a poster collection, but what I also meant is that in order to re-use the poster in another conference, you'd need to bring it, right? so basically the "conference-taking-care-of-posters" thing is only convenient if it's the first time you use this poster, and only because it saves you the cost and the "trouble" of having a loaded tube instead of an empty tube on your way there ;)
@Kerkyra: If the second conference prints the poster too, then not only do you not have to bring it, but you also don't need to take it home from the second conference. So you would not need to take a tube with you at all.
@einpoklum but chances are, the second conference has different requirements (size, file format,...) and you have to work on the poster again. Also, it duplicates the costs of printing in terms of money and environmental impact (loooots of expensive paper and glossy inks on those shiny posters :-) ). I'm not saying that everyone has to care about that, but some organizers might! Also, the financial cost is always for you: either you pay a direct "poster handling fee", or the cost is averaged on a slightly higher attending fee for everyone at the conference...
@Kerkyra: (1) If the second conference has different requirements, then I wouldn't be bringing the first conference poster there anyway. (2) We're talking about an extra single sheet of paper; even if it's of good quality - the extra cost (over the other 50 or 100 sheets) is tiny compared to printing it yourself, and the environmental impact it is entirely negligible compared to, say, actually flying to get to the conference. Honestly? I feel like you're justifying the hassle you (and soon me) are experiencing rather than disclaim it as unfortunate.
@einpoklum okay, I see what you mean, but for me it was never a hassle to walk around with a poster tube. Everyone does it anyway. Just keep in mind that for you to get rid of that "hassle", someone else has to take care of it (mostly unpaid volunteers organisers), so, well, you might want to do your part. But let's agree to disagree, we have obviously really different points of view and we both have made our points pretty clearly!
@Kerkyra: Oh, I know, actually - I organized a couple of courses (not academic conferences) in my day, and was the one doing the printing; and one of the people running around campus putting up posters. I guess I'm just assuming what I would consider to be the more efficient form of organization would also be the intuition for most people - and it isn't. +1 to that comment.
Speaking from the Applied Mathematics/Earth Science divide, the closest I've seen to the model that the question implies is where a conference will advertise a partner commercial poster printing firm, which will then have a physical presence at the conference, from which your poster can be collected. Actually placing the poster in the correct location remains the duty of the presenter however, and prices don't really seem all that competitive.
This tends to be linked to very large conferences, with multiple poster sessions per day, and to conferences which repeatedly use the same facilities year after year, and thus have built up enough repeat custom for both sides to keep up the relationship. When conferences are smaller, or cycle between multiple venues without revisiting, then it's possible a local member of the organising committee might have a recommendation of a local firm, but often, particularly if it's being held on a campus site, it's just left up to the individual presenters.
Having said all that, in the modern age it's fairly trivial to find a firm which will print and deliver a poster via snail mail. If you can arrange to get it sent to your hotel (for a large conference) or a friendly member of the organising committee (for a smaller one) then the same effect can be produced.
I'm adding an answer of my own based on the reply I got from the workshop chairs and information I gathered from other sources.
First - as others suggest, it is indeed at least very common for conferences not to print posters themselves. It's apparently just as common for there to be absolutely no support from the organizers for poster printing.
But what was just as interesting was the following:
Up until not so many years ago, there were no/very few posters in the conference + workshops overall. More and more tracks and workshops of the conference started "amassing" poster sessions - but apparently it has not dawned on many people that this is now a "many posters conference" (I estimate over 100). In fact, the reply to my question about the possibility of the conference doing the printing was, that there are no resources allocated for it, but that it "would be a great because XYZ". So, apparently nobody has brought up the possibility of the conference organization including the centralized printing of posters.
So my bottom line is:
Sometimes, the option of "conference prints" has simply not been considered; and thus is the default rather than the norm. We can make a convincing case in its favor - especially in large conferences - and make it more common as well.
What are the reasons for the downvotes, according to the downvoters?
@O.R.Mapper: Thanks for asking that, but - well, the downvoters don't get notified of your comment, so I doubt you'll get answers. I'm guessing some people disliked my argumentative tone in comments above and stuck it to me down here :-(
@einpoklum I do not think the word "norm" means what you think it means.
@O.R.Mapper I think they downvoted it because after all the answers and comments that OP got, this self-answer feels like it ignores all said and redefines what a "norm" is based on his own experience, not backed up by any sources, not even the rest of testimonies in this very page and, overall, it's a really poor answer that feels like half a rant, half a middle finger to the rest.
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87522 | Are there any online tool for translating a Russian-language PDF to English?
I am reading a paper on arXiv
However the paper is completely in Russian:
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1701/1701.02595.pdf
Is there any free online service I can use to translate this paper to English?
The translation produced by google translate is a bit awkward at best, I tried copying some paragraphs and the language is unnatural, in some places the syntax makes little sense and you have to reconstruct meaning from a lump of words, I can see why the OP would prefer something more dedicated. I hypothesize that scientific writing is not as developed an aspect of google translate, and having seen how volunteers help it get meanings and idioms right, I am not so surprised actually. Unfortunately there is lots of research an bibliography in Russian in CE so something dedicated would be great.
Google Translate will do this, and no copy-paste is required. On the main page click translate a document, then "Browse" to upload the document, then "Translate" (it will auto-detect the language in the document).
The chances of a really good translation are pretty slim; but that's the nature of translation being very hard. I'm not aware of a better, free resource than that. This is why many English-language mathematics PhD programs require proficiency in one of French, German, or Russian.
Thanks for pointing out the "translate a document" option. That must be new as I've never noticed it before.
During my PhD work, I've come across many non-English articles of interest that have no English translations best I could tell. Copying and pasting into Google Translate is good when you have a text or vectorized file. If you do not, OCR software, careful editing, and then copying and pasting into Google Translate works.
A member of my research group pointed out to me that you can get Google quality OCR by uploading the document to Google Drive and then editing in Google Docs. This can work very well, or not well at all. I typically find I need to clean up the scan enough in an image editing software that using a local OCR software is sufficient, so there's often no reason to use Google's OCR. I use Tesseract for local OCR. In your case, no OCR is required.
For longer documents, Google Translator Toolkit can be better than copying and pasting small segments. This will translate the entire document. I'd copy and paste the text of the document you are interested in into a text file and upload that to Google Translator Toolkit. Afterward, you can readd the equations and whatnot in Word, LaTeX, or whatever you believe would be best.
Also, my own experience with Russian and German in Google Translate for fluid dynamics related papers suggests that the translation often leaves something to be desired. Google Translate tends to give literal translations which may not correspond to what is said in English. (Frequently the differences in terminology are thought provoking, actually.) A scientific dictionary can help here, as also can having a copy of a related foreign language article and a professional translation of that article (to see how certain phrases are translated by a professional). All is not lost with Google alone, however. Google does take into account the edits you can make in Google Translate, and I've noticed over the past few years marked improvements that appear to come from my own edits.
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8055 | Do community colleges have good math libraries?
Do community colleges have good mathematics libraries (with advanced books)? I am sure that it is different from place to place. I am interested to get some feeling of the general situation.
You would need to enquire at each institution you consider applying to.
In addition to other helpful answers, I think the point should be made that one must reconcile oneself to spending money on math books, since even when libraries have the books, they may well be checked out. All the more so at active places!
Though I am not advocating it (also I am not a lawyer, etc.), the reality is that there do exist certain websites where you can find a wide array of scanned math books for free, which would enable you to supplement whatever your college library has to offer.
Of course, as Dave Clarke says, every institution is different. However, in general I would expect the answer is no.
Community colleges typically offer only lower-division courses and don't expect their students or faculty to carry on research. Moreover, they are usually publicly funded and charge only nominal tuition, so they are not likely to have a lot of extra money. Given this, it's difficult to see why a community college librarian would want to spend money acquiring advanced mathematics books or journals.
That said, a community college library would almost certainly have access to the interlibrary loan network, allowing one to (eventually) acquire any resource of interest. Some might also have a reciprocity agreement with a nearby research university library. It is also quite possible they would have access to online databases that could include a lot of material in mathematics.
I fully agree with Nate Eldredge's answer, but here are some resources for exploring what sorts of mathematics books you might find at primarily undergraduate institutions:
If there are specific community colleges you are thinking of applying to, you can look for an online library catalog, or visit the library in person and check it out. This is by far the most reliable way to tell whether you would be happy with the library.
The Mathematical Association of America provides a basic library list of books recommended for undergraduate libraries, annotated with how essential they feel the book is. Decades ago the list had two-year and four-year sections, but nowadays it is probably aimed more at four-year colleges. Still, it will give an upper bound for what one can reasonably expect of a typical community college. You won't find research monographs on the list.
The American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges apparently had a similar list, at least as of 1993 when these guidelines were written (see D.1), but I cannot find it online. You could probably learn more by asking them.
Of course, underfunded institutions may lack even the most essential books on the basic library list, while fancy schools may have all of them and more. Note that while there are some pretty fancy liberal arts colleges out there, you don't generally run across community colleges with big budgets.
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149514 | Erroneous paper published and reviewed on MathSciNet
An article claiming to solve a great long-standing mathematical open problem was published in a conference proceedings, and was refereed on MathSciNet positively, i.e. the reviewer makes an impression that the proof is valid. However, some details hint that this may not be the case:
the result of this caliber should go to a top-tier journal and get a significant resonance in the mathematical community;
the preprint has been available on arXiv for 15 years before its final publication and underwent eight redactions (with the last redaction about eight years before the publication);
I talked to an expert in this area around 10 years ago and their opinion about one of the earlier drafts of the preprint was that it is erroneous and the author doesn't want to admit his mistakes.
Now some other articles (published in first-tier journals) use this questionable result. And many other people are still working on solving this long-standing problem, and may have doubts about the status of the problem, in view of this publication.
So my question is: how much of the responsibility lies on the MathSciNet reviewer who "validated" the proof? My understanding is that it is their duty to reveal the mistakes in the published article, so that the other authors do not base their work on it. Is there a way to "nudge" the reviewer to make amends to the review?
I think I know which paper you're talking about (although I have not seen the MR review, as I do not have access to MR), but I think (1) this question is too specific to math content and math culture for Academia, and (2) your wording of "Isn't it their duty to reveal the mistakes in the published article" implies that the reviewer was aware of this, and while this might be true, nothing you've said implies this, and thus on face value this seems to be a leading question, and thus probably not suitable (as presently worded) for Academia.
@DaveLRenfro Thanks, I changed it into a statement.
Peer review is generally conducted without any reward or punishment for the peer reviewer. If you start punishing the reviewers, soon there will be none.
@AnonymousPhysicist: Technically, MathSciNet reviewers do get a small monetary reward, currently about USD 12.00 per review. While I understand your point, I think it's also important not to conflate review databases like MathSciNet with "peer review" in the usual sense, since there are many differences, and I think confusing the two may underlie some of the mistaken premises in this question.
Related, mathoverflow: Does a referee have to check carefully the proof? and Should I become a Mathscinet reviewer?. But please only say 'reviewer' not 'referee'
If you see mistakes, why not publish your own paper detailing at least what those mistakes are, if not what the true answers might be?
how much of the responsibility lies on the MathSciNet reviewer who "validated" the proof?
None. The instructions for reviewers don't ask the reviewer to check the validity of the proofs; by a time a paper gets to MathSciNet it has been peer reviewed already. The purpose of a MathSciNet review is to explain what's in the paper and why someone might want to read it.
It is fine to write to contact AMS and ask them to retract a review, if (1) you are a well-known expert in the field, capable of speaking (to a reasonable extent) for the field as a whole; or (2) you are able to conclusively demonstrate that the paper has an error.
If neither of these is the case, while your desire to do something is admirable, realistically there is probably not any effective action available to you.
Thank you for your reply. Maybe I can ask your opinion on the following aspect. Suppose a young researcher obtained a certain small contribution to the problem in some partial case. What would be his or her best course of actions when publishing their result: ignore the article in question whatsoever, or work hard on fulfilling item (2) in your answer ("conclusively demonstrate") and supply the findings in their article? The amount of work to do (2) may turn out to be incomparable with their small but still interesting contribution to the topic.
I'd ignore the article in question, if I believed it was wrong. If you have something you'd like to publish, I'd encourage you to seek out the opinion of an expert in the subject of your paper. In particular, if you are a student or postdoc, I'd recommend that you ask your advisor. Good luck!
How could one do (2)? Can people who do not sarisfy (1) really write proofs that some paper is wrong to MSN such that MSN actually reads them and works on finding out the truth?
(Disclosure: I review for MathSciNet.)
how much of the responsibility lies on the MathSciNet reviewer who "validated" the proof?
In my view, very little if any, and by using the word "validate" I think you overstate the case. Reviewing for MathSciNet is not meant to be like refereeing, and reviewers are definitely not asked to check the correctness of a paper as they would for a referee report. The purpose of a MathSciNet review is mainly to summarize what the paper contains, so that prospective readers can quickly tell if the contents of the paper are likely to be of interest to them. I don't think you should take the existence of a MathSciNet review as any sort of "seal of approval" on the correctness of the paper.
The reviewer is certainly allowed to mention errors or shortcomings in the paper if they should happen to observe any, but this is not a requirement or an expectation.
And keep in mind that unlike an referee report, MathSciNet reviews are public to the world and signed with the reviewer's name. If a reviewer says something negative about a paper, especially a very high-profile paper, they might face blowback in a way that an anonymous referee wouldn't. Maybe you think they have an obligation to do it anyway and face the consequences, but it's a significant ask.
Useful reading is the Guide for Reviewers that MathSciNet points reviewers to.
My understanding is that it is their duty to reveal the mistakes in the published article, so that the other authors do not base their work on it.
I would only agree insofar as to say that if the reviewer is actually aware of a specific mistake in the paper, they should mention it. Even so, that would only be out of a general civic duty to the community, not any responsibility explicitly laid on them by MathSciNet. And for me, a vague sense of unease that something is not quite right with the paper would not rise to that level. If the reviewer does not happen to find a specific error, I do not think they have a responsibility to go looking for one. Certainly in my time as a reviewer and in talking to others, I've never had an impression that this was expected.
Is there a way to "nudge" the reviewer to make amends to the review?
Their name is attached to the review, so of course you are free to contact them and say something. But as I mentioned, I think what you're asking is beyond the scope of what's expected of a reviewer. If you think the reviewer actually knows of a specific error and has covered it up, that would be another story, but as I said I don't think they have an obligation to carefully check a paper in hopes of finding errors.
Moreover, MathSciNet doesn't really encourage reviewers to revise their reviews after initial submission. There is no automated system to submit revisions. So even if the reviewer wanted to make changes, they'd have to contact the MathSciNet editorial staff and convince them that changes were warranted.
Now some other articles (published in first-tier journals) use this questionable result.
Well, it's the responsibility of those authors to satisfy themselves of the correctness of results that they rely on. They cannot reasonably take the mere existence of a MathSciNet review as positive evidence of the paper's correctness.
"Their name is attached to the review, so of course you are free to contact them and say something." If you complain about someone else's volunteer reviewing, you are putting your own reputation at risk.
So my question is: how much of the responsibility lies on the MathSciNet reviewer who "validated" the proof? My understanding is that it is their duty to reveal the mistakes in the published article, so that the other authors do not base their work on it. Is there a way to "nudge" the reviewer to make amends to the review?
None. Unlike what your title implies MathSciNet reviews are not referee reports nor are they endorsements. As stated in the guidelines, the reviews are there to help some decide if they wish to read the paper.
Incorrect. The primary duty is to provide context to the paper. Moreover, as noted in the instructions, the review is not meant to start a debate as the original author cannot answer.
This assumes or implies that somehow the review motivated citations to the paper, which would be extraordinary.
If you believe you found an error, you should supply evidence of that error in a comment to the original journal or another journal. This is the most constructive way of correcting a wrong paper. An alternative would be to use PubPeer.
Frankly: why the excitement? People cite wrong results - including papers that have been officially withdrawn by journals - all the time. See this table compiled by Retraction Watch of the Top 10 most highly cited retracted papers. #2 on that table has over 1000 citation since the article was retracted.
You state, without qualification, that the paper is erroneous. Actually, that may be true or not. And even if it contains errors, it is also possible that they are immaterial to the main result. You blame it on the reviewer. But the reviewer may simply be mistaken in their analysis - especially if the result is deep and subtle. People make mistakes. Authors do. Reviewers also. It isn't evil intent.
And it certainly isn't the job of a review writer, after publication, to make a claim without evidence that a paper is flawed.
It is the responsibility of the reviewer to try to give a valid report on the paper as best they can analyze it. If they are wrong, they have made a mistake, but I doubt that any reviewer would "cover up" for an author, stating that something was true, when they knew it was not.
But it is also the responsibility of the reviewer to include in any report that they can't follow the argument to its end, if that is the case. But that is about all that they can do and all you can ask for.
But, the proper response to an erroneous paper is to publish a correct one. That can be done by anyone. If you are sure the paper has errors, publish your own analysis.
But in the end, mathematics can be just hard.
I'll note that some papers have errors that haven't been noticed after fifty years or more. No one really doubts the result, though a thorough analysis might prove them wrong. Automated theorem provers/checkers can catch some of that, but not all. But the human mind has limitations in how much detail it can manage and some proofs go beyond the natural limits.
Can I ask you what exactly you suggest? To publish a correct solution to a long standing problem? Or to publish an "article" the whole purpose is to reveal a gap in the published paper? That seems more like a function of the designated review in the designated database. Hence my question.
Either is fine. But the reviewer can only comment on what they recognize. As I said, reviewers aren't perfect, though most are conscientious, especially for important works..
Your answer and comment do not address one important aspect. As you noticed, math is hard. A person may spend half of their career trying to prove a small partial case of this big open problem. And their dedication for this project is severely undermined by the existence of a "proof" that is most likely erroneous, but is "validated" by the reviewer who most probably did a disservice to the community. To rephrase my question plainly: is there a way to make the reviewer do his or her job right and amend the published review?
Why do you think "most likely erroneous"? What is your evidence? Find the proof, then make bold statements. If you have proof of error, then publish it. Otherwise you are just guessing, I think.
+1 The reviewer's job is not to be perfect; the reviewer's job is to write a good-faith review. (Same for referees, editors, readers, and ultimately even authors.) Not noticing a subtle error is not a moral failing. The math literature is full of mistakes, large and small, and this makes life as a mathematician difficult, but given that mathematics is done by human beings, how else could it be?.
The MathSciNet reviewer is NOT an additional referee.
@ZeroTheHero, but the issues are the same.
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46914 | List of 2013 US National Merit Scholars
I am doing research that requires me to find a list of how many US National Merit Scholars were enrolled at each university for 2013.
I can find the 2014 list in the Annual Report the National Merit Society has on the website and I can find data pre-2013 at the Center for Measuring University Performance (at ASU). However neither an online search, the National Merit Society website, nor my university's online catalog were able to locate the Annual Report for 2013. I know this information must be out there (since the Annual Report for 2014 is a downloadable pdf), but is not easy to find. Does anybody know of a list (preferably online) of how many 2013 National Merit Scholars attended each university?
Reference requests are considered on-topic. Typically, "shopping" questions are more related to whether or not you should attend A or B. Searching for a factual reference, especially regarding the scope of academia, is acceptable here.
I see this already has an answer, but for future reference and for searchability it would be useful (IMO) to specify what nation's 'National' award is being discussed.
Added a link to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation website, which should make it completely unambiguous which program is being referred to here.
Using Google-Fu, I believe I have found what you are looking for:
The 2012-2013 Annual Report
As a guide, someone somewhere will always want to archive something. In this case, archive.org didn't have it, but the owner of that domain, who is likely to be an awesome person in research in a few years, cached a copy of it for us.
The statement used to find this document was:
"2012-13" national merit scholar annual report pdf
It is important to use the years in quotes as 2013 can be used to find the current report as well.
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you both for the comment and the information; neither myself nor a reference librarian could find this. Google-Fu indeed :)
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127081 | Does every paper in mathematics have Zbl and MR?
I need to insert the Zbl and MR of papers given in the reference of my paper. I can't find Zbl of some the papers. for example the paper On Inverse Eigenvalue Problems for Two Kinds of Special Banded Matrices. I search in the https://zbmath.org/ database to find Zbl but it returns no result, I also search inhttps://mathscinet.ams.org/mrlookup to find the MR.
Thanks
Why do you need to add these if you can't find them? Is there some journal that requires references to include them?
@TobiasKildetoft yes the journal asks to include them
I see. That is very surprising, as I have never encountered a journal that requires those to be included.
Your paper is MR 3628846.
MR and Zbmath don't index every paper in mathematics. Each one has a list of specific journals that they index; these lists are extensive but not exhaustive. New journals are sometimes added, and journals can be dropped if they cease publishing regularly or don't keep their quality up. However, MathSciNet at least does index the journal where your paper appeared (I didn't check Zbmath).
Both services operate mainly by subscription (usually institutional subscriptions). As you've found, they do offer limited searching to non-subscribers (e.g. the MR Lookup service) but it is, well, limited, and it is not unusual to have trouble finding a paper through the free searches. The full subscription version offers much more powerful searching. In this case, however, when I pasted the paper's title into the "title" field of MR Lookup, it returned the paper right away, so I am not sure why you were having trouble.
The MR is ok, but can't find Zbl
I suspect Zbmath ceased indexing that journal in 2016. Plenty of results from 2016 and before, but none from 2017 or later.
Update: starting from 2021, Zbmath offers unlimited functionalities to non-subscribers.
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30415 | What are the pros and cons of being a Mathematical Reviews' reviewer?
I received a letter from Mathematical Reviews inviting me to be a reviewer. Before I make my decision, may I ask what are the possible advantages and/or disadvantages of being a reviewer?
Assuming that Mathematical Reviews is not a predatory journal (is it the AMS one?), this sounds more like "this is your regular job" if you work in academia.
I am pretty sure a similar question on this board has been asked before, not specific to Mathematical Reviews, though. Does anybody remember?
Yes, the one affiliated with AMS.
Related question http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/23530/546. I was probably wrong. It is specific to Mathematical Reviews. @ff524, yes I know Math Reviews is different.
Note that you need to transfer copyright in your reviews to AMS. When I was invited, I offered to write reviews under a Creative Commons license, but they weren't interested.
@scaaahu: Yes, the question you link is effectively a duplicate of this one, mod the "after leaving academia" part. However, user36236's answer below is much more complete than the answer on the other question.
@Greg No. Mathematical Reviews is what you might call a meta-journal, that summarizes and evaluates published journal articles about mathematics. Being asked to write reviews for them is not the same thing as being asked to referee papers submitted for publication so doing it is not part of a mathematician's regular academic job.
For background, MathReviews are reviews written by mathematicians of published mathematical papers and typically describe the content of the paper. Such reviews are available on the online database MathSciNet.
Here are some reasons to do it
Writing reviews forces you to read some papers that are not in the focal point of your interests. Since there is no decision to take, I find it less time-consuming and stress-generating than refereeing a paper.
A good review is a service to the mathematical community: it allows mathematicians to find relevant papers and decide wether a paper is worth searching for and/or reading.
You get paid $8 for each review that you can use to buy books from the American Mathematical Society.
Your name might appear in MathSciNet as a reviewer next to some nice authors and nice papers ;-)
Here are some reasons not do it:
Reading a paper and writing a review takes time.
You are not anonymous. If you are not careful enough in writing your review, you might upset some authors.
Here are some tips to have a good experience:
You can set up a limit of the number of papers that you accept to have at once. Set it a reasonable level for your workload.
Choose carefully the AMS classifications that you are interested in. A poor choice can lead you in reviewing papers that do not interest you. (Afterwards, if you receive many uninteresting paper, you should consider mentioning that you are not interested in their AMS classification.)
Reviewing a book takes much time. Think carefully about it when asked.
This pretty much sums it up. Another thing that comes to my mind: It is something you put in your academic CV if you're a starting researcher (PhD, PostDoc).
"You get paid $8 for each review" ... wow. seriously?
@xLeitix: Well, you get points, which are redeemable in the AMS online book store (at the rate of 1 USD per point). Zentralblatt has a similar scheme with Springer.
The AMS even explains how you should declare this to the IRS when your activity as a reviewer becomes industrial.
@tohecz I have seen this on CVs. I do not think it hurts your CV, but it does not neither clearly improve the CV. On a good CV, it gives the impression that you can do something else than writing papers and giving talk on you own subject.
@user36236: It's an indication that you're a good academic citizen, something that might be relevant when being considered for a faculty position. It'll never make up for fewer publications or grants, of course, but all things being equal, someone on the committee might think "This candidate doesn't shirk service to the profession, so will probably sit on committees without too much prodding, taking some load off our shoulders."
+After reviewing a book, you might get to keep it. Handy if it happens to be a book you're interested in. (Never happened to me though).
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23759 | Showing interest / Applying for PhD position that has just opened, before finishing Master studies
Currently I am working towards Master in Computer Science degree, hoping to be done by the end of the year.
Last month a new professor moved to our University and now there are open Phd positions in his research group. I decided to work on a Master thesis provided by this group, however before starting to work on the master thesis I want to finish my exams. Additionally, I am interested for the Phd positions as I like the area of research, but I believe that it is highly unlikely that the Phd positions will remain open until I am done with the thesis. Having in mind that I have the exams to finish first, it will be ca. 6-7 months from now until I am completely done. And I believe the positions will be filled by then.
I don't know how to proceed now. I think the best asset I have in hand at the moment is the fact that I am going to work my master thesis in the group of this new professor. But other than that, there are some downsides because he does not know me as a student as he just moved to our university. Also, I don't have any publications to impress him, and my grades got slightly worse lately.
What is the best thing to do now? There are multiple options:
1) Leave the exams aside; Start working on the thesis, after starting to work on the thesis express interest in the Phd position. Ensure that the work of the thesis is high quality so the Professor is impressed.
2) Express interest in the Phd position from now. Finish the exams, and then start working on the thesis. During the process improve the grades to impress the Professor.
The dilemma here is, if I wait long to finish everything, by then the places might be gone. On the other side, if I act as soon as possible, I think as if I don't have much in hand to impress the professor.
Please consider this question having in my the context of my exact situation and then from a general view point evaluate on what could happen in the typical case.
I am sure, here we have more experienced Professors and Graduate student that could provide insightful information and suggestions.
EDIT 1: Additionally, what is the typical time frame needed for a Phd position to be filled, I believe 6 months is more than enough, or?
EDIT 2: What if there is an application deadline? And the deadline is at least 6 months away before you get the Master degree? Is it worth applying? I believe no Professor would wait for a student to get his degree for 6 months and then give him a position? My basic instinct says "go for it" there is nothing you would loose at least you are not going to regret that you didn't do it, however when thinking rationally all the odds seem against
Thanks!
I can maybe guess, but what country?
If you are currently working on a master's thesis in the group of the professor with whom you'd like to a do a PhD, the best thing to do is set up an appointment and talk to him.
As an advisor, I don't need to have a published paper to see whether someone in my own group is a competent researcher or not. I can see this by interacting with the person, through reading their project updates and emails, and by talking with other the more senior members of the research group (who sometimes will work with the students more closely than I can).
Given that the goal of an advisor is to select people they believe will become excellent researchers rather than simply the "top students," someone who is an "internal" candidate is often a better option than taking a chance on someone whose work the faculty member hasn't been able to observe directly.
[That said, however, I think there is also something to be said for considering going somewhere else for a PhD than the place where you did your bachelor's and master's degrees, when it makes sense to do so.]
Thanks for the answer. I just want to rephrase some points which might be important in here. 1) The professor just moved to the new University, as such I have not cooperated with any of his coworkers. So there is no way for him to get insight about my qualities except the recommendation letters that I can get from influential professors. 2) I not working currently on the thesis yet. My dilemma is here: Should I start working on the thesis asap, and should I "open up" to the professor about my intentions?
If you're interested in working for the professor, let him know as soon as possible—with respect to both the master's and the PhD theses.
what would qualify for "when it makes sense to do so"... what are the things for which it would make sense to switch institution/country? research interest, university ranking, income?!?
In general, the only reasons I would stay at the same school are financial, personal (family in the area, two-body problems, etc.), or because there is a unique research opportunity that cannot be pursued elsewhere (for instance, your thesis advisor is the pioneer of method X that is at the heart of your research, or because only school Y has instrument Z). Otherwise, I'd try to go somewhere else.
Upvoted for "set up an appointment and talk to them".
Talk to the new professor ASAP, since he will be the one to make the decision about admitting you.
When someone moves to a new school/job, they are "unsure" about how they will be accepted at the new place. The best thing you can do is to give him a "welcoming gift" in the form of a student who will do what it takes to get into his group. Assuming that your qualifications are halfway decent, being among the first to welcome him may be all it takes to get it.
The professor may well have preferences as to whether you should do your thesis or your exams first. If he expresses a preference, follow that preference in order to "qualify."
On the other hand, he may say, I'll hold a spot for you until you complete both your thesis and exams. Getting a commitment at this early stage is way different from waiting until you are ready, and applying then.
It's like the airlines; they have a bunch of "cheap seats" for people who buy tickets "early." If you wait until the day of the flight, you will have to pay "full price."
I like your analogy with the airline. I believe talking to the professor asap would be clever as well, but I am afraid of looking to suggestive and cocky. And maybe at this point he wont have enough parameters in hand to evaluate me.
@WolfgangKuehne: Just take it slow. It's quite possible that "he won't have enough parameters in hand to evaluate you." But the key thing is to "take a ticket and get in line" before others do.
I think the answer depends strongly on where the money comes from. I third the advice to talk to the professor in question immediately.
In the US, for example, the answer will partially hinge on whether the money needs to be spent on a project that starts now or soon, say National Science Foundation grant money, or is coming from the professor's startup package and has a much longer or unlimited time horizon. If it's the latter, then they may not be too worried about when you might start, and therefore might be willing to make a commitment on you now for a position in a year.
People need to eat, so they need jobs. One does not need to wait until a time limited job is finished before searching for a new one.
There is nothing wrong with politely showing interest in doing a PhD in his research group. The fact that you are at the same institution means he can just go to your Master's advisor and informally ask if you are good for the position, and probably trust it more than a recommendation letter.
If he wants you on board, comes the starting date that the funding requires; but this is something only he can know, and will tell you upfront if he needs to fill the position before you finish. Even in this case, showing interest may put you on his list in case he gets another grant, or could forward you offers from other groups. If he really wants you, sometimes there are ways to get you in; for example, if the university does not require you to have a master to enrol on a PhD.
Regarding the timings, announced positions usually quote a deadline. You may want to wait to be closer to it so you have more time to build up your thesis, but on the other hand, the longer you wait, the bigger the chances your application will just join a big pile for review. In this case, probably the sooner the better, because it is unlikely your thesis will radically improve in a few of weeks (you will get progress, of course, but not a breakthrough that is not visible already).
Lastly, as aeismail said, I think is very important for a researcher to move around institutions, and when possible and makes sense, even countries. I did my undergraduate in Spain and a Master's in Sweden, and I can see they are very different systems; so they sort of complement each other's deficiencies. On the other hand, I know brilliant people that studied all the way to the PhD in the same university, and plan to become lecturers there some day. As such, they don't get "new input"; they have the same weak points and deficiencies as the people who taught them, and they will just perpetuate it.
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172883 | How to cite a YouTube Video embedded within a website?
I would like to cite a youtube video that is inside of another website. The video seems to be taken from youtube, but another website included it. Do I cite the video or the website?
Cite the original source wherever possible.
If you're referring to the content of the video itself, you should cite the video. Guidance for citing YouTube videos is available for APA and MLA formats.
If you also refer to the commentary on the video from the webpage, you can cite that in addition, similar to how one might cite a book review.
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91441 | Resolving authorship when PhD student does most of the work on paper, but originally agreed to support another PhD student (first author)?
I am a senior PhD student (in electrical engineering) who has been working on a project for approximately two years with another student (call him John, same year as me) and our advisor.
It was decided at the beginning of the project that John would be the leader of the research and I would help. Over the past two years, John's research interests have drifted away from the topic of the project, and he has increasingly lost interest in the project. This has pushed more responsibility on myself (coincidentally, my interests have drifted towards the topic). We published a conference paper on the topic (which had John as the first author even though I wrote the majority of it).
I raised concerns with my advisor about six months ago that I was doing more of the work. He listened and spoke with John that he needs to put in more effort. Shortly after I mentioned my concerns to my advisor, we were invited to submit the work to a book chapter to which we agreed (with the same author order, since John was still labeled as the leader of the project).
Over the course of the past six months, John and I have been writing the chapter. John has not been putting much effort into the chapter (John's written English is very poor and he is not detailed oriented at all, resulting in many equations being incorrect), so I have taken it upon myself to undergo the (very time-consuming) task of fixing the paragraphs and math. The quality of the chapter would have been very poor if it was not for my efforts.
I mentioned to my advisor in private that I basically wrote the entire chapter to which he responded that John's work was primarily in the theory. I know that John has not contributed more to the theory than I have. Furthermore, my advisor mentioned that John needs this work as a chapter of his thesis so he must be first author.
We are now a couple of days away from submission and I am feeling like I was exploited. I am sacrificing my own projects in order to finish this. Since my name is on the chapter, I have put in a lot of effort to make sure it is good quality. It is upsetting that John will end up getting more credit than myself. Furthermore, I am questioning the ethics of the fact that I wrote a chapter of someone else's thesis.
How should I proceed with this? My advisor has already seemed to make up his mind. Should I request/demand that a footnote be added that John and I contributed equally?
Your supervisor may be using you to help 'John' graduate. If 'John' is not listed as the first author, then he/she may not be able to claim that he/she did the work/thesis him/herself. If your supervisor is using you to help 'John' graduate, then the said footnote will be detrimental to 'John'. I would simply go along with it and try to get a publication out of it and move far far away from 'John' in the future.
This is an unfortunate situation. In the future, if you are not first author, you probably need to restrain yourself from putting in first-author-level time and effort.
It's a bit too late for the simplest solution, which would have been just to stop work on the project when you discovered that John needs the chapter for his thesis. You don't need this project at all, even if you have got more interested in it as it progressed.
The first authorship should reflect the amount of work invested. I would raise your concerns now, since when you submit it will really be too late.
If the first author is making mistakes, don't go fixing them for him. You have to tell him to fix them by himself. If he doesn't fix them, get your name removed, stop the cooperation and move on. This is a lesson you need to take from the situation - don't work for other people.
@Sulthan I strongly disagree. The author list should include all contributors, and all contributors are responsible for the quality of the finished paper. And your "lesson to take" seems to be to that one should avoid collaboration. That's terrible advice.
I personally find the "* authors contributed equally" footnotes to be supremely awkward, though perhaps you're in a discipline where they are common, in which case go for it.... And in this case you're arguing it isn't even true. I'd say you're getting a raw deal, but the time to push back was earlier, when you could have argued for the appropriate recognition and then declined the chapter inclusion if you didn't get either the proper recognition or more work from your colleague.
My advice: treat this as a learning experience, be gracious, and move on.
+1 for the time to push back was earlier. I think at an earlier stage you could have said, "Because I am not first author on this project, my other work must take priority. Therefore, I can only put X hours per week into the project. If you want me to put more effort in, then I would need to be made first author."
Thanks, Fred. Do you think it's worth expressing my frustration further or stay silent and move on?
Seems like you've already made your position clear.
Right, as @Dawn's comment, the time to push back was earlier. Now, at best passively, you'd found yourself complicit in (not completely crazy, but, still, ...) misrepresentation of contributions, as (dubiously) reflected in the author-list + order game. (Which is pretty dumb, from many reality-based viewpoints, notwithstanding that apparently some number of professionals make decisions based on this...) The real lesson is about avoiding in the future situations where people are playing such games. It's not good for science, either!!! That is, b.s. index numbers [cont'd]
[cont'd] ... are an almost entirely contrived commodified thing, hence, commodity, that for-profit entities (many publishers, whether open-source or not!) use for their commercial ends. This has a hugely corruptive influence on the behavior of grad students and post-docs, especially in situations where they're dependent on grant funding through a PI who is... inevitably... "in the game". You should be aware of all these potential corruptions, and be wary of PIs and "groups/labs" where either there's too much buy-in to game-playing, or at the opposite end, too much naivete about it...
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43012 | Puzzled with "Paper not suitable for this journal" decision for applied mathematics paper
Recently, I submitted a paper to a journal published by Elsevier. The "Elsevier Journal Finder" feature suggested this particular journal in #3 out of a total of 5 suggestions. A while ago, I had also published a work in the same journal, which was of the same topic (satellite retrievals) that I was trying to submit now. However, for the recent submission, the editor decided that the paper is not topical to the journal and suggested to submit in a mathematical journal. Although there are some mathematical applications in this paper, they are not new, has been known for over 20 years, and was only applied towards satellite retrievals. I am a bit puzzled. Any advice will be appreciated.
The "Elsevier Journal Finder"? Sounds worthless, indeed as you discovered for yourself. Anyway, I recommend you ask a senior scientist who knows you and is familiar with the paper in question.
First, I am not familiar with the "Elsevier Journal Finder," but any automated tools like this should be regarded as search tools and not wholehearted recommendations.
Second, there are a few obvious reasons why your paper might not be considered on topic.
Your paper has too much mathematical content or is written in too mathematical of a style for the journal, despite having applications to a relevant topic.
Your specific findings or methods are considered too specialized/not of interest for (the target audience of) this journal.
Even if this paper was pretty similar to your previous paper, different editors may have somewhat different views on what papers are relevant. This also means that the types of papers published by certain journals can change over time, as editors change.
Generally it's a good idea when you're journal shopping to do the following to check if your paper will be a good fit: 1) read the "scope & aims" section of the journal, 2) look at the list of editors to check for overlap in interest with your research (if you haven't heard of any of them, that's usually not a good sign), and 3) look at some papers the journal has recently put out to see if any are similar to yours.
The postdoc in my lab recently submitted a paper and got an instant: “Paper not suitable for this journal” decision as well. In our case we thought it was very strange because there were very similar papers published just within the previous week!
I think the postdoc and the PI e-mailed the editors to try and clear up the confusion and I think they got them to review the paper (not exactly sure, I am not involved with the project).
I think it would be beneficial to try and communicate further with the editor.
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87315 | What should an unpaid research fellow do when they thought they would be writing papers but are instead writing grants?
I am an unpaid research fellow in a mainly clinical research lab. One can call it a "volunteer research position".
I thought my goals prior to the fellowship were to write papers, help with clinical trials, but I am being asked to write a lot of grants by both my PI and his colleagues, colleagues I have never met and have never worked under. Is this normal? And not small grants, fairly big grants that take hours upon hours to write.
Is this ethical on the institution's part?
"Is it ethical?" is one of the most widely stretched questions on this site. Almost any proposed action is arguably unethical if you argue hard enough, but this is not very practical. Could you help us out by saying why you think the practice might be unethical? On a superficial reading, it sounds like you are saying "My volunteer job is turning out to be more work and different work from what I thought. What should I do?" It sure is tempting to say "Quit; it's a volunteer job." If there are reasons why this is not a good response, please tell us.
Could you add to your question: Why did you accept the unpaid position in the first place? What are you hoping to do with this experience? Presumably, experience and concrete outputs with your name attached would be good. Presumably you would be a co-author on papers? Would you be a co-author on grants? How formalised was your agreement? If it's volunteer work, why not just quit or say that you don't want to work on the grants?
I wonder if your PI sees this as an investment in your future. Have you asked when you'll be able to turn your focus to the clinical trials and the papers?
@Roland "In Germany, an unpaid position that is not focused on your education would be illegal." Interesting - what law is that? For what kind of "position" does that apply? Is it specific for academia?
I think the answer to this is pretty field and country dependent since there is variation on the frequency of unpaid post docs. In terms of ethics, I am going to ignore the big issue of whether it is ethical for you to be doing an unpaid post doc and focus on the grants/papers issue.
Despite how it may seem, most PIs do not go out of their way to take advantage of people. The PI probably thinks it is in your best interest to be writing grants and not running experiments or writing papers. One reason for this might be that getting if the PI, or one of the PIs collaborators, gets a grant, then they could pay you. There does not seem to be anything unethical about trying to get an unpaid person into a paid position as quickly as possible.
As for what you should do, you need to talk to the PI. Make sure he understands where you are trying to get to. Then work with him on an approach that gets you there. It might be writing more grants or maybe you need to switch to papers.
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89849 | Is it possible/acceptable to ask for wear & tear travel expense reimbursement?
An example: I've been using some suitcase, mostly (but not only) for traveling to conferences. Gradually, the wheels have wore out, and in my last trip I was walking over some gravelly road for a while and they're now completely busted. There are also small tears in a couple of places. So, for a trip I took last week, I bought a new suitcase. Again, I'm using it for conference travel, but of course also for strictly personal use.
In your experience, is it customary/acceptable/possible to ask for reimbursement for this kind of expenses - products which travel-related, not specific to the conference you're attending, and suffer wear over time?
Notes:
I'm a post-doc in the Netherlands, so if you feel your answer is academic-seniority-specific, or country-specific, please qualify it.
I actually spent a lot less on this trip then other people from my research institute - less than half, since I didn't stay at a hotel but with a friend. So it's not as though I'm artificially inflating the bill.
I realize one answer could be "just try it / ask about the institutional policy and see what happens"; but I want to hear about norms and customs.
I'm not asking about the ethics, I think it's perfectly ethical for me to make that request and get the money.
The suitcase cost 60 EUR, to give you a sense of the amount of money we're talking about.
If this was a case specifically for transporting equipment to conferences, I think you'd be fine... but as soon as you add "personal use", I think you're going to run into trouble. Nevertheless, I'm in the U.S., so I can't speak for if that will apply to the unis in the Netherlands.
You are not asking about ethics; the rest you can get from your Department / grant policy.
In grad school, my fellowship provided an "expense account" and I could have probably purchased luggage. I would look at the fine print of your grants/funding source or ask your PI about it.
I'm highly tempted to close this as "too localized". You should simply ask your department administrator whether this is an acceptable charge. The answer will almost certainly vary between universities and departments. There's no "universal" answer here.
I would just eat the cost and not ask for any reimbursement. One way to look at this would be to ask: What if you were a young student going to your first conference, and you didn't even own a suitcase? Would your school offer to buy you one? I've never heard of luggage being listed as a business expense, and it seems a bit outlandish to ask. It seems unlikely that a school would do this, and, even if they did, you might well lose some street cred just by asking.
Have you, are you, and will you use this suitcase exclusively for travel related work? If that's so you have a good point, if not, I would not see why a grant should pay for it. Even in the industry your firm doesn't pay for your luggage, unless you are a pilot or flight attendant.
As everyone else says, this is up to the specific policies at your institution, but it seems like a very unusual thing to ask for reimbursement for. Especially once you've used it for any non-business use, regardless of the major source of wear and tear. If you had a institution-owned computer, you might be able to justify the purchase of a carrying bag for that computer (but not cash reimbursement for wear on a bag you purchased previously), but not for a bag that carries your personal items like clothing, etc.
@eykanal: I do not want this to be about my suitcase, but rather about this kind of expenses. Edited to stress this a bit more.
@J.R.: Actually, I think it's not unreasonable for your employer to pay for a suitcase if it's your first one. Employers often buy their employees laptops, don't they?
@tonysdg: But think about the laptop example I just gave J.R.: Employers often provide their employees with laptops at their own expense - and these are obviously used for personal activities, like personal email or browsing or document authoring etc. Also, with expenses, you often take a few days after the conference - for the expenses during which you don't get reimbursed (fully/at all) - for sight-seeing, and you still get the flight home reimbursed even if it's "dual-use" - just like the suitcase.
@BryanKrause: See my reply to tonysdg.
@einpoklum Have you looked carefully at the limitations on how you use that computer? The rules might state company use only even if some personal use is quietly tolerated. Another area this comes up is in tax code, for example in the US you can deduct certain costs related to having a "home office" as business expenses. But if you play games in your office after hours, the whole thing is void! Tax law is relevant to expense reports because your company/institution is probably treating those costs as expenses; if you use any for personal use it becomes a type of income and must be taxed.
@einpoklum And as far as adding in personal travel to a business trip, the language is usually something like "if there is no further cost to the company/university" it is okay. If you stay 2 more days and pay for your own hotel but take a same-cost flight, there is no more flight cost to your institution. But your baggage spent those 2 days with you on your personal trip: 2 more days of wear and tear.
@BryanKrause: I have looked at the computer use limitations, and they were either non-existent or there was a "reasonable personal use" restriction. Now, as for taxation - I'm being taxed on these reimbursements anyway. I think. Actually, you know what, that's an interesting point, I should double-check the tax situation. As for the extra personal travel - often there is extra cost to the employer, e.g. the flight could be somewhat more expensive. But I've never seen this issue covered by official policy (never = 3 workplaces which have reimbursed me for travel).
Which is probably why others are recommending you check your employer's policies, but also caution you, as in the answer by @WolfgangBangerth, that asking might make you look petty. My institution allows for some minor flexibility with flight cost (i.e., you don't have to take a 6am flight the day after your conference if there is a 8:30 flight that costs 10% more) but I believe they do state a percentage. I've flown an additional personal inventory, such as leaving from a different city I was visiting, and had to provide documentation that the flight was cheaper than from my home city.
I guess really, why are you asking here? Do you want people's advice from their experience, or do you want us to tell you "Oh yeah you can reimburse whatever you want!" so you can use it as justification when your institution is mad at you later ("People on the internet said it was fine!")?
@einpoklum - I had thought about the laptop parallel when I made my comment, but there's often a good reason to issue laptops: standardization. When institutions issue laptops, they don't usually hand you a voucher and let you pick your own computer. Instead, they buy several identical machines which ensure that every student will be able to use all the software that may be required for coursework. I believe this helps the IT dept in the long run, too; it's easier to simply issue laptops than to contend with the tech issues that inevitably happen when a myriad of machines are in use.
@BryanKrause: The question is as it stands, we're just having some (friendly?) philosophical discussion in the comments. I hope someone says "I've seen many people's expense reports in state X and have never/occasionally seen this kind of reimbursement requested/approved" or "In universities Y Z and W, the reimbursement policy excludes/allows for such expenses".
I don't know about academia, but in industry allowable expenses often include a daily "personal allowance" to cover the miscellaneous extra costs of being away from home. How you spend that is entirely your own affair. On the other hand submitting a receipt specifically for the cost of a new case (unless the old one had been lost by an airline, or stolen from your hotel) would seem very strange, and would probably be refused, where I work.
This seems petty. You also don't account for wear and tear of your suit or shirt when you wear it at the conference. It's just one of those things you own in life, that wear out, and that you replace. The fact that you use a suitcase to transport your luggage -- in fact, the fact that you transport any luggage at all -- is your choice when going to a conference, and so it should also be your responsibility to replace it when the time comes.
All of that would be different if you were using a personal suitcase to transport things that are required for attending the conference. Say, if you were a vendor at an industry show associated with the conference, and you have to take product samples along. Or if your talk was on a new device, you took an example of the device along, and it would occupy a suitcase by itself.
With all due respect - your suggestion that taking a suitcase when travelling is some kind of "personal choice" suggests a very extreme opinion which is not in line with reimbursement policies anywhere that I know. You might as well tell me that buying food for 3 meals per day is a choice and my responsibility. Also, we don't account for wear and tear of clothes since those are: 1. very small amounts in terms of monetary worth, 2. difficult to quantity, 3. does not in itself involve money changing hands.
Sorry, but I agree with Wolfgang – a suitcase is a personal choice. (I went a long time without owning one: for a number of years I used my uncle's old duffel bag. Come to think of it, he probably gave it to me after he bought his first suitcase.) Moreover, you already have a suitcase, it just has broken wheels and a few small tears.
@J.R.: Suitcase, duffel bug, doesn't matter, same difference... I could have been using a duffel bag which got ripped. If you're saying that a suitcase is a luxury item, and there's a distinction between reimbursements for luxury and non-luxury items - that's an interesting answer and I would ask you to elaborate.
@einpoklum - I won't elaborate except to say that I think your analogy between a suitcase and meals is a poor one. If my employer expected me to travel for three days and not eat, I'd find that unreasonable – just like I think it would be unreasonable for me to expect my employer would pay for my new Samsonite.
@J.R.: A Samsonite suitcase typically costs upwards of 200 USD. Are you sure you're not confusing the qualitative with the quantitative here? What if it was, say, a 30 USD duffel bag?
@einpoklum - Please. I was simply using "Samsonite" as a generic term for a suitcase. (It's a well-known brand in the US, and is sometimes used conversationally as a genericized trademark). It doesn't matter what you paid for the suitcase or what brand it is.
@einpoklum -- the difference between meals, tickets, conference registration on one hand, and a new suitcase on the other is that the costs for the former are clearly associated with one travel only. Replacing a suitcase, on the other hand, is like new clothes: it likely accumulated tears etc over a number of trips, some of which may in fact have been personal. It may be true that the wheels came off on this one trip, but it's not unreasonable to assume that damage to the wheels has accumulated over years of use before. In other words, it's difficult to attribute things to one specific travel.
You will have to check your local regulations at your institution. (my answer is based on my experiences at public US universities and companies)
Tax code may also be important in determining what items you can expense, both for yourself and your institution. For example, in the US you can deduct certain costs related to having a "home office" as business expenses. But if you play video games in your office after hours, the whole thing is void! Similar restrictions apply to other possibly dual-use items, such as a car (may be a business expense, but the rules for reimbursement change to those involving business use of a personal vehicle if you use it for anything that isn't business).
Tax law is relevant to expense reports because your company/institution is probably treating those costs as expenses, and therefore they are not taxed as income. If you use anything for personal use it becomes a type of income and must be taxed, even if your institution wanted to provide it. In that case, they would have to not only provide you with an expense reimbursement, but also add the amount to your income, withhold taxes as appropriate, etc (of course this system could vary greatly by country) - this all seems like it would be quite a bother, and if I were an administrator I wouldn't be too happy if a post doc, or full professor for that matter, made me go through all of that for 60 euros.
In my current institution's policies, there is a list of exclusions for business travel expenses. The item on that list that applies to your situation is:
Statement of Policy
Following is a list of expenses which are not payable/reimbursable with university funds. [...]
Personal items and services, (e.g. toiletries, luggage, clothes, haircuts, etc.)
I tried to find some information on business travel in the Netherlands, but I was only able to find information about allowed reimbursement amounts for transportation, lodging, and meals, which may suggest that those are the only categories commonly reimbursed, but it may also suggest that there is more freedom for specific institutions to set their own policies. Also I don't read Dutch, so I was limited to documents that were available in English.
If you had a institution-owned computer, you might be able to justify the purchase of a carrying bag for that computer (but not cash reimbursement for wear on a bag you purchased previously), but not for a bag that carries your personal items like clothing, etc. If this was permitted, it would probably be purchased for you or reimbursed the way you would be reimbursed for other types of equipment, not through the travel reimbursement procedures, and the bag would be institution property, so you would be leaving it behind with your business laptop when you leave the institution.
Ok, now this is an answer :-) ... it's interesting, by the way, since in my last workplace (which was a commercial company but in the research division) they did cover laundry for clothes, even though it's a personal service. I will definitely have a look at the tax situation.
Similar to @alephzero's comment above, my institution has shifted from reimbursing for specific expenses toward a "per diem" to be used as the traveler sees fit. In practice, it mostly goes towards meal costs and personal travel (like a taxi from a conference site to where you are eating, which is not normally covered because it's just so you can eat where you want). However, the traveler would be free to skip breakfast and do laundry instead. In other cases, laundry might be an acceptable expense when it saves money: i.e., on a long trip, laundry might be cheaper than a second checked bag.
You tagged this as "etiquette." I will write an answer focused on the etiquette of the question.
Such expenses are part of the cost of doing business, as the accountants say. To take such a petty view (thanks for the great word, Wolfgang), makes you look like a nitpicker, not a team player, and not a scientist.
Haven't you got better ways to spend your time than nickel and dime your employer for every last bit of juice you can squeeze out of the lemon?
I'm not sure what you mean by "the cost of doing business". I'm an employee with a low salary and zero job security.
@einpoklum - I learned the term from listening to a radio interview with a finance expert, who was explaining that when a country pays interest on borrowed money, that's just a "cost of doing business." It turns out it is a standard phrase in the business world. I am not finding a good, succinct definition or explanation for you, unfortunately. This might make a good question on ELU SE.
What I'm saying is, that the "cost of doing business" is not supposed to fall on the low-pay employees, but on whoever is funding.
@einpoklum - Every individual has a CODB, a cost of staying afloat. This includes, for example, clothing appropriate to the job.
Ok, now I get where you're coming from. I disagree, though, I mean travelling is a special aspect of business which is financed independently of your salary, which covers the kind of "cost of doing business" which clothes are. But it's a valid opinion I suppose.
@aparente001 -- you're welcome with the word. And nice reply with the "cost of doing business". I think that's exactly the right term here. One could also have said "opportunity cost". There are so many aspects related to jobs that one can call that way. Your example of dressing appropriately is one. In fact, a hot shower every morning is another. Driving the car or using the subway to work is another: you just have to do it in order to have a good job; the alternative is to work for minimum wage at the corner store two blocks down the road. I would think a suitcase falls in the same category.
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90392 | Are there any academic institutions operating on bodies of water?
Are there any (accredited/recognized) academic institutions with a significant part of their activities - administrative and academic - held over a body of water (sea, lake or river), on some floating platform?
The kind of platform could be boat or a barge; or if that doesn't exist,
then at least - buildings built directly on struts in the water without solid foundations (a-la Tolkien's Esgaroth, or Lake-town).
Notes:
Universities which have ships and/or operate ships and/or hold some classes on ships and/or send students out on trips on ships - don't count. The univesity or institute has to operate primarily on the barge/ship/floating platform.
Bonus points if it's a proper university and if what they teach is not just shipping/marine-related.
I don't want a recommendation of such institutions, nor a list of them, I just want to know if any exist.
The closest I could find is the Universitat Pirata in Viladecans, Catalonia. It's not on water, but it is a "pirate" university... Also, the legenedary Miles de Viviendas squat in Barcelona ran a "pirate university" on waterfront in Barcelona's Port Veil, back in 2006.
It will certainly help if you elaborate why you want to know this.
@Wrzlprmft: Trivial interest, nothing more. I was talking to someone about house-boats and the conversation drifted to other things that happen on boats.
@Wrzlprmft I assumed that he wanted to teach on a boat. I really want to see if I can swing a semester at sea for my family now.
-1 I really don't get the point of this question (and the objections to existing answers are lame)...
@CoderInNetwork From the help centre: "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face." Being curious if there are floating universities is in no sense an actual problem. Plus, boat programming.
As mentioned by @DavidRicherby, this seems heavily inspired by the boat programming question. I would at least acknowledge this in the question itself.
@Bitwise: If I told you the question was not inspired by "boat programming", you wouldn't believe me (and I know this since it's already happened - see my comments above); and if I told you that it was inspired by "boat programming" you'd probably say "Ah, boat programming, so it's just a joke question, let's close it."
This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the "boat programming" question (which was intended as a rather subtle statement on community attitudes at the time), neither in spirit nor in subject. The only thing it has in common is the word "boat".
@CoderInNetwork: While one could argue whether it technically is a shopping question since there is no actual choice being made, it certainly has almost all the problems of a shopping question, namely having too many answers, a lack of an objective way of evaluating answers, and so on.
While I strongly agree that clarification on reasons would help this question greatly, I don't actually see it as a shopping question or having the "make a big list" failure mode, since it is asking for existence, not recommendation or enumeration.
@jakebeal: See third comment from the top. Perhaps I should mention I live in Amsterdam and there's a bunch of stuff on boats here (but not a university).
@einpoklum Ah, thank you --- my mistake for overlooking that comment. I still like the question and think it's better without the "Boat programming" allusion. The information that you just added further clarifies in a useful manner.
@jakebeal: I kind of resent having that removed when, say, questions like this one don't even get a comment mentioning "boat programming". Ah well.
@einpoklum Since all of this is community curated, feel free to be the one who raises it on that question. :-) For your question, though, I think it will have a much stronger chance of remaining open without the allusion.
Just a reminder that the final bullet point under "When shouldn't I comment" is "Discussion of community behavior or site policies; please use meta instead.".
Presumably the edit is designed to rule out my answer, but Semester at Sea holds all, not some, classes at sea. Meals are served at sea and the students sleep at sea. All student activies are at sea (except when they are in port). It sounds like you want the professional administration part of the university to be done at sea.
@StrongBad: No, the edit wasn't designed to rule out your answer (which I upvoted); there was another "university which has a ship" answer.
@jakebeal: Come on, you know I was going to get trampled on regardless. I might as well have kept it.
@einpoklum fair enough. The phrasing of the previous title ("Boat academics") was the main thing which suggested to me that the question is related to the boat programming question.
The Semester At Sea program is an established and respected program run by the The Institute for Shipboard Education, which I think only does this Semester at Sea program, and Colorado State University, which obviously has a lot of land based activities. The program offers a range of classes, but does not offer a degree (as far as I can tell).
See also Seamester. @einpoklum: Semester at Sea was formerly called "University of the Seven Seas" and later "World Campus Afloat". It's not clear what your objection is. CSU is a sponsor, and shares academic resources with it, but it's not a part of CSU. As Wikipedia says, "the program itself is run on a cruise ship."
The California Maritime Academy is an accredited part of the Cal State system; much of the instruction takes place on the Academy's ship, The Golden Bear.
While the curriculum has a Maritime focus, the Bachelor's degrees granted are in Engineering, Business, etc., and applicable to non sea faring pursuits.
+1, but they just send you out on a boat, the boat doesn't house the university, or a faculty. When you go on a boat it's like going on a field trip.
Not sure if that counts, but there is a very well rated university in Venice, Ca' Foscari. Its main building is in the center of Venice. I do not know in specific if this applies to it as well, but in general the buildings in Venice are constructed on wooden piles planted inside a layer of mud. In addition, it is quite common for Venice to be partially submerged due to high tides ("Acqua alta").
No, this doesn't count; if it were to count I could also list the University of Amsterdam which has buildings in blocks surrounded by canals. Venice was built on solid foundations.
@einpoklum If venice doesn't count, then why did you reference Tolkiens Esgaroth? Its the same principle. Lots of buildings in Venice do not have a solid foundation (some have, but not all), and Tolkiens used lots of things that suggest venice was a strong influence (masters of lake-town/doges of venice. If Venice shouldn't count, then you shouldN#t use Esgaroth as example, as its pretty much the same thing.
@Polygnome: No, it's not the same principle: Esgaroth is built on an actual lake and there are no foundations, just wooden struts/pylons. I agree Venice must have been an influence, but Esgaroth is "on the water" in a way Venice isn't. Even Esgaroth is not what I was really after, just a second-best thing. Sorry...
@einpoklum I do not follow your reasoning. Venice was build in a lagoon, on the water. How is that less on the water then in a lake? Wiki says "Constructed entirely of wood and standing upon wooden pillars sunk into the lake-bed [...]", which is exactly how Venica was build. So yeah...
@einpoklum The only difference is that they planted a lot of wooden pillars (and also consists of a few starting islands) https://venicewiki.org/wiki/Fondazioni_degli_edifici_veneziani . I suppose that the objection is that what's below the buildings is more "very watery mud" than water, but calling it "solid foundations" is a stretch
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the fall of 2005, Tulane University housed a significant number of displaced students and faculty in a cruise ship moored on the Mississippi River. However, from what I understand classes were not held onboard and this arrangement was only in effect during the Spring Semester of the 2005-2006 school year. Tulane University press release from 2006.
There is also the Peace Boat with it's 'Global University'.
That's like a week long, according to the video. They don't have a university or a research institute on the boat. I mean, it's called a "university" but that's just a name. Still, it's really interesting so +1.
University at Sea exists to give 'practicing professionals' the chance to earn continuing education credits in their field. The courses are taught aboard cruise ships.
Providing CEU credits is not really what a university does
The OP asked for "academic institutions", which I interpreted in the broader sense. I assumed that mention of "University" was an example, not a requirement. Perhaps the OP can clarify?
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94707 | How/where do I publish a 50-page-long writeup?
I've written this document developing a new theoretical model, with many definitions, some examples (with diagrams), and some fundamental uses of this model which are closely intertwined with its definition (specifically, without them it is not clear why it's interesting at all). It does not present nor discuss experimental results.
So, this thing is shaping up to take somewhere between 45-50 pages (still working on a few parts of it). Granted, that's in 1-column mode and in the default font size of the article document class, and there are generously-sized diagrams, a TOC, references and an index - but still, pretty long. I don't think that a reasonable 10-12 page conference paper can be cut out of it: Either it would have no grounding and be based on hand-waving; or it would be bits-and-pieces all over the place; or it would be a long series of definitions which doesn't go somewhere very interesting. On the other hand, this is not book-length material.
My question is: How / in what kind of venue could I try to get this thing published?
Notes:
I'm in applied computer science, even if the document is somewhat theoretical/reflective.
I'm open to outside-the-box suggestions
You can always publish a shortened version in a journal (which generally have higher page allowances) and link to the full version on ArXiv, but that is probably not the preferred method for you.
@malexmave: I wonder if it's not the only method though.
Can some material be moved to an appendix? I am in Econ and many theory papers include several appendixes, including proofs for minor results etc.
A book chapter in LNCS series is a possibility?
@Memming: I'd be the only chapter in the book (un)fortunately; but - if you can write a couple of paragraphs that could be an answer for people in generally.
@Dawn: That might work for 20-page writeup, not 50.
There are journals in computer science that publish long papers. Logical methods in computer science is an example, although perhaps it is not the right venue for your current paper. However, I think it is likely there are journals in your specialty that would work.
@AndrésE.Caicedo: Are you sure that long-paper journals exist in many/most subfields of Computer Science? If you are, perhaps you could make this comment into an answer, with some examples.
Are you sure that 50 pages is too long for an applied CS journal paper? I'm in pure math and have several papers that are 50-70 pages long, and that's not too unusual in many areas of math.
Your paper has an index? Really?
@DanRomik: 1. It's not really a "paper". If I told I wrote a booklet you wouldn't be surprised. 2. My writeup defines multiple Foos, scattered in different places. So I have an Index of Foos.
The options are really to either find a place that will publish in the format that it is or to figure out how to break it up.
The first thing I would do is try and get an accurate estimate of the length. A 50 page document with the standard LaTeX font and margins that includes a TOC, index and big diagrams may not actually be too long for a lot of journals. Depending on the complexity of the article, you can try creating a "preprint" to get a pretty good approximation of length. A 20 page article can probably be made to stay under the maximum length requirements of many journals. Getting a 40 page article to work will likely not be possible.
In terms of breaking it up, you need to figure out how to chunk the work.
Either it would have no grounding and be based on hand-waving; or it would be bits-and-pieces all over the place; or it would be a long series of definitions which doesn't go somewhere very interesting.
Trying to publish bits-and-pieces all over the place is going to be painful. Most reviewers want some sort of cohesive story. The other two options sound like dividing the work into two chunks. The first chunk seems like something you could publish in a good journal if somehow the theoretical grounding was published.
The second chunk seems boring that no good journal is going to want to publish. I see three approaches to getting it published. The first is to publish the second chunk as a stand alone item. Depending on your field you might be able to publish it as a methods article or in a methods journal. You could also target a low impact journal/conference that is targeting work that is slightly better than pay-to-publish quality and doesn't really care if things are interesting. Finally, you could use something like ArXiv (or whatever your field uses) to self publish the work.
The second option is to publish the second chunk as supplemental material in a journal that allows that. Here is an example of what APS supplemental material can include.
The final option, and probably the most difficult, is to find a journal that allows big appendices.
Does CS regularly do books with chapters and/or monographs? 50 pages in the humanities is a perfect fit for a chapter in a book. Or alternatively, could it perhaps be beefed up and published as a short-ish monograph?
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15098 | Refereeing papers on behalf of a professor: should it be listed on a CV?
My professor sometimes asks me to referee papers for him.
Should I list the corresponding journals in the professionals activity section of my CV?
Yes, if your professor explicitly lists you as a reviewer or sub-reviewer with the program committee of the conference/journal; no if your review is then edited by your professor before submission.
This is a very good point. If you are an official referee, recognized as such by the journal, then you can certainly list it on your CV. If you are just helping your advisor out behind the scenes, with no official recognition, then you shouldn't list it. The reason is that listing it on your CV shows two things: that you are doing your duty and that editorial boards view you as an expert. If you're not the official referee, then you are still doing your duty, but it's not a sign of expertise (your advisor might have asked you more as a learning experience than to get your expert opinion).
I disagree with the last point; even if your review is edited by your advisor, you are still a coauthor of the review and you still deserve credit. Do not agree to review "on behalf of" someone else without explicit permission from the journal/conference. The editor might be seriously unhappy with the idea that your professor isn't actually writing the review that they agreed to write.
Yes. It is the very prototype of service to the professional community that you want to show that you are willing to perform.
The question that Scrooge linked to has good advice for how to do so.
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16505 | How can one learn from poor teaching evaluations?
I teach at a large R1 state university, and I just received my teaching evaluations for Fall 2013. Usually I get excellent evaluations, but this time my evaluations for Calculus II were an unpleasant surprise. My numerical scores were mediocre, and representative student comments included: "Answers were obscure"; "can sometimes be cryptic when answering questions"; "didn't really answer questions".
These comments do not appear to be sour grapes, as the same students didn't complain heavily about the workload or grading of the exams. Moreover, I got excellent teaching evaluations when I taught Calc I a year ago, at the same university, with the same philosophy and style, with similar course policies, and with a comparable workload. Clearly, I did something wrong with regard to this course in particular.
I e-mailed both of my TAs, and only got encouraging comments ("I thought you did a good job"). I then e-mailed the class, and explained that my teaching evaluations were poorer than I expected, and asked students to offer criticism and suggestions for the benefit of future Calc II students. No responses.
So, apparently my teaching left room for improvement but I have no idea what to improve. This is quite uncomfortable -- is there anything useful I can do here?
From the students' homework/exam, can you tell they understood the contents of the course? Calc II is harder than Calc I. Could it be the case that Calc II was just too much for them? In other words, must it be your problem? not theirs?
Clearly, I did something wrong with regard to this course in particular. I don't think this is clear at all. Perhaps you just got a little lucky last year, and a little unlucky this year. All sorts of factors (obviously, the set of students, but also the time of day, etc.) can strongly impact the evaluations. I don't think you should ignore the comments, but I don't think this obviously requires a dramatic response.
As a current student I thought I could put a little input in, but as busy students finally done with a semester and moving on to different things, I'm not surprised you got didn't get any responses to your second email about your poor evaluations. Students are slow and often don't even do the first round of evaluations, and a second response is even less likely. From they're responses it sounds like students didn't have a core understanding of some of the content.
I'm an average teacher myself. I attended my friend's class, who gets the highest evals. I really couldn't tell why the students liked him so much: I thought he was not very rigorous and nothing special. However, two things were clear: he smiles a lot, really a lot, and looks like he's having fun, plus he grades generously. I noticed that if you return generous grades to students half-way through the course, they'll be very happy (I don't bother myself as I don't care about my evals). Were you going through a stressful time personally, lack of sleep, on a diet? Could make a difference!
Addition to AlexD's comment: As a former student, it's waaaay too easy for your email to your students to just look like you want someone to blame. I'm not surprised there were no responses.
@PatrickTs comment is good - looking enthusiastic about your topic is insanely important for being perceived a good teacher.
@PatrickT, as a student I can definitely say the smiling and happy teachers help so much when taking a class. When I think about it all of my teachers at least acted liked they enjoyed teaching the course and had a passion for the subject. Having that 'electric' attitude can resonate a lot with students, and not just make it seem like a boring lecture. I think if you add in the smiles, joke a round a bit in class, you'll be able to connect a lot better with students. Not just seeming better either, I think it will more actively engage them and grab their attention.
@Alex D, agreed, but in the joke department you must tread carefully, I only go for the safe kind!
@PatrickT of course, one of my ECE professors always went for the corny kind of jokes your Dad would make, they're so bad you have to laugh, and nothing that could even get close to crossing a line. We always new when they were coming, but no matter we were still laughing.
There was a study (couldn't find the reference) that was showing that the feedbacks from undergrads does not measure the quality of the teaching at all. So it is wise to take those feedbacks with a grain of salt.
Ben Norris's answer is excellent but I would add one additional point to it. When you are asking for constructive feedback from the students, you must do so in a way that students feel completely comfortable that their honesty is not going to come back to bite them.
At the end of every semester, I email all of my students a web-based survey with some open and some closed questions specifically so I can get their honest opinion. Again, the key is that all responses are anonymous. I believe if I asked them to email me (not anonymous) I would get nothing but praise, which does not help me improve at all. While I do still get many positive comments, there are usually some small gems in there which help me improve.
I don't think anonymity is the only way to convince students that honesty won't bite them. Offering some type of reward would also do that. You have to evaluate the ethics policy at your university, but for a student to receive a small gift card ($10) or a school logo shirt from the university bookstore in exchange for spending an hour offering very detailed feedback on a course seems quite equitable.
@scaaahu I have to agree with Ben. Anonymity is not the key. The key is what 2st paragraph of the answer explains: the trust that good negative feedback won't be punished. I usually manage to build such a relationship with my students (based on being fair, friendly etc.) that after the term they are willing to simply give me some feedback openly when I approach them.
@BenVoigt: The point of anonymity is not just getting the students to give feedback, but trying to help with gathering useful feedback. I agree with earthling that students are less likely to provide constructively critical comments in non-anonymous feedback.
"if I asked them to email me (not anonymous) I would get nothing but praise": throughout my undergrad, at the end of each semester, I emailed my feedbacks to prof.s directly; they contained harsh criticism, observations, positive points, all sorts of things, but above all the points I made were realistic and I didn't mention anything that I thought was really important. I understand the importance and the reason behind anonymity, but when people know they will only give feedback without getting any response to that feedback, they might be somewhat unrealistic.
@onurcanbektas There might be a cultural difference here.
Here are two things you can do:
1) Since the comments you mention have to do with the way you answer questions in class, perhaps it is time to explain your approach.
Sometimes all you need to do is explain at the beginning of a course why you are doing certain things. For example, if you do not like giving full answers to questions so that your students still need to work out part of the answer (and it sounds like that is perhaps the case), explain on the first day of class why you think this approach is beneficial. Perhaps you noticed that your students were more engaged and did better on exams after you started this approach. Let your students know that! It will help them buy in to the strategy. Explaining potential peculiarities of your instructional approach is especially useful if you are teaching the second or third course in a sequence, and you did not teach the earlier courses (this is the case). The students are used to different styles. If they were used to an instructor telling them the complete answer all the time, then they will not like what you do unless they understand it. You probably had fewer objections when you taught calculus I, since you set the expectations for those students on how a calculus class would go.
2) Ask some of your colleagues to periodically sit in on your class.
This is a good way to catch negative behaviors that you might be unaware of. The other benefit is appearing open to constructive criticism about your teaching. Having colleagues sit in on your courses also helps separate "students did not like what I did" from "what I did was bad". Just because students did not like, does not mean that it is a poor method of instruction (see point #1 above).
You can ask co-teachers for their opinion on the feedback even if they didn't sit in the class and didn't see you teaching. Especially if they saw you giving seminars or so, they might give you some good ideas as what happened and how to prevent it next time.
There are several ways this can happen. scaaahu provides one good reason, that students found Calc II harder than Calc I and was not prepared for it. Another reason could be that some person or group of persons in the student group infect the others with a sentiment. I have seen this happen and it only takes one dominant person to get others on the train.
Your description of the evaluations and your digging into them, with no response form the students, should tell you that the problem primarily is not yours in terms of teaching etc. The only thing you may consider thinking about is how you introduced the class. Setting the tone at the beginning of the course (or earlier if that is possible in your system) and thereby preparing them for the course can be a powerful tool to reduce complaints. This is all about the expectations and if expectations are wrong, it may lead to discontent.
As I was writing this a good response from Ben Norris was posted so I can only agree with that reply and let my anwser add to his.
Good point about some students infecting others. Like Ben Webster says in his comment, little can make a big difference.
Not only have I taught engineering courses for 10+ years and had to have students (corporate students) fill out evals after every 2-4 day class but I also built/run the company's evaluation system. In my opinion the following are things that heavily influence evaluations:
The student's view of the topic. If students don't want to take your class because they hate math but yet have to fulfill a requirement then your evaluation will be lower - for sure. This is the #1 factor. You can easily see this if you add questions to your survey like "What is your interest in CLASS_FIELD?" (1-5) or "Why did you take this class?" (choices being part of major, liked topic, whatever, other).
Students want learning to be easy. If you made them do a lot of nonsense work for little payoff they will not be happy. I had a teacher make us write these essays once a week and the 15 essays were 10% of our grade. Just a ton of work and it mattered very little to our grade. "How would you rate the workload (I don't like that word but you get it) of the class taken?"
Be clear about your goals of the class. Make sure you discuss at the beginning what you will cover and a brief outline of chapters in a book, other materials covered, and if there will be class discussion questions not found in those. You do not have to tell them exactly what topics are on the test but there needs to be a happy medium between "Know Everything" and "Here are the exact topics". Your survey should have a question that says something like "Were the tests and assignments reflective our your expectations from the syllabus?"
As a teacher you need to make sure that your goals are aligned with the school's goals. Is your goals to have happy students after your class? Seems like the easier classes would rise to the top then or the classes that are more topical at least. The way to truly evaluate you as a teacher is to test their retention of the materials at 3-6 months. Not a flat out test, but do they still understand the concepts of the class? Even this can have a lot of noise because batches of students will fluctuate (but you could fix this with a pretest).
Culture and individualism. Nothing you can do in an anonymous survey to get around this. Basically there are certain cultures and groups that feel like a 3 out of 5 is really really good. While others may think that is horrible. You can label whatever but you cannot account for this noise in numbers. However you can figure out if this is the issue with blank essay boxes - at least one that is mandatory. If you really want a good mandatory feedback question (which is negative) "What about this class would you change?"
Knowledge of the instructor and comprehension level of topic. You are teaching Calculus I and II right? Moderate level of difficulty. So you probably get some brownie points with students if you know your stuff well AND more importantly you can explain the difficult points in an easy to understand way. I see instructors at my company get good scores because they are an expert (maybe the only expert) in a field. Some of these people can barely form a coherent thought but still good scores. But still that is the expectation of some students - they want the best/smartest teaching them. So... "What was your instructor's skill level on the classroom topics?" (1-5) "How well did your instructor explain classroom topics?" (1-5)
Now how do you make students fill out an eval. Well in my company (100 instructors) we tell them the eval is used to do attendance so they don't get credit without it. If your school cares they would do the same. If you want to know what range of questions get people to respond, I gave some hints but that is a different question.
Also we tend to call our evaluations the "happy forms". This is because generally the instructors act all happy before giving the online surveys out (they are fully anonymous and they generally follow Kirkpatrick I). I have witnessed instructors saying all kinds of positive things to their class and even some passing out treats during the eval/survey. Of course students will give the instructor better scores. Your variance from one class to another could have had just as much to do with your attitude and mood the 30 mins leading up to your survey than compared to the entire semester.
Don't wait for the end-of-semester evaluation. It does not give us a chance to improve the students' experience. And it usually causes the teachers a lot of remorse and confusion. Instead, incorporate a mid-term evaluation. Send online questionnaire to students and solicit their comments on aspects like i) if their expectations are met, ii) if the objectives are fulfilled in a regular base, iii) challenges they face, iv) and suggested improvements. Address their concerns and lay out your revision right after you have checked the results.
Use anonymous channels such as online questionnaires (Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey) or forum (TodaysMeet, which works like Twitter.) Compared to getting students' criticism from their e-mail, I think I will have better luck to talk a tiger into giving me its hide.
In my experience, the noise in course evaluations is around 1 point out of 5. My evidence for that is that I once taught the same course twice at the same time with the same book, the same syllabus, the same homework, and very similar exams. Not only was the evaluation rating on my teaching different by almost one point out of 5, but the ratings of how appropriate the book/homework/exam was were also different by around 1 point out of 5. I had another similar experience TAing two sections of the same course (where the quizzes and exams were set by the professor) and where the class got rated 6/7 in one and 5/7 in the other. Students' expected grades have a huge impact on the ratings. So although you should definitely pay attention to your student ratings, it's also very important to smooth out the noise.
Yes, this happens to me every semester as we have twinned-sessions for all courses. For the early morning session I get 10 to 15% dropouts, and negligi(ea?)ble dropouts for the afternoon sessions, with much better evals for afternoon classes: randomly assigned students, exact same content.
@PatrickT: Sometimes the "noise" can be identified as something other than noise though. For instance, I would expect the time of day that class is held might have a huge impact on the scores.
@Mooing Duck, exactly what I meant yes.
"Answers were obscure"; "can sometimes be cryptic when answering
questions"; "didn't really answer questions".
This makes it sound to me that students never really understood the core content of Calc II. It was a problem I personally struggled with and needed a tutor to solve. Often students will be able to complete homework and quizzes of Calc II content (especially tougher content of sequences and series), even though they don't fundamentally understand what is going on. Calc II is quite a course, as many students test out of Calc I and their first college math course is Calc II. With often a new way of thinking, and representations of problems that students have never seen, Calc II is extremely difficult. I'd suggest (especially with like Power, Maclaurin series, etc.) that you take extra time to explain to students at the most basic level what is going on and move forward. Relate it to real life scenarios if possible, and give a few examples of where such problems are used in real life. I think they're missing key connections which make understanding the course a lot easier.
While I don't think you're a bad teacher, I think there is a slight disconnect here between you and your students. Obviously your level of understanding at the content is much higher than theirs, and what you may think is an easy subject to understand, could be the complete opposite to your students. While your students probably understand how to complete many of the problems in Calc II, from what you've said I doubt they have a true understanding of the content.
+1 for "Calc II is extremly difficult". Tougher courses often tend to get worse feedback, simply because they're tougher.
@MooingDuck, from my understanding of the question he's comparing to his previous experience teaching Calc I. "got excellent teaching evaluations when I taught Calc I a year ago", "Clearly, I did something wrong with regard to this course in particular." Makes it sound a lot like this was his first time teaching Calc II
@AlexD: Don't I feel foolish, I completely overlooked that he was comparing Calc I to Calc II.
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14498 | Should I mention a "math depression" I went through in my letter of motivation?
I am a master student in mathematics studying in Europe and I am applying to several graduate schools in the USA. They aren't all Top 10 in these dubious rankings, but I am applying to Harvard, Northwestern and Rutgers.
Currently, in the first paragraph of my letter of motivation (=letter of intent, statement of purpose, personal statement, ...) I explain how I overcame a big slump (=phase in which I had not much motivation to learn maths) which I went through after completing my bachelor, so roughly 1 year ago.
I mention it because this was an important experience to me, and as a result I feel like a more mature mathematician, and I am now confident that I want to do maths in my life.
However, I read that one should never put negative things about oneself in the letter of motivation, so right now I'm having doubts.
Could people on the admission committee consider having gone through a slump a negative point? Do they only want to hear how awesome I was my entire life?
How would you feel when you review someones SoP, and he writes he was sick of [subject he applies for] for a month.
think of how they would read it, they could read that as very negative :)
@Dylan Yeah, that's what I fear. On the other hand, I get the impression that having a math burnout is actually relatively common. It may not be among the professors reading my application, though ;)
Also, I explain how having this burnout actually helped me in the end, which in my opinion really is the case. Before that I had this rather unreflecting approach of doing maths because "what else is there? I've always done maths!", now I really know it is the right thing for me..
I guess in the end my question has no definite answer and it is left for me to decide it.
that's very true. After studying Software Engineering I got a "burn out" as well. I was so sick of it I studied physics. Then went back to SE afterwards, and know I'm in the right place :)
an overcome of a negative event is a big positive. Focus on that positive.
Actually, I kind of disagree with @TheHiary... I don't think you should put negative statements about yourself in your cover letter.
While they do not want to only hear how awesome you would be, they do want to hear how, and why, you would be totally awesome working for/with them. You can look up some tips and guidelines about writing a cover letter here: A good motivation letter.
I also think that any half-page story has no place in your cover letter. It should be fairly short, clear and memorable/striking. I was suggested two pages maximum. One page is better.
But, if it was an important experience for you as a potential researcher, there's definitely place for it in your cover letter, just not directly.
What you should include, however, is:
what helped you get back your motivation
(you can say that e.g. a project made you "rediscover your love of science" without explicitly saying that you lost it for a while)
how your approach to research has changed in a positive manner
(e.g. working on the team project made me realize how important and helpful peer input, informal discussions and exchanging ideas was for my productivity)
how your vision of science/yourself changed after that
(e.g. working with Professor X. what made me secure in my opinion that I want a career as a researcher)
basically, any positive result of your experience is worth mentioning, but I would rather mention just what triggered the positive change of attitude instead of motivation-less period before
Thanks for your answer! Your first link ("[here]") seems to be empty.
I kind of agree that my half-page story is too long, but then again the biggest part is a description of what fun stuff I learned to regain fun at doing maths plus the conclusion that I feel more mature and ready for a PhD now. I will still try to cut out the more negative part as you suggest, and I think your second and third bullet points especially are very good advice that I can use. Merci!
I agree that you shoudn't put negative statements about yourself in your application, but recovering from depression is not negative!
There, I edited in the link. There was a question about cover letters here, but it referred to them as "motivation letters". The bullets are just examples, but basically, my personal preference would be: talk about all the good from the recovering part, and let the depression part be just implied. You can't deny it, but don't write "I was depressed and could not work for months". Even if the next sentence talks about how you got out of it, the first one might have already made too strong of an impression.
How about "I got out of depression I had for a few months." ?
@scaahu well, it wasn't really a depression and I wouldn't want to throw this term around lightly. Instead I write that I felt exhausted and briefly explain what lead to this. Then I go on to describe how I recovered, which is important in my case, and what I learned from this experience.
Thanks for your answer, penelope and thanks also for your input, @JeffE! I'm going to accept this answer very soon, but I just want to wait a bit longer to see if anyone else wants to take a shot.
@Parisien As this answer indicates, it's about the spin. Any big negative that became transformational to your life can be talked about, and arguably should. But do so positively. Leave the negativity implicit at best. Make sure it is clear that you have purpose and passion that can last a career. Avoid anything that suggests to the contrary.
First, having observed graduate education in mathematics for a long time, very many people encounter their own period(s) of extreme disheartenment _in_grad_school_, for the obvious reasons of the challenges, but also for having not thought through the level of commitment to the enterprise that's required to make it work, and how delayed the gratification may be.
(So to a large degree it's not whether one has an episode, but when, and what happens afterward...)
Thus, if portrayed well, acknowledging such an experience already weathered could be a big plus, if the net was that you have a clearer purpose and clearer interest in mathematics, etc.
Maybe this oughtn't be the first point you make, and not in the cover letter, just toward the end of the personal statement... so if anyone is interested to read that far, they may also be interested in your remarks. In fact, thinking it's worth reading statements of purpose may be well-correlated with sympathy and interest in your having worked-through a bad period.
Youll hear a lot of "rules" in presentation and writing. There are no real rules, only guidelines.
For this question specifically the guideline is:
If you take your audience to depths, definitely bring them back to end a higher point. Do not end in the depths. If you experienced hardship, it has to be the second act in your story arc. The story must include how you learned and grew and are now a different, better person.
Always leave the audience feeling better at the end. Your goal is not to inform, but to enhance the audience. (Informing is a good route to making the audience feel better but thats a different conversation)
This might be tricky in a short letter, but youre talented. Im sure it can be done. I personally would stick with a purely upward story arc in this specific scenario, but saying it cant be done is false.
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10728 | What is the status/reputation of the University of South Africa (UNISA)?
I would like to follow PhD studies in my field of Computer Science. The problem is that I have to work in my native country. I have read that this university, UNISA, is known because of their online Master and Doctoral studies.
The question that I have is because I see different comments from people from United States or Europe that wanted to enter into this online degrees. Does anybody have experiences or know if that university is worldwide recognized? Or would it be only a waste of money and time? In case of the latter, which institution of quality offers online PhD degrees in CS?
Consider that this question is not focused locally, because as I mentioned in the aforementioned paragraph; there are people from all over the world that want to take those UNISA degrees.
I have never heard of a reputable online PhD program in computer science (or any other field).
UNISA is a telematic (and massive) university, their masters and PhD programs (full dissertation type) are handled very similar to other masters and PhD programs. I would suggest you get a list of supervisors and then check their backgrounds, to ensure they have the necessary skills. This university is very popular in the southern hemisphere, has huge physical locations in Pretoria and Johannesburg, and has various research related on-site workshops for masters and PhD students including everything from R to SPSS. (Disclaimer: completing my M here currently).
This university is very poorly ranked internationally and doesn't even feature on most ranking lists. Be very wary, as these "online" universities often aren't very active in research.
I offer the following evidence from credible and official sources against doing a PhD in Computer Science at UNISA:
Low graduation rates: 17 doctoral students graduated from the College of Science, Engineering, and Techonology (which includes the PhD in Computer Science degree) in 2010, 2011, and 2012 combined. Compare this to the 99 doctoral student enrollments five years earlier in 2005, 2006, and 2007 (combined). Graduation rates are expected to be somewhat low for distance learning students, but rates this low are a bad sign. (PDF source)
Inadequate supervisory capacity: The school admits that "many [research] areas in the School of Computing have reached supervisory capacity" and says that "long waiting lists started forming due to lack of supervisors," which is another worrying sign. (Same source)
Very, very low research output: Research output is arguably the most important indicator of a reputable PhD program. On this page, 6 professors in the School of Computing (which offers the PhD in Computer Science degree) are listed as having openings for PhD students. I looked up the Google Scholar and/or DBLP profiles of these 6 (for those that had them) and consulted personal pages of the rest to get a sense of their research productivity.
Averages across two years (2012 and 2013), the number of publications per person per year was 0.58 on average (range of 0-1.5)
Of the 7 publications I found for these professors in 2012 and 2013, 3 were in conferences or journals with the name "Africa" in the title (i.e., not international venues). So the average publication rate per person per year in non-local venues was 0.33.
Good answer - but I'm unclear why having "Africa" in the title indicates it's not an international venue or journal. Is this a peculiarity of Computer Science, that it considers Africa to be a single country, or is something else going on?
@EnergyNumbers by "not international" I meant "not global," i.e. likely to be localized to a particular region.
I'm a postdoc at the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and do collaborate with some researchers at UNISA. However, this is with the Department of Decision Sciences, rather than Computer Science - I don't know the latter.
When it comes to PhD studies, generally the advisor plays a large role, too, compared to the university. I'd recommend to look at what and where the potential advisors for you publish, where their co-authors are from etc to get a vague impression how connected and well-regarded they'll be in your chosen discipline.
I do not have a direct experience with UNISA, but this kind of universities (having massive number of students) does not have international reputation usually. They normally address the local needs for graduating professionals, but what pushes a university among top ones is interactive connection of the staff and students, which is almost impossible to be conducted in a university with 5,000 staff and 300,000 students (even in the digital world).
Thus, if you do care about your education and reputation of your PhD degree, it is more reasonable to choose a university with international standards.
UNISA is internationally recognized. The small numbers of students passing, shows by itself that it is not a piece of cake.
I did my Bsc Computer Science and believe me I had to work hard to pass and graduate.
Once you are there, the work load, assignments, deadlines etc, makes you forget that you are at a distance learning institution. It felt the same as when I was at a residential school.
I am currently doing my Msc Electronic Eng in the UK. It was the same UNISA credentials that took me there.
So no worries, please go with UNISA and you shall not regret.
Inacio Lote GIMO
This answer seems at best anecdotal. The statistics mentioned were for graduating PhD's, not bachelor students. There is a big difference. And being internationally recognized is not the same as being well-known or respected, it just means that the institution is not a scam.
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25955 | I have noticed GPA calculation "bug" in our University, what should I do?
University X offers course Y with Z credits. The course is mandatory, and very important. It lasts for more than one semester with heavy workload. The University awards Z credits for the course Y, but it only includes Z/2 credits in the GPA calculation.
This is where the story gets a bit personal. I assume the University includes only Z/2 credits in GPA calculation because the majority of the students do very bad in this course. But, that is not the case for me. If I have the Z amount of credits calculated for my GPA, it is increased for 0,3, which I believe can make the difference at some point.
I asked the officials at the examination regulation department about this situation, they said: "that was the case from the day when the program you study was established". Not convinced at all.
What should I do? Should I complain somewhere, should I ask for a specific GPA calculation for myself. In the end of the day it should be in the interest of the University to have students with good GPAs, hence I believe they do all this calculation "trick". And I believe I would not be asking for something "illegal".
What is the clever thing to do when one finds such regulations in own University which can be used on one's own good?!?
In case of need GPA calculation is done as follows:
(sum over all (number of credits for the given course x grade)) / number of credits used in calculation
example:
((course with 4 credits x grade) + (course with 6 credits x grade) + (course with 12 credits x grade)) / 22 (4 + 6 + 12 this case)
Note: From the comments it seems as my intention is to get in a battle of changing regulations at my University. That is not the case at all. I am just trying to find a nice way of using this situation on my benefit, by having some convincing discussions with the officials.
Additional Note: After digging through some documentation, I found an examinations regulations document which states clearly how the GPA is calculated, but does not give a reason for this type of calculation. I am also surprised to learn that minor subjects are not included in the GPA calculation. I also learned that the Final Thesis awards M credits, but in GPA calculations is weights ~2M credits. What bugs me at the moment is, why the University officials hide this information in all the other publicly available presentations. And their answers are not convincing to me.
What is the relationship between this courses credits and a normal 1 semester course?
@StephenTierney 1 : ~4 ; basically the grade of this course ~4 times as much as a usual grade
From what you write, it sounds like there is an honest error in the calculation of the GPA (I wouldn't suggest that the university is trying boost its student's GPA by mis-calculating it). You can try to talk with the administration of your department, or even address this issue to the dean of students office. A student union (if you have one in your school) might wish to be involved as well.
Are you saying that you told the school already and they have confirmed that it is intentional and that they do not intend to change it? That's the sense I get from your writeup but the other comments suggest that might not be the case.
What do you mean by It lasts for more than one semester? Exactly how long it lasts? Please explain.
How far along are you in your degree? I find it hard to comprehend how half weight on a single course, even if that course is weighted at 4 times, could make any appreciable difference to your GPA. Arguing this doesn't seem worth your time.
@BenjaminMakoHill Well, they behaved "politically correctly" and just said what I have written in the question: that has been always the case, we don't know why
@scaaahu It lasts 2 semesters
Just to be sure: this is not a case of this 2-semester course being listed twice, each time with X/2 credits, is it?
@KlausDraeger I had that in mind as well; but not, that is not the case
@WolfgangKuehne - Is it possible that you're just misreading the documentation? Are you willing to link it? Your latest edit makes it sound very strange.
snapshot https://www.dropbox.com/s/fjwxkbcv806p9xi/snapshot.png
@Articuno I never doubted that they do the things based on some regulation. My question is stated above the horizontal line
"I have noticed GPA calculation “bug” in our University, what should I do?" Exploit it.
I'd hold off on your conspiracy theories as to why the GPA is computed the way it is. You are entitled to a grade computed in an accurate and transparent manner, but if you go into this process assuming the university is out to get you, you're going to have a bad time.
(Note that from your terminology, I think that your university system may be different from the US ones I know, so take with a grain of salt.)
Credit for classes isn't assigned at someone's personal whim. If the university does have a policy of computing the GPA based on Z/2 credits for this class, that's a decision that must have been made by some committee and approved by some administrators, and there will be a record of it. Most likely, it would be published in the university's course catalog or official regulations, so my first suggestion would be to read through those carefully. If it's mentioned there, then you are expected to have understood and agreed to it, and that's the end of it. (If the policy was put in place after you entered the university, you may have the right to have the previous policy applied, but it doesn't sound like that is the case here.)
If you don't find it, it's reasonable to ask someone if they can show you where the policy is documented. (If you have an advisor or someone else assigned to advise you about which courses to take and your progress in the program, they may be helpful too.)
If you still don't get a good answer (probably unlikely), you could talk to more people (e.g. a department chair). Note that if you were told about it in advance, even informally, you'll probably be considered to have understood and agreed, and the best you can hope for is to get it more clearly documented for future students.
Throughout the process, I recommend keeping the tone of "I'm confused by the system and am trying to understand it better" rather than "you've cheated me out of my rightful grade". And always keep track of what you actually hope to gain and whether your efforts are worth it - if you lock yourself in an epic battle with the university just over "the principle of the thing", it's not going to have good results for your academic career, your relationship with your professors and peers, or your own sanity.
Well, I did my research prior to this post. Officials and other students say that is the case, but we don't know why. I went through the University regulations and welcome presentations. Everybody emphasizes the importance of the course by pointing to the fact that is has ~4 time more credits than another course, but no one says that only half of the credits will be used in GPA calculation
It appears to me that the course is something like 4 credits but you only get 2 credits towards your GPA. Well if you are getting 2 credits then you should only pay for 2 credits and not 4... This is something your university should consider
What is the clever thing to do when one finds such regulations in own University which can be used on one's own good?!?
I'm so glad you asked. The clever thing would be to realize that the best way to raise your GPA is to do excellent work in all your courses. Aside from being the optimal strategy GPA-wise, this has the fringe benefit that it is the only strategy with inherent rewards beyond the GPA game.
Look, I don't know where you're enrolled, but your university has taken a step down a dark road by playing with weighting GPA's differently than the number of credits or course hours (which is the weighting which corresponds to the actual instructional time and, ideally, to the workload of the course). You're contemplating a further step down this dark road by trying to play games with their game. It is up to them how they compute the GPA. I disapprove of their strange weighting system, but do you know what's even worse than a globally enforced strange weighting system? A student who asks for "a specific GPA calculation for myself".
Just rise above. See if you can recapture the quaint idea that your goal is to learn the course material rather than attain a certain number at the end. Or, if you feel that the world has moved on and that number that you get at the end is too important to your future to so naively dismiss, then respond by GETTING BETTER GRADES. Merciful Minerva, we live in strange days.
Interesting article in a recent NY Times about "internal motivation", a generalization of your excellent answer: http://nyti.ms/1qG0jiO
@pete I agree with the overall idea of your answer. But I don't see why asking for my credits being computed appropriately would be a continuation of the dark game. Moreover, how "a (correct) specific GPA calculation for myself" is worse than institutional misbehavior.
@Wolfgang Kuehne I used to be a pretty much extreme version of what Pete seems to describe (too GPA conscious). The good things about it are: [1] You have a clear goal you can set and track each semester [2] It makes you look good indisputably. Later I learn to realize that [2] is minor, many people at high places don't really care. I still think I got the material quite well that is I got from each course more than just a (good) number, but the GPA conscious mentality set up the habit and tendency of being too .. 'calculative'. Most people don't see that as a good human characteristic.
@Wolfgang: If you actually find out that your GPA is being computed incorrrectly, then sure, you should get it fixed. But there is no evidence of that whatsoever: rather it is being computed in a way that turns out to be less than advantageous to you.
It doesn't seem particularly remarkable or "dark" to me that a course exists that's a lot of work (hence 4x credits), but which is slow going and so whose content is less inherently valuable per hour (hence only 2x grade). I guess the "darkness" in trying to make the GPA reflect success-at-valuable-things instead of success-per-hour, is that it dispels the very useful administrative fiction that all courses have equal inherent value per hour, by admitting that at least one course does not. Once you try to measure something that subjective, it will never end ;-)
@WolfgangKuehne: it's playing a game because all of the students who benefit from the flat calculation would ask for one, whereas all the students who benefit from the existing weighted calculation will stick with what they have. What are you saying: because you didn't know the weighting, you worked harder in this class than the university itself values it, leaving less time for others? But (a) that ignorance might be "your fault" for not reading the system ahead of time, if you cared so much, and (b) it is difficult to complain with a straight face that you worked too hard at a course.
I can't agree with the "your fault" part. All the introductory presentations prior to the start of that course strictly emphasized its importance by pointing to the fact that it has 4x as much credits. Due to that I skipped some other courses & lectures; This, today has time/financial/learning consequences on me. As you point out, its true that I worked much harder on that course, got the best grade, and now am disappointed that the hard word "does not pay off"
When I was an undergraduate I was instructed to read the examination regulations document. In fact, since this was a long time ago, I was given a physical copy. If this document is secret at your university, or even if it's public but you weren't informed of its existence at any point in your induction or directed to read anything that informs you of it, then personally I'd hold you blameless for not knowing the weightings.
If your university uses a method to calculate GPA that is transparent, publicly documented, and reproducible; you will have to live with it (or transfer to another school). If GPA calculations are opaque and at the whim of some school official, that's cause for legal action (being patently unfair). Your first task is to find out which camp your GPA calculation falls into. It may seem to be a stupid formula, but if it's evenly and fairly applied (and anyone can accurately calculate their own GPA), what's your recourse?
As for "that is the case, but we don't know why", that is an unacceptable answer from the school. Someone should be able to officially tell you the reasoning behind it. It's possible that it dates back to a cheating scandal 200 years ago, or that they don't want to change it so that they can compare GPAs from year to year, but somewhere there must be a clear reason behind it. Go through the proper channels before raising a public stink about it, and don't be confrontational about it. There may be a perfectly good reason (in their minds, anyway), for calculating your GPA that way, but it should be publicly known.
The school does owe you an explanation for exactly how (and why) your GPA is calculated. They don't owe you a change in the calculations to match your expectations, or even to match "industry standards".
+1. Ultimately you may never be "convinced" of the reasonableness of many practices and requirements you encounter in life. You unfortunately can't force people to explain things to your satisfaction. The only thing you can (usually) do is hold them to what they said they would do.
If the University understands the issue and does not want to change, one solution might involve listing both GPAs (e.g., on a CV). I think this might be OK as long as this is completely transparent and you (a) include your official GPA (b) make it clear that your recomputed GPA is not your official GPA and (c) that you explain how both are computed and why you have two. This might be hard to do concisely but you might say:
3.9 [Official GPA] / 3.95 [Self-computed GPA: Sum(Grade * Credits)/Credits]
That said, doing this seems likely to be a distraction and pointing out two different GPAs is likely raise some red flags. If you're doing good work, how we choose to count really shouldn't matter. And if how we count does matter, you can't be doing that well. The other answers make this point very well and I won't try to reiterate it here.
You mention that this class is mandatory and most mandatory classes are taken early on. Is that the case here? Some graduate schools do not consider grades in the first year or two and most give much more weight to later years. StrongBad's comment makes it clear that some schools even try to incorporate this into the official GPA calculation itself!
This is a great idea if you want to present yourself to employers as the sort of person who will haggle, nitpick and complain about everything. Not many employers are looking for people like that, but OP might be happiest with one of the few who are.
@jwg, I think the downvote and saracastic comment is unjustified. I spend a third of my reply making the exact point you make and suggest that I do not go into even more depth because the other answers do so already. I agree with you and said as much but I was also trying to answer the question as asked.
What's the point of spending half the answer putting forward a really bad idea and another third explaining why it's a bad idea? Doesn't that make it a bad answer overall?
@jwg, Wolfgang suggested that it might make a "big difference." It's up to Wolfgang to decide if the risk of being seen nitpicking (IMHO, small but real) and the benefit of presenting a second/higher GPA is worth it. Wolfgang suggests it could change the GPA by 0.3. If the official GPA is tweaked and massaged by the university so that it really was that different, I would want to know this as part of evaluating a student's undergraduate work. Of course, I'm sure students wouldn't tell me in the situations that I really wanted to know.
I think the answer to this depends if you are an undergraduate or graduate student. If you are a PhD student (and possible a Master's student) your reputation with your future colleagues is much more important than you final GPA and I would suggest you just go with the flow. As an undergraduate student (and possible a Master's student) your GPA is really important and assuming the recalculated GPA is noticeably better, it is worth the fight.
For example, my UK department calculates an unofficial GPA that is then used to determine the degree classification (first, upper second, lower second, ...). The formula we use gives zero weight to first year marks, single weight to second year marks, and double weight to final year marks (it is a 3 year program). If the resulting degree classification were to improve by using a uniform weighting (either of all 3 years or just the final 2 years) and the student filed a formal complaint with the University, it would not surprise me if the University would not cave and change the degree classification. In fact, this year the University demanded that we change our policy and look at students who are one percentage point below the degree classification cutoff boundary and see if they would have done better with a uniform weighting.
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14358 | In single-blind peer-review, can you reveal your identity without the editor's consent?
In my field (chemistry), review is always done in a single blind process, i.e. the author does not know who the referees were, but the referees do know who the authors are. In ten years, I have never seen a referee breaching this anonymity, e.g. by signing their review, unless they got prior approval by the editor (in order to continue discuss things further with the authors, once the manuscript was accepted for publication).
So, it seemed logical to assume that in single blind peer-review, the reviewer should not disclose his identity without the editor's consent. Yet, some people have told me (here and there; also IRL a friend from human sciences) that they have seen people sign their reviews, or write emails to them after the review but before the paper is published.
So, in single-blind peer-review, can you reveal your identity without the editor's consent? Does it depends on the customs of each field, or is there a hard rule? (in which case, the few anecdotes I heard were outliers)
I would think that it's a bad idea to open the possibility of referees communicating with authors, since this opens the possibility of authors' influencing referees, compromising the process. Of course, this is not to say that there aren't some positive possibilities, but the conflict-of-interest criterion seems to me in this case to be clearly manifest.
That is, it should be understood, implicitly or explicitly, that referees will remain anonymous "in perpetuity", so that there is no hint or possibility that authors could communicate with them or influence them. E.g., either overt or subtle invitations from authors to a referee to communicate (and get some credit for the paper, maybe co-authorship, etc., as discussed around here some time back...) would be understood in advance to fail absolutely.
Thus, editors who discover referees willing to engage in such would probably regretfully stop asking them to referee, since if such activity became known it would seriously damage the reputation of the journal... if only in principle, but "principle" would seem to be the point...
Thus, editors who discover referees willing to engage in such would probably regretfully stop asking them to referee - aha ! :)
@Suresh, Ha! "Regretfully", because it's not so easy to find referees. But, srsly, if I were to take the trouble to be "An Editor", I'd be dis-serving myself and others by giving people a reason to wonder about the legitimacy of the review process, eh?
referees will remain anonymous "in perpetuity" ... I think that this is practical until the paper's been published, but I don't think it's a convention that you're supposed to leave it a secret "forever and ever". I've told people "I reviewed your paper" before and had people say the same to me.
@Irwin, I know that reality may not conform to either the pluses or minuses of the ideal, but I think that anticipation of disclosure even after acceptance could easily be viewed as a potentially fatal compromise of the system. Of course, this is relevant only under the assumption that anyone's trying to "game" the system, but presumably some weak form of that assumption is what motivates single-blind or double-blind review in the first place.
It is overwhelmingly clear from the answers at https://mathoverflow.net/questions/98308/when-if-ever-disclose-your-identity-as-a-reviewer that in the mathematical research community it is perfectly acceptable to sign one's reviews. I know people who do so, and their purpose in doing so is to ensure that they keep the tone and content of their reviews such that they are not embarrassed to be acknowledged as the author of the review. I think that other mathematicians largely consider this a courageous and responsible action. Some may think it is unwise, but I don't know of any who think it is unethical.
@MaoWao I agree! But check the Mathoverflow link and you will see a much larger number of upvotes there for what I am saying. Of course, this is not a scientifically valid survey.
It's possible to sign peer reviews. It's not common, but also not unheard of. You should check if you're unsure, though I don't think it's usually possible to do so without the editor's consent, as all the reviews typically go through them, not directly to the authors. If the editor truly found it unacceptable, I believe they would have the option of redacting the review or refusing to accept the review until it was amended.
A rising sentiment in my field (biological sciences) is that anonymity in peer-review is increasingly abused to make disingenuous, unreasonable, or inflammatory comments without having to stand by them, or to get away with sloppy or ignorant reviews. Signing reviews is seen as a step towards greater transparency. This pair of blog posts by Jeremy Yoder (1, 2) has some further pros and cons from people who sign or don't sign their reviews, respectively.
Personally I think open reviews, where they're actually published along with the manuscript, are a more effective remedy. But that's a separate discussion, probably.
You can sign peer reviews
This is not necessarily true and worth at least checking with the editor before doing so if you're unsure.
Yes, it's always good to check since norms vary so much by field. I've updated my answer.
In my opinion, informing anyone that you was their referee is a serious betrayal of the system. The fact that the reviews are (at least) single-blind by default has a good reason, which is that you don't feel unsafe writing a very negative review to a paper if it deserves it. As such, it works only if it's standard that this information stays secret.
Imagine a situation when 15 people vote for something in secret vote, but vast majority of them plan to reveal publically their vote. It stresses the minority to state their opinion as they feel it. And the uttermost reason for reviews is that reviewers state their opinion as they feel it.
There are some exceptions when it is acceptable, like:
When you reject to review the paper for whatever reason, you can of course tell them that you saw the paper.
Another exception is when the paper is really excellent and contains some breaking results (so that it is really really far from giving a negative review), but even then I would be quite careful.
AFAIK, in some countries, even a randomly-chosen portion of PhD theses get single-blind reviewed after they are published, to ensure that the thesis oponents take it more seriously in general.
The fact that others do it doesn't mean that it's correct.
Please notice that when you down-vote my answer with no further comments, I ignore that down-vote. Maybe if you commented why you down-voted the answer, I could make a better answer next time. Thanks.
"a good reason [...] is that you don't feel unsafe writing a very negative review to a paper if it deserves it."
Why would you feel unsafe? Will the author come after you with a bazooka if you point out factual mistakes in their paper? Just imagine what that would do to their scientific reputation. Nah, I don't think it's likely they'll do it. (And why do you want to know who downvoted your answer? Do you have a bazooka hidden nearby? Is that what you do?)
@rgrig Well, you don't imply that asking for commenting a downvote here is similar to asking to know who reviewed my paper, do you?
no, it's not similar at all
in any case, I didn't downvote your answer, so please don't hate me. (I'm saying this just in case we actually meet at some point and you do have a bazooka. That, and it's true.)
@rgrig Don't worry, I don't plan to do anything like that. I just really thought you compare the two things...
I do also agree with this answer... not that people will "come after you" in an obvious way: these are not stupid people. But (in my experience) even smart people can develop (irrational?) grudges, and be subliminally influenced, and come up with rationalizations, ... Better to avoid that.
Just one more data point: I recently submitted a paper to a physical science journal that uses double-blind review. One of my reviewers suggested that I add in a more detailed discussion of a relevant previous paper that I had cited - but then he revealed for the sake of transparency that he had somewhat of a conflict of interest, because he was the author of that paper. The journal editor chose to pass the review along to me even though it revealed the reviewer's identity.
I don't think that this reviewer's course of action is very common - and I acknowledge that many editors probably wouldn't like it - but personally, I really appreciated having the additional context behind the review.
In my personal opinion, I think that by default you should avoid revealing your identity in reviews, but in situations where there is a potential conflict of interets (e.g. a request to add citations to your own papers), it's ethically acceptable - although not mandatory - to reveal your identity.
In those cases it's often possible for the author to guess the reviewer's identity by the nature of their feedback. In those situations, it seems preferable to acknowledge that the reviewer is no longer anonymous, and get on with managing that situation accordingly, than to keep on pretending the author doesn't know.
For me (EE PhD in USA in 1990's) one would not reveal one's identity as a reviewer. This would seem to violate ethics, even though I suppose 'double-blind' would be a stronger system than 'single-blind'.
However, if certain reviewers made certain comments, it is likely my advisor could finger them by their concerns, and determine that it was a certain researcher (or one of their associates). Of course, this is just using likelihood.
We were able to revise a paper to get it published after it was initially rejected. This is certainly possible. However, the reviewers should remain anonymous at all times.
I suppose someone could reveal this years later, when it no longer 'matters' except as a curiosity.
As pointed out elsewhere, this would vary by field, publication-outlet, geographic-region and other concerns.
However, the default assumption would be for the reviewer(s) to remain anonymous.
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5005 | How do we end the culture of “endless hours at work”?
In many of the research groups I’ve worked at or visited, there is a culture that endless hours in the lab equal successful researcher. (I am in a theoretical field, so requirement of long-running experiments are outside of the picture. Let's ignore them in this discussion.) In chemistry, a widely-known example of this culture is the following letter:
I would like to provide for you in written form what is expected from you as a member of the research group. In addition to the usual work-day schedule, I expect all of the members of the group to work evenings and weekends. You will find that this is the norm here at Caltech. On occasion, I understand that personal matters will make demands on your time which will require you to be away from your responsibilities to the laboratory. However, it is not acceptable to me when it becomes a habit.
I have noticed that you have failed to come in to lab on several weekends, and more recently have failed to show up in the evenings. Moreover, in addition to such time off, you recently requested some vacation. I have no problem with vacation time that is well earned, but I do have a problem with continuous vacation and time off that interferes with the project. I find this very annoying and disruptive to your science.
I expect you to correct your work-ethic immediately.
I receive at least one post-doctoral application each day from the US and around the world. If you are unable to meet the expected work-schedule, I am sure that I can find someone else as an appropriate replacement for this important project.
I have fallen prey to this during my PhD, doing very long hours. Now that I manage a research team, what is good advice to help fight this culture in my team? (Obviously, I don't want students and post-docs to get the message that little work is required either.)
Things I already do to that end:
When a new group member comes in and they get the out-of-hours building pass (for Sundays and late nights), mention that they are not expected to use it on a regular basis.
Avoid planning meetings at unusual hours (bank holidays, week-ends, etc.)
Is that a real letter?
Repeated unpaid overtime is a sign of insecurity and lack of boundaries, from both the employer and the employee.
I thought USA overcame slavery?
@emory Yes, the letter is real. For more background, click the letter itself (it is a link to a more detailed discussion). It is famous at least in the chemistry community. The letter’s addressee actually enjoyed a successful career. Interviewed in 2010 for the Boston Globe, the letter’s author “said that he had been advised by a lawyer not to comment on the validity or the context of the letter” (duh!).
Also, I should say that the main quote is often used tongue-in-cheek by people who know the letter, e.g. “I notice that you didn't bring cake to share as usually on Friday. I expect you to correct your work-ethic immediately.”
There are post-docs who try to get away with working 4-6 hours per day. My guess is that Guido was one of them. Show up at 9:30, take a few 15-30 minute breaks during the day, take a 90-minute lunch, go home at 4:30. That's not going to cut it in a competitive environment.
@user2643: Then why didn't the letter say that? The letter specifically stated, "In addition to the usual work-day schedule, I expect all of the members of the group to work evenings and weekends", and complained only that "I have noticed that you have failed to come in to lab on several weekends, and more recently have failed to show up in the evenings." It did not include any complaints about a failure to fulfill "the usual work-day schedule" (aside from an explicit vacation request).
@ruakh I think user2643 was implying Guido was one of those lazy post-docs trying to get away with working 9:30-4:30 on Saturday, Sunday, Christmas, or the day of birth of one of his children.
Chemistry is a field of repetitive experiments and work. Not a surprise at all...
I had only seen this in PhDComics (and I believed it), but never thought it could happen so explicitly.
clicking the letter now takes you to an error page…
In the different groups I worked in, their respective cultures were always the result of the behaviour of the leader. So lead by example. In particular, some useful hints from my experience would be:
E-Mails: don't send e-mails in non-office hours, especially not requests for help with something. No e-mails on weekends and late night are a signal which everybody "gets" after a short while.
Social activities: support group's social life. A group hike to nearby mountains (in office hours on a working day!), or a joint trip to a museum sends a signal that taking time off is an important part of one's life. We used to do it on occasion of having a guest researcher (for a study stay, or just a seminar talk). It's good for group's cohesion and again tells people that rest time is also very useful.
Personal relationship: care for private lives of your group members. Build relationship with their families. Speak to them about their personal activities, about their vacations, kids, etc. and do not forget to give back and speak about yours. These kinds of discussions send a powerful signal that you perceive time off in a positive way and even encourage it, since you take it as well.
Plan well ahead: clear plans and roadmaps in projects allow people to plan their time off as well. Nothing more annoying than a spurt interfering with one's private life to deliver some report, because the boss didn't care to tell the group ahead.
Time in the office: being in computer science, where I do not need to spend time in a lab and can easily work anywhere, I was always lucky to have bosses who cared for deliverables, rather than for my time in the office. After all, most of my good ideas are born in weird places, such as under shower, while on a bike, walking in woods, and by reading stuff outdoors. Making it clear with the group members that you care first and foremost for deliverables and are flexible regarding the actual time in the office (within reasonable bounds and respecting the local laws and regulations) works well. My experience is also that people tend to deliver better if they are given the power to plan their time and process, rather being forced to mantinels set by their supervisor.
Generally, I found it always very comfortable in groups where having kids was something nice and for what the group leader and members cared. Nothing is worse than a group where work interacts negatively with one's family life and where going home before 6pm to care for kids at home is perceived as something bad.
Should I feel wrong for reading this on a Saturday morning? ;)
Good idea regarding emails; I often use boomerang to send emails at a future date (eg 8:30 am on the next working day)
Well, can your postdocs/grad students/whoever compete with their peers if they only spend 40-60 hours working instead of 60-80? If the answer is "no", you're actually doing them a disservice by trying to fix the system on your own. Some fields don't require much thought or brainpower. You can plan a thousand hours of experiments in an afternoon, and then you're left to just do it. In that case, your postdocs/etc. will just be outworked by others, which will negatively impact any future careers they might want in science. It's not very nice, but that's the way things are.
On the other hand, if you're in a field where quality of work and depth of insight are really important, you should not merely stress working less, but stress working intelligently and efficiently. This will help your postdocs/etc. to maintain a less absurd and exploitative lifestyle while still producing results that are as good as or better than those who work under incredible pressure.
Doesn't your first argument assume that success is more important that happiness?
Regarding success vs. happiness, there's a genuine trade-off here. If a student decides they care more about their personal life than career success, then that's reasonable. If a student hopes for a tenure-track job at a research university and doesn't realize that their advisor isn't pushing them hard enough to achieve that, then that's not a positive outcome, even if the student enjoys grad school more in the meantime.
This doesn't really answer the question, it just reenforces the culture the OP is hoping to change. Yes the current system/culture rewards obsessive work but the question is how can we change this.
@DQdlM - You can change the culture by producing equally good science without the obsessiveness. You cannot change the culture by willfully underperforming on principle; this leaves nothing by which to distinguish you from someone who just isn't very good. (Or you can change the system by reclassifying scientific research as work, and requiring overtime pay and such, but this is a legislative not individual action.)
I think you highlight the principle challenge. You are defining the quality of the science by the quantity. We are perfectly capable of performing science of equal quality w/o working weekends, thus this should not be considered underperforming.
@DQdlM - Depends if you have to think, or merely move things around. A lot of biology, for example, is you moving things around. If you spend fewer hours, you move less stuff, and don't get as far. This means that people who are willing to drive themselves absurdly hard will make you look like an ineffective scientist. You can't just not play that game except by losing; you have to do something game-changingly different (like becoming an engineer and automating the routine stuff so that it is thinking clearly and cleverly which is the limiting step).
I'm not convinced it's a just matter of quality vs. quantity. Instead, you get increasing (rather than diminishing) returns. I believe that if you systematically spend more time thinking and learning, you won't just produce more work at the same or lower quality level. Instead, your insights and perspective will increase like compound interest. In the end, you'll do work that's deeper and qualitatively better than what you could have done with less time. If you can manage to work 60 hours per week efficiently, you'll do better research than someone with equal talent who only works 40.
@AnonymousMathematician - I don't argue with that; the question I'd ask is whether you're going to spend, say, 75 hours a week at a lab bench, or 40 hours at a lab bench and 10 hours a week learning how to program in Matlab and 5 hours reading popular accounts of science you don't know and so on, then the person can possibly both have a more balanced life and be more productive. If you are actually a mathematician, I'd point out that you are supposed to spend your research time thinking and learning. This is not true for the majority of researchers even in the sciences.
I have the impression that in these fields, many people race against each other for doing the same thing first (say, on stem cells). If you come second, your work is wasted. That would explain the culture. But is my assumption correct?
@Blaisorblade - Yes, that's approximately correct--you need to be first or very close to be thought of highly.
"Some fields don't require much thought or brainpower" Then these tasks shouldn't be left to scientists. Let them handle the thinking, and the mindless execution should be done by technicians who are properly compensated for it.
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93360 | How to evaluate a book, rather than a paper, on a scientific subject?
In academia we collectively evaluate the validity, quality and significance of shorter publications - papers - with a complex system of conferences and journals. With all its flaws, you can get a typically-not-so-bad idea about those aspects of a published paper by looking at things like venue and citations.
But that's not the case with books. I don't have any experience publishing books, but obviously it's not the same process as for papers.
Now, suppose I've entered a field which I've studied through papers; and I now want to either teach from a book, offer it to someone for some concentrated self-study, or cite from it. Also suppose I have some specific books I'm considering. How would I obtain some sort of evaluation or review of them, overall or by specific criteria such as correctness of proofs, rigor, clarity, narrative flow, being up-to-date etc.?
Note: Of course you can evaluate a book pretty well by reading it, but the idea is to choose what to get and read.
It is true that books (unlike published papers) are not peer-reviewed. So all the snake-oil purveyors do it by writing books—with an M.D. after their name, the gullible public will (sometimes) eat it up.
@GEdgar That's not true. Many academic publishers in fact peer review their books.
Obviously, this question asks about reliable predictors for the quality of a book. Otherwise the answer can only be: You evaluate a book by reading it. With this out of the way:
Ask around. In particular when you are interested in using a textbook for a course, ask people who have directed similar courses.
Publishers. There is an informal hierarchy of publishers that can be used to predict a book's quality, just like conference venues and journal ranks for papers. This differs between disciplines, but the edge-cases are vanity presses (low-end) and Famous University Presses™ (high-end).
Citations. Just like for journal articles you can count the citations of a book to estimate its impact (with all the known caveats).
Reviews in journals. Many journals publish a review section. You can search these for discussions of the book that you are interested in.
Peer review. Some publishers also send full book manuscripts or at least the book proposal with sample chapters out for peer-review.
Professionals. Ask your trusted librarian for advice.
+1 for reminding me that journals are more than the collection of refereed papers they publish. I should actually have a look at those things.
(This is a semi-joke answer, in that I would like to discard it as a joke answer but I've actually been applying it.)
Online bookstore reviews. Specifically, reviews on amazon.com. Example 1 (for some Computer Science book with few reviews), Example 2 (a more popular and well-known Computer Science book).
Different people review based on different criteria, and mostly the reviews are very short and terse, but it gives you some idea of what the book is like, and various things to watch out for.
@Magicsowon Isn't accessibility a good thing? Or do you mean seeming accessibility, i.e. the content is easy to understand but is actually wrong?
@Magicsowon Do not confuse accessibility with depth of coverage. It is possible, although not easy, to write a very accessible book that also covers the subject thoroughly. And vice-versa.
@Magicsowon: If they justify their choices, i.e. explain why they like/hate the book, that's more contentful than the abstract "score".
Where should I read reviews: journals or Amazon? Reviews from journals seem only an aggregate from reviewers, while on Amazon people can rate and comment on them
@Ooker: If you find a review in a journal, obviously read that - it would be much more thorough. Stiil, bookstore review do give you the opinions of many people, so if a point comes up repeatedly there's probably something to it.
@einpoklum but I don't see how a review in a journal better than in Amazon. Since the books are specialized, only reviewers who do understand it can write good reviews. I read elsewhere in this site that reviews in journals are not peer-reviewed
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152207 | Have US universities seen a significant increase in administrative workforces relative to academic activity?
I was recently made aware of a study (caveat: from 2014) indicating that, supposedly, US academic institutions have taken on non-academic staff at a much higher overall rate than the increase in the student population, counting from 1987 and unti 2011-2012.
Now, the think-tank which authored this study seems fishy to me, but I don't live and work in the US, so I wanted to ask for corroboration or refutation of its claims based on your experience and knowledge.
Note: Academic activity and number of students is not the same thing; information relative either to the former or the latter is relevant.
I'm wondering why you think a non-partisan, large thinktank is fishy?
Nearly every university makes public the number of its faculty and administrative staff members as part of the Common Data Set; you can certainly check any sample that you feel would be representative. Whether any particular ratio is "overly large" is opinion-based.
I’m totally sure that audit and reporting burdens have fallen dramatically over the last 33 years.
Not really sure being from 2014 is that much of a caveat
@PeterK.: 1. Think tanks typically serve the interests of their funders. I don't know who funds this one so I'm suspicious - especially if it's large 2. If its prominent clients include the US foreign-meddling agency USAID and large for-profit corporations, I'm suspicious 2. Both large US political parties actively favor the interests of large capitalists (individuals and corporations) over other social interests - in a "non-partisan" fashion.
@AzorAhai--hehim: Well, I'm asking this question in 2020.
Define "overly large". I'm pretty sure that such staff has increased, but so have services as well as governmental regulations. What to one person is overly large is, to another, just right. In many places, also, some services to professors have declined. There is less secretarial help available, and professors now type all their own work, rather than having it done. My doctoral dissertation was typed by a secretary skilled in math typing. I paid for it, of course.
@Buffy: See edit.
https://www.thirdway.org/report/how-higher-education-data-reporting-is-both-burdensome-and-inadequate Might be enlightening
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140729 | How much actual funding does a Marie Curie fellowship entail?
The EU has a research fellowship program named after Physicist Marie Skłodowska-Curie. The website lacks a bunch of information, but I'm specifically interested in understanding what kind of funding it actually provides in the Individual Fellowship (IF) track. The linked-to-page says:
The grant provides an allowance to cover living, travel and family costs. In addition, the EU contributes to the training, networking and research costs of the fellow, as well as to the management and indirect costs of the project.
If you've received such a grant, participated in fund allocation, or saw the "books" at a hosting institution, I'd like to know more about what amounts of money they're talking about.
Specific points you could elaborate on:
Is the funding a lump sum? Per-year? Per-month?
Is the host institute's part figured as a percentage of the overall funding? Independently of it?
Do the applicants (individual + institution) ask for certain amounts, or does the program set them?
If it's the latter, what are the fixed amounts? Or the criteria for setting them?
Can you give a specific/typical example (no personal identifying information please) of the amount of funds some researcher, and their hosting institute, have gotten?
Obviously - no need to address all of the points.
MSCA is a set of funding fellowships, like the Individual Fellowship (IF), the Innovative Training Networks (ITN), or the Research and Innovation Staff Exchanges (RISE), are you asking for any specific call or in general? Because the funding varies between fellowships.
@MatiasValdenegro: You're right. Edited to clarify the question is about IF.
The website has a bunch of information if you look in the right place, in the applicant guide. All your questions are essentially answered by this paragraph:
The living allowance is the EU contribution to the gross salary costs of the researcher and amounts to EUR 4,880 per month. It can only be used to this end.
This amount is adjusted through the application of a country correction coefficient (CCC) for the cost of living according to the country in which the beneficiary is located. For the outgoing phase of the Global Fellowship, the country correction coefficient of the TC partner organisation will be applied. However, the adjusted amount will not change in case of secondments to a partner organisation in another MS or AC. The country correction coefficients that will be applied are indicated in Table 1 in Part 3 of the Work Programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions).
I'll let you read the rest. There is also a mobility allowance of 600€/month and a family allowance of 500€/month. There are also a few annex costs. Bear in mind that this is a gross amount.
I didn't search for the Work Programme (it's somewhere online, I imagine), but in France, the resulting net salary is around 3000€/month, which is extremely good for a postdoc; to give an idea, the median net salary for employees is 1789€ nationwide. I have a few friends who got or supervised postdocs like this in several European countries, none of them had to complain about the salary, quite the contrary.
What is an MS or an AC? I've noticed they use those acronyms a lot.
I don't have concrete numbers but can confirm that the salary is quite generous. A colleague got this in the UK and when he tried to open a bank account the bank first assumed it is a quarterly salary because they didn't believe he would be paid that much every month.
@quarague: It's not quite generous, but rather, typical researcher salaries in many countries are ridiculously low. Comparing these salaries to the media wage is a really low bar. But thanks.
@einpoklum-reinstateMonica Let's say Marie Curie fellowships are closer to professor salaries than postdoc salaries. Including allowances this comes to about 6k Euros a month pretax , postdocs in Germany, NL, France, GB are more around 4.5k per month. I agree that comparing to median salaries is useless, there is a massive difference in qualification.
@quarague: Well, if you add the mobility allowance and the family allowance and get to 6k EUR, then yes, I agree.
@einpoklum-reinstateMonica The mobility and family allowance are directly paid out to you together with the salary. I think they only need these because they are not adjusted with the country correction coefficient, but in western europe that coefficient is (should be) equal to 1 anyway. Note that the family one you only get if you are married or have kids.
@quarague Actually the coefficient can swing quite a bit even between countries in Western Europe. Though most of these places it will be at least 1.
This question was asked years ago, but I still want to share my experience as it was very frustrating to find out after the fact.
Per country the implementation of the grant differs. I had my MCIF in the Netherlands. I receive the legally obliged salary (CAO scale 11), and no penny extra. No family allowance, no travel allowance. Not even my full travel costs are reimbursed.
Obviously this upset me, and I informed the ERC people. They contacted the university and sided with the university that this is fair. The idea is that the minimum legal salary in NL is much higher than the MCIF minimum salary, so this CAO salary is plenty to cover minimum MCIF + travel + family allowance.
So for NL it doesn't matter if you receive the family allowance or not you salary will always be minimum CAO salary. The university just uses the allowance to decrease the cost for themselves.
I wish I would've had the option to tell ERC that I won't be using the mobility and family allowance so they could fund someone else with it.
Thanks for taking the time to share your experience, and I hope this will be useful to future post-docs. Did you try contacting your representative labor union, the AC-HOP?
Can I just clarify, are you saying your CAO salary was greater than the MCIF salary, but less than MCIF salary+travel+allowance, and the Marie Curie admin sided with the university to allow you to just be paid the CAO scale? That's surprising to me - I had a similar issue on my MCIOF where I was paid more than the salary part but less than the full allowance, and the university was directed to pay me the difference in full at the end of the fellowship. The idea of the university being allowed to simply pocket the balance was never on the table, so this is completely opposite to my experience.
I should note this was in a different host country, but in communication with the university the Marie Curie admin were very clear that this was their standard policy for all fellowships, so I don't think that should make a difference.
Same experience as Hanna in the NL. The salary is not nearly as high as advertised, in the end even the courses are charged from the personal allowance and not from the institutional allowance. It feels like a racket. Extremely misleading.
You guys (= Marie Curie fellows) should really do something about this. Too bad there isn't some EU-level federation of academic staff unions. Still, you might try to persuade single-nation level academic staff unions to intervene on your behalf to at least not have you charged for courses; or alternatively form an association of the fellows, and then lobby the EU about this matter, or even sue the fellowship program etc.
In Italy it is very convenient if you have assegno di ricerca. It is 4.400 euros net per month (including travel and family allowance). My total grant is about 190.000 euros.
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20665 | Should I give my affiliation as "independent" to protest my institution's funding policies?
In the following situation: I made research about some topic X in the field of Computer Engineering, submitted a paper and it got accepted. Actually it was an independent research that I have done while working as an information technology lecturer. Now the institution in which I am working does not want to give any financial support for the publishing of this research, what it would be the most ethical thing to do?
Put into my academic affiliation the place that I am working as a lecturer? that will count as a publication for their Faculty, but I believe that is not fair that they do not even try to pay for any expenses.
Put in my academic affiliation that I am an independent researcher, would that be advisable? maybe some academics would believe that I am not serious enough.
I believe that once I read some cases of people submitting papers as independent researchers, there were not so many, but those cases were real. For me I believe there is not so much difference, because what it matters is what is inside the article.
Any advice?
Thanks
How is this different from your previous question on this subject?
I have edited your title to more specifically state your question as I understand it. If I haven't got it right, please feel free to edit.
I'm not sure that I see an ethical issue here. Ethically, I think you are free to omit your affiliation if you so choose.
But I don't see any benefit to you by doing so. It may be a symbolic jab at your institution for not funding you, but it's not going to directly hurt them in any way: nobody is going to notice except you and them. On the other hand, it certainly can directly hurt you and your relationship with your institution. As just one example, they might decline to consider that publication as part of your research record when they evaluate you (e.g. for tenure). Or, more seriously, they might decide that if you don't want to be associated with them, they don't want to be associated with you; and therefore stop employing you (if your contract permits it).
Clearly you have some issues with your employer, and I hope you are able to improve matters somehow. But what you suggest seems at best ineffective and at worst self-destructive.
It can be a more than just symbolic jab, I'd say. If the place's funding is at least partly based on their publications, and it doesn't count as their publication without the affiliation, it'll be a jab (a small one) for real.
Assuming you are paid full time as a lecturer and your terms of employment cover research as well as lecturing (traditional balanced role), then that is support for your research and must be acknowledged unless your employer agrees otherwise.
Ethically you should put ALL the affiliations that contributed to the work. This included contributing to ANY of your expenses, living costs, research costs, travel costs, laboratory infrastructure, computer equipment, etc. used for the research.
If you are not paid by ANYONE to do (teaching and) research in the area of your paper, did not make use of ANY facilities or equipment not owned by you, did not do ANY work or thinking on an employer's time (think intellectual property) then you can say it is independent research, otherwise the affiliation of the supporter must be acknowledged. The primary source of support should be the primary affiliation. Depending on the publication venue you can provide additional affiliations or acknowledge other support in footnotes or acknowledgements. Funding for publication (from you or an organisation) can be mentioned in the acknowledgements like any other funding, and all funding really should be acknowledge unless the funder wishes otherwise. If you are affiliated with the funder (e.g. for self-funding through your consultancy) then this can go as an additional affiliation. This sharing of affiliation also makes clear that your university did not pay for everything needed.
I have never put "independent researcher" but have always put a relevant business/company name in some cases where support was officially declined for the project and/or I was between jobs or consulting. Putting "independent researcher" conveys the impression that this work is so unimportant that nobody would pay for it. As a consultant or employee, anything not actually covered by your contract and payment can be regarded as your intellectual property and independent research.
If you are an "independent researcher" then you have obtain your funding yourself, you support yourself, and are not receiving a salary to undertake research in the area of the paper, and you should thus regard yourself as a business and set things up as a business. You can register a business name or a partnership (e.g. with your wife) or incorporate a company, and use this name. Depending on where you are (legal residence/place of business) partnerships relating to your actual names may not need to be formally registered.
I am frequently in a position where I am a visiting professor somewhere and put both my substantive position and my visiting affiliation in an order that relates to where the bulk of the research and/or writing was done. But you really need to be able to justify this.
To make a closely related point based on the same ethical principals (often enshrined in a code of ethics by university, funding bodies, professional associations and/or journals): If you did any work on the paper or the underlying research at a university, you need to list the affiliation. If anyone else contributed in any way to the intellectual content or written form, this needs to be acknowledged, and if they contributed to both then they need to be an author, unless they specifically request otherwise.
Incidentally just providing funding (cash) or services (reviewing, technical assistance) doesn't require an affiliation or authorship byline, but should be included in the acknowledgements. On the other hand, provision of technical services or reviewing assistance that went beyond the call of duty and actually changed the direction of the project or lead to new conclusions (i.e. provided intellectual input and created intellectual property) does require the authorship and affiliation byline rather than just acknowledgement.
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8891 | Why don't all disciplines follow a double-blind review system?
I'm new to the journal publishing world, and I can't but help wonder why the review process isn't completely blind? By blind, I mean the reviewers don't know who performed the research or (more importantly) what university the research came from. It seems that knowing the identity of the authors could influence the review such that the quality of the research no longer stands by itself. You should be able to read an article and, assuming that the experiment was conducted accurately and ethically, decide if it is a significant scientific advancement. Why are reviews not routinely double-blind?
In fields with a vibrant pre-print culture (e.g. Physics or Math), most papers are already publicly posted on the internet with the authors name attached before the paper is submitted and reviewed. In that context, double-blind reviewing isn't even a sensible option.
Even without pre-prints the same is true of talks in some fields. For many papers, many potential referees will have already seen a talk at a conference on the results in the paper. This may be especially true of math where the process of writing up a paper in full detail is especially onerous, so it's common for people to be giving talks on topics while the paper is in preparation.
A recent example I came across is that the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics doesn't blind the author of the paper because it is impractical to disseminate supplementary material (which is frequently hosted on the authors personal website). Authors can ask for double-blind though if they prefer.
I don't think the argument that "review often can't be double-blind" is an argument against the benefits of using double-blind review. Just because some articles in some disciplines sometimes would already be published with a name, does not mean that the journals cannot try to do double-blind review.
@Behacad When there is no way the review will effectively be double-blind anyway (which is the case for mathematics), it would make journal editorial boards look extremely silly if they were to go through all the extra work (and put the authors through the extra work) involved in doing reviews double-blind.
Are more than 50% of manuscripts really published before formal peer-review? That is interesting indeed. But still, I see this only applying to some disciplines.
@Behacad I keep a feed of two subjects on arXiv, and I would be surprised to find even a few papers per year which were relevant to my work and which I had not already seen on that feed.
Further, in fields like experimental particle physics where there are relatively few large scale projects, the simple details of the measurement (even for a "small author-list" paper on some side measurement for reducing systematics) generally reduce the candidate pool to a just a few possible groups.
Years ago, the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society experimented with blind refereeing, and I was a blind referee for one paper. The main part of my report was essentially: "If the author is X, accept the paper. If not, put the author in touch with X, who presented the same results at conference Y."
@AndreasBlass: That summarizes the issue so perfectly!
@Nate Eldredge, It also summarizes the issue of author bias perfectly. The paper should have mentioned the results at the conference, and cited it regardless if it was the same author or not. Further, the paper should have been accepted or rejected based on its contents regardless of the Author.
@Hjan: It would be a nightmare if people could plagiarize other people’s work and still get it accepted because the referee assumed the submission came from the real author. And if every paper says “these results were presented by X at conferences A, B, and C” then doubleblindness is doing nothing.
@NoahSnyder The "real" authors should also cite their own work, and if in the new work indeed nothing substantial is added, the new work should not be accepted. There should be no difference in extending your own work or that of others. Although, in some communities, minor extensions and variations of the same work published by the same authors are tollerated. Double blind review, combined with minimal incremental value criteria could be a good tool to mitigate such 'salami slicing' publications.
A talk in math is not "work." You have to eventually write up the details.
It might be helpful to clarify that mathematics works very differently from most other fields. Theoretical mathematics is a slow field, and papers have much more longevity than a typical conference paper (which do not exist in most of mathematics). Many mathematicians (not just established researchers) give the same talk many times at conferences and local seminars, and this can occur at any stage in the write-up process.
Theoretical computer science uses single-blind reviewing almost exclusively. Reviewers know the authors of the papers they review, but authors do not who reviews their papers. (As with many things, we copy this attitude from mathematics.)
I think the main reasons we don't use double-blind reviewing are that (1) we never have, (2) we have a habit of posting preprints (although not to the same extent as math and physics), and (3) there's a general consensus that it's just not necessary.
The standard argument that double-blind reviewing is unnecessary is that the decision to accept or reject a given paper is more objective than in other fields. There isn't an experiment to judge. Either the algorithm is faster or it isn't; either the theorem is true or it isn't; either the proof is actually a proof or it isn't. (I don't buy this argument, especially for page-limited conference submissions, but there it is.)
You should be able to read an article and, assuming that the experiment was conducted accurately and ethically, decide if it is a significant scientific advancement.
These are not the only criteria by which scientific research is judged.
Update: As @a3nm points out in his comment, theoretical computer science is slowly transitioning toward a "lightweight double-blind reviewing" protocol that is already common in other computer science research areas. "Lightweight double-blind" requires the authors to submit their papers without identifying information, citing their own work in the third person, but it does not prevent either posting preprints to arXiv or presenting work at seminars and workshops.
ALENEX, DiSC, ESA, FAccT, FODS, and LICS already follow this protocol, as do several conferences at the intersection of theoretical computer science and machine learning. Major conferences like SODA are at least seriously discussing the idea, but change is slow, and many (especially senior) researchers are strongly opposed to the idea.
For more information, see this report on double-blind reviewing at ALENEX 2018 and this FAQ from POPL 2018.
I suspect your reason (1) has a large impact. Things are slow to change.
There is a third argument I have heard wrt theoretical computer science and our conference culture: when a program committee must make a decision within a relatively short time window about a paper on a technical subject, the paper should be scrutinized to a different extent depending on whether the authors are well-known experts.
the paper should be scrutinized to a different extent depending on whether the authors are well-known experts — This view is not universal within theoretical computer science. (My own view is that this approach might be reasonable if its aim were to give new authors the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, this is usually the opposite of what actually happens.)
the paper should be scrutinized to a different extent depending on whether the authors are well-known experts: this is precisely the reason why we should in fact be doing double-blind reviewing in TCS. This is an obvious bias against newcomers, and precisely the kind of things that double-blind reviewing is supposed to prevent.
It might be different with conference papers, but in mathematics a paper (especially at a top journal) is not merely evaluated for correctness. In my limited experience, journals also ask for an evaluation of how original and how important the work is (usually offering 3–5 options for each criterion, or open ended). So the objectivity argument should be taken with a grain of salt.
@Remy Oh, that's definitely also true for the most prestigious theoretical computer science conferences; it's not enough to be correct. To be clear: I'm not offering the objectivity argument because I agree with it.
@JeffE: thanks for the update! The situation continues to evolve, with essentially all major generalistic TCS conferences having transitioned to double-blind reviewing (at least as an experiment): cf the answer https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/53324 and the website https://double-blind.org/
While this article by Kathryn McKinley is quite old now, it provides a much more nuanced view of the processes that would support a double blind review process. In brief, it's not as simple as "make everything double blind". There are stages where it's important, and there are stages in the review process where it's useful NOT to be double blind.
Roughly speaking, you want double blind review when doing the initial evaluation, because people are more likely to jump to conclusions on a first look. But later on, it's helpful to know who's doing the work because even in mathematical work, there's an element of trust that goes into evaluating a paper (especially in theoretical CS for example, where papers are way too short (and deadlines too close) to do a rigorous evaluation of proofs).
This aligns with a slogan I heard from the sociological study of decision making, that decision rules in the first 'screening' phase are often non-compensatory ("deal-breakers" or "deal-makers"), whereas in the second phase of closer inspection they are usually compensatory (i.e. different attributes are weighted against each other). I would cite relevant reading if I were familiar enough with the literature...
The "element of trust" part is in line with this comment https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8891/why-dont-all-disciplines-follow-a-double-blind-review-system#comment90407_8899 and gives me the same impression that this is exactly the kind of bias that double-blind reviewing should prevent.
The answer is at least partly that many research fields are small enough so that most people know what other researchers or research teams are doing. Anonymity is thus impossible because it does not take much to figure out who wrote the paper.
Reviewers are (in my field) often anonymous. I personally do not like this because it is easier as author to judge the comments when you know who delivered them. When you get anonymous reviews you cannot easily judge the tone if it is just the way someone expresses themselves or if it is rude (positive reviews are usually not difficult to deal with for some reason).
I have also seen in journals with open reviews how anonymous posts are full of abrasive (unprofessional) comments and hence not very constructive. I pesonally think anonymity brings out the worst in some people and openness forces one to focus on the constructive.
So, double-blind reviews can be done but I do not really see the benfit, at least not in my and related fields where communities count a few thousand.
Double-blind means that authors and reviewers are both anonymous to each other. Your complaints apply equally to single-blind reviewing, where only the reviewers are anonymous.
@JeffE The process involves two processes, an authored manuscript and a review, so even if the two are combined there are stil two parts with specific issues and I describe my opinion of how this would (not) work in my field.
I agree. I wish that all submissions and reviews were entirely public and non-anonymous. Even if a reviewer can't figure out who you are it may be easy enough to figure out who you are not, and that could be enough to give space for bad behavior. I think if reviewers had to sign their names to their reviews in a completely public way this would greatly enhance the quality of reviewing and would also protect against those things that blind reviewing is supposed to protect against, but doesn't.
It is little off topic, but indeed interesting how anonymity is often generate unnecessary rudeness and trolling on the side of the reviewer. Curiously, almost any other field of life, blogospheres, SE etc work pretty well in a non-anonymous way, where the reputation of a given person actually backs up its argument, and not against it.
"I pesonally think anonymity brings out the worst in some people and openness forces one to focus on the constructive." On the other hand, anonymity forces one to consider only what one says, and not who said it.
In the age of Internet is not very difficult to get the name of the author (at least with a high probability), especially in a field with few practitioners. For instance see this: http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/12/the-journal-reviewing-process-isnt-anonymous-did-you-really-think-it-was-think-again.html.
So in practice only the reviewer remains anonymous.
Just because you may be able to de-anonymize the submission doesn't mean that double-blind reviewing is worthless. As a reviewer, I prefer the submission itself to be double-blind, so I'm sure I won't be biased by the author's reputation or that of their institutions; and I will not try to identify them, at least not before I have reached a final decision on the submission.
In some fields that involve a high degree of "practical development" (recognizeable prototypes etc.) rather than "just" theoretical concepts, it is often impractical to attempt and conceal the identity of submission authors.
A conference or journal may require submissions to be anonymized, which adds a certain extra burden on the authors: Anonymizing does not end with removing the authors list, certain sections such as an Acknowledgments section need to be removed, and parts of the text may need to be rewritten (when referencing earlier work by the same authors and would, in the final paper, write "We have already ..."). And as it is sometimes still obvious that the current submission is the direct successor of an earlier work, that reference needs to be replaced with something like Removed for double-blind review, thus naturally reducing the usefulness of the references.
And yet, all of those factors may easily be in vain, as, for example, CS often involves prototypical applications that get repeatedly extended. The theoretical possibility exists that another researcher may have gotten their hands on someone else's prototype, but when the screenshots in the submission bear a striking resemblance to those in a previously published work (*), the most likely explanation is that the two works were written by the same author or at least team.
So, as trying to reliably blind the submission is not feasible in many cases and just leads to extra work for the authors (including the discussions if the double-blind review is optional), various conferences/journals do not offer a double-blind review in the first place.
(*) I am not saying that the same contribution is published twice. I am referring to "unimportant" aspects such as the general layout of a window, or its toolbar icons, here.
It's not clear to me that in a small field, double-blind necssarily helps promote more impartial reviews. You gain something in removing bias/prejudice based on knowledge of the author(s). However, it becomes much more difficult to control for conflicts of interest: plenty of non-obvious connections exist between researchers that an editor can't be expected to know about. With single-blind reviewing, there is at least the opportunity for the reviewer to decline if they know they've influenced the author's views in some way, or if they feel they have reviewed too high a fraction of that author's output. If everything is double-blind, it seems quite likely that small review circles could form, to the ultimate detriment of the field.
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74708 | Math graduate, not enough physics coursework to apply straight to physics MS
I have a BS in math (2.9) and a MA in teaching (Pass/fail online program)
I am teaching math at a high school but now miss my college days and the upper level material. My end goal would be a PhD in Physics at a US university.
I don't have enough course work in Physics to try and apply straight to a Masters in Physics, as well as a low GPA to apply with.
What are my options? (I have ideas but am unsure as to what is realistic or worth doing)
Community college classes until I have prerequisites for physics?
Non-matriculated schooling?
See Graduate school admission with a degree in a different field
What country do you want to get your PhD in? You should be warned that a PhD in physics is often a totally different experience from being an undergraduate student.
In the US (Though I'm not opposed to going abroad as I have looked into teaching high school abroad). And I hope to go for a masters first to gain understanding of whether a PhD track is right for me.
Few community colleges can offer the appropriate prerequisites.
@alex_h: I edited the note about the US into your question. It makes a significant difference, and it will be easier for people to see there than in a comment.
For mathematics, some US colleges offer "post-baccalaureate" programs, which is a 1-year program for students who need some extra advanced coursework before applying to a PhD program. I wonder if there are similar programs in physics. It might be just the sort of thing you need.
If you are studying in the United States, you should take the core physics undergraduate courses from a reputable university. Then you should apply directly to PhD programs.
A PhD is usually narrowed down to a very peculiar research topic and as such missing some education in other general areas might not be particularly dangerous for the sake of getting the PhD itself. Moreover, what matters the most when undergoing a research path is the attitude to learn and to question the scientific method more than the titles you have previously obtained, which, however, do matter when applying for admission to a PhD programme. Committees might prefer someone with already some background just because the selection processes usually see many applicants and Universities need a way to filter them out. A good recommendation letter goes however far beyond any selection criteria and if you can get one it should not be too difficult to enter a PhD programme. In particular, especially in Europe, GRE, GPA and all these quiz results are irrelevant for anything.
Concerning the topic itself, as you have formal background in mathematics,
do consider that many PhD in theoretical physics are essentially pure mathematics, therefore you might even find it along your lines and not too difficult to enjoy.
This said, if you want to have a good research profile and a thorough understanding of what you are doing (rather than just getting the PhD), a good knowledge of physics is fundamental. I would suggest to first achieve a master degree and only then go for a PhD (which should always be the rule, even if you manage to get admitted before).
A masters in physics from an American university is not the rule; usually they are awarded for partial completion of the PhD.
@AnonymousPhysicist: If they are awarded at all. I skipped the course-work Master's degree in aerospace engineering on the way from my BS ASE to my PhD in ASE.
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75510 | How bad do your teaching evaluation scores have to be before you should leave them off your resume?
I got a 4.0 out of 5.0 on my teaching evaluations. The average grade in my department is a 4.5. Should I put this on my CV/resume?
For reference, I am a PhD student and this is the first class I've taught.
It depends what kind of job you are applying for and in what field. It is important to realise that most of the high-rep users of this site are American scientists working in research universities. Maybe you are a literature student who is aiming for a job in a liberal arts college? In which case, the conventions might be different. In my experience, 4/5 would be very good in a mathematics dept but fairly mediocre in liberal arts. Whether you should mention it on your CV at all is doubtful, but you could include it in a teaching dossier.
In my experience, people don't generally put teaching evaluation scores on a CV at all, regardless of what they are.
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
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51433 | What to do about negative teaching evaluations during job interviews?
This past year I taught two undergraduate freshman-level required religion courses (one in the Fall and one in the Spring) and the teaching evaluations from students were rather average-to-poor. These are the only two courses I have taught so far in my career.
Many academic jobs now request you to send proof of teaching excellence along with your application. Have these two courses ruined my chances of getting a full-time job? I don't want to be dishonest and only present a few positive student comments while ignoring the number of negative ones. At the same time I am committed to improving my teaching skills and want to learn from my mistakes.
What is the best way to present this information in a job application? Or should I just not send my evaluations at all?
One more thing I should mention: the student response rate was very low. In both classes less than half of the students filled out the evaluation at all. I don't know if this is relevant (I've read that students with negative opinions tend to be more motivated to fill out evaluations than positive students).
What type of position: research-focused or teaching-focused? What type of school?
It was a temporary adjuncting position open because one of the full time profs was on sabbatical. Is that something I should mention in the application?
@Ben Crowell: if I was applying to a liberal arts school (in mathematics), I would be sure to include student evaluations (comments and numbers). Some schools ask for them explicitly.
If you're asked to present information relative to your teaching, you need to do that, especially if teaching will be a significant part of your future job.
Not everyone is a superstar right out of the gate, as far as teaching is concerned, and everyone understands that it may take a while for you to hit your stride. The best way for you to finesse the negative responses is to include your own commentary on the teaching evaluations, showing that you can be reflective about your work. We all bomb out now and then; the question is whether you can look objectively at what the students have said and make some adjustments to your approach in the classroom that might address some of the issues. I want to see someone making improvements based on feedback. I don't want to see a faculty member getting the same kinds of comments, semester after semester, and just going on with the same old methods. Did you seek any kind of mentorship for your teaching?
A low response rate is not a positive thing, unfortunately.
Did you have a supervisor for your teaching? Was that person supportive and aware of your efforts in the classroom? Could that person write a teaching recommendation for you that might be in addition to the other expected letters?
Unfortunately I did not have a supervisor for my teaching. I do have someone writing me a recommendation letter who has observed my teaching / presentation skills outside of a classroom setting.
It would be good if that person could highlight your potential. Good luck --
How do you recommend including my own commentary on the evals? In the interview or as part of a cover letter / teaching statement?
I think a teaching statement would be good, clipped to the evaluations so that it's a packet. You might want to mention teaching in your cover letter, but don't go into detail there. You might also think about the courses you taught -- did anything make them particularly difficult to teach? Were they for freshmen? Required? and so on. Sometimes a particular class will be just plain difficult for anyone to teach --
Both classes were required Freshmen courses, and I did feel like many of the students did not want to be there to begin with. There were also two students mad about their grades at the end of the semester in one class (their attendance had been very poor). I'm afraid to say "the class was difficult to teach" though... wouldn't that just come off badly?
I think if I had been teaching a class of Juniors or Seniors my evals would have been more positive. The most common complaint was that I did not use Power Point. I don't personally think Power Point is a good teaching tool, but I may need to reconsider for Freshman students... a more visual-based experience may be better for them?
I based my lecture style on some of my own favorite teachers, which I think was naive and a mistake. While probably appropriate to upperclassmen who are more invested in the class, for freshmen it was not the right approach.
I agree that evaluations for major classes are generally better than those for non-major freshman classes (in which some students may not be aware that they're not in high school anymore). And I do agree that freshmen might need a few more bells and whistles -- if your information was rather dense, using PowerPoint especially for the important main points might have helped them.
Thanks ewormuth, you've been very helpful. I've been a bit stressed about these evals (because I do love and care about teaching, and of course I want a job!) so its good to have a sense of direction about what to do next.
Can you get information about the history of teaching evaluations in that course when others have taught it? I don't mean the evaluations of specific other instructors (that information would be private) but a long-term average. In my department, such information is available. There are courses where the evaluations are lousy no matter how great the teacher is. If your course is in that category, and especially if you did better than the average, then that would be good to indicate in your teaching statement.
Such evaluations are intended for internal use and even if they were full of praise, you wouldn't submit those.
The recommendation letter from the observer of the non-classroom setting is what you should submit. Yes, that is a bit thin for "proving teaching excellence" -- but don't despair. We don't know what sort of "proof" the other candidates will be submitting -- so it's worth a shot!
To improve your teaching, gain confidence, and collect more "proof," you could volunteer as a literacy teacher, English teacher for speakers of other languages, or grade school tutor. You could take a pedagogy ("Education") course. My impression is that a lot of what happens in those courses is that you go and observe a variety of classes and write a journal about your observations, in conjunction with some reading about different approaches and techniques. You could embark on a self-study project doing the observing, journaling and reading, without being enrolled in a class.
Particularly if the students evaluations are full of praise, you should highlight them in your teaching statement, if you are applying to jobs at schools where teaching is a significant criterion for hiring.
Sorry, I disagree. They really aren't intended for external use. However, a dean could review them and write a letter based on them, and could even include a few verbatim quotes.
It varies from place to place. Some schools might want a summary sheet, and so on. I'm not sure what the OP's application requirements were, but if there's no evidence of his teaching quality, that would speak for itself. Having a chair or dean write a letter is fine, but if the majority of comments were negative, and the new teacher was not supervised or observed, what is the letter writer to say? By the way, pedagogy courses can be a lot more involved than you suggest. A self-study project would likely not be the same.
@ewormuth - May I take it that you would recommend the course as more useful than the self-study project? (I've never done one of those courses.)
Hopefully the chair or dean could say something about the candidate's qualities (work ethic, student-centered, etc., etc.), and about the results -- they must have statistics on passing rates, etc., that they could compare the candidate's results to.
Right -- that's what they would usually do -- a table with the averages for the course and then the individual instructor's scores. Re the courses -- it may be hard to get into them, if you're not in an M.A. or credential program. You can certainly learn something by watching others who teach the same course.
Maybe audit the course?
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21166 | What are the important factors to consider when choosing a Master topic?
I am a computer science, master student. As I am nearing the end of my studies, I am starting to weight my options for the final "thing", the Master thesis. I already had 2-3 meetings with some Professors offering master topics. The more I think on this topic, the more I get confused.
One of the topics is not really within the area of my interests, or close to something that I would like to work in the future, but the Professor is really nice and quality, I have had good cooperation with him earlier before. And I think that I can further learn from him.
One of the other options, is much interesting, however I feel as if I am afraid of it. I don't have much experience in the exact field which the master thesis covers. The professor just arrived in out university and I have not taken any of his lectures.
The final option, is one that I feel more comfortable. It might be from a topic that I have worked on for the last 12 months, so I can get into it really fast.
Considering these information and the fact that in the future I want to have the possibility of continuing Phd studies, maybe not directly after the master studies, but sometimes eventually, which one of the thesis should I choose?
Should I go for the most worldly-renown professor, or for one of the others. Which parameters should I bear in mind when making the decision? I have thought about the quality of the professor, the effort that the topic requires, the potential of having a good adviser (on whom I can rely) etc.
I am sure, here are people much experienced than me who can tell what are the important things to consider when making such a choice.
It seems seems that deep inside, I am being influenced by the grading as well. Is the grade of a thesis more important than the topic itself?
I know the question might feel as offtopic, but I really need help.
Thanks
EDIT 1: Just wanted to add a couple of questions in here; To what extent the grades influence future job & Phd applications?
Is the grade of a thesis more important than the topic itself? — In the US, theses don't get "grades". Either you finish the thesis and you get the degree, or you don't and you don't.
One thing to keep uppermost in your mind - the topic of your Master's thesis is not necessarily the one that you have to pursue in later research, such as part of a PhD.
The point of a Master's thesis is to demonstrate your ability to do research. Opinions might vary on whether it is a reasonable expectation that the research that you do for a Master's thesis has to be world-class and leads to one or more publications. In my view, it would be nice, but it isn't a requirement.
What you need to get out of your Master's thesis is a strong demonstration that you are capable of academic research. You decision on which supervisor and topic to choose should be guided by this driver.
Pursuing a research topic merely because the professor is world-renown may be misguided. What happens if you don't strike up a good working relationship and your research falters because of it? Will your professor's reputation outweigh a mediocre research effort?
Your drive and interest in a research topic are strong factors of whether you will succeed. The motivation should come from you - most of the time - to address your research topic. Again, if you aren't particularly interested in the topic, you are going to find it hard to keep going at it when - and it is a matter of when - the going gets tough.
I reiterate that at the end of your Master's thesis, you want to demonstrate your research ability. You are still learning the skills and craft of research, and for that reason, you want to seek teachers who are skilled at teaching how to research. Is it necessarily true that the best practitioners of science research are the best teachers of how to do research? Sometimes true, sometimes not.
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12481 | Are there available corpora of academic works?
There are many different corpora[1] for the English language:
Google Books ngram database is freely accessible and covers publications indexed in Google Books from the 16th century; words are tagged by part-of-speech (more info here).
The Corpus of Contemporary American English is a large and balanced corpus of American English, including not only books but also magazines, newspapers and spoken English.
The British National Corpus is a similar enterprise for British English, both spoken and written.
However, one may want to do an analysis of the evolution of English as used in written academic works (theses, journal articles, etc.). This came apparent to me while I was trying to research usage of passive vs. active voice for this question.
So, are there any available corpora of academic works in English language?
corpus: collections of written or spoken material in machine-readable form, assembled for the purpose of studying linguistic structures, frequencies, etc. [New Oxford American Dictionary]
Yes, JSTOR provides a corpus for linguistic (and other) analyses of academic literature, at JSTOR Data for Research
See this Language Log discussion of one such analysis done on that corpus.
I'll self answer, because I realized just now that COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English) actually includes academic texts (a subpart of the corpus they refer to as COCA-Academic). It even allows one to search by section, for example restricting the search to academic works:
(and it was right under my nose the whole time!)
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5408 | Is pseudonymous publication ethical?
From this MathOverflow question:
William Sealy Gosset published a result under the pseudonym Student. (Because his employer, the Guinness brewing company, did not allow their employees to publish for fear of divulging trade secrets.)
Why isn't publishing under a pseudonym a breach of academic ethics? It seems that the common idea is that publishing under a pseudonym is ethical, unless they are deliberately used with intention to defraud or deceive. But, given that we don't know who a pseudonymous author is, how can his peers have any trust in that (or even check it)?
Authorship attribution after publication is different than review blindness. Example: if I use a pseudonym and no affiliation, I may be defrauding my employer because they will not be formally affiliated with the research. Also: I can create a pseudonym and publish research under both my real name and a pseudonym (or two pseudonyms), which is intentional deception at the very least. (And why would you assume that I'm not also publishing on this very Q&A site under my real name? winks back)
Ethics aside, there may be policy against pseudonyms regardless of intent. arXiv for example: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5874 http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6365 http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3934
@WillieWong Really? http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.3926 http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0374 http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.3956
@JeffE polymath is not exactly pseudonymous. They even gave a link in the papers to exactly who contributed to the projects. Of course, I have in fact not been able to find the so-called arXiv policy written down anywhere (blame arXiv's poor navigation design), hence I linked to instances of withdrawal instead of the actual policy.
I think the arXiv's pseudonym policy is basically for defense against crackpots (and DHJ Polymath is a little different since it's publicly known who was involved, and it was posted to the arXiv by a known person, namely Ryan O'Donnell).
What? Yes, "D. H. J. Polymath" is exactly pseudonymous! The fact that the authors' real identities are known doesn't prevent them from publishing under a pseudonym.
@JeffE in the spirit at least, I agree with Anonymous that Polymath is more of a consortium than a pseudonym… just like physicists often do
The worth of scientific work is in the content, not in who wrote it. Therefore, I think publishing under a pseudonym is not necessarily unethical. In the example the OP presented the author was prevented from publishing if he used his own name. If the research was sound and reproducible, I would be fine with this. In practice I would like to know who wrote the paper.
But if he was prevented from publishing by his employer/contract, wasn't published pseudonymously unethical?
@F'x In this case this is certainly illegal in some sense, but it may be ethical more than unethical (the paper is an advancement to the human knowledge, so it may be of high value in term of social utility).
I'd say it is more unethical to give someone a contract that forbids publishing papers, than to actually publish something despite such a contract. There's a difference between unethical and illegal.
If the pseudonym is used consistently, it is not relevant what "real person" it relates to, it gives you a picture of what to expect under this name. There is a good reason artists often use pseudonyms. With scientists, I do not see a fundamental difference. In fact, Sophie Germain used pseudonyms to study at a time where it was illegal for women to study or when communicating with Gauss. Was that unethical? When she was found out (e.g. by Gauss), they were, against expectation, positively surprised - but, shouldn't it be irrelevant who is behind the pseudonym?
I don't think there's an absolute answer here. Ethical questions generally have lots of "grey areas" associated with them.
I think the biggest question to ask—and the one you indirectly are headed toward—is "why is someone using a pseudonym?" If the answer is "to get around a contractual agreement that both parties have agreed to and accepted," then it's likely that the use of a pseudonym is probably unethical. (Although one could argue that if this were intended to "correct" a more serious problem, then it might still be ethical—even if contractually messy.)
If, on the other hand, the answer is "to avoid potential review bias," or "because publishing under one's own name would make one's life less convenient" (for instance, there's a negative stigma associated with publishing outside one's "home" field), then it's less clear that there's an ethical violation in progress.
And don't forget "because it's fun" as a motivation.
While "it's fun" is a valid motivation, it's hard to assess the ethics of that. . . .
An additional case is a change of names, e.g. due to marriage. If you don't want your work misattributed, you may want to stick with the name you started publishing under.
@Raphael: That's not really a pseudonym.
@aeismail It is, in the sense that it's not your real name, i.e. the one on your ID. Of course, it was your real name once so your identity is not a secret. Pen names and other common forms of pseudonyms don't either; some will even be listed on your ID (at least in Germany). The question does not specify which purpose for publishing under a pseudonym we should discuss.
@Raphael is right. In law the idea is: if you can do more (if you can have a completely random/"fake" pseudonym), you can do less as well (you can stick with a previously known name).
And even in this case, it probably wasn't to avoid contract - "the scientific brewers, including Gosset, were allowed by the company to publish research so long as they did not mention (1) beer, (2) Guinness, or (3) their own surname" (from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2018.1514325) - it sounds like a mutually-agreeable way to publish general knowledge w/o giving away Guinness's specific application.
There are various views of the usage of pseudonym. I'd say a prevalent one in Europe is that its part of the special protection of authors in the sense of freedom of speech. I do not know how this is handled in the US or otherwhere, but in many European countries there is a constitutional right of protection of pseudonyms (which implies the right of publishing under a pseudonym if desired for any reason).
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143863 | When is an academic a -sensei and when is he/she a -hakase?
I'm not Japanese, and I've been emailed by someone who is Japanese, in the context of potential academic collaboration. He's in industry, not academia. He used the "-sensei" honorific to refer to me, while I had called him using his company-position-related honorific.
This seemed strange to me, since he's older and more senior than me (in most respects anyway). I was assuming he'd call me "-san", or if he wanted to be nice, then "-hakase" or no honorific at all.
My question: In what circumstances is it customary to call non-medical academics, with a doctoral degree, "-sensei", and in what circumstances is "-hakase" the custom?
Sensei is a general term for a teacher, especially a master teacher. A Zen Buddhist learns from a sensei unless the teacher has a specific high title such as a Roshi. In Chinese, a sensei would be sifu. Skilled at teaching. Specifically, it indicates respect of the student for the teacher.
Nothing hard and fast- sensei is a general respectful term for a teacher. -hakase I think specifically refers to doctorates, but is a little awkward because a fresh PhD and a senior would both be -hakase, so it puts them in the same bracket. Sensei is safe and common. I'm not Japanese though, would love to hear more nuance if someone can share.
@Buffy: I know that. I should mention my conversation partner is not a student, and our interaction will not be about me teaching him things (other than how we all learn from knowledgeable people blah blah).
I think your partner is saying they have learned something useful/interesting from you and so you are, to them, sensei. Whether you thought you were teaching or not. Or, possibly, the person has misinterpreted your title/position. The Japanese can be quite polite.
@Buffy: But I haven't told him anything yet :-P
And you don't need to be an academic at all to be sensei to me. Or even formally educated, I suspect.
@Buffy not sure about the way it works in Japanese culture, but your analogy to the Chinese sifu (“师父”/“师傅”) is not really accurate. No one would ever call their teacher in real life as that, unless maybe you were a Shaolin monk and referring to your teacher of martial arts. The usual phrase is laoshi 老师 or just shi 师, although "professor" would translate to boshi 博士 (note that this shi is different).
@YiFan, thanks. I take it from Tai Chi, actually. And neither monk, nor master.
Probably "hakase" is for pure researcher or scientists in research institutions, not academic institutions. While "sensei" for academicians in universities, medical doctors, teachers, instructors, sifu, ... But not sure if "hakase" is usually used to address people or not.
@kate: Why is an academic not a "pure researcher"? Or rather, are you speaking from knowledge of custom, or your common-sense assumption?
I haven't told him anything yet: A non-Japanese person might address you as Professor before you tell them anything (regardless of whether you have that title), sensei is the equivalent
@einpoklum What I mean by "an academician is not a pure researcher" is because academicians do not only do research, but also teach; while research scientists at research institutes do not have the obligation to teach, their job is researching. From my limited observation though, so I might be wrong.
I've lived in Japan for two years and can speak the language to some extent.
Keigo is complicated, and any rule you learn about seems to have lots of exceptions. After two years, I felt that I had some idea, but I felt that I had far from mastered the intricacies. In particular, older people often addressed me using keigo for reasons I didn't quite understand.
"Sensei" is a general respectful term for a teacher. Since he is interested in an academic collaboration specifically, perhaps he regards you as "senior" because you have an academic position and he does not.
"Sensei" is a general and common form of address, used for academics and other teachers. I have not heard "hakase" used as a form of address.
In any case, he has certainly addressed you with respect. If you're unsure of what Japanese title to use, and your correspondence is in English, I'd encourage addressing him in English as "Mr. X" or (if he has a doctorate) "Dr. X".
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148216 | An equivalent of arXiv, but for tabular and other experimental data?
Suppose I'm doing some experimental work in an academic context. The essence of the results will likely be captured by documents such as conference/journal articles, technical reports, a M.Sc. or Ph.D. thesis, a monograph etc. For these kinds of artifacts, we have all sorts of avenues for long-term archiving and Internet availability: Journals have their own archives, universities make internal publications available (well, sometimes), and you can put copies on arXiv and/or sites like ResearchGate or Academia.edu (although the latter have their problems).
If you've produced software code - you can again use university-specific facilities, or platforms like BitbBucket, GitHub or SourceForge which recently revamped itself into relevance.
Where would you put raw data, though? Especially tabular data? You don't publish the (potentially large amounts) of it alongside your papers. You could put it as a file on your website, but this is limited-availability archiving/publications - it's like putting a link to a software source archive on your website. It's there, but people are much less likely to find it than if it were a repository on one of the platforms mentioned above.
So, my question is: Are there platforms for storing public data, in particular data obtained during academic/scientific work?
Notes:
It doesn't quite matter if the data is accessible directly as though on an SQL database; or if you can browse it in a tabular fashion through some web interface. Those are nice options, but even something "primitive" as a CSV file in a standard-format URL is already passable.
Same goes for versioning or revision-control support: Nice to have, not a deal-breaker for a potential answer here.
Publications don't need to have a perma-link to the data, nor will it necessarily be archived before such publications. But again - it's a nice feature such a platform could have.
This question is highly related - almost a dupe - if you look at the title, but the body asks different questions than I do. I don't want/need the data to count as a "paper" or a CV-worthy publication; I don't need/want peer-reviewing of the data as a condition for it being available to the public etc.
Does this answer your question? Creating a permanent URL to put in a publication
@GoodDeeds: No.
Related, maybe duplicate: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/987/data-publication-basics-where-why-how-and-when-should-i-publish-my-unpublis, https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9964/how-to-share-to-mention-publish-large-datasets?noredirect=1&lq=1
Do you know about zenodo which is a CERN initiative? It may be interesting for you https://about.zenodo.org/
I don't. Please describe that for us in your answer... StackExchange policy calls for answers to be more than just named links.
One solution that seems to fit your criteria is the Open Science Framework
Here is a description of the project (source):
OSF is a free, open source web application that connects and supports
the research workflow, enabling scientists to increase the efficiency
and effectiveness of their research. Researchers use OSF to
collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects,
materials, and data. OSF is the flagship product of the non-profit
Center for Open Science.
Regarding the specific criteria that you mentioned:
"OSF has built-in version control for all files stored in your project, can render hundreds of different file types, and allows you to directly edit plain text files (including R and Python scripts) directly in the browser." (source)
"Each project and component can have its own set of files, allowing you to organize your files into categorial or hierarchical groups, like datasets or studies. Each file has a unique, persistent URL so that it can be cited or linked to individually." (source)
"OSF is maintained and developed by the Center for Open Science (COS), a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. COS is supported through grants from a variety of supporters, including federal agencies, private foundations, and commercial entities... COS established a $250,000 preservation fund for hosted data in the event that COS had to curtail or close its offices. If activated, the preservation fund will preserve and maintain read access to hosted data. This fund is sufficient for 50+ years of read access hosting at present costs. COS will incorporate growth of the preservation fund as part of its funding model as data storage scales..." (source)
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173001 | Copyrights on epigrams in a commercial publication of academic work
An acquaintance of mine - let's call him Robert - is having a book published based on his academic research. The book targets the general public, and the publication is commercial, albeit with a scholarly nature. In theory, my acquaintance could even see some money out of this affair.
Robert begins each chapter with an epigram - a short quote from somewhere. It could be an official document of some world state, it could be some adage by a famous literary figure, etc.
Now, the (US) publisher is requiring Robert to obtain explicit rights for the text of each of these epigraphs - just like other reproduced material such as photos, tables of data etc. I am pretty sure this is a bogus requirement, but I'm not sure how to advice Robert to argue against this and claim he should not need to do this.
In case it matters at all - these epigraphs appeared in Robert's relevant articles, monographs, reports and/or theses on which the book is based.
Can you help me offer such an argument?
Isn't this a legal question?
@GoodDeeds: Well, yes, but one which academics occasionally face, and may have relevant experience with. Also, I don't want a court brief about this...
Why do you think it's a bogus requirement? It seems quite reasonable to me.
I guess the easiest would be taking epigrams that are old enough to fall outside of copyright. Not sure how long an explicit quotation you are allowed to quote verbatim under "fair use", if you do not take expired quotations. I could imagine that if using commercial mottos, you might not infringe copyrights, but instead trademarks. Caveat emptor.
I agree: legal question. In the US, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use Elsewhere see their lawyers.
Likely the issue for the publisher is that the "epigram" can, perhaps, be considered to be a "complete work". As such, you can't copy/quote it if it is copyrighted even with a citation. This is similar to images and some graphics, which are complete in themselves, so "fair use" doesn't apply.
It isn't just the length of the quote that matters but how much of the "work" it contains. There are other factors as well, but they may not apply.
Just as a two line poem can't be copied without permission (if under copyright), even if properly quoted and cited, you can't copy other "complete works".
One additional solution is to use older epigrams that are no longer under copyright.
Some publishers will provide a fund for license payments for such things, either a grant or a charge against future royalties. They do the same, sometimes, for cover images and some other things.
Can't copyright on old works be renewed somehow? Or is anything older than -N years from now, safe? Also, how can one decide whether, say, a two-line poem is a work, or a piece of a book of poems?
@einpoklum I forget the exact date (about the time Mickey Mouse first appeared) but sometime around 1927 the copyright law seems to be updated frequently enough that copyright may now be perpetual in US. Prior to that they expired some years after the creator's death. So, stuff prior to that date is mostly free of copyright. And a "piece of a book" doesn't imply that it is not a complete work on its own. In fact for poems it is likely that the "collecting in a book" is just coincidental. The individual poems are "creative works" individually. The "collection" may also be "creative", or not.
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47217 | Getting PhD from average institution (gain experience) before applying for a PhD in top institution?
What do you think about an idea of getting a PhD in an "better then average institution" to get tons of experience to get a second PhD (in the same field) from top institution?
I'm now getting a MSc degree in applied math from one of the top Russia institutions, but I still feel like I don't have enough experience, and publications, and general "coolness" for applying to places like MIT or Stanford or other top universities - but I would really want to work with people there! Moreover the problem I've came up with for my thesis is somewhat "non-mainstream" (that's why I don't really have a thesis adviser and I'm guiding myself through it, so it turned out to be slower process than I expected).
I've been thinking of getting a first PhD in some good place in Europe, getting few publications, gaining more experience there and only after that applying into top institutions. From your own experience, does that seem to be a good idea? (I mean, having a completed PhD in some other institution seems like a great advantage from the lab's perspective - right?)
@NateEldredge , thank you! Most of questions tagged like this are about getting two PhDs in parallel or second degree in other field; but the one you've linked actually has a more or less exhaustive answer on my question, thank you!
Terrible idea, at least as far as a life goal is concerned. You will spend 5 years of your life doing something you consider only preparatory, without any guarantee that you will actually be admitted by the MITs and Stanfords of your aspiration. In fact, if we had someone applying to our graduate program who already has a PhD, we'd seriously be asking ourselves why this person wants to get another PhD? So it may not actually be any easier to get into the good institutions if you already have a PhD. Finally, even if you do, you will be 5 years older than everyone else when you graduate, and this will count against you (statistically speaking) when you look for jobs beyond that.
The thing you have come to realize is that everyone wants to go to MIT and Stanford, but only few actually manage to. Make your peace with this -- shoot for the best place you can to get a PhD and then make your career from there. You'll find that with a PhD from a good place in Europe, you will have sufficiently many options.
Well, I've finished high school 2-3 years earlier then others, so I have few years "in store" :) But thank you for your time, finite elements are awesome!
Apply for three institutions, chosen primarily by affinity of interests. In your set of three, let one be ambitious, a just-for-the-heck-of-it application, one that you would be very happy to attend, and that you consider yourself very likely to be accepted in, and one "safety" school. The safety school is the one you would attend if you had extraordinarily bad luck and did not get accepted in #2.
Make sure that all three are carefully chosen, and that you are confident you would have a satisfying experience with.
After your PhD, you can do post-docs and build up your publication list.
"you are confident you would have a satisfying experience with" - here's where it becomes complicated :)
@BenUsman, check if my answer here helps: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/47106/doing-ms-in-cs-from-low-ranked-university-versus-applying-again-next-year/47208#47208
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48162 | Query on UK visa options for South African postdoc at Birkbeck University funded by a South African organisation
I am from South Africa, and have been awarded a freestanding post-doctoral fellowship award that I am expected to take up at Birkbeck University in London. The fellowship award is from a South African based funding organisation (NRF). The funding is valued at $26000 per annum which amounts to 18 000 British pounds. I realise that this amount does not qualify me for a tier two visa. I was wondering if I could get any assistance on what other options I have to qualify for a UK visa.
You might want to consider asking the expats stack exchange. Hopefully I am wrong about this situation being intractable.
Unfortunately, short of marrying an EU national, you likely do not qualify for a UK visa and there is nothing that can be done about this. This document contains the information about salary thresholds. These apply strictly, there are no exceptions. Even if your position fulfils a shortage occupation the salary threshold still applies. You will need to find some more funding, or give up on taking up the fellowship in the UK. You may also consider contacting the university to see if there is anything that can be done to help your situation.
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32288 | What are the benefits of working as a teaching assistant?
I am a first-year international master student in a US statistics department. I am offered a 10-hour teaching assistant appointment next semester. I am considering taking it. I have no idea how to weight the benefit and cost of the appointment.
Background information:
I plan to apply PhD next fall.
I plan to take 14-credit course next semester.
Costs (that I can come up with):
Potential overload
Benefits:
Improve my English skills
Half-coverage of tuition and salary (important to life yet trivial to PhD application)
What are the other cost and benefit of taking a TA appointment? In particular, how would TA experience affect PhD application?
Personally, the knowledge I've gained from being a TA cannot be underestimated. Even from basic level courses, you actually improve your knowledge of the field more than you'd think. The important thing here is, I think, that when you're going to teach something, it is no longer sufficient just to read the material and think that "okay, this is how it is". You will, instead, constantly find yourself thinking: "okay, this is how it is. But why?". That consolidates, if you will, your knowledge, and by teaching something you think you know you will realize you didn't really know a lot before!
With a 10-hour only appointment, are you going to have any teaching duties or will you mainly be grading tests/labs/homework? If the latter, could you work with the professor to guest lecture once or twice? Without a teaching component, that may affect its usage on your CV.
Personally, I have found working with students during my TA office hours to be extremely satisfying. It's a way for me to give back in my academic community.
I suggest a change of the title to something like "What is the benefit of becoming a teaching assistant" or "... taking a teaching assistant position". "taking teaching assistant" is ambiguous in that it could also refer to employing someone as a teaching assistant ("taking someone into one's services as a teaching assistant").
@O.R.Mapper: Done.
Being a TA has helped throughout my Ph.D. I would highly recommend becoming a TA for the following reasons.
You get paid.
You learn teaching skills
You strengthen your knowledge.
It's good for the C.V.
First and foremost you need to fund your life and studies. Although being a TA might not offer the greatest of pay and may take a lot of time. It does seem to pay reasonably well for the amount of effort you have to put in.
Secondly but possibly one of the most underrated things about being a TA. You learn to communicate, and you learn to communicate and learn how to teach.
By communicate, I don't mean just how to improve your English, but how to engage with students. Teaching skills are great, and if you want to go into academia or wish to go in a role where you have to explain concepts to others this will come in handy.
OK, you're teaching at undergrad level. So you may think you know everything. You may actually be surprised that some undergrads may ask some really advanced level questions. Also you may find yourself recapping on some content which you just swept over in your own undergraduate degree. Recovering content, you could find you have a better understanding of it.
Since being a TA. I have had several offers to teach in academic and commercial organisations, and have become a visiting lecturer at another institution based on some of my TA activities.
In terms of cons:
Time
Teaching, marking etc takes time. You may only be teaching for an hour of time, but actually its 4 hours worth of work. From preparing slides, teaching, marking coursework, meetings about students progress with academic staff etc.
I would suggest you give it a go, its only 10 hours after all. If you find it's too much you can always say that it's too much and you will be unable to continue being a TA as you feel your studies are suffering.
Best of luck and I hope this has been of some help.
Can I drop the TA duty in the mid of the semester?
@J.A.F this totally depends on your institution. I believe if it is having a negative effect on your own progress, most institutions will be understanding of this. However, this it is best to check this with your institution.
@JohnHass: I think in most departments this would be frowned upon. Teaching assignments are usually made for the entire semester, and it's difficult to replace someone who quits partway through; this is disruptive for the students in the class. If you agree to do it, you should really be committed to complete the semester, barring some emergency. Someone who quits mid-semester is not likely to be given additional opportunities in the future.
Regarding being good for the CV, this depends for what purpose. For research-focused positions this is often given much less importance then research achievements, so if you could have gotten an additional publication in the time you spent on teaching, it would not be good for the CV.
Usually people take TAs because they need the money. If you want to get a teaching job in the future it may help to show that you have teaching experience (keep records of what you did and how well it worked.)
If you do not need the money, I think you should use the time to improve your research and grades instead.
In many departments, including mine, when you apply for a postdoctoral position, you'll have to provide a reference letter about your teaching. And the people making the hiring decisions pay attention to those letters, not just to the letters about research. So you'd better have done some teaching. And if your first teaching assignment didn't go well, you should try again and do better.
Another point which can be added to your pros list is that by teaching you are effectively giving back to the community. Consider that somewhere sometime someone invested some of their time to teach you. You now have the chance to do the same for the future generations. This is an argument that somewhat holds for all teaching duties in general, be it for assistantships or full time professorships.
Personally I'm not at a teaching level yet. Nevertheless I always consider giving back in the pros list when I am asked to supervise interns.
I'm seeing some misleading comments about the time commitment and feel this warrants more than a comment, so here it is:
"just 10 hours per week" is misleading. Often times professors are told to make sure they don't exceed the total number of hours for the term, so in order to save hours for midterm and final exam grading, they will reduce the actual number of hours in a non-exam week. This means as TA you will be spending a lot of time grading precisely during the times when you yourself will be taking exams!
Ten hours a week is not bad, you know! Most TAships are 20 hours a week.
It can give you some balance in your life, and having it offered to you is an honor.
Being a teaching assistant is a very common thing; I have never seen this be what makes or breaks a grad student.
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89496 | How to tell advisor I'm declining a scholarship?
I recently won a scholarship that could (in theory) pay for the remainder of my time in graduate school. However, it comes attached with strings that I'm not comfortable with, and so I've decided to decline the offer.
I was aware of the strings when I applied for it (basically, the public institution funding the scholarship pays x years and you work for them for x years). I thought I had done my research at the time and knew all that I needed to know about that -- it didn't seem like an issue then. Since then, however, I've learned more about the program that has me on edge (some very negative experiences that past winners have had, and a relatively-low salary compared to industry on graduation). Furthermore, the placement is not what I had in mind -- I was hoping for a position on the east coast of the U.S., and they placed me on the west coast.
I have one more year of funding available, so I can continue applying for more fellowships/scholarships; and my advisor had indicated to me in the past that he had other funding available for when my current fellowship ran out. However, I'm worried he'll get angry if I tell him I'm turning down free (for him, at least) funding.
So my question is: how should I inform him of my decision such that (hopefully) he's least likely to get infuriated? Or, put another way, how would faculty members on Academia S.E. want to be informed of such a decision?
(I have already planned to do this in-person; I'm looking for suggestions for what to actually say.)
The biggest decision is whether to tell him before or after formally declining the scholarship. Suppose his reaction, whenever you tell him, is to say you are on your own for funding for the rest of the program. Would you still decline the scholarship?
"I have decided to decline the scholarship."
I still have to meet a single advisor who cares more about funds for a single person than about the growth (personal and professional) of the ones he is advising. Thus I would talk to him openly, present the bad reputation this scholarship has, tell him you will keep looking for a better one, etc. I don't think he made it to his current position without ever declining a bad offer, so he should understand. Furthermore, as Patricia already pointed out, the one with a problem if there is no funding is you, not the professor...
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38758 | How to choose the appropriate graphic representation (plot) method for the results?
Do you use a rule of thumb when deciding the type of the chart/plot (box plot vs. scatter plot) you use when you want to represent the results of your research/simulations?
I would say the answer is "choose the one that represents the data best" but still there must be some type of rule where you surely don't use a given plotting method but use another one.
Or is my understanding of the purpose of plots completely wrong. Hope the more experienced scientists here provide some guidelines
What do you mean by "type of chart"? Do you mean like box plot vs. scatter plot? Or do you mean like log scale vs. linear scale?
What kind of results? This question is very broad.
@Penguin_Knight "results of your research/simulations"
Data visualization is an entire scientific field of its own. A good introduction to the basic principles can be found in the works of Edward Tufte, whose book on the visual display of quantitative information is a classic in the area.
The basic principle, however, is that you want the important information of the chart to leap out to the eye, and as such the dimensionality of your presentation and the dimensionality of the presentation method should be matched as closely as possible. Likewise, the features of different elements of a graph should be adjusted to put the emphasis on the most important ones, while not concealing the others.
For a simple example, consider a simple one-dimensional data set, where there are a set of conditions, each of which produced some distribution of values.
If the conditions are qualitatively different or vary along many dimensions, the data should probably be presented as a bar graph
If they are quantitatively arranged along one dimension they should be presented as a line graph.
If they are arranged along two dimensions, the should be presented as multiple lines on a single graph.
The type of error bars also depends on the nature of the distributions:
If the distributions are small compared to the effect size, such that they do not significantly affects interpretation of the data, then error bars should be made small and subtle, so that the information is present but the eye is drawn to the means.
If the distributions are large but regular, they can be presented via visually prominent error bars.
If the distributions are large and highly irregular, then a more complex representation like a box-and-whisker graph is better.
This is just scratching the surface, of course, but hopefully gives an illustration of the principles of how to think about data visualization...
could you please provide simple examples for the first three bullet points?
@KristofTak Some examples from my recent work: bar graph: comparison of a single error statistic from several different methods. Measurement of a single value over time: line graph. Comparison of distribution over time: multiple lines on graph (one distribution per time point, colored in a rainbow to indicate time).
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52136 | Is there a rule of thumb for defining the scope and depth of the Related Work section in a thesis?
This might be a generic question but I ask it for a case of a Master Thesis.
DO you have a rule of thumb for inferring the right amount and type of citations that go to your Related Work section.
Let's say in field A there is this problem X. And in literature there are two types of approaches to solve problem X: type1, and type2. My approach belongs to type1. Should I include works about type2 in the Related Work section too?
I found this post helpful.
However, I still find myself in doubt when writing the related work. Sometimes I feel I go a bit too far including stuff seemingly unrelated...
Often, I loose the focus of the related work.
What is its purpose in a thesis? To show what others have done, and how my work relates to that. Or give a general overview of the works that have been done in the field?
Do I have to discuss and speculate in the Related Work? Or do I have to only list the other
works?
Do I need to include results of the other works in my related
work?
I would say that it is difficult to give a generic answer. It is best to discuss the concrete instances with your supervisor.
The rule is to provide more details on those works that are most relevant to yours. This is especially critical for those that seem to overlap with your work, or conceptually share similarities. The most relevant ones are those whereby the problem is exactly the same, but your approach and others are different. That means you need to cover these other approaches in detail.
For other not so relevant, you need to show you are aware of them. Basically, you state, 'there are also works on blah, blah2, blah3. However, this work is different because of x, y and z'. Note that you go as far as providing the reference, and differences. You might briefly state their aim(s).
Remember, one key reason for a literature review is to provide evidence that your work fills gaps in the literature. So present whatever is needed to proof this point.
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51802 | Where to include acknowledgements for used graphics
In the current technical report that I write, I have used graphic from an online-source where their policy requires that the author of the drawing has to be acknowledged in case that the drawing is to be used.
This policy applies to electronic and printed formats of the given work.
Where do I place the acknowledgement for this drawings? Probably the proper way would be to use footnote in the page where the drawing is shown but, the policy requires that the name of the author is written. I would like to avoid such content in the footnotes where I discuss important information.
Is it OK if I do the acknowledgement in an appendix in the end of the report?
You should include the authorship as part of a citation in the graphic (figure) label. There are some examples from Pierce College Library here. You are labeling your figures, right?
if by label you mean adding a caption to them, then yes. if I misunderstood, can you please clarify?
What I did on my papers is under the image (often needed to use an image editor) is put in a caption such as "Title of image (if applicable), author of image, year created" Similar to @mkennedy's comment but I prefer adding the citation into the image. I DO NOT alter the original I add extra pixels to the bottom of the image size.
Then in my works cited I would say "Title of image, author name, year, Retrieved from..."
You want the reference close to the actual picture. You could go with @Memj's suggestion in the other comment. Or simply put it in the caption:
Fig. 19: Measured relationship between galaxy distance and
red shift. (Figure reproduced with permission from http://abc.org,
copyright Adam Smith, 2015.)
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23727 | Do evaluation / recruiting committees respect "co first authors"?
Inspired by this question and this question, I continue my ongoing quest of understanding the concept of co first-authorship.
My question are:
In which fields does this notion even exist?
If the notion exists in your field, do recruiting committees (e.g., faculty search committees) actually care about this?
The background of the second part of this question is that it seems to me that a little footnote in a paper should be easy to miss for a committee, and even if a committee becomes aware of the claimed dual first-authorship, I find it hard to believe that the paper will actually be counted as another "first-authored" paper.
The notion exists at least in my wife's group (psychology), but I can't answer your second bullet point...
This exists in my field (chemistry) and I've seen it also for medical papers. I cannot speak about recruiting committees, but my impression is that the driving force are cumulative PhD theses where both co-authors can count the paper fully for their publication equivalent scores (see http://www.chemgeo.uni-jena.de/chegemedia/Forschung/Promotionsstelle/kumulatdiss2014.pdf for an example how detailed counting rules for co first-authorships are now getting established).
@cbeleites That link is very interesting. Thanks!
I have seen co-first authors in the social sciences, but it is not very common. It is usually indicated in a very small footnote that the "authors contributed equally" or something to that extent. Given that this practice is the exception than the rule, it is hard to imagine that committees (in the social sciences) will give much attention to this in whatever decision that is being made. Thus, I am in complete agreement with you that a 'co first-author' paper will actually be counted as a 'first author' paper.
For me, co-first authorship doesn't really mean much to me (in the social sciences). It is hard for me to believe that the contributions of the co-first authors were equal. Did they really quantify the actual intellectual contribution? Did they really work equally as hard? Did they really write equally as much? It would be impossible to balance every aspect of the work, so every co-first authorship paper in the social sciences is based on different divisions of labor, so the title co-first authorship really doesn't mean much.
(BTW, I would be very interested in seeing a 'highly cited' paper in the social sciences that is co first-authored.)
I come from mathematics, whose practices are described in JeffE's answer: we are not in the business of quantifying author contribution at all. I have heard remarks like those in your second paragraph made be authors on this site. I don't understand them. Let me explain: in order to make these remarks, it seems that you (and many others) must have some way of assigning a percentage measure to each author's contribution. How the heck are you doing that?...
...In most academic fields, contributions to papers live in some high-dimensional space: there are initial ideas, experiments, analysis, computations, writing, literature review, editing, and so forth. It is most common in a collaboration for one of the authors to do the majority of the work on some of these axes and another author to do the majority of the work on some other axes. So in order to numerically rank coauthors you must have some fairly precise function in mind which projects a multidimensional vector down to a single numerical measure. That's amazing: what is it??
Just to illustrate with an example: suppose the initial idea for the paper was mine, my coauthor did most of the implementation (and found, as usual, that some new ideas were necessary) and wrote a first draft of the paper, which I then edited and significantly rewrote, including improving some of the results. If we take (idea,implementation,writing) as axes, then maybe I have a vector like (1,.2,.4) and my coauthor has a vector like (0,.8,.6). Who deserves to be first author??
In theoretical computer science and mathematics, authors are (almost) always listed alphabetically. There is simply no such thing as a "first author", except lexicographically. Equivalently, all authors are co-first authors.
In my experience, recruiting committees generally understand and respect this practice, but (at least in computer science, where order by contribution is more common) they do occasionally have to be reminded, especially for candidates whose last names start late in the alphabet. One sentence in the CV and/or in a recommendation letter usually suffices.
For non-theoretical CS, I have seen CVs that indicated equal contribution of co-authors. Again, one sentence in the CV ("Stars indicate co-authors who contributed equally") made the notation clear, and the recruiting committee understood and respected it.
As Ari and gefei say, having a local advocate is much more important that having another (co-)first-author paper. If nobody on the faculty is willing to pound on the table and demand that you get an interview, you won't.
I have not seen co first-authorship in engineering or computer science papers. That said:
Any committee can find reasons to accept or reject a candidate. Ultimately, if you have an advocate, it will be his/her job to find out and explain your contribution to the work. It is much more important to develop a local advocate than it is to have high numbers.
Authorship deals only with what happens before the paper is published. However, what you do after publication (e.g. give talks, produce extensions) is no less important in cementing your ultimate contribution to the field.
I just want to repeat this: It is much more important to develop a local advocate than it is to have high numbers. +1
I work in a Psychology and order of authorship matters and co-first author papers are not unheard of. As for how search committee treat them, I think you might be missing how search committee work. There is no formula in terms of how papers are weighted in terms of authorship. We want to make sure a candidate has a strong publication record. Order of authorship doesn't really matter for this as much as being associated with strong papers. In some ways we don't care how hard you worked for the publication. The second thing we look for is wether you could continue to carry out the type of research in the papers. Co-first author papers raise more questions about this then single first author papers. Generally the rest of the publication history, CV, and research statement can clarify this. I would suggest making sure your research statement makes it clear what type of research you can do on your own.
As already said, the notion of fist author barely makes sense in mathematics. It is a common and important notion in (at least some part) of biology, with the additional and complicated provisio that I have heard of second-named-co-first-authors which where really not-as-first-author-than-the-first-author-but-more-than-the-third, even when the names are marked as a balanced co-first-authorship.
With respect to the second question, you should keep in mind that it is one's job to write one's CV in a way that stresses the important points. So, in addition to underlining one's name in the list of authors for each publication in one's CV (which seems common in the fields where author order matters), I would advise to make it very clear, at one glance, which papers in your publication record are first-authored or co-first-authored (so that they are shown on the same level).
Below are two easy ways to do that (to be adapted if you need to also highlight last-authored papers).
First, you can split your publication list in two, with in the top part all first-author and co-first-author papers, and in the bottom part all other papers. If you number publications, you can use a common numbering, e.g. first-authored papers are numbered 1, 2, 3 and the other papers are numbered 4, 5, 6, etc.
This makes it easy for a committee to count the number of first-authored papers and the total number of papers you have.
A second solution is to mark all first-authored and co-first-authored papers by a clear sign (e.g. bold star), with an explicit footnote explaining the meaning of the sign.
But you certainly should not expect committees to actually open your published papers to see if by any chance a little star somewhere credits you for co-first-authorship. They can do it if they want to check your claims, but you have to claim it clearly.
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18399 | Mapping connections between topics covered in academic papers - does such a tool exist?
I'm interested in learning about how to go about writing a paper, and obviously, an integral part of this process will be to read papers written by others, and study those. I'm curious about the idea of using software mapping tools as a means of logging connections between certain papers of interest.
The following questions: Is there a network map of subjects and how they connect with each other? and Map (tree) of citations/references are related to my question, but I'm not sure the suggested software, Auto Desk
or Cytoscape, would be entirely appropriate for what I'm interested in doing.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
ScienceWISE is one of the attempts:
The ScienceWISE project aims to develop a scientist-generated on-line knowledge base fully integrated into the physics ArXiv.org
The ScienceWISE system allows scientists, in the course of their daily work to
dynamically generate professional-field-specific ontologies: add concepts and logical relations between them; provide expertly-written, community-ranked definition articles and links to other existing resources;
to create an interactive semantic environment, annotating scientific research papers, uploaded to ArXiv.org, and linking them to the ScienceWISE ontology, thus expanding content of their papers with supporting material in the form of encyclopedia-like articles.
(See also info on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/help/sciencewise)
This question is a bit older, but I thought I would add a new suggestion to hopefully help anyone looking for something more current.
If you're looking for a tool to help you discover new papers based on related topics or papers you've already read to assist with scientific writing, I highly recommend using an online application/website called Research Rabbit.
They describe themselves as being like Spotify in that they learn from the papers you upload and collections (think playlists) of papers that you create and will modify their recommendations of new papers for you to look at that might be related. It also provides interactive visualizations showing how different publications connect based on their algorithm of relevance. All the papers can be connected to the reference library, Zotero, so you can save anything you find and use the Zotero tools for reference library organization and citation formatting.
I really enjoy using it to find papers and look through the literature, particularly on topics that I might be less familiar with.
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7317 | Attendance recording software
Possible Duplicate:
What systems are most effective for monitoring student attendance?
I'm looking for a simple software package, or online service, whereby teachers can record any students that are late/absent for any of their classes throughout the day. I'm not after a daily attendance system, I need a system that can be easy and quick for teachers to log attendance of students to their classes. Is there any such thing? If not, what do you recommend? a wiki? or something else?
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116251 | A text which is not a draft, but expected to be updated - upload to arXiv?
I've been working on a text which you could call a short monograph. Without going into details (which might lead to another question) - I'm considering posting/uploading/"publishing" it on arXiv.
It's not a draft - I've gone over it several times and it seems in pretty good share; but, at the same time, it is not finally done: I expect that, with feedback from others, I will need to make several additions, rephrasings, and possibly even slight correction of certain details regarding existing work.
Now, I would have liked to have received this feedback before ever publishing, but this is unlikely to happen; and I've been "sitting" on this for quite a long time already.
Is it legitimate, and is it reasonable, to upload an initial version on arXiv, expecting that an update will be necessary?
@DaveLRenfro: Changed the text. I guess that also has bearing on the answer.
I personally think this is legitimate, and this was originally the spirit in which I started using the arXiv (hence "comments welcome") - but this seems to be less common nowadays, probably due to the growth of arXiv usage and its "semi-official status" these days for e.g. establishing priority.
I suggest that you go ahead and do it, but use the "comments" field in the metadata to explain briefly that this is a preliminary version rather than an "about to be submitted" version
Not a draft, but you expect to make more changes? That still sounds like a draft to me, but maybe we're just using different terminology.
My normal workflow is to:
Post the first version after all coauthors are happy
Collect any feedback, and if there are needed edits incorporate them into a second ArXiv post which is exactly the version submitted to a journal (otherwise you run the risk that the referee looks at the wrong version).
After any referee reports and responses make a third ArXiv version which is the author-final version.
No more than once-a-year update with any post-publication typo fixes.
For any given paper steps 2, 3, or 4 might not be needed, so this is more of a maximum than a required. But I think if you’re not doing more posts than what I’ve outlined you’re certainly ok.
But... 1. I don't have co-authors, so I don't have the inter-coauthor feedback loop stage 2. It's not a draft journal submission, but rather an 80-page-long affair, so the space of potential changes (and potential deficiencies) is different.
If it’s just you then “all coauthors” means just you. If you’re happy with it and don’t have further changes you want to make before getting outside feedback the post. Anyway I have an 80-page paper and yes there were more changes from feedback for that paper than for other papers I’ve written, but the above workflow still worked great.
Yes, it’s legitimate. The fact that arXiv has a versioning system tells you everything you need to know: the ability to post updated and improved versions of your manuscript is an intentional feature of arXiv. So your question really amounts to “is it reasonable to use this feature?” - to which the answer is, yes, of course.
Now, keep in mind that the versioning feature can be, and at times has been, abused by people who post way too many versions of their paper with many confusing, incremental updates, usually in an attempt to bring an originally very low quality paper up to an acceptable level. This type of behavior is certainly looked down upon as a form of “noise pollution” and may be seen as a signal of low quality content, so if you think you’ll be posting more than, say, three versions (including the original submission), I’d suggest rethinking your approach. Also remember that the older versions of the paper remain accessible indefinitely. If you care about your reputation, you’d want to make sure that even the original version of the paper is of a high enough quality that you can accept being associated with it far into the future. With that said, your desire to share the work even in non-final form, whether because you think it may be useful to others and/or because you need some feedback to put the finishing touches on it, are quite understandable and acceptable, and shared by many; that is why the versioning system exists. So as I said, it’s totally legitimate.
Legitimate but not recommended.
My experience is that feedbacks from persons unknown are very rare. Think of the reverse: do you yourself send feedbacks to random authors in your field who submit on arXiv?
There is a reputational cost to submitting work obviously not ready for publication. Do you yourself read a lot of submissions of this type or do you stop once you realized this is not finished work?
Constantly updating an arXiv submission tends to bad at the time of journal submission.
If you are a few days away from journal submission then nothing is lost by privately circulating advanced copies of your work or posting on arXiv: you might get the occasional feedback especially if there is a glaring omission in the text or in the bibliography, but arXiv is not a peer-reviewing service, and thinking of this as such may lead to acute disappointments.
There won't be any journal submission. 2. I'm interested in feedback not from persons unknown, but essentially from persons known-poorly. It's just that instead of sending them some dropbox/box.com link "here's something I want you to look at" I want to have some that is sort-of-published (and thus supposedly more worth than time).
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133384 | Have there been attempts to get around "DeWitt clause"-like license restrictions?
(This is a complementary question to: Has the DeWitt Clause, which prevents publication of named DBMS benchmarks, ever been successfully defended in court?)
Several commercial database vendors include an end-user license agreement provision, known as the DeWitt Clause, that prohibits researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in academic papers.
There are several concievable approaches to circumvent this prohibition, including:
In the US: Ignoring the prohibition and claiming "fair use" which supersedes the Copyright, or general un-enforcability like Spitzer did (see the related question) - risking legal action.
Outside the US: Some states in the world allow download and certain kinds of non-commercial use of copyrighted works without permission from the author / rights holder, in which case the researcher never accepts the restriction in the first place.
Outside the US: Some states have laws regarding "standard contracts", as opposed to contracts specifically worded by two parties negotiating - e.g. the conditions for opening a bank account, your Internet Access Provider's terms of service etc. Such laws declare certain kinds of terms and conditions in such contracts as null and void if they are injurious to the weaker party - the many individuals who must accept the contract. One could publish a benchmark result, claiming s/he wasn't bound by the DeWitt clause.
Loopholes in the condition itself. For example, Microsoft's SQL server license says:
BENCHMARK TESTING. You must obtain Microsoft’s prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark test of the software.
Well, you must obtain Microsoft's prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark. But you're not required to go any significant effort to prevent third parties from learning about these results. So, for example, Joe Smith (not you) runs some benchmark and writes down the results in a file. It's not in a public folder, but - you or a friend of yours have access to that folder. You're not bound by the conditions of the license, and can supposedly publish the benchmark result. Joe Smith should also not be liable, since he did not actually disclose the results to anybody, nor did he solicit others to check out his results.
I'm not saying I know for a fact these avenues of circumvention are bullet-proof. And I'm not asking whether they are. I just want to know whether there are known cases of people using one of them, or any other course of action, to openly and notoriously circumvent DeWitt clauses (in Software or w.r.t. access to materials of academic interest).
I find this very interesting and think it’s mostly on-topic here, but you may get some interesting takes on this subject by asking the same question (or a related question, like what are some hypothetical arguments that may be used to invalidate the Dewitt clause) on law.se.
A third workaround is to avoid describing the experiments as benchmarks. For instance, "On this website we run horse races, and we found that Maria terminated the race in 17.2 seconds, while Progresso took 23.1 seconds". People have done this to work around restrictions on publishing electoral polls, in my country.
@DanRomik: I might, but note I'm not asking about whether the legal argument is sound, but whether anyone has tried something like that.
@FedericoPoloni: Could be a bit difficult when you want to compare the benchmark results of existing systems and alternative ones...
The legal argument may be sound or not. You can try, of course, to break "contracts". But, I would guess that if you go up against Microsoft or Oracle or similar in court that you'd better have very deep pockets. Very. Deep. Pockets. And I suspect that they utilized their own Very Deep Pockets in the phrasing of such clauses.
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34924 | What is the promotion rate of professors in United States?
I'm writing an essay, and want to know the promotion rate and average duration from assistant professor to associate professor and associate professor to professor in recent years. Sadly I don't know the data for the US. Could anyone tell me?
Would you explain what do you mean by I haven't known the date in the US ? And you want to know the average duration from assistant professor to associate professor in the whole world or a particular location?
@scaaahu: the OP means "data" not "date".
I really like the OP to answer that question.
@Danfox: I fixed it.
@scaaahu Sorry for my careless misspelling......I want to know the date in US
@DanFox thanks so much for help me to correctify it!
The US National Science Foundation collects a lot of data from surveys of recent doctoral recipients that it publishes on this web page. The precise thing you are looking for (tenure success rate) does not seem to appear, but there is a lot of relevant information. Specific professional societies collect similar information. For instance, the American Mathematical Society publishes an annual survey of information on recent doctoral recipients; it includes data about the salaries and employment situation of recent doctoral recipients in the mathematical sciences.
Hello Dan! I know the rate for assistant to associate is 48% in 2010, but it seems no precise data for associate to full, and the average duration neither. Anyway, your answer is really helpful for my eaasy. Thanks for your nice answer!
Well, I'm sure this is too late for the essay, but I happened to come across some (old) data for US medical school faculty from the AAMC. They look at average number of years to promotion and percentage of faculty promoted within a ten-year period, both from assistant to associate, and associate to full, broken down into various categories (gender, degree earned, whiteness, clinical vs theory, etc).
The 10-year promotion rates, both to associate and full, are generally in the 30-50% range, and for those specifically in tenure-track positions, around 50%.
I suspect the numbers would be higher for Arts & Sciences or Engineering faculty.
genuine curiosity: why do you suspect this with regards to faculty in different fields?
@kbh Personal observation in my field (math) makes me think that most tenure-track people who apply for tenure get it, except at top schools where it's more competitive. Among people I know, many more have gotten tenure than been denied. However, one thing I'm not sure of is how these studies count faculty who leave before getting or being denied tenure. If they count them as not getting tenure, then that skews the numbers downward.
@kbh BTW, see this related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/568/19607
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32157 | Should someone giving a second opinion on an article be a co-author or just acknowledged?
I decided to write an article extracted from part of my master’s thesis. This will be my first time trying to get published, so obviously I’ll never think it is good enough therefore I’ll need a second opinion. I’m thinking of contacting my previous supervisor and ask him if he can read it before I try to submit it to a journal. And if things goes well, I’ll ask one of my colleagues (an assistant professor) to read it as well.
My question is, if they are willing to read it, should I include their names as co-authors or just in the acknowledgment?
To just evaluate a manuscript should not result in co-authorship. Authorship implies a certain contribution to the article. There are many interpretations of what is sufficient and some are really bad. Criteria for co-authorship that has gained support has been given by the Vancouver Protocol (see e.g. the BMJ description of their use of the terms in practise)
Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
AND
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
AND
Final approval of the version to be published;
AND
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
An advisor for a master's project sounds as a reasonable candidate for co-authorship since that person likely has provided much input on original ideas through to the final written product. How that applies in your case is for you to decide.
It is, however, never wrong to add a new person as co-author, if that person provides contributions that qualify them according to the list above. So consider who may be considered co-author and do not promise co-authorship without explaining the terms.
For additional input, please search on the authorship here on Academia.sx and look into the concept of contributorship, a concept more clearly related to contributions than what the term authorship implies, by also searching the internet.
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118903 | MathSciNet reviews license
I have been asked to become a MathSciNet reviewer. I personally find the database very useful, but I am a bit held back by the fact the database is kept behind a paywall.
What is actually the licensing/copyright status of reviews submitted to MathSciNet? Do authors keep the copyright and are allowed to post copies on their websites (like the AMS license for its journals)? If so, does anyone actually do the latter?
The information is nowhere to be found on MathSciNet, and actually I have never seen anyone releasing their reviews somewhere else.
It's a good question. I am a reviewer and I found my original invitation letter. It says "We must ask each reviewer to grant all rights, including copyright, to the
American Mathematical Society for each review written for us. A paper copy of
form will be sent to you within in a few days; we ask that you sign it,
thereby granting such rights to the AMS, and return it to us." I can't find my copy of this form, but I'm sure you could ask them to send you the form before you decide.
In view of the journal policy, I would guess that AMS would probably not object to someone posting their own reviews, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone do this.
Back in 2016, when I was invited to review, mathscinet did not grant me the right to post my reviews under an OA license on my site. Not sure if they still are following this policy (I declined to review for this very reason, so I don't get updates from them).
This question on MathOverflow is very relevant, and puts the moral dilemma about writing for a paid subscription service in (what I think is) an interesting perspective.
I see no dilemmas here, moral or otherwise. They want unpaid work from me, they don't get to pose constraints on what else I do with it. This is standard across most of the online content-generating community.
@darijgrinberg a Creative Commons license is not a constraint? Anyway, even if there’s no dilemma for you, this question’s OP describes having a dilemma, and it sounds like his conflict is of a moral or ethical nature.
@DanRomik No, a Creative Commons license is not a constraint for the content creator. They are still free to do what they want with the content, including selling and re-licensing it.
Here are some answers to your questions: Yes, MathSciNet is behind a paywall. Yes, we ask reviewers to give us copyright to their reviews. Yes, you can post your reviews elsewhere.
In return, for each review, we put US$12 on account at the AMS (up from the US$8 it was a few years ago) for the reviewer to use to buy AMS books, to pay (part of) your AMS membership, or to pay for other things (such as t-shirts). The credit is in the form of "AMS Points".
Why the copyright? This helps us to copyright the whole database. Copyrighting a database is rather different from copyrighting a journal or a conference proceedings volume.
Can you post the reviews? The reviewer letter says, "You may post your reviews on your website, circulate them to colleagues, distribute copies to your students, and make other customary scholarly uses. You may even include your reviews in journals, books, and databases in the particular field(s) of mathematics to which they relate, provided that first publication credit is given to the AMS."
Why the paywall? Creating and maintaining MathSciNet is expensive. It costs millions of dollars per year to run it. The subscription model allows us to cover the costs. It would take a lot of donations or ads to make up for that.
Why so expensive? We work hard to make sure that we get things right. In order to do this, Mathematical Reviews has a staff of 80 people. That includes 18 PhD mathematicians who serve as editors. We also have people with advanced library degrees and experience that ensure that our bibliographic data is complete and correct. We have cataloguers who ensure that we correctly identify authors. We have copy editors who help out with the reviews and check references. We have a whole department who work with the reviewers (and their reviews). We have an IT department.
I hope this is helpful. If not, post a comment!
--
Edward Dunne
Executive Editor
Mathematical Reviews
Use the 'Standard Trick'.
Let's assume you're willing to contribute, but don't want at least your review to be hidden off from the world. So, as @NateEldredge suggests in a comment - AMS says they "must ask each reviewer to grant all rights etc. etc."
Well this is where the standard trick comes in - which is also useful for journals and conferences which try to one-up you legally by requiring you sign over your rights:
At the beginning, you hold some relevant legal rights on the intended item for publication (in your case, a MathSciNet review), and the publisher has none; you haven't yet submitted your item.
Before submitting the item and signing anything, you post a copy of the work somewhere, e.g. on your personal web-page/blog. You do so while specifying an appropriate license, such as Creative Commons (e.g. Attribution-Sharealike or another variant), GNU Free Documentation License or others.
To be extra safe, you make sure at least one person you can count on downloads a copy from that on-line posting. That person now holds rights you've granted him under the license.
You now submit to the publisher - possibly signing away most of the rights you hold. You now have almost no rights in your own work...
This is the fun part: You download a copy from your posting of the item. Magically - you've regained at least the rights specified in the license! To be mor air-tight-safe - have that trusted person send you a copy, and they are the ones who have now granted you the rights (so it can't be argued this was all an exercise in your head, with yourself).
Et voila! :-)
Caveats:
I have not had any interaction with MathSciNet, this is general advice.
IANAL; and while I have some legal experience, that is always country-specific.
If you want to take a more principled stance, consider my other answer.
If the journal license agreement grants an exclusive license, your "standard trick" could be fraud, which is a crime.
@AnonymousPhysicist: No, it would not be fraud. Now, it's true that MathSciNet could change the text so to make using the standard trick more problematic, but they haven't to my knowledge.
Do you have a reason for claiming that granting a license you can't legally grant is not fraud?
@AnonymousPhysicist: It doesn't work that way. If you claim something is fraudulent, the onus of establishing that claim is on you.
I think I already did that, but I'll go again. Fraud is intentional deception. Intentionally granting a an exclusive license after already intentionally granting another license is intentional deception. Therefore it is fraud.
I do not give legal advice.
@AnonymousPhysicist: Ok, let's discuss the (brief) case you've made. There are several issues with it, but two main ones: 1. Is deception occurring? 2. Intention to deceive. I'd argue none of them is happening . 1. MathSciNet are asking OP for a review of something, and he provides them the review. They don't have a basis to expect the review to be something that has never been communicated to anyone else; and they haven't asked OP to declare anything to that effect. So, no deception. 2. Scientists, or perhaps even all people, have a good-faith basis of assuming that ...
... all scientific information is inherently something of public interest which is to be shared by all humanity. They are never to be expected to hide research findings, data, comments, reviews and such. So, catering to a theoretical hope of some publisher to manipulate people into paying the publisher by preventing access to scientific material - that is a strange, counter-intuitive, and socially disadvantageous behavior which people cannot be expected to engage in.
If the license agreement grants an exclusive license, the intent to deceive is unambiguous. You are right about public interest, but I doubt you are correct about the law.
Let's assume you are right about the law; then surely the for profit publishers will immediately change their license agreements to forbid this trick.
@AnonymousPhysicist: No, not surely. There are multiple reasons why that would not happen. Perhaps the most significant is the fact that most MathSciNet reviews don't seem to be available elsewhere (as OP suggests).
If you don't want to use the standard trick, you can
Refuse on principle.
Do seriously consider telling MathSciNet you'll gladly accept, if they were to drop their paywall and make their content publicly accessible; which they will likely refuse.
But if you do this, don't just leave it at that, but rather engage with AMS policy-makers to at least make the case for opening up MathSciNet; and also make this known to your colleagues and encourage them to do the same. I'm not saying you must do so.
Do you have any suggestions for how MathSciNet could solve the cost issues raised by @Edward Dunne in the last two paragraphs of his answer here?
@DaveLRenfro: Note that this answer is not actually new, I just separated it from my "standard trick" answer of 6 years ago. But so as to answer your question: 1. Instead of asking people to sign over their rights, consider asking (some of) them to do some volunteer editing. 2. Solicit donations. 3. Lobby for funding and try to motivate MathSciNet users to participate in lobbying universities and governments for funding.
Incidentally, as far as "signing over their rights", I don't understand why MathSciNet would need or even want to do this. The value MathSciNet adds is MUCH MUCH more than just the review itself, and includes cross-referencing with other reviews, a centralized location, etc. -- things that are still just as valuable if many of the reviews were scattered throughout on several hundred mathematicians' web pages (these being the reviews those mathematicians wrote).
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48143 | Etiquette of wearing the wrong academic robes at graduation as a lecturer in the UK
I have graduated three times from UK universities. First was a bachelors' degree, then a Masters' degree, then a PhD. The graduation robes associated with my PhD graduation are absolutely horrible. I am now a lecturer in a UK university and if I attend graduation ceremonies at this University (or others, I suppose), I am supposed to wear the academic robes from my highest degree, i.e. the horrible PhD ones.
So my question is this, is it considered acceptable to wear the robes from my 'lower' degrees at such occasions, or even the equivalent PhD robes from the university I now work at (much nicer!)?
Basically, can I get away with wearing the wrong robes to graduation ceremonies?
I am struggling to imagine what negative consequences you could really face for wearing the "wrong" robes.
a kilt is probably not acceptable.
Wouldn't that question be more suitable for a site on medieval role-playing?
It probably depends on the university. I would expect Oxbridge to care more. But it is also the case at Oxford and Cambridge that you shouldn't wear academic dress from another institution. So it may be acceptable for you to wear the equivalent robes of your current university.
I'm curious, what university? I personally love the "horrible" robes I see at graduations.
There are usually regulations on what you should wear which will be online. You can make your own decision about whether you want to break them of course.
A kilt is totally acceptable!
And my PhD (in engineering) comes from Heriot-Watt University. The robes in question are plain cerise-pink, with a cerise-pink hood! http://oic.eps.hw.ac.uk/fun/photos/Graduation2002/Grad2002_3.jpg
@DrC those robes are are awesome. wear them with pride.
Suck it up, it's not a fashion parade.
I vote for wearing the cerise-pink robes.
"Cerise-pink" looks remarkably similar to Harvard's "crimson" robes, which I've worn without embarrassment.
In the United States, there are typically two acceptable pieces of regalia to wear: either your university-specific regalia or a "generic Ph.D." regalia that is just simple black robes plus your doctoral hood. It would seem rather gauche to me to wear non-Ph.D. regalia or to wear the regalia of a school that is not your alma mater, even if that is where your post is. I don't know if "generic Ph.D." regalia is also accepted in the UK, where many universities have a much longer and more formal set of traditions than in the US, but I would recommend that you look into that as a possibility.
"Generic PhD regalia" should do also in the UK. I wonder what else a PhD should wear who comes from a non-anglophone country, where regalia are not customary.
@henning: I guess that boils down to the question whether "a robe, but the 'wrong' one" is still better than "no robe at all" (just formal attire, such as a suit and a tie).
@O.R.Mapper - I can't read your comment without thinking The Emperor's New Robes. :^)
@J.R., did you hear about the emperor's new paint? It's a pigment of your imagination.
My dad got his PhD at a university that wore bright blue robes, and lectured at a university that had red robes for a PhD. Every graduation you could pick him out of a crowd with no trouble.
@Najib Idrissi I totally agree with you, but it's just as bad on other Stackexchange sites. Here is another amusing example: http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/14524/should-i-leave-tips-in-latvian-hotels
This is a matter for whichever official at your university is in charge of ceremonies; in a British university there is almost certainly someone who knows the official rules, even if the university as a whole is very relaxed about academic dress. At some universities (Oxford and Cambridge are the main examples) the rules about wearing 'local' versus 'foreign' academic dress are very strict, and still taken fairly seriously (there are only specific occasions when academic dress from other universities may be worn, and for other purposes fellows are 'incorporated' into the university so they are entitled to wear MA robes).
If your question is 'can I get away with it', the answer is almost certainly 'yes', assuming your institution is one of the majority that are quite relaxed about academic dress.
If your question is 'should I wear the less gaudy robes', I would suggest the answer is 'no'; part of your role at a graduation is to make the event as meaningful as possible for your students graduating, and wearing more impressive robes supports that.
I recommend the 'Academical Dress' Facebook group as a source of academic dress advice and knowledge, often from the people (at the Burgon Society) who wrote the book on the topic.
Yes, you can totally get away with it. The situation in the UK is much more formal than in the US, where I have seen a graduation ceremony that looked exactly like the Comanche attack scene from Blood Meridian, but I have never seen anybody called out for wearing the wrong robes, except for once in Cambridge where I was gently chided for letting some ribbons hang out which were supposed to be tucked under the armpits.
Wear whatever you feel comfortable with. As long as it's academic dress, nobody will know and it doesn't really matter. (But if you did happen to get a PhD from Leeds, you are wrong about those robes! They are awesome!)
I can't comment on whether you'd get away with it, as that depends on your institution and colleagues, but wearing the wrong robes is certainly both bad form and rude.
It's bad form to disrespect the rules of the ceremony, and it's rude to everyone who is graduating to do so. Moreover, it's rude to everyone who has ever got a PhD from Heriot-Watt to treat a Masters from another university as more valuable to display than your doctorate from Heriot-Watt.
You may not like it, but you neither get to choose the design of your institutes's robes not what the robes you wear mean and wearing the wrong gown communicates to anyone who understands that you place your masters in higher esteem to your PhD.
Who will ever know? No one really knows what degrees you have, save the panel that hired you and the people at HR who maintain the staff records!
Spotting a degree and university by eye from a robe is a real skill that I suspect few possess. Its even rarer than bird spotting. (Never heard of robe twitchers)....
Wear what looks the best in the photos or the official video, because you will appear in many hundreds of parent photographs.
Myself, I put on the most colourful ties and waistcoats under my robe. Colour, pomp and show is what the entire ceremony is about.
Who will ever know? I guess most people in your department and a few people out of it, some of whom may know what your robes look like. (Though I doubt many would would report you to the Ministry of Robes.)
Faculty know each other's colors. We comment on them regularly at graduation, how we feel sorry for those stuck with pink for the rest of their academic lives, how much we like the deep blues, etc.
Another thing that happens is that people also borrow regalia for one reason or another. My wife waited until she was the Dept. Chair and the school would let her charge the $800 expense before she got her own "correct" set.
I'm very confused by the suggestion that the OP's colleges wouldn't know what university the OP attended.
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43869 | What to do if the data in a paper you are reviewing is copied from another paper of the same authors which is supposed to be a different device?
I got a paper to review and the authors of this paper already published a conference proceedings on the same topic but supposedly a different device. When comparing the figures of the conference proceedings and the submitted paper it becomes apparent that the data is exactly the same. This should not be possible as even the noise patterns are agreeing and the device structure is different enough to show different results.
What are my options?
What field are you in? I'm in the life sciences and conference proceedings/abstracts usually do not carry much weight. However, I've heard that other fields such as computer science and mathematics gives much more weight to conference proceedings.
I think a word or two might be missing from the title: "...supposed to be obtained from a different device", perhaps? As it is now, the title seems to refer to the paper itself as a "device", which is confusing.
@RichardErickson: The field is irrelevant here. One or the other paper commit academic fraud by presenting data that does not match the description. Whether the paper is worth a lot of not does not matter. It's the same as stealing a silver ring from a store -- not worth as much as a gold ring, but still theft.
@WolfgangBangerth, You're correct. I misread the original post and didn't notice the research-misconduct tag. I was placing more emphasis the plagiarism. The question title places the emphasis on coping data rather than fraud, which is the bigger issue regardless of field. (PS thanks for you calling me out on that).
I didn't quite understand the nuances involving "different device", but if I have the rest right: you've observed that the data of the present submission is identical to that of a past submission. The present submission involves something different enough so that identical data is not plausible, and therefore you strongly suspect that the data included in the present submission is not legitimate. Is that it?
If so, I see just one reasonable option: bring this information to the attention of the editors. It is serious enough that you need not (and perhaps should not) make a recommendation of acceptance or rejection: this needs to be resolved first.
Having been in this position as both a reviewer and an editor, I concur: There is no need for your to write a complete review. Just send an email to the editor (and maybe the managing editor at the publisher) with a note that you have found an instance of academic fraud. They will (hopefully) handle the rest.
I believe the poster means "a different experimental device." (If true, this would allow the author to publish a second paper.)
@WolfgangBangerth, apparent academic fraud. I wouldn't be comfortable saying it is academic fraud (as opposed to, say, accidentally pasting the wrong graph into the paper) without better evidence.
It'd be tactful to avoid using the words "academic fraud" - just say that you've noticed a figure was copied from another source. The editor certainly knows that this constitutes fraud unless there is a legitimate reason for the copying.
All fair points. That said, I don't believe that there are cases of "accidentally pasting the wrong graph into a paper". I believe that there are only cases where people do it knowing full well what they are doing and later claiming that it was accidental.
If someone did manage to write a whole paper in which they accidentally analyzed the wrong data in a way that looks like fraud, then that is staggering negligence even if it's not fraudulent (and I wouldn't be unhappy to see it treated similarly to fraud).
@AnonymousMathematician Is it possible that they analyzed the right data, but then put the wrong data in the figure?
Yeah, it's certainly important to check whether the discussion in the body of the paper matches the figure. If it doesn't, then substituting the wrong figure is much less consequential.
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45385 | Where can I apply for a third party Travel Grant?
I am a fresh graduate (LLB) and I was selected as an volunteer for a conference in UK (held in June 1st & 2nd). They don't provide travel or accomodation expenses.
I'm a Sri Lankan citizen who resides in Sri Lanka and this volunteering opportunity will definitely be a great experience in my life. I really can't miss this opportunity.
But as a citizen from a developing country, its really hard for me to spend on huge airfare. Is there any place/organization that I can apply for a travel grant for my volunteering? (It will be a great help if I can gain even only the airfare, then I can spend my own for accommodation)
I fail to see the reason for downvote. However, I see this question may be too broad as there may be many organizations that could help the OP's situation.
Does LLB mean "Bachelor of Laws (Latin: Legum Baccalaureus)"?
Are you presenting at the conference (paper, talk, poster, etc)?
Yes, LLB means Bachelor of Law.
I'm not presenting nor an author in the conference. I was selected as an volunteer.
I couldn't find any organisations that accept my plea yet. Please recommend me if there is any. Thanks for your responses so far.
For many travel grants, you need to present your work at a conference to be eligible. The short time line is also an issue as applications often have to be submitted months in advance (and there was only about 2 weeks between you asking this question and the start of the conference).
Speak to the conference organizers, although you claim that they don't offer travel, you don't say how you know this. Have you asked them? If you approach them with a polite email expressing your intense interest and disappointment that you cannot attend, maybe some money can be found.
Can the conference sponsor help? Often these conferences are sponsored by a large company looking to hire fresh talent. This is a good way to get noticed, so maybe they can throw a few £100 in your direction. Make sure you talk to the right person in the company.
Can your (past) institution in Sri Lanka help? Don't just look at what your department offers, scour the websites for any kind of money that is available for student travel. Speak to your former advisor. Speak to the head of the department. Speak to the careers advice team.
Are you a member of any learned society or institute? They will often have discounted rates for students and unemployed, but offer bursaries for (recent) students attending conferences.
Does your government fund any programmes that might be of use?
Are you in a minority or in some other group that gets targeted for extra money? Don't be shy, go looking for it.
Finally, what kind of price quotes are you getting for your airfare?
+1 for "learned society" -- they're probably the best place to go for a grant that covers your specific area of interest.
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49375 | What's the bargaining space in a post-doc employment contract - in the Netherlands?
Motivation
I'm soon going to start a Post-Doc in the Netherlands. The labor laws are different from where I did my Ph.D. work; the academic culture is somewhat different; the unionization situation is different; etc.
So, I've gotten the informal offer over email, and I'm now expecting the formal contract offer. I already have a copy of the collective employment agreement which covers post-doctoral researchers where I'll be working.
When I did my PhD, like I said, the situation was quite different - plus, I didn't actually get to sign any contract and no bargaining was involved. But now there might be some bargaining (although I'm not sure to what extent as employment conditions are mostly standardized).
The actual question
My question is: What are, in your experience or opinion are points that are possible/useful to bargain about in the individualized contract? If you can, please give an example of better vs worse options for the same point. Long lists with less details are also quite ok by me :-)
Examples
(some more academia-specific and some more generic)
The extent to which the academic institute controls copyrights to your discoveries: Partial copyright in your works / Institute controls everything / Automatic publication under free license.
The extent to which you can be required to perform duties other than your chosen specific personal research: Not at all / At their discretion / Upto x% of the work week
Funding for attending conferences abroad
Notes
Somewhat-related question: What questions should I ask when I visit labs for potential post-doc employment?
Please answer even if your experience does not regard the Netherlands. I'm particularly interested in inter-national differences, because the prevalence of alternatives elsewhere is a point I can use in bargaining.
In hindsight, I can say the following:
The research institute did not take kindly to attempts at negotiation, and would basically not negotiate on nearly anything. (That is, it's not that it stuck to its position - there was no negotiations dialog).
Exceptions or near-exceptions to this rule were (or could have been):
Mode of calculation of your effective experience (e.g. how does industry experience count)
Guarantees regarding funding for experimental equipment
Opportunities for "access" to potential grad students
Some kind of help with temporary accommodation while you search for a place to live in Amsterdam, which is an incredibly long and arduous process.
(Informal?) agreement re how FOSS code you write is to be licensed upon release
Perhaps there are a few other negotiable points, but the negative attitude to negotiations makes it difficult to cover that many.
Legally, as far as I understand, it is not possible to negotiate new terms that contradict the terms of the applicable collective labour agreements in the Netherlands. Many labour agreements however leave some room for negotiation, see e.g. Appendix 3 in the file you linked. In practice however there I would not expect there to be much room.
As for your example questions:
As Bill Barth pointed out, Section 1.9 arranges IP ownership, and indeed the employer owns everything. See also point 4 of Article 1.9.3. I don't see much room here for negotiation.
This is not part of the collective agreement. Your contract may have certain provisions, for example the amount of teaching (if applicable). You should discuss this with your supervisor/boss on what is expected and how much freedom you will have. Here there may be some room for negotiation.
Again, this is something the supervisor can answer. It depends on how much budget the group has available, or if your work is part of a grant funded project, how much there is available there.
If the employer owns everything, the employer can transfer some/all of the rights to me, or decide to publish things under a non-restrictive license, if it so chooses. So no problem there. Also, of course I'm not talking about contradicting the terms of the collective agreement - just adding conditions to my contract which are in my benefit. And reading the agreement there does seem to be a lot of room for that.
About the budget - there seems to be enough of it. But I have absolutely no idea how it's divvied up or what part of it can be used for what. Plus, some of the conditions don't have a direct cost, or no cost at all.
I would just ask the PI how much roughly would be available for travel each year. For most of the people I know in the Netherlands, travel funding usually isn't a problem. I wouldn't count on being able to add much if anything to your contract. Probably the only point where there might be some room is the step in the salary scale where you will start. This depends on your experience, but as Bill pointed out, as a postdoc you don't have much leverage.
Looking at the collective employment agreement briefly, I'd say that pretty much everything is prescribed, and that only the things in Appendix 3 are negotiable. That is to say, you can negotiate about some things in the amount of gross salary and the amount of vacation. These are options for, it appears, trading salary/vacation for help with commuting costs, costs of school, union dues, additional retirement savings, and the purchase of a reasonable bicycle (it is the Netherlands after all!). This is referred to in Section 1.8 of the General Provisions.
Section 1.9 of the General Provisions covers Intellectual Property. I don't see anything that makes these provisions negotiable, and the employer appears to own everything. 1.9.2 covers Copyright and 1.9.2.1 covers requests for the transfer of copyright to the employee. If you are concerned about who owns your scientific articles or software products, I would ask how frequently these transfers are approved.
I haven't looked through all the chapters for provisions specific to researchers and postdocs, so if you are concerned that you might be assigned duties outside of your own, self-directed research, I would carefully ask your interviewer/potential supervisor about that. Post-doctoral positions are usually about extended training in the US, and so they tend to be a blend of producing works that came out of the dissertation (or extending it) and producing new works that are a collaboration between the postdoc and the advisor. I.e., postdocs are expected to continue working on their old ideas but also work on new ideas that come from the collaboration of the postdoc and the advisor.
That's the theory at least. They are often expected to do the former and also lead ongoing lab efforts at the advisor's sole direction. If you are concerned about this, ask. Just be careful that you don't turn your potential employer off to hiring you due to an apparent unwillingness to be a team-player.
First of all - +1 and thanks. However... the IP and copyright clauses are probably rather negotiable, since the employer can always cede copyrights and IP rights. Also, there are points not covered by the agreement at all, or covered vaguely, and those are the ones I'm most interested for people to bring up here.
@einpoklum What evidence do you have for the negotiability other than hope? I don't see anything in the collective agreement that says that any of its terms are negotiable, beyond those that are explicitly negotiable like I mentioned already? Where is your "probably" coming from? The IP portion even lays out the process for transfer to the employee, so I find it to be quite specific and not vague at all. I doubt you would get a blanket transfer written into your contract, for example, and I think that asking for such might be detrimental to your application.
I'm not applying for anything. I think you're considering the situation based on your experience in the US, which is one of the more employer-slanted places to work in... I've been given a job offer, and now we're negotiating terms. My evidence is experience in other workplaces, with and without collective agreement defaults.
@einpoklum, maybe you can come back and answer this question yourself with your experiences if you don't find a Dutch reader to provide one. I've never worked in a place with a pre-negotiated collective employment agreement like this, so I can only speculate. Everything is technically negotiable in non-union employment in the US, but in most of my experience, working without written contracts, employers don't deviate from their written policies. They'd rather forgo the hire than make an exception, though this is conventional not enforced by any law.
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27245 | Why only medicine lectures are closed to the public?
In a coment, David Richerby pointed out that in his university in the UK everybody was entitled to attend to any lectures, except for Medicine. I have also found that Dusseldorf has the same policy, but no reasons are quoted.
I can think of two possibilities:
Potential missuse of the information in the class "oh, I saw a rash like that the other day, it is nothing". (But no one has died because "the condition number of that matrix is not SO bad...").
Sensitive information, like some details about patients, necessary for the education.
But they don't seem too strong. They would both apply to med students, or just people that signed up for a few courses, but are not going to be doctors (think some biologist that may be interested in taking Pathology).
Does anyone know of an official reason for this policy?
This certainly does not hold for all German universities. I once went to a medicine lecture, which was held in our physics lecture hall before my lectures.
In my experience in Switzerland, you can attend all ex cathedra medicine courses as a guest. But laboratories, anatomy classes and anything that requires an ethical/safety protocol is restricted to registered students, mostly for practical reasons. Some are held in hospitals, which have their own rules about who can be present.
The University of Düsseldorf's policy specifically applies to high school students on a visit program, who will be underage in general. So I would assume that this is purely a parental guidance issue due to the possibly (very) graphic nature of the content of these lectures.
In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) greatly restricts who can see or discuss medical records. While most grand rounds tend to be obscure the patient's identity, there could be an abundance of caution. Note that there is an exemption from HIPAA for grand round presentations -- if the audience are only medical personnel (including students):
The HIPAA Privacy Rule allows physicians and staff to use and disclose PHI [private health information] without a patient's written authorization for purposes related to treatment, payment, and health care operations. It further defines "heath care operations" to include "to conduct training programs in which students, trainees, or practitioners in areas of health care learn under supervision to practice or improve their skills as health care providers. [Cite]"
The other reason in the United States that grand rounds are often closed is the prevalence of various types of protesters -- e.g. from PETA or from the anti-psychiatry movement.
[That all being said, at my university most of the grand rounds are open unless closed at the request of the speaker or for other reasons. However, they aren't advertised so you would have to be a department member or on the mailing list to know when and where to go. They are also behind the security umbrella of the university, so you would need an ID card to get past the guard at the front door of the building. So whether you call that 'open' is up to you.]
Are specific patients' medical records often discussed in med school lectures? (This is an entirely naive question. It happened once on an episode of House, which is where the majority of my experience with the medical field comes from.)
Specific cases are discussed. Most of the speakers will redact as much as possible, however it's not always possible to totally obscure the identity of the patient and deductive disclosure is always a risk. If a speaker from Atlanta came to talk about the experimental treatment of a patient with hemorrhagic fever, it wouldn't take Dr. House to figure out who the patient was.
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29007 | How much can/should quotes from student evaluations be edited when preparing a teaching statement?
I'm writing a teaching statement and want to include quotes from student evaluations. How much can/should I edit these (for grammar)?
In general, quotes should always be edited as little as possible.
The only changes you should make are:
Truncations to remove sections of quotes that aren't relevant for your purposes.
Edits to fit the grammatical structure of the existing sentence.
Correcting small errors in the original text.
However, any changes to the quotation must be clearly indicated. Truncations should be marked with an ellipsis (" . . . "), while all other changes should be indicated using square brackets.
Got it. So, I should act like a reporter.
what if a word is misspelled?
@DavidHill it depends what is the intended purpose. If it is just an internal document, I would say no one will mind that you silently fix typos.
@Davidmh: Especially if you're transcribing from handwritten comments!
@David You can always use (sic) if you don't want people to think that you can't spell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
@JeromyAnglim: (sic) can come across as snarky, unfortunately, so you might want to avoid it for that reason.
A quotation is, by definition, explicitly what someone else said or wrote. If you modify a quotation so that it's no longer what someone else said or wrote then you are deceiving your audience. On this basis you should edit as little as possible and if you do need to edit you should make it clear to your audience.
It is reasonable to truncate if it does not change the sense of the quote. If you omit parts in the middle of a quote you should indicate this with ellipses '...'.
It's okay to correct minor spelling errors if they're not relevant to the quote.
You can add in a missing word, but it's usually best to indicate where you've done so, if the student said "the lecturer overpaid fool" you could quote as "the lecturer is an overpaid fool" but it would be preferable to quote as "the lecturer [is an] overpaid fool" so it is clear you have edited the quote.
You can add context but should indicate where you've done so, for example if asked the question "Did you like the lecturer?" the answer you're quoting is "He is an overpaid fool" you could quote it as "He [the lecturer] is an overpaid fool" or "[The lecturer] is an overpaid fool".
You can also add emphasis but you should indicate where you've done so. For example: "I'm writing a teaching statement and want to include quotes from student evaluations. How much can/should I edit these (for grammar)?" (emphasis mine).
| Stack Exchange | 2025-03-21T12:55:50.246026 | 2014-09-25T20:36:53 | {
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30040 | How to express dissension as a grad TA while maintaining professionalism
I have a problem with the courses I'm TAing. I am a math PhD student at a large (supposedly good) state university where the lower-division math classes are taught in the "discussion section" format (i.e. students go to a big lecture with clickers three days a week, and attend 30ish person sized recitation with a TA once a week). I teach three of these recitations.
When I first came here several years ago, I was shocked by the low quality of the courses I was assigned to. This was supposed to be a good school, yet the students are treated without respect, held to no standards, and come out knowing virtually nothing. Furthermore, there are strict limitations imposed on TAs, to the point where I feel that I am being actively prevented from teaching anything to my students. A breaking point came for me recently when my course coordinator made it mandatory for us to assign online quizzes through a third party "online instructional application," instead of administering handwritten quizzes in class. I have very strong objections to this, for multiple reasons that I could elaborate on, but they are not the point of this post.
The point is, I feel gross. I'm being forced to teach in a way that I find unethical and unreasonable, and every attempt that I have made to bring up an issue in the past has been met with complete inflexibility. It seems to be the culture of the department to dismiss the opinions of its graduate students.
I don't know how else to state my objections. I know I'm not in charge, and I don't want to be unprofessional, but I want to be heard. I have given serious thought to resigning with a public letter. However, even with that sacrifice, I'm not sure anyone would listen.
Is there anything I can do? How should I handle this situation?
Could you elaborate on the fact that teachers have no respect for students and have low expectations on them? Also, what is the audience of this course? Maths major or not?
I would not recommend resigning with a public letter. It gives an impression that "There's a problem here, and I'm leaving rather than helping with it."
The prof leading the course is the person who decides the best way to teach it. You are not the one responsible for the quality of the course - the prof is. Your responsibility is to help the students understand the material with the guidelines and tools given.
@Taladris I think I need to leave out some details for answers to be useful in the general case. (and, also, to preserve my anonymity.) I will say that the audience is first year students of uniformly distributed majors, and that the school has discontinued honors / for majors calculus.
Regarding the online quizzes: politicians like "innovative education" and "new technologies" everywhere. This sometimes means doing the same things using electricity instead of paper, so they can tick an extra box in the form.
@Davidmh These new technologies can be detrimental. I wouldn't be upset if it really were the same thing. The medium matters.
@APOdTA I know they are different, but what I want to say is that there may be external pressures to do suboptimal things just to look good.
@Davidmh Yeah, that is possible. Is there some way that I can I help the administrators to look good by doing optimal things, instead?
@APOdTA Is it a way to reduce the amount of grading?
@APOdTA sadly, if they are just interested in looking good with the minimal amount of work, not. There is no way for me to tell if that is true, though.
@Alex I don't know. The TAs are the ones who do all the grading, so it wouldn't make sense to mandate it, instead of just providing the option. I don't mind grading and love to write quizzes and give feedback. I suspect the motivation is more along the lines of preserving section equality, since the online quiz questions must all be selected from a problem bank, and then graded automatically by a computer.
I would strongly recommend against doing anything dramatic, such as resigning or publicly denouncing the course. I feel bad about discouraging acting on your beliefs, but I think it could actually hurt your career. There are two reasons for this:
First, the topic of how to teach low-level mathematics courses has become contentious and politicized in recent decades. Unless this is actually your scholarly specialty, it's safest not to get too dramatically involved, particularly as a grad student. The problem is that you can easily find people who will embrace you as a champion or martyr, whichever side you are on. Even if you are sober and self-restrained (which would probably rule out a public letter), other people on your side will say provocative things and attract negative attention while supporting you. Controversy is dangerous for academic careers, since it's generally easier to veto hiring someone than to generate an offer. So if you acquire equal numbers of friends and enemies, your enemies can hurt you more than your friends can help you. Plus, if you want a research career, being known for inflexible opinions about low-level teaching will distract attention away from your research accomplishments. That distraction can be a problem even for people who agree with you.
Second, you risk coming across like a worrisomely disruptive colleague. Most math departments contain at least one faculty member who regularly takes fervent stands on seemingly minor issues. They feel they have logically analyzed these issues, and they can't in good conscience cooperate with anything other than what they see as the logical option, since that would be a betrayal of the basic principles underlying mathematics. Coordinating with others or compromising play no role in the analysis, and it doesn't really matter how important the issue itself is (what matters is standing up for what's right). These people drive everyone else nuts, since they make it impossible to get anything done without either giving in to them about their pet issues or spending hours debating.
I'm not saying you are necessarily disruptive in this way. You have chosen an important topic to get upset over, and you might be completely right about it. However, if a hiring committee hears that you resigned in disgust upon being asked to administer online quizzes, they will wonder what else you might make a fuss over. This could put them off even if they agree with your concerns about teaching, and there's no way to reassure them that it's really just this one issue.
So what can you do while avoiding these dangers? One approach is to let the faculty handle this fight. If every faculty member disagrees with you, then your cause is hopeless in the short term and it's best just to calm down and finish your Ph.D. program without too much controversy. If some of them do agree with you, then it's not likely that publicly joining them as a grad student will shift the balance of power in the department. Instead, you can try to get your future TA assignments in courses they teach, while encouraging them behind the scenes in their attempts to change the department's approach.
To the extent you take direct action, I'd look for approaches that don't cause extra work for anyone else. For example, if you resign, then someone will have to find a replacement for you (so they'll automatically be upset about it). But you might be able to improve the course by strategic volunteering. Could you prepare optional handouts meant to deepen the students' knowledge? Could you offer a few additional review sessions before exams? These sorts of things aren't going to effect the fundamental changes you seek, but they could at least make you feel better about having done something rather than nothing, and they may build some goodwill with the lecturer by showing that you really want to help the students.
I should also say that the disruptive faculty that takes a stand on everything is not specific to maths - every engineering department seems to have one of those as well, and they are also almost universally disliked.
This is closely related to the ideal teaching recommendation for faculty applying to large public universities. At these institutions, one thing the hiring committee and chair want to hear is that the faculty member "won't cause trouble": there won't be a long line of students at the chair's office because of the course. Yes, the departments would love to have only "excellent" instructors, but most academics are only average instructors, so that's not realistic. What the departments don't want are average instructors who cause the administratiors many hours of extra work each semester.
Thank you for the advice. I do frequently prepare handouts, answer keys, and hold reviews, extra office hours, etc. The problem is this behavior is often discouraged by administration, under grounds that it is uneven with the other sections. (The fact that this eclipses any quality concerns is one of the main thing that disgusts me.) Despite my semester evaluations being very good- often full of unsolicited, touching comments- I have never heard anything but negative feedback from the administration about my teaching. I admit this has built resentment, and makes volunteering hard to maintain.
Many new graduate students have idealized ideas about teaching. You should ask yourself whether your opinions are based on a long experience of teaching at similar schools, or only based on your impressions as a new TA of "how things should be".
In my experience in the math departments at two 40,000+ student state universities, many new GAs have an idealized viewpoint that doesn't match reality. Here are a few important aspects of these schools that I didn't recognize when I first arrived at one:
The typical student at a large state university is not as strong as many incoming GAs imagine. This is true even at highly-rated institutions. Yes, the students can do something - they are decent students. But the university has no way to find 10,000 "graduate-quality" high school seniors each year to admit as freshmen. Many of the students they do admit will still struggle with calculus, organic chemistry, and other traditionally "hard" courses.
At a large institution, many of the students who don't struggle with calculus already took it and can place out of it, or will sign up for an honors calculus course if there is one to take. So the calculus classes aren't a representative sample of the student body, which increases the effect from the previous paragraph.
Especially at large schools, students complain about unequal treatment. If every section of the calculus course ran differently - especially if some TAs decided to impose stricter standards than others - the likely result would be formal complaints by the students, which the departmental administration would have to resolve. So it is often a goal of the course coordinator to prevent each TA from making their section much different than other sections.
A new GA only enters the program once, but faculty see a new crop of GAs every year. These new GAs are unfamiliar with the history of the department, and they do not attend the administrative meetings where the relevant faculty talk about how they want the courses to run. But the GAs often have opinions about how the courses should be run which the faculty know would be disastrous if implemented. The general tone of the question above sounds to my ear like the type of complaint permanent faculty have probably heard from many previous graduate students, so I'm not surprised if they quickly dismiss it.
From the outside, it sounds as if the coordinator of your class is doing things to try to maintain quality. Using clickers in lecture, and using an online quiz system, are ways to increase student participation.
With that said, let me answer:
Is there anything I can do? How should I handle this situation?
As a TA, do your best in the situation you are in, and learn from your experience. Once you graduate, the format of the calculus course you once taught will be a very minor afterthought. If you end up in a position to decide on how calculus is taught at another school, you can use your experience then.
If you take up a career in academia, there will be many irritating things that you have to do, with little flexibility. You can't win every battle, even if you think the other side is completely wrong. So you have to have a thick skin, and keep a focus on what is really important.
I appreciate the advice, but I really don't think I'm just being unreasonably idealist. It seems like the policies have crossed the line from practical decisions to lazy ones that come at the expense of the students. (One example is, there are no excused absences. No sick notes, no deaths. You just fail.) I TAd for five semesters during my undergrad (which was smaller, but still big) and I thought everything was fine. I recognize the challenges of organizing courses at a large university, but that means optimizing for shortcuts, efficiency, not that it's ok to just teach like crap.
(Seriously, though, thank you. I think this is how they probably view me, and it is sincerely helpful to hear it reasonably depicted.)
A first important note before I answer the actual question:
I don't know how else to state my objections. I know I'm not in charge, and I don't want to be unprofessional, but I want to be heard.
From what it sounds like, you were heard (you have been given the chance to voice your objections on multiple occasions). The persons in charge just decided to not follow through with your suggestions, which is, in the abstract, completely ok for them to do (they are in charge, and you are not).
I feel this is an important distinction to make - from what you have written in the post, there is nothing that rings a big alarm bell of grossly unethical behaviour to me. Yes, the thing with the commercial provider could be due to somebody personally profiting from the contract, but it could just as well be that the persons in charge honestly think that handling quizzes electronically will improve class. There are strict limitations on what TAs can do and teach in many big courses in many universities, this is often simply required for coordination between different recitation groups. That you feel the students are treated without respect and "come out knowing virtually nothing" sounds dramatic, but I am not entirely sure whether this is a fact or just your personal impression.
One interesting question would be how other TAs and the undergrads see the situation. Are other TAs also of the impression that the quality in the courses is much lower than it could be? Do the students also feel treated without respect? If you have not done so yet, I would suggest you to verify that your opinion is indeed shared by a majority of the other involved stakeholders - and, if this is not the case, reflect critically whether you are just overreacting.
Is there anything I can do? How should I handle this situation?
It sounds like you did what you could do (bring up your concerns with the responsible persons), and they decided to dismiss your concerns. At this point, you have basically two options:
Quit TAing - some statements in your (well-written) question sound like you have reached a level where you cannot justify working on the course anymore. In this case, the best thing to do is to leave. However, don't make a big fuss with a public letter etc. - I have seen similar things happen on multiple different occasions, and they never led to any substantial change and they always led to a plethora of public shaming and scapegoating of the letter writer. Don't put yourself into that position.
Go on - you have done what can reasonably expected from you in this position (notified the higher-ups, argued your objections), and they have decided to not change. You do not need to have any ethical concerns about leaving things be for now, and just move on teaching the course even though you personally would do things entirely differently. You are, as you say yourself, not in charge, so you don't need to beat yourself up over decisions which are not yours to make.
If you select the "go on" option, you can either resign from your cause entirely (and give up all hopes of change), or play the political game. As you are probably well aware, politicians everywhere (not only in congress, but also in companies, faculties, and any other collection of humans) are able to influence decisions that are not actually theirs to make by slowly swaying over the formal decision makers to their cause. This will only work "from the inside", so if you quit, this door is pretty much closed to you.
+1 This. You either quit or go with the flow (since you did everything humanly possible to change things). Public letters of resignation will sound like a rant and will be treated as such
While I don't think it's necessary to say that the OP sound dramatic (some people feel strongly about good teaching), I concur that OP should talk to the other TA to verify his feeling.
@Heisenberg I said "dramatic", not "overdramatic". Maybe just an unfortunate choice of words on my side.
Thank you for the advice. If I quit I will not leave a public letter. I guess that was partly a frustrated fantasy.
I would recommend two things:
Don't take responsibility for what you don't have authority over. For example, if the students ask why they have to take their quizzes online, the answer is "Because Prof. X said so." If they complain, don't try to justify Prof. X's decision. Just say "I have been explicitly told that I don't have any authority over this matter. You should go talk to Prof. X."
Indeed, you have an opportunity to play good cop - bad cop. The powers that be have set up a system and a series of hoops to jump through. Become an expert on how the game is played. If old exams are publicly available, study them carefully and explain to your students what sorts of questions are likely to appear. If you present yourself as the students' ally against "the system", they will believe you when you give them advice and tell them that they really, really need to do their homework.
Keep this in mind in your job search. A lot of small liberal arts colleges pride themselves on offering an experience opposite to what you describe. Do a good job even in an environment you hate, and when twenty employers ask you "Why do you want to work at a liberal arts college?" in ten-minute interviews at the Joint Math Meetings, you will have a very convincing answer.
Point 1 is worth a downvote for me. Whatever you do, don't undermine your own course by passive-agressive statements in the sense of "well, I know this is terrible, go to Prof. X to complain". If you feel like doing that, then, by all means, quit. And, never, never, never play Good Cop / Bad Cop by making the other involved persons look bad.
I never once advocated complaining to the students about "the system", Prof. X, or anything else. I am saying that TAs should not defend superiors' decisions if they disagree with them. (And, I was once specifically encouraged by a professor for whom I was TAing to play good cop to his bad.)
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87138 | Which authority regulates the conferring of degrees in South Africa?
In South Africa, is there a body that regulates the institutions that are permitted to confer degrees? If so, what is this entity?
Does it regulate:
The ability to confer academic degrees?
Which degrees may be conferred?
Which subjects may form part of that degree?
The content of the subjects?
There is a university in my country that confers a Bachelor of Science in Complementary Medicine, this degree includes subjects whose premises have little to no evidence for them.
The laws you want are the Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 and its amendments, and the NQF Act 67 of 2008 (NQF being the National Qualifications Framework).
They establish the Council on Higher Education and the South African Qualifications Authority, respectively, who between them bear responsibility for assessing, registering and accrediting institutions and qualifications in South Africa, and recognising foreign equivalent qualifications as appropriate.
I have not examined specific availability of courses, programmes, specialties or qualifications in the records maintained by either group.
However, Chapter 7 of the HEA, Act 101/1997 as amended forbids practise as a provider of higher education by anybody except "public higher education institution[s] and ... organ[s] of state" without being registered or conditionally registered, under that Act.
Section 66 of the same Act is of particular note. In full,
66. Offences
Any person other than a higher education institution, who, without the authority of a
higher education institution -
(a) offers or pretends to offer any higher education programme or part thereof;
(b) purports to confer a qualification granted by a higher education institution, or in
collaboration with a higher education institution; or
(c) purports to perform an act on behalf of a higher education institution,
is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a sentence which may be imposed for fraud.
(2) Any person who pretends that a qualification has been awarded to him or her by a higher education institution, whereas in fact no such qualification has been so awarded, is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a sentence which may be imposed for fraud.
(3) Any person who contravenes section 51 (1) (a), 54 (7) or 55 (2) is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine or to imprisonment not exceeding five years or to both such fine and imprisonment.
[Sub-s. (3) substituted by s. 10 of Act 54/2000]
(4) Any private higher education institution which does not comply with section 55 (1) is guilty of an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding R20 000.
Note that 51(1)(a) is the aforementioned ban on unregistered practise, 54(7) forbids the use of names like "university" or "professor" unless entitled to use them by correct registration, 55(2) concerns deregistered institutions returning registration certificates, and 55(1) requires the public display of (a certified copy of) such a certificate.
Penalties are either specified in the section or are set equivalent to those for fraud. Needless to say, if you believe any such laws and regulations are breached, you should contact either the CHE or the SAQA directly with your information, because these are offences held equivalent to fraud.
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61488 | Should I alter personal holidays for a research visit?
The group of my professor and another professor from a distant Asian country have signed a cooperation agreement.
As part of the cooperation, me as a rookie graduate student have to visit the other professor. Unfortunately, the proposed days of the visit interfere with a few days of a personal holiday. On some other time-frames it is either too late or the host professor has deadlines to work on.
The only time-frame which fits all is the one which infers with my plans.
Both the host professor and my professor in their email communication asked explicitly whether the proposed date fits me. Of course it doesn't, but I don't know if I should say that or should I simply sacrifice my plans (a weekend + two bank holidays), lose a few days of personal traveling, and opt for the visit?
Have you already made arrangements for the holiday? Do these arrangements involve other people or major nonrefundable payments? If so, the holiday takes priority due to financial reasons or obligations to third parties.
On the other hand, if you can easily cancel all the arrangements and move the holiday to another date, be flexible. In this case, the visit is probably more important to you as an academic than the holiday would be to you as a private person.
Of course, I come from a background where PhD students are employees of the university with the same rights as any other employee. The answer might be different in a country where the student is subject to the whims of their supervisor.
How important is the research to you? And how hard is it for you to replan?
An enthusiastic grad student probably would jump onto the opportunity, but if you see it as a chore, and you do not see direct repercussions (after all, they asked you whether it works), you might decline it.
Of course, you may still be enthusiastic, but it may mean losing out on a pre-booked, expensive trip to the outback/jungle/mountains/etc. (or something else that requires a lot of organisation and/or money to arrange). In this case, the decision will be less clear-cut.
Depends exclusively on your priorities.
No one can help you but you!
Notwithstanding that, since you are the part of a team, IMO the best is not to mess up with plans of your team leader if you find the plan is good for both you and your team in the long run. A moral obligation exists, at least have an open discussion with your supervisor, random people is of no use here.
A personal side note: I would jump in to the opportunity if I were you! Well, I must say it depends a lot on the cumulative trust factor between you and your supervisor among other things.
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76643 | PhD crossroad: dealing with constantly absent supervisor and diverse workload?
I am in the first year of my PhD studies. Was involved with the same group since a while as a student, and then I was offered a PhD there.
Project work
The topic of my PhD is completely different from what I had done before, so the first 3-4 months passed while I was trying to get into the new topic. In the meanwhile a project arrived. It was loosely related to my previous experience, but still completely unrelated to the PhD topic.
I was assigned to this project. Soon it started hogging all my time. Project meetings, proposal, presentations, reports and all that. Months were passing by without doing anything on the PhD topic. Also it was hard switching between the topics as the context switch was immense.
I tried different strategies. Switching topics within the day. Switching topics week in week out. And in the end what worked for me was switching between the topics as the deadlines for the project were met.
Lack of supervision
On top of all this the supervisor is busy constantly. All in all I might have had less than 3-4 hours of one-to-one discussion with my supervisor within these 12 months, whereas I hear other professors have monthly meetings with their students. Also, no one from the seniors in the group has expertise related to my PhD topic. Neither there is a fellow student working on the same topic with whom I could discuss.
Assuming that my work-flow and the tools I use were faulty, I constantly looked around for approaches to become more and more efficient. To make sure there is nothing extra to be done from my side I started working actively on the weekends and did not take any holidays.
Yet, looking at my PhD topic I still think there is so much to learn there regarding the basics let alone advanced concepts. Much more than one usual candidate who is researching within a topic which s/he might have encountered previously during studies.
What next?
As the time for the contract extension is approaching I am trying to figure out what is the best to do next. Below I will list pros and cons from my POV.
Pros:
I like the PhD topic
I like the group
I like teaching duties
(although it requires significant time investment)
Cons:
I hate the project work
Lack of input from the supervisor
There is no one in the group to discuss with
Bottom line: How should I deal with this situation? Is it a common situation for PhD students?
Options:
Request a helping hand for the project (an extra student that will help me). I am even contemplating of paying from my own sallary.
Start contacting other groups worldwide and switch for a PhD there.
Visit another research group (e.g., my co-supervisor etc.) for half-a-year (or longer), whose main research aligns with my PhD topic
other...?
Update (6 years and 7 months later): Guys, I defended my PhD and graduated with honors. Just in case that anyone stumbles upon this question here, let me tell you that your supervisor and the people that you work with day in day out will have the greatest impact on your PhD.
That time-consuming project that I have mentioned above ended at some point, so that's okay... But the part regarding supervision didn't change.
At some later point in my PhD I learned that in some institutions the PhD supervisor and the student can sign a "PhD supervision agreement", but I never did that. Some Professors might not like it, because it is also legally binding.
Be more proactive in asking for supervision. Professors that have a hands-off style of supervision (like to) assume that everything is okay, unless you deliberately raise an issue.
"Remote supervising" is not good for the newbies in the group, they need close supervision in the beginning.
"Remote supervisors" have an inaccurate picture of the group. There is a mismatch between what they think is happening, and what is really happening. This also reflects in supervisor-student relationship because the demands and what is really possible do not fit.
From my observation, when the head of the group is not around also the group tends to slack.
One good thing with a supervisor who is absent is that they probably network a lot. They are absent because they are visiting some conference, giving a keynote here and there, attending project meetings etc, as such they are well-connected and you can benefit from their network.
A third alternative is starting to contact other groups worldwide and finding a co-supervisor there.
@svavil I have a co-supervisor, and I am ashamed telling him every other week that I have not been able to do anything on the PhD topic because of the other tasks
On the topic of your advisor being busy, you might these questions helpful: How to deal with advisor not allocating time to me?, How can I make my thesis supervisor be more responsive? I acknowledge that your question is bigger than that, but this subproblem can be tackled separately.
Option 3 ("visit another research group...") sounds like a great option if you have the opportunity. As a bonus, this kind of thing looks good on a CV, regardless of your other circumstances.
It's not clear to me whether you did Step 1 (or Step 2) yet. Forgive me if you already did them.
Step 1. Talk to your advisor and let her know how much time per week (or a percentage or proportion of your time) is being spent on the project, and ask for help and/or advice about how to balance your time more effectively.
Step 2. Work in the library, work at home, but limit the amount of time you spend in your office where other project members can grab you or distract you.
The first and the most important element of the PhD thesis is the topic and field of research that provide you the next years afterwards.
The thesis work needs some elements from your background and also your PhD courses.
The first thing is to think on your PhD topic that is suitable based on your background and available tools.
About your busy supervisor, if you think that you need someone to lead you on the hard path of the PhD life, my suggestion is to rapidly change your supervisor in that school or other ones.
Also, you can collaborate with well-known researchers around the worldwide on your topic, give advice how to begin, and maybe work with them as your advisor on your PhD committee members.
Based my experience, sometimes we need to dive into a topic rather than to start step by step from the beginning to the advanced level.
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48873 | How to formulate in academic writing when one comes up with a novel approach
In my project work I came up with a new method for solving a certain problem which has not been used before, by extending an already existing approach.
What type of wording should I use in academic writing to express this fact.
I wrote something in the lines of, but would like to have something more elegant:
Furthermore, in my project work I propose a novel approach by
extending X and incorporating an xyz mechanism to it in order to
get better Z metric
EDIT:
I would also like to say, that "something similar has never been done before to our knowledge"
What does your advisor or collaborator say? Or whoever else you can talk to with experience in your field?
"Extending an already existing approach" and "novel" are contradictory terms.
@Alexandros that depends how far the "existing approach" has been extended...
Novel kinda means something similar has never been done before to our knowledge.
Given that you are sure of novelty of your work, you can write something like: " to the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach is the first to do...." and show the novelty in your approach.
It's not enough to just say that your approach is novel. You need to make a convincing case that your approach is actually novel. This requires a thorough literature review of existing techniques for the problem you are attacking, together with direct comparisons between your technique and each of those existing techniques.
The message you want to send is "I have read every paper on this topic, and none of them do this thing that I'm about to do." The novice reader will just believe you, but the expert reader, who has probably spent decades thinking about your problem, will look for their favorite handful of papers in your survey. Make sure they find them.
You also need to understand the standards for novelty in your field. The same technique can be considered completely revolutionary in one field and a standard modification of classical textbook methods in another. (Yes, both views can be correct.)
Of course, the real reason to prepare this literature review is to convince yourself that your approach is actually novel. Because it probably isn't. Most “novel” techniques aren't.
This is good advice. Let me remark that how much to cite varies considerably based on the academic field [as we've discussed before]. In my subject of mathematics, citations are used rather sparingly, to the extent that citing papers to show a lack of connection is not usually done unless there is a significant expectation that the typical reader would expect such a connection. In any case, doing an extensive literature review for one's own sake is dead on.
Thanks for your answer and suggestions, although I believe it is a bit off the mark. I was just looking for proper wording and not what novel means in terms of science and research. Of course I came to the conclusion that the approach is new after thoroughly reviewing related work and consulting my supervisors
As they say in creative writing courses, "show, don't tell".
This paper presents a novel method for achieving Z metric. The method uses xyz mechanism combined with existing method x. This combination yields performance capabilities relative to z that were previously not possible or feasible with x alone. To support our claim of novelty, the following paragraphs present a comprehensive review of the relevant literature and comparisons to our method.
Then you follow with literature review and comparisons
If the question is indeed about proper wording that balances the novelty / modesty, why not:
Confronted with problem X, I tried all known approachs without success. Further analysis showed that approach Z yelded the closest results to the intended goal. Based on this observation, I worked on a Y mechanism allowing a better metric and, by integrating it with Z approach, developed a novel Z++ approach.
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16360 | Abbreviations (abbrv.) in journal (jrn) articles (artcs)
As we all know, you typically abbreviate something the first time that particular term shows up in a paper. However, I've been told in the past that certain things in a paper should be written in such a way that 'it stands on its own'. One such thing would include the abstract of the paper. So, perhaps a <STRING> appears in the abstract that I want to abbreviate. Now one of two things can happen.
1.) If <STRING> appears more than once in the abstract, I could abbreviate the first instance and then just use the abbreviation from that point on.
2.) If <STRING> appears only ONCE in the abstract, then I shouldn't abbreviate it because then I would have defined an abbreviation that I would not have used again (given the concept of 'the abstract should be able to stand on its own).
The problem with (2) is that people will immediately think that the 'first instance' of <STRING> should be abbreviated and don't immediately consider the 'stand-alone' idea so I'm either having to revise or try to put up a convincing argument for what I did.
Also, I've been told by some that tables and figures should be able to 'stand on their own'. So, if the abbreviation for <STRING> appears in the table somewhere (or the caption), then I should explicitly spell out <STRING> and then define an abbreviation for it right then and there, even if I have already done so earlier on in the text of the paper.
So, my question is, what is the proper way of handling these abbreviations and is the idea of 'this piece must be able to stand on its own' valid (and if its valid, what exactly does this idea apply to)?
Additional Information:
I am a computational chemist so we pretty much are forced to use the alphabet-soup of acronyms. MP2 is preferred over "second-order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory" and is commonly used. CCSD(T) is preferred over "The
coupled-cluster method that includes all single and double substitutions as well as a perturbative treatment of the connected triple excitations". The list can go on and on. If this wasn't abbreviated in an abstract, having to 'spell it out' even a few times would make for an incredibly long abstract, figure caption, table, etc.
The first comment will be, do not abbreviate just because something occurs more than once. Abbreviations other than established ones (within your field) such as DNA, EDTA make reading more difficult. Of course all established abbreviation were new at some point but the message is, be restrictive. I understand your field may be in need of many abbreviations so make adjustments to these general comments accordingly.
Now as for the abstract, I would recommend to not abbreviate anything even if it occurs more than once or twice (again barring established abbreviations). The abstract should be seen as a separable part which is (hopefully read) by a wider audience than the paper itself. If you need to abbreviate something in the paper, do so in the main paper as the "first occurrence".
Tables and figures should be made to stand alone if possible (which probably is 80+% of the time). Often figures and tables may be the parts others take up when they describe your work. To have self-explanatory figures and tables is thus useful. With a table the table caption should be an integral part so I think it is reasonable to have abbreviations in the table body as long as the abbreviations are explained in the table caption. The same could apply to figures as well but I would go further and aim for making the graphics along self-explanatory even without its caption.
I have updated my question to deal with this response.
I have updated my answer to keep the general recommendations but highlight the need for field related adjustments.
In my opinion the general rule is that abbreviations should be used exactly when they make reading easier; in particular, in some circumstances it will be easier to understand a sentence when a long term is abbreviated (provided the abbreviation has been defined of course). The same rule should apply in abstract and captions, except that the cost (in term of reading comfort) of having to look for the meaning of the abbreviation is usually greater.
The problem comes from the fact that we tend to use abbreviations when they make writing easier (or quicker), and this does not coincide with reading easiness.
very good point about easy reading ./. easy writing
If the abbreviation is so common that people use it instead of its real meaning (e.g. I'd call EDTA EDTA, but if I'm asked for the spelled-out name I mentally reconstruct that from the structure of EDTA - as opposed to knowing ethylenediamintetraaceticacid and reconstructing the structure from that) I'd use the abbreviation in the abstract.
If the abbreviation is really common, but not the "primary name" of the thing in question, I'd spend that one word in the abstract and give both.
Otherwise, I'm a big fan of a table of abbreviations. That way it is much easier for a reader who is not deeply familiar with the field to find the meaning than to search through the text to where the abbreviation first occurred.
See also: Shall acronyms in scientific papers be expanded exactly once?
I would write it out in full the first time that it appears in the abstract, and again the first time that it appears in the main text. This isn't authoritative, however, it's simply what "seems right" to me. The abstract needs to stand on its own, and the introduction should also make sense to somebody who hasn't just read the abstract.
Additionally, as some have said, in some fields there may be abbreviations that are so generally accepted that there is no need to expand them. To pick something that is not field-dependant, nobody would expect an author to spell out LASER or RADAR.
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104773 | How to automatize the making and sending of event's attendance certificates?
Our department make a lot of attendance certificates, for events we run, and we waste a lot of work typing attendance lists and sending them by email. Most of the public are students are from my institution, and we can get a list of names and email address. We make about 1.500 certificates by year.
We are thinking about using a event system, but I'm having trouble to find one that makes certificates and don't cost thousand of dollars.
Anyone have a suggestion? A better solution?
This doesn't seem like it's really about academia, as stated in the FAQ, and it is also a shopping question which is also explicitly called out as off topic in the faq.
Oh, sorry. Maybe I can edit to make less "shopping question". As making attendance certificates is a part of many events, like conferences, I assumed the question to be on topic.
But it still doesn't really fit the topics as listed https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic
Managing symposiums/congresses/conferences/courses is a central part of the "Life as a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, university professor".
(Changed the mysterious "os" to "of" in the title...)
Sounds like a candidate for a mail merge or even vba macro... could try looking on stack overflow for examples...
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it would fit better at software recommendations.
So you basically want a program that'll print off a certificate for each person in a list of 1,500 names? Or would you prefer to email the certificates? Or, what precisely would you like the system to do?
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